You Must Change Your Life

  But then a trusted friend came to Rodin with a set of more serious claims. He had heard that Choiseul was stealing artwork directly from Rodin’s studio—and he had already gone to the police with the matter. Now that Rodin thought about it, he remembered that a box of drawings had gone missing in June.

  Rodin confronted Choiseul about the lost works. She denied having anything to do with it and turned the accusation against his secretary, Marcelle Tirel, instead.

  Rodin might normally have fired the assistant on the spot, but Tirel had worked for him for six years, far longer than most had lasted in her position. When he questioned her about the missing art, she pointed the finger back at Choiseul. She told Rodin that she had seen with her own eyes the duchesse tucking the drawings into her stockings.

  Rodin leaned back against his statue of Ugolino and started to sob. He knew what he had to do. After seven years, he ended the relationship without a word. He sent an assistant to fetch Choiseul’s key to the Hôtel Biron and then left town with Beuret before his lover could protest.

  Rodin’s friends rejoiced, and so did the press. The New York Times declared on its front page that all of Paris society could talk of “nothing” but the alleged split between Rodin and the duchesse. Rumor had it that she had “exercised too great influence over the master . . . and generally monopolized the sculptor’s affairs.” The French were even more joyous to learn of Choiseul’s departure. Rodin’s studio, now “delivered of its Cerberus, has reopened its doors to friends of the modeler of the most beautiful torsos in our time,” announced Le Cri de Paris.

  Rilke found the whole situation mortifying. Like many of Rodin’s friends, he was glad to see the “frightful” duchesse go, but he wished that the artist had come to this conclusion on his own terms, rather than had it forced upon him with such an embarrassing deception. These trifles, which the artist might have kicked out of his path without a second thought in years past, now seemed to overwhelm him. He appeared so “grotesque and ridiculous” to Rilke now that it was almost as if all his years of struggle had been for nothing.

  Rodin returned home from his trip with Beuret to a pile of letters begging for his forgiveness. “I have ceased to live. My heart is broken—the hour of deliverance does not frighten me,” Choiseul wrote in one. Even her husband implored him to take the miserable woman back: “If you could only see her. I cannot believe you wouldn’t take pity on her.”

  This went on for two years. Once, she showed up at the studio in a black veil and threw herself at Rodin’s feet. He paused from his drawing, summoned an assistant, pointed to the woman on the floor and barked, “Show Madame out!” Rodin had resolved not to fall under her spell again, for he had truly loved Choiseul. “I am like a man who walks in a woods overcome by darkness,” he told a friend soon after their separation.

  Although Rodin vowed not to let another woman interfere with his work again, he promptly hired one of his models to manage his affairs at the Hôtel Biron. The young woman’s qualifications apparently included a “moist red mouth” and “tranquil” eyes. But when he realized that she was admitting a stream of questionable characters into the building he fired her.

  The stress seemed to take a toll on Rodin’s health, too. Over lunch one afternoon in July, Beuret watched him drop his fork to the floor. When he went to pick it up his arm just hung limply at his side. It remained paralyzed there for a while, probably the effect of a mild stroke.

  The mobility gradually returned to his arm, but those close to him said he was never quite the same after that. When Count Kessler noticed his friend’s thinning frame one afternoon and asked if he would like to go for lunch, Rodin brushed off the concern. He gestured into the sky and asked, who could have an appetite while in the presence of nature? Nature, he claimed, was the only nourishment he needed.

  CHAPTER

  17

  ONE LATE SUMMER DAY IN 1913, SIGMUND FREUD TOOK a walk in Munich with “a young but already famous poet” and his “taciturn” friend. It may have been in a park or on the outskirts of the city, where the fifty-seven-year-old Viennese professor had traveled to attend the fourth Psychoanalytic Congress. It was a tense juncture in Freud’s life, with the conference marking the last time he would ever see his friend and former heir apparent, Carl Jung, then thirty-eight.

  The two psychoanalysts had been close colleagues since 1906, when Jung was a budding Swiss doctor just starting to make a name for himself. When Jung discovered that Freud’s word association studies supported his own theory of unconscious repression, Jung sent a letter to Vienna to tell him about it. They had been engaged in a lively exchange of ideas ever since. But tensions arose as Jung began to doubt Freud’s belief that sexuality formed the basis of all human behavior. Meanwhile, Jung’s interests were branching out into the fields of mysticism and the occult, which Freud feared would discredit his fledgling discipline of psychoanalysis and supply its critics fodder for attack. When Jung refused to yield to Freud’s theories or to suppress his own, the elder doctor interpreted Jung’s defiance as an oedipal desire to overthrow his “father.” Jung claimed that he never wanted to be seen as a protégé, only as an equal. Shortly before the conference, Freud severed all personal communication with his former friend.

  By early September, everyone in the psychoanalytic community knew about the dispute and it divided the congress: the researchers from Zurich sided with Jung at a table on one side of the room, while the Viennese joined Freud on the other. Hanging over the entire room was the question of whether the International Psychoanalytical Association would reelect Jung as its president. Since Jung had no challenger, Freud loyalists encouraged voters to cast blank ballots. Twenty-two of the fifty-two participants did, but it was not enough to unseat Jung and he narrowly kept his post. But his defection from traditional Freudian psychoanalysis was now definitive.

  As this uncongenial event was underway, Freud was relieved to see his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé enter the hotel with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She had by then begun her own serious study of psychoanalysis, which she said was motivated in part by the years she spent sharing in “the extraordinary and rare spiritual destiny of another person”—Rilke. She was Freud’s student and one of the first women to attend the inaugural congress in 1911. A photograph of the group shows Andreas-Salomé, wrapped in a long fur, seated before Jung and Freud. When she had asked Freud during the conference if he would allow her to study with him, he just laughed. No formal psychoanalytic training centers existed yet, and he could not fathom why she would want to learn, “since the only thing I do is teach people how to wash dirty linen.”

  But Andreas-Salomé persisted, studying for another six months on her own, then going to Vienna to prove her dedication. She and Freud soon struck up a long, affectionate correspondence and she began training with him in Vienna in October 1912. It was she who urged him to look more closely at the role of the mother in early childhood. Soon, Freud entrusted her with treating his own daughter, Anna.

  Now Andreas-Salomé was not only Freud’s peer, but one of his staunchest allies. She took a seat firmly on his side of the room, writing in her journal from the conference, “there was nowhere I would have preferred to sit than right by his side.” It pained her to see Freud repress his sadness “over his break with his ‘son’ Jung, whom he had loved.” He spent the entire conference worrying that any questions or contradictions he raised during the lectures would make him look like the patriarchal tyrant Jung had portrayed him as.

  Freud found some respite from the stressful meetings by taking a walk with Andreas-Salomé and Rilke, with whom he was familiar mostly because of his children. His son Ernst and daughter Anna had memorized Rilke’s poems in school and when Anna heard that her father had met him on this trip, she wrote, “Have you really met the poet Rilke in Munich? Why? What is he like?”

  It seems Freud found him fascinating. Two years later, in his essay “On Transience,” Freud described his encounter with the “young but already famo
us poet,” who scholars widely believe was Rilke, and his “taciturn” friend, who also remains unnamed, but is thought to be Andreas-Salomé. Freud recounted how the poet marveled at the natural beauty of the summer afternoon, but confessed that he took no pleasure in it. Come winter, it would all wither and die, he said, just as everything one cared about would someday die. All that the poet would “otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom,” Freud wrote.

  Freud could not refute this morbid observation; of course all living things had to die. But he disagreed that this inevitability diminished their value in the present. On the contrary, the scarcity of life only made it more precious, he said. But Freud was surprised to find that his maudlin companion was unconvinced by what he thought were these irrefutable truths.

  An explanation for Rilke’s sadness later came to Freud, at a time when he was confronting his own sequence of sorrows: growing anti-Semitism in Europe, threats to the legitimacy of psychoanalysis and the onset of a world war in which his children would serve. He wrote in the essay that in Rilke’s anticipation of death, he was also anticipating the mourning that would accompany it. Unable to bear that impending grief, he had built up a resistance to ever experiencing its beauty in the first place. One could not mourn what one never loved.

  Freud advocated in his essay for adopting a more hopeful and therapeutic outlook. He admitted that the war had “robbed the world of its beauties.” It destroyed nature and demolished historical monuments. “It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.”

  But unlike Rilke, Freud insisted that the joy of beauty outweighed the cost of mourning it. Even if beauty disappears, grief, too, departs just as abruptly as it arrives. With each ending would come a beginning, Freud said, and with it the opportunity to rebuild “on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

  The paper helped establish Freud’s seminal research on defense mechanisms, the belief that people unconsciously manipulate their perceptions in order to guard themselves against painful emotions. Without knowing it, Rilke, too, may have anticipated this logic even earlier in the first of his Duino Elegies. He writes in it of his fear that an angel’s love will engulf him: “. . . For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror which we can still barely endure.” The longer we admire it, the more devastating its loss will be.

  PERCHED ON A STEEP cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, the Duino Castle struck Rilke as a cold, unfeeling colossus when he arrived in the winter of 1911. The dark water was a “featureless, outspread void,” cloaked in mist. There was no green, no sign of vegetation anywhere on the rocky terrain. Situated near the border of Slovenia, this was a far cry from the Italy Rilke had come to know during his vacations to sandy Capri.

  He moved into a corner room facing the sea and opened the window to let the salty air flow in. The austere environment should have instilled Rilke with a sense of discipline, but instead he felt like a prisoner within its stone walls. It enclosed him, too, with an anxiety that had been plaguing him since he left the Hôtel Biron.

  Witnessing Rodin’s decline had awoken in him the possibility that if he did not confront his fears now, they might continue pursuing him until they one day caught up to him when he was too weak to do anything about it, as Rodin’s fear of death had done to him. “The experience with Rodin has made me very timid toward all changing, all diminishing, all failure, for those unapparent fatalities, once one has recognized them, can be endured only so long as one is capable of expressing them with the same force with which God allows them,” he told the princess. For the first time, he thought that therapy could be a useful way to identify and excavate those fears.

  Rilke had always been somewhat frightened of Freud and his new science of the mind. He told Andreas-Salomé that he found the psychiatrist’s writing “uncongenial” and “in places hair-raising.” He believed psychoanalysis was bleach for the soul, a clearing out. Each time Freud had tried to cultivate a friendship with Rilke over the years, the poet tended to decline his invitations. The year after Freud published “On Transience,” his then-twenty-three-year-old son Ernst “at last met his hero Rilke,” but the encounter did not occur at Freud’s house: “Rilke was not to be persuaded to visit us a second time,” Freud wrote.

  But in his isolation at Duino, Rilke started to see how a branch of medicine as narratively driven as psychoanalysis could have its benefits for a writer. Rilke was writing so little then anyway, therapy seemed unlikely to make matters worse. He wrote to Andreas-Salomé to see whether she thought Freud’s talking cure could help him. “Dear Lou, I am in a bad way when I wait for people, need people, look around for people . . .” he wrote.

  When she received the letter she skimmed through his complaints of depression, muscle pains and loss of appetite before reaching a truly disturbing passage. It did not concern any of his usual ailments, but instead described the way he had written his most recent poem.

  It took place on a gusty January day. In Duino, the cold northern wind from the Hungarian lowlands could collide with warm gales coming up from the Sahara Desert and cause storms as apocalyptic as an El Greco painting. On one such afternoon, Rilke stepped out for some air just as the sky was darkening. He was too preoccupied with an important letter he had to write to notice the weather. From the castle, the princess watched him pacing the cliff, hands jammed in his pockets, head bowed in thought.

  Then he heard a voice in the wind: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” it said. Rilke stopped in his tracks and listened. He wrote the sentence down in his notebook, and with it the first line of his Duino Elegies. When he went back inside the castle, the rest of the poem poured out of him. In describing this surge of inspiration to Andreas-Salomé, he admitted that he hardly felt like its author at all. He felt like he had been inhabited by a higher power. “The voice which is using me is greater than I,” he later told the princess.

  Rilke’s account troubled Andreas-Salomé. From the way he told it, it was as if the hand that wrote the words had not existed at all. The disembodied description bordered on self-denial and was an extreme manifestation of the bodily alienation that she had long thought caused his recurrent illnesses. So when Rilke asked her whether he should go to Munich to undergo psychoanalysis, she encouraged him.

  He also ran the idea by Westhoff, who was already in therapy, and she told him he’d be a coward not to at least try it. Rilke then wrote to Westhoff’s psychiatrist to inquire about his candidacy for treatment. He told the doctor that he believed his work had been “really nothing but a self-treatment” all along. The problem was that it no longer seemed to be having its effect.

  But before Rilke could make the trip, Andreas-Salomé rushed him a telegram: Don’t do it, she pleaded. She had a sudden change of heart and now believed that the risk that analysis posed to his creativity was too great. It might well chase out the angels along with the demons.

  Rilke decided that she was right. Perhaps he needed a little madness to push him through the rest of the Elegies. Had the opportunity for treatment arisen during his long battle with Malte, he might have jumped at it. And if he opted to one day transition into a “noncreative” profession, as he had contemplated doing after he finished that book, he would consider it again. But for now he had made up his mind not to undergo psychoanalysis so long as he was a poet.

  Instead, he would finish out the miserable winter walking barefoot in the frost of Duino and Andreas-Salomé would continue acting as his unofficial therapist, as she had been doing for nearly fifteen years. She had recently also begun analyzing his dreams. In one, Rilke told her he stood in a zoo, encircled by cages of animals. One of them contained a pale lion, which he told her had triggered associations with the French words for “remembered” and “mirrored.” At the center, a nude man pos
ed, enveloped in violet and gray shadows, like a figure model in a Cézanne painting. The man was not a lion tamer, but was himself “put on exhibit with the animals,” Rilke said.

  Andreas-Salomé did not record her interpretation of the dream, which contained so much imagery from Paris and the New Poems. But she suggested that, in lieu of psychoanalysis, perhaps Rilke ought to return there for a while. She had not cared for his New Poems, which to her felt emotionally barren, but at least they had grounded him in the physical world. After all his recent talk about voices in the wind at Duino, she thought he could use a dose of harsh Parisian reality once more.

  RILKE TOOK HER ADVICE in the spring of 1913. He returned to his old apartment on the Rue Campagne-Première and promised to fulfill one final favor to Westhoff. She was still living in Munich, with Ruth now as well, when she told him of her enduring wish to sculpt a bust of Rodin. The artist had already given her his consent, but she wasn’t sure if it was sincere because he had since gone silent. Rilke promised he would talk to him for her.

  Trusting that Rilke would come through, Westhoff arrived in Paris to begin work in April. Over the next two months, Rilke wrote repeatedly to Rodin, pleading with him to pose for her. He told him how a museum in Mannheim had already commissioned the bust and now her professional reputation depended on it. When that failed to elicit a response, he tried appealing to Rodin’s ego, making the case that a subject as great as him could be just the thing to awaken Westhoff’s latent genius. He quoted to him a letter in which she had written, “I never dared hope that Rodin would sit for me.”