Rilke in Paris Read online

  He writes these details to his wife one Sunday afternoon:

  It’s Sunday and it is raining. A slow rain, soft and autumnal. On the boulevards they are already heaping great piles of damp dead leaves; we have evidently missed our summer…

  The initial impression of disorientation subsides:

  The evenings now belong to me: I shall be contented with reading books, making notes. Meditation, repose, solitude: all those things for which I am most nostalgic.

  In truth, it was first and foremost to make the acquaintance of Rodin that Rilke had come to Paris, and the master’s invocation took on in his mind a virtue of exorcism against those obscure threats emanating from the unknown city.

  All that relates to itself, will rise up around itself. Even perhaps Paris, this foreign city that to me is so truly foreign. I am in dread of all these hospitals everywhere. I now understand why they recur so often in Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. In every street you encounter invalids who end up there on foot or in carriages. You see them appear at the windows of the Hôtel-Dieu in their strange attire, the pale and mournful uniform of the invalid. You suddenly sense that in this vast city there are legions of the sick, armies of the dying, whole populations of the dead.

  Already we see seeping through, in these first letters one of the dominant themes of the Notebooks: the multiform face of death in Paris.

  In no other city have I felt this and what’s so strange is that this impression infects me here, in Paris, where (as Holitscher has written) the vital impulse appears stronger than anywhere else. Vital impulse, is that then life? No. Life is calm, immense, elemental. The craving to live is haste, pursuit. There is an impatience to possess life in its entirety, straight away. Paris is bloated with this desire and that’s why it is so close to death. Oh foreign city, how foreign indeed you are!

  These first weeks are however illuminated by the meeting with Rodin. In the master’s sprawling workshops, in the peaceful garden at Meudon, the youthful poet glimpses the kind of bliss that might bestow art upon him. ‘One must work, nothing but work,’ Rodin teaches his young visitor. That is to say:

  You should not dream of creating this or that, it is not enough to construct your own means of expression, and then declare everything. You must work. You must have patience. Look neither to right nor left. Lead your whole life in this cycle and look for nothing beyond this life.

  ‘That’s how Rodin does it,’ repeats Rilke, like a refrain. He disengages from a too-centred existence, giving an impression of sovereign calm, of assurance against the blows of fate, which may perhaps be a kind of joy. But Rilke does not yet dare believe in this path to contentment, not least because he knows the equilibrium that it supposes and the sacrifices it demands. He remembers the malaise he experienced in the house of Tolstoy, the painful scenes which he endured with Rodin. These experiences imposed a conclusion on him: He must choose.

  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…

  In reality, Rilke had already made his choice. He knew that he ‘would die of not being able to write’. If he had come to Paris, it was not only to gather together the elements for a study of Rodin, it was to ask this of himself: ‘How exactly should one live?’

  You replied to me: in working. And I understand perfectly. I sense that to work is to live without dying.

  Rilke wrote to Rodin that ‘yesterday, in the silence of your garden’ he ‘found himself’. He had understood that for the artist, work could be ‘space, time, dream, window, eternity… And now the clamour of the immense city became more distant and all around my heart there was a profound silence where your words stood erect like statues.’

  But what is the language of this city that remains when the tutelary shadow of Rodin and his great example recedes? Returning from Meudon, Rilke returns to the human stratum of Paris:

  Oh these oppressive summer evenings! Deprived of pure air, walled up in odours and stale breath. Evenings of anguish, as if trapped underground. Sometimes I lean my head against the gate of the Luxembourg just to breathe in a little space, calmness, moonlight, – but there too it’s the same leaden air, still heavy with the perfume of the too many flowers they have crowded into the borders…This city is just too vast and overburdened with melancholy…

  In the absence of the stimulating proximity of beings and objects emerging from Rodin’s powerful hands, Rilke returned to books:

  Each day now I spend long hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale and I read much. In Paris books are most discreet; they speak to you slowly and in a low voice. This contrast brings benefits.

  There were also art books lent to him by Rodin, monuments of gothic art, cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries:

  It was truly a great art. The more one studies these things, the more one senses the value and exquisite quality of the accomplished work: for these cathedrals, these peaks and mountains of The Middle Ages would never have been achieved if they had to be born from pure inspiration. A long procession of days was needed and each lent a hand; so although not all could be behind the inspiration, at least they were driving it forward. Everything has been said about these great churches. Victor Hugo penned some memorable pages on Notre Dame in Paris, and yet the action of these cathedrals continues to exert itself, uncannily alive, inviolate, mysterious, surpassing the power of words… I believe that in the middle of this metropolis they are like a forest or a sea; a fragment of nature in this city where even the gardens themselves are works of art. They are solitude and calm, sanctuary and rest in the ever-moving tracery of alleys. They are the future as much as the past, the rest runs on and drains away, rushes forth and falls… But they alone stand and wait. Notre Dame grows each day, each time you see it again it seems even larger. Nearly every evening, as night falls, I pass before it; at the hour when the Seine is like grey silk and when the lamplight falls upon it like cut jewels.

  And here his gaze is cast upon another landscape dear to Rilke, the Luxembourg Gardens, at the hour when ‘dusk falls over the purple flowers’.

  Somewhere, a drum roll suddenly rises, swirls now here now there. A soldier in red strides the avenues. And from everywhere the people are leaving: joyful beings, laughing, exuberant, serious beings, doleful, silent and solitary, people of all kinds, today, yesterday and the days that went before. Some who have spent long hours on a distant bench, as if waiting – and the drum tolls in their head that they have nothing more to hope for – some who remained the whole day long on benches, snoozing, eating and reading the paper: all kinds of beings, of faces and hands – what hands! – now file out. It’s like the last judgement. And behind those who are on their way, the garden grows. And Paris in contrast becomes narrower, clearer, more vocal and begins one of its insatiable nights, a night of spices, of life, of music and dresses.

  The idea returns frequently in Rilke’s letters that his stay in Paris is an apprenticeship:

  You can learn here, I think, but it requires a certain maturity, otherwise you see nothing. Firstly, because there are just too many things; next, because a thousand different voices are addressing you at once and from every side.

  For the first time, on 17 October, in a letter to Arthur Holitscher, Rilke attempts to relive, with a little hindsight, his initial Parisian experiences.

  Can you sense that to me Paris is infinitely foreign and hostile? There are cities which are discontented and melancholy for being too vast. In vain do they spread, a little nostalgia makes them fold back on themselves, and their constant din fails to cover the interior voice which repeats to them without cease: a city is something against nature. Think of St Petersburg. But Paris is quite different. Paris is vain, embellished with mirrors, eternally overjoyed with itself, so content with its greatness and its smallness that it can no longer distinguish between them. Living beings follow the streets; you can’t se
parate one from the other. In those first days, I encountered hospitals all over the place: behind the trees on all the squares stood these long monotonous buildings, with their great doors and their side gates set in high fortified walls. At the windows were affixed reproductions of the most serious ailments and the papers related in captivating fashion alarming crimes, playing with that kind of language which lends itself to everything and whose very terms are sensations in themselves. Yes, all was a game reflecting in other games. Ah! How I clung, with hand and foot, to those rare things which were different! To Rodin first, the great old man. To the things he had formed, to these silent stones, filled with restrained voices. I went to the Louvre, stood before the Mona Lisa. I saw the Nike of Samothrace, which made me feel for the first time a breath of Greece, from an age when they still celebrated such victories.

  It was there, the counterweight, without a doubt. But everywhere the atmosphere weighed heavy and as oppressively as the very first day.

  I read a great deal at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Geffroy, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourts. I read, though the universal authority of this language discourages me. And apart from Rodin and Carrière, I still haven’t seen and don’t wish to see anybody, for the moment. I would like via some solitary path to arrive at work, to daily work, to the capacity to work. I wish to remain at least in the short term in Paris, because it is difficult. I believe that if one could manage to get down to work here, one might penetrate to a great distance and to a great depth. I first intend travelling to Breslau for my studies. But I could as easily begin them here. I follow courses at the Collège de France, I am going to read a lot… Something good will come of this. How long I will stay here, I don’t know; in any case until early 1903…

  Never have I felt so much nostalgia for Russia.

  As much as he took full advantage of life in this city, there rose in him that anxiety which became the place where the images and feelings of Malte Laurids Brigge were gradually formed. ‘Paris’, he wrote to Otto Modersohn, who considered joining him,

  is an oppressive and febrile city. The beauties that one encounters there, with all their radiant eternity, cannot heal the sufferings inflicted on us by the cruelty and turmoil of the streets, the contrived face of the gardens, of people and things. Paris imposes on my nervous sensibility inexpressible anxieties. It seems to have lost its way, rushing headlong out of orbit like a planet, towards some terrible cataclysm. This is what the cities of the Bible must have been like, behind which rose the rage of God to devour and overwhelm them…

  Letters, over the months that followed, became ever more scarce. You might conclude that Rilke had sufficiently translated the first shock that Paris had given him. You might also suppose that he had sunk into his solitude and deliberately renounced letter writing. For:

  What good is it, asked Malte, to say to someone that I have changed? If I change, I am not he who I once was, and if I am other than I was, then it is obvious that I have no further connections. And I can hardly write to strangers, to people who don’t know me!

  In the midst of this opaque and overly animated city, Rilke undertook to explore that obscure dimension from which he awaited the responses to so many questions. ‘I possess an inner life that I was hitherto ignoring. From now on everything goes that way. I really don’t know exactly what’s happening.’ During that winter of 1902 to 1903, he doubtless inscribed the feverish curve of those first pages of the journal, which later would take its place in the Notebooks. If it is true that

  In spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion and knowledge of the universe, we remain only on the surface of life, if it is true that man has still ‘seen nothing, neither recognised nor properly announced the living’, then the first to discover this troubling void must surely do something about it.

  This Brigge, this foreigner, this insignificant young man must sit down, and up on his fifth floor, must write, day and night. Yes, he must write, for that is how it will end.

  And so it is presumed did Rilke, until, at winter’s end, illness threatened.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote to Ellen Key on 9 March 1903, ‘it is Paris I can no longer bear, above all in this uncertain changing season, when the sun is so hot, the cool shade like a cave, and where all is so replete with disquietude.’

  The Coast, the North, the South, all jostled for preference in his travel deliberations. Until one evening when the brisk trot of a carriage horse lead him across a barely discovered nocturnal Paris to the Gare de Lyon, from where a train would carry him to Tuscany.

  8. The Luxembourg Gardens

  III

  The Genesis of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  Nothing is more curious than following the evolution through which a work takes on its most complete form and in a sense emerges, before being actually written, from that ripening of inwardness, which had to precede its passage into the light. In 1902, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge were already sketched in Rilke’s mind, and certain pages had probably already been drafted, as he was at pains to include rue Toullier as the start date of the Notebooks, which were in effect a transcription of his own private journal or of certain letters. However, it was only in February 1904, in Rome, that Rilke clearly conceived this work in its entirety, and imagined the principal figure that, distinct from himself, must be encouraged to see clearly into his own being.

  Several of these ‘imponderables’ over his production and inner formation, whose influence Rilke had signalled, and putting aside those ‘literary influences’ through which historians too often seek to reduce an original work to the common denominator of its epoch, had converged to lend the Notebooks their definitive form, which is both of a private journal of a life, and a writer’s dialogue with the faces that haunt him.

  From his first contact with Paris, Rilke had borne this unsettling, grievous impression, which for a long time never left him and which would only be clarified much later. The overriding need to express these discoveries from the first moment sought some exit in the poet that he did not yet know how to open.

  I know of no incantation; it is God who must pronounce it when the times are completed. I can only wait patiently. I can only bear with faith that deep source that lives on these long days sealed within me, heavy as a stone. But life is there, and it wants to use me for everything, my stone and me. So then, I am lost and I suffer…

  It was Lou Andreas-Salomé, confidante elect, to whom Rilke spoke in greatest depth of his Parisian experiences – after a second and briefer stay in Paris, from May into June 1903. Certain noted faces, pitiable flotsam of the city, haunt him right up to Worpswede, in the mighty winds of the Lüneberg Heath:

  These beings, men and women, engaged in some metamorphosis, passing perhaps from mental disorder to recovery, perhaps to insanity as well, all those with something infinitely subtle about their face: a love, a knowledge, a joy; a rather anxious and vacillating light which becomes clearer if only someone… showed they cared. But there is no one. No one who comes to their aid when they succumb to anxiety, to fear, to alarm. No one for those who begin to misunderstand what they are reading, for those who still live in the common herd, who walk a little askew, and then presume things are threatening them; for those who don’t feel quite themselves in these cities and who are adrift there as if lost in a treacherous forest, a forest without end; and all those for whom each day is a sufferance; all those who, in the tumult, do not hear their own will, all those who are submerged in anguish, – why is there no one in these great cities?

  This call – discrete echo of the angst that Rilke himself never ceased to suffer – is reflected throughout his entire oeuvre; these passers-by, alone with their destiny, are the companions in solitude of Malte. The prose poem that Rilke cites in his letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé will find its way into The Notebooks, extended by a quotation from this chapter of The Book of Job, of which, he says, ‘Word for word, all of it applies to me’, and so will the letter formed from the
recounting of a meeting with an epileptic, on boulevard Saint Michel, that Rilke reproduced almost word for word in his book.

  So distance had not dissipated the phantoms of the city, and the memory of them, on the contrary, only tightened their embrace. There was now a pressing need to find expression for an adventure into the abyss that neither the romantic ballad of The Cornet nor the bright strokes of The Book of Images, nor the muffled accord of The Book of Hours, nor the rather affected naiveties of The Stories of God, had prepared the poet to evoke. So the idea of a Nordic hero emerged, a man both attracted and repulsed by the Parisian landscape, who would love this city, but must perish in having experienced too powerfully its oppressive presence, but who in so doing would concretise these confused ideas, assembling them around the central figure, the nebula of such impressions.

  Two encounters crystallised the project. Of one we are informed by the confidences of Rilke himself. But the correspondence so far published does not permit us to establish a concrete date. Was it in Paris, or later in Sweden or Denmark, that Rilke heard the name of the young writer Sigbjørn Obstfelder, poet of an extreme sensibility, a subtle impressionist, who died aged only thirty-two, after having lived for a prolonged period in Paris, without having properly realised his full potential? Whatever the case, Rilke was struck by the fate of this young writer. He who, on leaving a performance of The Wild Duck, in Paris, and once again conscious of his Nordic affinities, had been attracted to this figure, a poet who he imagined melding with his own personal torments. When he decided to give a more coherent form to his Parisian notes, the idea came to link them in some way to this character and to surmount those interior obstacles of too personal a proximity, by resorting to the medium of a half-imaginary hero.