(5 May 2025)
(13 094 words)
(Time to read: 69 minutes)
In March 1900, Rilke completed a translation of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, while continuing to immerse himself in the Russian language in preparation for his impending second trip to Russia with Lou Andreas-Salomé. The trip, which began in Berlin by train and then proceeded via Warsaw, lasted from 7 May until 25 August. The first stop-over was Moscow, where Rilke and Lou stayed between 9 and 31 May. The couple pursued a demanding itinerary: “they stopped in cafés to plan each day and to share their observations … In the mornings, they visited picture galleries and museums and attended church services, where possible. In the afternoons, they wandered more or less aimlessly, poking their heads even into slums and dark alleys. In the evening, they tried to follow up social connections or went to the theatre or just talked” (Ralph Freedman, The Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York. 1996. pp. 111-112).
Behind such tourism lay, however, a deeper mission: to find the spirit of Russia as “a form of lived myth” (Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs. New York. 1991. p. 87). It was the imposition of an ideal. As Ralph Friedman notes, “Rilke’s command of Russian art history and culture had become more solid now, but the illusion of aesthetic religiosity infused with mysticism, and his lack of interest in the social and political reality of in-de-siècle Russia, remained unaltered” (Freedman, p. 109). Both wished “to see Russia wrapped up in a mystical veil” (Freedman, p. 112), and that veil was represented by one man in particular: Leon Tolstoy. They paid a visit to the famous novelist on 1 June 1900, but it was not a success. The couple arrived uninvited and found Tolstoy prickly and unsociable (with domestic problems). Realism (Tolstoy’s realism) would dispel, at least temporarily, the romantic myth of a broad-hearted, spiritual Russia.
Romance would suffer in one further way. Rilke and Andreas-Salomé’s trip to Russia took them over a vast stretch of the country. They visited and stayed (often for weeks) in Tila and Kiev, and then to Kasan and Saratov on the Volga, before returning to Moscow and its neighbouring district of Tver Oblast, where they met (in a second attempt to find the quintessential Russia) the peasant poet, Spiridon Drozhzhin. They reached their final destination, Saint Petersburg, in late July 1900. It was too much: too much contact between two highly strung individuals. Lou could not handle Rilke’s bouts of extreme emotions, “the rage of his inner problematic”, his “explosions of feelings that turned into monsters, the monstrous” (Looking Back, pp. 90 and 89). She fled from him and stayed away for almost an entire month, visiting her relations in Finland, refusing to return to Saint Peterburg in spite of his increasingly desperate (and pathetic) letters of entreaty (the first, now unfortunately lost, she described as “almost depraved on account of [its] presumption and arrogance” (Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton. 1975. p. 31). Lou, however, had come to a final decision (although this would be purely a temporary final decision): his relationship with her must cease: it had become his unhealthy dependency.
On their return to Germany in August the two parted company. On 26 August 1900, Rilke accepted an invitation from the artist Heinrich Vogeler, whom he had known since 1898 when he had first met him in Florence. Vogeler had been commissioned by the Insel Verlag to provide illustrations for Rilke’s forthcoming book, About the Beloved God and Other Things (Vom lieben Gott und Anderes: An Große für Kinder), and sought the advice of the author. Vogeler lived in an artists’ colony in Worpswede (founded in 1889), near Bremen. Located in an austere windswept plain of peat bogs, heather and slow-moving water courses, its light was thin and ethereal, the perfect medium for impressionist nature studies. As Rilke was later to write, “the peculiar colour-filled light of this high sky does not differentiate but embodies everything that rises up in it and rests in it with the same kindness”. It is in such a landscape that the artistic eye searches out “the birch-tree, the moorland cottages, the stretches of heath, the people, the evenings and the days, of which no two are alike, and in which no two hours could be exchanged one with another” (Rilke, Worpswede. Insel Verlag. 1987. pp. 40 and 42).
The poet had briefly visited Worpswede two years earlier at Christmas 1898 but now he stayed for six weeks, living in Vogeler’s rustic art-deco house, the “Barkenhoff”. Rilke participated in the eco-centred “alternative” counterculture world of the colony with its “nude bathing [probably without Rilke], moonlit dancing, and weekly concerts and poetry readings” (Jill Lloyd, Introduction to The Modersohn / Becker Correspondence. Translated by Ulrich Baer. Eris. 2024, p. 10). He gave poetry readings and celebrated the Jugendstil rustic art (with its quasi-medieval aura) that was produced there by Vogeler and by his colleagues, Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn and Fritz Overbeck.
Rilke experienced Worpswede on two levels: on an aesthetic and on a personal level. The former included a newfound openness to stark (perhaps almost bleak) nature, “the way that all this lies here, so close and strong and real that one can’t possibly ignore or forget it” (see Diaries of Young Poet. Translated by David Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton. 1977. p.147). The personal level involved a discovery (or rediscovery of the feminine, perhaps Rilke saw it as the anima principle), because the colony included two promising young female artists, Paula Becker (born 1876) and Clara Westhoff (born 1878). Both had come to Worpswede “to attend live-drawing classes alongside other women who were excluded from state-run art academies” (Lloyd p. 9). Rilke soon found that the two levels of experience could merge. As he wrote in his diary:
“I am gradually beginning to comprehend this life that passes through large eyes into eternally waiting souls … In how poor a sense do we actually see compared with these people! How richly these people must journey. And when once they truly arrive at themselves after this blissful apprenticeship-time, what a wonderful language they must possess, what images for everything experienced! Then they must confide themselves the way landscapes do, as with clouds, winds, things going down …” (Diaries of Young Poet, p.163).
Rilke befriended the two women, whose uniquely feminine (as Rilke viewed it) artistic grasp of the world opened a new way of seeing. One evening both come to visit Rilke:
“I opened the door to my room, which was growing cool and dark blue like a grotto. I pushed open my window, and then they came to join the miracle and leaned out brightly into the moonlit night, which developed their laughter-hot cheeks in cold. And suddenly they all became so poignant in their gazing. Half fully aware, i.e. as painters, half intuitively, i.e. as girls. Initially, the mood seized them, the single note of this misty nighty night with its almost full moon over the three poplar trees. This mood of faintly tarnished silver robbed them of their defenses and forced them into the dark, yearning filled life of girls”.
Rilke had befriended both Paula and Clara, but it was with the former that (in the words of one commentator), an “amitié amourese” (Lloyd p. 7) arose (and, as “the blond painter”, she appears repeatedly in his diary entries). As Rilke noted in his diary on 10 September, he was taken by both women but,
“particularly with the blond female painter [Paula – Clara was a sculptress], I found yet again how her eyes, whose dark centres were so smooth and solid, when fully developed opened up exactly like roses in full bloom, soft and warm, and contained gentle shadows and delicate hues as on the frame and breast of tiny backward receding skins of leaves”. The aesthetic is not far from the erotic.
Whilst at Worpswede, Rilke wrote a number of poems, including one with the title “The Betrothed”. The poem is ostensibly about the fiancée of Heinrich Vogeler, but it is possible that the real subject was Paula Becker:
“I have felt her presence in this house
the blond bride, who suffered long, alone.
All hours sing with her soft voice,
and all steps follow her step’s tone”.
What Rilke did not know was that Paula Becker had formed (a still unofficial) bond with one of the painters in the colony, Otto Modersohn, whom she was to marry in May 1901. Although he had intended to stay longer (indeed, according to his diary entry for 27 September 1900, stay permanently), Rilke left Worpswede abruptly without a leave-taking the following week on 5 October, and returned to Berlin. He moved his possessions out of Villa Waldfrieden where he had been living with Andreas-Salomé and her husband and took up residence in an apartment in Misdroyer Strasse, but remained living in the south Berlin suburb of Schmargendorf, in proximity to Waldfrieden and to Lou. Leaving Worpswede brought Rilke close to an emotional trauma, as a poem (later published in his Book of Images) written at the time indicates. It is titled “Solemn Hours”:
“Whoever weeps now anywhere in the world,
weeps without reason in the world,
weeps for me.
Whoever laughs now anywhere in the night.
laughs without reason,
laughs at me.
Whoever walks now anywhere in the world,
walks without reason in the world,
walks towards me.
Whoever dies now anywhere in the world,
dies without reason in the world,
looks at me”.
Rilke’s spirits were low. In early November 1900, he attended a performance of Maeterlinck’s play “The Death of Tintagiles”. Soon after, he wrote in his diary:
“Maeterlinck’s drama, with all its events and circumstances, with its tenderness and longing and infinitely fragile happiness, has been shaped inside one feeling, inside this great gray fear that manifests itself as the eternal vis-a-vis all events”.
It is possible that “Rilke is here painting a picture, not only of Maeterlinck’s world, but of his own. That ‘gray fear’ – sometimes great and terrible, sometimes small and niggling, and not seldom turning from one to the other with frightening alacrity – was fast becoming the dominant feature of his psychic state, after his abrupt departure from Worpswede” (Daniel Jospeh Polikoff, In the Image of Orpheus. Rilke. A Soul History. Chiron Publications. 2011. p. 231). A physical separation may have taken place between Rilke and Becker, but not a separation of minds. Within two short weeks, a period of lengthy and detailed correspondence between the two had begun. Over the next five months, they would converse on matters relating to art and poetry, letters that often included lyrical words on nature and the passing of the seasons. There are also revealing insights into Rilke’s compositional technique as in the letter of 24 January 1901:
“My way of doing things seems to be to keep pearls secreted away and then, in a fortuitous hour, to cast a great piece of jewelry, in which I can secretly set the pearl that’s been hidden away, now concealed in the festive procession of richly attired words that returns the pearl with a thousand triumphs” (Modersohn-Becker / Rilke Correspondence p. 72).
Such letters were testimonies to a bond that both seemed to want to retain and even make flourish. On 11 January 1901, Paula moved temporarily to Berlin (staying with relatives), to undertake a series of cookery classes in preparation for her future domestic life. Immediately after her arrival, Paula went to visit Rilke in his apartment in Schmargendorf, a visit that Rilke treated like a visitation. In a letter written to her soon after, on 13 January, he described how he felt once her visit had come to an end, and he had said farewell at a tram stop:
“I returned home. And the green lamp was lit, and the candle where we had been sitting. I did not touch a thing, so as not to strip off the fine layer of your having been there. I went up to my desk and said [quoting an early poem]: ‘you pale child, each evening the singer / shall stand darkly among your things …’ and pursued the willing verse ever further and imagined you still to be here, listening and remembering. It was as if you really were very close by – there where my words ended, at the furthest seam of sound” (Modersohn-Becker / Rilke Correspondence 65).
The language and its tones of devotion suggest a love letter, and it is quite possible that Rilke still harboured hopes that her attachment to Otto Modersohn would be temporary (although an earlier letter of 12 November 1900 sent by her seems to point to an engagement). The words of Rilke’s letter represent an act of homage, of worship even, but the reality (that Rilke clearly did not want to see) was that Paula Becker saw Rilke as a fellow artist and a dear friend, not as a putative lover. Then on 8 February 1901, there came a letter from her that finally shattered Rilke’s romantic hopes, in which she called herself for the first time “Otto Modersohn’s intended” [‘Braut’].
Rilke (a daily letter writer) did not reply for over a week, and only then with three short vague sentences (and no mention of her betrothment). Her designation as “Braut” must have made it entirely clear to Rilke that his increasingly intimate letters to her were no longer appropriate Their correspondence was effectively over, but for one revealing letter sent to Paula on the 21 February, where he told her that he and Clara Westhoff (who was a cosignatory of the letter) had set up home in Westerwede, a short distance from the artists’ colony of Worpswede. Rilke and Clara Westhoff had become lovers during a visit to Berlin that Clara had made in early February, to see both Rilke and Paula Becker, whose birthday it was on the 8th of that month. In April a second communication to Paula followed, in which Rilke included a wedding announcement. Rilke married Clara in the same month, on 28 April. A daughter, Ruth, was born on 13 December. Clara was probably unaware that “Ruth” was the nom de plume of Lou Andreas-Salomé in her early publications (see Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back. p. 194)
Returning to Berlin had also meant for Rilke returning to Lou; this time not as a lover but as a friend. He would meet her, have dinner with her and her husband in their home, and attend the theatre as, for example, the dress rehearsal of Hauptmann’s “Michael Kramer” on 19 December 1900, a play that deeply impressed Rilke. Lou was in the dark about developments in Rilke’s private life, but when she discovered that he was still in touch (and in at least quasi romantic way with both Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff) she was outraged. What was intended on Lou’s part as the final break between them (although this would not be the final break) took place on 15 February 1901, when Rilke announced his engagement to Clara. Rilke was, Lou felt, wasting his time with such involvements and jeopardising the integrity of his artistic future. On 26 February, she wrote him a letter superscribed as the “Last Appeal”. She had had enough of the “other one” of Rilke’s personality, “now depressed, now overexcited”. But on Rilke’s final visit, she allowed herself a way out from this severance, writing on the back of Rilke’s grocery bill: “if one day much later, you feel yourself in dire straits, there is a home here with us for the worst hour” (see Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton. 2006, pp. 41-42). The next day, Rilke vacated his rooms in Schmargendorf, and moved into a hotel in Bremen, before his final departure to Westerwede later that month.
The engaged couple found a farmhouse that had long intrigued Clara. It possessed for Rilke too a particular charm:
“a house like this in the middle of the moor, without neighbours (except for a few out of the way farmsteads), lying on no street and known to no one, is a good refuge, a place into which one can blend with a kind of inconspicuous mimicry, and is designed, forwards and backwards, in future and in memory, for a life full of equilibrium” (quoted in Polikoff p. 255).
Paula witnessed these events with dismay, believing that Clara had sacrificed her personality in getting married. Rilke was aware of the letters that Paula had sent to her friend and on 12 February 1902, he replied to her on behalf of Clara and himself. He wrote, you say that “everything is supposed to be as it was, and yet everything is different from what it has been. If your love for Clara Westhoff wants to do something now, then its work and task is this: to catch up with what it has missed. For it has failed to see where this person has reached, it has failed to accompany her in her broader development, it has failed to spread itself over the new distance that this person embraces”. Far from sacrificing herself to Rilke, Clara had found a “new solitude”, which fed into her life and art, and it was this solitude that Rilke wanted to protect (see Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton. Norton. No date. pp. 64-65).
It was in Westerwede between 18 and 25 September 1902 that Rilke wrote the second part of his Book of Hours, the thirty-four poems of the “Book of Pilgrimages”. Compared to the first volume, “The Book of Monastic Life”, the poems in the second are long and sometimes convoluted. As one commentator has noted, “the relationship with God is difficult and one that the poems have to work their way towards. They are generally more tentative and feel precarious” (Charlie Lough. Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford UP. 2020. p. 68). The Pilgrimage volume is correspondingly marked by a mood that is sombre and introspective. The initial stanza of the first poem possesses sentiments that are clearly autobiographical:
“you are not surprised at the force of the storm –
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the avenues streaming. And you know:
he from whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing to him, as you stand at the window”.
The confidant self-presentation of the icon-making monk in the first volume of the Book of Hours gives way in this second volume to a poetic voice vulnerable and self-doubting, a state of mind that it attempts to overcome by means religious and artistic. In this poem, “the poetic persona consistently looks to God to restore a unity and presence it has lost. In this first poem, the poet views the storm from a distance and, in the recurrent motif that lends the poem its title, expresses his desire to move forward towards the force he recognises as somehow redemptive – a force, however, external to him, one he does not possess or control” (Polikoff p. 257).
Notes of non-attainment determine the emotional mood of the series. “I have been shattered to pieces”, we learn in the second poem, “I was stranger to myself”. Indeed, “the poems in the second book remain within a rhythm of constative, assertive and insistingly questioning sentences”. God, the invoked one, is both spectator and judge. “The polarity between the poetic subject and God is a product of this entire series. This polarity is poetically productive exactly because it is never closed and can never fulfil itself” (Wolfgang Braungart in Rilke Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Metzler. 2004. p. 224).
Rilke’s home life in Westerwede gradually became financially but also, it is clear, personally untenable. He was no longer a student and could no longer rely on the monthly allowance made by his relatives in Prague who controlled the family estate. He attempted to find alternative sources of income, offering his services as an editor and a reviewer to a number of journals and organisations, and contacting putative benefactors hoping to secure their charity. In January 1902, he wrote to the head of the Bremen art museum, Gustav Pauli, in tones half-pleading, half-cajoling, to see whether a position could not be found for him. This was followed in April by a letter to the Countess Franziska Reventlow, where he outlined his “daily worries” about money, and in July he wrote to Friedrich Huch, a fellow author that he had known since his Munich days, saying that he would be forced to stop writing unless he could obtain financial assistance from somewhere. And there were other letters of entreaty. All in vain. The only secure promise he had received was an advance on the monograph on Rodin he was due to write for the Insel Verlag, but this would not be enough to support a family.
Between 1 May and 28 1902, Rilke wrote his book on Worpswede and the artists who worked there (but significantly there is no mention of Paula Becker or Clara Westhoff). It was to be his last literary endevour in Westerwede. The Rilke household was effectively dissolved in mid-May 1902 (Ruth would soon be sent to live with Clara’s parents). Looking back from 13 November 1903 in a letter to Andreas-Salomé, Rilke speculated on what had gone wrong: “I had a house, a wife, a child, had something real and undeniable, believed that this would make me more visible, more tangible, more factual. But, Lou, Westerwede existed, it was real, for I built the house myself and made everything in it. And yet, it was really outside me. I was not part of it and was not taken up with it”.
The poet left Westerwede, spending time in Bremen and then between June and July, staying with Emil Prinz von Schoenaich-Carolath in Schloss Haseldorf near Pinneberg in Schleswig-Holstein (the first of many aristocratic dwellings that would offer Rilke hospitality). The prince was also a poet, and Rilke had visited him briefly in September the previous year with Clara, but now he came alone, for a longer stay of six weeks. This was, in literary terms a formative experience. The details of the castle, its necro-romantic customs, and the prince’s partial Danish ancestry, would provide essential material, and a certain inspiration of atmosphere, for Rilke’s later Malte Notebook.
During all of this, a new book of poetry was published: the Book of Images (Buch der Bilder), in July 1902 in the Axel Juncker Verlag in Berlin. The sacerdotal focus of the Book of Hours is replaced here with a sharper perception of nature, which clearly reflects the influence of Rilke’s Worpswede period. It is an influence that can be felt from the very first poem, “Entrance” (“Eingang”):
“Whoever you may be: at evening step forth
out of your room, where nothing is unknown;
your house, the last, stands before the distance:
whoever you may be.
Lifting fatigued eyes now barely able
to free their gaze beyond the word sill,
you raise slowly a single black tree
to set against the sky: slight, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is wide
and like a word ripening on through silence.
And as your will comes to grasp its sense,
tenderly your eyes let it go …
(translated in Ranson / Sutherland, Rilke: Selected Poems. Oxford UP. 2011. p. 25).
Rilke’s move towards a sharpened perception of the single physical object will come increasingly to inform his poetry, culminating in the first volume of the New Poems (Neue Gedichte) of 1907. Here, in this earlier poem, that move is thematised in the depiction of a tree framed against the sky. It is a gesture worthy of the Anglo-American Imagist school, which included amongst others Ezra Pound. The tree, sharply observed, has “made the world”. It is both a natural object but also an artistic statement, like “a word ripening through silence”. It is a statement waiting to be understood.
Rilke returned from Schloss Haseldorf to Westerwede in July 1902, just in time to leave it. In spite of the achievement of the second Book of Hours, Westerwede had been no place for artistic growth. For that he had to rub against the harder grain of the city. The pilgrimage continued. A final decision was taken. On 28 August , Rilke went to live in Paris, after receiving a commission from the art historian, Professor Richard Muther, the editor of a series of monographs on modern artists called Die Kunst (Art), to write a book on the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Rodin was to build on Rilke’s experience of Worpswede but, at the same time, transform it.
On 28 August 1902, on his arrival in Paris Rilke, moved into an apartment on 11 rue Toulilier, near Le Jardin du Luxembourg. On 1 September , he paid his first visit to Rodin in the latter’s workshop in the Rue de l’Université. The visit had been arranged on 1 August, when he had written a (rather ingratiating) letter to the sculptor, explaining that had been commissioned to write a book on “the master”. On 2 September, the poet visited Rodin in his home in Meudon, a short train journey from the centre of Paris. Rilke had been impressed by the “ordering spirit” (Freedman 168) of Rodin’s work (that he knew by photograph only) and was enthralled to find that same spirit embodied in the man himself. As he wrote to Clara, “he was kind and gentle. And it seemed to me that I had always known him; that I was only seeing him again. I found him smaller and yet powerful, kindly and noble”. (Rilke, Letters 1892-1910, p.77. Translation modified). Unlike his alienating encounter with Tolstoy in Russia, Rilke was made to feel at home by Rodin, encouraged to enter into personal conversation (although – at this stage – Rilke’s poor spoken French was an obstacle), and invited to join Rodin and family at mealtimes.
Rilke viewed Rodin as “a liberating Messiah of Art” (Introduction to Rilke and Andreas-Salomé p. xiv). As Andreas-Salomé later wrote (as she was reading Rilke’s study of Rodin), “for me there is something like a marriage in this book, a sacred dialogue, a sense of being ushered into … what has become a mystique” (quoted in Freedman, p. 202). Personal affinity soon became an aesthetic influence. Rodin’s insistence on structured form in his sculptures acted for Rilke as a model for a new type of poem, the “Kunst-Ding”, “a poem in which the obtrusive interferences of an authorial self and all subjective, accidental occasions have been replaced by an inwardly tensile, self-contained sculptural presence, delimited by strong contours but filled with an utmost of interacting of visual and visible reality” (see Edward Snow, Introduction to Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton. 2006. p. xiv). As Rilke wrote to Andreas-Salomé on 8 August 1903, “what he gazes at and surrounds with his gazing is always for him the only thing, the present thing, the one world in which everything happens”.
Rilke was uplifted by his contact with Rodin, but in his experience of Paris he went in the contrary direction. It has been argued that “Paris became his new Russia” (Freedman p.170). The opposite was true. Paris was his anti-Russia. Where the latter country spoke to him of spiritual integrity, depth of pious feeling and healthy contact with the soil, Paris was a cosmopolitan nightmare, shallow, brazen and physically and morally sick. After just two weeks, on 17 September, Rilke wrote to Heinrich Vogeler, describing his “instinctive disgust” with the city, sentiments repeated in a letter to Otto Modersohn on 31 December: Paris was “a difficult, difficult anxious city. And the beautiful things that are here do not compensate, even with their radiant eternity, for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets”. And yet it was precisely this cruelty and confusion that would provide the macabre but compelling thematics for Rilke’s greatest prose work: The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910).
In early October 1902, Rilke moved into a new apartment, 3 rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, a short walk to the south of his previous dwelling, once again in the vicinity of Le Jardin du Luxembourg. On 8 October, Clara arrived. The “couple” lived in the same building but in separate rooms. Between mid-November and mid-December 1902, Rilke wrote the first essay on Rodin., which was published in early 1903 to the grateful approval of Rodin himself. In February 1903, Rilke’s Worpswede (with chapters devoted to all its artists, except Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff) was published. On 10 February , Paula Modersohn-Becker arrived in Paris. This was a period of physical and emotional trauma for Rilke, which included ongoing attacks of influenza with endless fever nights (they too would appear in his Malte book). This discomfort was heightened by the tensions between the ex-Worpswede trio. Paula found the obsessive work ethic of Rilke and Clara stultifying and repressive of personality, whilst Rilke himself seemed to her to have descended into an epigone of his idol, Rodin. She left after five weeks.
On 23 March, Rilke left Paris and travelled to Viareggio, an Italian coastal town in northern Tuscany: “my strength and my courage had dwindled to practically nothing, and I went away with the last vestige of them” (letter to Andreas-Salomé 30 June). He remained there until 28 April 1903, writing between 13 and 20 April the third and final volume of The Book of Hours, the thirty-four poems of “The Book of Poverty and Death”. Although there is a discernible thematic continuity with the earlier volumes, a grasping of spiritual growth within an early Christian ethos, “once again, the initial situation of the poetic persona has altered dramatically” (Polikoff p. 286). Indeed, the voice of quiet desperation seems to deepen throughout that volume (through personal symbolism) and relativise that ethos, as in the opening poem:
“Perhaps I am pushing through heavy mountains
in hard veins, like ore, alone;
and am down so deep, I see no end
and nothing far; everything grows near
and all that nearness turns to stone”
The volume introduces a dimension of Zeitkritik that is rare in Rilke’s writing. As Freedman notes, in this concluding cycle “darkened by the interior horrors of Paris, the monk’s prayers [of volume 1] and the pilgrim’s pain [of volume 2] merged with those of modern cosmopolitan man. Extending the birth of man to the birth of Christ, the Man-God is visibly caught in the flotsam of the large cities, the degeneracy of an industrial century projected onto nature” (Freedman, p.188):
“Day on day, sped by an illusion, they try but fail to find real lives,
and money rises, takes all their strength,
and is as large as the easterly wind, and they are small,
and hollowed out, waiting for their wine, for all
the juice of animal and human poisons,
to stir them into pointless action”.
Rilke did not lose contact with the external world while he was in Viareggio. As always, letters formed his conduit with the former. Rilke had been contacted by Franz Xavier Kappus, a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Military Academy in Vienna, who had asked Rilke for advice regarding the poetry that he was writing. On 23 April 1903. Rilke wrote back, beginning a fitful correspondence between 1903 and 1908 that eventually led to Rilke penning “Letters to a Young Poet”, which was published posthumously in 1929.
Rilke returned to Paris on 1 May 1903 where he remained until July. During that time, he took his life in his hands and on 23 June he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé at her new address (imparted by a mutual friend, Johanna Niemann) in Westend, Berlin. For a poet of accented sensibility and heightened vulnerability, it was a brave step. He was politeness itself and asked if he might stay with her and her husband on his next visit to that city or, if not, at least have written contact with her. Lou replied in warm tones on 27 June: ” you may stay with us any time, in difficult as in good hours. And yet I propose: in this case that we first reunite in writing”. The erotic is held at bay through text. Indeed, they did not meet personally for a further two years. During this period, Rilke laid bare his ample soul, penning frequent confessional letters that were a cri du coeur, often extensive descriptions of his personal and mental plight, as he continued to suffer from living in Paris, alone. These letters were, in Freeman’s words, “at least partly public, designed to impress and, in strange way, to woo her by representing themselves as documents of his decay as a person and of his growth as an artist. They were precise, vivid, refined in their depictions of anguish”. And Freedman adds: “Rilke was beginning to turn himself into his future protagonist, Malte Lauris Brigge” (Wolfgang Freedman, Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk. Heyne Verlag. 1981. pp. 196-197).
In July – August 1903, Rilke went with Clara to Worpswede, staying with Vogeler. It was not a successful visit. Not only did they both feel uncomfortable with the pervasive and intrusive domestic regime (Vogeler’s wife was expecting her second baby), “he had long felt alienated from the painters there” (Leppmann p. 227). As he wrote to Andreas-Salomé at the time (to whom he had sent a copy of his Worpswede book), “the painters that I had to deal with are one-dimensional as artists and as human beings small and drawn to unimportant things” (Letters to Andreas-Salomé, 1 August 1903). His work with Rodin had Rodin had relativised Worpswede. The couple visited Clara’s parents in Oberneuland, two hours from Worpswede, where they attempted to bond with their daughter, Ruth, who barely recognised them. This was a period in which Rilke seemed to himself to be inextricably caught in the banality of life, oppressed, as he wrote to Lou on 10 August , by “the perpetual interruption of all the trifles the day brings, the worries about money, the chance occurrences and useless complaints, the doors, the smells, the hours that toll over and forever summon one to something”. Rilke felt that he was “scattered like some dead man in an old grave”.
As so often a more radical change of location was required, and as he listened to the express trains to Hamburg pass by the garden at Oberneuland, he knew that he must travel. Clara had received a grant to study and work in Rome, and Rilke went with her, leaving in September , where they lived (independently) for nine months. Rome was a change of place, but it seems that he had brought Paris with him, as he struggled against the dirt, the heat and the tourist presence. “Rilke felt again the disquiet engendered by the very transplantation he craved” (Freedman p. 202) (and Rilke had to give up his high hopes of encountering antiquity and settle for the Baroque). He lived until mid-November in a small apartment in the centrally located Via del Campidoglio, before moving to a small cottage in the suburbs of the city made available by a benefactor, the wealthy Alsatian painter and sculptor, Afred Strohl-Fern (Clara had also been granted a cottage). These were depressingly sterile days for Rilke. The Muse had not returned. As he wrote to Andreas-Salomé on 3 November, “I am unhappy with myself, because I am without regular daily work, exhausted though not ill, but deep in anxiety. When, Lou, will this pitiable life reverse itself and become productive, when will it grow beyond incompetence, lethargy and cheerlessness?” And he added, ten days later, “I am again the discarded stone which lies there so pointlessly that the grass of idleness has time to grow tall over it”. And yet he knew what must be done: “And so this perpetually is the one task before me, which I forever fail to begin, and which nevertheless must be begun: the task of finding the road, the possibility of daily reality”.
It is a road that Rilke found (or started to find) in January 1904, when he started to write poetry again, composing texts that would eventually be published as New Poems (Neue Gedichte), and in February, he began writing The Notebook [or Notebooks] of Malte Laurid Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurid Brigge). Certainly, the first poetic steps were tentative. Only three poems were written (Rilke tries to convince himself that living an idyl will help him write, but it is only two years later in the much-hated, non-idyllic Paris that most of the New Poems will appear). The three poems were “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”, “Courtesans” and “The Birth of Venus”. The first contains enormous symbolic weight, with its linkage of art, sexuality and death, broaching a theme that will inform his majestic Sonnets to Orpheus almost twenty years later. Rilke’s rewrites the conventional reading of the myth, which sees Orpheus’ impatient looking back on his loved one as pure loss. Eurydice, in Rilke’s account, however, gains not loses by this fatal glance, for Orpheus’ “possessiveness establishes an erotic dominance that Eurydice must escape in order to come into her own” (Polikoff p. 345). By escaping back into death, she escapes back into freedom (it is also hard to ignore the imagery of the poem that looks back to Rilke’s earlier amorous constructions of Paula Becker, “the blond painter”):
“She was no longer the blond wife
who echoed often in the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide bed’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer”.
The Malte Notebook was also begun in Rome, but the narrative structure of that work (which contains a story within a story) would be later entirely refashioned, and the name of the “hero” changed from the initial “Larsen” to the more enigmatic (and aristocratic) “Brigge”. With removal of the distancing effect of the framing device, the reader is allowed to experience Brigge’s torment pur sang, while by employing a narrative voice in the first-person the autobiographical pull of the text is assured.
Rilke chooses (and finds) isolation as his modus vivendi. His reputation, however, was expanding in broader circles beyond this isolation. Rilke had attracted a supporter, and an active advocate of his work in Scandanavian countries, in Ellen Key, the Swedish social reformer, educationalist and “difference” feminist (“difference” because she believed that men and women had different biological roles to play in life, the latter with respect to motherhood). Rilke had possibly met her via Andreas-Salomé (who was also a “difference” feminist) in Berlin. He had positively reviewed her book, The Century of the Child (published in 1900 and translated into German in 1902), and she had been moved by his Stories of God and wrote to him in early 1902 to express her admiration. Frequent correspondence ensued.
As Rilke’s growing fatigue with Rome increased, Key was now to play a major role in securing for him a domicile in Scandanavia. The brisk clarity of the North, Rilke believed, would cure the sultry apathy of the South. As he confided to Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 12 May 1904: ” the fact is that more northerly and sombre countries have since taught my senses to appreciate what is simple and understated so that they now feel all this shrillness and the strong, schematic, uninflected quality of Italian things as a relapse into picture-book instruction”.
Thanks to the good services of Ellen Key, Rilke (and Clara) were offered hospitality for six months in a manor house in Skåne, in southern Sweden, the home of the artist Ernst Norlind and Hanna Larsson. Here amongst “a nature of, sea, plains and sky”, Rilke could return to his interrupted work (including “my new book [Malte], whose tightly woven prose is”, as he tells Lou on 13 May, “a schooling for me”) in solitude and as he pointedly notes to her on 30 May with “no social obligations”. Rilke left for Sweden in early June, arriving, after short visits to Naples and then Copenhagen, two weeks later. The natural environment was coldly bucolic, sparse but atmospheric (perhaps a reminder of Worpswede), and Rilke wrote on almost a daily basis to Clara to pass on his impressions. He had much free time, and this gave him room for introspection. In a letter to Clara on 24 July, he wrote, ” I am not idle, and there is nothing lazy in me; all sorts of currents and a stirring that through depth and surface is the same”. “I am building at the invisible, at the most invisible, at some foundation: no that is too much, but that I am breaking ground for something that is to be erected there sometime” (Letters 1892-1910, pp. 170-171).
These were brave words, but the truth was that Rilke found himself once more adrift in a period of depressing unproductivity. He attempted to gloss over this impasse by dwelling on the nature of the local landscape (or, more accurately, by dwelling in his letter writing on the same). The summer had come and gone without a single creative word but, as we read in the same letter, “summer was really never and nowhere my high time. Always and everywhere, the point was to live through it; but the autumn this year should be mine again”. But it was not, and the peripatetic restlessness continued, with the deferred happiness and the desperate seeking of the “Place”. As he went on to tell Clara, he was not happy where he was living amongst his Swedish hosts: “if only I were living in a quiet room amongst great autumnal broad leaved trees, near the sea, alone … much good could then be brought into the world”. These were sentiments of a soul that has no home. As Rilke would later write, “where, oh, where is the place? – I bear it in my heart” (Duino Elegy 5).
Scandanavia was not a success. Ellen Key (whom he met in Copenhagen in August 1904) was not a success. “For the snobbish Rilke, she was a slight disappointment: her appearance lacked luster and elegance. Short, a little squat, wildly gesticulating, her dress undistinguished, she hardly conformed to his image of the Nordic woman” (Freedman p. 217). But Rilke soon got beyond the superficial image and drew often upon her friendship (and often at moments of crisis) in the years that followed. Rilke spent one final week in Copenhagen, before leaving Scandanavia on 9 December 1904, never to return. Now followed a period of wandering, as Rilke followed his inclination and responded to offers of accommodation from various well-meaning sources. Finally, on 12 June 1905, he arrived at a location that he had been seeking for more than two years, one that was not cobbled together by friends of friends (as the various residences in Scandanavia had been) but drew deeply on of his emotional life in the past: Göttingen and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Friedrich Karl Andreas had been elected to the Chair in Oriental Studies there in 1903 and had built a house on the edge of the town in the suburb of Hainberg, close to the surrounding countryside. As he wrote to Clara on 16 June 1905, “the aimless paths of life shall sometimes lead to the necessity, to the place where it becomes a matter of course for this person” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 186), and he talks of long conversations with Lou held in the garden that “goes gliding down the hillside into a dense field of fruit trees”.
Paradise is, however, temporary. Rilke left Göttingen on 25 June. The wandering continued, “the artist continued to struggle against the frail and confusing person that contained him” (Freedman p. 224). After Göttingen came Berlin, Treseburg am Harz, Kassel-Marburg, Friedelhausen bei Lollar, Darmstadt and Godesberg. And the destinations were lofty ones. Rilke seemed to be collecting aristocrats: Countess Luise Schwerin in Schloss Friedelhausen (August) and Karl von der Heydt in Godesberg (early September).
Rilke had spent most of June and July in Berlin, as a student of Georg Simmel (although the latter was often absent), but the spiritual mentor who appeared from nowhere was Auguste Rodin. Encouraged by Rilke’s growing reputation in France, Rodin wrote to the poet on 19 July 1905 inviting him to come to Paris and stay at his home in Meudon. Rilke wrote back on 6 September accepting the invitation in tones of idiolatry and homage. On 12 September, Rilke arrived back in Paris, and three days later travelled to Meudon. As he wrote to Clara soon after, “he greeted me, recognising me with exploring eyes, contented and quiet, and like an eastern god enthroned, moved only within his sublime repose and pleasure” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 191). They bonded like father and son, the latter’s prodigality forgotten or forgiven. Rodin was addressed in the same reverential tones that Rilke had used for Lou: the former is the real father; the latter is the real mother. Rodin is advisor, guide and idol. They talk together in Meuron (in Rilke’s broken French), and they eat together en famille (a family whose members Rodin never introduces), and they walk together (around Versailles): “and then he shows one everything: a distance, a motion, a flower, and everything he evokes is so beautiful, so understood, so startled and young” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 192).
Rilke took from his shared environment with Rodin not just an ethic and an aesthetic (work, and more work, and let the eye never wander from structure), but also quite specific instances of tangible forms and objects within that environment. On one occasion, we hear, “soon after supper, I retire and am in my little house [Rodin has since Rilke’s last visit built a number of cottages around his estate intended for long-term guests] by eight-thirty at the latest. Then the wide blossoming starry night is before me, and below, in front of the window, the gravel walk goes up a little hill on which, in fantastic silence, an effigy of Buddha rests, radiating with quiet reserve the inexpressible self-containedness of his gesture beneath all skies of day and night. C’est le centre du monde.” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 194).
The New Poems contains three poems on Buddha. One from 1907 (“Buddha in Glory”) reads:
“Centre of all centres, core of cores,
almond, self-enclosed and growing sweet –
all this up to the stars is your fruit-flesh.
I greet you.
You feel how nothing clings to you:
in the infinite is your shell
and there your potent juice lies and presses out.
And beyond it a radiance gives it succour.
And far above, your suns
rotate, complete and glowing.
But in you something has begun
that will outlast these glowing suns”.
The world as text has become the text as art.
Through an elaborate process of wishful thinking and embellishment, a process that sometimes bordered on mystification, Rilke found in the world what he wanted to find in the world. But reality intervened. His intimate association with Rodin did not last. Two weeks after his arrival in late September 1905, Rilke was invited by Rodin to be his secretary to deal with his growing body of correspondence. Rilke was flattered and accepted, but he had not considered the logistical consequences of this engagement and the impact it would have on his writing. The two men, in fact, had approached the arrangement with entirely different expectations: Rodin wanting Rilke to remain domiciled in Meuron, working on his duties as secretary. Rilke, who had penciled only in two hours a day for such duties, believed that he could achieve some distance from the same. Both men were to be disappointed. The growing fame that encouraged Rodin to bring Rilke to Meuron also took the poet elsewhere, on lecturing trips beyond France: on 21 October and 3 November, speaking in Dresden and Prague but also spending time in Cologne and Leipzig. Rilke returned to Paris. After spending Christmas 1905 in Worpswede and Oberneuland with Clara and Ruth, Rilke returned to Paris but soon embarked on a second lecture tour to Elberfeld (on 25 February 2006), Prague (15-19 March) and Berlin (20-30 March). He returned to Paris on 2 April.
It had all been too much for the self-regarding and “demanding taskmaster” Rodin (Prater p. 130). On 10 May 1906, the frequently absent Rilke was dismissed from his office of secretary and ejected from Meudon. The official reason was that he had behaved improperly in dealing with certain correspondences, which had been intended for Rodin but to which Rilke had replied without consultation. The real reason, however, lay more in the fact that Rilke was a practising poet, not a secretary, and felt he had a right to determine his own life and career. It is, perhaps, an irony that the subject of his lectures abroad had been: the life and work of Gustave Rodin. On 12 May 1906, Rilke moved into an apartment in Paris, 29 rue Cassette. As he wrote to Clara on 10 May, “I am packing up and moving out of my little house, out into the old freedom, with all its cares and possibilities … I am full of expectation and light of heart”. The sources of this self-confidence lay not only in the fact that 1905 saw the appearance of a major publication: The Book of Hours in December, whose three volumes had been written over a period of six years, the crucial years being 1898, 1902 and 1904. They were now brought together, revised, given a collective title and offered to the public. Waiting in the wings were two other projects: the second edition of The Book of Images, and the final editing of The Lay of Cornet Christoph Rilke, both of which involved towards the end of 1905 negotiations with Axel Juncker. The expanded second edition includes eighty-one to the forty-five poems in the first edition. Rilke thought of the two versions as forming “a characteristic unity”, but he also felt, as he wrote to his publisher at Christmas 1905 that there was an “abolition of aesthetic pretension” in the new volume, He had achieved “a consciously simpler, even colloquial language” (Jutta Heintz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 290).
The Book of Images looks backwards: it represents a culmination of the already written. Rilke’s main poetic project of this year, his New Poems (Neue Gedichte), looks forward both in content and in style, for they give voice to a new idiom in Rilke’s writing, and to a poetic phenomenon: the Dinggedicht (literally “thing-poem”). New Poems “represents one of the great achievements of modern(ist) literature”. “In contrast to Rilke’s earlier volumes of poetry, and the later poetic cycles [Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies] in New Poems the accent lies upon the individual poem”, poems that “represent ever new lyrical confrontations with the perceived tangible “[“dinglichen”] world and depict situations and emotions in a quasi ‘thing-like’ mode” (Wolfgang Muller in Rilke Handbuch, p. 296).
Most of the New Poems were composed between 1906 and 1907, but some were written earlier including, perhaps most famous of all, “The Panther”, dating from late 1902, during Rilke’s first visit to Paris:
“His gaze has become so weary by his pacing along the bars
that he can no longer retain anything.
It seems to him that there are a thousand bars
and behind them a thousand more, and then no world.
II
His soft gait flexed in strong steps,
which turn around in the tiniest of circles,
is like a dance of strength around a centre,
in which a mighty will lies dazed.
III
Only now and then does the curtain
lift silently from his eyes. An image goes in,
goes into the limbs of his tensed stillness –
and, within his heart, ceases to be”.
“The Panther” grew out of Rilke’s developing aesthetic and his concern with shaping the viewing image. One immediate influence was the work of Auguste Rodin. Rilke saw in Rodin a perfection of form, “its sacred being-stone that distinguishes it”, as he wrote in one of his diaries, “from fleeting forms and errant gestures” (Rilke, Diary 16 September 1900), adding “and this is one of the most superb qualities of Rodin’s sculptures – that they always remain within this untransgressable magic circle”. As he wrote to Andreas-Salomé on 8 August 1903 (in lines that anticipate the main theme of “The Panther”), “what he gazes at and surrounds with gazing is always for him the only thing, the present thing, the one world in which everything happens”.
Rilke was by nature internally a loner, but externally a socialiser. The two comportments could not always be reconciled. His hero worship of Rodin may have been an attempt to merge the two, as he came to internalise and employ in his own writing Rodin’s aesthetic of form. On 8 February 1906, Paula Modersohn-Becker (to give her her technically correct name, although she herself – because she had left her husband – did not know how she should be addressed) returned to Paris. As always with Paula, Rilke finds himself embroiled in the same messy bag of emotions: care, affection, concern infused with the libido, physical attraction and possibly the will to possess (a potential divorcee. Clara, however, who also had a history of emotions both with respect to Rilke and to Paula, continued to be in his life). Paula came to Paris in need of material and moral support. Rilke helped with both, but in doing so reawakened feelings that he thought had long since gone, “drawn by a bond, a memory discarded six years ago that now stubbornly returned” (Freedman, p. 239). They entertained a lively relationship” (Freedman, p. 254), but that phrase hides more than it reveals.
If Paula represented for Rilke new life (however star-crossed that might have been), then it would be balanced through death: the death of his benefactor, the Countess Luise von Schwerin, on 24 January 1906, and that of his father, on 14 March. His responses to the two deaths show Rilke in a bad light. Freedman talks of Rilke’s “shock” at the death of the countess and opines that this was not occasioned by the sudden demise of a friend but by the loss of a social contact and entree into aristocratic circles (Freedman, p. 239). This may seem harsh, but a letter that Rilke wrote at the time saying that the countess “had represented a protection, a haven, an aid for the coming years” (quoted in Prater, p. 128) seems to confirm this (although this does not exclude the possibility that he harboured personal affection for her as well).
Rilke’s aversion to his parents is a documented fact of Rilke lore. He found the demeanor and the values of his mother (and her attempts to make him as a child look and behave like a daughter), in particular, odious. His relationship with his father was more complex, as his depiction in the Duino Elegies testifies (“you, my father, since you died, deep within me, / often within my hopes, / you have remained anxious for me”, Elegy 4). Rilke knew from the doctors in Prague that his sixty-eight-year-old father was dying but made no effort to see him, refusing to break off his lecture tour in Germany. The reasons for this neglect may have been quite complicated: guilt at ignoring him for so long, the wish not to witness his death, not to recognise finally a suppressed affinity. This last possibility informs the poem that Rilke later wrote, “Portrait of my Father as a young Man” (1908), where the father is seen through a photograph depicting him in his prime. Rilke journeyed to Prague later that month, in March 1906, for the funeral.
In June, Ellen Key paid a visit to Paris and Rilke. Her intrusion into his life (particularly her unsolicited advice on how best to accommodate Ruth, his daughter, and her consistent pseudo-religious misreadings of his work) brought about a virtual termination in their relationship. As he wrote after her visit to Clara on 11 June, “we were in the end wholly without contact and our mutual expressions of friendship had become mere social forms”. Perhaps this was just another flight from the personal, for Rilke possessed an “unarticulated dread of intimacy” (Freedman, p. 256). Nevertheless, he knew what had to be done when duty required it and social forms were a key component of Rilke’s engagement with the world. From 29 July to 16 August 1906, he went on holiday with Clara and Ruth to the coast of Belgium (Paula would also have liked to have joined them, but this was not regarded as a good idea). He then spent time (17 to 31 August) staying with Karl von der Heydt in Godesberg, and then (1-8 September) in Braunfels and Schloss Friedelhausen (8 September – 3 October). It was here that Rilke met Alice Faehnrich, the sister of the Countess Schwerin’s stepmother (the aristocratic network was extensive and hospitable), and she invited Rilke and Clara to spend some time with her at her villa (“Discopoli”) on the isle of Capri. They left for Italy on 28 November, arriving in Capri on 4 December. Rilke stayed until May of the following year, initially with Clara, and then alone when she decided on an extensive tour of Egypt.
In late December 1906, the revised volume of his Book of Images and the The Lay of Cornet Christoph Rilke appeared with Axel Juncker (not without some dismay from the Insel Verlag, which was now Rilke’s official publisher). These were gratifyingly productive moments, but the lengthy stay on Capri would return little poetic capital. Before arriving at a new destination, Rilke typically had a precise image of what that place should be and should contain. There were three spatial layers to this image: a broad vista of beauty in a pleasing, stimulating natural environment (sometimes adjacent to a cultured civic context); a nobility and refinement of dwelling; and an inner sanctum of peace and tranquility for him alone. Capri disappointed on more than one score. As he wrote to Karl von der Heydt on 11 December 1906, “what people have made out of this beautiful island is close to hideous”, he asserts in despairing tones, all disport themselves “in the direction of pleasure, relaxation, enjoyment”, to that peripatetic villain of modernity: tourism. Rilke’s takes his observations further: perhaps this second-rate heaven is an Italian thing. “But in all seriousness, isn’t even Dante evidence for it, whose Paradise is filled with such helplessly heaped up bliss, with no graduations in light, formless, full of repetition, made of smiling angel-pure perplexity, as it were, of not-knowing, of not-being-able-to-know, of pure, blissful mendacity”. And he concludes: “Capri – is a monstrosity”. So much for the vaunted culture of classical Italy (but Rilke tells us that here, as elsewhere, the majority of tourists were German).
Rilke retreated to his aesthetically impressive villa. It was an experience that he fully internalises: “with walls about me, but with God and the saints within me, with very beautiful pictures and furnishing within me, with courts around which moves a dance of pillars, with fruit orchards, vineyards”. He took refuge in his inner sanctum “the room I live in is quite separate, in a little house by itself, some fifty steps from the villa proper”. As he tells Karl von der Heydt on 11 December 1906, “my room is simple and very congenial and already has a natural attachment to me for which I am very grateful”. His routine was to spend the evenings in convivial cultured company with Alice Faehnrich, friends and family, but to devote the days to “my inner life”.
Rilke told others (and told himself) that he was there to write, but his occupancy, here as with all his temporary domiciles, was as much therapeutic and financial as literary. Put simply: for the impecunious Rilke life is cheaper when was able to live at something else’s guest. Also: there were people to look after his needs: food, laundry, entertainment. He was on holiday, and his often-ailing body could recover from what seemed to be continuous medical complaints. Further illness was rare. He produced a small number of poems while he was on Capri, but no further work was done on the Malte Notebook. His poems belonged to his ethereal environment; they spoke of the transcendent, of the world caught in a universalism. They take us away from reality. Rilke, however, knew that ultimately, he must go in the opposite direction, away from timeless beauty and towards “the well-nigh exhausting task” of coming to terms with the material presence of Paris, because that alone, as he wrote to Tora Holmstrom on 19 March 1907, “transforms, heightens and develops one continually”.
On 31 May 1907, Rilke returned to Paris and to 29 rue Cassette (to a new apartment. He gave up the lease on the earlier apartment the previous year). It was as if he has never been away. He revisited familiar haunts, cafés, art galleries, the Louvre, and old friends, but, as he told Clara in a letter of 7 June 1907, “the difficult, the anxious is somehow still here too – indeed, everything is again: as always in Paris”. The familiarity and anonymity (he had little social or personal life) allowed him to channel his energy into writing. Within two short months he completed New Poems. adding more than a dozen to the existing collection. By July 1907, the volume was finished (although the publisher delayed publication until December). Material for some of the poems was drawn from the sights, sounds, people and ideas encountered in Capri. In December 1906, he had received a bouquet of flowers from the Countess Mary Gneisenau, which had included roses. He had written to her later that month, celebrating the unique presence of the rose:
“There is a deep repose in it; it lies in the very bottom of its name: rose, – there where the word grows dark, rose, and everything that is contained in it of movement of memory coming and going, of swiftly ascending longing, flows away over it, up above, and touches us no more”.
The rose possesses, both in name and being, a metaphysical quality:
“But what was in it of things thus unsayable, of things never taken by us and yet not lost to us, has remained in it, no longer imperiled now, secure, come home, and forces have come home in a talisman, collected, as we are collected in our hearts, held back by nothing, yet without inclination to stream out, quite absorbed, as it were, in the enjoyment of our own equilibrium”. That same achieved equilibrium, the balance between expression and inwardness, is a defining moment of the rose as it appears in “Das Rosen-Innere” (often translated as “Rose Interior” but “Rose-internalised” might be a better rendition) written in August 1907, which is one of three poems dedicated to the rose in New Poems and one of the final poems in that volume:
“To this interior, where is
an exterior? Over what wound
is spread such linen?
What skies mirror themselves so
in the inner seas of
these opened roses,
the ones without care? Look:
how they lie there loosely in the surrounding
looseness, as though a trembling
hand could ever disturb them.
They can barely hold themselves within; many
let themselves overflow and stream
out from inner space
into the days that close themselves
ever more fully,
until the entire summer grows
into a room, a room in a dream”.
The unusually short lines sustain the compact quality of the poetic image, as do the repetition of key terms (most noticeable in the original German) such as “loose” / “loosely”), and the poem is structured around tropes of place and placement (“inner” / “outer”, for example, “hold” / “overflows”). The goal is to reproduce the paradoxical energetic stasis of the rose, that it “remains” but, at the same time, sends itself out into the world.
The New Poems represent (are built around) a new aesthetic, but rather than clarify the terms of that aesthetic in any theoretical way (through an essay, for example), Rilke chose to find analogies and parallels amongst other artists, visual artists, such as Rodin. In October 1907, Rilke attended almost daily a retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cézanne in the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Rilke was overwhelmed with the intensity of the paintings and the fact that they showed a clear testimony to an unswerving dedication to art. On the basis of his viewings, he wrote a series of letters to Clara, which were later collected in book form.
As with Rilke’s absorption of Rodin, Cézanne was read out of an individual and subtly inflected optic that combined the viewer (Rilke) with the viewed (Cezanne). Rilke had already inherited the desire “to achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility” from Rodin (Rilke, Letters on Cézanne. Edited by Clara Rilke. Translated from the German by Joel Agee. Vintage Books. 1991. p. 34). Cezanne, however, was able to impart an enigmatic but enlightening insubstantiality to this thinginess, “where the minutest component has been tested on the scales of an infinitely responsive consciousness” (Letters on Cezanne, p. 65). For “his love for all things is directed at the nameless, and that is why he himself concealed it. He does not show it; he has it” (Letters on Cézanne, p. 21).
Rilke left Paris on 30 October 1907, on a lecture tour, in which he read from his own work and from his second essay on Rodin. He spoke in Prague, Breslau and Vienna, before moving on for recuperation to Venice. In November, after one and a half years of silence, the poet received a conciliatory letter from Rodin, who was arranging for a French translation of Rilke’s second essay on the sculptor, which had appeared earlier in the month.
Rilke had not forgotten his family, although there is just a sense that he spent time with them largely out of a sense of obligation, for after spending Christmas and the New Year in Oberneuland with Clara and Ruth, he set out once again on 29 February 1908 to Capri, where he stayed for two months. These are sojourns of personal and physical recovery rather than occasions for work (as Rilke well knew), and on 1 May 1908 he returned to Paris where, between 31 July 1907 and 2 August 1908, he wrote the second part of the New Poems, simply titled Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil, which appeared in the Insel Verlag in November of that year. The poems exhibit the steely distantiation from the expressive self that characterised the Dinggedichte of the first volume. There is, however, one exception, a poem with which the second volume opens, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, where the final act of distantiation takes a highly personal form:
I
“We cannot know his majestic head,
nor the pupils like apples that ripened within it.
But his torso is lit like a candelabra,
in which his gaze, wound back,
II
holds itself still and glows. Or the curve
of his breast could not blind you so, and the gentle turn
in his thighs could send no smile
to his centre and his procreative being.
III
Or this stone would stand disfigured and too short,
below the shoulders’ lucent fall,
not gleaming like a lion’s fell.
IV
and would not burst right through its confines
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life”.
The torso of Apollo, even its mutilated shape, is alive. Its crafted body contains within itself an energy and a comportment that sends forth human attributes, even reproductive ones. In its perfection of form, it calls the viewer into its presence: “there is no place that does not see you”. It is precisely the need (initially aesthetic, but ultimately existential) for this engagement that underscores the final extravagant line of the poem, where the focus of the torso is replaced suddenly and dramatically by an entirely different focus and a new linguistic register with the address to an unspecified “you”, which could be seen as the viewer but now also, and audaciously, the reader. We do not seek to reach the perfection of the torso (that would be impossible), but to reach an understanding of that perfection. But first, “you must change your life”.
At the beginning of November 1908 Rilke, since August living in the Palais Biron, 77 rue de Varenne, wrote a poem that appeared too late to be included in his second volume of New Poems (and in its style and thematic focus would not have belonged there): “Requiem for a Friend”. The “Friend” in the title (“Freundin” in the original German) was Paula Modersohn-Becker, who had left Paris and returned to her estranged husband in 1907. She had become pregnant in early 1907 and had been delivered of a baby daughter in November of that year. There were medical complications, and she died following the birth of her child. Two years later, Rilke wrote “Requiem for a Friend”. It begins:
“I have had dead ones, and I let them go.
You, you alone come back:
you brush against me, you move around, you want
to bump up against something so that it makes a sound”
Rilke greeted Paula’s return from the dead as a revenant. She came back not just in his mind, as a memory, but as a material reality, as the plenitude of absence. Rilke (or his persona) grasped the fact that Paula was present. He discerned that presence, but he could not see her directly only (like a blind person) indirectly through the sense of sight. Indeed, Paula remains a spectral figure throughout the poem (in spite of the many references to the tactile nature of her invoked presence), something that is reflected in the “extreme restlessness of the poem and in its “to-and-fro” oscillation of tone, mood and diction (Charlie Lough, Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford UP, 2020, p. 216). The poetic persona queries why Paula has returned to this second-rate world, and finds her amiss that she has done so, for not being happy with eternity. Indeed, this is an upbraiding, a note of frustrated criticism, and characterises a voice that moves throughout the poem between admonition (although the sources of the latter are in the pain caused by her death) and quizzicality “I believed you to be much further along. It confuses me”, through to grief and finally his acceptance of death, which brings no form of resolution. His attitude to her throughout is a vacillating one that prevents any clear contours from forming around his personality. This is the result, possibly, of the endemic mystery inherent in receiving a revenant or, on a biographical level, something that reflects, perhaps, his attitude to Paula during her life, a loved-one married to someone else. and perhaps someone who was not sufficiently appreciative of her art. As William H. Gass observes, “as with most apparitions, guilt is the ghost that walks within the Requiem“, and he adds, “at the end of her life Rilke “had been ambivalent, unhelpful, distant” (Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. New York. 1999, p.124). In the end, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the poem has its source in guilt.
Rilke continued to live in Paris, but at the expense of his health and mental well-being, as even the shock of the city could not prompt him into further work on Malte. He then did what he always did at such moments: he travelled, to the South. Between 25 – 30 May 1909, he was in Aix en Provence. “It was just travelling, without really ‘looking’, as he wrote to Clara” (quoted in Prater, p. 167). On 1 September 1909 he arrived in Strassburg for a necessary stay at the spa at Bad Rippolsau (thanks to funds from Kippenberg). Between 22 September – 7 October he was back, sightseeing in Avignon. His health had been largely regained, but he was still not writing. He returned to Paris on 8 October.
He may have reached a writer’s block (only half of Malte has been completed), but his fame knew of no such blocks. On 10 December 1909, he was contacted by Princess Marie Turn und Taxis through an intermediary, the poet Anna de Noailles. It was the princess (fifteen years older) who would become his mother figure replacing the absent Lou. The princess was without the intellectual verve of the former mentorix but (and possibly because of that) provided the safer more constant presence in his life. It was her invitation to him to stay with her and her husband in their castle at Duino later that year and the following year that would revitalise Rilke both in body and soul.
The immediate and most crucial source of support came not from the princess but from Rilke’s publisher, Anton Kippenberg. In constant touch with his author, Kippenberg realised that a new work environment, one that could offer technical assistance, had to be provided for Rilke. Paris allowed the poet too much opportunity for distraction. Rilke’s work ethic needed to be put on a formal footing. He wrote offering his own home in Leipzig as accommodation and his publishing office, equipped with a secretary and a dictation machine, as a workplace. Rilke accepted, and, taking his suitcase, and its motley assortment of half-started, half-finished Malte manuscripts, spent 11-31 January 1910 in Leipzig as a guest of Kippenberg and his wife. On 23 January, Rilke completed the manuscript of The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. It was published in May.
The form of the text (partly notebook, partly diary, partly memoir, partly family history and partly “novel”) is unique, as are its confronting themes. In Malte, the boundaries between death in life, life in death merge, an existential affinity evident from the very first words of the narrative: “people come here [Paris] to live; I should rather have thought that they come here to die”, opines the twenty-eight-year-old Danish narrator (a poet who writes little poetry). The (anti-) hero has three names, as does its author, both of whom are poor poets struggling physically and mentally in Paris. Is Malte the alter-ego of Rilke? Rilke as he might have become? The text at times reads like a Freudian “Selbstbehandlung” (“self-treatment”), where Rilke’s (much documented) phobias are externalised to be (hopefully) purged. For, as Donald Prater notes, “much was autobiography: Malte heads his first entry [in his notebook] with Rilke’s 1902 address in Paris, the rue Toullier, and is the age Rilke was then; his descriptions of the horrors of everyday life in the Paris streets, of the sick, the armies of the dying, the poor were Rilke’s, often phrased in the actual words of his letters at the time [and Rilke asked both Lou and Clara to temporarily return these letters to him during the composition of the work]; the hypersensitiveness to his room-neighbours, the nameless absolute fear that grips him, the recollection of his anxieties as a child, the mother’s game of treating him as a girl, are all Rilke’s experiences” (Prater, p. 173).
Death, imagined, real, longed for, forgotten or anticipated, symbolic or metaphorical, the basis for this life or another life, provides the existential contours of Rilke’s book. People carry death within them. Indeed, death possesses animate human attributes, speaking to us, impatiently demanding things from “all who come near it” (The Notebook of Malter Laurids Brigge. Translated by John Linton. The Hogarth Press. 1969. p.13), as in the face of the “young, drowned woman” made into plaster casts in the morgue that Malte sees hung outside a shop, benign and accepting, “because it smiled, smiled so deceptively, as though it knew” (Notebook p. 72).
If death provides the key term in the first section of Malte’s narrative, it is with fear (“I am afraid”, Notebook p.7) with which the second section opens. The sleep of reason produces monsters. Very much like the character Roquentin will later do in Sartre’s Nausea (published in 1938, a novel that bears remarkable stylistic and thematic affinities with the Notebook), Malte too discerns a disturbing presence that exists over and beyond the person, and which gives rise to a dread that seemingly comes from nowhere and goes nowhere and hides behind all understanding, but simply exists as a dark and secret threat). As he painfully observes, “this disease has no particular characteristics; it takes on those of the person it attacks” (The Notebook 59). It is a sickness unto death, a nameless otherness to which Malte gives a name (that is not a name): the “Big Thing”. Malte is in a clinic when the Big Thing, which he has known since childhood, presents itself to him: “Now it was there. Now it grew out of me like a tumour, like a second head; it seemed to be part of myself”. “And my heart had to make a painful effort to drive the blood into it; there was hardly enough blood there. And the blood went into it unwillingly, and came back sickly and tainted. But the Big Thing gathered and grew before my face (The Notebook 58). The Big thing, “with a somnambulistic assurance, it drags from the profoundest depths of each one’s being a danger that seemed passed, and sets it before him again, quite near, imminent” (Notebook p.59). “All forgotten fears are there again” (Notebook p. 60).
The Big Thing does not respect the modalities of past, present and future. It thrives on and cultivates the dislocation of time and space, where “the nearest tones take on the tones of distance”. At one point in his narrative, Malte’s hands, watched at a distance by their owner, are transfigured under a table, and are “moving all alone, down there, examining the ground”. Here, curiosity turns into “terror”. In the same disembodied state of the spiritualist experience, Malte observes, “I felt that that one of the hands belonged to me, and that it was committing itself to some irreparable deed” (Notebook p. 88). It is an experience of self-alienation, of the uncanny twisting of the self through space and time, and it forms the central modality of the Malte Notebook.
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 