Rilke in Paris Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Translator’s Introduction

  Rilke in Paris

  by Maurice Betz

  Notes on Places

  Notes on the Melody of Things

  by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Appendix I: Rilke’s Residencies in Paris 1902–25

  Appendix II: A Note on the Original Edition of Rilke in Paris

  Appendix III: A Note on Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  Biographical Notes

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  Translator’s Introduction

  ‘I sense that to work is to live without dying…’

  RMR

  Rainer Maria Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time on 28 August, 1902, as a still youthful poet seeking the best experiences and location from which to access his inwardness, a poet whose body of work, though already receiving recognition, had not yet earned its distinction of genius. He left it for the last time in the same month twenty-three years later, a celebrated poetic figure in poor health, whose legacy was now confirmed. The following year in 1926, he died near his home, the chateau of Muzot in the Valais, a French speaking canton of Switzerland. During those twenty-four intervening years the French capital would become for Rilke, a poet who, more than any other, oiled his precarious existence with almost continual European peregrination and a heavy dose of patronage, the place he might call home. However, in the midst of these two decades of ever-penurious creative germination, sprouting, blossoming and harvest, crouched the black dog of the First World War. Despite his relatively benign experience of war (three months of military service in Vienna), the 1914–18 conflict constituted an external trauma that threatened to usurp Rilke’s mental cartography, leaving him drained and disorientated in terms of his ability to continue his literary work. He was forced back to Germany for the duration of the conflict and the severing from his previous life of European displacement, together with a sense of horror at the war’s catastrophic annihilating power, the ruthless removal of both individual personalities and the creatively rich era that produced them, ushered in a period of sterility, which was only resolved long after the war’s end.

  1. Palais Royal gardens

  Having dispensed with overbearing family ties and fled the perceived provincialism of Prague, Rilke was a hypersensitive dreamer adrift, nurturing a growing pregnancy of the senses. But to deliver the birth and be relieved of this weight, to coax his latent talent to manifest itself properly, he needed an atmosphere that was sympathetic to his complex and not yet fully marshalled inner self; a precise location equipped to sustain such an undertaking. He was also looking for a personal master, a senior example from whom he could take counsel, whose behavior he might replicate to bring on those inner shoots he increasingly realized must not bloom prematurely, if they were to achieve anything of lasting greatness. From those first feelers in Paris at the dawn of the century, until final salvation in a veritable ‘storm of creativity’, at Muzot in 1922, all Rilke’s movements and behaviour, his aspirations and energies, are focused on this sole requirement for inner synthesis. It is this unremitting search with its dead ends and disappointments, its sudden unforeseen deliverances and mysterious gifts, that Betz traverses so poignantly in his essay, quoting liberally from the copious and notably rich letters penned by the poet to his wife and friends and from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the now famous prose work that consummates Rilke’s Paris experience.

  Touring Russia with Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1900, Rilke thought he might find a guiding figure in the great novelist Tolstoy. But to no avail. (See ‘Notes on Places’.) Rilke appealed to Tolstoy for counsel:

  I still lack the discipline, the being able to work and the being compelled to work, for which I have longed for years. Do I lack the strength? Is my will sick? It is the dream in me that hinders all action? Days go by and sometimes I hear life passing. And still nothing has happened. Still there is nothing real about me.

  Tolstoy’s answer was simply ‘write!’, but Rilke, having come such a great distance, was hoping for a few more words of wisdom. He moved on to the artists’ colony of Worpswede, amid the wind-combed heaths and plains of Northern Germany. Another potential location perhaps, but through those he befriended, and, in the case of the young sculptor Clara Westhoff, married, he only edged closer to the defining figure of Rodin and the unknown quantity of Paris. By the close of summer 1902, he was finally in the capital, meeting the great artist, and here his relationship with France properly begins.

  France, traditionally viewed as the natural home of the artist, still professed in Rilke’s day at least, to sustain an ‘aristocracy of talent’. Here it was thought genius could best flourish, the ideal of beauty, ‘le beau’, still endured right down to the common man, and the artist was seen as the necessary foil to the spiritual paralysis of the bourgeois or philistine. And although Austrian writer Rudolf Kassner warned that Rilke’s love for France was ‘nothing more than the German love for the foreign’, it is obvious that, even in the first flush of his relationship, France offered Rilke the pertinent literary and artistic architecture to coincide with his precociously maturing tastes and appetite for a concentrated cultural education. While based in Paris he made many instructive trips to the provinces. He visited the Roman ruins of Provence, the medieval towns of Burgundy, the cathedrals of Chartres, Bourges, Reims and many other notable locations. France provided the great personal examples of the patient indefatigable worker, from Rodin, who figures so strongly in the early period and in the pages of Rilke in Paris, through to Cézanne, interpreted as such through his biography and then in the later period in Paris, the Franco-Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. Rilke who had roused the ghost of Verhaeren as ‘Mr V’ in his controversial ‘Worker’s Letter’ of 1922, revered the Belgian poet as a visionary master ‘of the here and now’. Rilke was rarely without a collection of Verhaeren to hand in this period and constantly expounds on the life-affirming breadth and energy of his poetry, especially that of the posthumously published Les Flammes Hautes of 1917, in letters to friends and patrons.

  2. The Panthéon from the Luxembourg gardens

  In Maurice Betz, France also offered a sympathetic and dedicated translator of Rilke’s works, and during that last summer in Paris the two worked closely on the French translation of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the work that forms the backbone of Rilke in Paris. In fact it is evident that, along with Italy in a supporting role, France and French culture are the dominant guiding forces of Rilke’s adult life, exemplified perhaps by the fact that he celebrated this relationship by writing some four hundred poems in French, translated a clutch of French poets, chose to settle in a French-speaking region and became, in his later years, more deeply absorbed in the work of the French poet Paul Valéry than in that of any other writer. In the Valais Rilke claimed that he had found a combination of landscape and climate more perfect than any other he had encountered during his life. For even then, the search was no less pressing to find the ideal productive climate, the location and atmosphere most conducive to unbroken solitude and steady unhindered work.

  However, not all was straightforward or comfortable for Rilke during his final sojourn in Paris, and Betz provides some hints at the close of his essay on the rather ambiguous and not always fulfilling relationships Rilke experienced in his involvement with the Parisian literary scene. Betz also suggests that the sometimes vague and nonchalant Valéry did not always give Rilke the level of attention that the latter would have liked. However, the curious bond between these two very different poets was one of respectful mutual awareness of their significance, and a realisation of what each one might gain from the other. But crucially on
ly Rilke had the measure of the other’s language. Valéry struggled to gain a foothold in Rilke’s mysterious universe of feelings, while Rilke was intoxicated by the French poet’s condensed language, his way of getting to the core with the minimum of fuss. Rilke felt he was always on the back foot by being obliged to express himself in German. He saw in Valéry a clear path through the thicket to the light-filled glade beyond, and through his free translations of the poetry determined to follow it. But Valéry, analytical, methodical, intellectual, was the antipode to Rilke’s romantic, subjective poetry of feeling. Rilke excitedly discovered in Valéry’s French the kind of language vehicle he himself had been trying to design from German for years, and whose blueprint Valéry, now emerging suddenly into the light, calmly and confidently laid down like a Royal Flush. Rilke was drawn into a profound seduction, where the seducer was never quite able to reciprocate.

  Furthermore, despite the sterling support of Gide, who had translated some of the Notebooks and overseen his transition into French, Rilke suffered a certain disillusionment during his final period in Paris, worn out by the endless round of superficial social gatherings and introductions, which seemed to have sprouted from nowhere and threatened to suffocate his precious time in the city. As Betz reminds us, Rilke had written on fame in his book on Rodin, describing it as ‘the collection of misunderstandings that gather around a name’ and it seems this was borne out to some degree during his last eight months in Paris. Rilke seemed in some sense to be an anachronism in the Paris of the twenties. There is an intriguing incident recounted by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, of Rilke attending a function and entering into a monologue whose depth and sensitivity, perhaps too onerous for the occasion, served only to alienate the other guests, who one by one walked awkwardly away, leaving the poet virtually addressing himself, an alienated solitary figure. Zweig also recounts an earlier sighting of Rilke, when he chanced upon the poet riding the top deck of an omnibus, as if in a trance, curiously out of place amongst the other passengers. The sight of Rilke awkwardly embedded in this modern vehicle, silently passing in anonymity and unaware of his friend’s presence, had clearly touched Zweig.

  Since everything and everyone he encountered could potentially be of service to his artistic development, and since his life was in the most explicit sense an ongoing ‘journey’, which required its journeyman to be unencumbered and agile, Rilke has inadvertently left himself open to criticism of a certain ‘ruthlessness’ towards those he seduced, drew earnestly into his orbit and then as quickly abandoned. This was exacerbated perhaps by his failure to maintain any semblance of a normal family life. Rilke had always been eclectic in his choices to say the least, and as in other areas of his life, there is the feeling that many of those he drew towards him, or whose confidence he gained, were there to be donors for whatever they could contribute to his art and then to be jettisoned like husks after their fruit had been garnered. K.A.J Batterby in the book Rilke and France (Oxford, 1966), summarises this trend.

  In general Rilke’s contacts with artistic figures have the character of a series of separate and sometimes apparently unrelated episodes. As soon as their purpose was fulfilled they ceased. When Rilke had exhausted all their possibilities and assimilated all he could from them, they were discarded. Rilke’s progress resembles a series of distinct scaling operations, after each of which the ladder was kicked away. That is not to say that he forgot those associations, and certainly he never lost what he gained from them; but they were never allowed to outlive their usefulness.

  The war years, when Rilke was forced away from France, gave him the opportunity to contemplate Paris and its importance to his poetic development as Batterby puts it ‘in absentia protracta’. The sudden wrench of leaving Paris had been costly, in both mental and material terms. All Rilke’s belongings were simply left behind in his compartment in the rue Campagne-Première studio and then sold off in his absence. This must have felt like an inglorious and shabby end to his Paris residence and in a sense it was, for although he returned to the city on two more occasions, one very brief lasting only six days in 1920 and then again for a period of seven months in 1925, he was never to re-establish that sense of continuity and the settled periods of fruitful labour that he had experienced before the war.

  3. St Sulpice at night

  Between 1902 and 1914, Paris was the proverbial magnet that always drew Rilke back from his restless wanderings, whether in Italy, Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany or Spain. One only has to glance at the interweaving addresses of his Paris residencies to get some idea of the resilience and intricacy of this relationship. Paris both fundamentally oppressed Rilke, compelling him to depart elsewhere, and summoned him back with a kind of nostalgic urgency, which he was unable to resist. For Rilke, Paris gradually became the guardian of the productive stretches of elusive solitude he constantly sought. Paris flaunted the overarching magnificence of its past and enduring physical beauty, whilst at the same time trailing indifferently in its wake the gruesome reality of an abandoned caste of society existing hand to mouth on its streets. The city, bloated with unacknowledged suffering and a vortex of futile energies, both repelled and enthralled him. Though entranced by its legendary architecture and art, the perspectives and vistas, the parks and gardens, the wealth of churches and hidden convents, Rilke was always chased out of any comfortable rhetorical delectation of the impressive facade, by the darker, grittier, morbid underbelly of Paris, whose uncontained flocks of the dispossessed embedded in him a new found anxiety and terror. Paris was the necessary rude awakening, the eradicator of superficiality and dandified sloth. Here one had to realise one’s purpose, to work or go under; the simmering of the crowds constantly restated the danger of anonymity and separateness.

  From the moment he arrived at the fag end of summer in 1902, Rilke was assaulted by a range of contrasting emotions the city aroused through its unrestrained action, an intoxication of impressions which are liberally recounted in Betz’s essay and which drip-feed into the Notebooks. Betz focuses his book on the Rodin period, but opens with Rilke’s first probings of the city and those preliminary five tentative weeks at 11 rue Toullier, where Rilke abruptly switched family and the communal atmosphere of the artists’ colony in Worpswede for isolation in a dingy cramped student hotel near the Sorbonne. Here, in a kind of self-imposed claustrophobia, he would write long into the evening, by candlelight, since the fumes of the paraffin lamp nauseated him, drawn close to the rickety stove for warmth. The room in rue Toullier was like Paris itself, ‘over-experienced’ and worn out by the unceasing procession of occupants. Rilke felt the weight of the lives that had passed through it, imagining the string of tired heads that had, over time, worn a greasy patch on the back of the old armchair. Here he felt as never before a sense of feverish suffocation and complained of the ranks of windows opposite watching him like eyes, their ‘inquisitive glances’ somehow trained on him alone. (The windows as ‘eyes’ perhaps reflects his then reading of Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach’s writings on Bruges.) Furthermore, he laments the high austere wall outside his window ‘cutting off his breathing’. Right away the sense that the external is threatening his equilibrium and, as Betz says, ‘forcing him to participate against his will’, is emphatically established.

  Some of the most intense early passages in the Notebooks are culled from this period ‘lying five flights up’ at 11 rue Toullier, where Rilke expounds his ‘fears’ with a new, pronounced morbidity. In these brief passages, fairly quivering with existential despair, one might plausibly suggest Rilke the modern poet is born. Mostly he wrote letters to Clara, daily round-ups of his impressions of an urban landscape peopled by a veritable danse macabre of the lonely and lost, traversing this ‘strange, strange city’ which seemed to be ‘rushing headlong out of orbit like a planet, towards some terrible cataclysm’. The overriding atmosphere in all Rilke’s communication is one of the overt presence of death, exemplified by the hospitals that he sees on his perambulations. ‘I see now why
they figure so often in Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, you suddenly feel that in this city there are legions of the sick, armies of the dying, whole populations of the dead.’ He describes stumbling upon these ‘long hospitals, their gates standing open in a gesture of impatient and greedy compassion.’ His hospital phobia climaxes with observations of the Hôtel-Dieu (See ‘Notes on Places’), where he witnesses a patient being brought in, ‘propped up in an open cab, like a broken marionette, tossed from side to side with every motion, with a horrible abscess on his long, grey dangling neck’. On another occasion he breaks off his journey to follow for hours a man with St Vitus’ dance, as he hops uncannily along the boulevards to the gleeful interest of the café waiters and shopkeepers. Rilke selects such tragic figures, as he does later with a melancholy newspaper seller by the gates to the Luxembourg gardens, employing their monotonous struggle and the individual absurdity of their existence to provide an expressive ingredient for the precarious alchemy of his inwardness. But the intense indulgence of observing and absorbing such figures left Rilke wrung out and exhausted, ‘as though the angst of another had fed upon me and drained me’.

  4. Dusk in the Luxembourg

  Although Clara had now joined him in Paris and he had moved from rue Toullier in October to more comfortable accommodation at 3 rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, Rilke was still mortally afflicted by his experiences and it was from here that he felt compelled to write a letter to his most intimate confidante, Lou Andreas-Salomé, in which he poured out his anxieties at once, as if releasing a long-pent-up burden. Rilke describes his sense of ambulant isolation, of feeling like a ‘pothole in which stale water has collected, which the hurrying carriages, instead of going round, drive straight through’. He talks of his fears ‘expanding’ and the ‘excessively big city’ being ‘against me, standing in opposition to my life, like an examination I did not pass’. He talks of the people he encountered; the hordes that he feared would absorb his anonymous, perhaps superfluous body as one of their own. ‘They wore the desolate, discoloured mimicry of the oversized cities and survived like tough beetles under the foot of each day that stepped on them, survived as though they still had something to wait for, twitching like pieces of a huge cut up fish that has begun to rot but is still alive. They survived living on nothing, on dust, on the grime and filth of their bodies, on what dogs let drop from their jaws…’