Letters to a Young Poet Page 2
Solitude can also mute the voice of judgement. Kappus included some poems in his first letter and he asked Rilke’s opinion of them. Rilke offered one (the poems ‘have no identity of their own’) but then set out to interrogate evaluation itself: by what measure do we reckon a poem worthy or unworthy? Not by any measure that the outer world has to offer. Only one rule applies: ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.’ And how might a poet recognize this ‘necessity’? Only by making the ‘descent into yourself and into your solitariness’. In that isolated space, the world’s criteria drop away. When Rilke writes in the third letter that ‘an artist … must always remain innocent and unconscious of his greatest virtues’, I understand him to mean that questions of good and bad, virtue and vice, are foreign to the absorption of solitary work. As Flannery O’Connor once wrote: ‘In art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.’ Such has certainly been my own experience; in solitude (after a few days) the mind that weighs the work withdraws and I simply enter my material on its own terms. I may later find that what I have written is junk or that it is gold, but such labels have little currency in the confines of solitude.
After all this has unfolded – after acceptance has arrived, after doubts have become helpers, after evaluation has quietened down and time has opened up – then what happens?
Then nothing happens. Or, rather, then begins the practice of patience, a virtue in which Rilke had been schooled by Rodin. Rilke eventually published a book about Rodin and there he makes it clear that endurance was a necessary part of the older man’s talent: ‘There is in Rodin a deep patience which makes him almost anonymous, a quiet, wise forbearance, something of the great patience and kindness of Nature herself, who … traverses silently and seriously the long pathway to abundance.’ In a letter to Rodin himself, written just after the final letter to Kappus, Rilke spelled out one moral of the master’s ‘tenacious example’: ‘ordinary life … seems to bid us haste’, but patience ‘puts us in touch with all that surpasses us’. Practised in the present, patience is the art of courting the future. It belongs to becoming rather than being, to the unfinished rather than the completed. It is not so much suited to heroes as to invalids and convalescents, those who must wait.
The flowering of any creative ‘summer’ will come, Rilke tells Kappus, ‘only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day … : patience is all!’ Patience means sitting with the work even when – especially when – nothing appears to be happening.
The situation in which Rilke wrote the first Duino Elegy is again instructive. Marie Taxis later told the story: ‘One morning he received a tedious business letter. Wishing to deal with it right away, he had to sit down and devote himself to figures and other dry matters. Outside a strong bora was blowing …’ Descending from the castle to the bastions overlooking the sea, ‘Rilke walked back and forth deep in thought, preoccupied with his answer to the letter. Then all at once … it seemed to him as though in the roar of the wind a voice had called out to him: “If I cried out, who could hear me up there among the angelic orders?”’
Having received the first line, Rilke set to work and, by nightfall, the first elegy was on paper. ‘The Duino Elegies were not written,’ observes William Gass, ‘they were awaited.’ Awaited in patience of course, though in this case patience had a curious added detail, that ‘tedious business letter’. Should we count such annoyances as belonging to the geography of solitude? I think so. They are the distractions that force attention to wander, the catalysts of not-doing. All art requires effort but effort alone does not make the work, and distractions (so long as they are contained in solitude) are therefore useful. They are like the palladium atom that lets the carbon atoms bond, never itself becoming part of the new compound. That tedious business letter does not appear in the Duino Elegies, but there might be no elegies without it.
Here it should be said that Rilke never tells Kappus that a poet might find distraction useful. The letters to Kappus paint a grand portrait of how a poet works, and it will be worth pausing to interrogate that grandeur. I myself have often been put off by the extremity of Rilke’s language. His modifiers are consistently superlatives: there is no deep but the deepest, no quiet but the quietest. Works of art are not just solitary but ‘infinitely’ so. Rodin did not only teach art but art’s ‘profundity and eternity’. References to ‘purity’ abound: irony ought to be ‘used purely’, feelings ought to be ‘pure’, sexuality ought to be ‘entirely mature and pure’.
There is not much space in Rilke’s vision for many of the things that were to happen later in twentieth-century art – for composition practices that rely on chance, for example, or the writing of what Pablo Neruda called ‘impure poetry’ (poetry ‘corroded as if by acids, steeped in sweat and smoke, reeking of urine …’). No, in Rilke we find ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ rather than chance, and the desired ends are all of them highly refined. Approaching his elevated language a century after these letters were written, it is hard to resist offering a psychoanalytic reading. Surely what we have here is not just grandeur but grandiosity, the mind’s reflexive response to the fear and anxiety that Rilke so clearly felt.
As plausible as that reading may be, however, it is worth asking if there isn’t a way to approach Rilke’s extremities on terms that he himself might recognize. In puzzling over that question I have found it helpful to think of words like ‘purity’, ‘infinity’ and ‘eternity’ as placeholders pointing towards all that does not yet exist, but might. They are abstractions of the kind that allow the mind to work with the unknown and the not-yet-real. They correspond to things like surds, irrational numbers and infinitesimals in mathematics, that is to say, to ‘numbers’ that cannot be expressed in ordinary, finite terms. Albert Einstein once wrote that ‘as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’ No one would say that mathematicians who work with surds or with the kind of axioms Einstein called ‘free creations of the human mind’ are involved in grandiose responses to their own neuroses. No, they are just doing mathematics. Nor are their unreal placeholders entirely divorced from real experience. Most of modern technology, from suspension bridges to airplanes, would not exist if Newton and Leibnitz had not entertained the idea of infinitesimals.
Let us suppose that the pure, unreal elements of Rilke’s world perform a similar function, albeit in this case a spiritual or aesthetic one. In a 1903 letter, he wrote that an art object must be ‘withdrawn from all chance … lifted out of time and given to space …’ where it will become ‘lasting, capable of eternity’. I cannot be sure what ‘eternity’ means here, but at the same time I cannot be sure that it has no meaning. In The Letter from the Young Worker, included at the end of this volume, the character Rilke has created recalls the iconography of the old churches: ‘Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and … their unreality makes him more real for me.’ Here on earth it may be hard to find some of the things that Rilke mentions in the letters to Kappus – ‘an infinitely tender hand’, for example, or an ‘infinitely solitary’ work of art – but that does not mean the phrases have no function. Perhaps they lead us towards the outer edges of finite hands and finite works of art and, from there, towards imagining what lies beyond, what has not yet come to be. As the Young Worker says:
Isn’t our relationship to all the great unknown forces exactly like this? We experience none of them in their purity … But isn’t it the case with all scholars, explorers and inventors that the assumption that they were dealing with great forces suddenly led to the greatest of all?
In the letters that Rilke wrote to his friends and family during the years that he was writing to Kappus, he rarely mentions that parallel correspondence. An interesting excepti
on is a letter of July 1904 to his wife Clara. She has forwarded one of Kappus’s letters and Rilke remarks that the younger man ‘is having a hard time’, that he complains of having used up his strength. Rilke then, in a typical inversion, remarks that ‘the using up of strength is in a certain sense still an increase of strength …: all the strength we give away comes back over us again, experienced and transformed. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there that, truly done, would not be prayer?’
Rilke is speaking of Kappus’s struggles of course, but he could as easily be speaking of his own. After all, in the letters to Kappus he offers up the strength he himself had by then acquired, and gives it away such that it might come back transformed. Of note, then, is the way his thoughts turn from donation to prayer, as if to say that a letter, ‘truly done’, is itself a form of invocation. That, in any event, is how I have come to understand the otherwise exaggerated language of these letters. It is surely the case that, from Kappus’s position, the letters are hortatory and sermonizing. But to the degree that Rilke is speaking of and to himself – rehearsing his own trials in regard to poetry, family, sexuality, fear – the letters to a young poet are his prayers.
Lewis Hyde 2011
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
Paris, 17 February 1903
Dear Sir,
Your letter only reached me a few days ago. Let me thank you for the great and endearing trust it shows. There is little more I can do. I cannot go into the nature of your verses, for any critical intention is too remote from me. There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.
Having begun with this preliminary remark, all I will go on to say is that your verses have no identity of their own, though they do have tacit and concealed hints of something personal. I feel that most clearly in the last poem, ‘My Soul’. There something individual is trying to come into words, to find its manner. And in the lovely poem ‘To Leopardi’ perhaps a kind of affinity with this great and solitary man develops. Still, the poems are not yet anything in themselves, nothing self-sufficient, not even the last one and the one to Leopardi. The kind letter you wrote accompanying them does not fail to make many of the shortcomings I sensed in reading your verses explicable, without for all that being able to give them a name.
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me to offer you advice) let me ask you to give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge. Then approach nature. Then try, like the first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are too familiar and habitual: they are the hardest, for you need great maturity and strength to produce something of your own in a domain where good and sometimes brilliant examples have been handed down to us in abundance. For this reason, flee general subjects and take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life; depict your sadnesses and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty – depict all this with intense, quiet, humble sincerity and make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, the images from your dreams and the things in your memory. If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any of the sounds of the world outside reach your senses – would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that. Attempt to raise the sunken sensations of this distant past; your self will become the stronger for it, your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off. And if from this turn inwards, from this submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other. For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.
But perhaps even after this descent into yourself and into your solitariness you will have to give up the idea of becoming a poet (the feeling that one could live without writing is enough, as I said, to make it something one should never do). But even then, to have taken pause in the way I am asking you to will not have been in vain. Whatever happens, your life will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more than I can say.
What else should I say to you? I think everything has been emphasized as it should be; and all I wanted to do in the end was advise you to go through your development quietly and seriously; you cannot disrupt it more than by looking outwards and expecting answers from without to questions that only your innermost instinct in your quietest moments will perhaps be able to answer.
I was delighted to find Professor Horaček’s name in your letter; I retain a great admiration for this kind-hearted scholar, a gratitude that has endured over the years. Could you please pass on these sentiments to him; it is very kind of him still to remember me, and I much appreciate it.
The verses you were so good as to entrust me with I am sending back to you along with this letter. Thank you again for the extent and the warmth of your trust – as well as I can, I have attempted with this sincere reply to make myself a little worthier of it than, as a stranger, I really am.
With all devotion and sympathy,
Rainer Maria Rilke
Viareggio near Pisa (Italy), 5 April 1903
You must forgive me, my dear Sir, for only attending to your letter of 24 February today: the whole time I have been under the weather, not ill exactly but oppressed by an influenza-like feebleness which has made me incapable of anything. And in the end, when all else had failed, I travelled down to this southern coast, whose beneficial effects have helped me in the past. But I’m still not well again, writing is difficult, and so you must take these few lines as if there were more of them.
First of all you should know that every letter from you will always be a pleasure, and you only need to be understanding with regard to the replies, which often, maybe, will leave you with empty hands; for at bottom, and particularly in th
e deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise, let alone help, another, a great deal must come about, a great deal must come right, a whole constellation of things must concur for it to be possible at all.
There are just two things I wanted to say to you today:
Irony: don’t let yourself be ruled by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative ones try to make use of it as one means among many to get a grasp on life. Used purely, it too is pure, and there is no need to be ashamed of it; and if you feel too familiar with it, if you fear your intimacy is growing too much, then turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless. Seek out the depths of things: irony will never reach down there – and if in so doing you come up against something truly great, inquire whether this way of relating to things originates in a necessary part of your being. For under the influence of serious things irony will either fall away (if it is something incidental) or on the contrary (if it really belongs to you in a native way) it will gain strength and so become a serious tool and take its place among the means with which you will be bound to create your art.
And the second thing I wanted to tell you today is this:
Of all my books there are only a few I cannot do without, and two are always among my effects, wherever I am. I have them with me here: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. I wonder whether you know his works. They are easy to get hold of, because a number of them are available in good translations in Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek. Get hold of the little volume Six Novellas by J. P. Jacobsen, and his novel Niels Lyhne, and begin with the first story in the first of these volumes which is called ‘Mogens’. A world will come over you, the joy, the richness, the incomprehensible greatness of a new world. Live in these books for a while, learn from them what seems to be worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you thousands and thousands of times, and however your life may turn out – this love, I am sure of it, will run through the weave of your becoming as one of the most important threads of all among the other threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys.