Rilke in Paris Read online

  ‘If you read attentively The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,’ wrote Edmond Jaloux, ‘what strikes you most forcefully is that the refinement of form never diminishes at any moment the prodigious realities of life… It seems right, that to many readers of the Notebooks, this mysterious and moving treatment of the nature of life which is ever more absent from our literature, forms the backbone of Rainer Maria Rilke’s meditations.’

  In Rilke we observe a moving example of maturation through solitude and lucid contemplation of the loftiest problems of life, but equally an artist who expresses himself in a continual struggle to make explicit in poetic terms the fruit of that inner quest. These two images of Rilke cannot be separated; let us safeguard them equally and not permit one to overshadow or overlap the other.

  13. Plaque honouring Rilke’s residence in the Hôtel Biron, 1908–1911

  Notes on Places

  The French Component in Rilke’s Work

  Maurice Barrès in Toledo

  Maurice Barrès (1862–1923): French novelist, journalist and nationalist politician. Barrès visited Toledo in Spain and wrote the travel book Greco ou le secret de Tolède (Greco or the secret of Toledo) in 1911, in which he sought to interpret El Greco within his native landscape. In an essay on the Spanish painter, the writer John Cowper Powys penned an imaginative criticque of Barrès’ Toledo book, castigating the Frenchman for his ‘irrelevant watercolours of prancing moors, learned Jews and picturesque Visi-Goths,’ and concludes: ‘The Secret of Toledo is a charming book, with illuminating passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosity of dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, either of Spain or of Spain’s great painter.’

  Very little of Barrès’ work has found its way into English which is a shame, since he is a rather intoxicating and headstrong figure of fascinating contradictions.

  The Discovery of Paris

  Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana

  During their Russian odyssey, in August 1900, Rilke, accompanied by Lou Andreas-Salomé, paid an impromptu visit to Leo Tolstoy at his home of Yasnaya Polyana. Unfortunately, despite having telegrammed in advance, they arrived during a family row, where the sound of weeping met them from adjoining rooms and the Countess seemed rankled by their arrival. Somewhat distraught, the pair were glad to escape into the park surrounding Tolstoy’s modest house. There they walked with the great novelist, whose white beard, according to Rilke, ‘fluttered in the breeze’, whilst his face remained ‘impassive, as if untouched by the storm’. Finally Rilke, seeking a possible master in Tolstoy, timidly confessed to the old man that he was a poet, upon which Tolstoy merely launched into a prolonged vitriolic tirade against art. Rilke and his companion then walked back to the train station through meadows of wild flowers on empty stomachs.

  Worpswede

  A village near Bremen in Northern Germany, in whose artist colony Rilke settled from 1900, following a brief initial stay in 1898. He was invited there by Heinrich Vogeler, a member of the colony whom Rilke had met in Florence during the period in which he studied Italian art. During his second, longer sojourn, Rilke truly entered the atmosphere of the colony and became intimate with Clara Westhoff, a sculptress and former pupil of Rodin whom Rilke later married, and Paula Becker, wife of Otto Modersohn, who as an artist is now known as Paula Modersohn-Becker. When she died following childbirth in 1907, Rilke was deeply affected and wrote the long poem Requiem in her memory. After marrying Clara, Rilke and his new wife set up home in Westerhede, a village near Worpswede, and remained there until his departure for Paris in the autumn of 1902.

  Meudon

  In September 1893 Auguste Rodin successfully negotiated a rent of 2,000 francs a year for a modest red-brick house, named the Villa des Brillants, in Meudon, a suburb south-west of Paris. In 1895 he bought the house outright. It was in poor shape and visitors were therefore rarely encouraged until after 1900. But what transformed the Meudon emplacement was the erection of the sculptor’s pavilion, the new viewing gallery, which Rodin was eager to show off to friends. One of them described it thus:

  It harbours such luminous colours, and seems to dominate the valley of the Seine. From a distance you can see the elegant arcades of the loggia that make up the facades. From down in the valley, where the river follows its peaceful course… you look up and see this serene edifice, a temple of great art.

  Rodin was most contented living amongst his creations, and Meudon became a constantly developing working area and home combined. Electricity was installed in 1904, but the house remained simple and spartan. Rodin’s focus was on his sculpture pavilion and here he created a museum of antiquities, collecting Roman sculptures from his recent visits to Italy. Rilke arrived at Meudon in August 1902 and found Rodin ‘kind and gentle’ with a laugh which seemed to him ‘embarrassed and at the same time joyful’. The simple and unpretentious lifestyle the now world-famous Rodin chose to adopt at Meudon was noticed also by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig when he visited in 1905. With the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren also in mind, he observed that

  great men are nearly always the simplest in their way of living. In the home of this man, whose fame was universal, and whose work was as familiar to men of our generation as an old friend, we ate as simply as at a plain farmer’s table, a good piece of meat, a few olives, plenty of fruit, and a vin du pays.

  14. 11 rue Toullier, Rilke’s first address in Paris

  Rue Toullier

  Rilke’s first down-at-heel address in Paris, situated in the 5th arrondissement, close to the Panthéon, just off the rue Soufflot. Rilke was a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg gardens and the Sorbonne, at the heart of the student district of Paris.

  The Bibliothèque Nationale

  The national library of France serves as the archive of all that is published in France, its prodigious collections dating from 1368. The old library building, which Rilke frequented, was built in 1868, and is situated on the rue de Richelieu just north of the Palais Royal and the Louvre. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become reputedly the largest repository of books in the world. Here Rilke would retire from the oppressive influence of the streets and occupy himself on an almost daily basis during his initial period in Paris, with the discovery and study of French literature and art.

  The Hôtel-Dieu

  The oldest hospital in Paris, the ‘Hotel of God’ is situated on the Isle de la Cité, near Notre Dame. Up to 1908, during the period when Rilke encountered the hospital, the Augustine sisters cared for the sick. They provided food and shelter to an army of invalids whose sufferings en route to its gates and behind its windows Rilke so memorably interprets. Because of its central location, the Hôtel-Dieu took in the emergency cases and still fulfills this role today, though with a much reduced number of beds. Such hospitals, with their incarcerated populations of spectral white-robed inmates, also chafed on the morbid sensitivity of a number of poets contemporaneous with Rilke, such as Georg Trakl and Maurice Maeterlinck. For Rilke, who had claimed, ‘In those first days, I encountered hospitals all over the place. Behind the trees on all the squares, stood these long monotonous buildings…’ the Hôtel-Dieu was the main collection point for all those ‘broken marionettes’, the unnamed and unrecognized human flotsam and jetsam of the city whose individual expressive intensity by turns fascinated, appalled and exhausted him.

  The Luxembourg Gardens

  Always on his doorstep whatever his address, the Luxembourg gardens were Rilke’s preferred oasis of calm and a crucial location for reflection and reading across all his Parisian residences. The Luxembourg is the lung, the central open space in Rilke’s Paris, where the crowded tumultuous streets give way to uncluttered perspectives, quiet avenues, noble statuary and above all, light. The gardens were constructed on the order of Marie de Medicis, widow of Henry IV, in 1611 and were designed to echo her palace gardens in Florence. In some parts little changed from Rilke’s day, they harbour around 100 statues, fountains and monument
s. One of Rilke’s favourite corners was the Medici Fountain, dating from 1630, now situated on the eastern side of the gardens, with its distinctive topiary-like ivy bordering the long rectangular pool. Though there is no bust of Rilke in the gardens he so treasured, a number of French poets he most admired are present, namely Verlaine and Baudelaire, along with other notables such as Beethoven and George Sand.

  The Genesis of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  The Castle of Nevershuus

  The mysterious location for part of Countess Reventlow’s autobiographical novel, Schloss Nevershuus and its park, occupied a lonely stretch of the Danish coast. According to Betz, the melancholy atmosphere of this romantic castle exacerbated a nostalgic longing for northern latitudes in Rilke, who was already a perceptive interpreter of the sensorial tales of Jens Peter Jacobsen.

  The Strohl-Fern Park, Rome

  Rilke occupied a simple cottage here in the gardens of the Villa Strohl-Fern, near the Villa Borghese in Rome, throughout the autumn of 1903. In one of his ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rilke states: ‘in a few weeks I will move into a quiet, simple room, an old summerhouse, which lies lost deep in a large park, hidden from the city, its noises and incidents. There I will live all winter and enjoy the great silence, from which I expect the gift of happy, work-filled hours.’ Alfred Wilhelm Strohl-Fern (1847–1927), the architect of the villa and gardens, encouraged artists to stay amidst mature cedars, cypresses, elders and pines and a wealth of Roman statues, thereby creating a colony of sorts, which continued into the early part of the twentieth century.

  Paris Rediscovered

  Borgeby Gard

  Summer residence in Sweden, on the idyllic estate of Hanna Larsson, who offered the poet sanctuary in the summer of 1904, followed his stay in the garden cottage in Rome, where his attempts to continue The Notebooks had dried up. From here on 12 August, Rilke addressed an eighth letter to Franz Kappus, the young would be poet who had sought his advice. (Letters to a Young Poet)

  ‘If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.’

  Treseburg

  A picturesquely situated medieval town in the Harz region of Germany, with a castle perched above a bend in the river. Here Rilke stayed overnight in July 1905, according to Rilke biographer Ralph Freedman, to deliver a basket of strawberries and apples from Lou Salomé’s garden to a friend. It was here, Betz suggests, Rilke received the crucial letter from Rodin, which helped to staunch the wound of their separation.

  Viareggio

  A popular historic coastal town in northern Tuscany with an unusually high density of handsome art nouveau buildings. Famous for its carnivals and, perhaps, for Rilke.

  15. 29 rue Cassette, Rilke’s residence in 1906 and again in 1907

  Rue Cassette

  Rilke moved into a modest room at 29 rue Cassette in the 6th arrondissement, near Place Saint Sulpice, on 12 May 1906, after taking leave of Rodin’s hospitality at Meudon. In newfound solitude, he wrote down some of the memorable impressions garnered from his fortunate location in a quiet lane near the Luxembourg, opposite a church whose nave was ‘embedded in the sky like a wreck in the ocean’, separated from him by a wall and mature chestnut trees, which ‘extend their great hands’, presumably in welcome. To visit rue Cassette today is to find a road in essence little changed. The church is evident, as is the courtyard, which Rilke may have described as a ‘cloister’. Even mature trees are in evidence and the wall now devoid of the posters advertising shows and shoe polish which Rilke describes. Rilke left rue Cassette to travel restlessly in Italy, Belgium and Germany, but returned to the same address, albeit a different room, in the summer of 1907. As Betz states, it was at this point, during Rilke’s fourth period of residence in Paris, that ‘the fundamental images of that spiritual uprooting which was his Parisian experience, had taken on their fullest meaning and found their definitive value’.

  Villa Discopoli

  Still afflicted by the fallout from his rift with Rodin and exhausted by family demands in Germany, Rilke sought an escape at the start of the winter of 1906. True to form, his ability to gain the confidence of aristocratic women with implausibly long names paid off again. Rilke received the patronage of one Baroness Nordeck zur Rabenau, who offered him the Villa Discopoli on the island of Capri. The ‘rose house’ has since become famous as Rilke’s idyllic Capri residence. He arrived on his thirtieth birthday on 4 December 1906 and stayed until 20 May 1907, returning in the spring of 1908 for a few months. However, content as he was in the ‘rose house’, Rilke appeared unimpressed with the commercial aspect of Capri and naturally recoiled from the behavior of German tourists who drank themselves senseless in a beer hall off the piazzetta. In the spring of 1907, His thoughts were turning once more to Paris and the restoration of that hard-won solitude he had reluctantly interrupted.

  The Composition of the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  Rue Campagne-Première

  In May 1908, Rilke found a new ‘peaceful corner’ in Paris where he might resume his work. This studio at 17 rue Campagne-Première, where Paula Becker had once stayed, was located a little further south than his previous addresses, in the area of Montparnasse, a zone which would later become the enclave of a new generation of international writers and artists. Here Rilke live in enforced isolation, cherishing his newfound solitude and feeling creatively upbeat and perfectly snug ‘like the nut inside its fruit’. Here he completed the New Poems and presumably intermittently re-acquainted himself with the ever ongoing Notebooks.

  The Hôtel Biron

  It was Rilke’s wife Clara who led the poet inadvertently to the majestic Hôtel Biron, which would be the future Musée Rodin, at 77 rue de Varenne, in the 7th arrondissement. Rilke, after dispatching his manuscript of the New Poems, felt drained and had expressed the need for ‘a change of air’. He decided to occupy Clara’s studio space in the old mansion while she returned to Hanover. However, he was so seduced by the venerable old building and its romantic overgrown gardens that he soon found his own rooms, and through his emphatic endorsement of the aesthetics of the residence in turn drew Rodin, who then also moved in. The house had been subdivided into lodgings around 1905, but only a few years later plans were drawn up to demolish the building and put up a block of flats. Rodin’s presence thankfully subverted such a catastrophe. He rented several rooms on the ground floor for his sculptures, these rooms gradually turning into his studio proper. Here, at the height of his fame, he entertained friends and admirers from around the world. Fittingly, the building has housed the Musée Rodin since 1919.

  The Book of a Sensibility

  Duino

  The location that gave its name to Rilke’s most famous collection of poems, The Duino Elegies. ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me amongst the angelic orders?’ must surely have more alternative versions in English than any other line of modern poetry in existence. Rilke had visited the Princess Marie Thurn und Taxis at the castle of Duino near Trieste in January 1912. He was feeling unsettled and melancholy, so he took a stroll along the cliffs high above the sea to get some air. The voice that Rilke apparently heard coming in on the wind as he walked by the cliffs, dictated the above quote, presumably in fluent German. The initial Elegies were formed at this visit in what was said to be a kind of trance, but the remainder would have to wait until the protracted trauma of the First World War and Rilke’s mental vicissitudes could be cogently harnessed. They were finally completed at another quite different castle in another country, a decade later.

  Muzot

  The little ‘chateau’ of Muzot served as Rilke’s residence for
the last five years of his life. Situated high on the side of the valley overlooking the upper Rhône just outside Sierre, in the Valais region of Switzerland, it was the refuge Rilke had been looking for where he might finally complete the Elegies. Muzot was to be the chosen haven for uninterrupted work, amidst a rural landscape that was not so dramatic as to foist itself on the poet, but would genially accompany him in his labours. Thanks to the patronage of one Werner Reinhart, who bought the house and installed Rilke in it rent-free, the poet, in a veritable storm of creativity, not only completed the Elegies, but wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus, as well as some four hundred poems in French, many of which were dedicated to the region which had inspired his last years. Rilke died of suspected leukaemia at the Valmont clinic near Montreux on 29 December 1926 and was buried in the churchyard of the village of Raron, near Muzot. Typically he had chosen his final resting place with great care, a solitary position, dramatic yet not inhospitable, high on a rock promontory above the spectacular Rhone valley. His epitaph famously reads: ‘Rose, oh pure contradiction, to be no-one’s sleep under so many lids.’