The Hare with Amber Eyes (20 page)

Lodged in the archives of Deutsche Bank are files and files of these documents, the careful toing and froing about percentages, the reports of conversations with Viktor, the deals. But through the Manila shadings you can still hear the faint oscillation of Viktor’s voice, his weariness, in those tumbling consonants. The business was ‘
buchstäblich gleich Null
’. It was ‘literally zero’.

This feeling of loss, of having failed to preserve an inheritance, affected Viktor profoundly. He was the heir: it was his legacy and he had lost it. Each part of his world had closed down – his life in Odessa, St Petersburg, Paris and London was finished and only Vienna was left, the hydrocephalic Palais on the Ringstrasse.

Emmy, the children and little Rudolf weren’t exactly destitute. Nothing had to be sold for food or fuel. But what they possessed comprised the contents of this vast house. The netsuke still lay in their lacquer cabinet in the dressing-room, and were still dusted by Anna when she came in to arrange the flowers on Emmy’s dressing-table. The walls still held their Gobelin tapestries, their Dutch Old Masters. The French furniture was still polished, clocks still wound, the wicks of candles still trimmed. The Sèvres still lay stacked in the china closet next to the silver-room, service by service on the linen-covered shelves. The gold dinner-service with its double E and the proud little boat with its full sails were still in the safe. There was still a motor-car in the courtyard. But the life of objects within the Palais was less mobile. The world had undergone an
Umsturz
, an upheaval, and this led to a kind of heaviness in the things that made up their lives. Things now had to be preserved, sometimes even cherished, where before they had been just a background, a gilt-and-varnish blur to a busy social life. The uncounted and the unmeasured started at last to be counted very accurately.

There was a huge falling away; things were so much better and fuller before. Perhaps this was when there were the very first intimations of nostalgia. I begin to think that keeping things and losing them are not polar opposites. You keep this silver snuff-box, a token for standing as second in a duel, a lifetime ago. You keep the bracelet given by a lover. Viktor and Emmy kept everything – all these possessions, all these drawers full of things, these walls full of pictures – but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities. This was how they were diminished.

Vienna is sticky with nostalgia. It has breached the heavy oak door of their house.

Elisabeth’s first term at university was chaotic. The financial situation of Vienna University had become so critical that an appeal was was made to Austria in general, and Vienna in particular, for help. ‘If assistance is not promptly forthcoming the University will inevitably sink to the level of a little Hochschule. The Professors are on starvation salaries…the library is not able to function.’ The annual income of a professor, commented a visiting scholar, was inadequate to buy a suit and undergarments for himself and clothes for his wife and child. In January 1919, lectures were cancelled as there was no fuel for the lecture-halls. Against this rose the incendiary academic climate of possibility. It was, perversely, a fantastic time to study: there were Austrian – or Viennese – schools of economics, theoretical physics and philosophy, law, psychoanalysis (under Freud and Adler), history and art history. Each of these schools represented extraordinary scholarship coupled with intense rivalry.

Elisabeth had chosen to study philosophy, law and economics. It was, in one sense, a very Jewish choice: all three disciplines had strong Jewish presences in the faculty. One-third of the legal faculty was Jewish. To be a lawyer, an
Advokat
, in Vienna meant being an intellectual. And that is what she was, a plain, fierce, focused intellectual eighteen-year-old in her white crêpe-de-Chine blouse with a black bow at the neck. It was a way of making absolute the division between her and the emotional intermittencies of her mother. And the slowly resurgent domestic life in the Palais, the nursery, her noisy new infant brother, the fuss.

Elisabeth chose to study under a fearsome economist, Ludwig von Mises, a man known in the university as
der Liberale,
Mr Libertarian. Mises was a young economist out to make his reputation through his stress on the implausibility of the socialist state. There might be communists on the streets of Vienna, but Mises was going to find the economic arguments to prove them wrong. He started a small seminar circle,
Privatissimum
, in which his selected disciples would give a paper. On 26th November 1918, a week after Rudolf was born, Elisabeth gave the first talk on ‘Carver’s theory of interest’. Mises’s students remembered the intensity of the scrutiny in these seminars, the genesis of a famous school of free-market economics. I have her student essays on ‘Inflation und Geldknappkeit’ (fifteen pages of small italic handwriting), on ‘Kapital ’ (thirty-two of the same) and ‘John Henry Newman’ (thirty-eight pages).

But Elisabeth’s passion was for poetry. She sent her poems to her grandmother and to her friend Fanny Lowenstein-Schaffeneck, now working in an exciting contemporary art gallery selling the paintings of Egon Schiele.

Elisabeth and Fanny were in love with the lyric poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. It consumed them: they knew the two volumes of his
Neue Gedichte
(
New Poems
) by heart and waited impatiently for the next poem to be published: his silence was unbearable. Rilke had been Rodin’s amanuensis in Paris, and after the war the girls had travelled with their copies of Rilke’s book on the sculptor to pay homage in the Musée Rodin. Elisabeth marked their excitement in the margins in pencilled rushes.

Rilke was the great radical poet of the day. He combined directness of expression with intense sensuousness in his
Dinggedichte
, ‘thing poems’. ‘The
thing
is definite, the
art-thing
must be still more definite, removed from all accident, reft away from obscurity…’, Rilke wrote. His poems are full of epiphanies, moments when things come alive – a dancer’s first movement is the flare of a sulphur match. Or of moments when there is a change in the summer weather, a catch in mood when you see someone as if for the first time.

And his poems are full of danger, ‘all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further’. This is what it is like to be an artist, he says, breath-catchingly. You are unsteady on the edge of life, like a swan, before an ‘anxious launching of himself/On the floods where he is gently caught’.

‘You must change your life,’ Rilke wrote in his poem on the ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. Could any instruction be more thrilling?

It was not until after Elisabeth died, aged ninety-two, that I realised how important Rilke was to her. I knew there were some letters, but they were a rumour, a muffled roll of splendour. It was when I stood in front of the statue of Apollo with his lyre in the courtyard of the Palais Ephrussi on a winter’s afternoon and haltingly tried to remember Rilke’s poem, the marble glistening like ‘a predator’s coat’, that I knew I had to find them.

Elisabeth had been given an introduction to Rilke by her uncle. Pips had helped Rilke when he was stranded in Germany by the outbreak of war. Now he wrote to invite Rilke to Kövecses: ‘this house is always open for you. You would make us all very happy if you would announce yourself “sans cérémonie”.’ And Pips begs permission for his favourite niece to send some poems. Elisabeth wrote – breathlessly – to Rilke in the summer of 1921, enclosing ‘Michelangelo’, a verse-drama, and asking him whether she might dedicate it to him. There was a long delay until the spring – a delay occasioned by his finishing the
Duino Elegies
– but then he wrote back a five-page letter and they began to correspond, the twenty-year-old student in Vienna and the fifty-year-old poet in Switzerland.

The correspondence started with a refusal. He resisted a dedication. The best outcome would be to have the poem published, then the book ‘would represent a lasting link to me…It will be a pleasure to accept being a mentor in your first “Erstling”, but only if you don’t name me.’ But, continues the letter, I would be interested to see what you are writing. They wrote to each other for five years. Twelve very long letters from Rilke, sixty pages interspersed with manuscript copies of his recent poems and translations, and many volumes of his verse with warm dedications of his own.

Dr Elisabeth Ephrussi, poet and lawyer, 1922

If you stand in a library and look at Rilke’s collected works, the yard or so of volumes, most of them are letters, and most of these seem to be to ‘titled, disappointed ladies’, to borrow John Berryman’s penetrating phrase. Elisabeth was a young poetic baroness, and so not unusual amongst many of his correspondents. But Rilke was a great letter-writer, and these in particular are wonderful letters, exhortatory, lyrical, funny and engaged, a testament to what he called ‘a writing friendship’. They have never been translated and only recently transcribed by a Rilke scholar working in England. I move my pots to one side and cover the tables with photocopies of these letters. I spend a happy couple of weeks trying out possible translations of these sinuous, rhythmical sentences with a German PhD student.

Translating the work of his friend, the French poet Paul Valéry, Rilke writes about his ‘great silence’, the years when Valéry didn’t write poetry at all. Rilke encloses the translation he has just finished. He writes about Paris and how the recent death of Proust has affected him, made him think of his years there, working as Rodin’s secretary, makes him wish to return and study again. Has Elisabeth read Proust? She should do so.

And he is very careful and particular about Elisabeth’s situation in Vienna. He is intrigued by the contrast between her academic studies at the university where she is studying law and her poetry:

Be that as it may, dear friend, I am not anxious for your artistic abilities, to which I attach such a great importance…Even though I cannot foresee which path you will decide to take with your law doctorate, I find the great contrast between your two occupations positive; the more diverse the life of the mind, the better the chances are that your inspiration will be protected, the inspiration which cannot be predicted, that which is motivated from within.’

Rilke reads her recent poems ‘A January Evening’, ‘Roman Night’ and ‘King Oedipus’: ‘all three good, however I tend to put Oedipus over the rest’. In this poem she writes about the King leaving the city into his exile, his hands over his eyes, wrapped in a cloak, and that ‘the others went back to the palace, and all the lights were extinguished one by one’. She has spent enough time with her father and his
Aeneid
for exile to provoke powerful emotion in her.

If Elisabeth has time at the end of her studies, she
could
read literature, but Rilke’s advice is ‘to look into the blue of the hyacinths. And the spring!’ He gives her specific advice about her poems and about translation; after all, ‘it is not the gardener who is encouraging and caring who helps, but the one with the pruning-shears and spade; the rebuke!’ He shares his emotions about what it is like to have finished a great work. You feel a dangerous buoyancy, writes Rilke, as if you could float away.

In these letters he becomes lyrical:

I believe that in Vienna, when the dragging wind is not cutting through you, you can sense the spring. Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the shadows, a gleam in the windows – a slight feeling of embarrassment of being a city…in my own experience only Paris and (in a naïve way) Moscow absorb the whole nature of the spring into them as if they were a landscape…

And then he signs off: ‘Farewell to you for now: I deeply appreciated the warmth and friendship of your letter. May you keep well! Your true friend RM Rilke.’

Just think what it must have been like to get that letter from him. Imagine seeing his slightly right-sloping and looping handwriting on the envelope from Switzerland as the post is brought into the breakfast-room in the Palais, your father at one end opening the beige book-catalogues from Berlin, your mother at the other with the feuilleton, your brother and sister arguing quietly. Imagine slitting open the envelope and finding that Rilke has sent you one of his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ and a transcription of a poem of Valéry. ‘It is like a fairytale. I cannot believe it belongs to me,’ she writes back that night from her desk pushed up against the window looking onto the Ring.

They planned to meet. ‘Let it not be a short hour, but a real moment of time,’ he writes, but they were unable to meet each other in Vienna, and then Elisabeth got the time wrong for their meeting in Paris and had to leave before he arrived. I find their telegrams. Rilke at the Hôtel Lorius in Montreux, 11H 15 to Mademoiselle Elisabeth Ephrussi, 3 rue Rabelais Paris (
Réponse payée
), and her response forty minutes later and his the next morning.

Then he was ill and couldn’t travel, and there is a hiatus while Rilke is in the sanatorium where they are trying to treat him; then a final letter a fortnight before his death. And later a package from Rilke’s widow in Switzerland returning Elisabeth’s letters to him, reuniting the correspondence into one envelope, carefully marked and carefully put away in one drawer and then another over Elisabeth’s long life.

As a present ‘for my dear niece Elisabeth’, uncle Pips had ‘Michelangelo’ written and illuminated by a scribe in Berlin on vellum, like a medieval missal, and bound in green buckram. It is a gentle echo of an early volume of Rilke’s
The Book of Hours
, where each stanza is initialled in carmine. This is one of the books my father remembered having, and looked out and brought down to my studio. I have it on my desk now. I open it up and there is the epigraph from Rilke and then her poem. It is quite good, I think, this poem about a sculptor making things. It is properly Rilkean.

When she was eighty, and I was fourteen or so, I started sending her my schoolboy poetry and would get in return careful critiques and suggestions of what to read. I read poetry all the time. I had a passionate, silent longing for the girl in the bookshop where on Saturday afternoons I would spend my pocket money on slim volumes of Faber poets. I carried poetry in my pocket at all times.

Elisabeth’s criticism was direct. She hated sentimentality, ‘emotional inexactitude’. She thought there was no point in having formal poetic structures if they didn’t scan. No points for my sonnet sequence on the dark-haired girl in the bookshop then. But her greatest scorn was for the indefinite, a blurring of the real in rushes of emotion.

When she died I inherited many of her books of poetry. Her personal numbering system means that Rilke’s
Das Stunden-Buch
is no. 26, his book on Rodin no. 28, Stefan George is EE no. 36 and her grandmother’s books of poems are nos 63 and 64. I send my father off to a university library that has some of her books to check when she read them, and I have to stop as I find myself late at night looking through Elisabeth’s copies of French poetry, the twelve volumes of Proust, early editions of Rilke, for comments in the margins, scraps of forgotten lyric, a lost letter. I remember Saul Bellow’s Herzog spending his nights shaking out banknotes that he had left in volumes as bookmarks.