Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  The Notebooks of

  Malte Laurids Brigge

  TRANSLATED WITH AN

  INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

  BY EDWARD SNOW

  CONTENTS

  About the Author and Translator

  Translator’s Introduction

  THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE

  Notes

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  St. Vitus

  Rainer Maria Rilke completed The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge) in the winter of 1910, a full six years after he had begun work on the book. It would be the only novel-length piece of prose fiction he ever wrote. The book ends oddly but beautifully with an unnamed “I” retelling the story of the Prodigal Son. Toward the end of this retelling (which slips into the third person immediately), a long extended simile describes a period of “great changes” in the protagonist’s life:

  He was like someone who hears a magnificent language and feverishly resolves to write in it. Still ahead was the dismay of learning how difficult this language was; at first he refused to believe that a long life could be spent constructing those first short practice-sentences that meant nothing at all. He threw himself into this schooling like a runner into a race; but the density of what had to be mastered slowed his pace. It was impossible to imagine anything more humbling than this apprenticeship. He had found the philosopher’s stone, and now he was being compelled to transmute cease lessly the quick gold of his inspiration into the dull lead of patience. He who had adapted himself to infinite space now burrowed like a worm through long winding passages without exit or direction. Now, as he learned to love so laboriously and with such pain, he was forced to understand how all the previous love he thought he had achieved was peremptory and trivial; how nothing could have come of it, since he had not begun to work upon it and translate it into something real.

  I can’t help but hear in this passage an oblique but very deliberate comment on the language of Malte Laurids itself and how hard Rilke had to work (against himself, as it were) to achieve it. Both during and after its composition he characterized it as “my most difficult work.” He spoke in retrospect to his French translator of “the dense weave of this prose, which was completely new to me.”* Of the several contradictory things he said about the book on the verge of its completion, his remark in a letter to Sidonie von Borutin stands out: “It is my hardest and most cherished work [ . . . ] a true alchemy of suffering [ . . . ]: but ultimately the gold is nothing but gold, the purest gold, gold through and through.”†

  Certainly in The Notebooks one encounters “a magnificent language” that has been worked into a fictional prose that over long stretches takes one’s breath away. The aliveness of narrative voice and the states of mind that emanate from it, the musical interplay of long winding sentences and terse fragments, the hypersensorial descriptions and visualizations, the amazements of metaphor, the adroit, reader-friendly storytelling—and all this fully under control in the work at hand: one would be hard pressed to think of another book that sounds and reads like this.

  Often Malte Laurids Brigge is termed “a poet’s novel” because of the ways its language-magic comes to the fore. But there is a sense (thinking again of the labor the Prodigal Son passage describes) in which it is the very opposite of that. Rilke the poet never worked for such an extended period on any text he wrote, before or after Malte. His major books of poetry owe their existence almost exclusively to “the quick gold of inspiration.” The 1899 part of The Book of Hours (sixty-seven poems) was completed in three weeks; the second and third parts (1901 and 1903) in a week each. The New Poems he remembered as marking “my best time in Paris . . . when I anticipated nothing and no one and the whole world streamed toward me increasingly as pure task and I responded clearly and confidently with pure achievement.‡ He received the Duino Elegies in 1912 as a quasi-mystical “dictation,” and when that dictation broke off after a few days, he could only wait, for almost ten years, till it resumed.

  But The Notebooks would engage his worst time in Paris, and he was very conscious of being without help, either as a writer or as someone who might be losing his mind. The germ of the book can be found, I think, in an exchange of letters during July 1903 between Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, his former lover and (at least in his mind) his lifelong confidante and would-be therapist. Newly returned in 1903 to his home in Westerwede, he wrote her a July 18 letter of many desperately eloquent pages describing the fears that invaded him in Paris. He alludes briefly to encounters that will eventually appear in The Notebooks (e.g., a dying man arriving in a carriage at the Hôtel-Dieu, a sitting woman with her face buried in her palms, two outcast old ladies, one with a drawer of pins for sale, the other with a pencil that extrudes uncannily from her closed hand), and finally settles into a long account of walking down the Boulevard Saint-Michel one bright morning and inadvertently falling in behind a man who, it turns out, is struggling to fend off an incipient attack of St. Vitus’s dance. Rilke’s account of his own growing fear and fascination as he is drawn along behind the man is a detailed narrative, pages long, and so polished that it seems ready for immediate entry into a Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that has yet to be conceived. (A revised version will become a key episode in the finished book.) At the end of the narrative, when the St. Vitus victim finally gives in and begins convulsing helplessly amid a crowd of onlookers, Rilke transitions back to Andreas-Salomé: “I was as if consumed, utterly used up; as if another person’s fear had fed on me and exhausted me—that’s how I felt.” Then he continues:

  Had I been able to make these fears I underwent, had I been able to shape things out of them, real, steadfast things that are bliss and freedom to create and that, once created, stand there calmly and exude reassurance, then nothing would have befallen me. But these fears that were my daily portion stirred a hundred other fears, and they arose in me and against me and banded together and I could not get beyond them. In striving to form them I became creative for them; instead of making them into things of my will I gave them a life of their own, and they turned that life against me and used it to pursue me far into the night. Had it been better with me, been quieter and friendlier, had my room stood by me . . . I might have succeeded even so: succeeded in making things out of fear.

  Lou responded promptly on July 22—not with solicitude for his fears (which is probably what he wanted) but with enthusiasm for what she saw as a breakthrough in his writing:

  As I read your last letter there were moments when what you described made such an impact on me, came alive through the smallest physical detail and yet grew beyond it into the tremendously human, that I forgot about you completely. And I felt that odd process of “ensouling” [Beseelen] that can emanate even from impressions of misery when they come not straight from life but channeled through the life of that person creating them, transmuting them. For you are wrong when you say that you merely suffered through those things as a helpless accessory without repeating them in some higher process. They are all there: no longer only in you, now also in me, and external to both of us as a living thing with a voice all their own,—no different from any poem that ever came to you.

  His letter, she continues, left her with a twofold impression: first, of the neurasthenic, easily distractible young poet of their earliest days together, but also of an artist undivided from himself (her phrasing), whose unified consciousness “bend[s] down, like an adult to a child, toward the impressions arising from the earlier, more helpless world of experience, in order to lead them all upward into the light, clothed in its most difficult memories as in genius for everyt
hing that has ever suffered.” This latter impression, she says, now dominates, and she sees him as one whose work has arrived; “the poet in you creates poetry out of man’s fears”:

  [Earlier] you would have seen misery in a falsified way. To take an example: the man in Paris, the one struggling against St. Vitus’s dance—you would have taken on something of him, poetically and psychologically speaking, by being in his company, and you would have observed things in the manner of a St. Vitus’s dancer: now you describe him. But only in your doing so does the martyrdom of his condition open up in you, seize you with the clarity of insight,—and what then truly distinguishes you from him is the very power with which you experience it along with him, a power that is without any of the mitigating self-deceptions of the primary sufferer.

  Rilke wrote back on July 25, basking in Lou’s praise but protesting that she is overestimating him, that he is not up to it, that “it was only a letter and as yet nothing has come of it,” and that in his present state describing things is part of his problem:

  There is still nothing but confusion in me; what I experience is like pain and what I truly perceive hurts. I don’t seize the image: it presses into my hand with its pointed tips and sharp edges, presses deep into my hand and almost against my will: and whatever else I would grasp slides off me, is like water and flows elsewhere once it has mirrored me absent-mindedly.

  Nevertheless, the idea for a book has formed, and by earliest 1904 work on what will be Malte is underway. In May 1904 he writes Andreas-Salomé (trying to diagnose a new complaint) about the work he accomplished in February on “my new book,” which may have caused him “a certain overexertion”:

  I made an effort back then, in connection with my new book, to write down and give form to many things from my difficult Paris impressions, and occasionally I would feel, while I was doing this, a stab of pain in my soul similar to what one feels in one’s back when one lifts something too heavy.

  Later in the same letter he makes a “to do” list, and the second item is “my new book, whose firm, close-knit prose is a schooling for me.” If Lou has released him into this project, she has overestimated the degree to which the Apollonian stance with which she credits him has been achieved. She has unwittingly sent him back to school. There are always more things to learn about description. (Perhaps “a stab of pain in my soul” balances out her too-easy talk of “ensouling.”) There are limits to her understanding. It will take a new book to make good on those powers of empathy and descriptive insight that Andreas-Salomé prematurely celebrates in him.

  We are fortunate to have Rilke’s 1903 letter to Andreas-Salomé, with its complete early version of the St. Vitus episode (i.e., the version she responds to), and hence a true first draft of one of the most memorable of the many narratives in the published book.§ One can follow Rilke’s “work” of intricate revision, and watch the text rethink itself with each new choice. More importantly, we can experience how the feelings in the letter’s version shed their confusion and deepen in the book, perhaps even reverse course. So much changes. Even the first-person narrators (“Rilke” in the letter, “Malte” in the fiction) take us in different directions. Consider the concluding passages:

  I was as if consumed, utterly used up; as if another person’s fear had fed on me and exhausted me—that’s how I felt. [letter]

  I was drained [leer]. Like a blank sheet of paper I drifted along past the houses and up the boulevard again. [book]

  Both versions describe a defeat, but the extreme derangement in the former is replaced by a clipped despondency in the latter—and that feels almost healthy. In the letter the observing “I” is dominant, and yet without agency, as the other’s fear becomes an insatiable appetite that threatens to devour the defenseless self. As the account unfolds, Rilke the observer becomes more and more singular and fixated (“No one paid any attention to him except me—and I couldn’t take my eyes off him for a second”). His description of the afflicted man and his convulsive missteps conveys not the empathy with which Andreas-Salomé’s letter credits him but the taking-in of a fear imagined to be increasing in the other: “I felt this whole man filling up with anxiety, felt his pent-up anxiety expanding, felt it mounting, and I saw his will, his fear, and the desperate expression of his convulsive hands . . .”

  The book’s version, by contrast—as if to counter such phobic introjection—creates an odd but authentic version of genuine empathy. Fear almost ceases to be at issue. If Malte is “drained” in the book, it is because he has used up all his will in his striving (always fantasmic, to be sure, but still poignantly sincere) to help the other. He even decides to stumble when the other stumbles, not because he is caught in some sick mimicry but because he wants to lend credence to the other’s desperate charade (logic dictates that the nonexisting object will be more convincingly there to curious onlookers if two successive walkers appear to trip over it). While Malte is racking his brain trying to think of “ways to help,” the man is making his cane into a spinal support; when Malte notices this, he admires it as an “ingenious solution,” and observes that “now all went well. Blessedly well.” When all this wishful thinking inevitably crumbles, Malte reaches out with one of those great “inner” gestures whose language Rilke had not yet become master of in the middle of 1903:

  And I, who was following along behind him with my heart pounding, I gathered together all my bits of strength like coins, and, with my eyes still fixed on his hands, I begged him to please take it if he needed it. I think he did take it; there was so little, but how could I help that?

  More moving still is the change the book makes in the St. Vitus dancer’s climactic moment, as he gives himself over to the force he has been resisting. Here is the passage in the letter:

  By now I was close behind him, without a will of my own, drawn along by his fear that was no longer distinguishable from my own. Suddenly the cane gave way, right in the middle of the bridge. The man stood: stood there extraordinarily still and rigid and didn’t move. Now he was waiting; but it was as if the enemy inside him didn’t yet trust this surrender. He hesitated—but only for a moment. Then he erupted like a fire . . . [letter]

  One can understand how Lou would be struck by writing of this caliber. Yet “Rilke’s” version cannot compete with “Malte’s” later telling:

  But the cane was still in its place, and the expression of his hands was stern and unrelenting. So as we stepped onto the bridge, it was all right. It was all right. But now an unmistakable faltering entered his stride: he ran two steps, then stood still. Stood still. His left hand gently pulled away from the cane and rose so slowly that I could see it trembling against the sky; he pushed his hat back a little and drew his hand across his brow. He turned his head just enough, and his gaze loosened as it swept past sky, past houses, past water, without fixing on anything. Then he gave in. The cane was gone, he stretched out his arms as if he would take flight, and it broke out of him like a force of nature . . . [book]

  In the early passage, the distance between the two men is closing, but only because of the pull of a fear that “Rilke” is unable to resist. The book’s version, conversely, turns the “he/I” structure into a “we”—to tremendous and almost unnoticed effect—and keeps the physical distance between the two men constant. More impactful is the feeling of the prose. The passage seems to float. Everything slows down. For a moment the St. Vitus dancer stands quiet and alone against the sky, a tragic hero and a Rilkean thing. Malte does not presume to say what is going on inside the man. Instead the language “ensouls” him. One wonders how much time had passed when Rilke wrote this version. It was surely during a period of “great changes.”

  Maman

  On December 19, 1908, Rilke, still working on Malte but feeling a great confidence about his medium, wrote a letter to Auguste Rodin thanking him for “that long patience you taught me”:

  Now indeed I feel that all my efforts would be in vain without it. In writing poetry one is always aided
and even swept along by the rhythm of exterior things; for the lyric 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 and multifarious rhythm of the blood. Prose must be built like a cathedral; there one is truly nameless, without ambition, without help: there amid the scaffolding with only one’s conscience.

  And to think: that in this prose I now know how to make men and women, children and old men. Above all I have evoked the women by carefully crafting all those things at their perimeter, leaving a blank [un blanc] which might be only a void but which, since all around it there is tenderness and profusion, becomes vibrant and luminous, almost like one of your marbles.¶

  The claims about prose in the first part of this excerpt are, to be sure, entirely metaphoric, and in that quintessential “Rilkean” manner. But they do seem earned. Everything they name is there on the sudden first page of The Notebooks. Anyone who can write prose that edged and alive deserves to have their metaphors taken seriously.

  But what of those in the next paragraph? So many of the book’s pages are in praise of women, but are any of its actual female characters “evoked” in the way Rilke describes here? Abelone would be the logical exemplar, since she is the love interest of the story. But the prose’s disinterest in her seems to me the book’s gravest flaw. No tenderness or profusion shapes the contours of her white space. (One doesn’t know whether to blame Malte or Rilke for this . . .) She does occupy a special place in Malte’s consciousness once she has exited the narrative, but in the scenes they share together no feeling filters through to her—though her irritation with Malte can flare convincingly. Where passion is attempted, the prose becomes cloying and conventional: “Did it not grow milder around Ulsgaard from all our warmth? Do not stray roses bloom longer now in the park . . . ?” The end of the affair (i.e., the end of the telling of the affair) comes quickly, with two false-hearted sentences: “I won’t tell anything about you, Abelone. Not because we deceived each other—since even then you loved someone else, whom you never forgot, and since I loved all women—but because only wrong is done in the telling.” A seasoned novel reader might suspect that the narrative material withheld here will eventually return and be fleshed out—not realizing that a radical surgery has been performed.