Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Read online

  The only other major female character in the book is Malte’s mother—“Maman” as he calls her, the prose artfully sidestepping any situation where we might learn her actual name.# And how differently the prose relates to her! Here is Malte’s memory of the time Maman came rushing back to him from a fancy dress ball when word was sent to his parents that he had wakened from a nightmare screaming and wouldn’t stop:

  And I suddenly heard the carriage driving up into the courtyard, and I stopped screaming, sat up, and looked toward the door. And then there was a rustling in the adjoining rooms, and Maman rushed in wearing her beautiful court gown, paying it no attention at all, and was almost running and let her white fur fall to the floor behind her and took me in her bare arms. And I, with an astonishment and rapture I had never felt before, touched her hair and her delicate, beautifully made-up face and the cold jewels at her ears and the silk at the slope of her shoulders, which were fragrant like flowers. And we remained like that and wept tenderly together and kissed each other, until we sensed that Father was standing there and knew we had to separate.

  The moment of course is in the past, the experience of a very young boy; but the feeling of the prose is all present tense, completely uncensored by the disapproving perspective of the father or the embarrassment of a grown-up son. Indeed, Malte and Maman are the book’s single intimate pair, and Malte the narrator keeps Maman almost entirely to his younger self, surrounding her with tenderness. In their times together, they seem most often like two intensely bonded, same-minded children at ease only with each other.** She tells him the story of Ingeborg whenever he asks for it, he worries about the effect his story of “the hand” would have on her; alone together, they unroll with granular attention a spool of different strips of lace, and wonder when they reach the end about the afterlife of the women who made them; they huddle on the Schulins’ couch, the only two who know that outside a ghostly house is vanishing, while the rest of those inside search out a fugitive smell.

  At the same time, “words of wisdom” keep popping out of Maman during her times with Malte, and though they may be spoken in a quasi-childhood language, they often sound more oracular than naïve: “No one pays proper attention when we pass away. As if a shooting star fell and no one saw it and no wish was made. Never forget, Malte, to make a wish. You should never give up wishing. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes that last a long time, some even for a whole lifetime, so that you wouldn’t have time enough anyway to wait for them to come true.” And again: “There are no classes in life for beginners, what’s most difficult is always the first thing assigned.” There is more in Rilke’s “evoking” of her than at first appears. We are never quite sure how deep she goes.

  The feeling of depth is especially strong and elusive when Maman and Malte remember together how he pretended as a very young child to be her imaginary daughter “Sophie.” The episode is almost Shakespearean in the way it brings fraught themes and oblique motivations so lightly into play. It also collides head-on with primal “facts” about Rilke’s early life, and this has created divergent opinions about how to read the resulting palimpsest of truth and fiction. The passage needs to be quoted in full, since so much of what happens in it depends entirely on tone:

  Only when we were completely sure of not being disturbed, and when it was growing dark outside, we would sometimes give ourselves over to memories, shared memories that seemed old [alt] to both of us and made us smile, for we had both grown up since then. We remembered that there was a time when Maman wished I had been a little girl and not this boy I turned out to be. Somehow I had guessed this, and had come up with the idea of sometimes in the afternoon knocking on Maman’s door. When she asked who was there, with barely suppressed delight [glücklich] I would answer from the outside “Sophie,” making my little voice so dainty that it tickled my throat. And then when I entered (in the small, girlish house frock that I always wore anyway, with its sleeves rolled all the way up), I was Sophie pure and simple, Maman’s little Sophie, who busied herself about the house and whose hair Maman had to braid for her so that Sophie wouldn’t be mistaken for that wicked Malte if he ever came back. This was emphatically not to be desired; it was as agreeable to Maman as to Sophie that he was gone, and their conversations (which Sophie always continued in the same high-pitched voice) consisted mostly of listing Malte’s transgressions and complaining about him. “Ah yes, that Malte,” Maman would sigh. And Sophie could go on and on about the wickedness of boys in general, as if she had dealt with a whole crowd of the worst examples.

  “I should very much like to know what has become of Sophie,” Maman would say suddenly in the midst of our remembering. About that of course Malte could provide no information. But when Maman ventured that she must certainly be dead, he argued against that stubbornly and pleaded with her not to believe it, however little proof he could offer to the contrary.

  I can’t feel any darkness in this passage. The phrasings construct such an affectionate mutuality (how lavish Malte is with “we”) across such delicate temporal boundaries—not “Maman wished I had been a little girl” but “We remembered that there was a time when Maman wished I had been a little girl.” The Sophie story, which might on its own evoke strong feelings of abjectness, is told at a remove, and there is pleasure in the frame. Maman and Malte are reveling in “shared memories” that now are “old” to them, and as such quaint and theirs alone. It’s clear that this is something special that they often do, and they go to great lengths to keep it private. They smile at the thought of him becoming Sophie—they have both “grown up” since then. In his telling, the charade is his brainstorm, not something forced on him by a fundamentally unhappy mother. Why does the child think to play this game with her? To materialize her wish? To make a game of her regret? To create another way of being close? Simply to surprise her with himself? And what does the charade allow him in return? To play at being what he’s not? (The staff at Ulsgaard seem to take this quirk of Malte’s for granted.) To give voice to a loquacious girl inside him? To confess those bad things (many no doubt fabricated) that reassure him he is a boy? How can we say for certain? All we know is that when Malte answers “Sophie” from the other side of Maman’s door, he is brimming with happiness.

  The Maman of the memory plays along—she even braids Sophie’s hair so she won’t be mistaken for Malte if he ever reappears. But surely it is love and not delusion or perversion that is at work here, whatever secondary fantasies Maman may be playing out. As she and Sophie are enumerating Malte’s faults, Maman sighs (does she do so from inside or outside the charade?), “Ah yes, that [or “this”] Malte” (Ach ja, dieser Malte)—and the reader is left to choose the feeling that her sigh expresses.

  The narration transitions back to the “grown-up” reminiscing in the fiction’s remembered present with a trick of syntax that makes Maman’s free-floating remark seem for a moment still to be coming from the time of the charade: “ ‘I should very much like to know what has become of Sophie,’ Maman would say suddenly in the midst of our remembering . . .” Does she direct this to Malte (teasing him, testing him), or say it out loud to herself? Does the spirit of the game wistfully rekindle, or does Maman wonder why the playfulness of psyches, in which Malte once so easily changed into Sophie and back again, can only survive as memory in the stricter divisions of grown-up time? Malte is never more like Rilke than when he desperately begs Maman not to believe that Sophie must be dead.

  A reader familiar with the details of Rilke’s childhood (but how many such readers can there have been at the time of publication?) will be struck immediately by the biographical elements in the Sophie story. Indeed, Rilke deploys them as if to make sure they are recognized—even if logically he would be the only one who could detect them. Here are the important “facts” that form the underlayer of the fiction:

  1. Rilke’s mother was named “Sophia,” though she called herself “Phia.”

  2. A ye
ar before Rilke was born, Phia had given birth to a daughter, who only survived for a week. It is unclear what her name was; she was probably not given one. (Occasionally a critic will refer to her too as “Sophia.”) Rilke commemorated her in the delicate concluding poem of From a Stormy Night, an otherwise unremarkable poem cycle in The Book of Images:

  In nights like these, my little sister grows,

  who was here and died before me, so small.

  Many such nights have passed since then.

  She must be beautiful by now. Soon someone

  will marry her.

  3. Rilke was christened “René Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria”; he stayed René Maria until he was twenty-one, when Andreas-Salomé persuaded him in 1897 to change his name to the more manly and German-sounding “Rainer.” Phia would dress him as a girl, brush and braid his long hair, play with him “like a big doll” (Rilke remembers) and show him off in exquisite new dresses to her friends. At times (if one trusts the testimony of his son-in-law) he became Ismene: “According to a family anecdote, on one occasion when he was expecting to be punished the seven-year-old boy made himself into a girl to placate his mother. His long hair done up in braids, his sleeves rolled up to bare his thin, girlish arms, he appeared in his mother’s room. ‘Ismene is staying with dear Mama,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘René is a no-good. I sent him away. Girls are so much nicer anyway.’ ”††

  4. As an adult Rilke expressed a phobic aversion to Phia, including the fear that her treatment of him as a child had irrevocably harmed him. In an April 15, 1904, letter to Andreas-Salomé he wrote:

  Every meeting with her is a kind of relapse . . . I feel how even as a child I struggled to escape her, and I fear deep inside that after years and years of running and walking I am still not far away from her, that somewhere inwardly I still make movements that are supplements of her stunted gestures, small broken-off pieces of memories she carries around inside her; then I feel a horror of her mindless piety, of her obstinate religiosity, of all those distorted and deformed things to which she has clung, herself an empty dress, ghostly and terrible. And that still I am her child; that some scarcely discernible concealed door in this faded wall that is not part of any structure was my entrance into the world—(if indeed such an entrance can lead into the world at all . . .)!

  Yet Rilke continued to meet with Phia throughout his life, and carried on a voluminous correspondence with her. She outlived him by four years.

  Given this factual background, one can imagine the degree of broad psychoanalytic commentary that has accrued around this fictional episode in Malte. Maman is a projection of Phia, and the charade transposes Phia’s attempt to turn her unwanted son into her lost daughter; Maman is the fantasized good mother; Maman’s sympathetic depiction is reparation for Rilke’s animus toward Phia; Maman is evidence of a wholesale problematizing of maternal love in The Notebooks.‡‡ And of course there’s more. But all of it seems to lead down the same wrong path. It’s not so much the approaches as the blunt instruments employed. A passage from Malte comes to mind: “Everything is made up of countless incredible details that cannot be foreseen. In imagination we hasten past them and never notice what’s been missed. But realities are slow and infinitely specific.” What gets overlooked in this case is precisely the specificity of the episode—the sense of intricate deliberateness with which elements in the dysfunctional field of the truth are carried over into the “glücklich” space of the fiction, situationally refigured and tonally altered—but rarely discarded. (Malte’s braided hair is a prime example.) It’s as if Rilke is playing a game of revision with himself, in which the challenge is to reverse the valence of each dispiriting “fact” while allowing it to survive ghostlike in the fictive alteration. It’s fun, and yet the stakes are high. And there are extra points for cross-reference. Malte’s choice of “Sophie” is fictionally indifferent, but it is Rilke’s mother’s name, and perhaps his sister’s; Maman’s suspicion that the imaginary Sophie must be dead has its own complexities, but it also hauntingly invokes Phia’s dead child, who in Rilke’s young imagination is still alive.§§

  Aftermath

  One would like to think that to effect such transformations in an “autobiographic” fiction would have consequences in the field of the existential—that to take those worst isolating memories and turn them into figures of intensely shared affection would be a powerful therapy for the soul. As if the gnomic couplet in the last of the Son nets to Orpheus had been prematurely understood: “What experience remains your deepest shame? / If drinking is bitter to you, become wine.” But it didn’t work that way for Rilke. (Maybe it never works that way—what happens in fiction remains in the fiction.) He experiences a brief period of exhilaration at the sheer fact of having completed the book, but then his old anxious self comes to the fore. It becomes important for him after publication to keep insisting on an intimate connection between himself and Malte (“He had accompanied me to Venice, he had wandered the streets of Paris as I had . . .”), but in terms that fend off an anxiety that they are (or might be perceived as) the same. A generally positive early review by his friend Ellen Key so distressed him that he had to write immediately to Andreas-Salomé in a plea for understanding:

  I don’t need responses to my books, you know that,—but now I need fervently to know what impression this book made on you. Our good Ellen Key, of course, promptly misidentified me with Malte and had nothing further to say; yet no one but you, dear Lou, can make the distinction and judge whether and to what extent he resembles me. Whether he, who doubtless is in part created from my perils, is destroyed by them in order to save me, as it were, from destruction, or whether with these journals I have finally gone all the way out into the current that will sweep me away and plunge me over the edge.¶¶

  Later in the same paragraph Rilke will again refer to his protagonist as “the other one, the one who is destroyed.” This idea of Malte’s “destruction”—that he somehow fails at a fundamental task, that the outcome of the book is his downfall or perdition or even his death—is pure delusion: and yet it becomes increasingly dominant in Rilke’s extended comments on the book. It’s almost as if Malte has become in his mind another Sorrows of Young Werther, with its linearity, its protagonist’s suicide, and its stable framing by a fictional editor. The Notebooks is none of those things, and all the more interesting for it. Malte doesn’t die or fail, he simply fades, along with his author.

  The book’s last three entries constitute a kind of paradigm of the Malte-Rilke amalgam, and in the process enact its dissolution. After several gradually weakening pages about Sappho, the worldview of ancient Greek culture, “girls in my homeland,” and an aging recluse’s off-key involvement with those girls, an entry break catapults us into contemporary Venice. Immediately the narrative voice sharpens and interest heightens. The new episode opens with Malte addressing the lost beloved (“Once, Abelone, during these last years, I felt your presence again . . .”). But as the prose quickly comes to life, the personality of the narrative “I” transforms aurally into pure Rilke, praising Venice and loathing tourists as only Rilke can. Even a passing reference to things Danish doesn’t dispel the sensation of “reading Rilke.” Only when, near the entry’s end, the narrative voice responds to the sudden rise of emotion in a woman’s singing (even her lyrics are pure Rilke) by twice thinking to itself “Abelone,” are we reminded that the speaker has always officially been Malte. The book’s penultimate entry then provides Malte with a brief last chance to ruminate about Abelone, but again his thoughts are opaque and phlegmatic, and the entry winds up feeling out of place and almost dispensable. The one exception is a set of powerful aphorisms, and they are marked as writing retrieved anonymously from the margin of the manuscript.*** Then, with the last entry, a new narration takes over, and there is a long, crystalline exit through the saga of the Prodigal Son, with its perfect omniscient storytelling voice (somehow neither “Rilke” nor “Malte”) relating a perfect linear life-story
(everything must be perfect for the writing to succeed here) with a beginning, a middle, and an end—whose last two words are nevertheless “not yet.”†††

  Edward Snow

  Rice University

  __________________

  * Reported in Maurice Betz, Rilke in Paris (Zurich, 1958); quoted here from Hartman Engelhardt, Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilke “Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 164.

  † Letter of November 1909; quoted by Robert Vilain in his translation of The Notebooks (Oxford, 2016), iii.

  ‡ Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of December 28, 1911. All quotations from the correspondence between Rilke and Andreas-Salomé are taken from Rainer Marie Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence, trans. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (W. W. Norton, 2006).

  § Rilke would have had the earlier account at hand. He had asked Andreas-Salomé, his wife Clara, their mutual friend Ellen Key, and others to lend him copies of the letters he had written them from Paris, so that he would have access to them while writing his book. See Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 210.

  ¶ Quoted from Hartmut Engelhardt, Materialien, 55.

  # Count Brahe refers to the deceased Maman as “Countess Sibylle” whenever he speaks of her to Malte’s father (“as if inquiring after her health”), but this is perhaps his own punning coinage, both honorific and ironic.