Rilke in Paris Read online

  But Salomé rightly saw in this outpouring of angst and morbid terror not the catastrophe of breakdown, but an awakening, and the beginning of a new kind of literary achievement, as Rilke sought to write out of the pain he was experiencing, a cathartic process which would find its ultimate fulfillment in the verse of the New Poems and the prose of the Notebooks. Paris had unceremoniously torn Rilke out of his safe, somewhat fey nineteenth-century draped musings and thrown him headlong into the modern bear pit of a newfound expressivity. No wonder in letters he lauds the truthfulness of Baudelaire’s torchbearing ‘modernist’ poem ‘Une Charogne’ (A Carcass).

  This most necessary rite of passage, along with the encounter with Rodin, served to disengage Rilke from that reluctance to believe himself capable of working consistently enough to achieve anything of note. Paris and its vital energies swept him from the relative security and self regard of the purely artistic milieu in which he had hitherto moved, and sandblasted off any vestiges of literary self-indulgence still clinging to his person. Paris, with its monumental beauty but jealously guarded wicked edges, laced with that eternally seductive, bitterly romantic odour of possible defeat, serves as the necessary foil to his more reposeful aristocrat-sponsored residencies elsewhere. And although Rilke complains at the vitality of Paris being a false one in the sense that the constant frenzy of activity leads nowhere and only consumes itself, it proved to be his reaction to the unique self-devouring atmosphere of this city, not Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Hamburg, or Copenhagen, that counted in terms of his art.

  At each consecutive address Rilke finds inspiration to write the most moving vignettes of his impressions without even leaving the confines of his room. None more so than those from 29 rue Cassette, in the memorable impression of rain on vegetation beyond the window, or the appearance of the mysterious blind woman and her coin-collecting dog, which find a place in Betz’s essay. Rilke’s time with the Rodins at Meudon provides an insight into Rodin’s troubled domestic life and one senses Rilke in his assiduously absorbing role, monitoring the daily rituals and feeling for Madame Rodin with perhaps a nod to himself, when he compares her relationship to the never tiring master as ‘like holding a cup out under a waterfall’. The relationship between Rodin and Rilke was not without upset, as Betz illustrates, but despite the language barrier and Rodin’s ignorance of Rilke’s work, it is clear that respect even love was mutual and genuine. Each recognised greatness in the other, even though in Rilke’s case the proof was still to come. What Rodin taught Rilke most fundamentally was that total sacrifice was the recipe for greatness. But this came with heavy losses: the security and joys to be expected from a more conventional lifestyle. He had to choose and memorably articulates this dilemma in a letter, which shows he had no illusions about the fate of his personal life. ‘One or the other, happiness or art. The life of great men is a road bristling with thorns, for they are utterly dedicated to their art. Their own life is like an atrophied organ of which they have no further use…’

  The simultaneous acquirement of lodgings at the Hôtel Biron was a physical endorsement of their close relationship. That it exists today as the Rodin Museum is due in small part to Rilke’s urge to communicate the beauty of the environs to his friend, who immediately responded and joined him there.

  By 1925, when he stayed at the Hôtel Foyot at 33 rue Tournon, Rilke’s Paris time was drawing to a close. In failing health, he left a city that had provided a habitat, perhaps the only possible habitat, for that total sacrifice to art which was his legacy. Paris provided the premier cultural and historic architecture and necessary distillation of past atmospheres to enable this sacrifice. Baudelaire, Cézanne, Rodin, Valéry, Verhaeren… all these figures played their part in drawing Rilke closer to a regime of unremitting labour and the shaping of new experience within the confines of his poetic language at the deepest and most authentic level possible. Paris performed her roles equally convincingly, as both safe harbour and the threatening uncharted ocean beyond, as both siren and saviour, a lure to the infinite, immutable through the most violent storms or the dead calm.

  – Will Stone, Suffolk, February 2012

  5. Les Invalides from the gardens of the Hôtel Biron

  6. Bouquinistes in winter, quai de la Mégisserie

  Rilke in Paris

  by Maurice Betz

  Ah, The achievement of a small moon!

  Days where around us all is clear, barely an outline in the luminous air and yet distinct. Even the nearest things have a distant tone, shrink back, show only from a distance, are not exposed; and all that draws on this expanse of distance – the river, the bridges, the long roads and the squares which expend themselves – hold that distance within them, and are painted there as if on silk. Who can say what a bright green motorcar on Pont Neuf might be, or this vivid red rushing forth, or even simply that poster, on the wall adjoining a cluster of pearl-grey buildings. All is simplified, restored to a few planes, sharp and clear, as a face in a portrait by Manet. Nothing is insignificant or without relevance. The bouquinistes on the quais open their boxes, and the yellow freshness or weariness of the books, the brown violet of the bindings, the more sovereign green of an album, all harmonise, count, take part in the whole and converge in consummate perfection…

  From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

  The ‘French Component’ In Rilke’s Work

  The case of Rainer Maria Rilke is rather extraordinary: a Germanic poet in the deepest sense, who represents, in both its most intense and subtle form, a singular branch of German romanticism, at the point where he encounters the final ripening of the Slavic spiritual universe and discovers his own true identity through his relationship with a French city.

  In Paris, this German poet discovered not only a temporary home and more or less enduring friendships, but also an inner inspiration, which guided him towards the secret configuration of his entire being. For some twelve years he returned almost year on year, both contented and disappointed to encounter there ever renewed ecstasies and anxieties, and a virtually eternal landscape. This city lent him the framework and themes of a work through which he felt able to express himself to the very limits of the inexpressible, to the threshold of reflecting on and accepting death with a calm heart, following The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in which he was conscious of having marshalled the entire resolve of his existence. He gave himself so utterly to this work that after its completion he remained for many years stricken by sterility. For Rilke, Paris had been much more than Venice for Byron, or Toledo for Barrès: a revelation of the most profound possibilities, the ‘dividing line of his inward waters’ and the touchstone of his art. He declared on several occasions, with distinct emotion, what a debt he owed to this ‘incomparable city which represents a world in my development and memory’ and whose ‘immense and generous hospitality’ allowed him to bring into the light those feelings and thoughts which were tentatively seeking their form.

  However important the ‘French component’ in Rilke’s work, it did not manage to govern alone the deeper reaches of his being. This inveterate traveller criss-crossing the very soul and landscape of Europe, nourished himself on the nectar of all latitudes, without his fundamental architecture being altered. From one country to the next, he ploughed his unique furrow, scoring deep, sometimes losing himself in the most unfathomable subterranean labyrinths, but everywhere searching only that he might ultimately emerge into authentic existence.

  In these scenic variations for the poet, one observes certain cycles. Some are of major significance: principally the Russian and French ones. The Danish and Spanish cycles allowed Rilke, on the one hand, access to the fantastic and the intimate acquaintanceship of ghosts, and, on the other, to that wide expanse of sky inhabited by Greco’s supernatural angels, which haunt the Elegies and sustain the disembodied poetry. The Italian and Valaisan cycles frame these primary experiences: Florence and Venice are places of residence for the youthful poet who harmonises the first va
riegations of his impressionist palette, while towards the close of his life, the Valais afforded, following the deliverance which was the achievement of the Duino Elegies, the relaxation and relief enjoyed by a genial rustic poet.

  In terms of foreign experiences, Rilke’s discovery of Paris follows directly on from his encounter with the Slavic world, a religious and mystical phase which found expression in The Book of Hours written between 1899 and1903. France presented Rilke with a ‘human landscape’, which was mirrored at the same time in the works of her painters, in the lessons and example of her poets, and by that life so naturally expressive which is reflected in the faces of the Parisian street. ‘It is ever more difficult for the writer to find in action the exterior equivalent to the soul’s movements’ he wrote with Ibsen in mind. The landscape of Paris offered one of those equivalents. For Rilke, that revelation would only deepen, until it spread throughout his entire oeuvre.

  7. Le Pont des Arts

  II

  The Discovery of Paris

  At the dawn of the century, a young man who had just published his first verses in Germany arrived at a modest hotel in the Latin Quarter. He had blue eyes, his curly hair was brush-like; his manner furtive and he bore the countenance of a dreamer. His high waistcoat and blouse buttoned to the neck lent him the appearance of a seminarian or young priest. A Russian priest more precisely, for his chin was graced with a faint blond beard and he sometimes assumed one of their characteristic smocks with deep folds.

  After a journey of several months in Russia, during the course of which he paid a visit to Tolstoy in his residence at Yasnaya Polyana, Rainer Maria Rilke spent a period with a group of North German painters, at Worpswede, and in this Barbizon, set amidst the ponds and heaths of Lüneberg, had first heard pronounced the name of Rodin, by a young German woman who had for a time been the student of the great sculptor. This meeting was in many respects decisive, for Rilke began by marrying the young woman, after which, impatient to approach the master to whom he would shortly be pledging his profound admiration in person, Rilke abandoned this newly discovered home and departed for Paris, determined to meet Rodin and better study his work.

  In the eyes of this young poet, whom an intimate experience or discovery relating to art bore so effortlessly over all practical and social realities, Rodin was the unique master, without rival. This lyric poet, still permeated by Slavic mysticism and fluidity, experienced a sense of revelation before the powerful blocks of stone on whose surface this man’s sacred hand had the power to summon so many desires, sufferings and passions. And while waiting to be admitted into the court of the sculptor to whom he proposed to dedicate a work, Rilke wrote a series of moving letters to Rodin in which he compared the man to a God and his art to a daily miracle.

  But what can Rodin have made of these demonstrations of earnest devotion? The master of Meudon was not insensitive to homages, even excessive ones, in which his virile ingénue assurance regained vigour and energy from the affronts of a turbulent career. Perhaps too, he detected in the enthusiasm of this young German writer, of whose work he would never have any knowledge, the sentiment of some exceptional quality. The fact remains that, after frequent invitations to Rilke to visit his workshops and share his table at Meudon, he would go so far as to offer him the hospitality of one of his chalets and confer on the young poet, like a favour of state, the responsibility of replying to his voluminous foreign correspondence.

  This recognition came only after three years of active friendship, following Rilke’s publications of the projected work. Rilke only remained Rodin’s unpaid secretary for a few months. The master was a despot with the beard of a prophet; he had his moods, his caprices and rages. One of these storms dislodged, if it did not actually break, the friendship between the two men. In the meantime however, Rilke had discovered Paris and learnt French. He was drawn with contemplative obeisance to the forms of French life, to the Parisian landscape, to its writers and artists. To Maurice Martin du Gard, he later confided,

  Every being in Paris bears a unique expression, a sign of their personality that they do not show, but that they do not seek to hide either. All the nuances of joy, of misery or solitude, only in the faces of the people of Paris do I find them, and the French vitality expresses itself in the multiplicity of these myriad apparitions; in the street I never cross a void; I go from one face to another, still bearing the memory of the authentic value and clarity of the first, and all is imbued with a consummate and delicate light…

  The Louvre, Notre Dame, Chartres Cathedral, the spectacle of the Parisian street, supply him with the material for the new poems he is composing – strong contours, sculptural forms – all under Rodin’s influence. At the Bibliothèque Nationale he reads one after the other, Froissart, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Francis Jammes… He is enamoured by the work of Paul Cézanne, makes the acquaintance of Eugène Carrière, Emile Verhaeren, André Gide, The Comtesse de Noailles. In the manner of several other German poets of the nineteenth century, Rilke is subject to the charms of the French language and its forms, and much later he even undertakes to incorporate a part of it into his oeuvre. He speaks with subtle perspicacity of the problems inherent to this language, the difficulties of syntax, the snares of logic, the riches and loopholes of its vocabulary. He translates into German the works of Maurice de Guérin, André Gide, Paul Valéry, a few poems of Louise Labé, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé…and towards the end of his life, encouraged by the poet of Charmes, he even ventures to borrow this language, so long familiar to him, to expound in gracious and pastoral poems some of the enigmas of his heart and spirit.

  The history of the exterior relationship Rilke enjoyed with France is however not the most crucial. These exchanges, however distant their consequences might be, were situated only at the surface of his life. The most crucial discoveries Rilke owed not so much to his French friendships, as to the fateful chance that led him into a solitary confrontation with the faces and atmospheres of an unknown city, the fundamental problems of life and the most painful mysteries of being.

  On 28 August 1902, Rilke arrived at rue Toullier, already discomposed by the premonition of these forthcoming transformations. In a brief note, which, with a kind of coquetry he had prevailed to compose in French – ‘In a French,’ he would later write, ‘for which somewhere there must be a purgatory…’ – he announced his arrival to Clara Rilke.

  There is no longer any doubt. I am in Paris, although the quarter where I am living is oppressive with silence. I am a solitary in waiting: what must happen? My room is on the third or fourth floor (I dare not count) and what makes me rather proud, is that there is a mantelpiece with a mirror, a clock and a pair of silver candlesticks…

  Even five years later he would remember the strangeness of this first contact with the city and divulge to Clara, as they recalled a memorable birthday, his bewildered impressions: the Gare du Nord, the anxiety of those first moments, the long absinthe spoon which accompanied a glass of coffee, the post office on the Blvd St Michel which no longer exists, the leaves of the chestnut trees, that whole Paris at the close of summer, which he found right from the start ‘filled with waiting, promises and necessity, even in its most elementary details’.

  The comfort of the little hotel in the Latin Quarter was really quite primitive: in place of electric light, a smoky paraffin lamp. The back of the armchair displayed ‘an indent in a shade of greasy grey that must conform to every head’; the stairwell was so dark that Rilke compares his laborious ascensions to Saint Michael’s combat with the dragon. ‘Ah! how terrible are those nights of the Latin Quarter in those little student hotels’, he sighs.

  Rilke only stayed at No 11 rue Toullier for five weeks. Towards the end of his stay, he complained that the twelve windows of the house opposite were trained on him like so many inquisitive glances, forcing him to participate, against his will, in too many strangers’ existences. It was in this room however, that he began really to absorb Paris. When, two years later,
he started to write The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, it was from this fleeting but unforgettable abode that the secrets of his imaginary hero would date:

  To think that I cannot give up sleeping with the window open! The trams rumble clanging through my room. Automobiles roll over me. A door slams. From somewhere comes the clinking sound of a fallen pane. I hear the laughter of the larger shards, the faint chuckling of the splinters. Then, all of a sudden, a muffled sound, from the other side, from inside the house. Someone is coming up. They are getting near, are right outside my door, they pause, remain there a time, move on. Then, it’s the street again. A young woman shrieks ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram rushes up all nervous jangling, then passes over, rushes on. Someone calls out. People run, they catch up with each other. A dog barks. What relief! A dog. Towards morning there is even a cockerel that crows, pleasure unbounded. Then quite suddenly, I am asleep.

  Rilke bought candles for his silver candlesticks. He told Clara, ‘In the evening they burned as if on an altar.’ A soft light which he willingly contented himself with while waiting for morning. In spite of everything he began to feel at home. ‘The people of the house,’ he noted, ‘are friendly and attentive (without having received any kind of tip).’ Besides, he is a model tenant, returning home by eight o’clock, often earlier. A few visits to the museums, solitary walks, long evenings of work.