Reading Rilke (5 page)

you, who, beneath one another’s groping, swell

with juice like the grapes of a vintage year;

you, who may go like a bud into another’s blossoming:

I am asking you about us. I know

you touch so blissfully because your touch survives such bliss,

because just below your finger’s end you feel the tip of pure duration.

So you expect eternity to entwine itself in your embrace.

And yet, when you have dealt with your fear of that first look,

the longing, later, at the window, and your first turn

about the garden together: lovers, are you any longer what you were?

When you lift yourselves up to one another’s lips—chalice to chalice—

and slip wine into wine like an added flavor: oh, how strangely

soon is each drinker’s disappearance from the ceremony.

Rilke and Clara would go fifty-fifty on expenses, but the poet had no money and small hope. His books weren’t selling. By letter, he begged this acquaintance, that friend, this editor, that institution. Little was forthcoming—a small loan, a part-time task. He began to write reviews for a Bremen newspaper, but few of his efforts to find such work turned into even opportunities. He was commissioned to write on Worpswede and on Rodin—windfalls of puny fruit. And his play,
Daily Living
—what an ironic title—had flopped as his own daily life had, at its opening in Berlin.

Their lives passed from Clara’s confinement to his … and then to their union. Neither felt fulfilled, nor any longer saw the promise of it. To Paula, Clara complained that she once could get on her bike and simply ride away, her belongings in a backpack, leaving one life for another.

Rilke and his wife set one another free, then, freeing their infant at the same time by leaving her, blanket and basket, in the rushes of a relative. In Paris, where Rilke goes to write about Rodin, he will learn about another kind of love—that of the artist for his work; and about another kind of life—one in which women are merely sources of relaxation, servants, or sometimes models; he will learn of an existence utterly devoted to things—things observed, things made, things preserved; but what will strike him first is the streets and people of Paris itself, and his profound sense of estrangement from them—of disgust, loneliness,
fear, despair; so that death is the topic which will pursue his pen.

Death because Paris appears to be full of hospitals, full of poor ill weak people, homeless beggars, dirt and decay. Full of city smells and city noise. The poet is no longer in the country, where there are only winds and birds. The Paris streets slowly suck him in, so that as he walks alongside them, he increasingly belongs to their flushing gutters, their screeching trams and human outcries; he leans, like others lost, against their dirty defaced walls. This is how
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
, one of literature’s great novels, begins, oozing like some wound might from the pages of his letters to Clara, who has not yet joined him. Begins with death and goes slowly on as if death will never end.

Love and death: a Germanic theme indeed. Just as going and coming are one, just as beginnings and endings overlap, so are loving and ceasing to love, living and ceasing to live, reciprocals, and as we mature our death matures, too, the way one wave rolls up the beach while another wave recedes, and each roar of the surf is succeeded by a quiet hiss.

6

O Lord, grant each of us our own ripe death,

the dying fall that goes through life—

its love, significance, and need—like breath.

7

For we are nothing but the bark and burrs.

The great death we bear within ourselves

is the fruit which every growing serves.

For its sake young girls grow their charms,

as if a tree-like music issued from a lyre;

for its sake small boys long to shoulder arms,

and women lean on them to listen and inspire

these not yet men to share their heart’s alarms.

For its sake all that’s seen is seen sustained

by change itself, as if the frozen were the fire;

and the work of every artisan maintained

this myth and made a world out of this fruit,

brought frost to it, wind, sunlight, rain.

And into it life’s warmth has followed suit,

heart’s heat absorbed, the fever of the brain:

Yet when the angels swoop to pick us clean,

they shall find that all our fruits are green.
¹²

Rilke proclaimed the poet’s saintly need to accept reality in all its aspects, meanwhile welcoming only those parts of the world for which he could compose an ennobling description. He was venomous about organized religion, yet there are more Virgin Marys, saints, and angels in his work than in many cathedrals. And he hid inside The Poet he eventually became, both secure there and scared, empty and fulfilled; the inspired author of the
Duino Elegies
, sensitive, insightful, gifted nearly beyond compare; a man with many devoted and distant friends, many extraordinary though frequently fatuous enthusiasms, but still a lonely unloving homeless boy as well, with fears words couldn’t wave away, enjoying a self-pity there were rarely buckets enough to contain; yet with a persistence in the pursuit of his goals, a courage, which overcame weakness and worry and made them into poems … no … into lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by
itself … lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength.

When he, whose profession was Waiting, stayed in strange towns, the hotel’s

bemused and preoccupied bedroom

morosely contained him, and in the avoided mirror

the room presided again,

and, later, in the tormenting bed,

yet again—

where this adjudicating air,

in a manner beyond understanding,

passed judgment upon his heart—whose beating could barely be felt

through its painful burial in his body—

and pronounced this hardly felt heart

to be lacking in love.
¹³

Rilke’s life, Rilke’s poetry, Rilke’s alleged ideas, have exerted an amazing attraction for many minds. It’s not been just the highborn women who have sewed a skirt about him, or written him loving letters, or offered him castle space, eager ears, and ceaseless devotion; who came to him as though they were soup-less and he a kitchen. Biographers have lined up to check out the contents of his life; studies have multiplied as if they had been introduced into a scholar-empty Australia; and dozens of translators have blunted their skills against his obdurate, complex, and compacted poems, poems displaying an orator’s theatrical power, while remaining as suited to a chamber and its music as a harpsichord: made of plucked tough sounds, yet as rapid and light and fragile as fountain water.

Rilke was, like most men and women, many men … and women. How to describe this crude and jostling crowd of parvenus and office seekers without becoming fascinated or especially repelled by one or other of them, turning into a sycophant or hanging judge, as Rilke’s spiritual mumbo jumbo charms, or his presumably snobby politics jars? He is passion’s spokesman. He’s a cold and calculating egotist, covering his selfishness with the royal robes of art. He’s a poseur, a courtier, a migrant, a loner. He hates the United States for reactionary reasons: because he hates machines and commerce, and equality too. He is charming and sensitive and given to shows of concern that melt the heart. His soul is a knot of childhood resentments. He is a trifler. He is too continuously serious—he thinks of himself as a creature of myth. He has all the moth-eaten arrogance of the self-taught, and sports a learning, both quirky and full of holes, which he is as proud of as a pup just trained to paper. Put on airs? An Eskimo has not so many layers of fuss and show. A priest of the poet’s art, he takes the European lyric to new levels of achievement—forming, with Valéry and Yeats perhaps, a true triune god—and creates the texts of a worthy religion at last, one which we may wholeheartedly admire, in part because we are not required to believe in it or pay it tithes.

Doctor Serafico, the princess von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe called him. More appropriately, Doctor Dodge … Doctor Ricochet … as we follow this summary full of repetitions of repetition:

In Linz, it is Olga, in Prague, it is Vally who helps him publish; then Rilke meets Lou, his lover/mother, in Munich, follows her to Berlin, accompanies her to Danzig, St. Petersburg, and back to Berlin again; he vacations in Viareggio, where he meets Elena; enjoys the company of Paula and Clara at Worpswede; marries Clara when bounced by Lou, although he does so against Lou’s
good advice, and rolls to Westerwede, where there is a charming little cottage soon too full of child cries and other obnoxious duties; consequently he’s shortly off to Paris, where Rodin (and not a woman) is the lure, but it is no fun being poor in Paris, even if the parks are pretty; so with Clara (who has parked the kid with her parents), Rilke escapes to Rome, then volleys north to visit Ellen Key in Scandinavia, where he’s handsomely taken care of by her friends, until it is time to return to Bremen, Göttingen (one of Lou Salomé’s haunts), and Berlin again; but not for long, because it’s Rilke’s luck to enjoy a few more elegant estates—the Countess von Schwerin’s, the Baron von der Heydt’s, the beginning of a pleasant habit—before trudging back to Paris and a crankier Rodin.

Such summations are forms of exaggeration, yet so are maps and travel tables and those figures in the carpet.

It is a life of packing and unpacking, of smiling at new friends, looking out of different windows, sitting in trains, trying to write at odd and irregular hours, signing books and behaving like a literary lion, having ideas, getting used to strange dark halls, guest beds, always cadging and scrounging, eating poorly, keeping your pants pressed, and most of all, falling ill, the flu a favorite, sneezing into a pillow, dozing while wrapped up in a chair: life time which gets little report, for what is there to say about a sore throat or a coughing fit? the fumble to find a chamber pot beneath strangely squeaking springs? a scheme to put one’s ear out of range of the sleep-inducing bore who’s been seated at your left?

It is a life of loneliness, of brooding, self-absorption, moods the world seems to mirror, because all the hours most of us spend making a living in office or schoolroom or farm or factory, Rilke has on his hands. Hence all those letters, of course, a prodigious output of prose, prose which rehearsed his life so it might play as a poem.

The leaves are falling, falling from far away,

as though a distant garden died above us;

they fall, fall with denial in their wave.

And through the night the hard earth falls

farther than the stars in solitude.

We all are falling. Here, this hand falls.

And see—there goes another. It’s in us all.

And yet there’s One whose gently holding hands

let this falling fall and never land.
¹⁴

Later in that same September of 1902, he feels autumn on him once again.

Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.

Lay your shadow on the sundials now,

and through the meadows let the winds throng.

Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;

give them further two more summer days

to bring about perfection and to raise

the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will establish none,

whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,

will waken, read, and write long letters,

wander up and down the barren paths

the parks expose when leaves are blown.
¹⁵

It is a life of taking in: landscapes and atmospheres, both rundown rooms and lush islands, portrait galleries in this
Schloss
and that lodge, books by forgotten Scandinavians, but sometimes by equals like Valéry, Flaubert, or Proust, paintings by Cézanne, sculpture by Rodin: training his eye not to flinch, to see the thing seen and not to be the wadded ball of feeling his young heart flung at things; to absorb sensation as if it were food, and live on its sustenance, even in hibernation.
Regarde!
The result of his labor is to be found in the merciless exactness of
Malte Laurids Brigge
: “At last I am learning to see.”

Most important, Rilke’s life is the life of a great writer, a poet who trained on prose, who made his weaknesses into warriors. It is therefore a life which is built of those great moments when, at white heat, he creates whole populations of poems and stories: the entire
Book of Monkish Life
from September 20 to October 14 in 1899, followed by
The Stories of God
from November 10 to 21; then thirty poems of
The Book of Pilgrimage
from September 18 to 25 in 1901, the thirty-four poems of
The Book of Hours
from April 13 to 20 in 1903, the stanzas which make up
The Life of Mary
between January 15 and 22 of 1912, the sudden announcement in Duino of the
Elegies
on the same month’s 21st, or, of course, the greatest inspirational storm, perhaps, in poetry’s history, the
Elegies’
surprising completion in Muzot when, as if a tap had been left running, a sequence of sonnets he would dedicate to Orpheus appeared in the space of three days, from February 2 to 5 in 1922, priming the pump, as it were, to draw forth “The Sixth Elegy,” compose the “Seventh,” then the “Eighth” and “Ninth,” as his pen entered the second week of that sacred month, with the main body of the “Tenth” to arrive on the 11th like a flourish of trumpets. The cycle is not complete just yet. A “Fifth Elegy” is replaced by another on the 14th. The hinge of the set is the last one written, perhaps the most bitter elegy of all, a bitterness which sounds in the final notes of his triumph.