Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Read online

  ** The book is careful not to orient the reader to Malte and Maman (nor the two of them to each other) by specifying their ages. The one partial exception occurs in the first “Danish” episode, when Malte tells us that he must have been twelve at the time or at most thirteen, and that he could scarcely picture anymore the face of his mother, who had been dead “for years.” Thus all the interactions between the two of them that are narrated in the book occur within a very narrow span—though Maman seems to age in the episodes (but not sequentially) over a much longer course of time.

  †† Freedman, Life of a Poet, 10; citing Carl Sieber, René Rilke: Die Jugend Rainer Maria Rilkes (Leipzig, 1932).

  ‡‡ For this literature, see Robert Vilain’s introduction to his translation of The Notebooks, xxxvi–xxxix.

  §§ The name “Sophie” has the feeling of a leitmotif in The Notebooks. The old woman who accompanies Malte’s paternal grandmother is introduced as “Countess Oxe,” but after the grandmother breaks off relations with the family, she becomes “Sophie Oxe.” More intriguing are the details surrounding Count Brahe’s references to Maman, long deceased: “He called her Countess Sibylle, and all his sentences ended as if he were inquiring after her health. It also seemed to me, I don’t know why, that braided into these words was something about a very young girl in white who might walk in to join us at any moment. I would hear him speak in the same tone about ‘our little Anna Sophie’ . . . for whom the count seemed to have a special affection.”

  ¶¶ Letter of December 28, 1911. Andreas-Salomé responded promptly in January, and a substantial correspondence ensued. Tragically, none of her letters survive.

  *** “To be loved is to be consumed in flames. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to perish; to love is to endure.” One of nine passages that Rilke enclosed in parentheses and footnoted with “Written in the margin of the manuscript.” The intention is obviously to gesture toward the discrete entries in The Notebooks as “found documents” being brought together by a nameless editor. Rilke may have originally planned to create such an “editorial” frame around the book’s entries, but as it stands, the sprinkling of these anonymous footnotes serves to ambiguate the “genre” we are reading. The diary-like heading of the opening entry works similarly: it creates reading expectations that are disconfirmed when only one other entry is similarly headed, many pages later.

  ††† For “not yet,” see the final note to the main text.

  THE NOTEBOOKS OF

  MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE

  11th September, rue Toullier

  So people do come here to live; I would have thought they came to die. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who stopped and swayed and dropped to the ground. People crowded around him—so I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was dragging herself heavily along a high, warm wall, reaching out to it now and then as if to assure herself it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked on my map: Maison d’accouchement. Good. They will deliver her child—they can do that. Farther on, rue Saint-Jacques, a large building with a cupola. The map said: Val-de-Grâce, Hôpital militaire. The information was useless, but it did no harm. The street began to smell from all sides. It smelled, so far as I could tell, of iodoform, the grease of pommes frites, and fear. In the summer all cities smell. Then I saw a queer old house that looked blind, as if from cataracts; it wasn’t on my map, but above the door and still fairly legible was: Asyle de nuit. By the entrance were the prices. I read them. It was not expensive.

  And what else? A child by itself in a baby carriage. It was fat, greenish, and a bright rash had broken out on its forehead. Apparently it was healing and didn’t hurt. The child was asleep, its mouth wide open, breathing in iodoform, pommes frites, fear. It was all like that. The main thing was staying alive. That was the main thing.

  In spite of everything I can’t give up sleeping with my window open. Electric trains speed madly through my room. Automobiles drive over me. A door slams shut. Somewhere a pane of glass shatters, I hear the large shards laughing and the small splinters snickering as they hit the ground. Then suddenly from the other direction a dull, muffled sound inside the house. Someone is climbing the stairs. Approaching, ceaselessly approaching. Reaches my door, stands there for a long time, moves on. And again the street. A girl screeches: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley races up excitedly, slides to a stop, is off and away. Someone shouts. People run, overtake one another. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning a cock even crows, and it is an infinite blessing. Then suddenly I fall asleep.

  Those are the noises. But there’s something even more fearful here: the silence. I’ve heard that during large fires sometimes there’s a moment of such extreme suspense that the jets of water fall back, the firemen cease climbing, no one moves. Soundlessly a black cornice inches forward overhead, and a high wall, behind which flames are leaping, tilts outward, soundlessly. Everyone stands and waits, their shoulders raised, their faces tightened around their eyes, for the terrible crash. That’s how all the silence is here.

  I am learning to see. I don’t know how it’s happened, but everything enters me more deeply now and keeps on going where it used to stop. I have an inner realm of which I was completely unaware. Everything goes there now. I don’t know what happens there.

  I wrote a letter today, and as I did so, it struck me that I’ve only been here three weeks. Three weeks elsewhere, in the country for instance, could be like one day; here they are years. I’m going to stop writing letters. Why should I tell someone I’m changing? If I change I’m no longer who I was, and if I’m something different from what I used to be, then certainly I have no acquaintances. And to strangers, to people who don’t know me, it would make no sense to write.

  Have I already said this? I am learning to see. Yes, I’m beginning. It still goes badly. But I want to make the most of my time.

  For example: it had never occurred to me how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, of course, but even more faces, since each person has several. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears through, it becomes soiled, its seams split, it stretches like gloves worn on long journeys. These are frugal, simple people; they don’t change it, they never once have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they maintain, and who’s to say they’re wrong? But the question arises: Since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They put them away. Their children can wear them. But it can also happen that when their dogs go out, they have them on. And why not? Faces are faces.

  Other people put on their faces and wear them out with uncanny speed, one after the other. At first it seems to them that they have enough for more than a lifetime; but they scarcely reach forty when they come to their last. There is obviously something tragic in this. It never occurs to them to take care of a face, their last one is used up in a week, has holes in it, is in many places thin as paper, and then little by little the underlayer shows through, the not-face, and for the rest of their lives they go about in that.

  But the woman, the woman: she had fallen all the way into herself, forward into her hands. It was at the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The moment I saw her sitting there I started walking softly. When poor people are searching for an answer you shouldn’t disturb them. Perhaps it will come to them yet.

  The street was too empty, its emptiness was bored and pulled my step out from under my feet and banged around with it as if it were a wooden clog. The woman was startled and pulled up out of herself too sharply, so that her face remained in her two hands. I could see it lying there, its hollow form. It took unbelievable effort to keep focused on those two hands and not look up at what had torn itself out of them. It was horrible to see a face from the inside, but I was even more terrified of the naked flayed head that was waiting there without a face.

  I am afraid. Once you contract fear you have to take some action against it. It would be very nasty to fall
ill here, and if it occurred to anyone to move me into the Hôtel-Dieu, I would certainly die there. This hôtel is a pleasant building, always bustling and hugely popular. You can scarcely pause to admire the façade of the Cathedral of Paris without risking being run over by one of the many vehicles that speed across the open square on their way inside. These vehicles are little omnibuses constantly clanging their bells, and even the Duke of Sagan would be forced to order his coach to halt if some lowly dying person had gotten it into their brain to rush pell-mell straight into God’s Hôtel. The dying are headstrong, and all Paris comes to a stop when Madame Legrand, brocanteuse from the rue des Martyrs, is being sped toward a certain square in the Cité. One feature of these fiendish little vehicles is their unduly enticing frosted-glass windows, behind which you can imagine the most baroque agonies—the fancy of a concierge would suffice. And if your imagination is more highly developed and runs along more wayward tracks, the possibilities are truly endless. But I have also watched open carriages arriving, hired cabs with their tops folded back, transporting their passengers at the usual rate: two francs per hour en route to your death.

  This excellent hôtel is very old. In the days of King Clovis people were already dying in a handful of beds here. Now there are 559 for them to die in. A kind of assembly-line dying, of course. And with such an enormous rate of production, the quality of individual deaths may suffer a bit, but never mind about that. It’s quantity that counts. Who cares anymore today about a lovingly crafted death? No one. Even the rich, who can still afford to die in full, are beginning to grow neglectful and indifferent. The desire to die your own death is becoming more and more rare. A while longer, and it will be as rare as living your own life. God, it’s all there waiting for you. You arrive on the scene, you find a ready-made life, all you have to do is put it on. You wish to go, or you’re forced to leave: no problem: Voilà votre mort, monsieur: you take your death as it comes; you die the death that goes with your illness (for now that we’re becoming familiar with all diseases, we understand that their various fatal outcomes belong to the disease itself and not to the person; the ill in a sense have nothing at all to do with it).

  In the sanatoriums, where people die so readily and with so much gratitude toward their doctors and nurses, you die one of the deaths attached to the institution; that only seems right. But if you die at home, it’s natural to want to choose that genteel death the better classes die, which is really just the initial act, as it were, of a first-class funeral, with its whole sequence of exquisite formalities. Outside the house the poor stand and watch it all unfold. Their death is of course banal, with no frills attached. They feel lucky if they find one that more or less fits. And if it’s too big? One can always grow a little. But if it won’t button around the chest or if it chokes—then there’s a problem.

  When I think of home, where no one remains now, I’m convinced that at one time it must have been different. Previously you knew (or you sensed) that you had your own death within you, as the fruit contains its seed. Children had a small one in them and adults a big one. Women bore theirs in their womb, and men theirs in their breast. It was yours, and that gave you a singular pride and a quiet dignity.

  My grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge: one saw immediately that he still carried a death inside him. And what a death it was: two months long and so loud that they had to endure its screams all the way out in the distant farmsteads.

  The long, old manor house was too small for this death; it seemed that wings would have to be added on, for the chamberlain’s body kept growing, and he continually demanded to be carried from one room into another and fell into furious rages if the day had not ended and there were no rooms left which he had not yet occupied. At such times he would be carried upstairs, followed by the retinue of maids, manservants, and dogs that he always had around him; then, with the majordomo leading the way, they would all enter the room where his saintly mother had died twenty-three years before, and which had been kept exactly as she had left it and in which no one since had been allowed to set foot. Now the whole pack burst in. The curtains were thrown back, and the robust light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, startled objects and swiveled awkwardly in the wide-eyed mirrors. And the people behaved similarly. Chambermaids were so curious that they didn’t know what their hands were fumbling with, young servants gawked at everything, and elderly retainers wandered about trying to recall what they had been told about this locked room in which they now, by some stroke of fortune, suddenly found themselves.

  But it was the dogs especially who seemed to find exciting their intrusion into this room where everything had its own special smell. The tall, lean Russian wolfhounds paced busily back and forth behind the armchairs, crossed the room with long, swinging dance steps, reared up like heraldic animals, rested their slender paws on the white-and-gold windowsill, and with sharp, observant faces and expectant brows scanned right, then left, down into the courtyard. Little glove-yellow dachshunds sat in the broad, silk-upholstered easy chair by the window, warmed by the feeling that everything was exactly as it should be. A wire-haired, sour-faced pointer rubbed his back along the edge of a gilt-legged table, while on its painted top the Sèvres cups trembled.

  Yes, for these unmindful, half-awake objects it was a terrible time. From books some hasty hand had opened carelessly, rose leaves would come fluttering down and be trampled underfoot; small fragile things were seized, immediately broken, and hurriedly put back in their places, while many of the badly bent, dented things were shoved beneath curtains or even thrown behind the fire screen’s golden mesh. And from time to time something would fall, fall with a thud on the carpet, fall with a sharp crack on the hard parquet, but when it fell it broke, shattering loudly or fracturing almost silently; for these things, pampered throughout their lives, could not withstand any kind of fall.

  And had someone thought to ask what the cause of all this was, what had called down upon this exquisitely safeguarded room such waves of destruction, there could have been only one reply: Death.

  The death of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge at Ulsgaard. For there he was, bulging more and more grotesquely out of his dark blue uniform, in the middle of the floor, not moving at all. In his large strange face that no one recognized any longer, the eyes had fallen shut: he saw nothing of what was happening. They’d tried first to lay him on the bed, but he’d fought against being put there, for ever since those first nights in which his sickness had taken hold he’d hated beds. And the bed upstairs had in any case proved too small, so there was nothing else to do but put him down on the carpet; for he would not hear of going back downstairs.

  So there he lay now, looking for all the world like he was dead. As dusk slowly fell, the dogs had slipped out through the partly open door, one after another, and only the wire-haired terrier with the sour face remained beside his master, one broad shaggy paw resting on Christoph Detlev’s large gray hand. Most of the servants, too, now stood outside in the white hallway, which was brighter than the room; but those who had remained inside would glance furtively toward the large darkening heap in the middle of the floor, wishing it were only a giant cloak thrown over something that had gone bad.

  But it was more than that. It was a voice, the voice that until seven weeks ago no one had heard before: for it was not the voice of the chamberlain. This voice belonged not to Christoph Detlev but to Christoph Detlev’s death.

  Christoph Detlev’s death had been living at Ulsgaard many, many days now and had spoken to everyone. Issuing demands. Demanding to be carried, demanding the blue room, demanding the small salon, demanding the great hall. Demanding the dogs, demanding that people laugh, talk, play, hush, and all at the same time. Demanding to see friends, women, people who had died, and demanding its own death: demanding. Demanding and screaming.

  For when night had come and the members of the exhausted serving staff who were not on watch tried to get some sleep, Christoph Detlev’s death would scream, scream and g
roan, howl so long and unremittingly that the dogs, which at first howled with it, fell silent and didn’t dare lie down, but stood on their long, thin, trembling legs and were afraid. And when in the village they heard it howling across the wide, silvery Danish summer night, they rose from their beds as they do in a great storm, got dressed and sat around the lamp together without a word, until it had passed. And the women whose hour was near were moved into the most remote rooms and the most protected bedchambers; but they could still hear it, they could hear it as if it were howling inside their own bodies, and they begged to be allowed to get up too, and they came, pale and heavy with child, and sat among the others with their blurred faces. And the cows that were calving had helplessly closed up, and the dead fruit had to be torn from one of them, along with all the entrails, since it wouldn’t come out on its own. And everyone’s work went badly and they forgot to bring in the hay because all through the day they were dreading the night and because they were so exhausted from the long hours of lying sleepless and from the sudden terrified moments of waking that they couldn’t concentrate on anything. And on Sundays, in the white, peaceful church, they prayed for an end to the lords of Ulsgaard; for this last one was a horrible lord. And the thing they were all thinking and praying the pastor himself finally said out loud from his pulpit, for he too no longer slept at night and had ceased to understand God. And the church bell said it also, having found a frightening rival which boomed out all night long and against which, even when the bell pealed with every atom of its metal, it was completely powerless. Indeed, they all said it; and among the young men there was one who dreamed that he’d entered the castle and killed the kind master with his pitchfork; and all of them had become so crazed, so desperate, so sick from it, that as they listened to him tell his dream they looked at him and wondered, unconsciously taking his measure, if this might be the man to do the deed. People talked and felt this way throughout the district—where only a few weeks earlier the chamberlain had been loved and pitied. But for all their talking, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev’s death, which now resided at Ulsgaard, was not to be rushed. It had come to stay for ten weeks, and for ten weeks it would stay. And during this time it was more the master than Christoph Detlev Brigge had ever been. It was like a king who is known forever afterward as The Terrible.