Reading Rilke (15 page)

Mathematical and other conceptual blockages are often the result of the thinker’s remaining with a strategy or set of similar strategies to which he seems wedded. He needs to start off in a fresh direction, but is unable because most first efforts form a track into which the pencil-end of the mind slips, over and over. Hence the helpfulness of the distraction. It allows another idea to appear. I do not believe the completion of the
Elegies
was delayed for a decade for purely poetic reasons. I suspect that Rilke, first of all, could not satisfactorily fill out his metaphysics, and second, could not find the language which would provide that metaphysics with its justification, and third, was not yet the poet to whom the work could be revealed.

The
Elegies
were to provide us with a comprehensive outlook or attitude toward the world and in particular the poet’s role in it. We should not ennoble ideas that are made mostly of emotions, moods, and attitudes by calling them philosophical. Nor were they at all religious despite the presence (or absence, actually) of the Angels. The
Elegies
present us with conclusions, not arguments, so—again—they cannot be philosophical. And they are not revelations supported by a Faith. Their justification—their proof—is poetical and lies in the persuasive power of the language they arrive in. If Rilke could not resolve the oppositions which were everywhere in evidence in his outlook, he could not find the language which would allow him to affirm a solution. In short, he had not yet found the right metaphors; or, in those cases where he had them, he had not yet reached their inner nature.

In the first poem of “The Spanish Trilogy,” he had asked in anguish to be allowed, just once, in just one thing, to achieve
the unity of the world with himself: from me, from me, Lord. In a poem called “The Great [or perhaps Vast] Night,” written a year later, in the Paris to which he had returned, the earlier alienation is expressed again, now not in a petition, but in a statement of fact. The poem’s beginning is startling. It suggests that the window represents a larger, more spiritual opening.

Often I gazed at you in wonder, stood at the window

I started the day before, stood and gazed at you in wonder.

The new city still seemed to warn me away,

and the recalcitrant landscape darkened

as if I weren’t there. Even things close by

didn’t care if I didn’t understand them. The street

leapt to the top of the lamppost. I saw how strange it was.

Over there—a room, empathetic, lit by its lantern—

I’d begin to take part; they’d notice, clap shut the shutters.

I stood. And then a child cried. I knew what the mothers

in the surrounding houses could do—

and the inconsolable source of all sorrow.

Or a voice sang, exceeding expectations,

or downstairs an old man coughed reproachfully,

as if his body had it right and the gentle world was wrong.

Then an hour was struck, but I began to count too late

and it got by me. —Like a new boy at school,

when he’s finally allowed to join in,

who can’t catch the ball, and is a bumbler

at all the games the others play so easily,

so he just stands there and stares—where?—

I stood, and suddenly saw that
you
had befriended me,

played with me now, grown-up Night, and I gazed

at you in wonder. While towers threatened,

while the city surrounded me, its aims still a secret,

and unfathomable mountains pitched their camp against me,

and strangeness prowled in tightening circles

around the random fires my senses set—it was then,

great Night, you weren’t ashamed to know me.

Your breath passed over me. Across all those solemn

spaces, your smile spread to enter me.
⁶

Now Rilke knew what the glue was.

SCHADE

One might sentimentally imagine that Rilke’s separation from his wife, Clara, or his break with Rodin, especially his rejection by Lou, would be decisive in his life. Certainly, the onset of the
Elegies
was one such stroke, and not altogether salutary in its character either. Taking a more prosaic tack, one could be practical and suggest that the surprising popularity of his youthful prose poem
The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke
, which furnished him a much-needed income after it was published in a cheap pocket-size edition in 1912, was very significant. The dismal early Paris days were critical. World War I threw Rilke into a profound and enduring gloom—for both personal and humanitarian reasons. That might reach the Top Ten. In lives, it is hard to measure such things. Vital factors are sneaky and, like our internal organs, do most of their work out of sight. With Rilke, however, I think we always need to accept the cliché and
cherchez la femme
. So near the head of such a list, however suspect such lists of wounds and awards are, I should want to place the death of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the blond painter of Rilke’s Worpswede journal.

In the early days of his acquaintance with the colony’s artists, it is fairly obvious that Rilke was most taken by Paula Becker, and that she responded to his interest is also clear; but Paula had grown close to Otto Modersohn as he waited out his wife’s
death through a lengthy illness. He was a painter of some reputation, mostly for work in a style that was called Naturlyrismus, which aimed at not only the adoration of Nature but the veneration of the peasant whose relation to the soil was simple, noble, and direct. Modersohn’s sentiments and Rilke’s Russian boots and tunic would find much to talk about. As a suitor, Modersohn got several things right: he was enthusiastic about Paula’s paintings, which few others were; he found her attitude toward art admirable; and he thought that her personality—“charming, sweet, strong, healthy, energetic”—filled in the blanks in his own. Had Rilke wished to woo her, he’d have gotten off on the wrong foot, for he took no notice of her work, nor did he discuss either Paula or Clara in his Worpswede monograph.

Older, established, with a manner some called “magisterial,” Modersohn’s greatest advantage was the sympathy his ailing wife could elicit for him. In any case, Paula soon, and rather passively, it appears, found herself framed for marriage. Since her middle-class Bremen family was urging her to find a position as a governess, she may have thought that marriage to a painter would be a good escape. She’d have a husband knowledgeable about, and sympathetic with, her aims. To his credit, Modersohn did sincerely encourage and support his wife’s work, but Paula confesses to her diary how little understanding from him she feels she has, and how frequently she weeps. Marriage, she writes, does not make one happier. And now Worpswede is no longer a cozy enclosure. She pines for Paris. From 1903 to 1907 she will make three trips—lasting a month, several months, finally a year. Marriage did not make her happy. Paris did.

Because Paula found it increasingly irritating to have Modersohn’s tutorial eye still following her brush, blocking her way more and more often with cautionary words; and because, at some indeterminate point, she realized that her husband was
mediocre and could not lay claim to artistic superiority; because, as a woman, no one expected much of her as an artist; because when she showed her work, it was castigated; because when she painted, she felt she entered her real self; because, as pleasantly vibrant in society as Paula appeared, she was sensitive and shy by nature; because ordinary hausfrau life left her deeply unsatisfied and bored; because … From however many causes, for however many reasons, she became an artistic loner, painting in private and for herself, so much so that after her death, when Heinrich Vogeler and her husband entered her studio, they were surprised to find “a wealth of work” of whose existence they had been unaware.

Because … Clara had become so absorbed in her wifely, motherly life, she had no room in the arms of her intimacy for her formerly close friend, and in a letter Paula complained of the way “the old gang” (as the song says) had been broken up. It was Rilke who wrote back to Frau Modersohn (“exuding oily didacticism,” as Freedman says),
¹
suggesting that the Rilkes had reached a higher plane.

Actually, the couple’s plane had crashed, and they were scattered about like baggage on incongenial ground. Later, after Rilke and Clara had rid themselves of Ruth and established themselves in Paris, Paula came to visit, but the once happy trio couldn’t play well together anymore, and Paula found both of them—sewn like button to sleeve—to be bores. Even though Paula’s work was slowly seeping into him, Rilke was painfully preoccupied with Rodin, with the unsteady state of his marriage, with the alienation and self-doubt that would fever
Malte
and pave its pages with exquisite gloom and pain. About this time—the poet could not have failed to perceive it—Paula’s formerly high opinion of him sank out of sight in the sea of narcissism she felt now enveloped him. Both fled the city in the same week.

Three years later, in 1906, they met again in Paris. This time Rilke was breaking up with Rodin, and Becker had officially left her husband. They got on better now. Paula was at her best, painting odd nude portraits of herself. One in particular impressed the poet. Called
Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Day
, it has a background of pale splotchy wallpaper, and shows Paula, naked to just below the waist, standing slightly sideways and looking askance. The faces she was making at this time were becoming more and more Coptic. Hanging around her neck and falling between her breasts is a necklace of fat amber beads. The beads will show up in a much happier, even finer portrait from the same year. In the
Wedding Day
painting, the colors are washed out and, prophetically, Paula’s belly swells with her future fate; but in the later one her characteristic earth tones return, she becomes a Gauguin native, her lower lip is thick and red, she is holding flowers, there are flowers in her hair and flowers in an Henri Rousseau background of tall leafy stems.

She painted tomatoes, chestnuts, several still lifes with pottery jugs, and fruit in the spirit of Cézanne—a plate of apples sitting beside a green glass. The painter and the poet would meet for dinner at some vegetarian restaurant Rilke had selected, hoping that the asparagus would be delicate and plump, the tips tender. Paula began a painting of her friend at about the same time Rilke was writing his own “Self-Portrait from the Year 1906.”
²
The background that fills hers is olive drab, the paint thick throughout—paint in which a pallet knife leaves marks like icing tracks. Rilke wears his hair in a cap, and his Fu Manchu mustache, his goatee, his spade-shaped beard, are as brown as his hair, his shoulders, and his featureless eyes—featureless except for wide red rims which circle them like orbits that hopefully continue to spin although their planets have long ago left them. In both poem and painting the mouth is
“made as a mouth is, wide and straight,” but in Becker’s painting the jaw has dropped, the mouth gapes. The pink-rimmed eyes, the pink ears, pink lips, are a Paula Becker trademark. Her figures have grown blocky and brown and worn—worn because the surface of the paint has become streaked and flaky, the colors faded, like the side of an old barn.

From Worpswede calls came which were not satisfactorily answered, so Otto Modersohn, the husband who was supporting his wife in her separation from him, arrives to implore her to return. Paula’s refusal to leave Paris, her insistence on divorce, frightened Rilke, who stopped sitting for his portrait and ducked—as if guilty of some indiscretion—out of sight. The painting remains as unfinished as his self-portrait poem suggests his great work was. Nevertheless, it is boldly signed PMB, the M in the middle still like a river between towns. As long as Paula stayed tied to Modersohn the poet felt safe, and he bound himself to Clara, in a similarly loose yet protective way. Neither could drift off. But now he began to put his customary distance between them.

Rilke, as if he were Achilles in Zeno’s famous race, will grow nearer to each of the women he fancies, reducing the difference to a hair’s width, so long as there remains a space no spark can jump; so if Paula is going to declare to Otto: “I don’t want you as my husband,” and “I don’t want any child from you,” then Rilke will stay clear of her company;
³
but when, pressured by her husband, family, and friends, she reconciles, and the couple’s return to Worpswede is announced, Rilke reappears full of warm regard, with photos from his latest journey and an inscribed copy of
Book of Pictures
, his most recent publication.

If the person of the poet has betrayed his friend, the poet has betrayed his principles. Because he knew … he knew Paula’s situation. He should have supported her separation. But no one—not even Paula’s sister, Herma, whom she loved—not
even her friend Clara, whom she’d counted on—no one—no one—did.

Most women in Rilke’s day, unless they were barren or rich, were married off early and sent into a life of loveless broodmaring that led, after an interval that demonstrated their decency, to the bearing, the nursing, the raising, and the burying of children—six, eight, ten—losing their health and figure in the bargain, as well as any chance at achievement. Paula felt the attractions of motherhood, and painted satisfied babies at satisfying bosoms, and children, too, with awe and warmth. But, in addition to the down payment on the child’s life you were making—how many years would each cost, and bluntly, how many paintings?—when you gave birth, you courted Death, who often said, “Come with me.” Had not Paula Becker, relinquishing her art to perform a customary social service, cast away her vocation? Had she not allowed her husband’s lesser talent to dominate and destroy hers? The family may have felt like a fist to Rilke, but its grip kept women home. It held them down and hit them often.