You Must Change Your Life (17 page)

“My Dear Sir, Your letter only reached me a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great and kind confidence. I can hardly do more,” Rilke wrote in his looping black calligraphy.

Kappus had almost given up on a reply when the envelope bearing a blue seal and a Paris postmark arrived. The address was written in “beautiful, clear, sure characters,” he said. It “weighed heavy in the hand.”

When he opened it he found that Rilke had sent eight full pages in response to his two. Rilke, knowing how anxiously he had been waiting for his own bell of creativity to toll again, advised the young poet now to consider carefully whether he was prepared to bear the burden of the artistic condition.

“Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart,” Rilke wrote. Then ask yourself, “would you die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night:
must
I write?” If the heart utters a clear, “I
must
, then build your life according to this necessity,” but be prepared to surrender to the imperative forever, for art was not a choice, but an immutable disposition of the soul.

Rilke declined to critique the poems Kappus sent, other than to say that they possessed no distinctive voice and were “not yet independent.” He urged the poet not to send them to editors or critics again, himself included. That could only provide external validation, and a poet's testament must come from within. Besides, nothing was further removed from art than criticism, Rilke said, and reviews “always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.”

Rilke's response moved Kappus to write back immediately. We do not know what he said because his side of the correspondence was never published, but we know that they exchanged some twenty letters over the next five years. We also know that Kappus found Rilke's wandering reflections on solitude, love and art so touching, so deeply felt, that he astutely predicted that the letters would also stir the hearts of other “growing and evolving spirits of today and tomorrow.” Shortly after Rilke's death he brought the letters to Westhoff and Ruth Rilke to ask if they'd like to have them published.

Rilke viewed his prolific letter-writing habit as a part of his poetic practice. He took such care in composing his correspondence—he would sooner rewrite an entire page of script than mar its surface with a crossed-out word—that he gave his publisher permission to posthumously release it. When Rilke died in 1926, Ruth and her husband, Carl Sieber, began sifting through the surviving seven thousand letters. They took several collections to his publishers: a set that Rilke wrote to the head of his Dutch publishing house in the last year of his life appeared in 1927, while another to his biographer Maurice Betz came out in 1928, as did his series of letters to Rodin. In 1929, Insel-Verlag released his correspondence with Kappus under the title
Letters to a Young Poet
.

Little is known about Kappus because Rilke's family decided not to include the cadet's name or biography in the original publication, although some later editions include a brief introduction by him. Nor is it known why Rilke maintained such a long correspondence with a stranger from whom he had nothing to gain. But from the way his letters often read as though they were written to his younger self, it is
clear that Rilke sympathized with this young poet and fellow victim of that “long terrifying damnation” known as military school.

More importantly, however, was probably Kappus's timing. His letter reached Rilke just as the poet had been trying to locate his own footing within Rodin's in Paris, so he appreciated the desire to find one's form. Just as the puppet Pinocchio became “a real boy” once his father saw the good in him, young artists are often affirmed when they see their reflection in a master's eye.

Even though Rilke was himself sublimely naive at the time, Kappus had tacitly anointed himself Rilke's disciple, and the older poet took this responsibility to heart. He wrote Kappus letters in a tone of authority that only an amateur would dare—trying on the master's robe and liking the way it fit. But Rilke knew he was in no position to offer professional instruction then, having told a friend that spring, “I have written eleven or twelve books and have received almost nothing for them, only four of them were paid for at all.” Instead of advising Kappus on the profession of poetry, he opted to guide him on the poetic life. That was what Rilke had asked of Rodin, and from then on his letters to Kappus would serve as his field notes.

CHAPTER
8

T
WO DAYS AFTER PAULA BECKER DECLARED THAT RILKE
ought to leave his wife alone for a while, the poet did just that. Still ailing from an especially resistant case of the flu, he came to the conclusion that only the balmy Mediterranean could soothe his winter-worn body. He left Westhoff to finish her work in Paris and, aided by some money from his father, boarded a crowded train, curled up in a camel-hair blanket and shivered all the way to Tuscany.

At the edge of the marble mountains of Carrara, Rilke reached the elegant seaside resort Viareggio. He suited up in his black-and-red-striped swim trunks first thing and strolled barefoot along the beach, a copy of
Niels Lyhne
in hand. The soft sand and sun normally should have nourished him, but something was not quite right. The sea looked monotonously flat and the salty air made him thirsty. The tables at the restaurant were unfortunately round, rather than square. Worst of all, the sound of German echoed around him everywhere.

Even though he hid behind a French newspaper, the waiters took his order in German. The honeymooners at the table next to him murmured to each other in German. Tourists loudly chattered away in German small talk. “I underlined my silence with the thickest strokes; it was no good,” he wrote to his wife. It was like hearing the voices
of his family members at every turn. German had been the weapon of his mother's snobbery, wielded to assert her superiority over the Czechs, and it was the language of the military government that had crushed his father's pride. To Rilke, German was the sound of bullies and unearned dominance. He began taking meals alone in his room.

Unable to concentrate on his reading, Rilke wrote two letters to the young poet Franz Kappus in April. He tried to make peace with the uncertainty he felt at the time, even praising it by saying, “There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient,” he wrote. This was how Rilke once described Rodin, “sunk in himself” like a tree that has “dug a deep place for his heart.”

Whether or not the words comforted Kappus, they did little for Rilke, who himself still felt like a seedling. He advised Kappus to seek a mentor and named the two who had taught him the most about creativity: “About its depth and everlastingness, there are but two names I can mention: that of Jacobsen, that great, great writer, and that of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, who has not his equal among all artists living today.”

But perhaps Kappus was wise to have sought his master from afar. Rodin's towering influence had inspired Rilke, but it also cast a diminishing shadow. He feared that his poetry lacked the potency of a tangible medium like sculpture. “I actually experienced the physical pain of not being able to render a bodily form,” he wrote. A verse would never fill a gallery, nor could a verb move through space like a gesture.

The anxiety that paralyzed Rilke now resurrected his childhood nightmare of “the nearness of something too hard, too stone-like, too great,” he wrote. Days began to pass without his writing a single word. He was homeless and adrift, imagining he would return to Westhoff in Paris, but not knowing what he would do when he got there. Perhaps
he would write a book on Rodin's friend Eugène Carrière, the popular painter of brooding, sepia-toned portraiture.

Before Rilke left Italy, his slim book on Rodin came out. Rather than offer dry academic criticism of the kind he had denounced to Kappus, Rilke savored Rodin's art like wine, inhaling and swirling it into maximalist descriptions matched only by the melodrama of Rodin's own work. Of the
Gates of Hell
, Rilke wrote: “He has created bodies that touch each other all over and cling together like animals bitten into each other, that fall into the depth of oneness like a single organism; bodies that listen like faces and lift themselves like arms; chains of bodies, garlands and tendrils and heavy clusters of bodies into which sin's sweetness rises out of the roots of pain.”

Because the study had served largely as an exercise in Rilke's own powers of observation, the resulting book reveals as much about its author as it does its subject. “From no other book of his,” wrote H. T. Tobias A. Wright in the introduction to a 1918 collection of Rilke's poetry, “can we deduce so accurate a conception of Rilke's philosophy of Life and Art as we can draw from his comparatively short monograph on Auguste Rodin.”

Nearly every critic who reviewed
Auguste Rodin
commented on Rilke's exalted opinion of the artist: It was “enthusiastic,” “too attached,” “saturated with sensitivity,” or “panegyric.” “It is a poem in prose. To the eternally sober much will appear as excessiveness and pomposity, but all poetry thrives on exaggeration,” said one Austrian newspaper.

Rilke asked his wife to hand-deliver a copy to Rodin, along with a letter expressing his regrets that the master would not actually be able to read it in the German. But he promised, truthfully, that it would not be his final word on the artist. “For with this little book your work has not ceased to occupy my thoughts,” he wrote, “from this moment on it will be in each one of my works, in each book that I am granted to finish.” He also confessed to him that he hadn't been able to concentrate since he'd left Paris and that sometimes he read about Rodin just “to hear your voice, together with those of the sea and of the wind.”

When Rodin received the package, the sculptor replied with a simple note: “Please receive my warmest thanks for the book that Mme Rilke has brought me.” He hoped that it would be translated into French someday.

Then the lines of communication between the two men fell silent. As a storm moved up the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, Rilke felt a familiar stirring. Day after day the weather brought “restlessness and violence” to the town, wrapping the sky like a gray shawl. It drove Rilke into his room, where, in one sequestered week that April, he wrote the third and final part of his
Book of Hours
. The urban smog and concrete of Paris darken the palette of these thirty-four poems, subtitled “The Book of Poverty and Death,” in a sharp departure from the bucolic Worpswede setting of the first two parts.

In the book, Rilke acknowledges that he is starting to change. A cry to god invokes the rock that once threatened to crush him in his childhood dreams, but now it reappears as the stony will of a master. In the verse, he believes the force can squeeze creativity from him, like spice from a seed, and this time it is a transformation he welcomes:

But if it's
you
: weigh down until I break:

let your whole hand fall upon me . . .

These creative outpourings emptied Rilke out. Completing the book felt less like a birth than a loss of purpose. Rilke returned to Paris in May, but instead of beginning a new project, he promptly fell ill once again. Now that he was out of work and Westhoff's commissions were complete, they had no way to pay for their apartment in Paris. When Heinrich Vogeler invited them to come back to Worpswede, they had little choice but to accept. While Westhoff packed up her studio, Rilke lay in bed, dreading the loss of solitude that would accompany a return to the community. But then he considered that it would also bring him nearer to Lou Andreas-Salomé. He had resisted contacting his estranged friend for two and a half years, since the
announcement of his engagement to Westhoff. But now he was more desperate for her guidance than ever. Remembering the caveat she had scrawled on the back of her “last appeal,” Rilke decided that he had reached his “direst hour.”

In June, just before leaving Paris, he wrote her a letter. “For weeks I have wanted to write these words and dared not for fear that it might still be much too soon,” he told her. But now that he would be back in Germany he begged her to allow him to visit her for even a single day. She had moved near Göttingen, a university town in the north where her husband had recently accepted a professorship.

By the time Rilke's letter and a copy of the Rodin mongraph arrived, Andreas-Salomé had become “a peasant woman,” she joked, with a dog and a chicken coop. She was living in a valley of beech trees, just beyond a sylvan range of mountains. She began reading the book slowly at first, finding herself becoming gradually more engrossed as the days went on. Eventually she realized that Rilke had done much more than write an appreciation; he had mapped out a philosophy of creativity. This achievement, which must have required a major “psychic reorientation,” outshadowed any annoyances she had felt toward him in the past.