Rilke in Paris

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  The awkwardness and stupidity of adults are infinite! They find a means to enter with their second-rate parcels, destined for someone else. You run to their encounter and then you have to appear to circle around the bedroom for something to do, but without any clear aim… And it’s the child who must warn of the faults of others, save up their shame and confirm in them the illusion that they are acquitting themselves admirably. This, in any case, you achieve at will, even without specific gifts. A real talent was required when someone made an effort and brought, brimming with impatience and jovial bonhomie, a pleasure – and already from a distance you could see that this pleasure was good for anyone but you, that it was a wholly foreign pleasure; you never even knew for whom it might best be suited, that’s how foreign it was.

  Such is the first contact of the sensitive being with life, and now one understands that the childhood preceding these experiences signifies for Rilke the reign of a perfection sadly all too ephemeral. It is ‘the time when you touch everything, when you truly receive everything, when you raise the objects that you hold by chance in your hands, with a power of imagination that nothing can deflect, to an intensity and fundamental colouring of desire which justifiably presides over you’. But why would he not prefer that ‘wise non-comprehension of childhood’, to the struggle and mistrust that foists itself on the human melee, when ‘not understanding the embrace of solitude and that struggle and mistrust, are still ways of taking a full part in even those things that you seek to ignore’.

  The poet, who exited this childhood and began life’s adventure with such a raw sensibility, left himself open to experience the passions and emotions with singularly painful acuteness. In the play of the senses and the mind, the most infinitely minuscule, capillary movements entangled him, forging for him alone a peculiar interior life. The faintest impressions could enter into him, transform him, tie his senses and thoughts in knots to produce unexpected connections. Responding to a critic who had questioned him on the literary influences that he was thought to have undergone, Rilke listed Jacobsen, the great Russian writers, Rodin and Cézanne, then continued:

  But I sometimes ask if the imponderable in oneself has not exercised on my formation and production the most crucial influence: the encounter with a dog, the hours that I spent in Rome watching a rope maker, who, in carrying out his labours, repeated the most ancient gestures of the world, just like that potter in a little village on the banks of the Nile the sight of whom was for me a mysterious and inexplicable education. Or even when I was fortunate enough to cross the Provençal countryside in the company of a shepherd, or that an area as limitless as Venice seemed in some way so intimate… All this surely, is ‘influence’? And perhaps it only remains for me to name the most important, to know that I could remain alone in so many countries, cities and landscapes, relieved of all hearing and all the obedience of my mind to the multitude of impressions, prepared to welcome them at the same time as freeing myself from them…

  No, in these simple accomplishments that life accords to us, books could not have a decisive influence; many things whose weight settles on us through their medium, can be purely compensated by the encounter with a woman, by the change of season, or even by a slight fluctuation in the air pressure… for example when a morning suddenly hails a different afternoon, and through how many similar experiences we construct each day.

  These emotions, sometimes dangerous, could equally become a strength for the poet, provided that he knew how to deepen them in solitude and thus live the most strictly personal of lives. For the error is to believe that we might somehow escape solitude and ourselves.

  We are solitude. We can, it is true, grant ourselves change… But that is all. How much better it would be for us to understand that we are solitude. Yes, and to depart with this truth!

  And what does solitude teach this supersensitive being who is aware of being ‘an initiator in his own conditions of life’?

  ‘I am learning to see,’ says Malte Laurids Brigge. ‘I don’t know why, but all enters into me more deeply and nothing remains at the level where once it used to cease.’ In penetrating this virtually incommunicable world, it seems to him that up to now no one had really understood nor even guessed at the most profound secrets of the individual. ‘Is it possible,’ he asks,

  that all history of the universe has been misunderstood. Is it possible that we have still seen nothing, recognised nothing and said nothing about the living…? Is it possible that we can say: ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘boys’ and in spite of culture we don’t suspect that these words, for so long now, have no more plural, that they are infinitely ‘singular’. And to all these questions, one must reply: yes, it is possible.

  Strange vision, which from then on he could apply to the universe! Limits blur between reality and dream, the present and memory. Things participate in life; witness the glances, which have brushed past, the hands that have leant on each other. Mirrors, have they not retained beneath their face the images reflected in them? Flowers, perhaps, understand life in their own way. Childhood, is it not wholly present in us, committed to images and sensibility, ready to spill out? In an atmosphere of dream or hallucination, the most fantastic correspondences establish themselves between minds, between things, sensations and images.

  The existence of the terrible in each particle of air, you breathe it with its transparency; and it condenses in you, hardens, takes on pointed and geometric forms between the organs… people would like to be able to forget much; their sleep softly files down these furrows in the brain, but dreams retrace the pattern.

  And by who knows what poetic alchemy the real is suddenly evoked more powerfully, more surely than by the exertions of a more lucid intelligence:

  The road was empty. Its bored void drew back my step from under my feet and played with it like castanets from one side of the road to the other, as if with a clog.

  Of this sensibility, which flows right through the work of Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is in some sense a journal, immediate and routine translation. Reflections, landscapes, memories of childhood, coalesce and weave like the cloth of a tapestry. A young Dane traces these febrile lines, self-questioning, confiding his intimate discoveries, confessing the joys, anguishes and hopes that he experiences in his Parisian hotel room. The realities of the city oppose the strange apparitions of his dreams and hallucinated evocations of past events. All that troubles the life of this young hero behind whose features Rilke regards his own existence, drawn in some sense as confession, is delivered to us in a murky light, traversed by moments of mysterious phosphorescence, and in an apparent disorder, which already holds involuntary associations with the interior monologue.

  Like Proust, Rilke broke up the framework of the novel and, without care for chronological order, he proceeded with successive plunges into time, space and his own sensibility. Here a unity of the human takes the place of rigorous artistic composition. Rilke believed that the un-coordinated nature of his notations would fare better than a rigid essay in maintaining the illusion of a complete life and somewhere he compares the thoughts of his heroes to scraps of paper from the dead that you come upon in a drawer.

  A walk in Paris, a reading, an encounter, a window that opens and whose reflection projects a whole world of associated ideas, a visit to the hospital, a memory of childhood or travel, the discovery of a tapestry in a museum, a noise heard in a neighbouring room arousing the most bizarre thoughts, the sight of a house being demolished, a historic figure who takes on the relief or colour of symbol, a night of fever, the image of death, quasi-physical emotions, sketched or expunged sentiments, dazzling experiences, temptations, fugitive intuitions, all are pursued, abandoned, taken up again, orchestrated, analysed or formally realised.

  This little book can be likened to life: in the complexity of the whole, it encounters the required things and those that are down to chance, parts which are wanted and others never achieved, some that succeed, others obstructed, from w
here a sort of infinity emerges which is not easy to capture in reasonable words

  wrote Goethe in 1829, speaking to Rochlitz of his Wilhelm Meister, but these words might equally apply to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

  Through these evocations and resumptions of the real, Rilke explains, ‘The young Malte seeks to grasp that life which ceaselessly withdraws into the invisible.’ It is not in vain that he is the grandson of the old Count Brahe, who considers things of the past and those of the future as equally valid. The figures and symbols through which the poet exercises self-expression are not the idle games of an aesthete or variations of the virtuoso; they constitute ‘the terms of his despair’, are approximations to his wavering and tormented soul. But each of these characters is in themselves precise, wholly alive, and the meditations or apologues of the poet only serve to lend their existence a greater power.

  This burrowing by Rilke deep inside himself left the poet worn out, as if wrung dry by over-extended effort. He had embedded so many painful hallucinations in his work, buried himself so deeply alongside his hero in the terror and neurosis that he himself felt, that whoever read the Notebooks ‘against their current’, the book might ‘seem to suggest that life was impossible’. But precisely by expressing so purposefully his own interior persuasions, Rilke was to a certain extent saved. ‘If this book,’ he wrote,

  contains bitter reproaches, it is not to life which they are addressed, on the contrary, It is the continual recognition of the following: through lack of strength, through distraction and hereditary blunders we lose practically all the innumerable riches which were destined for us on earth.

  Instead of perpetually hesitating between action and renunciation, we fundamentally only ‘have to be there, to exist, that’s all, but in an immediate way, as if the earth is right there, according to the seasons’.

  And when the Notebooks appear, Rilke envisages the future with newfound confidence. ‘Now many things,’ he writes to his friend Kippenberg, ‘are, I think, going to reveal themselves in me; for these Notebooks provide a means of support… Now, finally, everything can really begin… poor Malte is a heart that embraces a whole octave, after him all songs become possible.’

  12. Rilke’s window at the Hôtel Biron

  VII

  Rilke’s Presence

  Here terminates the relationship of Rilke’s Parisian sojourns with the story of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

  After the brutal caesura of the war of 1914 to 1918, Rilke twice returned to Paris, in 1920 and in 1925. It was the universe of Malte that he sought to revive, and he stated in several letters how crucial it was in terms of his existence overall that this contact was re-established. ‘It is still, – to a level that exceeds all expectation – my Paris, that of once before, I might say: the eternal,’ he wrote on 19 November 1920 to the Princess Thurn und Taxis. And further to Mlle Elisabeth von Schmidt-Pauli:

  Yes, imagine, I saw it again, and from the first instant it seemed possible to live there with continuation assured. Ah! How my heart applied itself to the angry wounds of another time, corresponded perfectly everywhere, and was cured! What it meant to overcome that! It was only there that I knew how much I utterly depended on this reconnection with the world, the same place where… it became world for me, unity in oneself and transition towards myself.

  And in a letter to his mother, Rilke even speaks of returning in more stable fashion to Paris, to ‘transplant my life here, where the soil and air of my work exist’.

  But this was an illusion that lasted only a few days. In 1925 Rilke encountered friendships, but also deceptions. It was a stay that proved a stimulus, but at the same time left him with the inevitable exhaustion of a long drawn out benefaction. A number of his key friends of the past were absent: Rodin was dead; Verhaeren was dead. The ‘great friends who knew’ had vanished behind the ‘horrific wall of the war’. ‘Their death,’ lamented Rilke, in a letter to his wife in November 1917, ‘becomes vague and unrecognisable; I sense only that they will not be there when the dread vapour dissipates, and that they will not be able to assist those who are obliged to set the world back on its feet…’

  These absences Rilke strove to forget as he set off to rediscover the Paris of Malte Laurids, the Paris of another age, devoting long hours finalising the French translation of the Notebooks, which I was at that moment bringing to fruition. Old friendships had survived the war and new ones were born. Rilke saw André Gide again, in preparation for his journey to the Congo, André Gide who, fifteen years earlier, was the first to translate a few pages of the Notebooks into French. Rilke suffered somewhat from the scarcity of his meetings with Paul Valéry and from the too-evasive and nonchalant sympathy of the poet of Charmes. He met Léon-Paul Fargue, Alfred Fabre-Luce, Edmond Jaloux, Jules Supervielle, Jean-Luois Vaudoyer; he saw again the Comtesse de Noailles, deploring that these encounters often took place in a socialite atmosphere of commercial superficiality.

  Rilke spoke in his Auguste Rodin of the misunderstandings that gather around the works of great artists. One might ask if the story of a number of his French friendships, if such an account was ever written, might constitute such mistakes. The ignorance of Rodin and Valéry towards Rilke’s work necessarily limited their friendship, which was therefore reduced to a unilateral gift. André Gide, all intelligence and critical verve, renounced his projects to translate the The Cornet and the Notebooks. Valéry was perplexed by this ‘maltreatment of intimacy’ and with the silence and unbroken solitude in which his German translator indulged. Rilke himself kept a certain distance from the mind games and word play of Léon-Paul Fargue, and exhibited a retractile sensibility towards those socialite reunions, where the ‘muddled and substandard crowd,’ he wrote to a Miss Barney, ‘threatened to become the symbol of my Parisian sojourn’.

  Towards the end of August, Rilke fled, without bidding farewell, as if struck by a sudden illness, to plunge himself in ‘fertile forgetting’. ‘An exit sometimes has these holes in which one disappears,’ he wrote to me a little later. It was Muzot and not Paris which would prove the cradle of his new work, The Duino Elegies.

  I would have liked to quote here some of those admirable letters, spread over the long years, in which Rilke retraced or mitigated some line of the Notebooks, commenting on and developing the spiritual message contained in the book. But to do so would overburden the design of this fleet essay.

  The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was reviewed in La Nouvelle Revue Française on 1 July 1911. The first critic in France to comment on them, Saint-Hubert said ‘These notes do not amount to a beautiful well-crafted, well-made book. Furthermore they have something too raw about them, too abundant, too youthful, a barely mastered trembling; they are however exquisite and significant, heavy with the mystery of living works.’

  Twenty years later it was still this quivering of life, this personal mystery, that French readers sought in the book. The moral atmosphere they breathed there determined the warm welcome the poet continued to receive in France, and that auralike atmosphere in which his personality remains enveloped.

  Robert Brasillach remembers one day, concerning Rilke, a subtle distinction made by Albert Thibaudet between the different sorts of radiance issuing from great poets. There is, said the author of Les Heures de l’Acropole, a ‘position’ with Victor Hugo, whereas with Lamartine or Baudelaire, there is a ‘presence’, meaning that the work of the first is a block sculpted across centuries, a colossus before which one stands rooted, while the work of the others has rather a fluidity, a familiarity, an ambience, a recourse and an assistance to the everyday.

  In a not dissimilar way, one might say there is a ‘presence’ with Rilke. If this poet dwells beside us like a veritable shadow, if he offers a singular warmth and friendship, this doubtless emerges from the explicit nature of his work, in which, entirely intoxicated with itself, a soul is infinitely reflected, a soul which appears unique. But it is also because such an acute sensibility for the Pari
sian landscape is fused with the perspective of solitude, and because this poetry is richly interwoven with so many images and faces that seem familiar to us. In seeking to express in his own way the world we thought we knew, Rilke helps us to hear more clearly what already belongs to us and permits us access to the most sinuous and iridescent forms, to profound emotive states and to that strange melody of the interior life.

  Alighting on this or that aspect of the oeuvre, one could say that Rilke was the poet of death, the poet of anguish, the poet of solitude and of the inner life, the poet of things, the poet of angels and the life of the soul… and there is clearly an element of truth in all these easily reached-for labels, but each of them proceeds with some innate restriction and each translates a preference where something arbitrary may enter.

  The reason, it seems to me, that we experience so much difficulty enclosing this writer in a wide enough definition, is first the need for metamorphosis and flight from himself, which he never ceased to obey until the close of his life; and also because one must keep separate in Rilke the writer and the destiny.

  His oeuvre is both that of a magician and that of a pure poet, and also the astonishing testimony of a life, a lesson in human experience. Although The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a confession and a lyrical novel of sorts, a study in psychology and a treatise on the interior life, the work as a whole demands to be understood on a number of different levels. Rilke, who was an artist to the tips of his fingers, at the same time felt he was the bearer of a kind of message. If he had only expressed himself through metaphors and parables, in true poet style, he would have denied this instruction lay within him. Perhaps it is this that still contributes to his art and the strange fascination that he exercises over so many readers.