Rilke in Paris

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Ashamed to exist, shrivelled shadows,

  fearful, bent low, you stick to the walls;

  and none greets you, strange fates!

  Debris of humanity for ripened eternity.

  Then it’s the step of a blind woman during the night, which prefigures another episode in the Notebooks:

  That often does me good, to be faced with real night, the night of this little garden, for even a little garden may possess a vast night. (I was interrupted. I had recognised, down below, in the quiet rue Cassette, a light cadence uncannily repeated: it is an old woman who passes, who sings, as if she were cradling an infant. She is blind. A black poodle tugs on her left hand; on the right she holds a stick out in front. If a coin falls, the dog noses towards the place where it rolled, takes it and tosses it in the metal dish that his mistress holds out to receive it. While he searches about, she remains silent. Then, having launched to the heavens a final gratitude, she starts over as if she had never been interrupted, as if she had simply stopped listening for a moment. Now the street is once again in silence. From time to time, a footstep, from time to time, a carriage. Then, I recognise it, the stick of the blind woman against the pavement: She’s back. It is time. For the ear this scene is akin to a view of the sky for the eyes; the same law enables the elements to appear, places them and orders them into constellations, all this, in spite of its distance, is replete with meaning and speaks to the heart of the solitary who understands and attaches himself to these voices converging on him, aboard infinite space…

  So, during the fourth period of Rilke’s residence in Paris, it seems that the fundamental images of that spiritual uprooting which was his Parisian experience had taken on their fullest meaning and found their definitive value. Though Rilke had during the last two years devoted a significant portion of his time to the New Poems (where are to be found in any case many of the themes familiar to the Notebooks, only driven towards a more formal expression), crucial fragments of the book were now transcribed. Letters, notes, journal pages – fragile testimonies, some of which have unfortunately been lost – formed the backbone of the Notebooks and were employed like sketches, studies of hands or torsos which the sculptor uses to prefigure a group work. Roughed out in 1902, tackled again in 1904 via the detour of a dialogue, which was in effect only a ruse of his interior demon, hounded by remissions between 1905 and 1908, it was only in 1909, in Paris and then in 1910, in Leipzig, that the poet would begin the definitive composition.

  Formerly, in a letter of 17 October 1907, Rilke had admitted to his wife how much he owed to Baudelaire – the authority to integrate into his work the most horrifying experiences and to thus approach a totality of truth:

  You will certainly remember a passage in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge which concerns Baudelaire and his poem ‘Une Charogne’. I cannot help but think in writing of it, that without this poetry, the whole development of ‘objective’ language, such as we now think to see in the works of Cézanne, would never have even emerged: so this remorseless monument must be raised there, first. It was crucial that artistic vision was first overcome, to the point where could be perceived, in both the horrific and the sense of hostility, an existence as valuable as any other. Yes, the creator has no more right to turn away from any existence or to choose between them: if he refuses life in a certain object, he loses in one blow a state of grace, he succumbs utterly to sin. Flaubert, when he reports with scrupulous conscience the legend of Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, remains at the heart of the marvellous with a clear veracity because the artist in him participates in the decisions of the saint, approves them and acclaims them. He lies down with the lepers; he communicates all the heat from his body, right on through to the nights of love. Yes, an artist must go as far as this to ultimately achieve a new bliss…

  At the same time (and for the first time), I understand the destiny of Malte Laurids. That test was without doubt beyond his strength, he could not withstand it in the dimension of the real, even though he was, in terms of abstract reality, convinced of its necessity, to the point of still instinctively seeking right up to the moment where it clung to him and never let him go. The book of Malte Laurids, if it is ever written, would be only an expression of this means of seeing, demonstrated on someone that it overwhelmed…

  A day must come, one day, a time, for the calm and patience that will allow me to pursue the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; I know now many more things about him, or rather: I will know much more when he deems it necessary…

  ‘The book of Malte Laurids, if it is ever written…’ and ‘A day must come…’ These hypothetical or interrogative forms attest to the prudence with which Rilke sought to approach the authoritative assemblage of those manifold elements of his book.

  10. Rue Cassette, 6th arrondissement. (No. 29 is on the right facing the wall.)

  V

  The Composition of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  In creating poetry [Rilke wrote to Auguste Rodin], one is at all times aided and even borne by the rhythm of exterior things; for the lyrical cadence is that of nature: the waters, the wind, the night. But to give rhythm to prose one must go deep inside oneself and find the anonymous multiform rhythm of the blood. Prose must be built like a cathedral; there one really is without name, without ambition, without help: there upon the scaffolding with conscience alone.

  And to think, that in this prose, I now know how to form men and women, children and old people. Above all I have evoked the women carefully crafting all those things that move around them, leaving a whiteness which is not only a void, but which, all around is tenderness and fullness, becomes vibrant and luminous, almost like one of your marbles…

  This letter, dated 29 December 1908, comes at the time when Rilke, finally gathering together the elements of a book carried for so long in a state of virtual creation, pressed by his publisher, pressed more by the interior necessity to finish, undertook the actual composition, so to speak, of the Notebooks. Already in Rome, many years before, he had spoken of ‘a tight prose without gaps’ that this new book required. How different from The Cornet written in a single night, The Stories of God composed in the course of a week! This was a labour of prose the poet could not shrink back from. From the chaos of intuitions, of trial and error evolved a work of organisation, an arrangement following a precise melodic line, where the importance in comparing letters written in the immediate impression of an event and the definitive text of the Notebooks could be appreciated.

  The story of this last stage in the elaboration of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is principally reflected in the correspondence between Rilke and his publisher, M. Anton Kippenberg, director of the Insel Publishing House.

  After having published The Book of Hours in 1905, this great publishing house gradually absorbed into its list Rilke’s entire production, even those pre-dating this book. The foremost benefit from his alliance with Kippenberg, whom Rilke never failed to view as a friend and advisor, was that he could offer the poet both moral and material assistance.

  In February 1907, Rilke alluded for the first time to ‘my new prose work, which,’ he added, ‘only advances slowly.’ In March 1908, in a letter dated from Capri, he expresses to Kippenberg the hope that he will ‘be able one day to place it in your hands’. But the realisation of this work, he adds, depends – as much on his resumption of an essay he proposed on the work of Cézanne – on his return to Paris.

  This return took place on 2 May ‘in a peaceful corner where I am assured to secure a few months alone with a book I must finish’. And Rilke reiterates this confidence to Rodin saying that he ‘reckons to remain in Paris for a long period’. The ‘peaceful corner’ was a studio on the rue Campagne-Première. Rilke preferred it even to the little house at Meudon that Rodin, in a gesture inspired by thoughts of reparation and forgetting past misunderstandings, placed once more at the poet’s disposition.

  The little house awaits me – alas! – for I, returning from Pa
ris later than I had foreseen, after so much time involuntarily adrift, I must shut myself away there with my work: all alone. You can understand more than any other this disposition for solitude which takes shape in me now more powerfully than ever…

  Immured in his home ‘like the nut inside its fruit’, Rilke only left for evening meals and met his wife Clara, who had re-joined him in Paris, just once a week. ‘My book must be finished by the end of August and there is much left to be completed.’

  Was he referring to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge? No, for he had already interrupted the prose work to devote himself to the second volume of The New Poems, whose manuscript he would forward to Kippenberg on 18 August, and which he had the pleasure to dedicate, further attesting to their definitive reconciliation, ‘To my dear friend Auguste Rodin’. After this effort, the poet felt himself ‘rather edgy and fatigued’ and aspired to a change of air.

  Clara Rilke had departed again at the start of the month, this time for the region of Hanover, leaving at her husband’s disposition the large bright room that she had, in the guise of a studio, rented from the Hôtel Biron. In the absence of any more distant journey, Rilke felt he could find the necessary relaxation in this dream apartment whose bay windows gave onto a park of seven hectares. He moved in during the last days of August into the central large room on the ground floor where Clara Rilke had resided, then, seduced, rented for himself one of the rotundas on the first floor.

  Rilke had seen Rodin again on several occasions through the months that preceded his arrival at the Hôtel Biron, and one of his first thoughts was to communicate the enchanting decor to his great friend, the poet’s discovery of what would be the future Musée Rodin. ‘You must see, dearest friend, wrote Rilke on 31 August, ‘this beautiful building and the room I have resided in since this morning. Its three bays look out prodigiously across an abandoned garden, where from time to time one sees unsuspecting rabbits leap across trellises as if in an ancient tapestry.’

  Here, finally, Rilke would find the necessary momentum to reengage with work, ‘at my desk, in front of the open window’. Rodin, beguiled by the charm of the building did not delay in installing himself at the Hôtel Biron, and lent Rilke an oak table ‘that will be the great fertile plain where I will arrange my manuscripts like villages’, Rilke wrote to him in gratitude. One of these manuscripts was doubtless the prose work undertaken in Rome, for the poet, since the end of December 1908, announced to Doctor Kippenberg ‘rapid, solid and contented progress with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’.

  I have entirely devoted the last months to this manuscript, for which I was prepared to go to extreme limits. I cannot tell how long this work will continue to occupy me (perhaps I will still be able to submit it within our prescribed term of August). But whatever happens, it is my resolve not to be deflected from this task, where so many disparate developments habitually encounter one another. It will be done.

  On 2 January 1909, in the rare euphoria of creation, Rilke allowed his enthusiasm to burst forth.

  Isn’t it just this way? You comprehend that a man who is only strong enough for one thing, sometimes crudely and clumsily worried, might be preoccupied with this single task; especially at the moment where he is owed joys and progress as strange as those which procured me my current work these last weeks. I could cite you so many beautiful testimonies. It seems to me sometimes that I will die when it is finally achieved: all weight and all lightness are concentrated so powerfully in these pages, everything there is so definitive and yet at the same time so limitless in natural metamorphosis, that I have the feeling of continuing in this book, distant and sure, beyond all danger of death. I do not have it in my heart, you see: the power to live come what may, and the right to live only for this work, closed in on it, supplied from outside by a little kiosk, like a prisoner for whom all things, even the least, take on their true value…

  However, by the spring of 1909, three favourable months gave way to a period of uncertainty and fatigue.

  You have enquired on the progress of Malte Laurids Brigge, but unfortunately I cannot reply in kind to all your good news. It is impossible for me to deliver the book for August. From one week to the next I hope to return to it, but the unfavourable constitution of my health, of which I think I spoke to you, has persisted; spring itself has not appreciably rescued me, to the extent that I am, after four months, well nigh unfit for all inner exertion. ‘In this state of disheartened spirit, I do not dare predict when I will be able to re-apply myself to the interrupted prose work (of which barely half has been completed since January); perhaps it will not be until autumn. For it is possible that, as soon as my health is well disposed towards me, I will need to renew myself and to practise before nature and on my poems, to fortify myself and stretch out beneath the influence of the exterior world, the interior world from which I drew this book.

  Moreover, this summer will be further disturbed by the fact that (due to a change of ownership) I am relieved of my apartment, meaning that in the midst of July I will be obliged to undergo a relocation, with all that this entails…

  The evacuation of the Hôtel Biron was not as close as Rilke supposed, but this dread had contributed to a slow down in his output. On 20 October, he wrote to Kippenberg:

  Of my prose work, half is completed; perhaps a little more. But the text is inscribed in little notebooks and on an old spread out manuscript; thus it is difficult to take it all in as a unity. Worse still, during last winter, working poorly due to my ailments and my feeble development, I allowed myself, against my normal habits, to negligent notation and confused certain parts; which made a copy of the whole absolutely necessary

  This copy Rilke had undertaken himself, though he feared the exhaustion that this unattractive task would impose on him. ‘What is to be done?’

  Kippenberg’s response carried a cheering suggestion. He offered Rilke the chance of a period of several weeks’ repose in Leipzig on the occasion of his next visit. Thus he would be able with the lavish hospitality offered him by Frau Kippenberg, to dictate the text of The Notebooks to an experienced secretary, whom the publisher would put at the disposition of his guest. The impediment was therefore resolved to the satisfaction of Rilke and his Leipzig friends. In January and February 1910, Rilke was the guest of the Kippenbergs and in the tower room he was allocated, he could, thanks to ‘a few richly filled days’, put the final touches to this cherished book, whose manuscript he was loath to send in the post, even by registered mail.

  In the following month, the proofs of the work joined him on his journeys to Rome, Duino and Venice. In this provisory and incomplete form The Notebooks already had a few readers, Clara Rilke amongst others.

  My wife began to read the Malte Laurids Brigge and spoke to me of it at greater length than of her health and her current life. I am happy to see her envisage Malte primarily as a personality, accepting it as such, and motivating her existence by being drawn back into the past.

  Before sending back the proofs, Rilke leafed through them a last time.

  Yes, these Notebooks really form a book, as if they had never been anything else. What a feeling to see it like this, a genuine object amongst other objects!

  Rilke had just won back his apartment on rue de Varenne when, on 9 June 1910, the postman delivered him the first copy of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

  11. The Hôtel Biron, Musée Rodin

  VI

  The Book of a Sensibility

  According to Ricarda Huch, historian of German romantics, the foremost characters in the life of a romantic poet are: absence of family, absence of homeland and absence of profession. Family, homeland, profession are all crucial links to the exterior world. Family, in Rilke’s existence, barely counted: separated from his relatives by long-standing misinterpretations, he left his wife after the second year of marriage to obey the demands of his art more easily. (The prodigal son of The Notebooks flees his family for to be loved is too heavy a burden for him
.) Born in Prague when Bohemia was still part of the Hapsburg Empire, he suffered the eventful trajectory of his native city, remaining a German poet by way of his language and his genius. Although around the age of thirty he had entertained the vague notion of studying medicine, he had never exercised a regular profession. His roaming existence across a dozen countries of Europe, and as far as Eypgt and Algeria, would on occasion have proved precarious if certain generous friends, like Werner Reinhart or the Princess Thurn und Taxis, had not loaned to this troubled traveller such remarkable places of refuge as the Castle at Duino or the tower at Muzot.

  If Rilke’s destiny was to be without family, homeland or profession, one could also say that in large part he himself had been the architect of this destiny. With rare exceptions, he had fled friendships and women with the same ardour that he had employed only a short time previously to indulge them. The fact that, towards the end of his life, he began to write in a foreign language is further testimony to that need for constant change and renewal. Attainment caused horror, in matters of love as much as in those of existence. His life was a perpetual flight before social and human realities, towards that abstraction which is solitude, towards that preservation of the absolute that is infinite desire, nostalgia eternally unsatisfied, and towards those superior states of consciousness which give access, in the midst of the most beautiful and sorrowful landscapes of life, to the contemplation of death.

  A sensibility with antennae radically quivering, an overdemanding heart, vulnerable, tormented by a terrible thirst for the absolute. Rilke is this above all else. Realities only terrified him so much because all resonated in him too powerfully, because the least shock could wound him. Let us recall those painful and ironic pages of The Notebooks on the first deceptions of childhood, on those birthdays, for example, when one is always disappointed.