You Must Change Your Life (14 page)

That evening Rilke took a walk alone in the woods to think about the harsh truths Rodin had shown him. The sculptor's house was depressing. There seemed to be no love in his family. Yet Rodin knew all of this and didn't care. He knew what he was, that he was an artist, and that was all that mattered to him. He abided by his own code, and no one else's standards could measure him. He contained within himself his own universe, which Rilke decided was more valuable than living in a world of others' making. In fact, it now seemed like a good thing that Rodin couldn't understand Rilke's poetry, nor speak any other language. That ignornace secured him more soundly within his sacred realm.

As the poet breathed in the cool, damp air he felt a space open up inside him. It was the relief that came from realizing now the destination, even if he did not yet know how to get there. He had faith in Rodin and his assurance that hard work would guide him.

When Rilke returned from the woods, everything looked different. He now saw only beauty around him: the still sky, three swans floating in the lake, rose blooms that bent from their vines toward the sun. Even the chestnut-littered driveway seemed to serve a new purpose: to guide the way forward. Life may grow thickly around its path, but the
true artist stays focused on the way ahead. He must “look neither right nor left,” Rilke wrote to Westhoff that night. That was why great men like Rodin and Tolstoy each lived a meager life, “stunted like an organ they no longer need,” he wrote. “One must choose either this or that. Either happiness or art.”

One wonders how that news might have sat with Westhoff in Germany, caring for their daughter Ruth on her own. Rilke preferred to describe himself and Westhoff as artists first, on parallel but parted paths, rather than as a couple on the same track. He championed Westhoff's art but was less sympathetic to her frustrations over child-rearing. When she complained of exhaustion, Rilke told her it was healthy to be a bit tired. Sometimes he tried to sweeten this condescension with a word of pseudo-praise: You are so strong and courageous, he would say, “one night will be enough to relieve you of it.”

But that September, Westhoff did not acquiesce so easily. She insisted that she wanted to be in Paris, too, and to gain access to Rodin once more. Rilke agreed, but convinced her not to bring Ruth. Paris was no place for a child, he said. It was wretchedly expensive, the hotels were cramped, and there was no time for anything but work. Rodin felt the same way, Rilke told her. “I spoke of you, of Ruth, how sad it was that you must leave her,—he was silent a while and then said, he said it with a wonderful seriousness: Yes, one must work, nothing but work. And one must have patience.”

Westhoff arranged for Ruth to stay with her parents in Oberneuland, a town near Worpswede, and made plans to join Rilke the following month.

AFTER JUST TEN DAYS
with Rodin, Rilke sent his new master a letter. He confessed that it might seem strange to write since they saw each other so often, but he felt the language barrier prevented him from fully expressing himself. In the quiet of his little room he could work out the words to tell Rodin precisely how much he had inspired him. He had given him the strength to suffer through loneliness, to
accept sacrifice and to “disarm even the anxieties of poverty.” He told him that his wife had agreed with him on this, and would be joining him in Paris soon. If they could both find work there, they hoped to stay indefinitely. He sensed that this journey would prove “the great rebirth of my life.”

Rilke also sent Rodin a few lines of poetry that had come to him during a recent stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens. “Why do I write these verses? Not because I dare to believe that they are good; but it is the desire to draw near to you that guides my hand,” he wrote. Rodin had “become the example for my life and my art.” Rilke knew his German verses would be incomprehensible to Rodin, but he longed to have the man's eyes rest upon them all the same. Then he came to the real point of his letter: “It is not just to write a study that I have come to you,” he confessed, “it is to ask you: how should I live?”

We don't know whether Rodin replied to the letter, but he offered the poet an open invitation to his studios over the next four months, which was all the encouragement Rilke needed to attach himself to Rodin at every possible moment. On the best days, the master invited him to Meudon in the mornings. Rilke would come prepared with a list of questions and they would sit by the pond or take a walk, their discussions often carrying on well into the afternoon. Rodin enjoyed coining new metaphors for his disciple and Rilke dutifully scribbled them down, like a pigeon pecking up bread crumbs. “Look, it only takes one night; in a single night all these gills are formed,” Rodin said once of a mushroom he plucked from the ground. Turning it over to reveal its underside, he explained, “That's good work.”

Other days Rilke stood by in the studio to watch Rodin in action. He observed the way the artist wielded his tools like swords, remorselessly amputating limbs and heads with a single slice, slashing out swaths of clay until he ran out of breath. He chiseled into plaster until a cloud of dust filled the air. He was an additive sculptor and he broke his work down into parts before reassembling it. One minute he would snatch up a limb, like meat in a raptor's talons, only to toss it into the trash a moment later. Sometimes he left bodies armless or legless
entirely. The end result was often “not like a house, solidly built from top to bottom,” said the writer Jean Cocteau, “but only like part of a staircase, a balcony, or a fragment of a door.”

Rodin did not await inspiration, for some pure expression to flow from his soul onto passive materials, as Rilke had always done. To Rodin, god was “too great to send us direct inspiration.” Instead, it was up to the artist to create “earthly angels.” That's why Rodin approached unformed clay “without knowing what exactly would result, like a worm working its way from point to point in the dark,” Rilke would write in the monograph. He would grab hold of it with his huge hands, work it over, spit on it and come to know it entirely, energizing the object and stirring it to life in the process. “The creative artist has no right to select. His work must be imbued with a spirit of unyielding dutifulness,” Rilke wrote.

Rodin's hyper-animated style of sculpting produced no less dynamic bodies of work. Rodin manipulated light to enhance the sense of movement in his figures. When the geometry of the planes aligned just right, light would coast and dart across the surfaces and create the illusion of motion. Sometimes Rodin measured the success of this effect by employing a candle test, which illuminated the points of intersection between light and shadow. Rodin once demonstrated the test to a student at the Louvre. Arriving in the evening, just before the museum closed, he held up a candle to the Venus de Milo. He instructed the student to watch the light as he moved it around her contours. Notice how it glided across over the surfaces without jumping at a single hollow, rift or seam. Candlelight revealed all flaws, he believed.

TOWARD THE END OF
Rilke's first month in Paris, Rodin received a commission for a portrait that would take up an inordinate amount of time. He began working through the weekends and became too busy to continue the long chats with Rilke. The poet decided to give the artist some space by spending more time on his own in Paris. He could trace Rodin's artistic development there by following the sculptor's
footsteps across his native city. Rilke went to the Louvre, where he was surprised to find himself suddenly formulating strong opinions about art: The
Winged Victory of Samothrace
was a “miracle” of motion to him now, whereas the
Venus de Milo
looked too passive and static for his liking.

Rilke spent a week, every day from nine until five, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where Rodin had copied so many illustrations as a boy. Rilke's goal was to do the same with the great French Symbolists, to trace the lines of Baudelaire and Valéry until he could glide across their grooves as smoothly as a fingertip on wet clay. He also pored over reproductions of the Gothic cathedrals—those “mountain ranges of the Middle Ages”—which he knew Rodin worshipped.

Each day after the library closed, the poet walked back toward his hostel along the Seine, pausing at the Île de la Cité to watch the sun set over the two towers of Notre Dame. The cathedral built for the Virgin Mary had been ravaged and restored in battle after battle, its ornaments were looted, yet its walls stood as strong as its namesake's will was chaste. To Rilke, it was all the more beautiful for enduring that humiliation. This was the hour when the river turned to “gray silk” and the city lights glowed like stars fallen from the sky. Once darkness fell, people would once again pollute the air with their music and perfume, but cathedrals always offered asylum from the senses. Like a forest or an ocean, a cathedral was a place where the world hushed up and time stood still.

It's nearly impossible to stand before a cathedral and not consider the labor that went into building it. The painstaking process of its creation is as compelling as the consummate structure. Rilke marveled at the thought of the cathedral builders returning to work day after day, year after year, setting one stone on top of another. The cathedrals would “never have been finished if they had had to grow out of inspirations,” he thought. The vision alone would have been too daunting. They were completed only because the artisans chose to make this work their lives.

Rodin's mantra,
Travailler, toujours travailler
, contradicted everything
Rilke had learned about the fusion of art and life in Worpswede. But the poet had spent years watching the clouds, anxiously awaiting a muse that never came. Rodin's example gave him permission to act. Now, to work was to live without waiting. More than that, Rilke concluded, “to work is to live without dying.”

CHAPTER
7

B
IOGRAPHERS WOULD BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING. THEY WOULD
describe a boy too busy etching his dull blade into wood to eat. A young man working at a vase factory in Sèvres. They would identify his early influences—Dante, Baudelaire and Michelangelo—and the moment of his prophetic awakening, the flash point upon which his future genius hinged. It would be both “common and touching.”

But this would be the wrong way to tell the story of Auguste Rodin, or at least not the way Rilke wanted to tell it. In October, Rodin went to visit a friend in Italy, leaving Rilke with three uninterrupted weeks to write his monograph. At his broken-down desk in the hostel, he began to imagine all the ways he might approach the dreaded first page.

He stared out the window at the brick wall on the other side. He paced and procrastinated. Unaccustomed to shutting his windows, he suffered the fatty stench of
pommes frites
wafting in and commingling with iodine vapors from the hospitals. When the odor became overwhelming, he took a walk to the Luxembourg Gardens, leaned his head against the gate and took a deep breath. But even then the smell of flowers, packed too tightly into their sidewalk gardens, irritated his delicate senses.

He would always return to the hotel by eight o'clock, before the
drunks invaded the streets. Back at his desk, the smell replaced by burnt kerosene from the lamp, he considered starting the book with explanations of the sculptures that made Rodin famous. But Rodin's fame had nothing to do with his work, he decided. He wrote it down on his stationery: “Fame is no more than the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.”

Nor could it begin with Rodin's childhood, because, after observing the sculptor in the flesh, Rilke had concluded that Rodin was born great. His eminence felt as eternal as that of a Gothic cathedral, or a chestnut tree in full bloom. To tell that story, Rilke would have to start in the branches and grow backward, reaching down into the trunk, then plunging into the dirt where the cracked seed lay.

Rilke laid down in bed, knowing he wouldn't sleep. The vibrating trams kept him from fully relaxing. Even if he did doze off for a moment, the neighbors would soon be coming home, stomping up the steps so loudly that he'd jolt upright in fear that they would barge right through the door.

Lying there awake, he would summon Baudelaire, like a guardian angel. Rilke would recite to himself the beginning of his prose poem “One O'clock in the Morning” from
Paris Spleen
: “At last! I am alone! . . . the tyranny of the human face has disappeared.” But then he would begin to compare himself to Baudelaire and a new anxiety would set in.

Rodin never had this problem. He never questioned why he was an artist, or whether he should be. He knew that such doubts only distracted one from work, and Rilke was beginning to accept that work was all there was. He had spent so much time with the master by now that he could hold an entire conversation with him in his head:

“What was your life like?”