[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Letterhead:] Château de Muzot
sur Sierre
Valais
September 10, 1921
My dear Lou,
It would be—has been for so long now!—time for a letter, but this won’t become one, not yet, —today I just want to send you, as quickly as possible, a book* that during the past week has almost exclusively occupied me: it belongs emphatically, given the kind of book it is, among your store of materials, and will be so much more pertinent and provocative to you than to practically anyone else, that I can’t wait to know it is in your hands.
You’ll find enclosed here what “Koe.” (Koelsch, that is) has written about it in N[eue] Züricher Zeitung: it may give you some inkling. The book then will doubtless surpass whatever expectation the review creates. As you can imagine, I myself was affected by it very strongly.
Apparently that organizing urge, which among the artistic powers is the most constant and indomitable, is summoned most urgently by two contrasting inner conditions: by the consciousness of overabundance, and by complete inner collapse—which will eventually, in turn, produce its own kind of overabundance. And how deeply innocent are all these events, all these “transgressions,” brought about by a person’s flight into a paradise of his own creation before he was expelled from it at the age of eight. And then the innocence of illness as well and how it creates out of itself its own means of deliverance: the case of Wölfli will help to provide further insight some day into the origins of creativity; it already reinforces a curious and apparently growing recognition that there are many symptoms of illness (as Morgenthaler “conjectures”) which would need paradoxically to be supported, since they summon up the rhythm through which Nature attempts to recapture for itself what has become estranged from it and to weave it into the soothing music of a new harmony.
Enfin: read, read—
How is everything with you, with both of you? —did I see a new book announced recently?
I am in the Valais: do you remember the powerful impression it made on me last fall through its affinity with Spain and Provence? This time, over a longer period, I am experiencing it on its own terms (which does not make it any less astonishing) and from an old indigenous place in the landscape—such that suddenly I found myself living inside the picture, instead of standing receptively across from it. This turned out to be no small matter, especially during the hot days of this exaggerated summer (Valais being the hottest canton in Switzerland as it is!). I came here to see if this old manoir of Muzot could provide me with a refuge for the coming winter: but it is, I fear, too rugged for me; living in it is almost like standing in a heavy rusted suit of armor. And through the hard slits of the helmet one looks out into a defiantly heroic land. —In May, when my time in the château Berg had run out, I went to the area around Lausanne; at that very moment the Princess Taxis was passing through, and I missed by a hairbreadth traveling on with her! Then I came to Valais, meaning only to see it again one last time—, and here the opportunity presented itself to “try out” Muzot. And now it seems likely, if I don’t dare stay here for the winter, that another “Berg-like” refuge in the canton of Aargau will be prepared for me—and with that yet another (the third!) Swiss winter. Because elsewhere, much as I searched, no place turned up that was removed and dependable enough for what I have in mind for myself.
And so now at last, Lou, you have a few bits of news again and know where to think of me and more or less: how.
The postcard of Muzot doesn’t give the right impression: for one thing, the nearest village, Miège, is not as close as it looks; there is nothing in the vicinity except a small whitewashed St. Anne’s chapel (not in the picture!). For another, there is no hint in the card of the colors in this magnificently variegated landscape, nor any suggestion of its modelé, —called forth by the indescribably rich, interactive light that creates events in all interstices and fills the distance from one thing to another with such singular tensions that they (trees, houses, crosses, chapels and towers) appear bound to each other with the same pure relatedness that to our eyes binds the individual stars into a constellation. As if space itself were being produced by the beneficent and intense distribution of things, —such is the effect in this valley, where one scarcely wants to believe that one is still in Switzerland. (This only to correct and augment the unconvincing card.)
And so farewell for today, dear Lou. Now this has inadvertently turned into eight pages after all, and so will have to go off with a later post—impossible to carry it down to Sierre before déjeuner!
Rainer.
P.S.: Were you in Göttingen all summer? Greetings to all and everything at Lou-fried.
Göttingen, September 22, 1921
Dear Rainer,
When your letter came I wanted to write quickly, the way one does when something long expected arrives, —but then you alluded to a subsequent letter that was already almost on its way, the real one that was about you, and then it was as if this one were just your luggage that had arrived in advance of you, and so for the time being I merely unpacked, i.e., I read and read and am still reading the book about W[ölfli] in Waldau. You see: to interact with such people, to learn how to view and understand them—how I long for this! Psychoanalysis, you know, may treat only those it regards as curable and thus as neurotics, and the only asylums it considers appropriate are Waldau and Zürich’s Burghölzli (from which psychoanalysis once learned many things, back when Bleuler was still fully involved with it). These days Prinzhorn in Heidelberg would be a source (has been for several years now). What must have seized you so forcefully, I imagine, is the fact that the core compulsions of the creative artist clearly reappear in the schizophrenic—that in both of them, active and passive, seeing and shaping are incomprehensibly the same, creation is as little to be halted or held in abeyance as is revelation itself: for both still proceed as one, undivided, behind all that which, in the name of rationality, separates subject and reality into two different things. In W’s case, where the role of consciousness is insufficiently developed, elements in a state of confusion get mixed into and interfere with the form-creating process; whereas the artist is bound more strictly to a deliberate content, and also by the ordering force of his—be they even his oldest, childhood-oldest—memories, which rise to the level of general relevance only as symbols, since they must not extinguish themselves in the unconscious for the sake of the artist’s synthetic activity (which is why analysis can only lead the way into them, and then only proceed there alongside the individual person). This is the immensely moving, gripping thing about a psychotic: that he, though incurable himself, does impart something to us that goes even beyond us (if only we make the attempt, which has been under way for about a decade now, to understand him in his own dialect), that he lays bare for us things that no normal, healthy demeanor could ever lay bare: and such things are indescribably important, since beyond that which has been subjectively individualized it is an objective reality that is (as it were surreptitiously and from behind) being touched again. The way I have always imagined it (and psychoanalysis has for some time now been moving in a similar direction) is like this: in the psychotic as in the artist the circle closes anew—whereas in other people the individual and the whole, subject and object, stand facing opposite each other.
September 24: I was interrupted here, and now just want to pin a tail on this thing so that it can run off to fetch your follow-up letter, which I anticipate with such longing! The landscape alone, on the card and in your elaboration, doesn’t give me nearly enough of you, no matter how strongly your pleasure in living there comes through. The book I recommended to Freud at once, in the strongest possible terms. This winter I’ll see him, since I’ve been invited to his house—a stay that I’m looking forward to. Last summer I had a position in a sanatorium that works with psychoanalysis, but it proved a wretched disappointment. I hope it isn’t like this everywhere. Then I was ravaged by a high fever (so thoroughly that afterward, in no time at all, my hair fell out, so that ever since I’ve been going about in little bonnets!). When I came home I saw Baba with three little black monsters hanging at her teats and sucking noisily: she looked proud and shamefaced at the same time. My husband, who felt himself the guilty party in this, had already written to me embarrassed: “please don’t grow cold toward me and the doggy”; he looked after these four little darlings with grandfatherly care. Just now he sees me writing to you about his little misdeed and sends his most cordial greetings.
When will we have a chance to talk to each other? And will it be at all, ever? I still do tell you, often and at length, about everything essential in my life. And now also about Russia, new things again and again, as certain ideas are taking hold of me. This time, moreover, a very personal Russian grief is tearing my heart in pieces. Poбa, my last surviving brother, has returned from the Crimea, where he buried his youngest son who had died from wounds suffered in the war. He arrived in Petersburg after a journey of two and a half months with his wife and daughter. They now live in a few small rooms of his former country house on the small estate which meanwhile has become the property of his domestic servant. There he goes looking for mushrooms and berries with them to quiet their hunger (one pound of bread costs three thousand rubles).
Dear Rainer, I send greetings to you, from all, all, all my heart!
Lou.
You know, if one didn’t die of old age, one would die of melancholy.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Château de Muzot
sur Sierre (Valais) Suisse
December 29, 1921
My dear Lou,
Nothing came of my “follow-up letter” back then: the distraction from all the uncertainties and instabilities of my existence was so strong and continuous up through the beginning of December that I lacked all calmness and quiet; for just when, thanks to the support of friends, everything had been arranged for my stay in this ancient Muzot, the plunge of the mark and its prolonged depression seemed to put the whole thing at risk again. Well, it has just barely, barely been possible to make arrangements, for the time being, for me to sit in my strong little tower; its shelter, its silence I am really just beginning these days to make use of, and my wish now is for nothing but a good seclusion that will be long and uninterrupted.
Though it may well come at the price of a certain immobility, one nevertheless does feel strongly here the well-being of a neutral territory and, to boot, the healing properties of this glorious landscape (which keeps reminding me of Spain and Provence). I have done everything I can to become rooted in it; and the old masonry walls within which I sit have played no small part in supporting this effort. The proportions of the study where I work and the little bedroom adjacent to it sometimes remind me, especially toward evening, of the upper rooms in Frau Quiet’s Schmargendorf “Waldfrieden”! (I felt this immediately and still do, though it’s difficult to put into words.) On this floor there is only one other small (empty) room, the so-called “chapel,” with a stone-framed medieval door still completely unchanged, above which, in bold relief, there appears hewn out of the wall not, strangely enough, a cross, but the “swastika” with arms bent clockwise. About the place itself, in which I live alone now with a quiet housekeeper, there would be much to tell, and much about the landscape—, and then we would finally have arrived at me, and at that point it would behoove me to continue on and on in great detail. But it feels to me that this would have to be done orally. When I emerge again and return to Germany (and because of Ruth’s engagement there is certain to be an occasion for this next year that will preclude delay), my first destination will be you, if this should coincide at all with days when you can have me.—
Above all, though, the quiet winter must have come and gone. If I am granted a long and uninterrupted one, perhaps I can progress a little farther than last year at Berg, —if not far enough to catch all the way up with myself, then at least far enough to see myself again walking on ahead of me in the space required for a deeper breath. The interruption of the war years has left me with an unbelievable inability to concentrate, which is why I can’t manage without the help of this most literal self-isolation. More than ever all communication becomes the rival of what I want to accomplish, which is no doubt true of anyone who more and more has his mind set on one thing only, so that any giving, be it inward or external, is an expending of the very same thing, this one thing. A few days ago I was offered a dog: you can imagine what a temptation that was, especially since the secluded position of the house makes the presence of a watchdog almost advisable. But I felt at once that even this would result in much too much relationship, what with all the attention I would devote to such a housemate; every life that in some sense depends on me arouses in me an infinite obligation to do right by it, and then I always end up withdrawing painfully from the actual consequences of that obligation when I realize that they are using me up completely.
Are you in Vienna, dear Lou? Then greetings to Freud—; it’s a pleasure to see that he’s beginning to become a significant influence in France, which for so long preferred to ignore him. Not much comes my way from there except a word, now and then, from Gide; the only poetry I find truly astonishing is that of Paul Valéry, whose poem “Le Cimetière marin” I was able to translate with a degree of equivalence I scarcely thought possible between the two languages. When I’ve regained some assurance in my own work, I hope to have a try at his prose too; there is a glorious dialogue, “Eupalinos—” like all of Valéry’s few works possessing a serenity, calm, and equanimity of expression that you too would fully appreciate. Paul Valéry comes from Mallarmé; about twenty-five years ago a remarkable essay appeared (Introduction à la Méthode de Léonard de Vinci), which he has now—in 1919—published again with an unusually beautiful introduction; but starting out from Mallarmé meant stopping and standing in silence after the first half step, dans un silence d’art très-pur, and this is what happened: Valéry fell silent and worked at mathematics. Only now, during the war, in 1915 or 1916, in a man of fifty, did the need for artistic expression arise again, so much the purer; and what has since come from him is of the greatest distinction and significance.
But enough, dear, dear Lou: please give me a small token of how you, both of you, are faring! And where are you? —What has become of Baba’s little monsters?! My thoughts often turn toward you, as this is the time between the “two” Christmases—, the first and the Russian one. . . . That you could receive news from there: it seems almost unthinkable that what’s over there still is life and still can express itself in words to us over here.
Have you seen any of the books by Skythen Publishers, who also put out a journal (in Russian and German)? Young Reinhold von Walter wrote me about the project back when it was started.
And Picard: have you seen his book Der letzte Mensch —and Regina’s Landstrasse (with the amazing story “An Old Inn’s Sign”)? I’d love to see these two books reviewed by you, if you’re not too involved with other things.
I am sending you my little “préface” to the drawings of young Klossowski, whose images so completely tell their story; I was pleased that I could do it using French ideas (for nothing in it has been translated in my mind!). But now farewell and on to a good 1922.
Rainer.
(Just now I read in Litt. Echo Ernst Heilbron’s no doubt justified opinion of Peter Brauer, Hauptmann’s new “tragicomedy.” And then the poor hexameters of Anna! What a decline now over nearly twenty years, plastered with birthdays and honorary doctorates.)
P.S.: A brood of little ladybugs is wintering with me (this also might somehow have happened in Schmargendorf); one of them, one that has turned out particularly well, —they don’t all do so in this indoors winter—has just wandered across this page. Take it for a good omen!
[LAS to RMR at Muzot]
Göttingen, January 4, 1922
Dear Rainer,
Precisely on New Year’s morning Mitsou took its place on the table near the stove (an ugly iron stove that due to the lack of English anthracite has been moved into the middle of my room), and since Baba was already sitting there she was the first to absorb the pictures. Then my husband and I went through these mute tales with full pleasure. But it is just as your introduction says: what I feel in the small species of the cat tribe is “the other side” existing alongside the human; and I find myself instinctively repelled by this, probably because the great violent energy of predatory beasts—which regards its embodiment in individual animals as merely accidental and contingent, while it pulses as something unboundedly elemental—houses here (and at best mouses here) in too belittling a format. Baba is of the same opinion, whereas Lorie, her illegitimate daughter (the only one of the three we kept, since Baba would all too quickly resume her sinful ways with her two sons), recently became the foster mother to newborn kittens, and now, gathering the thriving brood around herself, dances and roughhouses with them (she has no sense of rank at all but loads of intelligence).
Yesterday your letter and the Muzot postcard: the absence of windows is what first gives one a shock, —yes, protection to the most extreme degree, as hiding-place tremendously convincing; one imagines for it a fairy tale about someone most powerfully alive who keeps within and holds in his life like precious breathing that cannot be allowed to blend with the ordinary function of the air, because something is there, invisibly at his side, into which he will “blow breath,” instantly bringing it alive. And one imagines all the Божия коровки to be around him, Good Lord’s Dots, Mary’s Little Beetles, undemanding fellow occupants who ask only that when a track of sunshine or warmth from inside appears on the house’s walls (best where they are thickest) they may crawl the length of it or trace it flying (which always leaves one amazed, since they seem to dissolve into thin air—for who has ever detected one in flight? It feels as though they don’t become earthly again till they’ve landed).
To imagine, Rainer, dearest, that in the new year, this actual, current year of 1922, you yourself will be coming here, all the way over to our place, into our gradually encroaching garden (almost the only cultivating we still do is negative, cutting back the worst overgrowth, and our house stands just as neglected and unkempt in the middle of it, diligent maintenance work is simply no longer possible), but trees and bushes remain as carefree and rich with fruit and summer-beautiful as ever, and inside at least we have not been assigned tenants, as have most people around here, and among all the things that have aged so noticeably something very old that never changes lives on full of expectation and in accord with all its seasons. The event that will force you out of hiding for a brief sojourn to Germany was made known to me both through a printed announcement and in a dear, joyous letter from Ruth in which she introduced “her Carl” to me with almost childlike happiness. I received it in Vienna where I had gone for two months; strong, rich days and vivid even back here, made so above all by Freud himself, but also by everyone around him, professionally as much as personally, including a few old friends (above all faithful Beer-Hofmann), and not least Freud’s daughter Anna, whom you’ve met, and who is going to come by here this spring on her way home from a trip to Hamburg to see the children of her late sister. Here I am completely immersed in patients, 6 and beginning next week 8 hours of analysis each day; in between I can think of scarcely anything more wonderful than simply to lie down and keep silent. In two (or perhaps three) months these analyses will come to an end, and should you encounter a Swiss possibility, please pass it along to me: now that postal connections with Russia are finally being resumed in earnest (even though postal charges are like something from a land of fables: the other day there was a letter to Freud from Odessa affixed with 10 thousand-ruble stamps!), it is actually possible to send money as well to those who are going without food there; if you had any idea how much that alone inspires hard work—quite aside from our own pile of debts. I have accustomed myself well to an existence by the clock and indeed down to the minute, and psychoanalytic work is so satisfying that even if I were a multimillionaire I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Be assured that even so I’ll find the time to read Picard, whom I greatly enjoy (he arrived just a moment ago, book and letter), and I hope a review will come of its own. Regina [Ullmann] is another matter: I could only write about her in the context we discussed back then in Munich, and that would basically require—her death. She must under no circumstance read about herself in a review by me, no matter how admiring this review may be. The “Inn’s Sign” is indeed astonishing, I read it in manuscript, everything else pales in comparison, and here and there her inspired naïveté is augmented by invasive little displays of worldly wisdom—which may, however, merely be her way of seeking refuge in normal practice. The bilingual Skythen journal has regrettably ceased publication after only its second issue; R. von Walter, son of the Petersburg pastor and (alas) crony of the ever more unpleasant “v. Gunther” wrote me a congenial letter back then; such a journal would have been wonderful indeed! My Russian piece, Rodinka, I would gladly publish in just about any journal, on account of the honorarium; but there are no prospects, and turning to Swiss periodicals would probably be futile, since they especially will be inundated with submissions.
I have a host of things still to talk about, but where would there be an end to it? So this at least shall get on its way now and greet you with a hopeful досвиданья in this not yet belated year. My husband conveys to you all best wishes; needless to say you would find him too very changed, and yet, even now not the “old gentleman,” only growing into old age as into a country, the way the creatures of the wild do when they go more slowly through their forest; and he is dear and good like a country that is becoming ever more Mediterranean.
(What I’d like most to go on chatting about is a long work on daydreams and their significance, conceived on a large scale, psychoanalytical but with a turn to philosophy.) Прощай.
Lou.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Château de Muzot
s/Sierre
(Valais) Suisse
February 11 [1922]
(in the evening)
Lou, dear Lou:
At this moment, now, Saturday, the eleventh of February, at six o’clock, I lay my pen aside after the last completed Elegy, the tenth. The one whose beginning had already been written in Duino (even back then it was meant to come last): “Someday, at the end of the nightmare of knowing, / may I emerge singing praise and jubilation to assenting angels . . .” I had read you all there was of it, but only the first twelve lines remain, everything else is new and: yes, very, very, very glorious! —Think of it! I have been allowed to survive until this. Through everything. Miracle. Grace. —All in a few days. It was a hurricane, as on Duino that time: all that was fiber in me, tissue, framework, groaned and bent. There was no thought of eating.
And imagine, one further thing, just before: in a different context (that of the Sonnets to Orpheus, twenty-five sonnets written all at once, in the squalls that announced the storm, as a monument for Wera Knoop), I wrote, made, the horse, you remember, that free happy white horse with the hobble on his foreleg who once, at approach of evening, came galloping over toward us on a Volga meadow—:
how
I made him, as an “ex-voto” for Orpheus! —What is time? —When is Now? Across so many years he bounded, with his complete happiness, into my wide-open feeling.
And in the same way one thing followed upon another.
Now I know myself again. It was like a constant mutilation of my heart that the Elegies were not—here.
They are. They are.
I went outside and put my hand on the little Muzot that had guarded and finally entrusted all this to me, I touched its wall and stroked it like a big old animal.
That’s why I didn’t write in answer to your letter: all these weeks I have been anticipating something, have been waiting in silence for this, with a heart drawn farther and farther inward. And now, today, dear Lou, just this. You had to learn of it at once. And your husband also. And Baba—, and the whole house, even down to the good old sandals!
Your old
Rainer.
P.S. Dear Lou, my little pages, breathlessly written last night, these two, could not go off, registered, today on Sunday, and so I took advantage of the time to copy out for you three of the completed Elegies (the Sixth, Eighth, and Tenth). The other three I shall write out in the days ahead, by and by, and send them soon. It will be so good for me, knowing that you have them. And it will also set my mind at ease to know that they exist somewhere else, outside, in accurate copies, kept secure.
But now I must get out in the open for a moment, while the Sunday sun is still in the air.
Прощай!
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
[Göttingen, February 16, 1922]
Ah слава Богу, dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you—and yours to me! I sat and read and cried from joy and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good. I remember as if it were today how much the beginning of the last Elegy plagued you, and when it had shaken me so severely, how even that only plagued you; it had been on your lips for such long years, a word which one cannot make conscious and which is there all the same; in the beginning was this word. And then the Creature Elegy! —It is the poem of my most secret heart, oh so unsayably glorious; and said, the inexpressible made present and actual. And that, finally, is the message of this poetry: that we are surrounded, ringed about by things of mute presence which are being rescued, redeemed into existence for us only thus, and yet it is these things alone by which we live. But where is something like this in other poetry? On my way back from Vienna I read in Munich the Insel Almanach (no, Inselschiff) and your Michelangelo verses, and saw before me how you are climbing after the deepest that has been attained in poetry, and yet it is as nothing, even when it comes from this powerful mind, —so very, very, very different from the inexpressibility that has become word through you. And now I think: how he also must have struggled for it; and to you yourself it seemed powerful enough that you would subsume it into your own language. But what is it worth compared to this primal text of the soul?
I am imagining with such fabulous clarity how you must look now: just as in those days long, long ago, when the brightness in your eyes and your cheerful stance would sometimes make one imagine a boy: and whichever hope moved you then, whatever it was that you were asking of life, absolutely and intensely, as your only need and necessity—is now as if fulfilled. It is possible, perhaps probable, that a reaction will set in, since the work created had to bear and sustain the creator, but don’t let that frighten you (this being also how the Marys feel after that birth which is so incomprehensible to their carpenters).
On the table where the envelope of your letter still lies, there is a big decorated cake, and next to it a little basket of figs and grapes: from patients who were mistaken about the date of my birthday;—so that it IS birthday now all around everything that arrived from you, celebration surrounding yours. Dear, good Rainer, how grateful to you is your old overjoyed
Lou
Château de Muzot
sur Sierre
(Valais) Switzerland
Sunday
[February 19, 1922]
That you are there, dear, dear Lou, to seal it so joyously in my inmost heart with your response! As I read your good, assenting letter: how it flooded me anew, this certainty from all sides that it is here now, here, this thing that has gestated so long, from the very start!
I had intended to copy the other three Elegies for you today, since a week has passed and it is Sunday again! But imagine: in a radiant after-storm a further Elegy arrived, the one of the Saltimbanques. It is a most wonderful addition: only now does the cycle of Elegies seem to me truly closed. Rather than joining the others as the eleventh, it will be inserted (as the Fifth) before the Hero Elegy. Actually, the piece that has held that place until now is so different in structure that it has never seemed to me justified there, though beautiful as a poem. This one will replace it (and how!), and the supplanted work will be transferred to the section Fragmentary Pieces, which, as a second part of the Book of Elegies, will contain everything contemporaneous with them, but which time ruined, so to speak, before it was born, or cut off in its formative stage and exposed its jagged edges. —And so now the Saltimbanques are here also, with whom I became so absolutely preoccupied in the earliest Paris years, and who ever since have followed after me like a task.
But that was not all. Scarcely was this Elegy on paper when the Sonnets to Orpheus began again and kept coming; today I am arranging this whole new group (as their second part), and have hastily transcribed for you (to keep!) a few that seem to me the most beautiful. All from these days just past and still warm. Only our Russian horse (how he greets you, Lou!) is from the earlier first part, from the beginning of this month.
But enough of that, for today. I have to catch up with my letters, several of which have piled up for answering.
I am well aware that there may be a “reaction”—, after being thrown skyward like this, there is ultimately the falling down somewhere; but I am falling into springtime, which has already drawn closer here, and besides: since it was given me to have this patience, this long patience, for what has now been achieved—, how should I not be able to manage a little auxiliary patience to get me through poorer days; and then too: thankfulness (of which I have never before had so much) ought to outweigh in them every attack of frustration and bewilderment!
Thanks for having written to me at once, despite all your own work!
Your old
Rainer.
Elegies 5, 7, 9,—: soon!
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
Göttingen, February 24, 1922
Our Лошадка, how vividly it bounded toward me, and how forcefully I see it now, free and unfettered, —like You, who have had a hobble slipped off by the gentlest of all invisible hands, —ah, Rainer, all this is like a dream, this glorious certainty that life is in such glorious order, —that there are trees “visited by angels,” —that neither “the wantonness of the bird nor the jealousy of the worm below” could harm the slowly ripening fruit. This primal spring that broke forth as if only it could fling open for us the gates of the coming season; through such feelings I look at the brownish catkins that are now swaying on the willow branches in my garden. I am living in the very midst of what you have written down for me, and it is no hindrance to my work with patients but rather strangely helpful, like something in me that causes healing, and when I read it in the midst of this work, often for only ten or twenty minutes, it nevertheless remains entire and completely protected within itself, separate through its limitless frame and its limitless manner of experiencing. And I would like to try to say what it all comes to: you speak in your letter of thankfulness which even during a subsequent “reaction” would teach patience and trust, —indeed, this inward thanking is almost the only valid proof of the existence, the actuality, of God: through the existence, the actuality, of his gift to you; as if this gesture of his, this gesture to you from him, from the one who is most veiled from us, has torn the most opaque veil away, so that one receives him along with his gift. Because thankfulness for any other gift, however ardently it may arise in people so favored, however strong their desire to be allowed to thank, to know that God exists to this end (and not to perpetuate the gift), does not finally create God, because one’s happiness is too dizzying and fulfilling and eager to be savored; only the thankfulness expressed in the creative person’s gesture of giving back, only his own gift-giving, bestows on him this power of unveiling, of verifying; only this gesture fully searches out the god, and not his gift, nor him in his gift, but him alone. He, the creative person, alone “adds himself joyously and erases the score” (surely the most glorious sonnet—but no, I can’t swear to that, though just now I feel nestled into Боженка’s bosom, and how could one be any closer to him).
I’ll send this off quickly only because I find it impossible to quit chirping; accept these little noises as I do those of the birds who are just now returning home, and who are also not singing yet but merely tuning up their throats after this endless winter (it stood here white and hard and imperturbable, but the sun, quite un-German in its southerly demeanor, strove to make up for the lack of coals). Now I await the Saltimbanques, —how I’ll be waiting! (My copy of the Elegies has no number five but merely provisional little dots between the Second and the Hero Elegy, which has meanwhile been added so splendidly.) Dear Rainer, farewell, and thanks for you.
Lou.
(It is certainly no “loving oneself anew” that you will feel for yourself: rather in a new way all the negativity will have disappeared, all the “being unable to love oneself,” all the taking offense at oneself, all the scuffling against oneself, to which one so often submits in moments of despair as to a sin against oneself.)
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Château de Muzot]
February 27, 1922
Yesterday, dear Lou, was a Sunday truly named after the sun, which shone from early until late (and it was already here the way it is in summer, over a landscape it knows intimately far down into the soil). And when I entered my study, early, roses were there—, and below, on the breakfast table, for no discernable reason, as the other day at your house, a gugelhupf and a little bowl with the first primroses from our meadows, still tender and with short stems, but already very happy. All these things assembled magically, and then towards noon your letter joined them as if by prior agreement, full as it was, full of insight and joy! It induced me to sit down that same afternoon and copy for you the remaining three Elegies, first that of the Saltimbanques and then one more and then another: it was just turning dark when I finished, around a quarter to seven! —So now you have them. —I am enclosing for you a list of the first lines; could it be that you don’t have what are now the Third and Fourth? —if so I’ll also copy these for you by and by; but what is important is that now all these new ones, the ones that are reopening things, are with you, dear Lou, living with you:
Прощай!
Rainer.
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
[Göttingen, March 6, 1922]
Dear Rainer,
That such days exist now for you and me! Days where it is natural for even the sun to invite itself in, so that it can shine on your festive table and allow the latter to bask there, so to speak, in the universe. But this is certain: that to feel such a sun-time so utterly is given only to human beings like you: the ones who take risks, the ones who go on and on endangering themselves, for whom at any moment any season could topple over into absolute light-blind wintriness. Who all the while kept working over and over at achieving mastery in every inward exertion, and felt only their failures; —who, like the Saltimbanques, until they do succeed, are perpetually only exposed, wrenched, sent reeling (where others stride safely and in comfort), for with almost every step they want the impossible: the “too little” that has become that “too much” in which “the complex equation equals zero,” and that is ultimately beyond earthly algebra. Only thus could I let the Fifth speak to me, as saying something I have known from your most long-ago emotions, like the epitome of fearfulness and will to victory, of ultimate abstinence and almost bull-like self-concentrated strength (of neck and nun), of “widowed” self-robbed existence in one’s own skin, of fall and falling-off such as “only fruit knows,” and of ripening in an instant into summer and high autumn. How could the Saltimbanques not have been trailing behind you and haunting you for such a long, long time? (Didn’t “The Ball” fly up ahead of them? I had made myself a copy, and whenever I read it, I was, even if unconsciously, thinking of you, with both fear and elation struggling inside me. But now I can’t find it anywhere, it seems to have simply disappeared in flight.) And now, now that the Saltimbanques have caught up with you, have arrived where you are, so that your meadows with the first primroses became their carpet, spread out by that Angel of yours with the deepest smile (as a springtime everywhere) —ah, Rainer, that it has turned out this way!
Even though I can’t really say this without amending or revoking it the moment I let myself glide into one of the other Elegies, I must say it anyway: the most powerful and at the same time gentlest for me is the Ninth. There reading, reading on to the end, is scarcely possible, as in gardens whose paths one can’t even use as paths, since what is blooming and greening all around slows every step, brings it to a halt; again and again, in every stanza, every section of a stanza, I sit down, feel myself in a bower, as if little branches were plaiting themselves together above me into an unheard-of homeland. Yes, these are the gardens of my most secret homeland from far, far back; childhood and youth and all existence have always stood in the midst of them and have grown eternal there. I can never tell you: how much this means to me and how I have unconsciously been waiting to receive what is Yours as also Mine, as life’s true consummation. I will remain grateful to you for this until the end, until the new primal beginning, dear, dear, Rainer.
And imagine my feeling when I found in the concluding line that: “superabundant existence wells in my heart,” which, along with the line preceding it, I have looked up so many times in the Fragments (which you, on extra pages, enclosed along with the finished Elegies); it was tremendously moving for me, and your patience in waiting for it, holy.
The earlier Elegies I have entirely, the Hero Elegy is lacking only the one magnificent new section.
Lou.
And yet—and yet: just now I read the Eighth,—is not it, after all, the heart of the heart? I cannot rank it below any of the other Elegies, it would almost be as if I killed all living creation with such a deed.
This is the essence: one becomes passionate again over all this, becomes young, enraptured, partial, happy, dead serious, in short a creature of God the Creator.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Château de Muzot sur Sierre
(Valais) Suisse
January 13, 1923
My dear Lou,
Today must be the Russian New Year! But so often recently, on the morning of the western New Year and between it and Christmas Eve, I have been with you in thought: I estimated that if I could put off writing just a bit longer, I could enclose both the Elegies and the Sonnets in the next letter. But my calculations were badly off. On the last day of the year there appeared, instead of the first copies of the Elegies, yet another set of proofs, still containing many errors, and work on them took me right up to and over the threshold of the year. In the tolling of midnight and in the first stillness of 1923, I was right in the middle of correcting and reading the fifth Elegy! I rejoice that I was allowed to begin this way (if such segmenting of time really needs to be acknowledged). And you? I am often deeply worried, dear Lou, about you, about all of you, when I hear and try to imagine how everything in Germany has become increasingly ridiculous and living and the cost of living practically impossible. It seems—and this was my impression in 1919—that the one right moment, when everything could have prepared for agreement, has been missed on all sides, now the divergences are lengthening, the sums of mistakes have become so many-digited that they can’t even be read off any longer; helplessness, desperation, mendacity, and the all-too-modern desire to profit regardless of cost from even these calamities, yes, even from them: these treacherous forces are behind the world now, shoving it forward . . .
But perhaps it isn’t moving forward, perhaps nothing moves forward in politics. Yet the instant one penetrates into some layer beneath politics, no matter where, everything looks different, and one wonders if a most secret growth and its pure will aren’t just using these confusions to remain whole beneath them and hidden from curiosities occupied elsewhere. (Especially in France, among those who are not involved in politics, who are inwardly engaged: revolutions, reinvigorations, reassessments everywhere; a spirit newly oriented, grown suddenly, almost against its will, reflective again, its horizons widening . . . I don’t know if you have been following Proust, but his influence is enormous—, and not only his influence, but its transformative force at work now in other and younger people . . . ) I have the advantage here of being able to follow all this without much difficulty; I have been translating Paul Valéry, and feel my own resources so in harmony with his great glorious poems that I have never translated with such sureness and insight as here—an often very difficult instance to be sure. (Do you know that he, P. V. . . . , a friend of Gide’s, descending from Mallarmé, after a few early publications fell silent for almost twenty-five years, wholly occupied with mathematics; only since 1919 has he resumed a life of poetry, and now the pace of every line is enriched by that deep balanced repose which none of us can muster. A glory.) And Valéry, although his ignorance of the language excludes him from all things German, wrote me when he was traveling through Switzerland last fall to give lectures: “Vous étiez l’un des objets principaux de mon voyage.” How uncanny and unpreventable are all true connections! And yet in the end I was not, alas, able to see him, and for the stupidest of reasons; the impossibility of getting Austrian or German money sent out makes me more and more a prisoner within the old walls of my Muzot, inside them I have everything for a while yet, but every step to be taken outside, though it be only to Lausanne, is becoming more and more impossible! But how should I not take this mischief in reasonably good stride, when I think of the troubles that would beset me and crowd in upon me in a less out-of-the-way and sheltered place. On freedom of movement one may not place much value now; it would only expose one to calamities. In the summer I had all sorts of plans; but at the edge of their least implementation there massed all at once so many warnings that I, instead of leaving, expended all my effort and ingenuity on keeping myself in Muzot. Were the world less out-of-joint, a change, at this moment of so important a conclusion for me, would have made good sense, and it would probably have happened of its own accord. But as it was, the best thing was to hold fast to what was given and proven and to remain loyal to and grateful for it. Especially since my health is going through strange upheavals: with increasing frequency every excitement, even that of work (which often for weeks has not let me eat quietly), attacks that center in the pit of the stomach, the sympaticus, or “solar plexus”; there I feel truly annullable, and I am going through remarkable experiences involving the rivalries and agreements between the two centers, the cerebral and that more focal one which is, presumably, our real center: for the visible and the invisible alike!
How so ever: I am not worrying all that much about these pitchings and swayings that beset the central organs; at most just using my energy to “shut off” at meal-time those intense vibrations coming from my mind or mood—the same way I treat them, usually with success, when I want to sleep. That great god: Sleep! I sacrifice to him, without any thought of hoarding, —what does he care about time! —ten hours, eleven, even twelve, if he deigns to accept them in his mild, sublimely silent way! Though, alas, I seldom manage now to go to bed early; evening is my reading time. The presence of enticing books, the stillness of the old house intensified to the point of improbability, mostly keep me awake past midnight. The little bustlings of a mouse in the many undiscovered passageways within the thick walls further deepens the mystery which nourishes the immense night of this landscape, eternally without care.
I have become strangely inured, was so, to my amazement, even during the summer—, inured to the landscape itself, whose splendor, once so deeply experienced, I have to hold before me with great strain and deliberateness if I am still to partake in it. Does the dulling of our senses really go this far under the constantly reasserted presence of the environment that touches them and borders them? In how many ways, then, must “habit” place us wrongly vis-à-vis people and things. Should one remind oneself then that the curve of delight does continue on in one’s inner realm? But how follow it there, where it will surely refract and scatter in the density of the medium, perhaps become unrecognizable and only flare distinctively where other curves, from origins just as lost, cross it in the strange whirl of intersections.
Dear, dear, Lou, will a word from you come soon? Have you been away from home, and where? —Do you manage somehow to keep your life on hold in this surfeit of worsenings? And do you have news now and then from Russia? —Soon, please, write me. The year doesn’t properly begin until I have heard you say a few words in it, in the new space.
Ruth, it seems, has been living in grand and complete happiness since her marriage: all her aptitudes for cheerfulness and joy are finally being put to good and increasing use. And since they are living in that old farm on the estate of her parents-in-law, they are not quite as subject to the strident necessities of this evil time as they inevitably would have been in any city!
Прощай, dear Lou! Many good greetings to everything in your house.
Your old
Rainer
(How is Druzhok doing?)
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
[Letterhead:] Polyclinic of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association
Berlin W. 35, January 18, 1923
Dear Rainer,
I hurry to write on the only stationery I have available just now in order to answer your letter at once; it came to me by way of Göttingen at this hour, and during how many hours already have I searched for you in my thoughts, now in Switzerland, now in Germany because of the new circumstances in Ruth’s life. That you remained in the old Muzot house, could remain without weariness is something very beautiful indeed: though you wrote that the landscape no longer speaks to you the way it did earlier, this is also how it is with a good marriage, where the exchange is no longer noticeable, since one identifies with and even to some extent stands in for one’s partner in the living flux of life. Think how often it has been otherwise: in whatever place you lived, something would happen to turn that hoped-for harmony between you and your environs into the very opposite; now there must have evolved in you somewhere a place of repose, despite all the excitements and eruptions of a half-bodily nature that you describe; otherwise Sleep would not take you in its motherly arms and as into an inalienable homeland. But, love, it is so heavy a burden to me not to be able to talk with you about all this; we have been so completely separated by this current world’s insanity, and one day time may have run out. About the French matters of which you wrote—I would like so much to know more, what I know about them now is nothing. That in translating Paul Valéry you came to feel an especially happy affinity with him accords with how, over the past years, the work of translation in general has become a strong need for you: back when you read me your Mallarmé translations in Munich (we have often talked about it) I already felt as if a desire inside you for masculinity and maleness were resolving in the direction of embracing the other’s contours with the purest urges of the mind, and as if it only required finding “the” poet most perfectly suited for its fulfillment. With what anticipation I shall look forward to what you are proofreading now—it goes back to that incredible time almost a year ago! Life is good and this year also it shall be blessed many times over if it keeps you in the kind of existence that remains—both in its inner aspect and in its urge toward the external, out into human reality and your most delicate attunements with it—so substantive, so essential, so eternally present.
Starting early next month it’s back to the Loufried address where I hope to find my husband in good health and by his side, as his pampered child, also Baba (she, no doubt, round as a ball, so that it will fall to me to work her and walk her back down to size). I have been in Berlin since the end of September, came here to attend the psychoanalytic congress, stayed at Eitingon’s together with the Freuds for several beautiful months (which I owe to his thoughtful friendliness) while he himself was away with his wife on a trip (all the way down to Sicily). My guest room is a wonderful Biedermeier with grand old plane trees outside the windows. The day is divided into psychoanalytic sessions, some for patients at the polyclinic (which was founded by Eitingon a few years ago to help the poorer population), some with a few previous patients from Göttingen, some for the money, which, due to the frightful pace of inflation (formerly 50 marks an hour, now 3000 already), will soon scarcely be possible any longer. For this reason I may have to be away again during the summer [In the margin: assuming that I can’t obtain patients of my own]: Königsberg has proposed that I conduct teaching analyses using the senior physician of the clinic for internal medicine there and his assistants as my subjects in order to explore with them the relevance of psychoanalytic perspectives for medical treatments. One must do what one must if one is to keep one’s head above water during this time of the Flood (and in these sinful days one really can speak of the ancient Deluge). And exploring further the scientific and theoretical aspects of these things really has become a passion for me; if I saw you I would be close to overflowing with news about this.
And Russia? An issue about which I long to have an exchange with you more than with anyone else. But I won’t enter here into something that would inevitably lead into vast uncharted territory, will only jot down a few lines that have become clear to me in the course of conversations with a Russian Jewess who was my patient and who only recently had fled from Russia. What concerns me about this is roughly the following: ever since the Bolsheviks have backed away from the gross brutality of their means (which so violently contradicted their social ends), i.e., now that they see themselves forced to make concessions toward European capitalism, a newer generation has been growing up full of fervor and purity, determined to accomplish this ideal end in spite of everything, and thus willing to fight against the kind of bolshevism practiced at the time of concessions. From them will come the martyrs of the next era, comparable to those supplied by the terrorists during the rule of the tsars (who in turn were shoved against the wall by the Bolsheviks as nothing but impractical idealists, desecularized by prison and каторга). And when the time has come, the new fight between the men of praxis and the generation of martyrs will break out, and thus despite their relapses into concessions they will always be taking a few more steps toward total conquest. But who now is really willing to discuss these ultimate ethical questions! Life, however, real, overwhelming Life, exists only in this continuously dying and reborn country (in which the little children from the Volga villages—our little villages, Rainer!—ran away into the woods during the despair of starvation so that they would not be eaten).
The Eitingons’ house is frequented by many Russians, even the Moscow Artists’ Troupe was there in October; I have also taken up the beloved language anew. From my brother in 
still these great calm letters as are written only by people who are not “dying unto themselves” and who stand out against the background of a world being turned upside-down, so that they are changed also, inwardly, and no longer stand in a place where their eyes face the earth. Now I close, beloved Rainer, всего хорошаго!
Your old Lou
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Inscribed in a copy of the limited edition of the Duino Elegies:]
for Lou,
who has owned it with me from the first,
this now in its ultimate form
Rainer
(Muzot, around Christmas 1923)
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Inscribed in a copy of the Sonnets to Orpheus:]
Lou,
Rainer
(in the spirit of Christmas)
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
At last again: Loufried
March 16, 1924
Dear Rainer,
After 1/2 year back home! In the middle of the room, as its very center, your two books, consummated and come home. All the way to the blue of their covers so full of memories. While the first few days have to be real days of rummaging, taken up with all sorts of busywork, I constantly know that these are lying there, existing there, as life’s still point, not unlike the way one knows that the amber stone is there in the midst of churning water, —a piece of fairytale magic and ready to be part of any jewelry, although shaped mysteriously from the same profound recesses of Nature. But I must tell you something further, immediately, however well or badly I manage, since it can scarcely be told at all: namely, the experiences I had using the handwritten versions of your poems with damaged, recovering patients. They were the sort of people for whom, as a result of their neurosis, everything had become dead, and they felt no differently about their own lives: they existed in a deep apathy, and it caused anything alive—human, creature, nature—to turn immediately into a thing for them, into a material object, a worthless non-thing, in the end garbage, a cast-off piece of filth. This produces severe states of anxiety, bitter terror: dead among dead things, to feel that one stands outside oneself, has been evicted from oneself, from someone still vividly terrified. Different moments can bring about the resolution in a recovering patient: on a forest trail above our house, a woman with agoraphobia first saw that the trees lived and what the harvested fields expressed so clearly and with such yellowness and she cried out in delight over the force and strength of the world that had suddenly been given back to her and was accepting into itself her liberated steps. But there were others who sat up and took notice for the first time when they heard your tone as that of Life: and it was indescribably moving that they heard and understood it before they were capable of grasping even the most readily understandable attributes of the day around them, much less any experience from the realm of art, as something alive. And not one of them had previously had some special relationship to poetry, rather the opposite: what resounded there had come all the way across to them only because those who have been blessed as artists and those who have been stripped of their blessings by an affliction live in a single region, in close proximity and at the same depth—for Heaven and Hell are not at all two places. (So that your tone as the sound of home is the first to become perceivable, is the one that serves to open home.) That is another insight whose truth has been driven home to me so powerfully during the last few years: all neurosis is a mark of quality, it means: here someone wanted to go to his outermost limits, —for this reason he was derailed sooner than others—; they, the ones who remained healthy, were, as opposed to him, simply those who made do with what was; his noblest challenge caused him to appear small among them. If he achieves health he will stand on a niveau towering above any level he might have attained had he simply remained healthy (—and will then be more secure against relapses of illness than those others, for not one of them will have explored so deeply the far dimensions of his unknown self by reliving memories and reawakening distant experiences). If I ask of someone who is sick, “What brought about his illness?” I have come to ask just as skeptically of someone who is well, “What caused him to remain healthy?” And ever since, there have been moments during the analyses—for example, during the “teaching analyses” that were done with physicians, etc., and at just as personal a level as those with “patients”—when the people involved became just a little bit ashamed of their careful, cautiously maintained health, or at least learned a new reverence and respect.
In Königsberg, during this last 1/2 year, I had five physicians and several very difficult patients, some of whom will return here as soon as summer begins. K. with its massive winter coldness, its streets that are never swept, its hideous houses, etc., reminds me of Petersburg (now renamed Ленинград!); the best things about it were two ponds located in the innermost part of the city rather than outside, as if they had strayed into it and couldn’t find their way back, —also a delightful miniature schnauzer that belonged to a hat shop, which accounts for my buying two hats there one after another; you can’t imagine a more enchanting creature, even though someone remarked not unfairly that with all his bristly hair the tiny dog looked like nothing so much as a toilet brush. Baba—who became round as a ball in my absence—will get to hear quite a few things about him. And now to move on from the dogs to the little Master and Mistress. I’ll tell you only of my delight in my dear old husband’s heartiness; just now, on the occasion of his 78th birthday, a colleague of his wrote: may you keep up that splendid youthful vigor which sets such a fine example for the rest of us. The little house around us is growing dilapidated calmly and without despondence; the colors on the inside walls are fading along with us, the only difference being that the bleached-out fabrics gradually assume a golden hue, whereas we are turning ice-gray. Unfortunately the world goes on constructing itself closer and closer to us; only the good fortune of being situated high and at such a beautiful incline has prevented the surrounding terrain from being turned into new buildings. I should be off again right away to attend the psychoanalytic conference in Salzburg; but I am too exhausted to go (have been working 12 and 13 hours every day), and Freud himself is not going either, prefers to convalesce on the Semmering (he has been seriously ill the last 3/4 year), where I was to go afterwards. And you, Rainer? Dear, dear Rainer. In gratitude
Lou.
I’d go on chatting if this badly stored ink hadn’t thickened, which is making my pen furious.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Château de Muzot
s/Sierre (Valais) Switzerland,
Tuesday after Easter
April 22, 1924
My dear, dear Lou,
I cannot tell you what a grand, marvelous Easter you brought me with your letter; I had been looking forward to it as something which, the longer it failed to arrive, the fuller and more certain it promised to be. Now it has been added to these festive days and was so ripe with good news and affection—more so than anything that has befallen me for a long time. Only when I recount to you my past (third) winter in Muzot will you see how wonderful it is that just now you are able to tell me this of your patients: I keep reading it over and over and draw from it an overwhelming comfort and reassurance. The very fact that I was in need of such strengthening will tell you that my winter has not been a good one, has in fact been almost a hard one. The reaction you foresaw after that tremendous outpouring of the first winter at Muzot did indeed occur, and for a moment it was so violent and bewildering that, shortly after Christmas, I left Muzot and went into the Val-Mont Sanatorium (above Montreux), incapable (for the first time in many years) of managing without help. They were peculiar weeks. Physically, the transverse colon had become more and more the point of attack, but from there my whole system was thrown into chaos. I was in Val-Mont for three weeks. Unhappily on the next-to-last day, just before my departure, the attentive and well-meaning but not very insightful doctor found in addition to all this a goiter on the left side of my throat, and though he assured me that it was ten years “old” and had been “neutralized,” once discovered it worked its way into my consciousness, the more so since there also issued from the transverse colon, through an upward pressure of air, swallowing and breathing difficulties toward which now, given this additional cause, I became even more sensitive and suspicious. But this “case history” I will sketch for you in greater detail another time, dear Lou; for just now the house is full of guests, and during the next few days a whole succession of visitors will be coming, each according to schedule (not so unwelcome a change after the loneliness of the long winter). Let me add only this: I am well aware that a rather foolish habit of mine is to blame for all kinds of damage and that my sundry ailments did not arise without assistance from me (or at least did not grow so emphatic all on their own); but neither have I recanted what I wrote you back then two years ago: that after the magnificence of this achievement I would gladly undergo whatever I may have to experience in the way of reaction. I will live through it. And in the meantime I have not been completely inactive: an entire volume of French poems (it was an extraordinary experience: occasionally I even set myself the identical theme in French and German, which then, to my surprise, developed very differently in the two languages: which argues strongly against the naturalness of translating) has come into being as of its own accord, along with much else besides, and my reading was lively all winter long and most fruitful in what I gained from it. Because of the location of my old tower I have been getting many more books from France than elsewhere: I am endlessly amazed at all the things that are now coming from there. First and foremost Proust, who will certainly be a marvel for you as well. You remember how I was translating Paul Valéry all of winter before last: this year he was one of my first visitors at Muzot, two weeks ago on Easter Sunday!
Ever since your letter arrived, Lou, do you know what I’ve been thinking? That one day you will be here with me, one day this year! Why shouldn’t that be possible? (Though not during the hottest time, when it wouldn’t be good for you and when I myself will probably go away.) You know I have a guest room, a charming little guest room under the roof, albeit with very small windows. Let us remember this in case the opportunity should arise. Yes?
Perhaps too, I will soon have to exchange the rather special and exposed solitude here for that in Paris, which is differently nourished and imbued: perhaps everything here is beginning to be not so necessary to me and is thus making itself, especially as regards climate, oppressive. The sun here works only on the wine, that is its métier: everything else, plants and people, it urges on too strongly and then burdens with the weight of its scorching heat, which is well suited for bringing grapes to ripeness but not for much else. And so in time at least a temporary change will be necessary.
Since November second I have had a granddaughter, a strong and vigorous little Christine. Ruth asked me particularly to tell you. From her, then, endless good news; from Clara, too, wonderfully good things (originating within) and with such lovely unburdenings and enlightenments.
And the good, steady news of you both, of Loufried, how it moved me! How, how much, you dear one, you dear ones both, it touches me! Tell your husband how glad I am to know him so firmly moored in the Unchanging, and greet him from my heart. And Baba, for whom you could bring back such fine exciting stories!
Enough: I want to know much, much about you, your work, experiences, impressions, insights—there’s no other way, you must come some time soon. Think what days we would have!
Remember me to Freud when you write him.
I must go to Sierre to await my guests, who went off to see Sion today and are due back at six.
Прощай
Your old
Rainer
Enclosed is a stanza from Paul Valéry’s beautiful poem “Aurore” (and two other little current things in a different mode).
I think I sent you a different card of Muzot the other day; this one goes farther back. It shows the old manor as it was shortly after 1900, before its restoration—which, fortunately, only acted to prevent further deterioration, without attempting much in the way of change. On the lower floor is a Salle à manger, a small salon (now unheatable and locked), and the kitchen with scullery; upstairs my work room, my little bedroom, and the “chapel.” In the dining room a tile oven of 1656 in the regional style; beamed ceilings and a few pieces of furniture from the same period!
From Paul Valéry, “Aurore”:
Je ne crains pas les épines!
L’éveil est bon, même dur!
Ces idéales rapines
Ne veulent pas qu’on soit sûr:
Il n’est pour ravir un monde
De blessure si profonde
Qui ne soit au ravisseur
Une féconde blessure,
Et son propre sang l’assure
D’être le vrai possesseur.
Ich fürchte nicht Dornen im Laube!
Erwachen ist gut, selbst hart!
Es giebt bei so reinem Raube
keine sichere Gegenwart:
eine Welt an sich zu reissen,
kann nur so sich verwunden heissen,
dass, wer sie an sich riss,
eine fruchtbare Wunde gewänne;
wenn das eigene Blut nicht ränne,
nie wär der Besitz gewiss.
[LAS to RMR, letter from Göttingen to Muzot, end of April 1924]
Château de Muzot
s/Sierre (Valais)
May 2, 1924
My dear Lou,
Your sheltering letter has brought me so much that ties in with earlier things, —I promise to tell you more soon about my long winter; just this moment my many recent visitors have absorbed all my attention and set me back in my scribblings and correspondences, so that first I have to do a bit of catching up. Kippenberg was here also, and we agreed to bring out my Válery translations as soon as possible, perhaps even before Christmas—which will require of me extensive transcribing now for the next few weeks. You will be astonished by Válery. No: though some of his individual stanzas (like those I sent recently) can be glossed accurately at the level of content, his poetical work as a whole and even his prose, which is completely different from his poetry and distilled to the core of its innermost law (unlike many lyric poets he has crafted, apart from his poetry, a true, perfect prose just as distinctly his own) cannot really be clarified, that is to say it is clearest exactly where it reveals the secret, the open secret that is secret by its very nature and thus not capable either of concealing itself or explaining itself. —Proust then stands at the opposite extreme of elucidation, as different from Válery as can be imagined: between them lies the whole of French literature, which is now exploring its untapped potential and speaking in such manifold voices and undergoing, it seems to me, one of its great decisive moments, in almost inexhaustible renewals and transformations. I can scarcely enumerate for you today, especially in such a hurry, all the things that are happening there, again and again I come back (thinking of you) to Proust: you will almost surely find him rich with meaning and be struck (as I often am) by how closely his extraordinary portrayals concur with the outcomes you have achieved. There are now eleven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu: I would like to give them all to you very soon, since for the time being you surely must have some free time again . . .
Nevertheless I am coming today to increase (possibly) the workload of your analyses. It happened like this: for about a year I have known of a young girl’s emotional disturbances which now, for want of better alternatives, are being treated increasingly as a mental disease. Years ago (1916), when she was still a child, I saw this beautiful creature a few times in Vienna, but more in connection with her older siblings and her mother, for whom I feel a great veneration (without really knowing her that well). It has troubled me endlessly, I don’t know quite why, that this girl may have been treated incorrectly and is now being given up to institutions; whenever someone would speak to me about her (my contacts with the family have been only indirect, by way of mutual friends, and occasional), the notion would torment me that I should do something, or at least manage to prevent something; all this leading the other day, quite unexpectedly, to an inner dictation: I wrote the mother who was worried about this youngest child concerning your treatments; without as yet mentioning your name, quite spur-of-the-moment and provisional: I also avoided, by the way, out of an instinctive precaution, any use of the word “psychoanalysis,” since so many things are being sold now under this label and resistance against any application of this mode of healing is quite powerful in certain circles. Some feeling tells me that here is a case where you could provide wonderful help, perhaps even salvation, and it actually seems to me now that attempting something of this sort might be possible (your time and the various other circumstances permitting). My letter (unexpected even to myself) went off to Vienna about the time not long ago when the first of your letters arrived here; last evening a telegram from there reached me, saying:
Remercie énormement lettre, aimerais entrer en rapport avec dame, lettre suit, mille amitiés
[ . . . ].
Before this announced letter arrives I wanted to let you know what I have instigated here: I sent [ . . . ] your address together with this letter: so be prepared, dear Lou, to receive a call someday from Vienna regarding this matter. The person involved, as I said, is [ . . . ].
In any case, do make a quick note of the address: [ . . . ]. (If, by the way, the patient, as I suspect, is still in Switzerland, who knows if this might not turn into a roundabout way of effecting our own real and true-life reunion!)
Your old Rainer
(Your dear greetings for Ruth and little Christine will be passed on to them soon, in my very next letter.)
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
[Göttingen,] May 26, 1924
Dear Rainer,
Please don’t forget that you still wanted to tell me: about last winter and other things. I would have written you much earlier if I had not wanted to confirm to you in the same letter that I had received the expected call from Vienna. What you told me about the case made me eager to play a part, and I was ready to throw myself into it. But for some reason, this was not to happen: perhaps the daughter in Switzerland is being constrained from leaving? That you avoided using the word “psychoanalysis” is a good thing, because in Vienna, more than anywhere else, prejudice against it has been spreading virulently and is becoming truly moronic—this includes, by the way, Herm. Keyserling (who has ties with all branches of the aristocracy), even though he propagandizes on behalf of psychoanalysis, especially the Swiss version coined by Jung (“whose later writings scarcely ever give offense”); he says in the journal he edits: whoever has a nose for dirt must be a swine, and even though he would not want to state categorically that all psychoanalysts have been swine, it is the case, after all, that one becomes adept at noticing and searching out only those things toward which one is particularly inclined, and thus of course someone of a pure and sublime nature could never practice such an art! And for all that, he himself has read extensively in psychoanalysis, and thus should well know what opposite inclination lurks repressed behind this fancying oneself pure and sublime. It has made me remember the accounts of his nephew’s vanity with which old Eduard used to entertain us. Too bad.
But of quite different things I would like to talk to you and hear you talk. I think about this more and more often when I am wandering with Baba (who seems to roll along as she walks, panting happily) through the early German summer (in these parts the most beautiful slice of the seasons). That at such times the ugly business mentioned above (about which I have not written a single word to you, even though my heart has been burning with it for over a year now) will also go through my mind is because Freud has been threatened for so long now by a fatal illness and is living only, as he himself just expressed it to me in a letter, “with a notice of termination.” After horrible operations (with artificial feeding through the nose, etc.) he has been fitted with an upper jaw, which permits eating and speaking but only with great difficulty. We kept it a secret for a long time, but finally it leaked out anyway, though for the moment he is able to work again. Personally as well as professionally this is a deep, deep tragedy for all of us and lends even the summer a gray aspect.
I am enclosing in this letter—like filling a skinny goose with apples and sweet-smelling herbs—a few pages that contain a veritable torrent of love from Helene [Klingenberg]: love that in the end only tries to stammer her feelings in your own words. Helene is still the same: made so very beautiful by sheer strength of love, so that Life, persuaded by her example, cannot but join in this faith and uphold it. I see her and her family only when I am passing through (and longer last winter), but it is always just for so long, since every time the whole visit is one continuous rushing into each other’s arms. Little Schnuppi (grown very tall and to my mind too muscular) is a student at the conservatory and a splendid instance of kindness and honesty.
Two hours later:
Dear Rainer! what did the mailman just bring me! All of eleven volumes of Proust! What are you doing! Just one would have been so much! I’ll start À l’ombre etc. this very day. My heartfelt thanks; I will feel as if every day we were reading a little of it together.
Your old Lou.
[RMR to LAS, letter from Muzot to Göttingen, September 1924. Response from LAS?]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Château de Muzot s/Sierre (Valais)
last day of October, 1925
Dear Lou,
You wrote me, back when the Elegies were finished, saved, present and at hand—that I should not be alarmed if, as part of a reaction, things should one day go badly for me; and I remember still that I answered bravely. But now I am alarmed nonetheless: you see, for two whole years I have been living increasingly in the very midst of an alarm, whose most palpable cause (a self-induced stimulation) I invariably, with devilish obsession, exacerbate just when I think I have overcome the temptation to indulge it. It is a horrible circle, a ring of evil magic that encloses me as into a picture of Hell by Breughel. Now, beginning a month ago, phenomena have appeared that are almost certain to maintain me in that particular phobia which besets so many people these days . . . My staunch, faithful nature has been so weakened by the duration and intensity of this affliction that now an overpowering anxiety manages to dispossess me of myself constantly. I don’t know how I can go on living like this.
It was two years ago that I first, observing how the hateful inclination to indulge this habit outwitted and overgrew my will, sought out medical advice at the Valmont Sanatorium above Montreux. I found there an attentive physician (Dr. Haemmerli) who is still quite young (and whom, by the way, people already travel long distances to consult, even from as far away as India): the founder of Valmont, Dr. Widmer, is an old man; the whole repute of the institution now really rests on the experiences that Haemmerli’s patients take with them and relate in praise of him. I too can only praise his responsiveness, his patience, his shrewd feeling for when and when not to intervene; but he saw (and sees) my situation in so much brighter a light than the one in which I, again and again and ever more frequently, trapped in an atmosphere of doom, feel condemned to endure and overcome it. I remained from the end of 1924 into January of this year again under his observation in Valmont, and traveled from there to Paris on January 8—, not quite sharing that expectation with which Dr. Haemmerli tried to brace me: that so complete a change of surroundings and all influences would at one blow jolt me out of the rhythm of that senseless temptation, and that then all the reflexes that had been cast into my body would die out of their own accord. But victory did not come and neither did relief. I suppose the obsession to do oneself that old harm with all its aftereffects and menaces proved stronger, more powerful than Paris: it turned into the suffering of a long defeat, and if, far beyond my limit, I did remain there until August, it was only from shame at returning just as ensnared into my tower, whose complete isolation, I feared, would allow these miserable devils to have their way with me even more perversely. Now that, since the end of September, new phenomena (nodules along the inner lip, which Haemmerli considers cysts, though other doctors gave different—placating?—interpretations) have joined the previous ones, I briefly saw Haemmerli again—in Zürich, where we both happened to be staying at the same time—and again the distance between his objective assessment and the subjective primary color (it scarcely changes any longer) of my condition was enormous.
My dear Lou: (you have so many old dictionaries of the language of my lament in your possession), does this give you some picture of my defeat? No doubt it is due to something over-simple in my nature that it could come about under such absurd conditions. Do you see someone in the ambit of your world who might help me? I see only you—but how actually to reach you? I could travel now only with difficulty, could you do it? All the way here? As my guest? If only for a few days . . . ? (That is a question I have been holding back now for a year.) If only I had called out long ago. Or if I had gone there and stepped for a moment into my old hard sandals: I would have become “upstanding” like the tin soldier who has been welded back onto his level platform. But I stand ever so crooked, and your first glance at this page will have told you, love, at which angle.
Rainer
Greetings to all that is forever precious, forever yours!
P.S.: Valmont is only about three hours from here, but a longer stay there would be impossible for me this year because of its very steep prices; and Dr. Haemmerli is too much in demand to write me regularly enough to keep me a little above water that, much to my despair, often rises over my head. He did, when we met in Zürich, consider taking Dr. Meder into his confidence—but not in a way that envisioned any psychoanalytic treatment.
Write me, dear Lou, if you can, a word. As it is, for so long nothing has come your way in response to something I received. Now I send you this shabby bank note of distress: give me a gold coin of concern in exchange for it!
R.
Second postscript:
More than a month later, on December 8: Dear, here it is after all, this letter, it has been on my desk all the time, reminding me of the calamity I’ve called down upon myself—just as back then in Rome with that note and its издомай! (I found the latter recently in the Paris boxes that were saved.) I’m sending you all of this because it is all as true as when I first wrote about it; even the phobia, maintained not only by the little nodules along the inner lip but also by all kinds of other discomfort in the mouth, throat, and on the tongue, has increased! Last week I was almost on my way to Valmont, but unfortunately Dr. Haemmerli just then had to leave on a trip (he’ll be in Berlin for ten days at the [Hotel] Kaiserhof), on his way out leaving only a written note, advising Maeder again, in case I might be over-anxious, to wait until his, Haemmerli’s, return. Advise me; but I don’t really want to call you now, because any day I may rush to Zürich; and besides, the winter has now grown so harsh that traveling from you to me would be no simple matter. But a few lines, please?
R.
[LAS to RMR at Château Muzot]
[Göttingen, December 12, 1925]*
Do you know, dear, dear Rainer, how I feel just now as I write? Like a champagne bottle that, free at last of its cork, should want to gush out everything at once so that there would be bubbling and fizzing in its throat—yet nothing comes but little drops.
The old letter is from September. If September had been a year ago, it would have been about the time we had wanted to be together, as you wrote that summer—do you remember? Before Valmont as well as Paris. Back then your worries, whatever they were, could have easily been put to rest. Even though you weren’t yet writing about these fears, but only expressed concern about those swellings related to goiter. But the whole thing no doubt already lay in wait: I mean the notion that everything has been brought about by your own fault and is connected with the “devilish obsession.”
Rainer, this is now in every respect the main thing to accept: it is not a devilish obsession at all! Because a feeling of guilt perpetually clings to it, as early as childhood, —that’s why it can inflict so very much evil. As children, and even later, we can be plagued by a guilt feeling that is more like a moralizing voice which only by chance, as it were, manifests itself in punishments that beset one’s body. As we are outgrowing this stage, the feeling of guilt takes refuge in the bodily processes themselves, i.e. it cultivates in various organs, so as to acquire the strength of a destiny or doom, a hysterical propensity to make itself felt as a sickness or pathology. It achieves this through the attention focused on it, fearful interest taken in it, the increased blood supply and hypersensitivity directed there—very much like what happens at the penis through erotic stimulation; such hypochondria can also be thought of as a kind of amorousness or infatuation turned back upon itself with reference to the organ in question, except that the amorousness isn’t felt that way at all, but rather as aversion, torment, almost hatred of the body, for the organ in question is not one suited for this, it serves nothing erotic, it has been torn away from its natural function, has been disturbed and interrupted, and takes revenge. All of this likes to attach itself to obliging weaknesses of the body, be they ever so minimal: it is inevitable then that they manifest themselves in vastly magnified and terrible ways, as if who knows what were taking place. Logical deliberation is of no use here; the objective diagnoses of a thousand doctors are of equally little help for the same reason. We corresponded about this years ago, it made very good sense to you, but do not let this reiteration make you lose patience, Rainer, read on, think of the bottle and its tight neck in which I feel this urgently bubbling pressure that wants to get out to you.
To continue: when you look at your current situation, that all too eager readiness in your mouth and on your tongue and throat to second your guilt feeling—what does it remind you of? Not perhaps of those years when you likewise had to contend with nodules and with sensations at a different bodily opening, had been operated on and feared that malignant tumors might develop there? Those were your words at Loufried in Wolfrathshausen; but instead of growing larger in later years, as is typical with hemorrhoids, yours shrunk, and thus presumably were already neurotically overdetermined, could make their way “up the chute,” from the very beginning obedient to psychic inhibitions.
Alas, the whole picture is so clear; only I, stupid girl that I was back then, didn’t see it. And this then is the guilt that God has visited on me: that back when we were first growing close I was not there for you with the knowledge and abilities I’ve acquired now. Therefore this had to grow and progress over the years. Even a shift from the lower to the upper region signals an advance of the affliction, since the oral (the infant’s pleasure in sucking, first gratification, and disappointment when the maternal button on the nipple slips from the lips, which would like to keep holding it inside!) stems from a more infantile stage than the anal, in which the child is preoccupied with its own excrement.
But nevertheless it did not overcome and corrupt you, Rainer! There still ruled over you that vast grace which also makes use of those most primitive infantile forces: the creative discharge into the work of art, which for that very reason is so implicated in the bodily: for it is on account of this discharge that we are erotically fired to subsume things of the body into the meanings of art, instead of limiting ourselves to practical objectification, which has no room for the excess that still surges from us primordially and makes everything one, in the way that the newborn child still feels at one with the mother’s breast. The tipping-over into the realm of the tormented, the forsaken, the being at the mercy of one’s own body, —it’s not something you experience merely as a reaction after tension-filled creative work; on the contrary, it has been from the first intrinsic to that work: the reverse of the thing itself, and the devil merely a deus inversus. Whom the god’s image fully illumines, he also is given to see what lies behind, on the other side. But even there he is of the god; enveloped and embraced by what remains ever-maternal, even though we consciousness-hedged little humans have to pay a price for the ecstasies that surpass us. —If you wish to learn about this until you fully feel it, take up R. M. Rilke’s Elegies (as some of my most severely ill patients have done; you remember I wrote you about it). I can’t verbalize here the way that for them, for all those who labor and are heavy laden, it has become a reality, so much so that they see themselves blessedly invited to every manner of peace.—
Did you, I wonder, have the patience to read this to the end? If so, Rainer, dear Rainer, write me again, and then let me write you back. You know I don’t usually talk that way, but this time I do—to bind you, to obligate you: since the apparent misplacing of the old letter that remained unsent on the desk is no accident: something in you wanted it to be lost, for as impossible, as grotesque as it sounds: we want to hold tightly to the things that are most dreadful about our circumstances, don’t want to let go despite all the suffering, —this is the terrible mix-up that is possible simply and only because all these conditions are full of the god, —who, however, has become an inverted god. Nothing here is a matter of guilt; the изломай will diminish as soon as you know it deeply enough: trusting in You, dear, dearest!
Lou
[Sanatorium Valmont, above Montreux]
Monday. [December 13, 1926]
Дорогая,
So this you see was the thing for which during these last three years all the alerts and forewarnings of my watchful nature have been preparing me: but now my nature will have a very, very hard time surviving, since during this long interval it has exhausted itself in acts of help and correction and imperceptible adjustment; and before the present infinitely painful state with all its complications began to develop, it had undergone with me an insidious intestinal flu. And now, Lou, I know not how many hells, you know how I made a place for pain, for physical pain, the truly great one, in my accommodations, but only as an exception and as already a first step back into the open. And now. It encases me. It supplants me. Day and night!
Where to find courage?
Dear, dear Lou, the doctor writes you. Frau Wunderly writes you, who with all her impulse to help has come here for a few days. I have a good judicious garde-malade and believe that the doctor who is seeing me again now after three years, this time for the fourth time, is right. But. The hells.
With you, with both of you, how, Lou? Are you in good health? There is something malign blowing through the end of the year, something menacing. Прошай, Дорогая моя
Y. Rainer
*The first quarter of this page has been removed—resulting also in the missing text in the middle of the letter.
*Part of a letter quoted in LAS’s Rainer Maria Rilke (Leipzig: Insel, 1928), p. 17.
*Letters no longer extant but identifiable from subsequent letters or reliable external sources will henceforth be indicated in brackets.
*“If one day much later you feel yourself in dire straits, there is a home here with us for the worst hour.” [Words written hastily on the reverse side of Rilke’s bill for milk deliveries.]
*I am sending you my own copy of the Worpswede book (since it is the only one I have at hand), but the Rodin book is meant to remain with you.
*With the inscription: For Lou, Borgeby gård, August 1904.
*The Book of Images (augmented edition) of 1906.
*LAS tried to make illegible ”And I thought of you!;”
*[In the margin:] I’d say time for me to go to bed with the chickens if they hadn’t all been butchered!
*The (lost) one of January 18.
*The Love of the Magdalene. A French sermon transcribed by the Abbé Joseph Bonnet from the manuscript Q I 14 in the royal library of St. Petersburg. Translated by Rainer Maria Rilke, Insel- Verlag, 1912. —Handwritten dedication in the book: “for Lou (a kind of supplement to Malte Laurids, found in Paris Easter 1911, shortly thereafter translated.) Duino, March 1912.”
*[In the margin:] Your question about the Books of Moses will have to wait until I can ask my husband.
*These words are underlined twice, “dear” three times.
**LAS tried to render the words in the margin illegible.
*Underlined three times.
*Written into the March 1914 issue of Die Weissen Blätter, regarding the essay “Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel.“ Underlined twice in pencil at the end of the essay: Thanks.
*[In the margin:] But I do like looking into this eye, and it does know of you.
*“Sent to me by Ruth and Dr. Sieber end of Nov. 1927“: note written by LAS on the envelope in which she kept this unfinished letter from RMR along with the subsequent passage, contemporaneous with the letter, that he had copied from his pocket notebook.
*This poem, probably written in November or December 1911 at Duino, was found among LAS’s papers only in a copy by Rilke’s hand from the time of this stay in Munich. Because she cut off the top part of the (folded) sheet, the upper two lines of the second sheet are also missing (though they might conceivably have been the reason she cut the page); they have been restored here from Rilke’s pocket notebook.
*The Tenth Duino Elegy (in its original form), followed by the Sixth and the Fourth.
*[In the margin:] Frau Heyseler’s birthday is today, and she really did think you’d be the candles on her cake.
*[In the margin:] The publisher, Bircher, sent me the original of one of W[ölfli]’s drawings; if I may keep it—I’m not sure this was his intent—, I’ll send it to you at the next opportunity; but the reproductions do give a relatively accurate impression.
*Date of postmark. This letter survives only in a copy made by Dieter Bassermann, a Rilke scholar, in the late 1940s.