You Must Change Your Life (13 page)

Rodin circa 1898, with
The Kiss.

When the artist looked up at his young visitor he stopped what he was doing, smiled shyly, and offered a chair. Next to the lionesque artist, Rilke looked even more like a mouse. His face gathered into a point right where his nose joined a few droopy whiskers. He was twenty-six years old, narrow-shouldered and anemic, while the stout Rodin, then sixty-one, plodded around heavily, his long beard seeming to draw him even closer toward the ground.

Rilke labored through all the French pleasantries he had memorized before Rodin, thankfully, took over the conversation. The sculptor gestured around the room, pointing out one remarkable object after another: There's a plaster hand, there's a hand in clay, he would say. Here's a
création
, there's a
création
. How much more exquisite that word,
création
, sounded in French than it did in German—
Schöpfung
—Rilke thought. There was a surprising lightness to the man. He had a laugh that was simultaneously joyous and embarrassed, “like a child that has been given lovely presents.”

After a while, the artist went back to work, inviting his visitor to stay in the studio and observe for as long as he liked. Rilke was astonished to see how easy Rodin made sculpture look. He approached a bust like a child making a snowman, rolling up a ball of clay and plopping it on top of another ball to make a head, then cutting a slit for the mouth and two thumbholes for eyes. As the work progressed, so did Rodin's energy. Rilke noted the way the artist would lunge at his sculptures, the floor creaking and moaning under his heavy feet. He would fix his heavy eyes on a detail and zero in so close that his nose pressed up against the clay. With a few pinches of his fingertips, a face, and from the rough gashes of his pick or chisel, a body. He worked rapidly, as if “compressing hours into minutes,” Rilke noticed.

Rilke could have watched Rodin all day, but he did not want to impose on his first visit. He told the sculptor that he would be on his way and thanked him for the fascinating introduction to his work. To Rilke's delight, Rodin invited the poet to join him again the next day. He would be working at his country studio then and it might be useful for Rilke to see the way things operated there. The poet wholeheartedly agreed.

Rodin's generosity with his time buoyed Rilke's spirit when he returned home that evening. He could not have hoped for a more kind and engaging subject. “He is very dear to me,” he wrote to Westhoff that night. “That I knew at once.”

THE NEXT MORNING,
Rilke rehearsed a few French phrases, put on a cheap but tidy suit and then boarded the nine o'clock train from Gare Montparnasse. He could hardly wait to see Rodin's workshop in the suburb of Meudon, and to finally breathe in some much-needed country air.

Meudon was only twenty minutes southwest of Paris by train, but seemed to exist in another century altogether. The hills swallowed up
the city's smokestacks, which could be seen chugging in the distance. The old cottages slouched like sheep in a field, Rodin thought when he first visited this landscape. It had awakened in him the “untroubled happiness” of childhood. He felt so at home there that he bought a petite Louis XIII–style chateau called Villa des Brillants and built a studio on the property in 1895—two years after his split from Camille Claudel, who was likely a consideration in his withdrawal from Paris.

As Rilke's train lurched toward town, the view did not charm the poet nearly as much as it did Rodin. The road leading into the station was dirty and steep and the houses cramped the Seine River valley too tightly. In town, all the cafés reminded him of the dingy osterias he had seen in Italy. It was not the setting Rilke had imagined for such an illustrious artist.

To be sure, Meudon was no Giverny, the lush suburb where Monet owned his compulsively manicured estate. Whereas the painter nurtured beds of exotic flowers and built a footbridge over his pond of water lilies, Rodin let his estate grow wild. Passing through the gates to the Villa des Brillants, Rilke crunched along an unpruned path paved with equal parts chestnuts and gravel. The simple red-brick building at the end of the drive was not much of a sight, either.

When Rilke knocked on the door, an apron-clad woman with soapsuds on her arms opened it. She stared at him, looking as tired and gray as an antique, while Rilke recited his French greeting and told her that he had an appointment with Monsieur Rodin. Just then the artist appeared at the door and invited Rilke in.

The sparsely furnished rooms reminded Rilke of Tolstoy's austere home in Russia. There was no gas or electricity and Rodin did not hang paintings on the downstairs walls, in order to focus the view out the windows. The only decorations he displayed were his antiques, a growing collection of terra-cotta vases, classical Greek nudes, Etruscan artifacts, and broken Roman Venuses. There was a simple trestle table and a few straight-backed chairs, for Rodin believed that cushions were indulgent: “I do not approve of half going to bed at all moments
of the day,” he once said. This led one visitor to remark that Rodin's home “gives one the feeling that the act of living itself plays hardly any role for him.”

Rodin then took Rilke outside for a tour of the grounds. As they walked, Rodin began to tell Rilke about his life, but not in the way one might speak to a journalist on assignment. He understood that Rilke was a fellow artist, and so he framed his stories as lessons that the young poet might take as examples. Above all else, he stressed to Rilke,
Travailler, toujours travailler
. You must work, always work, he said. “To this I devoted my youth.” But it was not enough to make work, the word he preferred to “art”; one had to live it. That meant renouncing the trappings of earthly pleasures, like fine wine, sedating sofas, even one's own children, should they prove distracting from the pursuit.

Rilke listened to Rodin's advice as best he could through the rapid French. But whereas Rilke's intense eye contact held his company close, Rodin rarely looked directly at listeners at all. The artist could become so absorbed in a topic that he sometimes forgot who he was talking to altogether, much less whether they were still paying attention.

When Rodin finally paused to take a breath, Rilke seized the opening to say that he had brought the master a small gift. He pulled out some pages of poetry and presented them to Rodin, who politely flipped through them. Although they were written in German, Rilke thought for certain he detected in Rodin's nodding an approval at least of their form.

At noon, they sat for lunch at an outdoor table, joined by a red-nosed man, a girl of about ten and the woman, in her late fifties, who had answered the door earlier. Rodin did not bother introducing Rilke to any of his guests. He addressed them only to complain that the meal was late. The woman's face narrowed in rage and she slammed the dishes in her hands onto the table. She fired back some sharp words that Rilke didn't understand, but their intent was perfectly clear. There could only be one explanation for such an intimate
display of resentment at the table, Rilke thought. This must be Rodin's wife.

Eat up!
Rose Beuret barked at her guests. Rilke obeyed, nibbling nervously around the edges of his plate to avoid the meat. A waiter mistook Rilke's vegetarianism for shyness and pushed more meat on him still. Rodin, oblivious to it all, noisily spooned himself mouthfuls as if he were dining alone.

When the meal was finally through, Rodin stood up and invited his visitor to join him in the studio. Relieved, Rilke rounded the corner of the house with Rodin and discovered that on just the other side stood the artist's pavilion from the World's Fair. After the exhibition closed in November 1900, Rodin had purchased a patch of land from his neighbor and shipped the entire pavilion to his property.

It served as a daily reminder of Rodin's greatest success to date. He had sold two hundred thousand francs' worth of art and received so many visitors that after he shipped the works to Meudon, the German publisher Karl Baedeker wrote the suburb's mayor to inquire about the hours of the town's “Musée Rodin.”

It occurred to Rilke that Rodin surrounded himself with his own sculptures the way a child does his toys. Nothing made the man happier than spending his days in the presence of his most prized possessions.

They then went to the studio, a long building encased almost entirely in glass. When Rodin opened the door, the sight left Rilke speechless. It contained what looked like the “work of a century.” The workshop pulsed like a living ecosystem, with white-smocked craftsmen carving away at hunks of marble, setting flames inside brick kilns, and hauling blocks of stone across the floor. The sun poured in through the arched glass, lighting up the rows of plaster bodies like angels, or “inhabitants of an aquarium,” as Rilke wrote. The bright whiteness seared his pale eyes like snow blindness; it was almost too much to bear. But that didn't stop him from greedily trying to take it all in anyway.

After a few minutes, Rodin left his awestruck visitor to look around on his own. Rilke didn't know where to begin. There were acres of half-made sculptures: limbs piling up on tabletops, a torso with the wrong head attached; arms and legs intertwined, striding and reaching. It looked like a storm had torn through a village and scattered body parts everywhere. There were casts of works that Rilke had only read about in books, including several yard-long sections of
The Gates of Hell
, uncast and strewn about shelves and display cases.

It became clear that Rodin prized hands above all other parts of the body. A well-informed visitor knew that to please the
maitre
one should ask him,
May I look at the hands?
They appeared around the studio in all configurations: old wise hands, a pair of clenched fists, two fingertips pitched into a cathedral spire. Rodin once claimed to have sculpted twelve thousand hands, only to have “smashed up” ten thousand of them. Just as he had previously spent years molding hands and feet for his old employer Carrier-Belleuse, Rodin now tested prospective apprentices on their facility with hands.

Rilke understood immediately the lesson contained in all these hands, often “no bigger than my little finger, but filled with a life that makes one's heart pound . . . each a feeling, each a bit of love, devotion, kindness, and searching.” Whenever Rilke had described hands in his poetry they were always extensions into the world. They were need: a woman reaching for her lover, a child grasping its mother, a mentor pointing the way to a disciple. For Rodin, a hand was its own landscape, complete and internally resolved. It was not merely a sentence in the narrative of the body, it told its own story in lines and contours that added up like verses of a poem.

Rodin seemed to dream with his hands rather than his head, Rilke thought, enabling him to make his every fantasy real. Rilke only wished that Rodin would now take the poet into those transformative hands. He believed his calling was predestined; he just needed a master to animate it. Only Rodin, a man whose hands had set metal men into motion and roused heartbeats from stone, seemed to possess the life-changing touch that Rilke described in his
Book of Hours
:

I read it in your word, and learn it from

the history of the gestures of your warm

wise hands, rounding themselves to form

and circumscribe the shapes that are to come.

By three o'clock, Rilke had filled his eyes with as much as they could take for one day. When he returned to Paris in the early evening, they were aching and exhausted by all they had seen. Still, he managed to dash a letter off to Westhoff that night to say that the visit had restored his hope in Paris and his decision to come there. “I am glad that there is so much greatness and that we have found our way to it through the wide dismayed world.” But now he was smearing the ink and ought to sign off: “My eyes are hurting me, my hands too.”

RILKE RETURNED TO MEUDON
a few days later. He again shared an awkward meal with Rodin and Beuret and, again, they were joined by the same young girl. (Rilke assumed it was Rodin's daughter, but most likely it was a neighbor, since the couple only had a son.)

After lunch, the two men retired to a bench in the garden. The girl followed them and sat down on the ground nearby, turning over and inspecting pebbles from the path. A couple of times she came over and looked up at Rodin, watching his mouth move while he spoke, only to retreat again unnoticed.

A few moments later she came back, this time presenting him with a tiny violet. She placed it timidly in his huge hand and waited for him to say something. Instead, he looked “past the shy little hand, past the violet, past the child, past this whole little moment of love,” Rilke noticed. Rodin carried on talking to Rilke and eventually the girl gave up. He had been telling the poet about his education and had launched into a tirade about art school, which he believed taught students to slavishly copy their subjects. Most teachers were not like Lecoq, he said, who had taught him to see with his emotions, with an eye “grafted on his heart.”

The girl returned to make one final bid for the man's attention. This time her bait, a snail shell, caught the master's eye. He turned the shell over in his palm and smiled: “
Voilà
.” Here was a perfect facsimile of Greek art, he told Rilke. Its surface was smooth, its geometry simple, and the shell seemed to radiate with inner life. It bore the infallible laws of nature on its exterior, just like an exquisite figure model.

And,
voilà
, the snail might have also presented Rilke with an unexpected model of Rodin's mind: an inwardly spiraling coil, oblivious to anything outside its own will. Rilke watched the girl recede once again into the background and he spoke up at last. Carefully suppressing his bulky German accent, he asked Rodin his opinion on the role of love in an artist's life. How should one balance art with family? Rodin replied that it is best to be alone, except perhaps to have a wife because, well,
un homme besoins une femme
.