Rilke and Benvenuta: A Book of Thanks, by Magda von Hattingberg,
translated from the German by Cyrus Brooks.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1949.
ON his fiftieth birthday, “What a bore, what futility!” Rilke wrote to a friend about all the flowers and messages and visitors. “. . . Naturally, if one looks at it justly, there was something dear in it, but where is the love that does not make more trouble?”
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the lovelessness in which most people live, men or women: wanting love, unable to give it, or inspire it, unable to keep it if they get it, not knowing how to treat it, lacking the humility, or the very love itself that could teach them how to love: it is the painfullest thing in human life, and, since love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits. . . . Having imagined love, we are condemned to its perpetual disappointment; or so it seems.
“You know Rilke. . . you know how he is and how much he means to me. . . . You have never asked how it will end. . . . I. . . have not asked that question either, and perhaps that was wrong of me, I have been happy with him in the present. . . because of his noble and lofty spirit. . . because of his inexhaustible kindness. Every time I saw him was a gift of God to me. And I thought that if some day he had to withdraw, and be quite alone with his work, then I should be alone again. . . far away from him, not hearing from him any more but guarding his holy image in my heart. I should almost forbid myself to think of him.”
This is Magda von Hattingberg, Rilke’s Benvenuta (The Welcome One), writing to her sister when her curious association, whatever its real nature, with Rainer Maria Rilke was drawing to its close in 1914. It had been brief: two months of letters, three of living together; and strange: for by this account, the obvious conditions of such a relationship seem never to have existed. They traveled openly together for those three months, to Paris, to Berlin, Munich, Venice, besides visits to houses and castles of his friends. Yet Benvenuta says plainly (and she does wrap some plain things in the sustained fanatic rapture of her style) that when they parted forever they kissed for the first and last time. This statement comes as rather an anticlimax after the heroic if fevered effort of an apparently healthy, all-too-feminine young woman to grow wings for her god, devoted as he was to angels.
One hardly knows where to place Rilke and Benvenuta in the clutter of letters, memoirs, critical studies, and biographies so steadily accumulating around Rilke’s name. As much hysterical nonsense has been written about him as about D. H. Lawrence, if that is possible. Like Lawrence, his personal attractiveness drew to him the parasitic kind of adorers who insist on feeding on the artist himself instead of on his work: who make mystification of the mysterious, and scandals instead of legends. But Rilke was luckier than Lawrence in this: that he also had many faithful good friends who anxiously and constantly for long years succeeded in defending and helping him, almost in spite of himself. For he demanded, and would have, and would content himself with nothing less than, the humanly impossible in all human relationships. As relatives, friends, publishers now dole out mangled fragments of his literary estate, the secret of their long enchantment with him seems lost, for a temperament rather less than enchanting is being revealed little by little. His afterlife of fame is very similar to his former life in his restless, painful flesh: the perpetual unsatisfied guest, the helpless dependent, the alienated genius seeking silence and solitude to work out his destiny—Paul Valéry was shocked at the inhumanity of an “existence so separated. . . in such an abuse of the intimacy with silence, so much license given to one’s dreams. . .”—the continuing stranger who claimed the veneration due to the poet, that is to say, prophet, priest, seer, one set apart by his tremendous mission. In the meantime: “One lives so badly one always comes into the present unready, unfit, and distraught for everything. . . only the ten days after Ruth’s (his daughter’s) birth, I think, did I live without the smallest waste; finding reality as indescribable, even to the smallest detail, as it doubtless always is.” This to his wife in 1907.
By 1914 he had not yet discovered the truths of reality, indeed, it was not his goal; but after seven years of search and flight, of homelessness and poverty, added to his double sense of failure as human being and as poet—for the two warring beings were never to be reconciled in him—he was ready, or hoped he was ready, for “a more human and natural footing in life,” and Magda von Hattingberg seemed to be the one who could provide it for him. She wrote him first, as women so often did, an adoring letter; he hastened to answer it, and thirty-five long years later, she publishes some of his letters—very interesting letters, too—some of hers, passages from her diary, some very valuable transcriptions of conversations they had, and for the rest, a rhapsodical, high-flung, farfetched romance which for style is an extraordinary blend of Marianna Alcoforado and The Duchess. . . .
In the best German Romantic tradition of the 1840’s, not only all nature, and all society, but heaven itself, are tender accomplices in this transcendent episode. Nature especially assists with manifestations symbolically appropriate: the rains, the snows, the fogs, the sunshine, flowers of spring, arrive punctually; the moon is always obligingly full to witness a high encounter. They travel through enchanted landscapes like spirits in a dream, they even sit up all night outdoors somewhere at a crisis, she sleeps on his shoulder and the dawn finds them there, weary, a little stiff in their bones, but with exaltation undiminished. It is absurd, no other word for it. For the heroine was a young, beautiful, professional concert pianist, and too often, especially in the castles and drawing rooms, it is as if she played out her dream-romance on a grand piano, her costume always perfect, the moment perfect, the high-born spectators always on hand and attentive, the cultural ambience of the purest edelweiss.
But the fact that she has made herself so easy a target does not mean that she can be dismissed so easily. E. M. Butler, in her Rilke, tells her story in a few lines, and does not mention her name but quotes a letter from Rilke about her, written shortly after he had broken with her, broken with a decision and finality which shows plainly how dangerous to his future he considered her. For he was incapable of the kind of love she gave, and humanly wished to have from him; he could not endure the burden of her adoring warmth and energy and naturalness. After admitting that for years he had tried to flatter himself that his failures in love and in friendship had been the fault of others, that each in turn had violated, injured, wronged him, he writes: “I have entirely altered my opinion now after these last months of suffering. This time I have been obliged to recognize the fact that no one can help me, no one at all. And even if he (she) should come with the best and most loving of hearts, and should prove his worth to the very stars. . . keeping his regard for me pure and untroubled, however often I broke the ray of his spirit with the cloudiness and density of my submarine world I would yet (I know it now) find the means to strip him of the fulness of his ever-renewed assistance, and to enclose him in a loveless vacuum, so that his useless succor would rot and wither and die a terrible death.”
It is pleasant to know that none of this happened to his tenderly nicknamed Benvenuta; she had to a triumphant degree the womanly knack of starving gracefully on the thinnest ration of love, and yet at last spreads her own feast—a strange feast, but her food—out of that famine.
Only once had he succeeded in almost frightening her off. He was admiring some fantastic doll figure, and she protested that the virtue of a toy was in its effect on a child, and she could not imagine an innocent, healthy little girl not being repelled by this monster. Rilke proceeded to rip to shreds her notions of childish innocence, and to explain to her at length the innate corruptness of toys—and quoted also at length from his fierce essay against dolls, published shortly afterwards. She had unknowingly touched him on the quick: his mother had dressed him as a girl, and had given him dolls to play with.
The faithful and patient Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis witnessed not only this love affair at one point, but many others with many other women. She was disconcerted, she wrote in her journal, at the attraction women had for Rilke. Rilke was equally disconcerted many times at the attraction he had for them: it seemed to him that what a man did only for God, a woman did always for a man. For a while he could impersonate a man, imitate his functions passably—provided the woman was infatuated enough, and most often she was, for women, of all sorts, and for all sorts of reasons, are flattered by the attentions of genius—even he could deceive himself into a plausible enough feeling, or a belief that he felt, or was capable of feeling, a natural, spontaneous sexual desire. But nothing of this could last: in no time at all he was faced with the terrible alternative: to go on with a eunuchlike sniffing and fumbling, or flight—flight in almost any direction, to any goal, even into another trap of womanly tenderness and incomprehension.
He depended in all faith, and with good reason too, on the tenderness and sympathy of women: all of them high-minded, romantic, some of them very gifted, many nobly born and rich: but alas, seekers after a man-god rather than the God in man. By the simplest means, and without any method except that provided by the natural duplicity of his need to be adored and taken care of, Rilke wove his web about them for good. This web was the Word—the Word multiplied, an endless spinning of high, poetic, noble words, flowing easily as a melody carrying with it painless didactic counsel, and if they had not been so flattered, they might have read as we do now the warning between the lines: This is what I have to give, ask for nothing more.
He flattered the soul, or the intellect, or the heart, or all three at once; whatever the individual woman craved that words could supply, he gave her generously. There were more than enough words to go around. Not one of them had any real right to complain, for he was faithful to them all, and he paid them the highest compliment of never confusing one of them with another. . . . And he asked of them all the same thing—that they would save him for himself and from them.