Rilke Chronology 1875 – 1910
Rilke was born, as René (later to be changed to Rainer) Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, in Prague on 4 December 1875. His parents were Josef Rilke and Sophie (known as “Phia”). Josef was a minor railroad official who had been a member of the Austrian Army but had failed to secure a commission as officer, disappointing thus the social aspirations of his wife. The discrepancy between the needs of her social climbing and the bleak, lowly reality of her actual domestic situation led to serious marital tensions. Rilke’s parents separated in 1884.
This was a “very dark childhood”, Rilke was later to recall. “My mother was highly nervous, slim, a woman who wanted something from life, something undefined” (Rilke quoted in Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford. 1986, Prater, p. 5). “She dressed always in black and affected the demeanor of a grande dame … Religious observance and the ritual of the Catholic Church occupied her to the point of bigotry” (Prater, p. 4). “Every time he saw her, Rilke relived his struggle as a child to get away from her, and felt, after years of running, he still had not gotten far enough” (Prater, p. 5). Rilke harboured the same negative feelings towards his father, whose “stiff conventionality gave little room for love”. Looking back long after Josef’s death in 1906, Rilke said that “right to the end he had a kind of inexpressible fear of the heart towards me” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 6). These bitter accounts of his parents would later inform his rejection of them in his Duino Elegies.
The year before Rilke had been born a daughter had died soon after birth, and Sophie tried to compensate for this loss by treating her young son as if he were a girl, by giving him two female names, René and Maria, and dressing him in girls’ clothing. There was one positive to this unsettling transgender practice. “For the growing child, this feminine posture was soon associated with a gift for writing verse” (Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York, 1996. p. 10). It was a gift that the mother cultivated; only to be stymied by the father. As Rilke later wrote, “ah, if our parents were only born with us, how much bitterness and retracing of paths we might be spared. But parents and children can only walk along next to each other, never with each other; a deep trench runs between them, across which they can now and then extend each other only a small tenderness” (see Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton.1997, p. 65).
In 1882, Rilke went to school at a German-speaking Catholic establishment belonging to the Piarist Order. He was to stay, enjoying a good deal of academic success, until 1886, when he enrolled in the Military Junior School at St. Pölten in Lower Austria. He was to remain there for four years, until 1890. Four unpleasant years. “In retrospect, Rilke’s confrontation with the military became a metaphor for hell” (Freedman, p. 14). Perhaps for that reason, Rilke began writing home describing repeated bouts of illness. He did well in the subjects that were purely academic, but the military side of his education caused him constant distress. It also led to something else: distance from his fellow students who, like most young men, took to the physical dimension of military training in a way that the rather poorly Rilke did not. As he later plaintively described it, the time he spent as a military cadet constituted “a painful training in loneliness amongst the crowd” (quoted in Prater, p. 9). According to one account, “he endured his schoolmates’ blows without returning them or even talking back, because he actually believed that ‘the will of an infinite, unchangeable fate’ demanded of him a posture of a heroic patience. He took pride in the way he bore his tortures. Martyrdom, too, was a game that he learned from his mother” (Freedman, p. 16). He would greet his own painful death forty years later in the same spirit.
Rilke suffered a recurring illness at the military academy, which was finally diagnosed as “pneumonia aggravated by severe nervous strain” (Freedman, p.19, although it was possibly psychosomatic) and he was allowed to transfer to a non-military institution at Linz in September 1891. The curriculum of the latter combined “a scientifically based general education with a comprehensive preparation for various commercial professions” (Prater, p. 11). Its non-regimented environment allowed greater scope for Rilke’s literary pursuits and in the following year, 1892, he was able to publish his first collection of poetry, Life and Songs. “We can set the beginning of his vocation as a poet to the winter of this year” (Wolfgang Leppmann, Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk. Heyne. 1981, p. 65). Rilke took his final examination at the Linz school in 1894 and was now free to begin a course of study at Prague University. He had been granted a monthly allowance from the family estate of his uncle, Jaroslav, to support him whilst a student. The assumption was that he would study law, but Rilke chose instead to enroll in courses in history of literature, art history and philosophy.
In December 1895, he published his second book of poetry, Offerings to the Lares. Whereas the first book had been the voicing of a juvenile lyrical poet, intended to express a post-romantic sensibility, this volume looked outwards to the customs and physical world of Prague. Some of the short poems were of a descriptive topographical nature, as if this were a poetry guidebook. The poems laid the basis for his later concern with the integrity of the object world. “Whenever he described precisely what he saw, Rilke was able to draw on his power to shape images, which was to be the strength of his maturity” (Freedman, P. 37): “there I see towers, some domed like acorns / others pointed like slender pears; / there lies the city; the evening nestles / against its thousand brows with tender care”. Other poems deal with historical moments in the history of the city. One such poem was written to the memory of the Czech hero, Josef Kajetan Tyl, who penned the national hymn for the country, but whose fame did not provide him with material success. “There had the poet Tyl / his song written: “Kde domov muj’ / Those whom the muses love / do not grant them much” (quoted in Leppmann, p. 61).
It was at this time that Rilke encountered the first love true of his life. Valerie von David-Rhonfeld was a friend of his cousins in Prague and Rilke met her through that social contact. She would be the first of many women that Rilke would love only to decide that serious commitment would be detrimental to his career with literature. The latter was progressing with speed and Rilke was a supreme self-promoter. “In dogged determination to succeed, he showed astonishing industry” (Prater, p. 15). It was self-evident that to reach the heights of his literary influence he would need to move beyond the provincial scene of Prague to somewhere bigger, more cosmopolitan, where noted writers of German literature lived and had the greatest effect on the public. He chose Munich and moved there from Prague on 29 September 1896, living in an apartment in 48 Briennerstrasse. It possessed an unreal atmosphere. It was, as Rilke wrote in his autobiographical story Ewald Tragy, “a small flat, with two windows and old fussy furniture, and quite full of shadows, so that one had the feeling that one was renting a host of things beyond one’s dreams” (Rilke, Ewald Tragy. Insel Verlag. 1989. p. 35).
Rilke enrolled at the university to study art history and philosophy, attending amongst other classes a seminar on aesthetics held by Theodor Lippe. It was essential for him to maintain the pretext that he was a student, so that he could continue to receive his monthly allowance from the family trust, but his principle activity was artistic. He wrote further poetry and plays but, above all, attempted to make social contact with other writers and artists, such as Ludwig Ganghofer, Max Halbe and Jakob Wassermann. In December 1896, he published his third book of poetry, Crowned with Dreams. It represented a return to an introspective mode after the outward-looking realism of the Lares volume. As he wrote in one poem, “my heart resembles a forgotten chapel”. Adding in a subsequent poem, “a memory that I call holy / lights my way through my innermost soul, / just as the white of marble gods / glows through the twilight of sacred groves”. Rilke returned to Prague during the Christmas period to organise a reading of the work of Detlev von Liliencron, a poet who had shown him, “a city child, whose road to distinction was still strewn with tears”, the way to “the open heath” of real life. (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 30).
Rilke returned to Munich, and in February 1897 moved into a new apartment in Blütenstrasse near the artists’ district of Schwabing. Rilke read much at this time, including the works of the spiritualist Baron du Prel, to whom he wrote a letter on 16 February 1897. The author of Studies from the Realm of Secret Knowledge (1890) and Spiritualism (1893), du Pre adhered to the key tenets of spiritualism, “maintaining that man is a dual being whose second self appears in somnambulistic states and reaches to the Beyond” (see Notes to Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton. New York. Vol. 1, p. 367). Rilke wrote to du Pre explaining his attraction for the latter’s work: “apart from the charm of the mysterious, the domains of spiritualism have for me an important power of attraction because in the recognition of the many dormant forces and in the subjugation of their power, I see the great liberation of our remote descendants” (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Vol. 1, p. 25).
This spiritualist ethos may well have fed into Rilke’s then current writing, such as his poem cycle Visions of Christ. These were not published until twenty years later, although certain poems were circulated to individuals at the time. As Polikoff notes, “each of the eleven poems narrates in verse Christ’s appearance in often dramatically rendered dialogues, shares his charged encounters with various figures (a child, a prostitute, a painter). Many of the settings – a Prague graveyard, Munich fairgrounds, a tavern – are recognizably drawn from real scenes. At the same time, the appearance of the Christ figure often transports the action into a different dimension in which ordinary time and space are effectually suspended – the almost surreal domain of The Visions, closely akin to dream” (Daniel Joseph Polikoff, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History. Chiron Publishers. 2011. p.29).
In Munich, Rilke was introduced by Wassermann to the work of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose novel Niels Lyhne, a melancholy story of unrequited love and suicide, committed by an overly sensitive aesthete, found a wide readership. It is a novel that “reflects many of the themes of Rilke’s later work: the unheard music of the souls, the allure of old furniture, the concept of all the gods as the creation of men, Lyhne’s thirst for knowledge, and the notion that each man should die his own death” (Prater, p.32). Rilke read the rest of Jacobsen’s works, “for it is to them in the first place that I owe my readiness for unelectric observation and my resolution to admire, and they have continued to strengthen in me, since I came to love them, my inner conviction that even for what is most delicate and inapprehensible within us nature has sensuous equivalents that must be discoverable” (quoted in J.F. Hendry, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rilke. Carnacet. 1983, p. 22).
In March 1897, Rilke paid his first visit to Italy, including Venice, “which he found mysterious like a collection of fairy tales fashioned into stone” (according to Freedman, p. 59). But these were fairy tales shot through with a bitter streak of realism. As Rilke wrote in one poem, “it always seems to me as though the quiet / gondolas travel through the canals / to welcome someone or other. / And yet the waiting lasts long, / and the people are poor and ill, / and the children are like orphans”. On 10 April, Rilke returned to Munich, and to his writing and the cultivation of social contacts. His demenour at this time has been described as a combination of ” the cult of personal friendship, with an obsession with coteries and entrepreneurial activity”. This was “an interaction between the mind and the social” (Leppmann, pp. 69 and 70).
There was one interaction that would be particularly decisive in Rilke’s life. On 12 May 1897, at a party organised by Jakob Wassermann, he met Lou Andreas-Salomé. Russian born, from a French Huguenot German family, of the haute bourgeoisie, Andreas-Salomé had achieved notoriety as a putative fiancé of Friedrich Nietzsche, but she had also won serious intellectual acclaim (although this is not to say that any association with Nietzsche could not be serious) as an author of works on philosophy and religion, including the essay “Jesus, the Jew”. The latter had been read admiringly by Rilke and that intellectual bond, “a devout fellow-feeling” (as he described it in a letter to her of 13 May), now became a personal one. They arranged to meet four days later, when he read to her three poems from his “like-minded” work in progress, Visions of Christ.
Rilke was twenty-one; Lou was thirty-six. She was married but in an open marriage with her husband Karl Friedrich Andreas, professor of oriental languages in Berlin. She led a varied love life, combining attraction of the mind with desire of the body. “She made eroticism itself a spiritual iconography” (Freeman, p. 63). Intellectual affinity turned, for Rilke, immediately into romance. He wrote to her on a daily basis. One letter reads: “you come to me from all that is, beautiful, my breeze of spring my summer rain, my June night with a thousand ways that none before me was blessed to tread: I am in you” (quoted in Prater, p. 39). On 14 June 1897, Rilke and Lou moved out of Munich to a small cottage in nearby Wolfratshausen. “The idyll that would come in the summer marked in every sense a new epoch for Rilke”. “Lou’s feelings for nature, her habit of observing the animals at dawn, and walking barefoot through the dewy grass brought him for the first time down to earth from the insubstantial romanticizing of the city poet” (Pater, p. 39). Lou became part lover, part mother. As Rilke later wrote, “I came to you then so poor, almost like a child comes to the bountiful mother. And you took my soul into your arms and cradled it. At that time, you kissed me on my brow, and you had to bend down deeply to do this” (quoted in Wolfgang Leppmann, Rainer Maria Rilke. Heyne Verlag. 1981, pp. 99-100).
Lou’s influence on Rilke was all-forming: psychological (indeed, psychoanalytical), intellectual, aesthetic and amorous. “Lou tried to help him deal with his sudden outbursts of temper and sudden withdrawals. She also sought to cure him of his extravagant, sentimental style in poetry and prose, although she was quite capable of indulging in purple prose herself. Here she was not immediately successful, but as a first step she made him improve his handwriting, which he changed at once, from a loose, highly expressive but fairly uncontrolled form to self-consciously precise exquisitely chiseled letters. Henceforth, even the physical task of handwriting became part of Rilke’s art” (Freeman, p. 68). Lou was also responsible for persuading Rilke to change his name from what she saw to be the affected “René” to the more manly “Rainer”. It was a form of benign control, which Rilke freely (Indeed, willingly) accepted. Polikoff comments on “the contradiction latent in the image of a man who preached the gospel of self-reliance while relying so deeply on various forms of communion with others throughout his life” (Polikoff, p. 62).
Rilke wrote a series of love poems celebrating Lou and his relationship with her and collected them in a volume titled In Celebration of You. Lou found the poems too intimate and asked Rilke not to publish them. One poem reads:
“Tear out my eyes: I still can see you,
Stop up my ears: I can still hear you,
Without feet, I can still walk,
Without a mouth, still plead to you.
Break off my arms: I’ll grasp you yet
with my heart as with a hand.
Tear out my heart, my brain will beat.
And if you set my brain afire
I will carry you still in my blood”
In Celebration of You, Rilke posited Lou “as extending as well as withholding love’s mystery” (Freedman, p. 64). Lou did, indeed, hold to a complex model of love and male-female relationships. As decidedly as ever, she maintained in her association with Rilke a clear distinction “between friendship, physical love and marriage. Marriage, she wrote should be ‘not a binding but a being-bound’, ‘something lying beyond all interests of friendship, much deeper, much loftier’, a kind of pinnacle that the partners are striving to reach, ‘the recognition that each belongs in and not just to the other, in an almost religious or at least ideal sense’. ‘I have never been able to understand why people physically in love with one another get married’ (quoted in Prater, p. 40). And Pater dryly notes, “that this was her feeling would only gradually become clear to Rilke” (Prater, p. 40).
In December 1897, Rilke published a further book of poetry, Advent. “The title refers not only to the pre-Christmas season but also to its literal meaning of impending arrival” (Freedman, p. 76). The volume represented an “episode”, like all his other books of verse, “a small moment in a great becoming” (Rilke quoted in Freedman, p. 76). Many of the poems are laudatorily descriptive and return to the people and places that he had met in Prague, Venice and Munich (and a good number are dedicated the writers and artists he most admired), but others were more inward looking and speak of the intensity of his poetic mission:
“This is my fight
dedicated to longing
to wander the paths of all my days.
Then, strong and prepared
to send my thousand roots
grasping deep into life –
and through the pain
to ripen far beyond life,
far beyond time!”
Lou Andreas-Salomé and her husband moved to Berlin in October 1987 and Rilke moved with them. Lou found an apartment in the suburb of Wilmersdorf, and Rilke in one nearby, no. 8 Im Rheingau. He enrolled at the university at the start of the academic year to study art history and to learn Italian. Under the guidance of Lou, the Italian Renaissance art became an idee fixe for Rilke and in February he started to plan a trip to Italy. It was decided that he should keep a diary, not to record his daily activities (too personal and irrelevant for Lou) but as a way of registering what he was learning about art and his appreciation of art, a project that led to “many pages of quasi-aphoristic, largely theoretical reflections on selfhood, art, religion and culture” (Polikoff, p. 69). Prior to his departure, he traveled to Prague on 5 March 1898 to give a lecture on “The Modern Lyric”. Rilke drew heavily on an essay recently published by Lou called “Basic Forms of Art” and largely followed her in his description of modern poetry. The terms of reference are largely those of fin de siècle aestheticism. “Where earlier poets where in touch with nature and ‘the dimension of things’, recent poets have learned ‘to look into their own minds’. ‘In this way subjectivism has reached its highest form’. The lyrical poet has become ‘a solitary who can acknowledge no one but himself’, a ‘cosmic hermit’ able to hear what no one else has heard. Listening and loneliness are the attributes of the modern poet” (quoted in Freedman, p. 79).
Rilke remained in Prague for three weeks before setting out for Florence on 4 April 1896, “trembling with expectations” of a city where “spring became eternal in name and deed” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 44). Rilke opened his diary on 15 April with a homily to Lou in the form of a poem (where the final upper case “YOU” foregrounds the importance of the recipient). Its first two stanzas read:
“From our winter-shaped terrain,
I’ve been cast far out, into spring;
as I hesitate at its edge,
the new land lays itself out lustrously
into my wavering hands.
And I take the beautiful gift,
want to mould it quietly,
unfold all its colours
and hold it, full of shyness,
up towards YOU.”
(Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton.1997, p. 4).
Rilke was overcome by his initial impressions of Florence. He wrote on 19 April, “I felt at first so confused, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendour”. His immersion in this culture soon produced an empathy that was total: “I have entered into the very midst of it. I sense it as it were the rhythm of a deeper breathing, compared to which mine is a tapping of children’s feet, and I become strangely free and fearful”. Rilke’s encounter with the great civic art of Florence, the statues, for example, in St. Marks, took on, at times, a almost surreal animistic dimension, as the statues come towards him while he faces them: “as my eye coasts back along the arcades, there is a movement: out of the dark a line of bright figures emerges, as if they wanted to approach someone. I look around but there is no one – can their welcome be meant for me? Suddenly I feel it clearly. And with a shy awkwardness I, the small, the nameless, the unworthy one, hasten toward them, and pass devoutly and gratefully from one to the next, blessed by each”.
It is impossible to separate Rilke’s acts of aesthetic appreciation in the diary from a consistent existential refashioning of self and sensibility, undertaken for the eyes of Lou. On 17 May, he describes to her how he approaches the great beauty of the masters, such as Raphael. “A longer contemplation [in term of time spent in front] of their works would be superfluous; devout absorption can make many a beautiful aspect more intense and deeply felt, but there is no sensation so strong that it will project beyond the ripeness of that first enjoyment”. Rilke is not alone in his travels around Florentine art. There are others too, whom Rilke seeks to avoid: tourists. The latter, as he tells us in the same letter, have a philistine fear of the unpleasant in art, of the sad or tragic”. On the basis of a rejection of their “guidebook” mentality, Rilke begins to elaborate, as in this letter, his own theory of art and art appreciation, seeing in it “a path towards freedom”, “the means by which singular, solitary individuals fulfill themselves”. The modern artist must absorb not only the work of the great artists of the past but also their store of inner values. As he says later in the diary, these must be internalised: “how completely like the best amongst us they were. Their longings live on in us. And our longings will, when we are used up, remain active in others, until they fulfill themselves in whomever are the last ones. Only these last ones will be a beginning. We are presentments and dreams” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet, p. 20).
Rilke left Florence on 6 July 1898, returning, via Viareggio, Sopot and Prague, to Berlin on 31 July and to a new apartment in Villa Waldfrieden, no. 11 Hundekehlstrasse. He came back to Berlin and to Lou and (much to his dismay) to her disappointment with the Florentine diary. Rilke’s self-indulgence and hyperbolic style were precisely elements of his personality that Lou had been trying to expunge. She was also hoping, as later events would show, after the second Russian trip, to undo his childlike worship of her which came with a dependency “which he both hated and craved” (Freedman, p. 87). The crisis in their relationship seemed to have returned, but by the autumn of that year some form of reconciliation had taken place, as Lou began to encourage Rilke to undertake a number of projects, including the learning of Russian (at that time a vogue culture and country in Germany). The fruits of this new enthusiasm were soon to manifest themselves in a planned trip to Russia.
Their trip commenced in Berlin on 24 April 1899, with the couple arriving in Moscow on 27th, and finished on 28 June 1899 in Saint Petersburg. It was to be a transformative experience. “The sights and sounds of Russia, its mythical peasants and icons, the infinite expanse of its land, provided the canvas on which this transformation took place. It allowed Rilke to mystify reality in a new idiom that was not to be demystified until years later in Paris and later in Muzot” (Freedman, p. 92). A priority was a visit to Tolstoy in his apartment in Moscow, “a revered figure with and against whom Rilke could define his aesthetic, his work, himself” (Freedman, p. 94). The meeting was only a partial success (Rilke was an unknown entity, and he would have the same problem when he and Lou visited Tolstoy on his estate on the second trip to Russia the following year). Rilke found, however, the greater sights, sounds and art of a (for Rilke) thoroughly spiritualised Russia overwhelming and spent much of his time in Moscow visiting the cathedrals, where art merged with religion. Their stay in Moscow was short. On 2 May, they travelled to Saint Petersburg, Lou’s former home. Rilke found the modern city “internationalised” and lacking the chthonic depth that he had expected from Russia. Tensions were now becoming evident in their relationship, and soon after they went their separate ways: Lou remained in Saint Petersburg, while Rilke left for Prague at the beginning of June, but typical of their contradictory synergy, they met up again in Sopot (near Danzig) in June, remaining there until the end of July, when they both returned to Berlin.
Had the Russian trip been too short, or a disappointment, or both? Had their knowledge of Russian, its language and its culture, been insufficient? By the end of 1899, they were planning a second trip, this time without Andreas. The princess Maria von Meiningen made her summer cottage on the Bibersberg mountain (Thuringia) available to them, and here, between 30 July and 12 September, they immersed themselves into all things Russian. At the end of that month, Rilke returned to Berlin to continue his university studies (with further private study of the Russian language).
Once back in Berlin (and possibility in total seclusion), he gave full reign to the poetic fruits of his Russian trip and wrote between 20 September and 14 October 1899 the first group of a cycle of poems, which would later form the first of three volumes in The Hour Book (Das Stunden-Buch). The first was titled “Of Human Life” (“Vom menschlichen Leben”). Here “Rilke placed most of the poems in the mind and mouth of a persona, a pious monk whose voice holds the sequence together. God becomes a humanised presence, animated, close by, concrete. The entire atmosphere is permeated by the naive and pious spirit that he and Lous had celebrated since their Russian trip” (Freedman, p164). Typical of this spirit is “I find you in all things present”, where the monk addresses, in assertive pantheistic terms, God as master, friend and confidant:
“I find you in all things present,
to which I am good and like a brother;
you sun yourself, a seed, within the small
and in the great you give yourself even more.
This is the mysterious play of forces,
and go through things so serving,
growing high in the roots, dwindling in the stems
and in the crowns rise to a resurrection”.
The writing of the poems in The Hour Book was an eruption of creativity, which was now a defining feature of Rilke’s mode of composition, where months of inactivity were often followed by days of almost phrenetic activity. It was Rilke’s practice to write poems but leave them lying before seeking publication. In this same period, between September and December 1889, there followed an early draft of The Stories of God (written for children, and published a year later), and in December 1899 a volume of poetry, In Celebration of Myself (the title, perhaps a rejoinder to Lou’s rejection of the earlier non-published In Celebration of You volume), a collection of poems that he had composed over a three-year period from 1897. Heterogeneous in style and subject matter (Rilke did not seek as he had done with previous volumes of poetry to bring the individual poems under a single rubric or categorise them), a number are self-conscious about the poetic activity and the role of language within it, as in the following poem that almost borders on the idiom of prose in its matter-of-fact style:
“I was so scared of people’s words.
They say everything so clearly:
this is called a dog, and that is called a house,
and here is the beginning, and there is the end.
I am scared also of their meaning; their mocking play,
they know everything, what was and what will be;
mountains don’t thrill them anymore;
their gardens and their estates directly border onto God.
I will always warn about them and ward them off: stay away.
I love to hear things sing.
You can touch them, and they are firm and silent.
You, however, are the very destroyer of things”.
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 stopover 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” (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 Xaver 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 spent 11-31 January 1910 in Leipzig as a guest of Anton Kippenberg, the editor of the “Insel Verlag”, and his wife. On 23 January, Rilke completed, through mechanical dictation, the manuscript of The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, which was published in May. He now embarked on a tour of cultural engagements, which took him to Berlin (late January to late February 1910) and Weimar (March), when he then recuperated in Rome (March to April), Duino castle (April) and Venice (April to May), before he returning to Paris (late May). The period after the completion of the Malte Notebook was a restless one for Rilke. Feeling that he had peaked with that work, he found himself in a state of literary aboulia, “beset by demons of poetic sterility, gloom and self-recrimination” (Daniel Joseph Polikoff, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History. Chiron Publications. 2011, p. 448). As Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé in December the following year, “you must understand that this book has left me stranded like a survivor, my soul in a maze, with no occupation, never to be occupied again”.
Rilke attempted to overcome this miasma of indolence in two ways (ways with which he was long familiar): travelling and romance. The former meant for the peripatetic poet constant changes of abodes and frequent visits to his cohort of often aristocratic acquaintances, as if he were being “kept alive through constant motion” (Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet, p. 309). The latter way of romance led to his involvement (sometimes on a platonic level) with a growing number of female admirers, which included, at this point in time, Mimi Romanelli, the daughter of the Venetian art dealer, Sidonie Nádherná of Borutín, friend of a notable group of writers, such as Karl Kraus, and Marthe Hennebert, a waif that Rilke had met on the streets of Paris. At the same time, his marriage with Clara was going in the direction of an anti-Romance, towards divorce.
Later that year, Rilke was able to combine both modes of distraction. In September 1910, whilst in Munich, Rilke met Frau Jenny Oltersdorf, the wife of a wealthy businessman, who persuaded him to accompany her on a voyage to North Africa, commencing in November. Their initial itinerary, which took them to Algiers and Tunis, was followed by a second trip in January 1911 to Cairo and a journey down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, before their return leg to Cairo. Rilke was delighted by the non-European otherness of the sights, but on a personal level there was less delight. Rilke was not inclined, much to her disappointment, to see in Frau Oltersdorf anything other than travelling companion. The journey, however, left a lasting legacy in Rilke’s deep fascination for Islamic culture and cultivated spiritual impulses that would later bear poetic fruit (Polikoff, p. 448).
Rilke returned to Paris on 6 April 1911. The round of apparently never-ending cultural activities and the obsessive travelling continued. In August, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis invited him to stay at her castle in Lautschin (Czechoslovakia). The Princess was so sure of her maternal influence that she found a new name for the poet: “Doctor Seraphicus”, the seraphic doctor. “I explained that ‘Rainer Maria Rilke’ was too long; ‘Rilke’ too short and definitely not his true name; and ‘Rainer Maria’ disrespectful [because of its association with the Virgin Mary]” (see Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, The Poet and the Princess: Memories of Rainer Maria Rilke. Amun Press. no date. p. 16). This was the second time that Rilke had allowed a benefactor (after Lou Andreas-Salomé’s conversion of “René ” to “Rainer”) to change his name. It is difficult to imagine Thomas Mann or Bertold Brecht permitting this.
Such an action, effectively the imposition of a new personal identity (if we see it positively), reflected the growing bond between Rilke and the princess, and Rilke probably accepted it so that he could remain part of her aristocratic world. In which case, it was the right decision, for the princess and her family possessed not one but two castles. The second was located in Duino on the Adriatic coast, and it was here, between October 1911 and May 1912, that Rilke went for his longest and most productive sojourn since his trip to Italy five years earlier. Duino offered him the necessary seclusion to make possible a reassessment of his personal and creative identity. As he wrote to Elsa Buckman in December 1911, “I have been wishing for a long time to be here by myself, completely alone in order to shed my old self”. He had to be patient: the divine afflatus cannot be willed into existence. But then one day, it came, as he was walking along the sea cliffs in front of the castle, in the midst of a storm. The Princess later recalled Rilke telling her what happened: “all of a sudden in the middle of his cogitations, he stopped still, for it seemed to him that he heard a voice call through the roaring of the wind: ‘who if I should cry would hear me then from the orders of angels?’ He stood motionless and listened. ‘What was that?’, he whispered, ‘what is coming?’ ” (The Poet and the Princess, pp. 34-35).
Rilke’s abrupt revelatory words formed the opening lines of a series of ten poems that would be given the title The Duino Elegies, although the cycle would not find its completion until 1922. Rilke completed the first elegy on 21 January 1912. Around the cry and the angels, around the hope for transcendence and the pained recognition of the impossibility of the same, Rilke built a poetic monument. The first elegy introduces the major themes of the cycle: the common imperfection of humankind compared to the unreachable perfection of the Angel; the debilitating effect of self-consciousness that inhibits our belonging to the world; the failure of love to escape games and dissimulation; and the living presence of the dead. The Angel, in particular, is a central figure. It is an object of longing, but it also represents something that should only be wished for but not attained, for should we succeed, it would crush us with its beauty, “and beauty is nothing else / than the beginning of terror”. But as Rilke had written in a letter to Countess Sizzo in April 1924, “he who has not accepted the terror of life, definitely and decisively, yes even come to welcome it, has not taken possession of the ineffable fullness of our existence”, and he added, “to demonstrate the identify of terror and beatitude … that was the essential meaning and significance of my two books [Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus]”.
The second elegy was finished soon after the first, between the end of January and the beginning of February 1912. The Angel appears once more (invoked in the opening lines as both a promise and threat), but beyond its appearance we are in this elegy exclusively in the low mimetic world of the human (the all-too-human). The poem explores the absolute requirements of absolute love compared to the inconstant affections of relative “love”; the attainment of an earthly beauty that should belong to us (but does not); and the instability of the human realm in contrast to the stability of the object world. The elegy ends with a vignette celebrating (albeit in elegiac tones) a bucolic landscape, in which we might finally be at home. In the face of Rilke’s endemic restlessness and constant feelings of displacement, the evocation of this material utopia tells us much about his state of mind at this time: “If only we could find some modest place, pure and secluded, /our own fruit-bearing land, something human, between river and stone. / For our own hearts always exceed us”. It is a plaintiff voice that helps explain perhaps Rilke’s almost pathological concern with habitation, which plagued him throughout his life.
Perhaps to relieve the intensity (almost painful, if we read his letters) of poetic introspection, Rilke left Duino on 9 May for Venice, an old haunt and one that he seems to have come to regard as his personal retreat, although he wrote little during his stay. A more radical change of place was needed for the Muse to return. On 28 October 1912, Rilke (now temporarily in Munich) boarded a train for Spain, the initial destination being Toledo. This was where the artist El Greco had lived for most of his life, whose paintings Rilke had been inspired by in Paris. That sense of inspiration has now been made manifest. As he wrote to the Princess on 2 November, “what is it like here? That I shall never be able to say (it would be the language of angels)”. And yet even this glimpse of the celestial cannot satisfy Rilke’s restless soul. In spite of the achievements of the first two Duino elegies, he is forced to confess to Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 19 December 1912: when I look back to a year ago, “it does honestly seem to me that I haven’t moved since, except for going round in circles”.
Rilke stayed in Toledo only three days before travelling to Seville and from there to Ronda, where he remained until 18 February 1913. It was in Ronda that Rilke started to write again, producing a series of poems known as “The Spanish Trilogy”. As so often in Rilke’s poetic idiom, universal statement and the autobiographical (indeed, confessional) mode inform one another. The first poem begins, “from this cloud, look! which has so wildly covered / the star that just now shone there – (and from me), / from these dark clustered hills which hold the night, / the night-winds, for a while – (and from me)” (translated Stephen Mitchell). The pained state of nature is reinforced by an anaphoric repetition of the presence of the lyrical subject, who is likewise pained. As Rilke wrote in a letter to Andreas-Salomé’ on 19 December 1912 from Ronda, “once more, I am a burden on my own heart, with all the weight and with the heaviness of I know not what”. He went into greater detail concerning his malaise to Anton Kippenberg the following month: “my indispositions are not due to the climate but are only a new chapter in this singular overcoming or renewal which my entire nature is having to accomplish in these years”. This involved “a digging-up process of the entire soil of my being whereby the uppermost goes down to the very bottom”. These are times “when it would be most propitious to have no consciousness at all”.
On 23 February 1913, Rilke returned to Paris, to resume his occupancy of 17, rue Campagne-première, in (the for Rilke aptly named) district Montparnasse. The inner man must now look outwards; indeed, he sees the latter as a refuge from his debilitating plight of introspection. Social life, cultural contacts and romance now moved into the centre of Rilke’s life. Paris is his base, but it is just the starting point for further bouts of travelling: in June-July, he goes to Bad Rippoldsau (seeking a respite from his incessant illnesses); to Göttingen in the same month (visiting Lou), followed at the end of the month with a visit to Kippenberg in Leipzig. The restless movement continued, taking in Berlin and Munich. As Freedman concludes, “each month took him yet a further step from his writing” (Freedman, p. 363). During this period, Rilke’s erotic life intensified, with the arrival of three new women in his life: Ellen Schachian, Helene von Nostitz-Wallwitz and Hedwig Bernhard, whom he had met through his ever-expanding network of acolytes and well-wishers, all admirers of his poetry and impressed (perhaps even seduced) by his growing reputation.
Rilke has discovered the eroticised body, shorn from sentiment and aesthetic adornment (but not of its place in mental play). In October 1913, he returned to Elegy 3, begun the previous year in Duino. It begins: “the sing of the beloved is one thing, but, oh, yet another / to sing of that hidden guilt-laden river-god of the blood”. The ethereal, the transcendent idiom of the first two elegies (and the Angelic, however forbidding that was) gives way to the low-mimetic realm. Perhaps lacking any further source of inspiration, Rilke returned to his writing on Rodin. In the first of his two essays, he had described the sculptor’s art as emerging out of the “language of the body”, a language that brought to the surface “a thousand emanations for all that was nameless and new” (Rilke, Auguste Rodin. Dover Edition. 2018, p. 4). In Elegy 3, the body is depicted as a visceral massif, a dark realm that belongs to the individual but seems to exert itself in a non-individual way, as “this inner wilderness, / this jungle within”. In this Elegy, physical Immanence replaces spiritual transcendence.
It is within this context that we should perhaps see the next major moment in Rilke’s personal life. On 22 January 1914, he received a letter from a young woman called Magda von Hattingberg, saying how much the poet’s Stories of God had moved her. Rilke had received many letters of appreciation from female admirers before, but this time it was different: her simple words, “I wish I could be Ellen Key [to whom the book was dedicated] even for a little while” “transformed him into someone else, an instrument of feeling and singing”. He wrote back to thank her, in profuse terms in “effusive poetic prose that displaced any further poetry” (Freedman, p. 373). But the letters included poetry. On 25 February, he wrote: “Can you imagine how for years / I’ve travelled thus, strange among strangers? / And now at last you take me in, to home -” (quoted in Prater, p. 243). They eventually met in March and moved in together into a Berlin apartment. Roles of dependency developed: “they travelled less as lovers than as brother and sister – or once as patient and nurse” (Pater, p. 245).
In the midst of his personal imbroglios (“my entanglements, which are unforeseeable and so long in the making”, as he described them to Andreas-Salomé’ in a letter of 26 June), Rilke went through a major change (perhaps a crisis) in his artistic self-image and in his poetics. To date, Rilke’s greatest poetic achievement, his New Poems (1907), had been founded on an aesthetic of perception where, as in the “Dinggedicht”, the integrity of the phenomenal world had been given fullest realisation through the impartiality of a narrating gaze. On 20 June 1914, Rilke sent Lou Andreas-Salomé a poem, simply titled “Turning” (“Wendung”). The poet speaks of himself here in the third person voice, as if he is talking of another, previous self: ” he had long prevailed through gazing. / Stars fell to their knees / under his grappling up-ward glance”. This was earlier poetic disposition that the “new” Rilke rejects: “work of the eyes is done, / begin heart work now / on those images in you, those captive ones”. In a letter sent six days later, 26 June, to Andreas-Salomé, Rilke explained the background to the poem: “a mental acquisition of the world that so completely makes use of the eye, as is the case with me, would be less dangerous for a visual artist because it would be comforted more tangibly by physical results”. And he adds, “some sort of life within me has saved itself from being exposed like this”, concluding “and between the uninterrupted addiction to outwardness and this inner existence that is hardly accessible even to me, there exist the true habitations of healthy feeling, empty, abandoned and stripped bare”.
The relationship between Rilke and Magda von Hattingberg did not (perhaps, could not) last: by June it was all over. As Rilke wrote to Sidie Nadherny, “I’ve unwittingly drawn a person more intimately into my life than I really intended” (quoted in Prawer, p. 267). If that, however, were the case, what was the purpose the extensive personalising rhetoric and the self-pitying cry for acceptance? As Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé, I have experienced “three months of reality (which I couldn’t face up to)” (quoted in Prater, p. 247).
But reality in a different form was about to happen. In August 1914, war was declared amongst the major European powers. Rilke had left France earlier that month to visit Lou, but now found himself stranded in Munich, unable to return to Paris and his possessions (most of which he would soon lose). “For the first time, therefore, he was really homeless” (Prater, p. 252). Rilke initially responded to war (as did many German writers, including Thomas Mann) positively: it represented the principle of heroic selflessness that had now emerged over and beyond an increasingly materialist civilisation. “Who, who would have thought it?”, he wrote to Anna Baroness von Münchhausen on 15 August. “And now one thinks nothing but this, and everything former has become as if it were immemorial, separated from one through abysses and heights of no longer feelable feeling. The high heart of all who are out there [at the Front] must sustain us over the still water of not-knowing and not grasping, which sometimes threatens to engulf us”. Rilke wrote “Five Songs” welcoming the war. The initial poem begins: “for the first time that I saw you arise / you legendary, unbelievable distant one: the war god”. All poems invoke the war as a divine visitation. In the words of a further one: “at last a god. So, we’ve so seldom seized a god /of peace, the Battle-God suddenly seizes us, / flinging fire, and over our hearts full of homeland/ screams the reddened sky in which he dwells in thunder”.
The euphoria was collective, sustained by the false belief that German victory would be swift. Such a belief was, however ill founded. Rilke’s enthusiasm soon wilted. Within weeks of penning his homilies to the war, he could write (also to the Baroness on 29 August 1914), “I am having a very hard time finding, by myself, across this span, the valid and if possible somehow fruitful attitude towards the monstrous generality”, adding, “an impatience and discontent are growing in my breast”. Not a rejection of war, certainly, but an expression of Rilke’s now ambivalent feelings towards it. The First World War was not the Franco-Prussian war writ large (as many had hoped). The former had been conducted according to rules that were centuries old. The First World War, on the contrary, was a modern war, a “Materialschlacht”, and fought along lines of an industrial operation. As trench warfare became the norm, it consumed large amounts of fighting men in a seemingly pointless competition for small amounts of land. On 12 September, Andreas-Salomé wrote to Rilke to express her horror of the war and its conduct. She wrote that she understood those who had welcomed it, seeing men “in the grip of something”. But such sentiments were “made true and real only at the cost of one’s closest fellow humans and only by virtue of their death”. The words are pointed, and pointed at Rilke and his poems (that he had sent Lou the previous month) celebrating the god of war. And she continued, “nothing has anything in all my years horrified me more than this, and it is if my mouth were to come open, it could only start screaming senselessly”.
It is difficult to believe that such sentiments would not have had an effect on Rilke who, in their frequent correspondence, hung off her every word. Indeed, as early as September (in a letter to Lou), Rilke made reference to “the continually disturbed present” that was making creative work and communication impossible. By October, his tone had become even darker, as he talked (writing to Frau Helen von Nostitz on the 21st of that month) of the “monstrosity” of war and its “unspeakable suffering”. By November, he seems to have taken back his earlier stance on the war entirely: it is “no longer a god but the unleashing of a god over the people”. “Everything visible has simply been cast once again into the boiling abysses, to be melted down”, he wrote on the 6 November to Karl and Elizabeth von der Heydt.
But as Ralph Freedman dryly observes, “he found a cure of sorts” (Freedman, p. 382). Attending a cultural function in Munich in September, he met a young artist, Loulou Albert-Lasard. Romance would divert Rilke from history. This was just one in a number of relationships that Rilke, almost obsessively, entered into during this period. As the lyrical muse wilted, romance flourished. He was now a fully mature man, with a growing reputation as a major poet. His successes were significant. Throughout the final period of the war, he entered into relationships with Mia Mattauch, Elya Nevar, Elsa Hotop and Claire Studer. All were part of the increasingly wide cultured social circle that Rilke enjoyed in Munich. The relationships were, on the whole, intense, complicated and short lived. As one biographer has noted about his earlier relationship with Magda von Hattingberg, “their life together fell into a pattern that many of Rilke’s serious relationships with women would follow, beginning with sensitive caring, tender endearments, small, sophisticated gifts, and an almost domestic tranquility”, “followed by her sinking realization of his slow, barely accelerating withdrawal” (Freedman, p. 375). But, as Freedman also observes, such a pattern in his love life may have been tactical, “a pattern of living through failure as part of a process that turns denial into art”, representing “a power of creating and denying desire as a way of forging a poet’s self” (Freedman, p. 377).
Rilke, however, had already known this. In Elegy 4, written In Munich in November 1915, he had celebrated the pure unselfconsciousness of animals. They act with integrity out of sheer instinct. “But we, as we speak of one thing / already mean its opposite. / Hostility is second nature to us. / Lovers get no further than their boundaries, / although they had promised one another / open plains, the chase, and homeland”. Indeed, Elegy 4 is the most autobiographical of the Elegies. Midway through it, we read: “who has never sat anxiously before the stage curtain / of the heart?”. The curtain is lifted to reveal a complex and psychologically ambivalent portrait of the father, who with temporal ambivalence occupies a space between the living and the dead. He is invoked in a confrontational recall in tones that move between animosity and compassion: “you, my father, since you died, deep within me, / often within my hopes, / you have remained anxious for me, and have surrendered /those realms of serenity that the dead possess, / for my paltry future. Am I not right? / And you, am I not right?”.
At one time, the son had also been a child, and the fourth Elegy contains one of Rilke’s most evocative portrayals of childhood: “oh, hours of childhood, behind whose figures / lay something that was always more than the past / and what lay before us was not just the future”. It is an idyll, where the child exists for itself and in itself in a place “of pure happening”. But the idyll is short lived because, as Rilke will tell us in a later elegy, the child is subject to “Gestaltung”, formation, the controlling presence of the adult world. Here what is childlike within the child is extinguished: “who makes / a child’s death out of grey bread that has become hard, – / or leaves it there in its round mouth / like the core of an apple? … Murderers are easier to understand”.
As an Austrian citizen, Rilke was obliged to present himself for military duties. On 24 November 1915, he underwent an army medical inspection, which found him fit for active service and ordered him to report on 4 January 1916 to a barracks in Turnau, north Bohemia, for service with the “Landsturm” (territorial Home Guard).After three weeks, he was transferred to the War Archive in Vienna, contributing to the writing up of reports of successful Austrian offensives for journalistic purposes. The task was demeaning and took him away from his own writing. As he complained to Kippenberg, on 15 February 1916, “being spent and weary, as it came over me in the barracks, has understandably enough not been removed by the new position; at three, I get out of the office, eat, go home by trolley-car (i.e. Parkhotel, Hopfner, Hietzing, Vienna XIII) and yet not in a condition to give the little remainder of the day its own stamp and its own meaning. For that, I am too full of the stones rolling from the mountains of strangeness that have fallen over me. I taste, if I try myself for a moment, nothing but patience, patience in which nothing is dissolved, pure, colorless patience”.
By this time, Rilke could now only see in the war a manifestation of a mechanical and power-hungry materialist ethos. As he wrote in a letter at the time, the war was lying on him “like a hand on the mouth, a hand on the heart” In particular, “he mourned the loss of the open Europe that had been his home” (quoted in Freedman, pp, 386 and 399). Rilke was also unhappy in Vienna, with its dissipation and formlessness. The city was “a torment, as it must be to anybody with a tidy and precise mind: it is inexactitude, and the sloppy enjoyment everyone takes in this hopeless slovenliness gives the city’s spirit its own particular sad bloom” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 275).
Rilke survived the present of the war by keeping in mind his past. As he wrote later to Elisabeth Baroness Schenck zu Schweinsberg on 5 January 1919, “the longer the exceptional period of the war lasted, the denser and more impenetrable it grew, the more did I take pains not to be separated from all that had been, the more did I insist on keeping what was happy, open, guileless in my past, indeed, on nourishing and prolonging myself, across the terrible interruption, out of this very past. Practically my only achievement in these dreadfully annihilating years was to remain believing in what once in the past was mine, in Capri, in Rome, in Paris, in Russia, in Egypt and Tunis – all the marvellous sheer happenings of my life, to which a different future seemed to belong”.
Rilke enlisted help in high places to get himself removed from his duties. After four months, he was successful and allowed to return to Munich in June 1916. His pleas succeeded largely because it was clear to all that Rilke was acting out of cultural rather than political motives. Freedman summarises the general attitude of those in authority to Rilke’s case: it was clear “that he was no conscientious objector publicly acting from pacifist convictions but rather an artist acting from a strong belief that he was a cultural monument” (Freedman, p 408).
Rilke was allowed to return to Munich, but that return did little to lift his spirits. To be sure, the immediate pressure had gone, but he was now subject to an equally oppressive influence that came from and with history (what he called in a letter to Kippenberg, on 5 July 1917, “the perpetual weight of the times”). As he had written to the latter (who may have been worried about his author’s lack of productivity) on 15 April , “I am proceeding but very slowly along the course of the translations [of The Sonnets of Michelangelo], and the attempts to continue with my own very particular work [the Elegies], interrupted by the military enlistments, have simply moved into my daily experience a torturous inability to work. Those broken surfaces have gone hard and cold, and the warmth of simple joy is lacking to melt them”. In such despondency, even his attempts to communicate via letters (Rilke’s life source) must suffer. As he explained to Elisabeth Taubmann on 18 May 1917, “how long I have left you without an answer. By this, I clearly see the degree of my numbness and apathy. The present time with all its hindrances and its activity, gone to the most frightful ruin, is like lead poured around me – I cannot move outwardly or inwardly. And should there still be some life in my inmost being, I am too blunt and too untransparent to feel and recognise myself in it”.
The four war years were indeed unproductive years for Rilke. He finished translating the Michelangelo sonnets and September 1917 saw the publication of five poems in the journal, Die Dichtung, almost all of which date from 1914. The war itself continued on its tragic course with much cost in human life, with the failed and bloody offensive at Verdun (February-December 1916) leading to the death of some of Rilke’s friends, such as the promising young scholar and Hölderlin editor, Norbert von Hellingrath. Rilke felt compelled to look for a deeper meaning in such senseless slaughter. As he wrote on 19 September 1917 to Marietta Baroness von Nordeck zur Rabenau (the fiancée of Hellingrath), “I think how much salvation and relief will be implanted in my spirit the moment the great healing process of the world has begun”.
That great healing process would not begin until the war was over, which happened with the armistice of November 1918 (although Germany’s military defeat was evident well before then). Rilke tried to find a compensation for this loss. As he wrote to Marie von Bunsen on 22 September 1918, “if only each loss were a full pledge and relentless in demanding of us a life more serious, more responsible and more sensitive to the mysteries of the world!”. The war had shaken Rilke, but it had not shaken his faith in the human soul, as he told the Countess Aline Dietrichstein on 9 October 1918, “with all this affliction, confusion and disfigurement of the world, I still believe in the great, in the consummate, widely inexhaustible possibilities of life”, and he added, “I hold life to be a thing of the most inviolable preciousness, and that the entangling of so much doom and horror, the prostituting of such countless destinies, everything that has been, in these last years, unconquerably growing for us into a still augmenting terror, cannot dissuade me of the fullness and goodness and congeniality of existence”. These are sentiments that will inform the future Elegies which, in spite of their often pessimistic portrayal of the insincerity of human (inter)action, give voice to an existential euphoria, as in the concluding lines of Elegy 9: “look; I am living. From what? Neither childhood nor future / is diminishing … superabundant being / springs from my heart”.
One such moment of the fullness of existence seems to have been the “November Revolution” of 1918, which took place around his very dwelling in Munich. On 5 November, the radical socialist, Kurt Eisner, in the wake of anti-war sentiment, succeeded in organising forces against the state. Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils were set up, and Bavaria was declared a Republic. The normally apolitical Rilke participated empathetically in the event. As he wrote to Clara on 7 November 1918, there was much turmoil and conflict between the different revolutionary groups, each of which had a different vision of what the new government should look like, “and in every hesitation in the strife of that which eventually has to come, one’s heart stops as though this future, still going on foot through the crowd, might stumble or turn back again”. Rilke not only participated empathetically with the dramatic political events (viewing them with enthusiasm and hoping that they might augur a more compassionate and human form of society; he also participated directly, being present (in spite of the incongruity of this lofty spirit normally only at home in aristocratic circles) at a number of beerhall meetings, where the foment of radical change was promoted by demobbed soldiers and sailors. As he told Clara (clearly a supporter of the change) in the same letter, “I too was among thousands on Monday Evening in the Hotel Wagner” where Max Weber, the noted Professor of national economy, rubbed shoulders with the Expressionist playwright and anarchist, Erich Mühsam. And Rilke adds, “the fumes of beer and smoke and people did not affect me uncomfortably”. Brave words from the non-smoking, teetoler Rilke. Such demotic sentiments did not, however, last.
The new guard, however, soon adopted the modus operandi of the old guard. As Rilke wrote to Anni Mewes on 19 December 1918, “under the pretext of a great overturn the old lack of principle works on and gives itself airs under the red flag”. The Revolution had become largely a matter of power, with competing groups (often espousing the same ideology) seeking dominance. As he shrewdly observed to Baroness Heyl zu Herrnsheim on 1 March 1919, “those who do not want to raise the question of the maturity of the multitude for its rights, try to secure their position by all the antiquated means”. As he concluded in a letter to Countess Aline Dietrichstein on 6 August 1919, “for behind so much upset, racket and malicious crowding there was after all no will to real change and renewal, to share and take part in which I would have been only too ready”. The utopian idealism, which had promised so much, gave way in the hard reality of day to different motives: “the preponderance of material aspirations and inferior, if indeed not evil and vengeful impulses, almost in [the Revolution’s] first hours, destroyed the cleaner future of this forward drive, joyful at first, but later desperate and finally totally senseless – in the whirlpools of which many innocent persons went under as did almost all those who thought to carry ahead a vision of humanity, impatient indeed, but noble”. And Rilke now adds a final word on what being involved in this maelstrom meant for those standing on the sidelines trying to make sense of what was happening: “strictly speaking, the unswerving intellectual could side with neither party in this chaotically confused struggle”. Such people shared the ideals but not the ruthless pragmatism of the political. “To the future, the intellectual is after all allied and sworn, not in the sense of the revolutionary, who would presume to create from one day to the next a humanity freed (what is freedom?) and happy (what is happiness?), but in that other patient understanding that he is preparing in people’s hearts those subtle, secret, tremulous transformations out of which alone will proceed the agreements and unities of a more clarified future”.
The Revolution soon degenerated into a quasi-civil war, conducted by left wing (largely communist) factions, and right-wing groups made up from paramilitary units (returned soldiers, now known as the “Freikorps”) and a police force sympathetic to the values of the previous conservative state. All who were suspected of pro-revolutionary sympathies (however idealistically held) were targets for retribution. The Revolution devours its children. In May 1918, police and right-wing militia ransacked Rilke’s apartment looking for evidence of possible Communist sympathies (he was known to have befriended the playwright Ernst Toller, who for a short time had been President of the Bavarian Soviet Republic). They found no such evidence but clearly politics in the wake of the failed November Revolution had become more divisive and more dangerous than ever. Exitum sit. Almost immediately after this event, Rilke took up a long-standing invitation to go on a lecturing tour of Switzerland, arriving there on 14 June 1919. He would never return to Germany.
On 22 May 1919, Rilke wrote to his publisher, Anton Kippenberg, explaining that he had decided to leave Germany and go to live in Switzerland. “My body longs for helpful change, and everything suspended and watchful in me is indescribably ready to think that this is right. So, I grasped the friendly hand, offered to me again yesterday in a telegram from Switzerland, with an affirmative answer. It now seems possible to get in through the Hottingen Reading Circle”.
Rilke cites reasons of health for his decision, but he also refers earlier in the letter to “the experiences we had here in April, and particularly to those infringements and interferences that have been going on since the first of May”. The allusions are cryptic, but what Rilke was alluding to was the ongoing state of violent civil unrest in Munich and the rest of Germany. The assassination of Kurt Eisner on 21 February 1919 was just one in a series of bloody events in which extreme nationalist groups attempted (successfully) to reclaim the revolutionary impetus from the left-wing inspired revolution of 1918. Rilke left for Switzerland (Zurich) on 11 June.
The Hottingen Reading Circle based in Zurich was an organisation which, apart from its local goal of bringing serious readers together, was devoted to inviting writers of international standing to Switzerland. It offered these writers both renumeration and accommodation. Apart from speaking in Zurich, Rilke travelled in his first year there to other centres in the country, giving talks in St. Gallen, Lucerne and Bern (November 1919) and Locarno (December).
The ostensible purpose of his coming to Switzerland (and which had made acquiring a visitor’s visa possible) was to give his course of public readings in Zurich and elsewhere, but, as always with Rilke, social and personal contact was also a priority. And (equally as always) that contact largely involved contact with women. On arrival, he was greeted by the Countess Mary Dobrcensky, a benefactor of the Arts who had helped organise and fund Rilke’s trip. Soon after he got back in touch with a former flame, Sidonie Nádherná of Borutín (also in June), Dorothée Klossowska (otherwise known as “Baladine”, in July), Also in July, Rilke met Yvonne de Wattenwy, and he resumed his relationship in the same month with Marthe Hennerberg. In September, he became friends with Lisa Heise and in November with Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, “the epitome of unpossessive love” (Prater, p. 309). In December, he took under his wing the destitute Angela Guttmann. Rilke’s engagement with these women crossed a broad and indeterminable spectrum, that included their roles as benefactors, hostesses, soul companions, the materially dependent, intellectual associates and lovers. Rilke’s biographers tend judiciously not to place a clear dividing line between these roles. Little poetry was written at this time.
Rilke found much in Switzerland that appealed to his feeling for the material aesthetic of the surrounding world. As he told Countess M. on 13 August 1919, after reaching the isolated village of Soglio, “old houses, old things can acquire the most compelling power over me, the smell of old cupboards and old drawers is so familiar to the nostrils”. And lest we should think this is quaint, second-hand Proust, Rilke is quick to disabuse us of that view. As he wrote to Prince Schoenburg on 11 January 1920,” I am just ashamed to be so entirely dependent on externals”, “and my wishing for old things about me, that is not aesthetic affectation and being fussy either; what humanness have they not brought me (how often have I experienced it!) in the very times when all social intercourse had been given up: how much they tell, how much destiny passes from them”.
So, positive words, but Rilke seems to have experienced Switzerland on several levels, and none of them quite cohere. The poet, in fact, came to Switzerland full of misgivings and prejudices. In his biography of Rilke, Ralph Freedman tells us that “his sensibility became quickly attuned to this pristine world, seemingly untouched by war”. “It was a fairy-tale world”. “Here, it seemed the artist had found his proper refuge, a still point where his kind of poetry could be safely composed” (Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York. 1996. p. 435). But this was not the case. As Rilke wrote to the Countess Aline Dietrichstein on 6 August 1919, “I always regarded Switzerland as a country of transit, harboring a sort of mistrust of its too famous, too obvious, too pretentious ‘beauty’. Mountains are just naturally difficult for me to grasp”. And he added, in the tone of the disappointed but aesthetically informed viewing tourist, “anyway, they seem to me something of an obstacle; there are appallingly so many of them. Their shapes cancel each other out”.
The composed, picture-postcard quality of the Swiss countryside is a topic that Rilke (rather condescendingly) returned to time and again in his letters. The country had provided him with asylum, but he found himself, in his sensibility, not at home there. As he wrote to Elisabeth von Schmidt Pauli on 14 August, “Switzerland is certainly no country for me; it strikes me like one of those painted or modeled nudes intended to make apparent all the ‘beauties’ of many women in a single figure; that is, if I am not mistaken, the aesthetic of Switzerland – for us an abominable one; which is why her artists so quickly turn pedagogical, for where examples of every type are present together, what remains but to point to them, to consider them picture books and to educate through them”. It is not just inert nature that partakes of this picturesque monumentality: it is also found in its population. As Rilke explained to Gertrud Ouckama Koop on 12 September: “the wonderfully picturesque fountains make even the water into good citizens. One readily decides to explain the Swiss himself as part of this security: that is the easiest way of understanding his outlines and his structure, the ground material of which seems indeed to have been kneaded from the most homogeneous mass and cut from the whole; so that in each individual the nation is present”. “What sort of an inner life can take place in his mind, which is germ free and shadowlessly lighted like an operating room!”.
The Swiss, Rilke told Kippenberg in a letter of 2 December, “are stolid, often arid and hard to penetrate”. For that reason, he decided to begin his poetry readings (which began in October. The first on 27 October attracted six hundred people) with general introductions explaining what he was trying to achieve. This he followed, in the second part of the evening, “with an absolutely impromptu causerie, flexibly adapted to the particular place, which led back over various subjects … to my work and quite imperceptibly prepared and explained it in such a way that even very difficult and ‘personal’ poems were unusually well received”. The poetry readings were interlarded with anecdotes relating to his contact with Tolstoy and Rodin. In spite of the condescending impetus behind this strategy, it proved a great success. The overfilled auditoriums greeted Rilke’s talks and readings with enthusiasm, a fact reflected in the positive press reviews they received.
In spite of such public success, Rilke sought to find an isolated place where he might retain the silence of his inner self. As he explained to Dorothea Baroness von Ledebur on 15 January 1920, his greatest pleasure is to seek out deserted country churches: “I sit in one, now here, now there, and sometimes the tears come into my eyes for sheer joy over the pure serene silence in these churches. Such silence, it seems to me, I must be allowed to have around me for a year, to become aware of myself again and of that little spring of renewal in the middle of me, which is the secret of every life”.
But this yearning for solitude and tranquility did not exclude the need for movement, to be in constant motion. Rilke spent a good deal of early 1920 attempting to procure a Czech passport that would allow him to visit other countries, including Italy, and it was here, in Venice that he spent most of June and July. It had been eight years since his last substantial stay in the city and he returned there now hoping to reconnect with the past, as a step towards “restoring the lost continuity of his life” and “the pervading sense of a lack of personal identity” (Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford. 1986. pp. 316 and 310). If so, he did not succeed. As he wrote to the Princess Marie on 23 July, “I only observe that life cannot be joined on to the broken surfaces of the pre-war days in the way I thought”. “Whoever thinks he can live from now on as he was ‘accustomed’ to live, will find himself continually facing the sheerest repetition, the bare once-again and its whole desperate unfruitfulness”.
His trip to Paris in October saw greater rewards, bringing the past to life into Rilke’s present identity. “Here begins the unsayable”, he recorded in his notebook (quoted in Freedman, p. 460). He basked in his asocial solitude and anonymity. As he wrote to Fanette Clavel during his stay, “I have seen no one but things, and it is always through them that I have always composed my life” (quoted in Freedman, p. 460). But as Freedman shrewdly notes, “he allowed himself to be coaxed out of his solitude by persons with glittering names” (Freedman, p. 460). And glittering long names, we might add.
Rilke returned to Switzerland and to a romance that would occupy (uplift but disturb him) for the rest of his life (he has six years more to live). This was with Dorothée Klossowska (otherwise known as “Baladine”, but she also chose for herself the name “Merline”. A sorceress indeed). Rilke had met her in Paris before the war when she was then married to the art historian Erich Klossowska. They were now divorced and Dorothée was living with her two sons in Geneva. The years between 1921 and 1926 ushered in a turbulence in Rilke’s life that initially prevented further work on the Elegies, and then, paradoxically (through the same energies), made them possible.
From 12 November 1920 to middle of May 1921, Rilke lived in Schloss Berg am Irchel, a seventeenth-century manor house north of Zurich. It was a version of Duino in Switzerland. It should have been the place where the Elegies were finished, but it wasn’t. In his autobiographical recall of his time there, the semi-diary, Testament, Rilke blamed it on external pressures (a sawmill operating in the early hours of the morning), but the real disturbance was in Rilke’s mind and in his confused emotions towards Merline. They were not internally conflicting (he knew that he wanted to be with her); they were conflicting in terms of their interference with his wish to write. Merline was not physically present at Schloss Berg, but as an invoked loved one she was, as Testament shows, permanently, with Rilke. She was the pivotal person in his life. It was with her that he discovered Valais, the valley of the Rhone (reminding Rilke of France), which was soon to provide his final resting place and the background to (and perhaps inspiration for) his completion of the Elegies.
In the meantime, however, Rilke was in Schloss Berg, where he struggled to move forward in his work. In his six months stay, nothing was written beyond the preface to a pictorial book that Merline’s son had produced on cats, and a book of occasional poems, titled From the Literary Remains of Count C.W., an imaginary figure who was “a kind of pretext, a personality which could be responsible for what was taking shape at this highly inadequate stage of concentration” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 326). The (often incomplete) poems are whimsies on the whole, but they contain gestures at what would later find their way into the Elegies, such as a musing on childhood: “don’t let the fact that childhood has been, that nameless / bond between heaven and us, be revoked by fate.” Other than these Remains, it was a period of stagnation: just reading and letter-writing (although this was an essential activity). “For Rilke, it was as though fate had nursed a ‘secret hostility’ towards his work” (Prater, p. 331).
The poet left a record of these days of immobility and frustration in a quasi-diary that he called Testament, where he tells of his hope that the castle would provide “that inner thoughtfulness that has to precede the constellation of his work” (Das Testament. Insel Verlag. 1974. p. 81). Rilke concluded that, torn between love of the Other and love of himself, “he was no longer at one with himself”, a victim of “the game of acceptance and refusal” (Das Testament, pp. 92 and 95). Choosing to go down the path of non-love, the past of asceticism, was, however, not an option for someone who was committed to the senses “in order to grasp appearances as pure and forms as true on earth How could that person embrace denial!? And even if it proved to be helpful and useful at the outset, it would remain for him a fraud, a ruse, a misappropriation, and in the end it would take its revenge somewhere in the liniments of his work, as a hardness, as something arid, a miserliness, the result of cowardness” (Das Testament, p. 98). Rilke cannot, thus, renounce love, but he must keep it at a distance (in this case with Merline). “That being-alone, in which I have anchored myself for the last twenty years, must not become an exception, a ‘vacation’, which, bringing many justifications into play, I would have to beg from a supervising happiness. I must live in it without any boundaries. It has to remain this basis of my consciousness, to which I can always return, without hoping for a quick gain, without expecting that it should prove productive for me, but almost involuntarily, unstressed, innocent, the place to which I belong” (Das Testament, p. 113).
Schloss Berg am Irchel was not the right place for Rilke’s “being-alone” but he was soon to find that place. On 30 June 1921 (a month after leaving the Schloss), Rilke came across in Sierre an advertisement for a small “castle” at Muzot. Rilke, assisted by Merline, moved in on 26 July. It was here that he would complete his cycle of elegies. The castle lay in the Valais valley (“where here in the physiognomy of the landscape Spain and Provence so strangely interact”), which was, as he wrote to Princess Marie on 25 July, “so wide and so grandly filled out with little heights within the frame of the big border mountains that the eye is continually provided with a play of the most delightful changes, a chess game with hills, as it were”. And as for the castle, the chateau? (which was no more than a country house: “a square, step-gabled tower set in a small garden” (Prater, p. 337): “it lies about twenty minutes steep above Sierre, in a less arid, happy rusticity with many springs rumbling through it, with views into the valley”. For the spiritualist-minded Rilke it possessed an important feature – a ghost: Isabelle de Chevron, who wandered at night looking for her murdered husband.
In its antiquity, distinguished lineage, ethereal atmosphere, Muzot was conducive to work, but Rilke still could not find the right words for the continuation of his Elegies. He knew, however, as he told the Countness Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck on 25 September 1921, what those words would look like: “I must more and more remind myself that my now nearly ten years’ silence lies upon the words, with which I want to break this silence, is an extraordinary responsibility. Those words, indeed, all those that I ever as yet have to form, are made from the indescribable hindrances that have been put in my way through the years, and especially since 1914, and such words will be heavy and massive by nature. Never was I less in a position to produce light and pleasant words of an occasional sort. It seems to me as though from now on but one thing, something final and valid, the one thing that is needful, will give me the right to speak”.
The one thing that was needful came in the form of a letter from Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, whose daughter, Wera, had been a friend of Rilke’s daughter, Ruth, in Munich. Rilke now wrote to Gertrud, telling her of Ruths impending marriage. It started a train of correspondence, which included letters written by Wera when she was on the point of death. As he wrote back to Gertrud at the beginning of January 1922, the letters “were all at once the introduction into something so manifoldly moving, affecting, overwhelming to me”. Rilke, the believer in death as a form of spiritual integrity, now found his way to new poetry: the Sonnets to Orpheus,
Orpheus, a figure of legend who had visited the dead and found poetry amongst them, had provided a poetic theme once before, in the poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”, written in Italy in 1904. The first sonnet begins: “Oh, Orpheus sings! Oh, tall tree in the ear!”. “These were words that came to Rilke on the morning of 2 February 1922, finding their concrete shape from restless imagining” (Freedman, p. 482). At Berg, Rilke had read Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and this served as inspiration for the transfiguring Sonnets. “The Orphic myth – the power of Orpheus over animals and trees, his descent into the Underworld – was particularly fitting as a symbolic expression of Rilke’s ideas of the unity of life and death, and especially of the poet’s vocation” (Freedman, pp. 350-351). Unlike what will come later in the form of the Elegies, the Sonnets are a “pure” poetry shorn off any murky engagement with the world: their idiom is timeless myth, and their autobiographical origins (which do exist) belong to the achieved transcendence of transfigured death.
It is almost as if the vatic inspiration of the purely poetic of the Sonnets (of a flight uprising “guilelessly into the pure, pellucid skies”, as he wrote to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop on 18 March 1922), had to cleanse his sensibility before he could face the challenges of the Elegies, with their hybrid mix of shifting stylistic registers, their discussive engagement with matters personal and visceral, and their vision of earthly incompleteness. On 7 February 1922, Rilke finally resumed work on them. To the four that already existed, Rilke added a fifth. The sixth elegy, which Rilke had begun in in Duino, with additions made in January and February 1912 in Ronda, Spain, was now completed. Entirely new elegies, the seventh and eight were written, and the ninth, begun in March 1912 in Duino, was also finished at this time. The composition of the final tenth elegy had followed a fragmentary trajectory. Its initial lines had been written in February or March 1912 at Duino, with new sections added towards the end of 1913 in Paris, and now the final draft was finished at Muzot in February 1922.
Rilke was ecstatic about the completion of the Elegies. As he wrote to Baladine on 9 February: “Merline, I am saved! What weighed me down and caused me anguish most is done, and I believe gloriously so … I am still trembling from it – tonight I was afraid that I had collapsed, but no, I won … And I went on to caress old Muzot, just now, in the moonlight” (quoted in Freedman, p. 492). The Elegies brought together the major themes of Rilke’s work: the authenticity or inauthenticity of selfhood; the precariousness but necessity of love; the machinations of failed “love”; the spirit’s struggle against the weight of banality and habit; the urge to transcendence stymied through the imposed definitions of a prescribed world; death and dying as positive conditions of living; the will to constructivism and to art and writing; the glory of existential being in the world and the simple facticity of life; the fluid experience of time; the redeeming power of nature; the joy of childhood that is not allowed to survive under adult control; and the terrifying attraction of Angelic Otherness. That thematic complex is mediated and finds figuration through its dramatis personae, notably the Angel, the lovers, the puppet and the young dead. These may be all fabulations of the mind, but the Elegies also represented a culmination of many experiences in Rilke’s life and drew upon the places where he had been and the people he had seen: the churches in Naples and Rome (Elegy 1), the Athenian stele (in the second Elegy), Egypt and the Sphinx (in the seventh and tenth Elegies), and the Parisian travelling street performers (Elegy 5). Within the text, all contribute to the autobiographical pull of the Elegies, its personal inflexion and its distinctive tone of rapture but also of departure and loss. The latter (the emotive centre of the elegy genre) manifests itself in the “Abschied” motif of the second, fourth and eighth Elegy, but also in the recognition of cultural loss in the age of modernity, as in Elegy 9.
But after the triumphal mood of the Elegies came depression. “Whatever the vicissitudes of the hand-to-mouth life of the previous ten years, the one great task had always been before him: in the calm now after the storm of its achievement, he was left without the sense of purpose that it had given him” (Prater, p. 359). Rilke chose an unusual solution to this crisis: he started to write much of his new poetry in French. “It was part of his class-bound, supranational European vision, in which the language of poetry could be spoken in several tongues” (Freedman, p. 503). The inspiration was provided by his decision to translate, between December 1922 and January 1923, a volume of verse, Charmes, by Paul Valery into German. As for the poems Rilke wrote in French, these were collected in a volume completed in February 1924 and titled Tendres impôts à la France (Affectionate Duties to France).
Rilke’s poetry in German was occasional and infrequent. One series of poems, however, was more substantial. In May 1924, the poet was contacted by an eighteen-year-old Viennese student, Erika Mitterer, who had been impressed by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. The letter that she wrote was, in fact a poem, and Rilke replied to her in a similar vein, initiating a poetic correspondence that lasted until his death. They would eventually meet in late November 1925, when Erika visited Rilke in Muzot.
In the first of her “letters”, Erika had called herself a “Fremder”, someone talking to the Unknown. Rilke replied in his “letter”: “oh, how we treasure the unknown / all too swiftly a dear face takes form / from contrasts and analogies”. In their final exchange of letter-poems, in August 1926, Erika had given praise to the heavens for having survived a difficult medical operation. Rilke replied, sharing her praise in a poem of which the central stanza reads: “the dove of all doves best sheltered, of all doves least / open to danger, knows least, too, of tenderness; / heart that has convalesced makes the most lived-in home; / strength returns delight all the more boundless (translated Ranson and Sutherland. Rilke Selected Poems. Oxford World Classics. p. 269).
Rilke may have been aware of the irony of his words, for he would have known by then that he was suffering from a probably terminal illness – leukemia – from which no operation would save him. Rilke first became seriously concerned about his health in January 1924, after returning from a Swiss sanitorium. Although his illness had not been identified by the doctors (the X-Rays were inconclusive), his condition gradually worsened to the point where he drew up his last will and testament at the end of October 1925. This included instructions on his preferred place of burial (Raron, in the Valais valley) and the headstone and the inscription to be used on it: “rose, oh pure [‘reiner'[ contradiction, delight / in being nobody’s sleep under so many / eyelids”.
Rainer Maria Rilke died on 29 December 1926. He was fifty-one.
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.
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Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 