You Must Change Your Life (16 page)

Hora
ek explained that he had been chaplain of St. Pölten some fifteen years earlier, when the pale, sickly boy was a student there. He described Rilke as “a quiet, serious, highly endowed boy, who liked to keep to himself.” He had “patiently endured” life at the junior academy until his fourth year, but after he graduated on to the next level of military school, his parents withdrew him. Hora
ek had not heard any news of him since.

Kappus could not help but begin lining up the similarities between Rilke and himself. Both poets had come to the academy from Slavic cities in the east, Rilke from Prague and Kappus from the Romanian town of Timi
oara. They both had lingered at the threshold of military careers that they felt were “entirely contrary” to their nature, as Kappus put it. As he thought about how the two young men had stood on the same soil, worn the same uniform, and shared the same dream, Kappus thought to write a letter to Rilke, the poet in whom he “hoped to find understanding, if in any one.” He told Rilke about their mutual acquaintance Hora
ek and enclosed a few of his own poems, asking for Rilke's opinion.

RILKE WAS HARDLY QUALIFIED
to give career advice at that point in his life. In December, he turned in the Rodin monograph, but the measly fee hardly made a difference. He still could not even afford to send friends copies of his books—“I cannot buy them myself,” he admitted at the time. Meanwhile, royalties from previous projects were running thin.

He and Westhoff spent the holidays in Paris, lonely for their friends and family abroad. Rilke wrote Otto Modersohn a New Year's letter to soften the tensions with his old friend. He complained about Paris, saying that “the beautiful things there are here do not quite compensate, even with their radiant eternity, for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the gardens, people, and things.” He urged Modersohn to “stick to your country!” The only good thing about Paris was Rodin, he said. “Time flows off him, and as he works thus, all, all the days of his long life, he seems inviolable, sacrosanct, and almost anonymous.”

Rilke did not need to convince Modersohn. “That dreadful wild city is not to your taste—Oh I can believe that,” he wrote back to Rilke. To him, cities bred the sicknesses of egotism, Nietzscheanism and modernism. “Nothing, nothing at all is more important to me than my peaceful, serious countryside. I could never endure living in
such a city—I should look at and enjoy the art that is stored up there and then quickly return to my peace and quiet.”

But while Modersohn was content to sink into the sofa, pipe in mouth, and stay there all night, his wife had not yet exhausted her curiosities about foreign landscapes. Paula Becker was, at twenty-five, too young to give up and become one of those hard Worpswede peasant women, bitter and “bound to the plow,” as Rilke once wrote. The village's monotonous routines, and the staid landscape painting it had been producing, was starting to dull her senses. Ever since she and Westhoff had gone to Paris three years earlier, German artists looked so obedient compared to the French. No one in Paris seemed to care whether their work achieved consensus. The mere thought of returning there quickened Becker's pulse.

Now that the Rilkes were back in touch, she saw her chance. Modersohn did not love the idea of his wife traveling alone. But he knew he still owed her for the sacrifice she made by attending the ghastly cooking school, and agreed that she could make the trip in February 1903.

Becker could barely contain her excitement when she boarded the train for Paris that winter, just in time for her twenty-sixth birthday. She imagined her Parisian life picking up right where it had left off, with days occupied by art galleries, champagne and philosophical discussions with Westhoff, then Saturdays spent galavanting around the countryside. When she arrived, Becker rented the same little hotel room where they had stayed as students.

On the first evening Rilke and Westhoff were free to meet, Becker rushed over to their Latin Quarter building, eager as a puppy. She regaled them with gossip about Worpswede, but they seemed not to care, as if her small-town stories were beneath them. It wasn't that they were rude; it was worse than that. They were
cordial
. There was no warmth, no familiarity and, on top of it all, they seemed totally miserable. All they did was complain about money and feeling overworked. When Becker tried to convince them to take some time off and join her on a day-trip to the country they declined, insisting they had to work.

The Rilkes “trumpet gloom,” Becker wrote to her husband the next day. “Ever since Rodin said to them, ‘
Travailler, toujours travailler
,' they have been taking it literally; they never want to go to the country on Sundays and seem to be getting no more fun out of their lives at all.” Rilke spoke incessantly about Rodin and the monograph, a project that Becker believed was little more than thinly veiled social climbing. “Rilke is gradually diminishing to a rather tiny flame which wants to brighten its light through association with the radiance of the great spirits of Europe: Tolstoy, Muther, the Worpsweders, Rodin, Zuloaga, his newest friend,” she wrote to her husband. Westhoff's latest work, a series of fragmented bodies, was also beginning to resemble Rodin's a little too closely. “We shall see how she plans to avoid becoming a little Rodin herself,” Becker wrote.

The only benefit to the Rilkes' obsession with Rodin was that it opened the door for Becker to meet the famous sculptor herself. Rilke told her that Rodin hosted an open house for friends and colleagues at his studio every Saturday. Rilke would write a note identifying her as the “wife of a very distinguished painter”—an insult not lost on Becker—which should secure her entry.

When she arrived the following weekend a crowd had already gathered at the studio. She hesitated at the edge of the room, attempting to compose herself before approaching the master to present her pass. When she finally summoned the nerve, she cautiously went up to him and held out the note. He nodded her along, not even glancing at it.

Once inside, Becker was free to examine the sculptures standing around the room as closely as she liked. Not each work resonated with her, but they gathered such force collectively that she decided she trusted Rodin's intentions completely. “He doesn't care whether the world approves or not,” she thought. On her way out she worked up the courage to ask him if she might one day visit his studio in Meudon. To her amazement, he didn't flinch: Come next Sunday, he said.

When she arrived by train that weekend, an assistant informed her that Rodin was busy at the moment but she had his permission to wander the grounds on her own. Becker took a walk and revisited
the pavilion of works she had first seen at the World's Fair, recognizing now how deeply they expressed their maker's “worship of nature.” After a while Rodin joined her and brought her to the studio. When he pulled out several reams of drawings, she was surprised to see how his process began with simple pencil lines that were then doused with watercolors. How unusual that such wild, blazing colors could come from such a mild man, she thought.

Before long Rodin launched into a familiar soliloquy: “Work,” he said, “that is my pleasure.” It was the precise rhetoric that exasperated her when it came from Rilke, but out of Rodin's mouth every word was intoxicating. Becker believed that Rodin truly lived by his words; the proof surrounded her in every corner of this room. But Rilke, who had only a few mediocre books to show for all his complaining, merely quoted them. Becker wrote to her husband that he must come to Paris at once, if only to be near Rodin. “Yes, whatever it is that makes art extraordinary is what he has.”

Becker's exhilaration was interrupted as soon as she returned to the Rilkes and their contagious misery, however. For a while she had been determined to salvage her trip and accommodate their interests over hers. Instead of a picnic in the countryside she went with them to see a show of Japanese paintings that contained flowing, childlike lines unlike anything she'd ever seen. But in March, Rilke fell ill again with his third bout of flu that winter. Becker brought tulips to him in bed but announced to Modersohn afterward that “I can't stand him anymore.” She kissed her wedding ring and decided to cut her stay in Paris short.

As she waited for the train back to Worpswede she wrote to her husband that she believed Westhoff would be better off if Rilke went away for a while. Her bust commissions were picking up and his wallowing only brought her down.

RILKE'S OPINION OF HIMSELF
was not much higher than Becker's at that time. Having finished the Rodin monograph, he was left worrying once again where his next paycheck would come from, and
where—or if—the inspiration for his next book would arise. “I cannot bring myself to write at all; and the consciousness alone that a connection exists between my writing and the days' nourishment and necessaries, is enough to make my work impossible for me,” he wrote that spring to his friend Ellen Key, a Swedish psychologist and patron of the poet. “I must wait for the ringing in the silence, and I know that if I force that ringing, then it really won't come.”

His desk was now bare, apart from a stack of unanswered mail. Finally, in February 1903, he sat down to respond to a letter that had come from a student at the military academy he had attended as a boy. Rilke did not know this young man by the name of Franz Xaver Kappus, but he was pleased to see a reference to Professor Hora
ek. Rilke had always liked the man, who was the only teacher on staff who wasn't also a military officer.