Reading Rilke (16 page)

Ultimately, money settled the matter. How would Paula live if Modersohn didn’t support her? She had no training in anything but art; the social status of unwealthy divorced women was shaky; job opportunities for them were few and unscheduled; Paris was expensive (compared to Worpswede); and success for a female in her field was unlikely indeed. The situation forced an accommodation. Economics was the other fist.

Reconciliations have their own momentum. Giving up always goes beyond the given that has been intended. Paula became pregnant during the March of Modersohn’s arrival in Paris, and gifted her husband with a daughter, Mathilde, on the 2nd of November 1907. It hadn’t been that easy, but a prolonged rest was regularly prescribed. The new mother (and now the
madonna of the restored family) was to be bedridden until the 20th.

Paula Becker had always believed her life would be a short one. As early as July of 1900, she writes in her diary:

Worpswede, July 26, 1900

As I was painting today, some thoughts came to me and I want to write them down for the people I love. I know I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration. My powers of perception are becoming finer, as if I were supposed to absorb everything in the few years that are still to be offered me, everything. My sense of smell is unbelievably keen at present. With almost every breath I take, I get a new sense and understanding of the linden tree, of ripened wheat, of hay, and of mignonette. I suck everything up into me. And if only now love would blossom for me, before I depart; and if I can paint three good pictures, then I shall go gladly, with flowers in my hair.
⁴

After three weeks, Paula Becker gets out of bed for the first time. Crowned by freshly combed and braided hair, with roses pinned to her dressing gown, she walks slowly from her bedroom, flanked by her husband and her brother in case she should suffer a sudden weakness, into another room, where dozens of candles have been lit and placed about.

You sat up in your childbed

to confront a mirror that gave back everything.

Now that image was all of you,
out there
,

inside was mere deception, the sweet deceit

of every woman who tries a smile while

she puts on her jewelry and combs her hair.
⁵

Seated in a chair, she asks for her baby to be brought to her. This is done. “Now it is almost as beautiful as Christmas.” She tries to elevate her foot, perhaps to place it on a footstool. And dies then of an embolism. It’s said she said “
Schade!
”—what a shame.

A year later, after the death of the Countess von Schwerin, too, and then, suddenly of typhoid fever, his Capri hostess, Alice Faehndrich—in short, with death the atmosphere—Rilke wrote a requiem to a woman he would not name. Unnamed even on her monument, I suspect, because Otto Modersohn was, of course, still alive, still there to be hurt, still there to take umbrage at what the work would say. Almost the moment Paula’s poem was completed, Rilke wrote another requiem, this one for a suicide he’d never personally known, Count Wolf von Kalckreuth, but in this case the identity of the dead is prominently displayed.

Paula Becker’s stock as an artist has risen some over the years, but at the time (though one thinks the thought wryly and without vainglory) those who knew her had to believe that the climax of her brief life was the death which occasioned the composition of Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend,” one of poetry’s eternal triumphs.

“I’ve had my dead, and I let them go,” it begins, “and was surprised to see them so consoled, so soon at home in being dead, so right, so unlike their reputation.” (The
Elegies
will argue otherwise, deciding that “it’s difficult to be dead.”) Only Paula Becker assumes the mantle of the traditional restless spirit and continues to trouble her friend. What is the point of coming back from the dead if it’s only to visit the dead, because everything
in this so-called life disappears in the very moment of its brief appearance?

Bitterly, the poet promises to do the things, see the things, feel the things which the painter didn’t live to enjoy; bitterly he blames her for acceding to custom, abandoning her art, dying a death designed and demanded by an undeserving society, a system she should have opposed; bitterly he accuses her of eating the seeds of her own death, bending her own path from its true course, upending, as if it were an enemy, her proper end; and now she has rejected her death as well, to return, to beg for something from the life she left which can no more be given her; bitterly the poem accuses, not Modersohn alone, not merely Rainer Maria Rilke (who hides now behind the universal), but Men in general for Paula’s premature departure. The social condition in which women find themselves is partly to blame, but the opposition between life and art which society also insists on is a considerable factor. Love demands an increase of freedom for one’s lover, and justice asks that we measure it by the amount we command in ourselves.

“Don’t come back,” the poem ends. Later, Rilke will issue the same command to Orpheus: remain with Eurydice in the realm of the dead. “If you can stand it, stay dead with the dead, the dead have their own concerns.” No longer bitterly, but with a resignation which does not relieve him of his obligations, the poet promises to carry on the task she should have stayed here to perform, but now he asks for her help, if she must come back at all, and if it won’t distract her from her new responsibilities, “since, in me, what is most distant sometimes helps.” The final line, in German, is even more revealing:

Doch hilf mir so, dass es dich nicht zerstreut,

wie mird das Fernste manchmal hilft: in mir.

That
in mir
, placed as it is at the end of both line and poem (and creating, for any English version, an intolerable awkwardness), suspends the entire text behind the colon, and makes (as is customary with Rilke) the poem even more deeply personal.

Paula Becker’s ghost remained at large to trouble the poet despite his poem’s pleas. A selection from Paula’s journals had been assembled by her brother, Kurt, and published in a magazine,
Güldenkammer
, in 1913. Rilke had read these pieces and was sufficiently impressed to suggest to their editor that all of Paula’s manuscripts should be made available. We should not cry out, “Lo, and behold,” when, in the autumn of 1916, Paula’s mother sent a packet of her daughter’s journals and letters to Rilke, requesting that he edit them and see to their publication, because people were always sending such intimacies to him, and would again. Rilke had written his own Florence and Schmargendorf diaries for Lou Salomé’s eyes. The practice was common.

On this occasion, however, after a delay that extends to the day after Christmas, and in a lengthy letter which squirms like a worm, Rilke refuses Frau Becker’s request, and repeatedly insists that these letters and journals (picked over and selected by the family to be sure) do not do Paula Becker’s achievement justice, because most of them reflect her earlier views and the level of her early work, whereas the painting she did in her final Paris period, which establishes and defines her genius, is inadequately reflected by the written materials that Rilke has in hand.

Whenever one evokes the name of Paula Becker, one has implicitly to assert that in the power of her later work she produced an extraordinarily personal style, and one will never come closer to this “personal” essence than by
realizing that it resides in that most astonishing tension between validity and grace. For precisely in the middle, between a validity already remote from her and a newly entered state of liveliness, already grown modest, there stands and endures her pure, free, sacrificial achievement.
⁶

These sentences are stuffed with phrases of postponement and evasion, just as the entire letter is. Yet Rilke may have been right. There is no better hiding place than behind the truth. Who will part that drape?

When the publisher Anton Kippenberg accepts the editorial task that Rilke has refused, the poet writes, opposing the project for the same reasons he has earlier advanced: that such a volume would tarnish rather than enhance her reputation: “It may simply be that her final years were too short to permit any articulation whatsoever alongside the breathless progress of her art …”
⁷

What is most distant sometimes helps
. Many years later, when the critic Hermann Pongs, in a questionnaire about the
Elegies
which became a major source for their understanding, asked Rilke for his impression of Paula Becker’s late paintings, he shamefully answered, “I last saw Paula Modersohn in Paris in 1906 and knew little of the work she was doing then or later—
work I don’t know to this day
.”
⁸

If guilt can write a great poem, it’s been accomplished here, for Rilke also brought his own wife to bed with child. That had to be borne upon him—his resemblance to Modersohn. He did so despite the fact that he felt (somewhat inconsistently) that children supplanted in women the need for creativity. Clara survived her pregnancy, yet soon had the burden of a baby and another’s life to manage all alone … yes, alas, since her husband,
having become bourgeois, as Paula was to, and having succumbed to custom, as Paula would (even if Clara had begged—as, later, Modersohn must have—for a child) … had then—against all the poet’s aims and principles—inseminated the woman he said he loved, the artist he claimed to admire, thus endangering her life (as Modersohn would Paula’s) … and again, when finally, attempting to escape the consequences of that crime, he finds he faces yet others—principally the couple’s joint entrapment in common life—he selfishly flees his new family, seeks refuge in Rodin, suffers as a substitute the poverties of Paris … yes … well … alas … but these were actions and attitudes which redoubled his guilt, troubled his conscience, and disturbed his sleep, because the poet’s very real very sordid very ordinary weaknesses were always threatening to appear before the fair public figure of the Poet Personified, take its place, and, as he said he feared Paula’s journals would, disgrace the work of a life.

Under her changed and straitened circumstances Clara could only hope to continue with her sculpture. But hope is the lone evil those evils left behind when they popped out of Pandora’s box. For how much of Clara’s imitation of her husband—leaving her child as he had both of them—must the husband accept responsibility, having set the tone and led the way?

Toward Paula, too, at the end, the poet had been ambivalent, unhelpful, distant—quadrupling the counts against him. As with most apparitions, guilt is the ghost that walks within the “Requiem.” Whenever a poem of Rilke’s seems to admonish its reader, openly with “You must change your life,” or tacitly, through the poem’s example, we can be certain that Rilke himself has failed the charge.

REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND

I’ve had my dead, and I let them go

and was surprised to see them so consoled,

so soon at home in being dead, so right,

so unlike their reputation. Only you,

you come back, brush by me, move about,

bump into something that will betray

your presence with a sound. Oh, don’t take

from me what I was slowly learning. You’re mistaken

if you feel homesick for anything here.

We alter all of it; whatever we perceive

is instantly reflected from ourselves,

and is no longer there.

I thought you were farther off. It bothers

me that you should stray and come this way,

you who managed more transformation than any other woman.

That we were frightened by your death—no …

that your harsh death darkly interrupted us,

dividing what-had-been from what-would-be:

this is our concern; coming to terms with it

will accompany all our tasks.

But that you too were frightened, and even now

tremble with terror when terror has no cause;

that you are giving up some of your eternity

to return here, friend, here again,

where nothing yet
is
; that, half-hearted

and confused by your first encounter with Totality,

you did not follow the unfolding of infinite natures,

as once you grasped earthly things;

that, from the circle that received you,

the stubborn pull of some past discontent

has dragged you back into calibrated time—

this starts me from sleep like the break-in of a thief.

If I could say that you only come out of your

abundant kindness, that because you are so sure

and self-possessed you can wander childlike here and there,

unaware of any risk from harmful places—

but no: you’re beseeching. That’s what chills me

to the bone and cuts me like a saw.

A grim rebuke, borne to me by your ghost,

might weigh on me at night when I withdraw