Letters to Benvenuta

  Letters to Benvenuta

  Rainier Maria Rilke

  MAGDA VON HATTINGBERG

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  CONTENTS

  A Foreword—BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER

  Preface—BY RUDOLF VON JOUANNE

  “A Note From Benvenuta”

  The Letters

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke

  Portrait of Magda von Hattingberg

  Facsimile of an original letter by Rilke

  A FOREWORD

  It was in January, 1914, that Rainer Maria Rilke received his first letter from a Viennese correspondent who had discovered his little collection of stories, Geschichten vom lieben Gott (“Tales of the dear Lord God”), and had fallen in love with them. A sudden, intense, and even feverish exchange of letters followed, a correspondence which inevitably brought together the poet and the woman hitherto unknown to him. Rilke was going on forty. Separated from his wife, he was physically ill and mentally depressed, fearing the loss of his creative power, alternately dreading and desiring a self-determined isolation. She was many years younger, a concert pianist of no small repute. She, too, was alone; her early marriage had ended in a divorce, and she was seeking for something, or someone, mortal yet beyond the flesh. In Rilke she found not a man but an apparition, a super-earthly saint, a visionary Fra Angelico—at their first meeting she thought: “He has come by a miracle to our poor earth and me.”

  The woman, Magda von Hattingberg, told the story of that strange attachment and the short but dramatic association in Rilke and Benvenuta (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1949), a revealing volume which she subtitled “A Book of Thanks.” The quasi-narrative of that book is amplified and enriched in Letters to Benvenuta, a series of letters written by Rilke during his second sojourn in Paris. Rilke had traveled restlessly: from Prague, where he was born, through the military schools of Moravia; to Germany; Russia, where he met Tolstoy and attended the Pushkin festivals; Denmark, because of his great admiration for the Danish novelist, Jens Peter Jacobsen; France, where he lived with Rodin. Then, after the break with Rodin and during Rilke’s “dry” period, he journeyed to Tunis, Algiers, Biskra, the Nile, which affected him deeply; Cairo, where he had a three-weeks’ serious attack of sickness; north to Venice, to be watched over by the Princess Marie von Thum und Taxis-Hohenlohe, who installed him in the ancient castle at Duino near Trieste on the Adriatic; then Spain, where his illness overcame him again; then, in 1913, back to Paris.

  It was in Paris that there began the extraordinary correspondence which is disclosed in this book. To be more exact, only half of it is here—Magda von Hattingberg, rechristened “Benvenuta” by Rilke, has withheld the letters which prompted the poet’s introspective and far-reaching replies—but the portion reprinted is of inestimable value as a supplement to what we know about the author of the immensely popular The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke and the profoundly moving Duino Elegies. Here, as in the poetry, Rilke writes not only on two levels—statement and suggestion, observation magnified by imagination—but on many levels of consciousness swiftly and simultaneously.

  Sometimes the writing is placid and even happy; sometimes it is full of tortured apprehension—the letters were composed daily, often several a day—they floated serenely from his musing mind or hurtled out of the depths of his troubled spirit. The record is tantalizingly brief. Although there had been at least one previous exchange of epistles—apparent in Rilke and Benvenuta—the first letter in this volume is dated February 1, 1914, and the last was written twenty-six days later. A scant month is encompassed, yet in these pages there is indicated a lifetime of loneliness and longing, of fear and frustration and desperate hope. No one could assuage his gnawing discontent or satisfy the sick need which he himself only partially understood. No woman could heal him—not even his dearest friend-sister-spiritually beloved, the radiantly and too eagerly welcomed one.

  It is probable that Rilke’s abnormal shyness stemmed from his unfortunate childhood when his mother, who disliked men, dressed the growing boy in girl’s clothing, made him dust the furniture, and do a woman’s work in the house. It is likely that his desire to escape the everyday world and become a “solitary” was the result of his enforced training in the military schools and was intensified by the rejection of his father. Other things besides the death of a beloved and protective uncle—a tragedy which drove the adolescent Rainer to the verge of suicide—made it difficult for the mature Rilke to establish normal relations with his fellow men, to enjoy the personal give-and-take of society, and to conclude that all human influences were “disastrous” and life itself hostile. It would require an intricate examination to account for Rilke’s violent renunciations, his passion for suffering, his vehement refusal to consider psychoanalysis—but this is not the place for such a study. Resenting Freud, Rilke insisted on the sanctity of the inner self, a sacred mystery which it was the artist’s duty to preserve; the strongest impulses of life arose, he claimed, from the very fact that the creative spirit does not know—and does not want to know—itself: “it is inexhaustibly connected through its own deep, psychic mystery with all the mysteries of the world, even with God himself, by whom it is secretly and richly sustained.”

  Nevertheless, these letters to Rilke’s “Benvenuta” reveal glimpses behind the self-protecting cover if they do not completely lift the veil of the mystery. They are alternately blinding and blurring, a series of kaleidoscopic flashes, a play of swiftly changing ideas, images, moods, and emotions. The tone may be contradictory, even within the same letter, intensely communicative yet incomplete, passionate and yet guarded, brilliant with anticipatory delight and darkened with a premonition of doom. The fierce effort to achieve pure clarity in a world of confused materialism shows the dedicated mystic. Here is the complex of the artist’s pain and struggle, of his resignation and revolt, of his distrust of people and his life-giving love with which he animated inanimate things. Here, in short, is the man briefly emerging from the mask, the letter-writer finding the inspired—and inspiring—correspondent, inseparably uniting the mortal person and the immortal poet.

  LOUIS UNTERMEYER

  Brooklyn, N. Y.

  January, 1951

  PREFACE

  There is a remote quality about the personality of Rilke, even though, in some strange fashion, he seems to grow ever closer to us out of the distance, transcending himself, as it were. Over the years there have been many interpretations of him, on many levels. Here the voice of the poet himself rings out to us.

  Benvenuta’s first book on Rilke* was a document of quiet and reverent gratitude. The infinitely appealing picture she drew in it was irradiated with the warm light of intensely personal impressions and memories, and hence she succeeded in making visible his innermost nature. The present volume, by way of ideal supplement, vouchsafes us the poet’s own tongue.

  Now that gentle hands have proffered us the pastel background to see, the pure image of the poet can be set against this lovingly illuminated environment, unconsciously limned in his own pen.

  The editor of these letters has therefore deliberately foreborne comment on any of the passages; nor has he offered any explanatory text to connect the several letters. Thus these pages bear their own valid witness to a segment of Rilke’s life, testimony sharply reflecting the infinite complexity of a truly creative mind. The most trivial mundane incidents give forth a spark that kindles to a searing flame in the poignancy of a single word, a thought, a depth but glimpsed. Yet side by side with the brusque and passionate surrender to the uniqueness of all things, with the awareness of the mysterious world spreading out behind all that happens, stands not only a fervent will to live, but a sorr
owful sense of leave-taking—resignation.

  Hence these letters will be of incalculable value to all who are sincerely concerned with obtaining a true and authentic picture of the poet’s work. The scholarly biographer may, among other things, prize Rilke’s confession that Malte Laurids Brigge* had absorbed much of his own nature. But beyond such things, these letters speak a language so intense, so intimately personal, that we must go far afield to find its like. How deeply moving are those few bare lines, hinting at Rilke’s longing for the love within which children should be granted rest, that imponderable sense of shelter for which the boy Rainer so often yearned in vain, and which guided his heart as though by instinct to Benvenuta, years younger than he, his sister, his friend!

  In the surface sense of the word, he cannot be said to have been truly musical. The strains of music evaded his memory, blended into his whole world. Yet in the recitals Benvenuta held for his special benefit, in the very memory of those hours, music guided Rilke back to his spiritual home. He loathed all constraint, though in his work he bowed to an austere regimen, a rigid schedule he scarcely ever blinked. Yet these letters show the poet in those rare intervals when he ignored his carefully regulated stint, returning to the world of his dreams, thoughtful or smiling in exaltation, and not infrequently melancholy with the chafings of nostalgia for that evanescent abode where his unquiet heart might rest, raising as it were the helpless arms of an outcast child. Caught in such a quandary, such a maze of confusion, he sought refuge, in these letters to his trusted friend, from his lofty sense of duty that chained him to his daily work with its intellectual demands. He pondered Benvenuta’s music, let his involved commitments go, and drifted back into the childhood land of his soul—“Thus do I yield to dreams.”

  It is fitting that we pay personal tribute to the woman whom we must thank, in a dual sense, for this deep insight into the realms of Rilke’s soul. Vouchsafed the privilege of accompanying him on his way for a while in closest spiritual intimacy, she is one of the few who have fathomed the mysteries of that soul.

  Benvenuta has not seen fit to add her answering letters to this slim volume, though unquestionably they returned to her possession upon Rilke’s death. Thus she has hushed the echo that might have rendered publication of this book far more sensational. She is not concerned with sensationalism. Like a priestess performing her rites, she shares with us the gift a great man trustfully placed into her hands. In this she seeks—in keeping with Rilke’s own desires—to bear witness to his life and growth, “when the time shall have come.”

  And it has come, that time. A fearful, gloomy time of guilt and error, but a time, also, of hunger—a time bent on rearing temples within its hearing, to hearken in solemn reverence to the plaints and yearnings and glories of God, the “Great Neighbor.”

  It is no mere quirk, nor a hollow phrase, if these pages are specifically dedicated to young people. It may be ineluctably ordained unto the end of time that nothing in this world is ever lost, no single gesture nor prayer; but it is youth, above all, that has been plunged into darkness, youth—boy or girl—that was herded into a nondescript mass to bear the arms of hate, ere yet it was able to savor a foretaste of the sweetness of life—its unity and individuality. How many young people have been debarred from giving abode, in their innermost hearts, to the radiance and harmony of poetic grace! Let this light, then, stand out against the gloom, a chord struck from the heart, soaring above the welter of a world in chaos—a small book, but a precious boon of humble, prodigal loving-kindness.

  It is in this sense that the present document, blossoming with the mysterious heart’s blood of a soul consumed in fire, is placed into the open hands of youth, of all those who are themselves pure in heart. May they accept it in gratitude and reverence, to strengthen the all but extinct power of the heart, a power that ever exalts us to the stars, far beyond the present, time out of mind.

  RUDOLF VON JOUANNE

  * Rilke and Benvenuta. A book of Thanks. By Magda von. Hattingberg. Translated by Cyrus Brooks. William Heinemann, London, 1949.

  * The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. Translated by John Linton. The Hogarth Press, 1930. Published in the United States as The Journal of My Other Self. Translated by M. D. Herter Norton and John Linton. W. W. Norton & Co., 1930.

  “A NOTE FROM BENVENUTA”

  Dear American friends:

  This book is dedicated to those young people who have retained a sense of reverence, and to all others who are pure in heart. It means to speak to you as a friend speaks to friends, as one man speaks to his fellows, whose sorrows and joys he has understood and shared. This globe of ours is caught up in material and violent turmoil, as it has ever been. In such times all of us stand in dire need of marshaling all our inner powers. Since the beginning of time they have always been the essential unifying element, stronger than any material things that keep us apart; and if this was true in the beginning, how much more so today and tomorrow! This inner power, this spirit of loving understanding—they are what Rilke possessed to such a high degree. If it should be within the power of this little book to make a contribution toward the inward human bond from continent to continent, that would be the highest honor we could render Rilke on his memorial day. I send you this book confidently, with all my best thoughts and wishes. The distance between us will vanish when we join, in a spirit of friendship, in commemorating the great poet.

  Magda von Hattingberg (Benvenuta)

  Gmunden, Austria, December 4, 1950, the 75th birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke.

  THE LETTERS

  Paris, 17, rue Campagne Première

  February 1, 1914

  My paper—the letter sheets—is here now, dear friend, but let me make bold to say: It has been my settled custom to write you* on this paper which I ordinarily use for my work, and let it rest at that … My friend, were you but to come!—but then again, when I think that we might really meet, I feel as though I should be deceiving you; for one thing, you see, you must accept in the fullest sense what I wrote you the other day about the limitations of my ear; it is like the skin on the sole of a new-born babe; that is to say, not only as new, as unused, with all actual contact still before it; but also as awkward, as impractical and clumsy, and perhaps (as I was assured time and again even when I was still a child) altogether incapable of walking, unable to learn even the first faltering steps. (In truth, I cannot remember a single tune, not even songs that have moved me, that I have heard thirty times over. I recognize them, but am quite unable to strike up even a single note on my own. This may well be the crassest weakness of all.) … Have I even the right to open your letters?—are they not all addressed to someone else, someone in the past, someone for whom I myself at times feel something like nostalgia, if truth be told? …

  (Later) Dear friend, this morning, when in a single rush from my innermost being I sought to pour out my joy to you, and admonition and a thousand other sentiments, I neglected one matter of real importance:

  There is no scope for making music, as I am presently established. I myself have waged a valiant fight against the very existence of pianos in my proximity. One does stand at my neighbor’s, but dare not stir. My ire has vanquished it.

  And the more I think about it, it may well be a good thing that this is not to be, here and now. I have embarked on certain undertakings which I must bring to a conclusion in the same frame of mind (good or ill, as it may happen to be); yet every new note (as I well know) sets the scene for other times, other things. Hence let us not mingle the future with the present—I have written you of the present—I am still in the midst of it, fighting, struggling … I have simply hardened my heart to my fellow man; at best I have been willing to be redeemed by an angel—with such a one I am confident of reaching the proper footing. Surely there is a degree of need to which the angels must lend ear, radiations of extreme emergency which men do not even perceive, which pass through their dense world, and only over yonder, in the angel’s aura, strike a gentle, sorrow
ful note of violet, like a tinge of amethyst in a pocket of rock crystal …

  Does this startle you? Am I who undergo all this in my peculiar fashion a stranger to you, compared to the man who on the strength of the earlier books was granted the boon of becoming your friend?

  This you will write me in the next letter, and it will be addressed wholly to me, the present me, whether he be understood or denied.

  But surely all this can in no wise impair your own sense of gladness!

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  (A hasty postscript in the late afternoon) … Things that do not yet have a name are surely best left to the future and its certainties; and thus what we cannot very well call a “reunion” is likely to be in the best hands. But before then (and perhaps it will take a very long time), please, an occasional line, whenever people, impressions, a book, on a sudden bring your friend to mind.

  In the morning

  Dear, dear soul, so deeply am I moved at times that it seems you must be present. This morning I rose—I spoke to you, as though there were but you. Sister, dear, not even a picture of you do I have, can form none, guess at none—I see you only walking underneath the hoarfrost, dear, distant, distant figure! Frost—how long since I have seen a real one! Once, many years ago, in a bit of Swedish winter—we were riding in a sleigh through a countryside quite obliterated by its gleaming burden—but then, walking is almost more beautiful still, in the great pure silence. Some day we shall walk like that together, shall take it upon our two selves to outrage the jackdaws with our irrepressible exuberance … Worries are folly, as Goethe’s mother said so briskly, according to Bettina—aye, aye, each night the starry sky arches, full of law. Measured against it, there are no cares—there are none in music, none in my poems, yet my heart is filled to overflowing with them …