You Must Change Your Life (23 page)

Rodin with the Duchesse de Choiseul in his studio
.

Choiseul was hardly content to be merely Rodin's muse, however. She intended to be his dealer, his accountant, his wife and, ultimately, executor of his estate. She soon tightened the open-door policy of his studio, requiring that friends now get passes from the concierge before entering. Sometimes she refused them admittance altogether. When the aspiring sculptor and heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whose grandfather owned an apartment down the block (rented out at the time to Edith Wharton), came to study with Rodin, she was shocked to find the duchesse turning away his guests. “No use disturbing him since I am here. I handle everything. I am Rodin!” Choiseul reportedly said. Her tyrannical gatekeeping led one journalist to nickname her the Cerberus of Rodin's studio. Others called her “The Influenza.”

BACK IN MEUDON,
Rilke was oblivious to the tawdry rumors spreading about Rodin in Paris. The poet had been too consumed with the
artist's correspondence and the visits with Shaw to spend much time in Paris at all.

On April 23, two days after George Bernard Shaw had returned to London, Rilke was working on Rodin's mail when an unexpected letter arrived in the post. It was from William Rothenstein, one of Rodin's biggest patrons in London. Rothenstein had recently come to Paris as a favor to his friend Roger Fry, the newly appointed paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum, to lend his opinion about some works he was considering buying. While he was there, Rothenstein also visited Rodin, who introduced him to Rilke.

The poet was fond of this new acquaintance and had sent him a note soon after their meeting. Rilke wrote about how delighted he and Rodin would both be if he would one day visit them in Meudon. He went on to describe the success of the Panthéon celebration and repeated his praise for Shaw, whose new bust radiated the man's “astonishing intensity.”

The letter that arrived in Meudon on that April day was Rothenstein's cordial reply. He returned Rilke's pleasantries and thanked him for the kind words. Even though nothing he said was out of the ordinary, Rodin flew into a rage when he saw the note. He had not given Rilke permission to write
his
friend a personal letter. It didn't matter to Rodin that the words had been innocuous, he saw the act itself as an unforgivable breach of trust.

Rodin tore through his files and soon uncovered a second unauthorized letter, this one written to Rilke in German from another prominent collector and writer, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Rodin confronted his employee with the evidence in hand. Rilke, who withered in the face of any confrontation, struggled to explain that although the baron's letter was indeed addressed to him, it was done so
as Rodin's secretary
. He reminded Rodin that he had approved the original outgoing letter to the baron. Perhaps the master had simply forgotten?

As for the more serious violation, the exchange with Rothenstein, Rilke argued that Rodin had introduced him to the Englishman as a friend, not an employee. As such, Rilke had thought there was no harm in writing an innocent note to his new acquaintance.

Rodin refused to hear Rilke's excuses. His obstinacy surprised Rilke,
but others who knew the artist then had become accustomed to it. “Rodin's disposition had begun to change; he was impatient and despotic, and his commands fell like swords upon innocent necks. His warmest friends turned from him in dismay,” wrote his close friend Judith Cladel.

Rodin dismissed Rilke from his job at once, “brutally and unjustly,” thought Cladel when she heard the news. To Rilke, it was as if he were being thrown out “like a thieving servant.” After nine months of devoted service, banishment was a harsh punishment for the crime of opportunism. Rothenstein himself said he was shocked to learn years later that the letter he had sent to “poor Rilke” that day had been such “a source of grievance to Rodin.” But he also recognized that Rodin was a notoriously “difficult person to deal with.”

This was far from the first time Rodin had exploded at an employee. He responded to any misstep like a lion startled from his sleep, lashing out in rage, then acknowledging his overreaction later. He repeatedly fired and rehired his assistants. With one of his favorites he went through this cycle five times in just two years.

When directed at his work, the artist's destructive energy resulted in fascinating amputations and fragments. When directed at people, it was merely destructive. When one young model, the future silent film star Lou Tellegen, brought his own clay figure to Rodin for critique—the first he ever made—the artist took one glance, picked up a tool, and started hacking into it himself.

“When he was through, there was hardly anything left of my original figure. Of what remained, he destroyed the whole mass and saying, ‘Begin it over again,' walked away,” Tellegen wrote in his memoirs. Rodin “always called a spade a spade—that is, if he could think of no more vulgar name for it.”

By the time Rilke arrived, Rodin's fame had made him even more sensitive to perceived betrayal. It also could not have helped to see his most loyal disciple fawning over Shaw during those stressful weeks leading up to the Panthéon inauguration, when he had needed support the most. By evening, Rilke had packed his belongings from the little cottage in Meudon and was gone.

     

RODIN DID NOT HAVE
time to interview candidates for Rilke's replacement. So when an acquaintance from a well-known painting family, Albert Ludovici, suggested his son for the position, Rodin hired him on the spot.

The twenty-five-year-old English writer Anthony Ludovici had admired Rodin's work since he first saw it at the 1900 World's Fair. But when he arrived for his new job in Meudon, to say he was disappointed would be an understatement. The sculptor looked old, hardened, and exhausted by the endless stream of visitors to his studio. He was consumed almost entirely with bust commissions then, yet the rest of his production galloped on relentlessly. Rodin now ran a veritable factory, churning out replicas of old works in multiple sizes and materials. For each wax or clay work that Rodin sculpted, his assistants made up to a dozen versions in plaster. Some of these would then be cast in bronze or sent out to a stone workshop to be carved in marble.

Rodin's rough, country demeanor horrified the young sophisticate, who found him to be “uneducated, coarse, ill-mannered, and intimately associated in his home life with a woman,” Rose, who was “very much beneath him.” Unlike Rilke, Ludovici did not think he could learn anything from talking to Rodin and decided to take his breakfasts alone.

Ludovici also thought Rodin could be colossally unfair, requiring his staff to treat him with “unflinching sympathy, tolerance and devotion,” to the point of their own self-effacement, yet rarely returning the goodwill. He was not surprised when one of Rodin's maids told him that his predecessor's departure was a case of “the proverbial
pot de terre et le pot de fer
.” In Aesop's story, the delicate clay pot always cracks when it tries to play with the overpowering iron pot.

Like Rilke, Ludovici, too, wrote a book about his time with Rodin, but what his
Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin
lacks in unbridled awe, it makes up for in cool objectivity. Ludovici uses it to point out Rodin's cruel treatment of his son, Auguste Beuret, whose name he never once heard the artist utter. Ludovici saw firsthand the heartbreaking letters Auguste wrote his father, often addressed to “Monsieur
Rodin, Statuaire, Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur.” Auguste would see his father's name in the newspaper and then write to congratulate him on whichever award or exhibition was making headlines then. Ludovici also knew that these letters usually went unanswered.

Auguste embarrassed his father, who wrote off the boy as slow-witted his entire life. It is unclear whether Auguste suffered from an actual disability, or whether Rodin's assessment was overly harsh. Some biographers have claimed that Auguste fell out of a window as a child. But this story has never been confirmed, nor were any diagnoses of brain damage made. In any case, Rodin saw the boy as a burden from the outset and for several years sent him to live with his aunt.

In adulthood, Auguste fared no better in his father's eyes. Ludovici was troubled to learn that, despite Rodin's fortune, the young man lived like a pauper, barely eking out a living as a secondhand clothes salesman.

After six months, Ludovici, feeling overworked and underappreciated, quit his post as Rodin's secretary. He later wrote that his tenure had ended much like Rilke's had, “in a violent quarrel over a trifling misunderstanding in which Rodin was insufferably rude.”

Ludovici went on to become a conservative Christian writer and a Nietzsche scholar of some renown. But his early support for Hitler and the eugenics movement soon relegated him to obscurity. A year after World War II ended, Ludovici took a break from writing about the feminist and black invasion of Great Britain to review a new English edition of Rilke's monograph on Rodin. Ludovici wrote that he had initially expected the poet to have used the opportunity to write some vengeful words against Rodin for firing him.

In fact, Rilke had briefly considered it. When it came time to publish his second essay in the book, the poet debated whether to write it in a more critical tone. He had begun to worry that his early enthusiasm for the artist had been colored by “the demands Rodin taught us to make,” and not necessarily his actual achievements. He ultimately decided, however, that the timing was not right “to say anything new about Rodin now.” Introducing contradictory opinions on the artist would only confuse readers and spoil the book's celebratory spirit.

Ludovici admired the conviction and originality of Rilke's book. He concluded in his review that “Rilke was much too generous and understanding a nature, and too profound in his knowledge of humanity, to allow mere accidents of temper in an over-worked and much lionised artist to influence his interpretation of that artist's life-work.”

IN THE GOSPEL OF
Luke, the parable of the Prodigal Son tells the tale of a wayward son's return home to his father. The younger of two brothers, he withdraws his inheritance early and spends it all traveling the world, while the elder boy stays home and works for their father. Eventually the prodigal son's money runs out and he must return home, tired, hungry, and penniless.

Upon seeing his long-lost son, the father rushes to embrace him.
Prepare a feast
, he tells the other boy, who is horrified by the suggestion. Why should they celebrate his reckless, selfish brother, especially when he had been loyal for years and received no such honor? The father responded that it did not matter what the prodigal boy had done in the past. All that mattered was that he had come back.

This parable of forgiveness was on Rilke's mind as he looked for a new home in Paris. To his surprise, his lifeline came from another prodigal child adrift in the city, his old friend Paula Becker. Three months earlier, Becker had left Worpswede in the middle of the night, while her husband slept. She wrote a letter to Rilke telling him of her plan to come to Paris, declaring in it, “I'm not Modersohn and I'm not Paula Becker anymore either. I am Me.” She told him that she was eager to see him again, to see Rodin and, most of all, to work.

Rilke hadn't expected Becker to make it this long on her own, but she was content living with nothing but an easel, a pine-board chair and worktable. She had moved into her usual hotel a few blocks north of the Luxembourg Gardens, at 29 Rue Cassette. It was cramped but cheap, and allowed week-to-week leasing. When Rilke called on her looking for lodging in May, she helped him rent a room upstairs.

He immediately moved into the apartment, which looked out onto a church nave that plunged into the sky like a sinking ship, Rilke thought. He sat down at his new desk to break the news of his firing to Westhoff. He tried to bear the insult with grace, writing to her that perhaps Rodin had sensed his suffering and dismissed him out of mercy. The arrangement had to end at some point, he reasoned; maybe this was actually a “happy” outcome.

But Rilke exposed his true anguish in a letter to Rodin the next day. “I am profoundly hurt by this,” he wrote. Rodin's casual dismissal made him feel like a mere employee, while he had seen himself as “a private secretary in external terms only,” and, as Andreas-Salomé later said, “in reality a friend in a full and free exchange.”

“It was not to your secretary that you gave those familiar quarters,” Rilke continued in the letter. He defended his actions once again, claiming that the infractions were mere misunderstandings, not breaches of trust. But regardless of what Rodin ultimately believed, Rilke pledged his everlasting devotion: “I understand that the wise organism of your life must immediately reject anything which appears detrimental to maintaining its functions intact . . . I shall see you no more—but, like those apostles who remained lamenting and alone, life begins anew to me, the life which will celebrate your great example and will find in you its consolation, its honesty and its strength.”

For Rilke, exile from Rodin was more than merely hurtful. It also cut short the crucial progress he was making as an artist. He felt like a grapevine pruned at the wrong time, and “what should have been a mouth has become a wound.” He captured his vulnerable state in “Self-Portrait from the Year 1906,” a poem he wrote that month:

In the glance still childhood's fear and blue

and humility here and there, not of a servile sort,

yet of one who serves and of a woman.

The mouth made as a mouth, large and defined,

not persuasive, but in a just behalf

affirmative.

As he wrote these lines, Rilke also became the subject of another portrait. Becker needed to practice figure painting for her classes at the Académie Julian, but could not afford to pay model fees. Rilke had agreed to pose for her in the mornings. But then, during one sitting, a knock came at the door. Becker peeked between her curtains onto the street, then yanked them shut again. She spun around and whispered to Rilke, “It's Modersohn.”