You Must Change Your Life (32 page)

But for now Rilke comforted Kappus one last time as he entered this new phase of life, urging him to trust in his solitude on those nights stationed alone in “the empty hills.” The poet repeated some familiar wisdom about how all a person needs to feel at home in the world is to stand “before big natural things from time to time.”

In the last moment of his letter, however, Rilke makes a surprising reversal in the doctrine he had been ministering to Kappus for so long. He rejected Rodin's rigid ultimatum between art and life, now imploring the young poet not to regret his decision to abandon poetry for a more stable way of life—for “art too is only a way of living.”

CHAPTER
15

A
LIQUIDATOR APPOINTED TO SELL OFF THE HÔTEL BIRON
scheduled the auction for the end of June 1909. It was expected that a real estate developer would buy the dilapidated mansion, raze it and build a more desirable, modern building in its place.

“Imagine the shock and indignation of the old master upon receiving this announcement! His beloved Hôtel Biron was to share the fate of many another antique of Paris and fall victim to commercial vandalism,” wrote Sylvia Beach, future proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, of Rodin's likely reaction to the news.

Shocked and indignant only began to describe Rodin's feelings about the government's plans to demolish his studio and “enchanted abode,” as Choiseul called their secret lair. In the old days, kings personally housed the great artists in their palaces; now his country wanted to throw him into the street. Rodin would not endure this indignity without a fight. He wrote to a city councilman in late 1909 with a serious proposal. He would donate all of his works to the state upon his death, including the sculptures in “plaster, marble, bronze, stone, and my drawings, as well as my collection of antiquities,” to open a Rodin Museum on the site. The only condition was that he be
allowed to stay there for as long as he lived. Rodin pointed out that his art already had a permanent home in America, at the Metropolitan Museum, so it seemed only appropriate that his homeland should honor him in at least equal fashion.

The government promised to consider Rodin's offer, but in the meantime many of the building's tenants didn't want to hang their fate in the balance, and the artist enclave started to disband. The looming sale gave Matisse the final push he needed to move to the countryside. His academy had been taking up too much time, and he had grown disillusioned by the ambivalent treatment he had received in the Parisian press. His 1908 manifesto “Notes of a Painter” was an attempt to settle the score with critics, who were alternately calling him too academic—André Gide said his
Woman with a Hat
was “the result of theories”—and too wild. But the essay backfired and only opened him up to more attack. Now he was eager to withdraw from society altogether and paint alone in peace. He had even begun practicing abstinence as a way to preserve his “creative” resources for his art. The bacchanalian climate at the Hôtel Biron had not been especially conducive to his efforts.

Even Cocteau would soon leave, albeit against his wishes. His mother had found out about his forbidden hideaway when her ladies' club, the Friends of the Louvre, heard about the historic site and asked her if her son might be able to invite them in for a visit. Apparently everyone knew about his secret
garçonnière
except Madame Cocteau.

She was appalled that her well-bred son would keep company with such a depraved bunch of artists. Most likely she had the openly gay actor Édouard de Max, known for wearing eye shadow both on- and offstage, in mind. Even though the French public, living in a post–Oscar Wilde era, largely accepted de Max as a kind of
monstre sacré
, not everyone was so open-minded. “De Max was like the ocean, and like the ocean he was dreaded by mothers,” Cocteau said.

She threatened to suspend her son's allowance if he did not move out immediately. The Friends of the Louvre took their tour and then, with great sadness, Cocteau said goodbye to his “fairytale kingdom.”

Rilke spent the winter packing up his room. His publisher had invited him to Leipzig to finish the manuscript for
Malte
. There he could dictate his notes to a typist, rather than transcribing them all himself, so he paid a courtesy visit to Rodin to wish him farewell before leaving the Hôtel Biron, possibly for good. Rodin gave the poet a drawing as a Christmas present and wished him good luck. Then, on January 8, 1910, Rilke boarded the train for Germany, a suitcase full of loose notebook pages in hand, ready to lay Malte to rest once and for all.

“
SO THIS IS WHERE
people come to live; I would have thought it was a city to die in.” So begins the story of young Malte Laurids Brigge's arrival in Paris. It is the first entry in a novel comprised entirely of impressionistic sketches, dated like journal entries. The first opens “September 11, Rue Toullier”—a variation on Rilke's first address in Paris: 11 Rue Toullier.

From there the similarities between Rilke and his twenty-eight-year-old foil multiply. Malte is a gloomy northerner displaced in a merciless metropolis, an aspiring poet whose obsession with death and decay is drawn out in passages lifted directly from the author's own notebooks. While
Malte
is indisputably a work of fiction, it is worth remembering that Rilke nearly named it
The Journal of My Other Self
. One of the earliest modern novels, Malte's journey involves little plot. It instead takes its protagonist on a meandering search for identity, and for an answer to Rilke's own persistent question, How should one live?

Malte's story is one of eternally unfulfilled striving. He is a human sponge, steadily absorbing the pain of others. As Malte begins to harness his hyper-receptivity, he discovers its eye-expanding possibilities. “I am learning to see,” he says in the beginning. “I don't know why, but all enters into me more deeply and nothing remains at the level where once it used to cease.”

In the end, Malte returns home from Paris, a kind of Prodigal
Son. We do not know whether he is back for good, only that he is there for now. But in Rilke's retelling of the parable Malte does not seek his family's forgiveness; “How could they know about him?” He belonged to nobody now. For Malte, the Prodigal Son parable was really “the legend of a man who didn't want to be loved.” This was both his strength and, “in the end, is the strength of all young people who have left home.”

Rilke ends his story there, before we know how the young poet turns out. “He was now terribly difficult to love, and he felt that only One would be capable of it. But He was not yet willing,” read the novel's last lines. It's not that Malte didn't know what he had to do—he understood Baudelaire's challenge—he simply was not able to ultimately achieve it. “This test surpassed him,” Rilke wrote, “so much so that he sought it out instinctively until it attached itself to him and did not leave him any more. The book of Malte Laurids, when it is written sometime, will be nothing but the book of this insight, demonstrated in one for whom it was too tremendous . . .” He was one who would have been overpowered by the sight of the convulsive man in Paris, like the old Rilke was and like Kappus probably would have been. But Malte's failure marked Rilke's transformation.

The doppelgänger had been a hallmark of German Romanticism for a hundred years when Rilke became one of the first modernist authors to revive the literary device in the twentieth century. Rilke had to destroy his doppelgänger, traditionally a harbinger of doom, in order to liberate himself. At a time when psychologists were developing theories on mirroring and narcissism, many literary critics saw the doppelgängers of Rilke, Kafka and Hofmannsthal as vehicles for self-psychoanalysis. At one point Rilke asked Andreas-Salomé if she could tell that Malte “perishes in order to keep
me
, as it were, from perishing.”

She could, she said, writing, “Malte is not a portrait, but rather the use of a self-portrait precisely for the purpose of making a self-distinction from it.” Whether it was through the unrealized
potential of Malte or Rilke's late sister, the poet felt he could be reborn only when the soul of another died.

At the end of the month, Rilke wrote the final words of the book in Leipzig, at what his office mates at the publishing house had come to call “Malte Laurid's desk.” “It is finished, detached from me,” he said. Not that this accomplishment gave him much joy, naturally. Instead it was followed by a feeling of emptiness, from which he distracted himself with travel.

He went to Berlin, where he briefly reunited with Westhoff, who was on her way back to Worpswede after spending three months sculpting a bust of their friend the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, in the small village near the Sudeten mountains where he lived. Then, in April, he traveled to Italy once more, this time for a few days at the princess's castle. But he was disappointed to find that he was not her guest of honor. She was also hosting her son and the Austrian writer Rudolf Kassner, whom Rilke found intellectually intimidating. In conversation, Rilke, who never completed a university education, felt like he was failing a test he shouldn't have been taking in the first place. Although he and Kassner would become good friends in later years, at this time Rilke could not get away from him and Duino fast enough. He promised himself to return again when conditions were more conducive to work.

Then news came that the state had halted the sale of the Hôtel Biron to give officials more time to consider Rodin's proposal for a museum. The tenant exodus the previous year had left a private apartment vacant on the third floor, farther away from Rodin. It had a bedroom, a small kitchen and an office, and was separated from the other residents by a long hallway. A window spanning from floor to ceiling looked out onto a bright green linden tree in the garden. Rilke figured that if he had to endure proximity to other people it may as well be in the place where he had been most productive. He rented the space and made his way back to Paris in May 1910, even bringing some furniture and books along to make it feel like a home.

     

RILKE'S RETURN TO PARIS
marked the start of a series of endings in the poet's old way of life. No longer a sapling cowering beneath the shade of Rodin, he stepped into the sunlight of Paris that spring with more independence than ever before.

He had learned to manage his crowd anxiety and the intrusion of other people's lives upon his own. Ever since he had mastered the art of “inseeing” he could not only penetrate the interior worlds of objects and animals with his mind, he could also reverse the strategy to defend himself against penetration by others. In the past, going to the Louvre had meant bracing himself for an onslaught of flesh and faces, the real often indistinguishable to him from those on canvas. But now he learned to pause before his senses overwhelmed him, close his eyes and imagine fortifying his body's borders, as if they were castle walls.

“[I] stretched my contours, as one stretches violin strings, until one feels them taut and singing, and suddenly I knew I was fully outlined like a Dürer drawing.” With his psychic composition reinforced, he could now stand with the crowd before the
Mona Lisa
and appreciate her for the “incomparable” beauty she was.

At this point, Rilke's address book listed twelve hundred names, and he didn't hesitate to use it. When the Ballet Russes came to town Rilke joined Cocteau, Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky for a party after the performance at the nightclub Larue's. He soon befriended the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and Count Kessler introduced him, at last, to André Gide.

Gide was by then a writer of such stature that he seemed to have far more than six years on Rilke. He had already traveled extensively in North Africa, the landscape of his casually chilling 1902 novel
The Immoralist
. And the previous year he founded Paris's leading literary journal,
La Nouvelle Revue Française
.

In June Gide invited Rilke to a luncheon at his recently renovated west Paris mansion, Villa Montmorency, once home to Victor Hugo. Rilke was becoming proud of his French language abilities by then,
and he spoke fluently with Gide and the two Belgians who joined them, the artist Théo Van Rysselberghe and the interior designer Henry van de Velde, who had decorated both Count Kessler's home and the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar. The lunch marked the start of a meaningful and mutually beneficial friendship. When Rilke's publisher Insel-Verlag sent him the proofs of
Malte
that month, Rilke sent Gide one of the first copies.

The book was not greeted with much fanfare when it was released in July. The German-language press was largely favorable to Rilke's sensitive portrait of a young artist, but some were befuddled by its nonlinear narrative. “The
Notebooks
were not written for many, but the few for whom it was written will like it,” read one early review from Berlin. Another critic found Malte's hyper-susceptibility to stimuli “appropriate” for a moment in history that was characterized by “our yearning for internalizing.”