You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  In return, Rilke received only a polite response that seemed to deliberately avoid mention of the favor. Finally Rilke told Westhoff that Rodin simply did “not want to hear of sitting for the bust for the moment.” The artist had not officially declined, but he wouldn’t commit, either. They had one last chance to plead their case in May, when Rodin invited Rilke and Westhoff to join him for breakfast in Meudon. They spent a lovely morning together and before they left Rilke confirmed plans to come by again with his publisher a few days later. They were to pick up some photographs of Rodin’s work to illustrate a new edition of the monograph.

  Rodin had agreed to release the images, but when Rilke returned on the appointed day, the artist had inexplicably changed his mind. He refused to give Rilke the photos and he would not say why. Rilke vowed that this second broken promise would be the last he would tolerate from Rodin. Westhoff knew that she had no chance of convincing Rodin to sit for her on her own, so she returned to Munich and settled on sculpting a bust of Rilke’s friend the Czech baroness Sidonie Nádherný.

  “He can’t be counted on for anything anymore,” Rilke concluded. Rodin’s reckless mood swing was “as unexpected” now as it was when he fired Rilke eight years earlier. But this time the poet knew it was “probably final and not to be made up.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  AS THE AVANT-GARDE BROKE GROUND IN THE CITY, RODIN defiantly declared himself a member of the avant-derniers. At the 1913 Salon de la Société Nationale, Rodin displayed a thoroughly unfashionable marble bust of Puvis de Chavannes, an artist whose reputation for decorative, “wallpaper” painting was driving his descent into irrelevance in the fifteen years since his death. But Rodin maintained he was a genius and was willing to risk his own reputation in his defense.

  Already operating on the margins of Paris’s contemporary art scene, Rodin began to flee farther from the city still. He started spending weekends in the south, learning to paint with Renoir, and teaching him sculpture in return. The painter was by then so old and arthritic that he had to tie the brush to his wrist. Rodin, too, had some difficulty, but it brought him a childlike joy to learn a new skill at his advanced age.

  He also made pilgrimages to his beloved cathedrals, observing them with all the unjaded awe that he had as a boy in boarding school. He began sketching their columns, moldings, stained glass and canopies and jotting down his impressions. Since he had been paying homage to past masters lately, he could not forget the buildings to which he owed his education more than anyone. The cathedral was the mother of all sculpture, the body that bore carvings on her surfaces for centuries before the reliefs, ornaments and statues climbed off her walls to stand on their own as individual works of art. Rodin couldn’t imagine sculpture as we know it existing at all without cathedrals.

  An aging Rodin, circa 1913.

  In early 1914, Rodin published these meditations alongside a hundred free-associative drawings in a book, Cathedrals of France. The chapters follow his meanderings from Chartres to Beauvais to Laon, eventually arriving at Reims, the thirteenth century Gothic masterpiece ninety miles northwest of Paris, and his most beloved of all the cathedrals.

  Rodin devotes the longest chapter in the book to Reims Cathedral, where he would stand for days “in terror and in rapture” before it. It had an almost “Assyrian character,” he wrote, but its effect was even more profound than that of the pyramids. He filled thirty-six pages with technical observations taken from the front, from three-quarter angles, from his hotel window, from within the hollow nave, and during the day and at night. An evening spent in the nave gave him the feeling of being in a grotto where, at any moment, Apollo might rise in resurrection. He imagined how nicely The Thinker would look sitting in these chambers. The crypt’s “immense shadow would have fortified that work.”

  He wrote about the bells, which seemed to ring at the same rhythm as the clouds passing by, and about the hunched gargoyles, which lunged from the walls into his nightmares. By the end of the chapter, Rodin still felt he had fallen short of conveying even a fraction of the cathedral’s fascinations. “Who indeed would dare to boast of having seen them all? I give only a few notes.”

  Reims was his religion, Rodin said. “The artists who built this Cathedral brought the world a reflection of divinity.” That’s why he considered the fifty years of crude restorations it had undergone to be nothing short of blasphemy. The cheap, synthetic materials these barbarian conservators used on Gothic cathedrals signified “a sick France . . . a France ravaged by selfish interest . . . that France of the schools where people talk and no longer know how to work,” he said.

  To Rodin, the Gothic cathedral embodied the essence of France, just as the Parthenon embodied Greece. Yet cathedrals had become symbols to him of a lost art and their obliteration marked the end of France’s genius. Yet the public didn’t even seem to care. Rodin believed that the cathedrals were so in need of prayer that his collaborator on the book, the Symbolist poet Charles Morice, described the sculptor as “a prophet conducting his people to the promised land.”

  The book is part anguished cri de coeur and part call to action. Rodin begged his readers to save the cathedrals for France’s children and implored the public to visit them in person. Photographs would not do; a camera lens has no sense of touch, whereas the eye could caress. He also begged visitors to be patient and humble before the cathedrals, studying them like apprentices before their masters.

  Given Rodin’s essential complaint—that no one defends the old anymore—the artist’s evangelizing may have been as much a lament for himself as it was for the cathedrals. “Who can believe in progress?” he asked. “We should long ago have been gods if the theory of indefinite progress were true.” When Rodin returned to Meudon to finish the book, his colleague felt the outsized pressure of the task bearing down upon him. He scrambled to decipher many of the book’s notes from Rodin’s shirtsleeves, and once said that the artist “goes out of his way to be unpleasant to me.”

  When the book came out in May 1914, Rodin and Morice staged a reading at the Hôtel Biron to mixed reviews. Some critics believed that Morice had ghostwritten the whole thing. He certainly played an important role, yet it’s hard to imagine anyone so precisely mimicking Rodin’s singularly magniloquent style of prose. He makes such forceful aesthetic judgments that they often strike the reader as unquestionable facts. The book offers “vibrant notes, noble thoughts, beautiful metaphors,” wrote the critic Émile Mâle, but he and others emphasized that it should not be mistaken for serious scholarship. Some critics went further and accused Rodin of deliberately deceiving readers into thinking that his prominent status as an artist somehow made him an expert on Gothic architecture, too.

  Rodin did not have time to defend himself before the entire world turned its attention to the crisis unfolding on the global stage and promptly forgot about Rodin’s little book. Europe was balancing on the brink of war and Rodin’s prayer to preserve the symbols of France suddenly became a prayer for the survival of France itself.

  RILKE DID NOT ATTEND the reading at the Hôtel Biron, nor did he ever see Rodin in Meudon again. He had gone there once in early 1914 as a favor to his friend Magda von Hattingberg, who had asked if he could introduce her to Rodin during a visit to Paris. But Rodin was not there on the afternoon they arrived; he was off painting with Renoir.

  Rilke walked von Hattingberg around the yard instead, and the countryside looked every bit as enchanting as she had imagined it would. But the house looked so cold and uninviting, she told Rilke. This was how Rodin lived, he explained to her: in a dilapidated home, without heat and surrounded by friends eager to exploit him. The whole scene struck her as “so hopeless: human weakness and genius combined in a great creative personality that is growing old in loneliness and unhappiness,” she wrote in her diary. “I wish we had not gone to Meudon.”

  It wasn’t only Rodin’s refusal to pose for Westhoff, or to turn over the promised photographs for his book, that
kept Rilke away from the artist at the end of his life. It was the sight of Rodin’s graceless aging, his submission to desires and earthly entanglements, that repelled him. Rodin had harbored the poet when he was at his most vagrant. “Deep in himself he bore the darkness, shelter, and peace of a house, and he himself had become sky above it, and wood around it,” Rilke wrote in 1903.

  More than sheltering him, the sculptor had taught Rilke the meaning of structure. He had given him the blueprint to build his poetry like a carpenter builds four walls around him. “But to make, to make is the thing,” Rilke had understood. “And once something is there, ten or twelve things are there, sixty or seventy little records about one, all made now out of this, now out of that impulse, then one has already won a piece of ground on which one can stand upright. Then one no longer loses oneself.”

  This was the gospel Rilke had followed for so long. When Rodin said to work, always work, Rilke had taken it to mean that one must not live. The poet was willing to make that sacrifice for a while, when he still believed that his obedience would be rewarded with mastery. Rilke had isolated himself and diverted his love for people onto objects. He acted as if he lived underwater, in a climate inhospitable to humans. Should someone dare to comfort him in this “airless, loveless space,” as Westhoff had attempted, it would be only a matter of time before their support would age and die “in a withered and terrible state.” Rilke worked himself to the brink of madness in those years. And yet, try as he might, he could never fully extinguish his desire to live.

  On one of their last visits together, Rodin had wondered to his old friend, “Why leave all this?” At rest in the garden at Meudon, the artist, then in his seventies, gazed out over the marble and plaster figures who had been some of his closest companions in life. He looked so satisfied in that moment with all his beautiful things around him, his faithful companion Beuret inside and his memories of great loves, that Rilke realized that Rodin had not made any of the sacrifices that he, Rilke, had. Rodin was no martyr for his art. How did he live? Full of pleasure, and exactly as he pleased, it turned out.

  Rodin could not have realized how the words he had uttered a decade earlier might deprive the poet of life’s most sacred experiences. When Rilke had heard the directive travailler, toujours travailler, he followed it literally, abandoning life in anticipation of future payoff. When he saw that Rodin had not followed this mandate himself, he felt betrayed. But his mistake was failing to grasp that Rodin could never tell Rilke how to live. The best any master could do was encourage their pupil and hope they find satisfaction in the work itself. In art, Rilke had started to realize, there was never anything waiting on the other side: There was no god, no secret revealed, and in most cases no reward. There was only the doing.

  One morning in late June, just before the outbreak of the war, Rilke wrote a poem about the high price he had paid for his work. He had sat around empty hotel rooms, stared at cathedral towers and caged lions, slept in empty beds. But deep within the body of this lifelong observer was the trace of a “still feelable heart” that had been “painfully buried-alive” by images.

  Just as his narrator reached the limits of objective observation, Rilke had decided, “Perhaps I shall now learn to become a little human.” He sent Andreas-Salomé a copy of the poem, which he titled “Turning” because it represented the turning “which surely must come if I am to live.”

  Work of the eyes is done, now

  go and do heart-work . . .

  THE ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND was shot on June 28, 1914. Two weeks later, Rilke packed a bag for what he thought would be an ordinary trip to Germany: a visit to Andreas-Salomé in Göttingen, then to his publisher in Leipzig, and finally to Munich, where he would meet with Ruth and join back up with Andreas-Salomé. Assuming he would return after the brief trip, he left all his belongings—the desk from Rodin, his family’s coat of arms framed on the wall, a daguerreotype of his father—behind in the apartment. As he stood waiting for his taxi on the Rue de Campagne-Première, his landlady started to sob. Rilke, oblivious to the reality that Europe was on the brink of collapse, didn’t understand why.

  Rilke arrived in Germany in mid-July, two weeks before Austria declared war on Serbia. News of faltering diplomatic relations sounded throughout the continent and Rilke remained fairly indifferent to it all. He dismissed Russia’s threats of mobilization as posturing and carried on with his plans to travel to Munich and meet Andreas-Salomé, acting “as the child he was in everything concerning politics,” as a friend said of him at the time. But Andreas-Salomé did not take that risk, thinking better of boarding a train that might leave her stranded in another city. She was wise. It would be six years before Rilke made it back to Paris.

  On August 2, two weeks after Rilke had unintentionally evacuated Paris, soldiers seized Rodin’s car as he was passing through the city gates on his way home to Meudon. All travel in and out of Paris had been shut down. The seventy-three-year-old artist and his plaster assistant had to walk back to the suburbs. Luckily a peasant took pity on them along the way and let them ride in his cart.

  When Rodin arrived home that evening, he found that his employees had been called in for military duty. Even his old, disabled horse Rataplan had been requisitioned. Then came a telegram advising him to move his art to the cellar of the Hôtel Biron within forty-eight hours. Rodin had not fully comprehended the scale of the conflict when flyers went up around Paris notifying citizens that mobilization was underway.

  The next day, Germany declared war on Russia and France. Rodin hired a team of movers, including his son, Auguste, to rush his sculptures into storage and arrange to send as many of them as possible to England. By the end of the month, German forces were closing in on Paris and blanketing the city with pamphlets warning that surrender was its only hope.

  On September 1, Rodin realized that it was time to leave town. He and Beuret pushed through crowds of incoming troops at the railway station, leaving Auguste behind in Meudon while they boarded a train to England. A relative of Rodin’s temporarily took over the artist’s country estate and converted it into a field hospital during the Battle of the Marne, which narrowly saved Paris from German occupation one week later.

  Rodin and Beuret took shelter at the London family home of their friend Judith Cladel. Rodin found a silver lining in his English exile in that he would now at least get to witness the unveiling of his Burghers of Calais in the gardens of the House of Parliament that fall. But at the last minute the curator decided it would be in poor taste to celebrate this monument to the sacrifice of Calais at a time when German soldiers literally had the French port town under siege.

  Although the decision disappointed Rodin, it did not begin to match the devastation that came a few weeks after his arrival in London. Rodin had opened a copy of the Daily Mail one morning and plastered across the page was a photo of the Reims Cathedral, bombed to rubble.

  Reims under bombardment in September 1914.

  “He turned pale as if he was dying, and for two days, white and mute from sorrow, he himself seemed to have turned into one of the statues of the mutilated cathedral,” Cladel said. The Germans, fully aware of Reims’ role as a national symbol of French ingenuity, fired shells at its skeleton for another four years. In the future, Rodin predicted, “One will say ‘the fall of Reims’ as one says ‘the fall of Constantinople.’ ”

  For perhaps the first time, Rodin found himself passionate about politics. He wrote to a pacifist writer who had lived at the Hôtel Biron, Romain Rolland, telling him, “This is more than a war. This scourge of God is a catastrophe against humanity that divides the epochs.” His patriotism hardened, Rodin donated eighteen sculptures to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in November—a gift to his English brothers in the fight against Germany. When he received the unlikely offer of 125,000 francs to sculpt a bust of the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Rodin rejected the commission, saying, “How could I do the portrait of an enemy of France?”

&nb
sp; Two months after the fall of Reims, Rodin and Beuret moved on from London to Rome, where he had been commissioned to sculpt a bust of the Pope. Benedict XV had consented to twelve sittings, but dropped out after just three. He did not seem to enjoy holding poses for prolonged periods of time and told Rodin that he was too busy to continue. When an assistant dared bring Rodin photos of the Pope to use a substitute, the sculptor untied his apron and stormed out. A friend who had helped arrange the session ran into Rodin on the Vatican staircase that day. Tears welling in the sculptor’s eyes, the man had to help the distressed old artist down the steps.

  When the fighting shifted from France to Belgium a few months later, Rodin returned to Paris and continued working on the papal bust. It bore a fine resemblance to the man but, he lamented, it would never be the “masterpiece” it could have been had the Pope cooperated.

  WHILE RODIN WAS DISPLACED from Paris during the early months of the war, Rilke enjoyed an unusually fortunate turn of events. In September, his publisher informed him that an anonymous donor who was going into battle had bestowed twenty thousand Austrian kronen upon him and another poet, Georg Trakl. Rilke never knew the name of his mysterious benefactor, but it was later revealed to be the Viennese philosopher and steel heir Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had admired Rilke’s early lyrical poetry.

  To the poet, this was “no less astounding than the existence of the unicorn.” It was the start of an uncommonly comfortable season in Rilke’s life. In the summer of 1915, he got a girlfriend, the painter Loulou Albert-Lasard, and a rent-free riverfront apartment in Munich, courtesy of a vacationing patroness. In her living room Rilke gazed daily at a wonderfully strange painting of six forlorn circus performers, Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques, which would later make an appearance in one of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.