Rilke in Paris Page 4

  It was on 17 March 1904 that Rilke spoke for the first time, in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, of his new book: ‘A sort of sequel to The Stories of God.’ On 15 April, in another letter to the same, he affirmed that he had begun a ‘new work’ on 8 February. Now, some time in January Rilke had read an autobiographical novel by the Countess Franziska Reventlow: Ellen Olestjerne, an account of which he rendered in the Zukunft. Rilke, who had met the Countess Reventlow on another occasion, was disappointed by the poor means of expression employed in this romantic biography about a young woman prey to poverty, illness and solitude. He wrote on 21 January 1904 to Lou Andreas-Salomé,

  This life, whose fundamental value comes precisely from what has been lived without being destroyed, perhaps loses too much of its necessity if it is recounted by the one who directed it and suffered it, without even becoming through all that an artist. One has the sudden impression that the human being it speaks of had not been the most important thing in that life and its conjunctures, as if, above it, life was born, and had not been properly understood…

  How the poet’s imagination surpassed the facility of these romantic approximations, to evoke the ‘tiny suffering face of a strange young woman’, and beyond this face the immense grey ocean, the low Danish coast behind the dunes, the castle of Nevershuus and its park… Such images welled up in the midst of a too opulent and fast moving springtime in Rome, and nourished in some way by the deception he had carried with him, for a book so impatiently awaited, rekindled his nostalgia for the Northern countries. And this was the second encounter that brought Rilke closer to his Danish model Malte Laurids Brigge.

  But Rilke did not lend to the Notebooks straight away the form in which he finally presented it to his publisher. The Rilke Archive in Weimar conserves the manuscript of an embryonic version of the Notebooks (I) which begins with a conversation by Malte with ‘One of those rare Parisian friends’, in front of a log fire. In a style of rather affected solemnity, which more recalls Rilke’s youthful writings, than the dense and dark prose of the definitive version, the author describes the play of the flame, the distant face of Malte, his hands animated by the reflections of the fire.

  But does this version pre-date or post-date the one Rilke undertook to write in 1904 in Rome? Perhaps one day this will be established. For my part, I return to what the poet confided in me many years later, on his last sojourn in Paris, in 1925, on the detours that led him, almost in spite of himself, to the definitive form.

  The figure of Malte haunted me [he said], but I felt that I had an incomplete knowledge of him and in a certain sense only an exterior one. That is why, when I began this book, which at first presented itself to me as a sort of matching vase to The Stories of God, I had recourse to the dialogue form that I used to evoke Ewald and his friend. I was far from suspecting then what development this would have for the work in question and what imprint my Parisian experience would finally impose on it.

  I was then in Rome. I lived for a few months in a little artist’s studio that they had placed at my disposition in the Strohl-Fern Park. The lecture on Jacobsen, along with that so deceiving Italian springtime, with its excess of haste, had given me a nostalgia for the northern countries, where I still knew the good Ellen Key, to whom I had dedicated The Stories of God. I was writing a suite of dialogues between a young man and a young woman who confide their little secrets. It happened that the young man spoke for quite a long time to the young girl of a Danish poet that he had known, a certain Malte who had died very young, in Paris. The girl wanted to know more and the young man had the imprudence to divulge to her that his friend had left behind a journal, which he insisted he had no further knowledge of. But the girl protested that he show it to her.

  For several days I managed under diverse pretexts to instil patience in her. But the girl’s curiosity became only more active and she began to depict Malte in her own imagination. I realised that I could hide no longer. Interrupting my dialogue, I began to write the The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, without concern for the secondary characters who, in spite of myself, had brought me back to him.

  9. The Luxembourg Gardens

  IV

  Paris Rediscovered

  More than two years passed before Rilke returned to Paris. Sweden, Denmark, Germany welcomed him and successively detained him; his letters do not tell us if he again took up the work he had involuntarily begun in his Rome studio. Rilke renounced the study he had proposed to dedicate to Jacobsen, but he profited from his time in Sweden by perfecting his knowledge of Scandinavian languages and one might suppose that the Danish background to the Notebooks was established and intensified during the months spent at Borgeby Gard, at Furnbourg and Copenhagen.

  It was at Treseburg, in the Harz, on 11 July 1905, that an affectionate letter reached him from Rodin, a letter that touched him so ardently that after having sent it to Clara Rilke, he asked his wife to send him back the original, ‘to keep with me’.

  My dear friend, I am writing to communicate to you all the friendship and admiration that I bear for man, the worker writer, who has already exerted so much influence everywhere through his labour and his talent. I needed to send you these tokens of friendship and these endorsements for your worker’s soul…’

  Rilke replied:

  Thank you, most revered master… My soul opens to your words so that they might germinate in me. I think of you always. You know that… Bless you dear master, from all those to whom you give not only joy, but strength, solitude and the desire to live a more concentrated existence replete with labour. I love you with all my heart.

  Thus restored at a distance, this friendship between the young poet and the great old man would draw Rilke back to Paris in mid-September.

  ‘Paris,’ he writes to Clara Rilke, on the very day of his arrival,

  is as sure of itself as ever. It is just the same, as gigantic and brimming with necessity in the detail as much as in its larger forms. Unbelievably real… I have become reacquainted with many things… I went to Jouven without even being recognised… Ah!

  In this city, three years are but a single day. I stayed sitting a long time in the Luxembourg. I went to the museum so full of people and statues. A light autumn sun shone from time to time upon the Seine and warmed a bridge. And all this, is Paris.

  Rilke happily accepted Rodin’s proposition of hospitality at Meudon. ‘Life around the Master,’ he wrote to Ellen Key, ‘is like a river whose banks one does not see.’ His days were divided between hours spent in the studio on rue de l’Université, walks at Versailles, Paris or Saint-Cloud, and the peaceful charm of the garden at Meudon, peopled by swans and statues. ‘It’s the very centre of the world,’ he wrote, filled with admiration.

  The relationship between Rilke and Rodin deserves a separate study. It is enough to recall here that Rilke was for the master, from September 1905 to May 1906, ‘A sort of private secretary’ until the day when an unfortunate incident – a moment of neglect by the poet which exposed him to excessive protestations – concluded in his being ‘let go’.

  This position, which enabled Rilke to be close to Rodin, has been interpreted in diverse ways. Rilke himself employed the term, in a letter to Karl von der Heydt: ‘A private secretary of sorts’. But M. Angeloz reports that, according to the testimony of Jean Lurçat, Rilke would later protest against this label of secretary. In fact, it seems that the poet, in a bid to compensate for Rodin’s hospitality, had simply proposed to the master that he take on a portion of his correspondence during those times when he was with him at Meudon. But, as he later recalled to Rodin,

  It was as a friend that you invited me to come to your home. You yourself, you offered me your intimacy and I entered furtively, as you wished it, never making any other use of this unforgettable preference than to receive comfort to the depths of my heart, and that other, legitimate and indispensable, the authority to accomplish your business with your intention, before your own eyes.

  The joy of l
iving in the master’s intimate circle had at first eased the burden of the tiresome work the poet had undertaken for him.

  Rilke persuaded himself that in agreeing to relieve Rodin in this way he was acting as a true disciple. ‘My pupils,’ the sculptor had confided to him with a certain despondency, ‘think they have to surpass me, to overtake me. They are all against me. Not one of them comes to my aid.’ ‘Rodin is truly alone as never before,’ wrote Rilke to his wife.

  But the two hours that Rilke proposed to dedicate daily to this correspondence had gradually overflowed to take up the entire day. Spring made him dream of Viareggio, especially when he was obliged to write for the fiftieth time that Monsieur et Madame Rodin were afflicted by ‘a horrendous flu’. ‘I must get back to a time for myself where I can be alone with my experience, where I can belong to it and transform it; already it weighs and troubles me, all that which in me is named metamorphosis,’ he confided to Karl von der Heydt.

  A shift in Rodin’s mood, which from one day to the next gave Rilke his freedom, came unexpectedly to fulfil this secret wish. The master had dismissed the poet with a brusqueness perhaps to be found in his nature, but by which Rilke remained ‘deeply wounded’. Nevertheless:

  I understand you [replied Rilke]. I understand that the wise organism of your life must immediately reject anything which appears detrimental to maintaining its functions intact; as the eye rejects the object which hampers its view. I understand that and (do you remember?) how much I understood you so often in our joyful contemplations?

  With a painful accent, but not without dignity, the poet bade farewell to the artist whose bewitchment, in spite of everything, he continued to suffer.

  So there you are, great master, become invisible to me, as if by some ascension carried off to the heavens which are yours.

  I will not see you any more – but, as for the apostles who remained lamenting and alone, life now begins anew for me, the life that will celebrate your lofty example and which will find in you its consolation, its honesty and its strength.

  We were in agreement that in life there is an immanent justice, which fulfils itself slowly but without imperfection. It is in this justice that I place all my hope; it will one day correct the error that you sought to impose on that which has no more means nor right to reveal its heart to you.

  On 12 May 1906 Rilke left Meudon and installed himself in a small hotel on rue Cassette, where one of his Worpswede friends Paula Becker had once stayed. Between two avenues of the Luxembourg, he managed to correct the proofs of a new edition of The Cornet and to review the manuscript of The Book of Images.

  My room is small, but not too much so… not very well ventilated, but not stifling either, plenty of old objects, but those which do not bother you with their memories… Opposite, here, against the sky, the trees of the cloister; below, an old garden wall, covered alas with posters: a negro who shows his teeth, advertising shoe polish; to the side, Beethoven and Berlioz, Independent Artists in a washed out yellow; ‘Bernot, end of season, generous discounts’, in black and in blue on dark grey, the ‘Palace Hotel’ of Lucerne. But above there is an old ledge on the wall, in the form of a vault, scorched and bleached by the sun at its extreme edge, which always dries rapidly, a dark grey in its hollowed part and covered in places by greenery, busy with life and rustling. Further above, the chestnut trees, ancient, which extend their great hands, and higher still, always higher, a little to the left, the corner of a church nave, without a mast, embedded in the sky like a wreck in the ocean. And above, behind, and on all sides: Paris, of light and silk, faded once and for all time, as far as its skies and its waters, to the heart of its flowers, with the overpowering sun of its kings. Paris, in May, her white communicants who pass amidst the people, swathed in veils, like little stars, sure of their path and their hearts, for which they rise, set out and shine…

  And the letter climaxes with an allusion to the hero of the Notebooks, which Rilke speaks of as a death that he himself would have known and that, doubtless, he will reencounter in his new found solitude: ‘I think of Malte Laurids Brigge who loved all that as I did, if he had been permitted to survive his great distress.’

  It was in this bright vernal Paris, less peopled with phantoms and hallucinations than the city of his early anxieties, that Rilke rallied again and little by little staunched the wound in his heart caused by Rodin’s unjust harshness. Days of labour, where the Bibliothèque Nationale took centre stage, days whose strict organisation Rilke defended from tiresome intrusion with an always courteous but inflexible firmness. And Malte Laurids Brigge, did he prove a companion during these long afternoons browsing old chronicles of French history?

  ‘I am still a long way from Malte Laurids Brigge,’ he wrote on 25 March to Clara Rilke. But even to regret being at such a distance, perhaps reveals that Malte was still very much in his thoughts.

  A day of rain, observed from the window of rue Cassette and described with a virtuosity that makes one think of Jacobsen, places us right at the heart of the greenest pages, the most budding of the future Notebooks:

  After several days of full sun, here comes the rain, and opposite me, against the wall, a gentle breeze returns the chestnut and acacia leaves, so that they all share in this dripping, experience it and all are shining from it. This is one of those days of rain that are not meant for the city. One must live beyond, on the outside, to see all this darkened green, all the meadows reflecting greyness, all the agitated numberless leaves in verdant luxuriance, for the lights have vanished (the clear, melting, dissolving lights), which are merely reflections: green, reflected by green, placed over green, shadowed with green, deepened green, and which somewhere are the innermost depths of green. And suddenly all these colours are drawn back from the perfume itself as if the sun, in vanishing had poured them into the flowers.

  However, a few darker notes sometimes disturb the agreeable harmony Rilke now enjoys with Paris, leading to nostalgia for the countryside. For example, the incomprehensible laughter of the Parisian public before Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, which the poet saw performed at the Théâtre Antoine:

  The incredulous laughter of the Parisian public (public of the lower rung, it must be said), during the most sensitive, the most vulnerable, the most agonising passages, where merely the light touch of a finger brought pain. And right there: laughter. And once more I understood Malte Laurids Brigge, his Nordic essence, and that Paris had in effect destroyed him. How he had truly seen it, felt it and how much he had suffered by it!

  Following a projected stay in Brittany, sketched out then simply abandoned, Rilke departed suddenly for Belgium, then Germany and Italy.

  Once again, an absence of almost ten months, and a journey of the same length, which took Rilke from Bruges as far as Capri, via Berlin, Naples and Sorrento. But in June 1907, the poet was reinstated in his little room – well almost the same room, one floor closer to the rue Cassette. And this time he really seemed to have rediscovered, with renewed receptivity, the intuitions and anxieties of Malte, the fundamental tone of the Notebooks.

  ‘Here once more, the Paris that devoured Malte Laurids,’ he wrote to Clara a few days after his arrival, confiding in her the difficulty he was experiencing this time in acclimatising. ‘The atmosphere of these furnished rooms is always loaded with disquietude and oppressive with disorientation…’ And: ‘That weight, the anxiety are everywhere here. Nothing has changed. It’s always the same Paris.’

  It is almost with surprise that in this foreign room he watches the blooming of a hortensia, which reminds him of the flowers in the courtyard of the Villa Discopoli. ‘It never hesitates, it is so full of confidence, it already lives in this foreign room, for it only knows how to live.’

  And the poet adds: ‘But we, alas, we have so many other possibilities. We have far too many of them.’

  Now occurs the encounter with that student – whom we will encounter again as Malte’s neighbour, and whose nervous affliction ended up communicating itsel
f so forcefully to Rilke that its manifestations seemed contagious to him, in spite of the wall that separated them. Rilke felt that this invasion of his being, this excessive responsiveness regarding other people, was a danger for his health and his mental equilibrium. ‘This error would be excusable, if at least I was capable of drawing fully on it for my art,’ he wrote to the Baron von Nordeck zur Rabenau.

  But he feared not being properly prepared for the transposition of all too fresh experiences:

  For Paris, that I admire so much and to which I know I must submit as one submits to a training, is always in some sense new, and when you feel its grandeur, its near infinity, it annihilates you so violently and so completely that you must demurely recapture from the very beginning the impassioned attempt to live.

  There followed a period of withdrawal, during which Rilke closed himself in with his spectres and those protagonists of the Notebooks: Death, Fear, Dream and Poetry. In October, announcing to his wife the recent visit of Mathilde Vollmöller, returned from Holland, he confides to her that this was the first living being he had seen ‘for very, very long weeks’. For can one really count as human beings those ‘ruined caryatids’, the apparitions and voices of nameless passers-by, to whom the poet continues to devote a fervent attention? Marionettes, broken by life, who slowly drag themselves, like so many turtles, along the pavements of the city and make one think of strewn wreckage and those ‘little old women’ that so readily evoke Charles Baudelaire.