Rilke in Paris

by Maurice Betz

Ah, The achievement of a small moon!

Days where around us all is clear, barely an outline in the luminous air and yet distinct. Even the nearest things have a distant tone, shrink back, show only from a distance, are not exposed; and all that draws on this expanse of distance – the river, the bridges, the long roads and the squares which expend themselves – hold that distance within them, and are painted there as if on silk. Who can say what a bright green motorcar on Pont Neuf might be, or this vivid red rushing forth, or even simply that poster, on the wall adjoining a cluster of pearl-grey buildings. All is simplified, restored to a few planes, sharp and clear, as a face in a portrait by Manet. Nothing is insignificant or without relevance. The bouquinistes on the quais open their boxes, and the yellow freshness or weariness of the books, the brown violet of the bindings, the more sovereign green of an album, all harmonise, count, take part in the whole and converge in consummate perfection…

 

From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

 

The ‘French Component’ In Rilke’s Work

The case of Rainer Maria Rilke is rather extraordinary: a Germanic poet in the deepest sense, who represents, in both its most intense and subtle form, a singular branch of German romanticism, at the point where he encounters the final ripening of the Slavic spiritual universe and discovers his own true identity through his relationship with a French city.

In Paris, this German poet discovered not only a temporary home and more or less enduring friendships, but also an inner inspiration, which guided him towards the secret configuration of his entire being. For some twelve years he returned almost year on year, both contented and disappointed to encounter there ever renewed ecstasies and anxieties, and a virtually eternal landscape. This city lent him the framework and themes of a work through which he felt able to express himself to the very limits of the inexpressible, to the threshold of reflecting on and accepting death with a calm heart, following The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in which he was conscious of having marshalled the entire resolve of his existence. He gave himself so utterly to this work that after its completion he remained for many years stricken by sterility. For Rilke, Paris had been much more than Venice for Byron, or Toledo for Barrès: a revelation of the most profound possibilities, the ‘dividing line of his inward waters’ and the touchstone of his art. He declared on several occasions, with distinct emotion, what a debt he owed to this ‘incomparable city which represents a world in my development and memory’ and whose ‘immense and generous hospitality’ allowed him to bring into the light those feelings and thoughts which were tentatively seeking their form.

However important the ‘French component’ in Rilke’s work, it did not manage to govern alone the deeper reaches of his being. This inveterate traveller criss-crossing the very soul and landscape of Europe, nourished himself on the nectar of all latitudes, without his fundamental architecture being altered. From one country to the next, he ploughed his unique furrow, scoring deep, sometimes losing himself in the most unfathomable subterranean labyrinths, but everywhere searching only that he might ultimately emerge into authentic existence.

In these scenic variations for the poet, one observes certain cycles. Some are of major significance: principally the Russian and French ones. The Danish and Spanish cycles allowed Rilke, on the one hand, access to the fantastic and the intimate acquaintanceship of ghosts, and, on the other, to that wide expanse of sky inhabited by Greco’s supernatural angels, which haunt the Elegies and sustain the disembodied poetry. The Italian and Valaisan cycles frame these primary experiences: Florence and Venice are places of residence for the youthful poet who harmonises the first variegations of his impressionist palette, while towards the close of his life, the Valais afforded, following the deliverance which was the achievement of the Duino Elegies, the relaxation and relief enjoyed by a genial rustic poet.

In terms of foreign experiences, Rilke’s discovery of Paris follows directly on from his encounter with the Slavic world, a religious and mystical phase which found expression in The Book of Hours written between 1899 and1903. France presented Rilke with a ‘human landscape’, which was mirrored at the same time in the works of her painters, in the lessons and example of her poets, and by that life so naturally expressive which is reflected in the faces of the Parisian street. ‘It is ever more difficult for the writer to find in action the exterior equivalent to the soul’s movements’ he wrote with Ibsen in mind. The landscape of Paris offered one of those equivalents. For Rilke, that revelation would only deepen, until it spread throughout his entire oeuvre.

7. Le Pont des Arts

 

II
The Discovery of Paris

At the dawn of the century, a young man who had just published his first verses in Germany arrived at a modest hotel in the Latin Quarter. He had blue eyes, his curly hair was brush-like; his manner furtive and he bore the countenance of a dreamer. His high waistcoat and blouse buttoned to the neck lent him the appearance of a seminarian or young priest. A Russian priest more precisely, for his chin was graced with a faint blond beard and he sometimes assumed one of their characteristic smocks with deep folds.

After a journey of several months in Russia, during the course of which he paid a visit to Tolstoy in his residence at Yasnaya Polyana, Rainer Maria Rilke spent a period with a group of North German painters, at Worpswede, and in this Barbizon, set amidst the ponds and heaths of Lüneberg, had first heard pronounced the name of Rodin, by a young German woman who had for a time been the student of the great sculptor. This meeting was in many respects decisive, for Rilke began by marrying the young woman, after which, impatient to approach the master to whom he would shortly be pledging his profound admiration in person, Rilke abandoned this newly discovered home and departed for Paris, determined to meet Rodin and better study his work.

In the eyes of this young poet, whom an intimate experience or discovery relating to art bore so effortlessly over all practical and social realities, Rodin was the unique master, without rival. This lyric poet, still permeated by Slavic mysticism and fluidity, experienced a sense of revelation before the powerful blocks of stone on whose surface this man’s sacred hand had the power to summon so many desires, sufferings and passions. And while waiting to be admitted into the court of the sculptor to whom he proposed to dedicate a work, Rilke wrote a series of moving letters to Rodin in which he compared the man to a God and his art to a daily miracle.

But what can Rodin have made of these demonstrations of earnest devotion? The master of Meudon was not insensitive to homages, even excessive ones, in which his virile ingénue assurance regained vigour and energy from the affronts of a turbulent career. Perhaps too, he detected in the enthusiasm of this young German writer, of whose work he would never have any knowledge, the sentiment of some exceptional quality. The fact remains that, after frequent invitations to Rilke to visit his workshops and share his table at Meudon, he would go so far as to offer him the hospitality of one of his chalets and confer on the young poet, like a favour of state, the responsibility of replying to his voluminous foreign correspondence.

This recognition came only after three years of active friendship, following Rilke’s publications of the projected work. Rilke only remained Rodin’s unpaid secretary for a few months. The master was a despot with the beard of a prophet; he had his moods, his caprices and rages. One of these storms dislodged, if it did not actually break, the friendship between the two men. In the meantime however, Rilke had discovered Paris and learnt French. He was drawn with contemplative obeisance to the forms of French life, to the Parisian landscape, to its writers and artists. To Maurice Martin du Gard, he later confided,

Every being in Paris bears a unique expression, a sign of their personality that they do not show, but that they do not seek to hide either. All the nuances of joy, of misery or solitude, only in the faces of the people of Paris do I find them, and the French vitality expresses itself in the multiplicity of these myriad apparitions; in the street I never cross a void; I go from one face to another, still bearing the memory of the authentic value and clarity of the first, and all is imbued with a consummate and delicate light…

The Louvre, Notre Dame, Chartres Cathedral, the spectacle of the Parisian street, supply him with the material for the new poems he is composing – strong contours, sculptural forms – all under Rodin’s influence. At the Bibliothèque Nationale he reads one after the other, Froissart, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Francis Jammes… He is enamoured by the work of Paul Cézanne, makes the acquaintance of Eugène Carrière, Emile Verhaeren, André Gide, The Comtesse de Noailles. In the manner of several other German poets of the nineteenth century, Rilke is subject to the charms of the French language and its forms, and much later he even undertakes to incorporate a part of it into his oeuvre. He speaks with subtle perspicacity of the problems inherent to this language, the difficulties of syntax, the snares of logic, the riches and loopholes of its vocabulary. He translates into German the works of Maurice de Guérin, André Gide, Paul Valéry, a few poems of Louise Labé, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé…and towards the end of his life, encouraged by the poet of Charmes, he even ventures to borrow this language, so long familiar to him, to expound in gracious and pastoral poems some of the enigmas of his heart and spirit.

The history of the exterior relationship Rilke enjoyed with France is however not the most crucial. These exchanges, however distant their consequences might be, were situated only at the surface of his life. The most crucial discoveries Rilke owed not so much to his French friendships, as to the fateful chance that led him into a solitary confrontation with the faces and atmospheres of an unknown city, the fundamental problems of life and the most painful mysteries of being.

On 28 August 1902, Rilke arrived at rue Toullier, already discomposed by the premonition of these forthcoming transformations. In a brief note, which, with a kind of coquetry he had prevailed to compose in French – ‘In a French,’ he would later write, ‘for which somewhere there must be a purgatory…’ – he announced his arrival to Clara Rilke.

There is no longer any doubt. I am in Paris, although the quarter where I am living is oppressive with silence. I am a solitary in waiting: what must happen? My room is on the third or fourth floor (I dare not count) and what makes me rather proud, is that there is a mantelpiece with a mirror, a clock and a pair of silver candlesticks…

Even five years later he would remember the strangeness of this first contact with the city and divulge to Clara, as they recalled a memorable birthday, his bewildered impressions: the Gare du Nord, the anxiety of those first moments, the long absinthe spoon which accompanied a glass of coffee, the post office on the Blvd St Michel which no longer exists, the leaves of the chestnut trees, that whole Paris at the close of summer, which he found right from the start ‘filled with waiting, promises and necessity, even in its most elementary details’.

The comfort of the little hotel in the Latin Quarter was really quite primitive: in place of electric light, a smoky paraffin lamp. The back of the armchair displayed ‘an indent in a shade of greasy grey that must conform to every head’; the stairwell was so dark that Rilke compares his laborious ascensions to Saint Michael’s combat with the dragon. ‘Ah! how terrible are those nights of the Latin Quarter in those little student hotels’, he sighs.

Rilke only stayed at No 11 rue Toullier for five weeks. Towards the end of his stay, he complained that the twelve windows of the house opposite were trained on him like so many inquisitive glances, forcing him to participate, against his will, in too many strangers’ existences. It was in this room however, that he began really to absorb Paris. When, two years later, he started to write The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, it was from this fleeting but unforgettable abode that the secrets of his imaginary hero would date:

To think that I cannot give up sleeping with the window open! The trams rumble clanging through my room. Automobiles roll over me. A door slams. From somewhere comes the clinking sound of a fallen pane. I hear the laughter of the larger shards, the faint chuckling of the splinters. Then, all of a sudden, a muffled sound, from the other side, from inside the house. Someone is coming up. They are getting near, are right outside my door, they pause, remain there a time, move on. Then, it’s the street again. A young woman shrieks ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram rushes up all nervous jangling, then passes over, rushes on. Someone calls out. People run, they catch up with each other. A dog barks. What relief! A dog. Towards morning there is even a cockerel that crows, pleasure unbounded. Then quite suddenly, I am asleep.

Rilke bought candles for his silver candlesticks. He told Clara, ‘In the evening they burned as if on an altar.’ A soft light which he willingly contented himself with while waiting for morning. In spite of everything he began to feel at home. ‘The people of the house,’ he noted, ‘are friendly and attentive (without having received any kind of tip).’ Besides, he is a model tenant, returning home by eight o’clock, often earlier. A few visits to the museums, solitary walks, long evenings of work.

He writes these details to his wife one Sunday afternoon:

It’s Sunday and it is raining. A slow rain, soft and autumnal. On the boulevards they are already heaping great piles of damp dead leaves; we have evidently missed our summer…

The initial impression of disorientation subsides:

The evenings now belong to me: I shall be contented with reading books, making notes. Meditation, repose, solitude: all those things for which I am most nostalgic.

In truth, it was first and foremost to make the acquaintance of Rodin that Rilke had come to Paris, and the master’s invocation took on in his mind a virtue of exorcism against those obscure threats emanating from the unknown city.

All that relates to itself, will rise up around itself. Even perhaps Paris, this foreign city that to me is so truly foreign. I am in dread of all these hospitals everywhere. I now understand why they recur so often in Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. In every street you encounter invalids who end up there on foot or in carriages. You see them appear at the windows of the Hôtel-Dieu in their strange attire, the pale and mournful uniform of the invalid. You suddenly sense that in this vast city there are legions of the sick, armies of the dying, whole populations of the dead.

Already we see seeping through, in these first letters one of the dominant themes of the Notebooks: the multiform face of death in Paris.

In no other city have I felt this and what’s so strange is that this impression infects me here, in Paris, where (as Holitscher has written) the vital impulse appears stronger than anywhere else. Vital impulse, is that then life? No. Life is calm, immense, elemental. The craving to live is haste, pursuit. There is an impatience to possess life in its entirety, straight away. Paris is bloated with this desire and that’s why it is so close to death. Oh foreign city, how foreign indeed you are!

These first weeks are however illuminated by the meeting with Rodin. In the master’s sprawling workshops, in the peaceful garden at Meudon, the youthful poet glimpses the kind of bliss that might bestow art upon him. ‘One must work, nothing but work,’ Rodin teaches his young visitor. That is to say:

You should not dream of creating this or that, it is not enough to construct your own means of expression, and then declare everything. You must work. You must have patience. Look neither to right nor left. Lead your whole life in this cycle and look for nothing beyond this life.

‘That’s how Rodin does it,’ repeats Rilke, like a refrain. He disengages from a too-centred existence, giving an impression of sovereign calm, of assurance against the blows of fate, which may perhaps be a kind of joy. But Rilke does not yet dare believe in this path to contentment, not least because he knows the equilibrium that it supposes and the sacrifices it demands. He remembers the malaise he experienced in the house of Tolstoy, the painful scenes which he endured with Rodin. These experiences imposed a conclusion on him: He must choose.

One or the other, happiness or art. The life of great men is a road bristling with thorns, for they are utterly dedicated to their art. Their own life is like an atrophied organ of which they have no further use…

In reality, Rilke had already made his choice. He knew that he ‘would die of not being able to write’. If he had come to Paris, it was not only to gather together the elements for a study of Rodin, it was to ask this of himself: ‘How exactly should one live?’

You replied to me: in working. And I understand perfectly. I sense that to work is to live without dying.

Rilke wrote to Rodin that ‘yesterday, in the silence of your garden’ he ‘found himself’. He had understood that for the artist, work could be ‘space, time, dream, window, eternity… And now the clamour of the immense city became more distant and all around my heart there was a profound silence where your words stood erect like statues.’

But what is the language of this city that remains when the tutelary shadow of Rodin and his great example recedes? Returning from Meudon, Rilke returns to the human stratum of Paris:

Oh these oppressive summer evenings! Deprived of pure air, walled up in odours and stale breath. Evenings of anguish, as if trapped underground. Sometimes I lean my head against the gate of the Luxembourg just to breathe in a little space, calmness, moonlight, – but there too it’s the same leaden air, still heavy with the perfume of the too many flowers they have crowded into the borders…This city is just too vast and overburdened with melancholy…

In the absence of the stimulating proximity of beings and objects emerging from Rodin’s powerful hands, Rilke returned to books:

Each day now I spend long hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale and I read much. In Paris books are most discreet; they speak to you slowly and in a low voice. This contrast brings benefits.

There were also art books lent to him by Rodin, monuments of gothic art, cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries:

It was truly a great art. The more one studies these things, the more one senses the value and exquisite quality of the accomplished work: for these cathedrals, these peaks and mountains of The Middle Ages would never have been achieved if they had to be born from pure inspiration. A long procession of days was needed and each lent a hand; so although not all could be behind the inspiration, at least they were driving it forward. Everything has been said about these great churches. Victor Hugo penned some memorable pages on Notre Dame in Paris, and yet the action of these cathedrals continues to exert itself, uncannily alive, inviolate, mysterious, surpassing the power of words… I believe that in the middle of this metropolis they are like a forest or a sea; a fragment of nature in this city where even the gardens themselves are works of art. They are solitude and calm, sanctuary and rest in the ever-moving tracery of alleys. They are the future as much as the past, the rest runs on and drains away, rushes forth and falls… But they alone stand and wait. Notre Dame grows each day, each time you see it again it seems even larger. Nearly every evening, as night falls, I pass before it; at the hour when the Seine is like grey silk and when the lamplight falls upon it like cut jewels.

And here his gaze is cast upon another landscape dear to Rilke, the Luxembourg Gardens, at the hour when ‘dusk falls over the purple flowers’.

Somewhere, a drum roll suddenly rises, swirls now here now there. A soldier in red strides the avenues. And from everywhere the people are leaving: joyful beings, laughing, exuberant, serious beings, doleful, silent and solitary, people of all kinds, today, yesterday and the days that went before. Some who have spent long hours on a distant bench, as if waiting – and the drum tolls in their head that they have nothing more to hope for – some who remained the whole day long on benches, snoozing, eating and reading the paper: all kinds of beings, of faces and hands – what hands! – now file out. It’s like the last judgement. And behind those who are on their way, the garden grows. And Paris in contrast becomes narrower, clearer, more vocal and begins one of its insatiable nights, a night of spices, of life, of music and dresses.

The idea returns frequently in Rilke’s letters that his stay in Paris is an apprenticeship:

You can learn here, I think, but it requires a certain maturity, otherwise you see nothing. Firstly, because there are just too many things; next, because a thousand different voices are addressing you at once and from every side.

For the first time, on 17 October, in a letter to Arthur Holitscher, Rilke attempts to relive, with a little hindsight, his initial Parisian experiences.

Can you sense that to me Paris is infinitely foreign and hostile? There are cities which are discontented and melancholy for being too vast. In vain do they spread, a little nostalgia makes them fold back on themselves, and their constant din fails to cover the interior voice which repeats to them without cease: a city is something against nature. Think of St Petersburg. But Paris is quite different. Paris is vain, embellished with mirrors, eternally overjoyed with itself, so content with its greatness and its smallness that it can no longer distinguish between them. Living beings follow the streets; you can’t separate one from the other. In those first days, I encountered hospitals all over the place: behind the trees on all the squares stood these long monotonous buildings, with their great doors and their side gates set in high fortified walls. At the windows were affixed reproductions of the most serious ailments and the papers related in captivating fashion alarming crimes, playing with that kind of language which lends itself to everything and whose very terms are sensations in themselves. Yes, all was a game reflecting in other games. Ah! How I clung, with hand and foot, to those rare things which were different! To Rodin first, the great old man. To the things he had formed, to these silent stones, filled with restrained voices. I went to the Louvre, stood before the Mona Lisa. I saw the Nike of Samothrace, which made me feel for the first time a breath of Greece, from an age when they still celebrated such victories.

It was there, the counterweight, without a doubt. But everywhere the atmosphere weighed heavy and as oppressively as the very first day.

I read a great deal at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Geffroy, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourts. I read, though the universal authority of this language discourages me. And apart from Rodin and Carrière, I still haven’t seen and don’t wish to see anybody, for the moment. I would like via some solitary path to arrive at work, to daily work, to the capacity to work. I wish to remain at least in the short term in Paris, because it is difficult. I believe that if one could manage to get down to work here, one might penetrate to a great distance and to a great depth. I first intend travelling to Breslau for my studies. But I could as easily begin them here. I follow courses at the Collège de France, I am going to read a lot… Something good will come of this. How long I will stay here, I don’t know; in any case until early 1903…

Never have I felt so much nostalgia for Russia.

As much as he took full advantage of life in this city, there rose in him that anxiety which became the place where the images and feelings of Malte Laurids Brigge were gradually formed. ‘Paris’, he wrote to Otto Modersohn, who considered joining him,

is an oppressive and febrile city. The beauties that one encounters there, with all their radiant eternity, cannot heal the sufferings inflicted on us by the cruelty and turmoil of the streets, the contrived face of the gardens, of people and things. Paris imposes on my nervous sensibility inexpressible anxieties. It seems to have lost its way, rushing headlong out of orbit like a planet, towards some terrible cataclysm. This is what the cities of the Bible must have been like, behind which rose the rage of God to devour and overwhelm them…

Letters, over the months that followed, became ever more scarce. You might conclude that Rilke had sufficiently translated the first shock that Paris had given him. You might also suppose that he had sunk into his solitude and deliberately renounced letter writing. For:

What good is it, asked Malte, to say to someone that I have changed? If I change, I am not he who I once was, and if I am other than I was, then it is obvious that I have no further connections. And I can hardly write to strangers, to people who don’t know me!

In the midst of this opaque and overly animated city, Rilke undertook to explore that obscure dimension from which he awaited the responses to so many questions. ‘I possess an inner life that I was hitherto ignoring. From now on everything goes that way. I really don’t know exactly what’s happening.’ During that winter of 1902 to 1903, he doubtless inscribed the feverish curve of those first pages of the journal, which later would take its place in the Notebooks. If it is true that

In spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion and knowledge of the universe, we remain only on the surface of life, if it is true that man has still ‘seen nothing, neither recognised nor properly announced the living’, then the first to discover this troubling void must surely do something about it.

This Brigge, this foreigner, this insignificant young man must sit down, and up on his fifth floor, must write, day and night. Yes, he must write, for that is how it will end.

And so it is presumed did Rilke, until, at winter’s end, illness threatened.

‘Perhaps,’ he wrote to Ellen Key on 9 March 1903, ‘it is Paris I can no longer bear, above all in this uncertain changing season, when the sun is so hot, the cool shade like a cave, and where all is so replete with disquietude.’

The Coast, the North, the South, all jostled for preference in his travel deliberations. Until one evening when the brisk trot of a carriage horse lead him across a barely discovered nocturnal Paris to the Gare de Lyon, from where a train would carry him to Tuscany.

8. The Luxembourg Gardens

 

III
The Genesis of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Nothing is more curious than following the evolution through which a work takes on its most complete form and in a sense emerges, before being actually written, from that ripening of inwardness, which had to precede its passage into the light. In 1902, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge were already sketched in Rilke’s mind, and certain pages had probably already been drafted, as he was at pains to include rue Toullier as the start date of the Notebooks, which were in effect a transcription of his own private journal or of certain letters. However, it was only in February 1904, in Rome, that Rilke clearly conceived this work in its entirety, and imagined the principal figure that, distinct from himself, must be encouraged to see clearly into his own being.

Several of these ‘imponderables’ over his production and inner formation, whose influence Rilke had signalled, and putting aside those ‘literary influences’ through which historians too often seek to reduce an original work to the common denominator of its epoch, had converged to lend the Notebooks their definitive form, which is both of a private journal of a life, and a writer’s dialogue with the faces that haunt him.

From his first contact with Paris, Rilke had borne this unsettling, grievous impression, which for a long time never left him and which would only be clarified much later. The overriding need to express these discoveries from the first moment sought some exit in the poet that he did not yet know how to open.

I know of no incantation; it is God who must pronounce it when the times are completed. I can only wait patiently. I can only bear with faith that deep source that lives on these long days sealed within me, heavy as a stone. But life is there, and it wants to use me for everything, my stone and me. So then, I am lost and I suffer…

It was Lou Andreas-Salomé, confidante elect, to whom Rilke spoke in greatest depth of his Parisian experiences – after a second and briefer stay in Paris, from May into June 1903. Certain noted faces, pitiable flotsam of the city, haunt him right up to Worpswede, in the mighty winds of the Lüneberg Heath:

These beings, men and women, engaged in some metamorphosis, passing perhaps from mental disorder to recovery, perhaps to insanity as well, all those with something infinitely subtle about their face: a love, a knowledge, a joy; a rather anxious and vacillating light which becomes clearer if only someone… showed they cared. But there is no one. No one who comes to their aid when they succumb to anxiety, to fear, to alarm. No one for those who begin to misunderstand what they are reading, for those who still live in the common herd, who walk a little askew, and then presume things are threatening them; for those who don’t feel quite themselves in these cities and who are adrift there as if lost in a treacherous forest, a forest without end; and all those for whom each day is a sufferance; all those who, in the tumult, do not hear their own will, all those who are submerged in anguish, – why is there no one in these great cities?

This call – discrete echo of the angst that Rilke himself never ceased to suffer – is reflected throughout his entire oeuvre; these passers-by, alone with their destiny, are the companions in solitude of Malte. The prose poem that Rilke cites in his letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé will find its way into The Notebooks, extended by a quotation from this chapter of The Book of Job, of which, he says, ‘Word for word, all of it applies to me’, and so will the letter formed from the recounting of a meeting with an epileptic, on boulevard Saint Michel, that Rilke reproduced almost word for word in his book.

So distance had not dissipated the phantoms of the city, and the memory of them, on the contrary, only tightened their embrace. There was now a pressing need to find expression for an adventure into the abyss that neither the romantic ballad of The Cornet nor the bright strokes of The Book of Images, nor the muffled accord of The Book of Hours, nor the rather affected naiveties of The Stories of God, had prepared the poet to evoke. So the idea of a Nordic hero emerged, a man both attracted and repulsed by the Parisian landscape, who would love this city, but must perish in having experienced too powerfully its oppressive presence, but who in so doing would concretise these confused ideas, assembling them around the central figure, the nebula of such impressions.

Two encounters crystallised the project. Of one we are informed by the confidences of Rilke himself. But the correspondence so far published does not permit us to establish a concrete date. Was it in Paris, or later in Sweden or Denmark, that Rilke heard the name of the young writer Sigbjørn Obstfelder, poet of an extreme sensibility, a subtle impressionist, who died aged only thirty-two, after having lived for a prolonged period in Paris, without having properly realised his full potential? Whatever the case, Rilke was struck by the fate of this young writer. He who, on leaving a performance of The Wild Duck, in Paris, and once again conscious of his Nordic affinities, had been attracted to this figure, a poet who he imagined melding with his own personal torments. When he decided to give a more coherent form to his Parisian notes, the idea came to link them in some way to this character and to surmount those interior obstacles of too personal a proximity, by resorting to the medium of a half-imaginary hero.

It was on 17 March 1904 that Rilke spoke for the first time, in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, of his new book: ‘A sort of sequel to The Stories of God.’ On 15 April, in another letter to the same, he affirmed that he had begun a ‘new work’ on 8 February. Now, some time in January Rilke had read an autobiographical novel by the Countess Franziska Reventlow: Ellen Olestjerne, an account of which he rendered in the Zukunft. Rilke, who had met the Countess Reventlow on another occasion, was disappointed by the poor means of expression employed in this romantic biography about a young woman prey to poverty, illness and solitude. He wrote on 21 January 1904 to Lou Andreas-Salomé,

This life, whose fundamental value comes precisely from what has been lived without being destroyed, perhaps loses too much of its necessity if it is recounted by the one who directed it and suffered it, without even becoming through all that an artist. One has the sudden impression that the human being it speaks of had not been the most important thing in that life and its conjunctures, as if, above it, life was born, and had not been properly understood…

How the poet’s imagination surpassed the facility of these romantic approximations, to evoke the ‘tiny suffering face of a strange young woman’, and beyond this face the immense grey ocean, the low Danish coast behind the dunes, the castle of Nevershuus and its park… Such images welled up in the midst of a too opulent and fast moving springtime in Rome, and nourished in some way by the deception he had carried with him, for a book so impatiently awaited, rekindled his nostalgia for the Northern countries. And this was the second encounter that brought Rilke closer to his Danish model Malte Laurids Brigge.

But Rilke did not lend to the Notebooks straight away the form in which he finally presented it to his publisher. The Rilke Archive in Weimar conserves the manuscript of an embryonic version of the Notebooks (I) which begins with a conversation by Malte with ‘One of those rare Parisian friends’, in front of a log fire. In a style of rather affected solemnity, which more recalls Rilke’s youthful writings, than the dense and dark prose of the definitive version, the author describes the play of the flame, the distant face of Malte, his hands animated by the reflections of the fire.

But does this version pre-date or post-date the one Rilke undertook to write in 1904 in Rome? Perhaps one day this will be established. For my part, I return to what the poet confided in me many years later, on his last sojourn in Paris, in 1925, on the detours that led him, almost in spite of himself, to the definitive form.

The figure of Malte haunted me [he said], but I felt that I had an incomplete knowledge of him and in a certain sense only an exterior one. That is why, when I began this book, which at first presented itself to me as a sort of matching vase to The Stories of God, I had recourse to the dialogue form that I used to evoke Ewald and his friend. I was far from suspecting then what development this would have for the work in question and what imprint my Parisian experience would finally impose on it.

I was then in Rome. I lived for a few months in a little artist’s studio that they had placed at my disposition in the Strohl-Fern Park. The lecture on Jacobsen, along with that so deceiving Italian springtime, with its excess of haste, had given me a nostalgia for the northern countries, where I still knew the good Ellen Key, to whom I had dedicated The Stories of God. I was writing a suite of dialogues between a young man and a young woman who confide their little secrets. It happened that the young man spoke for quite a long time to the young girl of a Danish poet that he had known, a certain Malte who had died very young, in Paris. The girl wanted to know more and the young man had the imprudence to divulge to her that his friend had left behind a journal, which he insisted he had no further knowledge of. But the girl protested that he show it to her.

For several days I managed under diverse pretexts to instil patience in her. But the girl’s curiosity became only more active and she began to depict Malte in her own imagination. I realised that I could hide no longer. Interrupting my dialogue, I began to write the The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, without concern for the secondary characters who, in spite of myself, had brought me back to him.

9. The Luxembourg Gardens

 

IV
Paris Rediscovered

More than two years passed before Rilke returned to Paris. Sweden, Denmark, Germany welcomed him and successively detained him; his letters do not tell us if he again took up the work he had involuntarily begun in his Rome studio. Rilke renounced the study he had proposed to dedicate to Jacobsen, but he profited from his time in Sweden by perfecting his knowledge of Scandinavian languages and one might suppose that the Danish background to the Notebooks was established and intensified during the months spent at Borgeby Gard, at Furnbourg and Copenhagen.

It was at Treseburg, in the Harz, on 11 July 1905, that an affectionate letter reached him from Rodin, a letter that touched him so ardently that after having sent it to Clara Rilke, he asked his wife to send him back the original, ‘to keep with me’.

My dear friend, I am writing to communicate to you all the friendship and admiration that I bear for man, the worker writer, who has already exerted so much influence everywhere through his labour and his talent. I needed to send you these tokens of friendship and these endorsements for your worker’s soul…’

Rilke replied:

Thank you, most revered master… My soul opens to your words so that they might germinate in me. I think of you always. You know that… Bless you dear master, from all those to whom you give not only joy, but strength, solitude and the desire to live a more concentrated existence replete with labour. I love you with all my heart.

Thus restored at a distance, this friendship between the young poet and the great old man would draw Rilke back to Paris in mid-September.

‘Paris,’ he writes to Clara Rilke, on the very day of his arrival,

is as sure of itself as ever. It is just the same, as gigantic and brimming with necessity in the detail as much as in its larger forms. Unbelievably real… I have become reacquainted with many things… I went to Jouven without even being recognised… Ah!

In this city, three years are but a single day. I stayed sitting a long time in the Luxembourg. I went to the museum so full of people and statues. A light autumn sun shone from time to time upon the Seine and warmed a bridge. And all this, is Paris.

Rilke happily accepted Rodin’s proposition of hospitality at Meudon. ‘Life around the Master,’ he wrote to Ellen Key, ‘is like a river whose banks one does not see.’ His days were divided between hours spent in the studio on rue de l’Université, walks at Versailles, Paris or Saint-Cloud, and the peaceful charm of the garden at Meudon, peopled by swans and statues. ‘It’s the very centre of the world,’ he wrote, filled with admiration.

The relationship between Rilke and Rodin deserves a separate study. It is enough to recall here that Rilke was for the master, from September 1905 to May 1906, ‘A sort of private secretary’ until the day when an unfortunate incident – a moment of neglect by the poet which exposed him to excessive protestations – concluded in his being ‘let go’.

This position, which enabled Rilke to be close to Rodin, has been interpreted in diverse ways. Rilke himself employed the term, in a letter to Karl von der Heydt: ‘A private secretary of sorts’. But M. Angeloz reports that, according to the testimony of Jean Lurçat, Rilke would later protest against this label of secretary. In fact, it seems that the poet, in a bid to compensate for Rodin’s hospitality, had simply proposed to the master that he take on a portion of his correspondence during those times when he was with him at Meudon. But, as he later recalled to Rodin,

It was as a friend that you invited me to come to your home. You yourself, you offered me your intimacy and I entered furtively, as you wished it, never making any other use of this unforgettable preference than to receive comfort to the depths of my heart, and that other, legitimate and indispensable, the authority to accomplish your business with your intention, before your own eyes.

The joy of living in the master’s intimate circle had at first eased the burden of the tiresome work the poet had undertaken for him.

Rilke persuaded himself that in agreeing to relieve Rodin in this way he was acting as a true disciple. ‘My pupils,’ the sculptor had confided to him with a certain despondency, ‘think they have to surpass me, to overtake me. They are all against me. Not one of them comes to my aid.’ ‘Rodin is truly alone as never before,’ wrote Rilke to his wife.

But the two hours that Rilke proposed to dedicate daily to this correspondence had gradually overflowed to take up the entire day. Spring made him dream of Viareggio, especially when he was obliged to write for the fiftieth time that Monsieur et Madame Rodin were afflicted by ‘a horrendous flu’. ‘I must get back to a time for myself where I can be alone with my experience, where I can belong to it and transform it; already it weighs and troubles me, all that which in me is named metamorphosis,’ he confided to Karl von der Heydt.

A shift in Rodin’s mood, which from one day to the next gave Rilke his freedom, came unexpectedly to fulfil this secret wish. The master had dismissed the poet with a brusqueness perhaps to be found in his nature, but by which Rilke remained ‘deeply wounded’. Nevertheless:

I understand you [replied Rilke]. I understand that the wise organism of your life must immediately reject anything which appears detrimental to maintaining its functions intact; as the eye rejects the object which hampers its view. I understand that and (do you remember?) how much I understood you so often in our joyful contemplations?

With a painful accent, but not without dignity, the poet bade farewell to the artist whose bewitchment, in spite of everything, he continued to suffer.

So there you are, great master, become invisible to me, as if by some ascension carried off to the heavens which are yours.

I will not see you any more – but, as for the apostles who remained lamenting and alone, life now begins anew for me, the life that will celebrate your lofty example and which will find in you its consolation, its honesty and its strength.

We were in agreement that in life there is an immanent justice, which fulfils itself slowly but without imperfection. It is in this justice that I place all my hope; it will one day correct the error that you sought to impose on that which has no more means nor right to reveal its heart to you.

On 12 May 1906 Rilke left Meudon and installed himself in a small hotel on rue Cassette, where one of his Worpswede friends Paula Becker had once stayed. Between two avenues of the Luxembourg, he managed to correct the proofs of a new edition of The Cornet and to review the manuscript of The Book of Images.

My room is small, but not too much so… not very well ventilated, but not stifling either, plenty of old objects, but those which do not bother you with their memories… Opposite, here, against the sky, the trees of the cloister; below, an old garden wall, covered alas with posters: a negro who shows his teeth, advertising shoe polish; to the side, Beethoven and Berlioz, Independent Artists in a washed out yellow; ‘Bernot, end of season, generous discounts’, in black and in blue on dark grey, the ‘Palace Hotel’ of Lucerne. But above there is an old ledge on the wall, in the form of a vault, scorched and bleached by the sun at its extreme edge, which always dries rapidly, a dark grey in its hollowed part and covered in places by greenery, busy with life and rustling. Further above, the chestnut trees, ancient, which extend their great hands, and higher still, always higher, a little to the left, the corner of a church nave, without a mast, embedded in the sky like a wreck in the ocean. And above, behind, and on all sides: Paris, of light and silk, faded once and for all time, as far as its skies and its waters, to the heart of its flowers, with the overpowering sun of its kings. Paris, in May, her white communicants who pass amidst the people, swathed in veils, like little stars, sure of their path and their hearts, for which they rise, set out and shine…

And the letter climaxes with an allusion to the hero of the Notebooks, which Rilke speaks of as a death that he himself would have known and that, doubtless, he will reencounter in his new found solitude: ‘I think of Malte Laurids Brigge who loved all that as I did, if he had been permitted to survive his great distress.’

It was in this bright vernal Paris, less peopled with phantoms and hallucinations than the city of his early anxieties, that Rilke seized again little by little and staunched the wound in his heart caused by Rodin’s unjust harshness. Days of labour, where the Bibliothèque Nationale took centre stage, days whose strict organisation Rilke defended from tiresome intrusion with an always courteous but inflexible firmness. And Malte Laurids Brigge, did he prove a companion during these long afternoons browsing old chronicles of French history?

‘I am still a long way from Malte Laurids Brigge,’ he wrote on 25 March to Clara Rilke. But even to regret being at such a distance, perhaps reveals that Malte was still very much in his thoughts.

A day of rain, observed from the window of rue Cassette and described with a virtuosity that makes one think of Jacobsen, places us right at the heart of the greenest pages, the most budding of the future Notebooks:

After several days of full sun, here comes the rain, and opposite me, against the wall, a gentle breeze returns the chestnut and acacia leaves, so that they all share in this dripping, experience it and all are shining from it. This is one of those days of rain that are not meant for the city. One must live beyond, on the outside, to see all this darkened green, all the meadows reflecting greyness, all the agitated numberless leaves in verdant luxuriance, for the lights have vanished (the clear, melting, dissolving lights), which are merely reflections: green, reflected by green, placed over green, shadowed with green, deepened green, and which somewhere are the innermost depths of green. And suddenly all these colours are drawn back from the perfume itself as if the sun, in vanishing had poured them into the flowers.

However, a few darker notes sometimes disturb the agreeable harmony Rilke now enjoys with Paris, leading to nostalgia for the countryside. For example, the incomprehensible laughter of the Parisian public before Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, which the poet saw performed at the Théâtre Antoine:

The incredulous laughter of the Parisian public (public of the lower rung, it must be said), during the most sensitive, the most vulnerable, the most agonising passages, where merely the light touch of a finger brought pain. And right there: laughter. And once more I understood Malte Laurids Brigge, his Nordic essence, and that Paris had in effect destroyed him. How he had truly seen it, felt it and how much he had suffered by it!

Following a projected stay in Brittany, sketched out then simply abandoned, Rilke departed suddenly for Belgium, then Germany and Italy.

Once again, an absence of almost ten months, and a journey of the same length, which took Rilke from Bruges as far as Capri, via Berlin, Naples and Sorrento. But in June 1907, the poet was reinstated in his little room – well almost the same room, one floor closer to the rue Cassette. And this time he really seemed to have rediscovered, with renewed receptivity, the intuitions and anxieties of Malte, the fundamental tone of the Notebooks.

‘Here once more, the Paris that devoured Malte Laurids,’ he wrote to Clara a few days after his arrival, confiding in her the difficulty he was experiencing this time in acclimatising. ‘The atmosphere of these furnished rooms is always loaded with disquietude and oppressive with disorientation…’ And: ‘That weight, the anxiety are everywhere here. Nothing has changed. It’s always the same Paris.’

It is almost with surprise that in this foreign room he watches the blooming of a hortensia, which reminds him of the flowers in the courtyard of the Villa Discopoli. ‘It never hesitates, it is so full of confidence, it already lives in this foreign room, for it only knows how to live.’

And the poet adds: ‘But we, alas, we have so many other possibilities. We have far too many of them.’

Now occurs the encounter with that student – whom we will encounter again as Malte’s neighbour, and whose nervous affliction ended up communicating itself so forcefully to Rilke that its manifestations seemed contagious to him, in spite of the wall that separated them. Rilke felt that this invasion of his being, this excessive responsiveness regarding other people, was a danger for his health and his mental equilibrium. ‘This error would be excusable, if at least I was capable of drawing fully on it for my art,’ he wrote to the Baron von Nordeck zur Rabenau.

But he feared not being properly prepared for the transposition of all too fresh experiences:

For Paris, that I admire so much and to which I know I must submit as one submits to a training, is always in some sense new, and when you feel its grandeur, its near infinity, it annihilates you so violently and so completely that you must demurely recapture from the very beginning the impassioned attempt to live.

There followed a period of withdrawal, during which Rilke closed himself in with his spectres and those protagonists of the Notebooks: Death, Fear, Dream and Poetry. In October, announcing to his wife the recent visit of Mathilde Vollmöller, returned from Holland, he confides to her that this was the first living being he had seen ‘for very, very long weeks’. For can one really count as human beings those ‘ruined caryatids’, the apparitions and voices of nameless passers-by, to whom the poet continues to devote a fervent attention? Marionettes, broken by life, who slowly drag themselves, like so many turtles, along the pavements of the city and make one think of strewn wreckage and those ‘little old women’ that so readily evoke Charles Baudelaire.

     Ashamed to exist, shrivelled shadows,

     fearful, bent low, you stick to the walls;

     and none greets you, strange fates!

     Debris of humanity for ripened eternity.

Then it’s the step of a blind woman during the night, which prefigures another episode in the Notebooks:

That often does me good, to be faced with real night, the night of this little garden, for even a little garden may possess a vast night. (I was interrupted. I had recognised, down below, in the quiet rue Cassette, a light cadence uncannily repeated: it is an old woman who passes, who sings, as if she were cradling an infant. She is blind. A black poodle tugs on her left hand; on the right she holds a stick out in front. If a coin falls, the dog noses towards the place where it rolled, takes it and tosses it in the metal dish that his mistress holds out to receive it. While he searches about, she remains silent. Then, having launched to the heavens a final gratitude, she starts over as if she had never been interrupted, as if she had simply stopped listening for a moment. Now the street is once again in silence. From time to time, a footstep, from time to time, a carriage. Then, I recognise it, the stick of the blind woman against the pavement: She’s back. It is time. For the ear this scene is akin to a view of the sky for the eyes; the same law enables the elements to appear, places them and orders them into constellations, all this, in spite of its distance, is replete with meaning and speaks to the heart of the solitary who understands and attaches himself to these voices converging on him, aboard infinite space…

So, during the fourth period of Rilke’s residence in Paris, it seems that the fundamental images of that spiritual uprooting which was his Parisian experience had taken on their fullest meaning and found their definitive value. Though Rilke had during the last two years devoted a significant portion of his time to the New Poems (where are to be found in any case many of the themes familiar to the Notebooks, only driven towards a more formal expression), crucial fragments of the book were now transcribed. Letters, notes, journal pages – fragile testimonies, some of which have unfortunately been lost – formed the backbone of the Notebooks and were employed like sketches, studies of hands or torsos which the sculptor uses to prefigure a group work. Roughed out in 1902, tackled again in 1904 via the detour of a dialogue, which was in effect only a ruse of his interior demon, hounded by remissions between 1905 and 1908, it was only in 1909, in Paris and then in 1910, in Leipzig, that the poet would begin the definitive composition.

Formerly, in a letter of 17 October 1907, Rilke had admitted to his wife how much he owed to Baudelaire – the authority to integrate into his work the most horrifying experiences and to thus approach a totality of truth:

You will certainly remember a passage in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge which concerns Baudelaire and his poem ‘Une Charogne’. I cannot help but think in writing of it, that without this poetry, the whole development of ‘objective’ language, such as we now think to see in the works of Cézanne, would never have even emerged: so this remorseless monument must be raised there, first. It was crucial that artistic vision was first overcome, to the point where could be perceived, in both the horrific and the sense of hostility, an existence as valuable as any other. Yes, the creator has no more right to turn away from any existence or to choose between them: if he refuses life in a certain object, he loses in one blow a state of grace, he succumbs utterly to sin. Flaubert, when he reports with scrupulous conscience the legend of Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, remains at the heart of the marvellous with a clear veracity because the artist in him participates in the decisions of the saint, approves them and acclaims them. He lies down with the lepers; he communicates all the heat from his body, right on through to the nights of love. Yes, an artist must go as far as this to ultimately achieve a new bliss…

At the same time (and for the first time), I understand the destiny of Malte Laurids. That test was without doubt beyond his strength, he could not withstand it in the dimension of the real, even though he was, in terms of abstract reality, convinced of its necessity, to the point of still instinctively seeking right up to the moment where it clung to him and never let him go. The book of Malte Laurids, if it is ever written, would be only an expression of this means of seeing, demonstrated on someone that it overwhelmed…

A day must come, one day, a time, for the calm and patience that will allow me to pursue the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; I know now many more things about him, or rather: I will know much more when he deems it necessary…

‘The book of Malte Laurids, if it is ever written…’ and ‘A day must come…’ These hypothetical or interrogative forms attest to the prudence with which Rilke sought to approach the authoritative assemblage of those manifold elements of his book.

10. Rue Cassette, 6th arrondissement. (No.29 is on the right facing the wall.)

 

V
The Composition of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

In creating poetry [Rilke wrote to Auguste Rodin], one is at all times aided and even borne by the rhythm of exterior things; for the lyrical cadence is that of nature: the waters, the wind, the night. But to give rhythm to prose one must go deep inside oneself and find the anonymous multiform rhythm of the blood. Prose must be built like a cathedral; there one really is without name, without ambition, without help: there upon the scaffolding with conscience alone.

And to think, that in this prose, I now know how to form men and women, children and old people. Above all I have evoked the women carefully crafting all those things that move around them, leaving a whiteness which is not only a void, but which, all around is tenderness and fullness, becomes vibrant and luminous, almost like one of your marbles…

This letter, dated 29 December 1908, comes at the time when Rilke, finally gathering together the elements of a book carried for so long in a state of virtual creation, pressed by his publisher, pressed more by the interior necessity to finish, undertook the actual composition, so to speak, of the Notebooks. Already in Rome, many years before, he had spoken of ‘a tight prose without gaps’ that this new book required. How different from The Cornet written in a single night, The Stories of God composed in the course of a week! This was a labour of prose the poet could not shrink back from. From the chaos of intuitions, of trial and error evolved a work of organisation, an arrangement following a precise melodic line, where the importance in comparing letters written in the immediate impression of an event and the definitive text of the Notebooks could be appreciated.

The story of this last stage in the elaboration of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is principally reflected in the correspondence between Rilke and his publisher, M. Anton Kippenberg, director of the Insel Publishing House.

After having published The Book of Hours in 1905, this great publishing house gradually absorbed into its list Rilke’s entire production, even those pre-dating this book. The foremost benefit from his alliance with Kippenberg, whom Rilke never failed to view as a friend and advisor, was that he could offer the poet both moral and material assistance.

In February 1907, Rilke alluded for the first time to ‘my new prose work, which,’ he added, ‘only advances slowly.’ In March 1908, in a letter dated from Capri, he expresses to Kippenberg the hope that he will ‘be able one day to place it in your hands’. But the realisation of this work, he adds, depends – as much on his resumption of an essay he proposed on the work of Cézanne – on his return to Paris.

This return took place on 2 May ‘in a peaceful corner where I am assured to secure a few months alone with a book I must finish’. And Rilke reiterates this confidence to Rodin saying that he ‘reckons to remain in Paris for a long period’. The ‘peaceful corner’ was a studio on the rue Campagne-Première. Rilke preferred it even to the little house at Meudon that Rodin, in a gesture inspired by thoughts of reparation and forgetting past misunderstandings, placed once more at the poet’s disposition.

The little house awaits me – alas! – for I, returning from Paris later than I had foreseen, after so much time involuntarily adrift, I must shut myself away there with my work: all alone. You can understand more than any other this disposition for solitude which takes shape in me now more powerfully than ever…

Immured in his home ‘like the nut inside its fruit’, Rilke only left for evening meals and met his wife Clara, who had re-joined him in Paris, just once a week. ‘My book must be finished by the end of August and there is much left to be completed.’

Was he referring to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge? No, for he had already interrupted the prose work to devote himself to the second volume of The New Poems, whose manuscript he would forward to Kippenberg on 18 August, and which he had the pleasure to dedicate, further attesting to their definitive reconciliation, ‘To my dear friend Auguste Rodin’. After this effort, the poet felt himself ‘rather edgy and fatigued’ and aspired to a change of air.

Clara Rilke had departed again at the start of the month, this time for the region of Hanover, leaving at her husband’s disposition the large bright room that she had, in the guise of a studio, rented from the Hôtel Biron. In the absence of any more distant journey, Rilke felt he could find the necessary relaxation in this dream apartment whose bay windows gave onto a park of seven hectares. He moved in during the last days of August into the central large room on the ground floor where Clara Rilke had resided, then, seduced, rented for himself one of the rotundas on the first floor.

Rilke had seen Rodin again on several occasions through the months that preceded his arrival at the Hôtel Biron, and one of his first thoughts was to communicate the enchanting decor to his great friend, the poet’s discovery of what would be the future Musée Rodin. ‘You must see, dearest friend, wrote Rilke on 31 August, ‘this beautiful building and the room I have resided in since this morning. Its three bays look out prodigiously across an abandoned garden, where from time to time one sees unsuspecting rabbits leap across trellises as if in an ancient tapestry.’

Here, finally, Rilke would find the necessary momentum to reengage with work, ‘at my desk, in front of the open window’. Rodin, beguiled by the charm of the building did not delay in installing himself at the Hôtel Biron, and lent Rilke an oak table ‘that will be the great fertile plain where I will arrange my manuscripts like villages’, Rilke wrote to him in gratitude. One of these manuscripts was doubtless the prose work undertaken in Rome, for the poet, since the end of December 1908, announced to Doctor Kippenberg ‘rapid, solid and contented progress with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’.

I have entirely devoted the last months to this manuscript, for which I was prepared to go to extreme limits. I cannot tell how long this work will continue to occupy me (perhaps I will still be able to submit it within our prescribed term of August). But whatever happens, it is my resolve not to be deflected from this task, where so many disparate developments habitually encounter one another. It will be done.

On 2 January 1909, in the rare euphoria of creation, Rilke allowed his enthusiasm to burst forth.

Isn’t it just this way? You comprehend that a man who is only strong enough for one thing, sometimes crudely and clumsily worried, might be preoccupied with this single task; especially at the moment where he is owed joys and progress as strange as those which procured me my current work these last weeks. I could cite you so many beautiful testimonies. It seems to me sometimes that I will die when it is finally achieved: all weight and all lightness are concentrated so powerfully in these pages, everything there is so definitive and yet at the same time so limitless in natural metamorphosis, that I have the feeling of continuing in this book, distant and sure, beyond all danger of death. I do not have it in my heart, you see: the power to live come what may, and the right to live only for this work, closed in on it, supplied from outside by a little kiosk, like a prisoner for whom all things, even the least, take on their true value…

However, by the spring of 1909, three favourable months gave way to a period of uncertainty and fatigue.

You have enquired on the progress of Malte Laurids Brigge, but unfortunately I cannot reply in kind to all your good news. It is impossible for me to deliver the book for August. From one week to the next I hope to return to it, but the unfavourable constitution of my health, of which I think I spoke to you, has persisted; spring itself has not appreciably rescued me, to the extent that I am, after four months, well nigh unfit for all inner exertion. ‘In this state of disheartened spirit, I do not dare predict when I will be able to re-apply myself to the interrupted prose work (of which barely half has been completed since January); perhaps it will not be until autumn. For it is possible that, as soon as my health is well disposed towards me, I will need to renew myself and to practise before nature and on my poems, to fortify myself and stretch out beneath the influence of the exterior world, the interior world from which I drew this book.

Moreover, this summer will be further disturbed by the fact that (due to a change of ownership) I am relieved of my apartment, meaning that in the midst of July I will be obliged to undergo a relocation, with all that this entails…

The evacuation of the Hôtel Biron was not as close as Rilke supposed, but this dread had contributed to a slow down in his output. On 20 October, he wrote to Kippenberg:

Of my prose work, half is completed; perhaps a little more. But the text is inscribed in little notebooks and on an old spread out manuscript; thus it is difficult to take it all in as a unity. Worse still, during last winter, working poorly due to my ailments and my feeble development, I allowed myself, against my normal habits, to negligent notation and confused certain parts; which made a copy of the whole absolutely necessary

This copy Rilke had undertaken himself, though he feared the exhaustion that this unattractive task would impose on him. ‘What is to be done?’

Kippenberg’s response carried a cheering suggestion. He offered Rilke the chance of a period of several weeks’ repose in Leipzig on the occasion of his next visit. Thus he would be able with the lavish hospitality offered him by Frau Kippenberg, to dictate the text of The Notebooks to an experienced secretary, whom the publisher would put at the disposition of his guest. The impediment was therefore resolved to the satisfaction of Rilke and his Leipzig friends. In January and February 1910, Rilke was the guest of the Kippenbergs and in the tower room he was allocated, he could, thanks to ‘a few richly filled days’, put the final touches to this cherished book, whose manuscript he was loath to send in the post, even by registered mail.

In the following month, the proofs of the work joined himon his journeys to Rome, Duino and Venice. In this provisory and incomplete form The Notebooks already had a few readers, Clara Rilke amongst others.

My wife began to read the Malte Laurids Brigge and spoke to me of it at greater length than of her health and her current life. I am happy to see her envisage Malte primarily as a personality, accepting it as such, and motivating her existence by being drawn back into the past.

Before sending back the proofs, Rilke leafed through them a last time.

Yes, these Notebooks really form a book, as if they had never been anything else. What a feeling to see it like this, a genuine object amongst other objects!

Rilke had just won back his apartment on rue de Varenne when, on 9 June 1910, the postman delivered him the first copy of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

 

11. The Hôtel Biron, Musée Rodin

 

VI
The Book of a Sensibility

According to Ricarda Huch, historian of German romantics, the foremost characters in the life of a romantic poet are: absence of family, absence of homeland and absence of profession. Family, homeland, profession are all crucial links to the exterior world. Family, in Rilke’s existence, barely counted: separated from his relatives by long-standing misinterpretations, he left his wife after the second year of marriage to obey the demands of his art more easily. (The prodigal son of The Notebooks flees his family for to be loved is too heavy a burden for him.) Born in Prague when Bohemia was still part of the Hapsburg Empire, he suffered the eventful trajectory of his native city, remaining a German poet by way of his language and his genius. Although around the age of thirty he had entertained the vague notion of studying medicine, he had never exercised a regular profession. His roaming existence across a dozen countries of Europe, and as far as Eypgt and Algeria, would on occasion have proved precarious if certain generous friends, like Werner Reinhart or the Princess Thurn und Taxis, had not loaned to this troubled traveller such remarkable places of refuge as the Castle at Duino or the tower at Muzot.

If Rilke’s destiny was to be without family, homeland or profession, one could also say that in large part he himself had been the architect of this destiny. With rare exceptions, he had fled friendships and women with the same ardour that he had employed only a short time previously to indulge them. The fact that, towards the end of his life, he began to write in a foreign language is further testimony to that need for constant change and renewal. Attainment caused horror, in matters of love as much as in those of existence. His life was a perpetual flight before social and human realities, towards that abstraction which is solitude, towards that preservation of the absolute that is infinite desire, nostalgia eternally unsatisfied, and towards those superior states of consciousness which give access, in the midst of the most beautiful and sorrowful landscapes of life, to the contemplation of death.

A sensibility with antennae radically quivering, an over-demanding heart, vulnerable, tormented by a terrible thirst for the absolute. Rilke is this above all else. Realities only terrified him so much because all resonated in him too powerfully, because the least shock could wound him. Let us recall those painful and ironic pages of The Notebooks on the first deceptions of childhood, on those birthdays, for example, when one is always disappointed.

The awkwardness and stupidity of adults are infinite! They find a means to enter with their second-rate parcels, destined for someone else. You run to their encounter and then you have to appear to circle around the bedroom for something to do, but without any clear aim… And it’s the child who must warn of the faults of others, save up their shame and confirm in them the illusion that they are acquitting themselves admirably. This, in any case, you achieve at will, even without specific gifts. A real talent was required when someone made an effort and brought, brimming with impatience and jovial bonhomie, a pleasure – and already from a distance you could see that this pleasure was good for anyone but you, that it was a wholly foreign pleasure; you never even knew for whom it might best be suited, that’s how foreign it was.

Such is the first contact of the sensitive being with life, and now one understands that the childhood preceding these experiences signifies for Rilke the reign of a perfection sadly all too ephemeral. It is ‘the time when you touch everything, when you truly receive everything, when you raise the objects that you hold by chance in your hands, with a power of imagination that nothing can deflect, to an intensity and fundamental colouring of desire which justifiably presides over you’. But why would he not prefer that ‘wise non-comprehension of childhood’, to the struggle and mistrust that foists itself on the human melee, when ‘not understanding the embrace of solitude and that struggle and mistrust, are still ways of taking a full part in even those things that you seek to ignore’.

The poet, who exited this childhood and began life’s adventure with such a raw sensibility, left himself open to experience the passions and emotions with singularly painful acuteness. In the play of the senses and the mind, the most infinitely minuscule, capillary movements entangled him, forging for him alone a peculiar interior life. The faintest impressions could enter into him, transform him, tie his senses and thoughts in knots to produce unexpected connections. Responding to a critic who had questioned him on the literary influences that he was thought to have undergone, Rilke listed Jacobsen, the great Russian writers, Rodin and Cézanne, then continued:

But I sometimes ask if the imponderable in oneself has not exercised on my formation and production the most crucial influence: the encounter with a dog, the hours that I spent in Rome watching a rope maker, who, in carrying out his labours, repeated the most ancient gestures of the world, just like that potter in a little village on the banks of the Nile the sight of whom was for me a mysterious and inexplicable education. Or even when I was fortunate enough to cross the Provençal countryside in the company of a shepherd, or that an area as limitless as Venice seemed in some way so intimate… All this surely, is ‘influence’? And perhaps it only remains for me to name the most important, to know that I could remain alone in so many countries, cities and landscapes, relieved of all hearing and all the obedience of my mind to the multitude of impressions, prepared to welcome them at the same time as freeing myself from them…

No, in these simple accomplishments that life accords to us, books could not have a decisive influence; many things whose weight settles on us through their medium, can be purely compensated by the encounter with a woman, by the change of season, or even by a slight fluctuation in the air pressure… for example when a morning suddenly hails a different afternoon, and through how many similar experiences we construct each day.

These emotions, sometimes dangerous, could equally become a strength for the poet, provided that he knew how to deepen them in solitude and thus live the most strictly personal of lives. For the error is to believe that we might somehow escape solitude and ourselves.

We are solitude. We can, it is true, grant ourselves change… But that is all. How much better it would be for us to understand that we are solitude. Yes, and to depart with this truth!

And what does solitude teach this supersensitive being who is aware of being ‘an initiator in his own conditions of life’?

‘I am learning to see,’ says Malte Laurids Brigge. ‘I don’t know why, but all enters into me more deeply and nothing remains at the level where once it used to cease.’ In penetrating this virtually incommunicable world, it seems to him that up to now no one had really understood nor even guessed at the most profound secrets of the individual. ‘Is it possible,’ he asks,

that all history of the universe has been misunderstood. Is it possible that we have still seen nothing, recognised nothing and said nothing about the living…? Is it possible that we can say: ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘boys’ and in spite of culture we don’t suspect that these words, for so long now, have no more plural, that they are infinitely ‘singular’. And to all these questions, one must reply: yes, it is possible.

Strange vision, which from then on he could apply to the universe! Limits blur between reality and dream, the present and memory. Things participate in life; witness the glances, which have brushed past, the hands that have leant on each other. Mirrors, have they not retained beneath their face the images reflected in them? Flowers, perhaps, understand life in their own way. Childhood, is it not wholly present in us, committed to images and sensibility, ready to spill out? In an atmosphere of dream or hallucination, the most fantastic correspondences establish themselves between minds, between things, sensations and images.

The existence of the terrible in each particle of air, you breathe it with its transparency; and it condenses in you, hardens, takes on pointed and geometric forms between the organs… people would like to be able to forget much; their sleep softly files down these furrows in the brain, but dreams retrace the pattern.

And by who knows what poetic alchemy the real is suddenly evoked more powerfully, more surely than by the exertions of a more lucid intelligence:

The road was empty. Its bored void drew back my step from under my feet and played with it like castanets from one side of the road to the other, as if with a clog.

Of this sensibility, which flows right through the work of Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is in some sense a journal, immediate and routine translation. Reflections, landscapes, memories of childhood, coalesce and weave like the cloth of a tapestry. A young Dane traces these febrile lines, self-questioning, confiding his intimate discoveries, confessing the joys, anguishes and hopes that he experiences in his Parisian hotel room. The realities of the city oppose the strange apparitions of his dreams and hallucinated evocations of past events. All that troubles the life of this young hero behind whose features Rilke regards his own existence, drawn in some sense as confession, is delivered to us in a murky light, traversed by moments of mysterious phosphorescence, and in an apparent disorder, which already holds involuntary associations with the interior monologue.

Like Proust, Rilke broke up the framework of the novel and, without care for chronological order, he proceeded with successive plunges into time, space and his own sensibility. Here a unity of the human takes the place of rigorous artistic composition. Rilke believed that the un-coordinated nature of his notations would fare better than a rigid essay in maintaining the illusion of a complete life and somewhere he compares the thoughts of his heroes to scraps of paper from the dead that you come upon in a drawer.

A walk in Paris, a reading, an encounter, a window that opens and whose reflection projects a whole world of associated ideas, a visit to the hospital, a memory of childhood or travel, the discovery of a tapestry in a museum, a noise heard in a neighbouring room arousing the most bizarre thoughts, the sight of a house being demolished, a historic figure who takes on the relief or colour of symbol, a night of fever, the image of death, quasi-physical emotions, sketched or expunged sentiments, dazzling experiences, temptations, fugitive intuitions, all are pursued, abandoned, taken up again, orchestrated, analysed or formally realised.

This little book can be likened to life: in the complexity of the whole, it encounters the required things and those that are down to chance, parts which are wanted and others never achieved, some that succeed, others obstructed, from where a sort of infinity emerges which is not easy to capture in reasonable words

wrote Goethe in 1829, speaking to Rochlitz of his Wilhelm Meister, but these words might equally apply to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Through these evocations and resumptions of the real, Rilke explains, ‘The young Malte seeks to grasp that life which ceaselessly withdraws into the invisible.’ It is not in vain that he is the grandson of the old Count Brahe, who considers things of the past and those of the future as equally valid. The figures and symbols through which the poet exercises self-expression are not the idle games of an aesthete or variations of the virtuoso; they constitute ‘the terms of his despair’, are approximations to his wavering and tormented soul. But each of these characters is in themselves precise, wholly alive, and the meditations or apologues of the poet only serve to lend their existence a greater power.

This burrowing by Rilke deep inside himself left the poet worn out, as if wrung dry by over-extended effort. He had embedded so many painful hallucinations in his work, buried himself so deeply alongside his hero in the terror and neurosis that he himself felt, that whoever read the Notebooks ‘against their current’, the book might ‘seem to suggest that life was impossible’. But precisely by expressing so purposefully his own interior persuasions, Rilke was to a certain extent saved. ‘If this book,’ he wrote,

contains bitter reproaches, it is not to life which they are addressed, on the contrary, It is the continual recognition of the following: through lack of strength, through distraction and hereditary blunders we lose practically all the innumerable riches which were destined for us on earth.

Instead of perpetually hesitating between action and renunciation, we fundamentally only ‘have to be there, to exist, that’s all, but in an immediate way, as if the earth is right there, according to the seasons’.

And when the Notebooks appear, Rilke envisages the future with newfound confidence. ‘Now many things,’ he writes to his friend Kippenberg, ‘are, I think, going to reveal themselves in me; for these Notebooks provide a means of support… Now, finally, everything can really begin… poor Malte is a heart that embraces a whole octave, after him all songs become possible.’

12. Rilke’s window at the Hôtel Biron

 

VII
Rilke’s Presence

Here terminates the relationship of Rilke’s Parisian sojourns with the story of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

After the brutal caesura of the war of 1914 to 1918, Rilke twice returned to Paris, in 1920 and in 1925. It was the universe of Malte that he sought to revive, and he stated in several letters how crucial it was in terms of his existence overall that this contact was re-established. ‘It is still, – to a level that exceeds all expectation – my Paris, that of once before, I might say: the eternal,’ he wrote on 19 November 1920 to the Princess Thurn und Taxis. And further to Mlle Elisabeth von Schmidt-Pauli:

Yes, imagine, I saw it again, and from the first instant it seemed possible to live there with continuation assured. Ah! How my heart applied itself to the angry wounds of another time, corresponded perfectly everywhere, and was cured! What it meant to overcome that! It was only there that I knew how much I utterly depended on this reconnection with the world, the same place where… it became world for me, unity in one-self and transition towards myself.

And in a letter to his mother, Rilke even speaks of returning in more stable fashion to Paris, to ‘transplant my life here, where the soil and air of my work exist’.

But this was an illusion that lasted only a few days. In 1925 Rilke encountered friendships, but also deceptions. It was a stay that proved a stimulus, but at the same time left him with the inevitable exhaustion of a long drawn out benefaction. A number of his key friends of the past were absent: Rodin was dead; Verhaeren was dead. The ‘great friends who knew’ had vanished behind the ‘horrific wall of the war’. ‘Their death,’ lamented Rilke, in a letter to his wife in November 1917, ‘becomes vague and unrecognisable; I sense only that they will not be there when the dread vapour dissipates, and that they will not be able to assist those who are obliged to set the world back on its feet…’

These absences Rilke strove to forget as he set off to rediscover the Paris of Malte Laurids, the Paris of another age, devoting long hours finalising the French translation of the Notebooks, which I was at that moment bringing to fruition. Old friendships had survived the war and new ones were born. Rilke saw André Gide again, in preparation for his journey to the Congo, André Gide who, fifteen years earlier, was the first to translate a few pages of the Notebooks into French. Rilke suffered somewhat from the scarcity of his meetings with Paul Valéry and from the too-evasive and nonchalant sympathy of the poet of Charmes. He met Léon-Paul Fargue, Alfred Fabre-Luce, Edmond Jaloux, Jules Supervielle, Jean-Luois Vaudoyer; he saw again the Comtesse de Noailles, deploring that these encounters often took place in a socialite atmosphere of commercial superficiality.

Rilke spoke in his Auguste Rodin of the misunderstandings that gather around the works of great artists. One might ask if the story of a number of his French friendships, if such an account was ever written, might constitute such mistakes. The ignorance of Rodin and Valéry towards Rilke’s work necessarily limited their friendship, which was therefore reduced to a unilateral gift. André Gide, all intelligence and critical verve, renounced his projects to translate the The Cornet and the Notebooks. Valéry was perplexed by this ‘maltreatment of intimacy’ and with the silence and unbroken solitude in which his German translator indulged. Rilke himself kept a certain distance from the mind games and word play of Léon-Paul Fargue, and exhibited a retractile sensibility towards those socialite re-unions, where the ‘muddled and substandard crowd,’ he wrote to a Miss Barney, ‘threatened to become the symbol of my Parisian sojourn’.

Towards the end of August, Rilke fled, without bidding farewell, as if struck by a sudden illness, to plunge himself in ‘fertile forgetting’. ‘An exit sometimes has these holes in which one disappears,’ he wrote to me a little later. It was Muzot and not Paris which would prove the cradle of his new work, The Duino Elegies.

I would have liked to quote here some of those admirable letters, spread over the long years, in which Rilke retraced or mitigated some line of the Notebooks, commenting on and developing the spiritual message contained in the book. But to do so would overburden the design of this fleet essay.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was reviewed in La Nouvelle Revue Française on 1 July 1911. The first critic in France to comment on them, Saint-Hubert, said ‘These notes did not amount to a beautiful, well-constructed, well-made book. Furthermore they have something too raw about them, too abundant, too youthful, a barely mastered trembling; they are however exquisite and significant, heavy with the mystery of living works.’

Twenty years later it was still this quivering of life, this personal mystery, that French readers sought in the book. The moral atmosphere they breathed there determined the warm welcome the poet continued to receive in France, and that aura-like atmosphere in which his personality remains enveloped.

Robert Brasillach remembers one day, concerning Rilke, a subtle distinction made by Albert Thibaudet between the different sorts of radiance issuing from great poets. There is, said the author of Les Heures de l’Acropole, a ‘position’ with Victor Hugo, whereas with Lamartine or Baudelaire, there is a ‘presence’, meaning that the work of the first is a block sculpted across centuries, a colossus before which one stands rooted, while the work of the others has rather a fluidity, a familiarity, an ambience, a recourse and an assistance to the everyday.

In a not dissimilar way, one might say there is a ‘presence’ with Rilke. If this poet dwells beside us like a veritable shadow, if he offers a singular warmth and friendship, this doubtless emerges from the explicit nature of his work, in which, entirely intoxicated with itself, a soul is infinitely reflected, a soul which appears unique. But it is also because such an acute sensibility for the Parisian landscape is fused with the perspective of solitude, and because this poetry is richly interwoven with so many images and faces that seem familiar to us. In seeking to express in his own way the world we thought we knew, Rilke helps us to hear more clearly what already belongs to us and permits us access to the most sinuous and iridescent forms, to profound emotive states and to that strange melody of the interior life.

Alighting on this or that aspect of the oeuvre, one could say that Rilke was the poet of death, the poet of anguish, the poet of solitude and of the inner life, the poet of things, the poet of angels and the life of the soul… and there is clearly an element of truth in all these easily reached-for labels, but each of them proceeds with some innate restriction and each translates a preference where something arbitrary may enter.

The reason, it seems to me, that we experience so much difficulty enclosing this writer in a wide enough definition, is first the need for metamorphosis and flight from himself, which he never ceased to obey until the close of his life; and also because one must keep separate in Rilke the writer and the destiny.

His oeuvre is both that of a magician and that of a pure poet, and also the astonishing testimony of a life, a lesson in human experience. Although The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a confession and a lyrical novel of sorts, a study in psychology and a treatise on the interior life, the work as a whole demands to be understood on a number of different levels. Rilke, who was an artist to the tips of his fingers, at the same time felt he was the bearer of a kind of message. If he had only expressed himself through metaphors and parables, in true poet style, he would have denied this instruction lay within him. Perhaps it is this that still contributes to his art and the strange fascination that he exercises over so many readers.

‘If you read attentively The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,’ wrote Edmond Jaloux, ‘what strikes you most forcefully is that the refinement of form never diminishes at any moment the prodigious realities of life…It seems right, that to many readers of the Notebooks, this mysterious and moving treatment of the nature of life which is ever more absent from our literature, forms the backbone of Rainer Maria Rilke’s meditations.’

In Rilke we observe a moving example of maturation through solitude and lucid contemplation of the loftiest problems of life, but equally an artist who expresses himself in a continual struggle to make explicit in poetic terms the fruit of that inner quest. These two images of Rilke cannot be separated; let us safeguard them equally and not permit one to overshadow or overlap the other.

 

13. Plaque honouring Rilke’s discovery of and residence in the Hôtel Biron, 1908–1911