You Must Change Your Life

  But then, at the end of November, Austria began losing ground in the war. The military extended the age limit for soldiers and suddenly Rilke qualified to be drafted and “whisked off to who knows where.” When his birth date was called up for medical board review, officials declared the poet fit for service. He was ordered to report for duty in the mountain town of Turnau in January.

  Rilke rushed a letter to Princess von Thurn und Taxis to see if she had any authority to save him from this nightmare. She made every effort to mobilize her contacts, but it was no use. The government insisted Rilke enlist in the second reserve. “I’m scared, scared,” he told the princess.

  Nearly forty, Rilke found himself buttoning up the stiff military collar of his youth to report to boot camp. It was just as traumatic as he remembered. The other soldiers still bullied him and, now that he was known once again by his given name René, taunted him for its girlish sound. After three weeks, Rilke’s influential connections finally arranged for his transfer to a desk job in Vienna. According to some reports, the princess personally came to the barracks to escort him away.

  Rilke’s new job was in the War Archives, where he was to write short, glorified accounts of the battles being fought. Rilke loathed this revisionist “hero grooming,” as he called it. Nonetheless, he devoted himself to the task with all the diligence he would normally reserve for his poetry. On one shift, he crumpled up page after page, unable to get the narrative just right. When he explained to his superiors that he was suffering from writer’s block, the colonel brought Rilke a stack of paper and a measuring stick and told him to hand-rule each sheet instead.

  “Industriously he drew vertical and horizontal lines, for hours on end. Sometimes the spaces between the lines were only two millimetres wide, but he worked with perfect accuracy and a genuine humility,” remembered one of his colleagues in the department.

  Thus, for five months, Austria had its greatest living poet ruling sheets of paper, until the military at last released Rilke from service in June 1916.

  THE PAPAL BUST WAS one of the last works Rodin would undertake in his lifetime. He had returned to Paris “tired; the war overawed him, aroused his fears,” said his secretary, Marcelle Tirel. He spent his last two years sculpting very little at all. He visited the Hôtel Biron now only for important appointments, spending most of his time in Meudon with Beuret.

  Some of his friends urged him to marry her before it was too late. It seemed only fair, given her loyalty to him over all these years. Rodin finally agreed and, on January 28, 1917, he married his companion of more than half a century. The mayor of Meudon performed the rite amid explosions at a nearby munitions factory. The couple’s son and a few close friends and employees joined, noticing that Rodin smiled throughout the brief ceremony, often eyeing the pastry table. Beuret wore her usual scowl.

  A few days after the wedding, Rodin’s new bride caught a terrible cough. Between lozenges she confessed to his secretary, Tirel, “I don’t the least mind dying,” but she did not want to go before Rodin and leave him alone. Two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Tirel came home to find Rodin standing in the center of the room staring at Beuret “like a statue.” Tears ran down his face as he whispered, “I’m all alone.” She had died that day of pneumonia. Tirel changed Beuret’s clothes into a white dress and they buried her in a joint grave in the garden at Meudon, beneath a statue of The Thinker.

  The tomb of Rodin and Beuret.

  Rodin’s health declined rapidly after that. An infection in his lungs prevented him from leaving Meudon, where he lived out his last months in near-solitude. A resentful nurse kept him caged up in the house like a child, he complained. Only his most devoted past mistresses and a few vulturous acquaintances, hoping to acquire a last drawing or photograph, came to visit him now. His son returned to the house for a while, too, but even he departed after learning that his presumed inheritance would be donated to the state. In the eyes of the law, Auguste was Beuret’s son alone and therefore entitled to nothing of Rodin’s without a will.

  For five days Rodin lay in bed shivering, attended to by three nurses, whom he called “his Three Fates.” On November 18, 1917, water filled his lungs. In his last breath he reportedly groaned a defense of his late hero: “And people say that Puvis de Chavannes is not a fine artist!”

  THE NEWS OF RODIN’S death reached Westhoff before it did Rilke. She was living in Worpswede again, building her final home with Ruth, when she delivered Rilke the sad announcement. She told him that Paris would seem “wholly desolate without him.”

  Rilke was about to write Westhoff a belated birthday note when he received her letter instead. Although he and Rodin had not mended their most recent differences, the news devastated the poet, and superseded all other matters in his life then. “Like me you will be steeped in memories and sorrow and, with Paris and all we have lost in it, will have to go through this now so final loss,” he wrote Westhoff.

  He maintained from that day forward that Rodin’s influence on him outweighed that of anyone else. Rilke thought that perhaps the artist’s death would have been easier to mourn had it not occurred during the war, which would rage on for still another year. But the letters of condolences that started streaming into Rilke’s Munich apartment only compounded his sense that life was almost surreally inhumane.

  His friend Count Kessler attempted to comfort the poet one day by telling him that he had managed to find some meaning in his time serving in the war. He told Rilke how moved he had been just by the sheer number of men sacrificing their lives all around him.

  Rilke dropped his head into his hands. There was nothing meaningful about death during war, he said. The only worthwhile sacrifice was a sacrifice made in the name of art. Only a Rodin bronze, or a Michelangelo marble, or the dark sea at Duino were worth fighing for, he told Kessler. War was merely a pastime for the vocationless.

  Kessler confided in his journal that he realized then how little Rilke understood about human nature. Fighting must have been too real, too physical for this poet who lived entirely in the realm of the spirit. Apollo, he concluded, was Rilke’s only god.

  There was not much one could say to comfort those who, like Rilke, emerged from the war wounded and morale-beaten. But the writer Sylvia Beach saw some hope for Parisians with the opening of the Musée Rodin in 1919. The fighting had delayed its official ratification for several years, but now that the soldiers would “return from the preoccupations of the war to the eternal beauty of art, many will be the pilgrims from all countries of the world to this shrine of beauty, the Musée Rodin,” she wrote. Today the museum remains home to the largest collection of Rodin works in the world. A plaque on the side of the building reads, “In this mansion, to which he introduced Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke lived from 1908 to 1911.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  SINCE THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR, RILKE HAD BEEN ASKING himself, Where do I belong? There was a time early in the fighting when the sound of soldiers singing on trains filled his heart with pride for his Austrian homeland. But that patriotism deteriorated rapidly as he saw the waste of war firsthand, and he gradually began to align himself with the growing pacifist movement.

  He returned to Munich after his release from the military, but felt allegiance to no nation. “I have behind me so many years that are lost or at least have almost eluded me, that I am now ruthlessly living toward a certain inner ownership,” he wrote. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 only confirmed his lifelong sense of homelessness. Suddenly Rilke found himself a Czechoslovakian citizen by law, and yet he didn’t even speak the language.

  By that time Rilke felt little connection to his native tongue, either. Now that he had mastered French, he could never find the words he needed to express himself in German. Take “palm”: the French had paume, the Italians had palma, but the Germans had nothing to describe the inner plain of the hand, he said. The closest word Rilke could find was one that translated to “hand plate.�
� That it conjured an image of a beggar asking for alms perfectly evoked the impoverishment that characterized the German language to Rilke.

  In the last phase of Rilke’s life, he settled in a French-speaking region of Switzerland and changed his name back from Rainer to René. Anti-German sentiment still ran high in French-speaking nations then, and Rilke soon began writing in French and even found himself thinking in French. Writing poetry in a foreign language was a challenge, but rediscovering how to express himself made him feel like a child, experiencing the world with new eyes.

  BEGINNING IN 1919, Rilke saw through the emotional “turning” that he felt stirring in him just before the war. He would remain a fundamentally solitary poet, but he was now ready to do the “heart-work” he had denied himself for so long. For once, he wanted to give something to others.

  The black-haired Polish painter Baladine Klossowska was still married when she and Rilke first met more than a decade earlier in Paris. Her husband, the German art historian Erich Klossowski, had also written a book for Die Kunst, the series of art books that included Rilke’s monograph on Rodin. The two writers ran into each other periodically over the years, including in Paris the year after Rodin fired Rilke, and the poet had invited the couple back to his little apartment to hear him read from his Book of Hours.

  After the war, Baladine Klossowska, a German citizen, was forced to leave Paris. She settled in Geneva and separated from her husband in 1917. Two years later, Rilke looked her up while he was in town giving a reading. His five-day visit stretched into fifteen as the old friends speedily became lovers.

  Soon they were writing each other letters three times a day and, by the summer of 1921, they began renovating a home together. Set atop a steep cliff in the Rhône Valley, the thirteenth century chateau known as Muzot was a sturdy stone square, as if a castle had collapsed and only one defensive tower remained. Its violetish gray walls and turrets were reminiscent of a Cézanne mountain, while its barren interiors—crumbling stone walls and no water or electricity—would have pleased Rodin.

  Rilke became an adoring and protective father figure to Klossowska’s two boys, who were both budding young artists. The eldest, Pierre, was a writer, while little Balthasar was just eleven and already a gifted artist. When Balthasar, a tall, lanky troublemaker, was denied entry into an advanced class at school, Rilke protested to the headmaster that it was not the boy’s grades that were at fault, but rather the “extreme pedantry on the part of the school.”

  At some point, a stray Angora cat wandered into the house and joined the family, too. They it named Mitsou and it became Balthasar’s closest companion. When it ran away one day, the boy drew a series of forty thick-lined ink drawings that illustrated the memories they had shared. They slept together, ate together, spent Christmas together. The final image was a self-portrait of Balthasar wiping away his tears.

  Rilke was stunned by the raw skill and vulnerability of the drawings. He found them to be so good, in fact, that he arranged to have them published in a book. They titled it Mitsou and Balthasar took Rilke’s advice and signed it with his nickname, Balthus, an alias that stuck with the artist throughout his long career as one of modern art’s most celebrated and provocative painters.

  Rilke, a young Balthus and Baladine Klossowska in Switzerland.

  Rilke supplied the foreword to the book, a meditation on the elusive nature of cats and his first text published in French. It opened with a question, “Does anyone know cats?” Unlike dogs, whose unflinching worship for humans feels both wonderful and tragic, “Cats are just that: cats. And their world is utterly, through and through, a cat’s world. You think they look at us?” Hardly, he says; even as their eyes are upon us they are already forgetting we exist.

  After the book came out, Kurt Wolff, the first publisher of Franz Kafka, came across it and called the drawings “astounding and almost frightening.” And the Postimpressionist painter Pierre Bonnard wrote to “Madame” Rilke with a letter “full of praise” for Mitsou. It is no wonder that in all the years after Balthus rose to fame he continued to praise Rilke. He was “a wonderful man—fascinating. He had a wonderful head, with enormous blue eyes. He had a sort of dreamy voice and an extraordinary charm.”

  The poet had always treated the boy as an equal. Of one series of drawings, Rilke told the twelve-year-old, “Their invention is charming, and their facility proves the wealth of your inner vision; the arrangement unfailingly enhances the excellent choice you have made.” Given the chance to look at them side by side, he imagined the two artists would share “an entirely parallel, virtually identical joy.”

  After Mitsou came out, Rilke shut himself up in Muzot for a long, cold winter, and, in February 1922, he wrote all fifty-five of his Sonnets to Orpheus. The book was inspired by the death of his daughter’s teenage friend Wera Knoop, a dancer who had turned to music after leukemia had ravaged her body. Like the Elegies, Rilke said the Sonnets came to him almost unconsciously. Critics would later classify the Sonnets as the crossroads that guided Rilke to his most mature poetic phase. But to him they were merely the spiritual overflow of the Elegies, which he also completed in one final “storm of spirit” that year.

  That spring, his daughter Ruth married a young lawyer named Carl Sieber. Rilke missed the wedding and never met her husband. “I have a great desire to do nothing,” Rilke told Balthus around this time. “If you imagine that an evil sorcerer changed me into a turtle, you’d be close to the reality: I wear a strong and solid shell of indifference toward any challenge.”

  Klossowska found him increasingly absent from her life, too. The couple stayed together for five years, but he insisted on spending much of the time away or locked in solitude. She took his absences hard. “But we are human beings, René,” she said to him upon one of his many departures. Eventually Klossowska found herself unable to make a living on her painting—Rilke apparently did not help—and she took the boys to Berlin to stay with her sister. They lived between Germany and Switzerland for the next two years, with Klossowska updating Rilke often on Balthus’s progress. “He’s beginning to have a public,” she wrote. “René, he’ll be a great painter, you’ll see . . .”

  Although Rilke’s relationship with Klossowska ended in much the same way it had with other women, with Rilke choosing solitude over intimacy, he remained a zealous supporter of her sons. When Pierre Klossowki turned eighteen, Rilke secured him a job working as a secretary for Gide in Paris and assisting him on his novel The Counterfeiters. Rilke inquired to his friend endlessly about how much money the boy would need, what he should study and what kind of work he should aspire to do. Eventually Pierre went on to write influential books on Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, to translate Kafka, and become a painter in his own right.

  Around the same time, Rilke suggested that Balthus, then sixteen, should go to Paris, too. Like Rilke, the young painter would end up forgoing school and letting the city be his teacher. He had already received recognition incredibly early thanks to Mitsou. Rilke gave Balthus a copy of Wilhelm Worringer’s history of panel painting and sent him off to Paris, also in the care of Gide.

  In January 1925, Rilke dedicated his newest poem to Balthus. Titled “Narcissus,” it reimagines a sixteen-year-old boy’s extreme self-regard as a condition for his artistic awakening. That fall, Balthus spent all his days in the Louvre copying Nicolas Poussin’s painting Echo and Narcissus, incorporating his dedication, Á René, onto the surface of a stone.

  Throughout Balthus’s career, the early themes from his life with Rilke manifested in his work. He became notorious for his almost single-minded focus on painting cats, and on girls who lounged languorously like cats. His biographer Nicholas Fox Weber wrote that Balthus came to identify himself with the feline spirit as a young man, emanating in life and self-portraiture “the same haughty confidence and inaccessibility.” He sometimes signed his work, “H.M. The King of Cats.”

  Another dominant motif in Balthus’s work was windows—often with w
omen falling or gazing out of them. The window was the place in the house where Balthus’s mother spent much of her time as she waited for Rilke to return. She decorated the sill with flower boxes to greet him upon his arrival, and to give her something to look at while she sat there. Sometimes his absence would last so long that she would watch the buds bloom and then wither and die before he came back. For Klossowska, Rilke’s comings and goings were as fleeting and unpredictable as a cat’s.

  Rilke had been fascinated by windows since he and Klossowska took a trip to a small Swiss town early in their relationship. He thought about how all the windows of the little cottages looked like picture frames for the lives taking place inside. Someday he’d like to write a book about windows, he said. He never got that far, but he did write a cycle of poems, “Windows,” which Klossowska illustrated. In it, windows become many things for Rilke: they are eyes, a frame of vision, a measurement of expectations. Windows were an invitation, tempting you to come closer, but also an invitation to fall; they could be the beginning of terror. “She was in a window mood that day,” begins one poem, “to live seemed no more than to stare.” Klossowska published them in a little book, Windows, a year after Rilke died.

  Windows also communicated the essence of the term Weltinnenraum, or “worldinnerspace.” Rilke coined the word in his later years to describe the space where the barriers between the internal and external collapsed onto a single plane. It is a realm where the self is like a bird flying soundlessly between the sky and the soul, he said. Rilke accepts the concept as both a contradiction and a reality in a poem titled “Worldinnerspace”: “. . . O, wanting to grow, / I look out, and the tree grows in me,” he writes. Worldinnerspace returned Rilke to the philosophy education that began three decades earlier in Munich. His old aesthetics professor Theodor Lipps might have appreciated the idea while he was trying to explain how it felt to watch dancers whose movements seemed to occur both onstage and in his own muscles.