Letters to Benvenuta Read online

  Dear one, you must accustom yourself to beholding my heart—it is not an easy thing, believe me … Look closely into the trained telescope—over there, that tiny, tiny point of light—have you got it?—that is my heart, scarcely recognizable … Ah, my sister, is it a mansion? Is it but a bright, rigid spot in the rock, blinking blindly from among the lambent green of busy nature?—

  (Do not become alarmed—time and again I would address you formally, but I cannot do so, and call you “sister”—that would sound as though I were ill abed and you, in starchy uniform, had engaged to nurse, not me alone, but all the world, without distinction.)

  Later

  Just then the femme de ménage arrived to clean up—very late, filled each morning with a new store of gossip, never even dreaming that one might not feel like listening. And so one allows oneself to be watered for a while, like a potted plant, trusting to nature’s well-known magnanimity that somehow this humidité too will make one grow. Hélas, chère amie—how all these minor characters, admitted in order to bring quiet efficiency to the irksome concerns of the day, themselves become a source of noise, a handicap, a downright annoyance! It is almost as though one had bought a set of rugs, only to stumble over each one, at every conceivable occasion. To make the story short, I did what I do each morning—having been sufficiently watered, I ran off.

  Paris, February 5, 1914

  17, rue Campagne Première

  Here is the third letter (since yesterday), my friend. In the morning I wired you, ruing in advance that I should do so—but, to tell the full truth, I had to do it—ah, what am I saying? When it comes to truth, I should have to write you day and night, to express all that rises and stirs to and fro amid the contradictions, and even then God only knows whether I should make myself understood, since, after all, I myself do not understand it all. Yet from the very first letter I have not felt right about troubling you with nothing but the circumstances of my life, which are, after all, no concern of yours—making that life important before you and in the end merely succeeding in beclouding, with these many words, the pure joy you have borne toward me, as a Spring breeze wafts the Spring day before it. What shall I do?

  For months I have played a game of hide-and-seek, and now that your fine joy suddenly seeks me out, I behave like a small boy who takes the matter dreadfully seriously, cries out “not yet, not yet!” and wants to be hidden even more artfully, so that he may later on savor for himself the utmost shock and ecstasy of being found—Then again, when I write like this, I seem to myself like a valley begging the good sun to delay its rising (yes, I implore the good sun!), telling it what has happened throughout the night, about the storm and the gloom, and how disgracefully unkempt the trees look now.

  Who are you really, dear friend? This garden of mine fears the sun—it is so badly dug-up, so topsyturvy. It does not even look like a garden now, but is once again committed solely to the business of growing. It is preparing for winter, for a long process of gestation beneath its hard, harsh, ugly surface. Surely it is not fit to receive you in all your radiance, nor the god, or demigod, who dwells within you, impatient for action. Imagine, if you will, that Orpheus, with his unfathomable lyre, had run athwart the Lord’s Creation ere the mountains had risen and the waters run off! In the self-same way I think I too ought first to rear my few rocks, send forth my river—and no one should be tempted to mistake my dozen odd trees for anything but trees. Then let divine tranquillity or the storms of inspiration do with them what they will—things beyond all comprehension—stir them and sweep them.

  Do I distress you, friend? Surely I could not do such a thing, in the face of your wondrous joy!

  Again, I tell myself that surely what I here recount and strew across your path must not serve to deter you from coming to visit me soon, if your schedule permit it without violence, and if your desire to that end be maintained. For besides me, Heaven knows, there is Paris, and this much is certain: She is incomparably fairer in the Spring than in the Fall, especially to one who has never seen her before.

  I shall now tell you in all sincerity how I, in keeping with the habits of my solitary soul, should respond to such an event. First of all, I should take your hand in both my own and let it rest in them as long as it pleased; then I should once again retire completely into my wonted aloofness, venturing nothing; yet we should have a few afternoons, an evening, a shared walk—things, all of them, that have never been our lot and that should mean so very much, because of their very rarity. We should have good things to say to each other beyond all measure, and in the end some future plan might be agreed upon in a more certain and tangible form, perhaps again with the help of that ugly, versatile, yellow monster*; for even if it could somehow be done in practice, if a place and an instrument could be found, I have the feeling that I should not allow your music to sweep over me here, in this city that has come to prey upon my mind to such an extent that I should not even be able to show it to you without guile. Your music (thus do I yield to dreams) should not only breathe new order into my inward world; it should be associated only with new outward relationships. You will say that I am immoderate. I am, my friend, and perhaps nothing of great urgency is ever moderate, least of all nature.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  (If you were but to write that you have not become angry at me over all this!)

  Paris, February 8, 1914

  Oh, Benvenuta, what have I done, that the burden of achievement has always fallen to me in love, that, by my nature, I have never borne its sunny fruit, as an orange tree bears its innocent, blissful wealth? That I have had to go to and fro with it, like a slave in the marketplace, weighed down, carrying provisions which I could not see, which some god purchased over my head to use for his feasts, to which I was not bidden?

  Children rest in love (has this been ever granted me?), but then, they are unsullied in their illusion that it is possible to belong to someone; and when they say “mine,” they make no claim to ownership; they grasp and let go, and when they do not, they cling to God, with whom they retain a subtle connection, who draws even others to himself through their guiltless open arms.

  Can you explain why it is that people always become my undoing? I shall confess to you that if at this moment my neighbor were to enter—a young Hungarian painter whom I scarcely know, and to whom I bring no more than the sympathy one feels for young people when one is no longer quite convinced of one’s own youth—no more than that—if that young man were to enter here now, having no conceivable inkling of what preoccupies me—I should yet put aside my pen and for two hours on end, until I ran out of breath, relate impressions and memories to him, with the warmth (can you conceive of such a thing?)—with the warmth that belongs to you, that is of rights yours in this place—with that self-same suppressed warmth—what in the world is this? Surely not kindness, weakness, sickness, vanity, a crime? And I do the same thing with my work. The innermost tension that exists for its sake, to which it alone has a claim, is released in some less worthy cause, is spent, vanishes into thin air. Must I then not keep myself well-stoppered, as the merchants do their attar of roses? And, dear, am I not right in doing so? Why should I not say that I prefer to be alone? My friend, believe me, this is my sole desire. In the same breath with which I implore God to let me love you, I beg him, I implore him to strengthen my will for militant solitude, for such is the destiny of every fiber of my being. Oh, do you not feel it in my heart?—do you not feel it when you hold your hands against it—that ineffable urge to push everything aside, all tenderness, to stride irresistibly from deed to deed, down the hard and splendid path of action? Can you feel it? Is it not true that, in the end, there may be no need for anyone to lay my funeral pyre, since I myself have touched the torch of ecstasy to my unblemished heart, that it consume itself utterly and flare up in a single flame to God? But here I am under lock and key, you see, behind barred doors, yet I do not act. Once, unless I am mistaken, it seemed to me each morning, or now and then at least, as though each beginning were the first, the only one. Long since, now, it has been very different. The least and the greatest that I undertake—even ventures that are dear and familiar to me (and these perhaps most of all)—are burdened in advance by such an indescribable weight of experience and suspicion of incapacity. In the morning, when I lay out my work—sometimes, indeed, start on nothing more than a letter—a sense of foreboding sweeps over me: You shall not be able to do it!—and often enough I cannot. True, the crucial element in art—what people have long called “inspiration”—is not within our power; but that I have always understood—it could not be otherwise, because we are so fickle—and it has never troubled me; nor have I ever used the slightest means for conjuring it up. To be patient in the face of the divine is natural, for it is governed by standards of its own. The difficulty arises from another side and has but slowly spread its infection to the point where my real certainties lie. A young and rather eccentric author (I should like to send you his book—his name is Marcel Proust—the pencil-marked copy over which I have spent my evenings) speaks of a peculiar fear that haunted his childhood and exerted great influence on him. In the later course of his life, when there should have been no more question of such a fear, he nevertheless thought he still recognized it in different guises, c’est cette angoisse qui revient dans l’amour. If that be true, mine is the next phase, l’angoisse de ne pouvoir pas aimer qui revient dans la travail.

  (The suddenly inspired familiar address does not mean that I forego the earlier form. I want to say everything to you—call you by every name—and thus keep mindful that to me you are both nearness and distance, that you are both an open door and refuge from it.)

  My dear friend, I see you are familiar with Brigge. There is no identity, of course, but it is true that he absorbed much of my own life, some of it almost completely—yet what a different record it would be, if the ineffable sorrows of the three or four years that have elapsed since then were suddenly to be precipitated in words! The rift in my heart dates only from certain other events—that rift that must be the reason why my heart flutters so fitfully when it is touched by nature, by the stars, by lofty things. (You should have heard it before—the exalted purity with which it sounded forth, when purely touched!) That was on a great journey to another continent, when I had laid open my mind to the most powerful things; and since it lay wide open, fatefully distorted circumstances overwhelmed it at the same time. Deeply receptive, surrendered to grandeur, I was yet steeped in guilt and torment; I lost all my bearings, all self-assurance, but for that one spot in my heart which has retained its inborn stability in every vicissitude. I recall a night in a small hotel room in a Tunisian town—the nightmarish atmosphere in which I dwelt had infected my innermost being so frightfully that the very hands with which I touched myself seemed like strangers to me. There was no electric light, and I lit a candle. I sat on my bed—friend, sister, try to understand: That simple little flame, into which I must have so often drowsily gazed as a child—will you believe it, it was the first thing in a long time that I knew and recognized, a cherished survivor from an earlier, lost world—my world! Can you understand that? I was touched to the heart, felt a swelling sense of gratitude—something like the feeling that now joins me to you …

  You who are full of love—

  … My life was never given a foundation. No one was able to imagine the direction of its growth. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca’ del Duca, a princely fundament, on which subsequently the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me the case is opposite—the fine arches to which my spirit soared rest on the most tentative beginnings, on a wooden scaffold, a few flimsy boards… Is that why I feel thwarted in rearing the nave, the steeple to which the burden of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels—who else could do it?)? … How wonderful are great lives, how wonderful is yours to me, dear friend!—a life to which I suddenly speak as though I were talking to the clouds and the depths of my sky, to settle when there are to be showers in my nature and when the weather is to be clear—How overwhelming is the impact, night after night, from sky to earth! I sleep by open window, and when I open the bedroom casement (it adjoins the lofty studio where I live and work)—when I open it, I must first compose my face, that it be equal to the nearest star. How feeling overwhelms the spirit! What freedom in the soul! How overpowering the fellowship of man!

  Tomorrow night you will be in Berlin. Perhaps my letter will be waiting for you there, the letter I wrote yesterday afternoon, still dispatching it to Vienna. This one I shall not be able to post until early tomorrow—my little postoffice takes Sunday seriously and will not be receptive again until tomorrow.

  Farewell, dear true friend, champion on behalf of my future, fine, joyful heart, dear one, farewell! Tell me soon how it is with you in Berlin—I know many of your errands …

  R.

  (Here are three little pictures of me—may I soon have one of you? There are no others, for I have not allowed any to be taken for some ten years. In part, because I do not like self-conscious modern photographs (old ones all the more)—in part, because the indiscreet publicity of our age too readily broadcasts a picture, making it a fatuous article of commerce. As for Busoni’s book (“Outline of a New Esthetics of Music”), I should like to devote some quiet hours to it, if I may have it from you; and if you have time for Proust’s “Swann’s Way,” I shall send it to you shortly.)

  [Undated, probably. February 1914]

  Oh, Benvenuta, thou unto me Benvenuta—can you understand it? Is there to be no limit to marvels? Your dream of Wednesday night! Do you know that was the night of which I wrote you that I lay as though caught up in slumbering creation, in the vast nameless spaces of sleep, where the spirit, plumed in the colors of sleep, wheeled with nocturnally wakeful eyes; the self-same night during which, from time to time, I noted down on little slips of paper things meant for you, things I thought could not wait, you must know at once; the same night when I sensed with a pellucid feeling all the hundred fatigues of my body, unquenched, each one whole, each one beyond healing, each in its place. Not that they were at rest—but each one lay, something like the trial bastings on an embroidery, side by side with its complementary repose, a gentle strand of silk, as it were—as though that repose were to be worked by a loving hand, thread for thread, into the pale background, gently and thoughtfully, in utter peace, some day, soon. There I lay, you see, nor was there any balm for me. On the contrary, the fullness of my fatigue loomed like a figure of many digits in my physical awareness; but throughout my mind there emerged a sacred assurance, the promise of a beneficence so indescribable that I would not have dared stir, fearful lest I dispel the miracle that came so close. I remember that even in the morning I rose with great care, amazed at the grandeur of the night just past—I was reminded of the Bible prophecies or the dream images in Dante’s Vita nuova; never have I experienced anything like this temple-sleep through which strode a god not yet in action, but paving the way for action, planning and looking about—And you, loving heart, that night you dreamed!

  Last night, although right after your letter I had read something else that was very beautiful, I was assailed by an abject faintheartedness. May I tell you about this too, my sister?—I felt as though I should not be able to travel at all. It is a foolish case of nerves. Secluded here these past four months, I sometimes feel like the released prisoner who grows bemused at the notion of stepping forth into the thick of things and events outside—Then I somehow lose my physical courage. I wanted to go to sleep, but could get nothing done—even to go to sleep seemed like such an effort—and now to travel! Oh, scold me, dear heart: I fancy, perforce, how easily some clumsy outward circumstance, innocent in itself, might do less than justice to our meeting; that it should be more carefully prepared; that it must be safeguarded; that at the very least things should be as they are here in my room where, to a degree, interference and accident can be ruled out. Where I should be able to tell all my chattels: Quiet! she comes; or should say nothing, with the stillness of all things growing deeper and surer about my clamorous heart. Yet again, there are reasons why I should not like to see you here, against a background of sorrowful wear and tear—not for the first time, not quite. I must also make a confession to you: Some ten days ago I had the notion of journeying to meet Spring in the Umbrian countryside, since here it reminds me too much of other Springs; indeed, at times I am seized by a craving for long walks into the country, hour-long walks, by way of counterpoise to so much inner turmoil. (I do not know how early one dare go down there, without fear of still encountering winter, or a relapse into winter; but in any event, I have written to someone who ought to know.) And then, a few days later, when you mentioned Geneva, dear one, a hope kindled within me, immoderate as I am—I saw us sitting in a Geneva hotel, four about a table, the two of us separated by our respective “black bags,” gravely given seat and voice in the council. I saw your yellow book before us, read names to you of indescribable sound—Perugia, Assisi—Dear heart, with such trivia do I toy; and dared not tell you about them. But when you mentioned Geneva, of all places, the thing took on a kind of fantastic probability (or am I again beyond the bounds of geography?). As for myself, I cannot yet truly estimate whether I should be doing well to go to Umbria and stay there a month or two; or whether it were better, wherever I might be, to come straight back to lectern and desk. (The black bag, lacking imagination and exhausted by lean years, naturally votes for the latter course—but you must know that often I consult it only to ignore utterly its irritable recommendations, delivered in the sober tones of a governess.) Truly, I am at a complete loss. This obstinate impediment has led me to indescribable lengths—shall I perpetuate it in seclusion (when you are here)?