You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  Rilke at the Chateau du Muzot in Switzerland, 1923.

  This in-between realm was the only place Rilke understood as home, the space where all things came to settle at last. For him, the house was a container and he was the air slipping out its windows; the cat running away at night. He was a ghost and a myth, first of a dead sister and then, at last, as the author of his own death, for which he created a final perfect metaphor.

  ONE OCTOBER DAY in 1926 Rilke pricked his finger on the thorn of a rose as he was gathering a bouquet from his garden. The wound worsened as the days wore on. A septic infection spread into his arm and then to the other arm before invading his entire body. Bloody black blisters erupted on his skin and ulcers flared from the front of his mouth down to his esophagus, making it impossible to quench his desperate thirst. By December, he knew he was nearing the end.

  On his last day of life, Rilke asked his doctor to hold his hand, and to squeeze it from time to time. If he was awake, he would squeeze back. If not, the doctor should sit him upright in bed to return him to the “frontier of consciousness.” Rilke did not fear illness, a place he knew well from his youth, nor did he fear death.

  Death was simply the laying out of a life. It was the transformation of a conscious being into purely physical matter, which would at least provide conclusive evidence that the person had been real—a fact that was not always self-evident to the poet. To Rilke, death was a “thing” to be examined like any other thing. In “The Death of the Poet,” a poem he’d written shortly after his father died, in 1906, Rilke had described the face of the dead: “tender and open, has no more resistance, / than a fruit’s flesh spoiling in the air.” Now it was his own death to which he was to bear witness.

  After seeing how much the fear of death had diminished Rodin at the end of his life, Rilke now believed that the only way to face the indignity of his disease was to embrace it. In his bedside notebook, Rilke summoned it like a spirit, beginning his final poem, “Come, you last thing, which I acknowledge . . .” At the end of the page, he made a note to himself to be sure to distinguish this final “renunciation” of death from his childhood sicknesses. “Don’t mix those early marvels into this,” he wrote.

  Up until his last hour, Rilke refused painkillers. He refused hospitals, where people died en masse. He refused company, including his wife and daughter. He refused to know the name of his disease. He had already decided it was the poisonous rose—and his death would be his own. When it came on December 29, 1926, three weeks after his fifty-first birthday, he met it with his eyes wide open.

  Rilke had his final words etched into his tombstone: “Rose, O pure contradiction, desire to be no one’s sleep beneath so many lids.” And when the ground unfroze that spring, the roses awoke, undaunted by the headstone bearing down upon the soil. They gathered around the stone, their young petals opening gently around sleeping, oblivious centers, like mouths and eyelids, ready to receive.

  A BRIEF CATHOLIC CEREMONY was held the Sunday after Rilke’s death. A violinist and organist played Bach inside the church, while children gathered outside in a foot of snow, forming a circle around the open grave. Rilke’s longtime editor Anton Kippenberg attended, along with several of the poet’s Swiss patrons. By some accounts Balthus, too, made the journey, and then wept in the mountains for days.

  Twenty years later, when Balthus was nearly forty, he published a series of letters that Rilke had sent him in the years leading up to his death. The collection was titled Letters to a Young Painter. In the first, written to Balthus when he was twelve, Rilke recounted a story Rodin had told him about reading The Imitation of Christ, the fifteenth century guide to leading a spiritually fulfilled life. Rodin had said that each time he came across the word “God” he would replace it in his head with the word “sculpture.” It worked brilliantly, resulting in chapters with such titles as, “We Must Walk Before Sculpture in Humility and Truth” and “To Despise the World and Serve Sculpture Is Sweet.”

  Rilke instructed Balthus to do the same with Mitsou. Each time the boy came across Rilke’s name, he should replace it with his own. “Your part of this work was all labor and sorrow,” Rilke told him, while his was “minor and all pleasure.” Balthus had proven himself with this book and was now on his way to becoming a master. Seeing it was the first step toward feeling it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Matt Weiland for his painstaking but always spirited editing across many drafts. Thanks also to Remy Cawley at Norton for always having a patient answer, and to my agent, Larry Weissman, for his early and enduring encouragement.

  I am grateful to all the individuals and institutions that allowed me to reproduce the images in these pages. The descendants of Rainer Maria Rilke, in particular Bettina Sieber-Rilke, granted me access to their archive, and in doing so generously enriched this book.

  Anyone writing on Rilke and Rodin today will rely on the accomplishments of scholars, translators and biographers such as Ralph Freedman, Stephen Mitchell, Edward Snow, Frederic V. Grunfeld and Ruth Butler. I was particularly inspired by the work of Geoff Dyer, William Gass and Lewis Hyde, all of whom have contributed deeply perceptive essays to the literature on Rilke and Rodin.

  Many friends supported me throughout this undertaking: Whitney Alexander, Stephanie Bailey, Charlotte Becket, Lauren Belfer, Ben Davis, Natalie Frank, Andrew Goldstein, Ryan McPartland, Emmy Mikelson and Kathryn Musilek. I owe special thanks to Rainer Ganahl for his thoughtful translations and readings. Finally, I am indebted to my mother, my stepfather, my brother Tyler and my grandparents, especially Babika Olga, for their abiding kindness and faith all these years.

  NOTES

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  FREQUENTLY CITED

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910–1926. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. All of Rilke’s letters are from this book unless otherwise noted.

  AR—Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin. Translated by Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil. New York: Sunwise Turn, 1919, 39.

  BT—David Kleinbard, The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Life and Work. New York: NYU Press, 1995.

  CF—Auguste Rodin, Cathedrals of France. Translated by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

  DF—Eric Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000.

  DYP—Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

  FG—Frederic V. Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998.

  LB—Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs. Edited by Ernst Pfeiffer. Translated by Breon Mitchell. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

  LC—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne. Translated by Joel Agee. New York: Macmillan, 2002.

  LP—Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

  LYP—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by M. D. Herter Norton, New York: W. W. Norton, 1934; revised edition, 1954.

  LYR—Marcelle Tirel, The Last Years of Rodin. Translated by R. Francis. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1925.

  JA—Harry Graf Kessler, Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880–1918. Translated by Laird Easton. New York: Vintage, 2011.

  PMB—Paula Modersohn Becker, Paula Modersohn Becker: The Letters and Journals. Edited by Günter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken. Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

  PR—Anthony Mario Ludovici, Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1926.

  RA—Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center of
Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

  RAS—Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

  RL—Wolfgang Leppmann, Rilke: A Life. Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1984.

  RP—Ruth Butler, Rodin in Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980.

  RR—Anna A. Tavis, Rilke’s Russia: A Cultural Encounter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997.

  RSG—Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

  INTRODUCTION

  x “Perhaps all the dragons”: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1984, 92.

  PART ONE • CHAPTER ONE

  4 “with head raised”: CF, 252.

  8 “Art is essentially”: Quoted in Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, The Training of the Memory in Art: And the Education of the Artist. London: Macmillan, 1914, xxvi.

  9 “You were born”: RSG, 17.

  9 “walking temple”: Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center of Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 186.

  10 “The day will come”: RSG, 15.

  10 “Think about words”: RSG, 13.

  10 “hold the keys”: PR, 51.

  11 “When one is born”: RSG, 18.

  11 “You don’t go” . . . “I understood”: Judith Cladel, Rodin: The Man and His Art, with Leaves from His Notebook. New York: Century, 1917,113.

  12 “How I should love”: Ronald R. Bernier, Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin de Siècle France. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007, 69.

  12 “transitory intoxication”: Frederick Lawton, The Life and Work of Auguste Rodin. New York: C. Scribner’s, 1907, 16.

  12 “Where did I learn”: Jennifer Gough-Cooper, Apropos Rodin. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, 20.

  13 Rosa Bonheur: Frederick Lawton, The Life and Work of Auguste Rodin. New York: C. Scribner’s, 1907, 19.

  13 “All right, that’s”: PR, 2.

  13 “The lion is dead”: Quoted in Glenn F. Benge, Antoine-Louis Barye: Sculptor of Romantic Realism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984, 37.

  14 “They ran” . . . “Barye had found”: FG, 29.

  14 “takes up the art”: Quoted in FG, 270.

  CHAPTER TWO

  15 “too big”: Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2009, 68.

  17 “wanted something indefinite”: To Ellen Key, April 3 1903, p. 98.

  18 “Once when I was struck”: RL, 27.

  18 man named Pölten: Magda von Hattingberg, Rilke and Benvenuta. Translated by Cyrus Brooks. New York: W. W. Norton, 1949, 134.

  18 “History of the Thirty-Years War”: BT, 141.

  19 “dungeon of childhood”: Arnold Bauer, Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Ungar, 1972, 10.

  19 “scorn and uneasiness”: To Ludwig Ganghofer, April 16, 1897.

  19 “dream children”: LP, 55.

  19 “not an artist”: To Ludwig Ganghofer, April 16, 1897.

  19 “a bright”: J. F. Hendry, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Manchester, UK: Carcanet New Press, 1983, 20.

  20 “The only progress”: RR, 6.“death of God”: Friedrich Nietzsche first described this in The Gay Science, published in 1882, then again in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1884.

  20 “be breathed”: RL, 56.

  21 “thought meter”: Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology. Edited by R.W. Rieber. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1980, 36.

  22 “beholder’s involvement”: Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland. Los Angeles: Getty, 2000, 11.

  22 “feeling into”: Nancy Eisenberg, Empathy and Its Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Archive, 1990, 18.

  22 “move in and with”: James Henderson, Reconceptualizing Curriculum Development. London: Routledge, 2014, 115.

  22 “striving and performing”: Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings.” Translated by Max Schertel and Melvin Rader. In A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology. Edited by Melvin Rader. California: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1935, 379.

  23 “immersed” himself: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. August 26, 1898. Translated by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, 324.

  23 “the courage and capacity”: Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917, note on 4.

  23 “putting of oneself”: Fritz Wittels, Freud and His Time: The Influence of the Master Psychologist on the Emotional Problems in Our Lives. New York: Liveright, 1931, 71.

  24 “stand at the”: To Frieda von Billow, August 13, 1897.

  24 “dreamer, floundering”: Quoted in Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne. Introduction and translation by Hanna Astrup Larsen. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919, vi.

  24 “by far the smartest”: RL, 73.

  24 “holy trinity”: Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 45.

  25 “Pythagorean friendship”: Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (life)styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 64.

  25 “I really ought”: Walter A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press, 2013, 61.

  25 “enormous quantity”: Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God, and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012, 32.

  25 “Thou goest”: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, a Book for All and None. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908, 87.

  27 “gentle dreamy”: LP, 68.

  27 “no back”: LP, 60.

  27 “the famous writer”: RR, 23.

  27 “Yesterday was not” . . . “I can think”: RAS, 3-4.

  27 “must not”. . . “manly grace”: LB, 68-69.

  27 “style of gentle”: Julia Vickers, Lou von Salomé: A Biography of the Woman Who Inspired Freud, Nietzsche and Rilke. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008, 111.

  27 “fling themselves”: LYP, 55.

  28 “pageboy”: Quoted in Angela Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work. East Sussex, UK: M. Bell Limited, 1984, 109.

  28 “his mother or”: LP, 113.

  28 “I am still soft”: BT, 88.

  28 “your very name”: Quoted in Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Archive, 1985, 163.

  29 “What!”: RR, 96.

  29 “made a dragon”: J. F. Hendry, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Manchester, UK: Carcanet New Press, 1983, 32.

  30 “LAID IN THE HANDS”: Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006, 157.

  30 “[Y]ou took my”: BT, 91.

  30 “Put out my eyes”: With permission—Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from The Book of Hours. Translated by Babette Deutsch. New York: New Directions, 1975, 37.

  30 “be more by”: Julia Vickers, Lou von Salomé: A Biography of the Woman Who Inspired Freud, Nietzsche and Rilke. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008, 142.

  31 “go away” . . . “I would be capable”: Quoted in Daniel Bullen, The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2013, 33.

  CHAPTER THREE

  32 “terribly hideous” . . . “seemed so dreadful”: Quoted in Robert K. Wittman and John Shiffman, Priceless. New York: Broadway Books, 2011, 37.

  33 “There are a thousand voices”: Quoted in Victor Frisch and Joseph T. Shipley, Auguste Rodin. Frederick A. Stokes, 1939, 410.

  34 “There is nothing ugly”: August
e Rodin, Paul Gsell, Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell. Oakland: University of California Press, 1984, 19.

  34 “The mask determined” . . . “It was the first”: Albert E. Elsen, In Rodin’s Studio. New York: Phaidon, 1980, 157.

  35 “She didn’t have”: RSG, 48.

  35 “tough as a cannon ball”: FG, 618

  35 “I had put” . . . “she attached herself”: RSG, 48–49.

  35 “It is necessary”: To Clara Westhoff, September 5, 1902. [Rilke’s letter quoted Rodin in French, parce qu’il faut avoir une femme.]

  36 “unknown”: RSG, 49.

  36 “Dinant is picturesque”: FG, 93.

  36 “Hold on!”: FG, 95.

  36 “not directly of his works”: FG, 95.

  37 “the great magician”: Catherine Lampert, Rodin: Sculpture & Drawings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986, 13.

  37 “study rather than”: Quoted in T. H. Bartlett, “Auguste Rodin,” American Architect and Architecture, volume 25. March 2, 1889, 99.

  37 “in the absolute”: RP, 3.

  38 “I am literally”: RSG,110.

  38 “a very rare”: Jacques De Caso and Patricia B. Sanders, Rodin’s Sculpture. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1977, 44.

  40 “with a fury”: Quoted in Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center of Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 21.

  40 “like an egg”: Quoted in Marie-Pierre Delclaux, Rodin: A Brilliant Life. Paris: Musée Rodin, 2003, 114.

  40 “his feet” . . . “The fertile”: Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center of Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 175.

  41 “whole body”: AR, 49.

  41 “It is my door”: Albert E. Elsen, The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985, 60.