You Must Change Your Life (19 page)

Rilke identified a possible candidate for the job in Georg Simmel, the German sociologist whom he had met through Andreas-Salomé. Simmel was an enormously popular lecturer who had risen to widespread acclaim the previous year for his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In it, he made his native Berlin a case study for examining the neurotic psychology of the modern city dweller.

Simmel argued that urbanites were evolving to develop “protective organs” that defended them against the sensory overload of cities. But these organs also blunted their emotional receptors in turn, resulting in populations that were less sensitive, more intellectual and more apathetic. “There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook,” Simmel wrote.

Rilke recognized in Simmel's milieu a setting he could use for
Malte
. The Danish character, like Rilke, would undergo the “rapid telescoping of changing images” and the “intensification of emotional life” that were characteristic of Simmel's metropolis. Gradually, Rilke had come around to Andreas-Salomé's view that these emotional fevers had an advantage. As he wrote to Kappus in November, “Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.”

In early 1905, Rilke wrote Simmel to ask whether the professor would be teaching in Berlin the following semester.

Simmel replied that he would not, he was taking time off from
teaching to research a paper on artistic manifestations of modern anxiety. In fact, he had wanted to ask Rilke a favor: Could he introduce him to Rodin? Simmel believed that Rodin's works gave form to the restless modern spirit. “By inventing a new flexibility of joints, giving surfaces a new tone and vibration, suggesting in a new way the contact of two bodies or parts of the same body, using a new distribution of light by means of clashing, conflicting, or corresponding planes, Rodin has given to the human figure a new mobility that reveals the inner life of man . . .” he would write. To Simmel, Rodin marked the endpoint on a continuum that began with the Renaissance. Whereas four hundred years earlier Michelangelo's
David
posed in a comfortable contrapposto, and his female figures lolled on lounges, Rodin's works teemed with tension and instability, stalled in states of eternal becoming.

Rilke was proud to be of service to the two great thinkers and swiftly made the introduction. As Simmel set off to write one of the greater essays in the canon on Rodin, “Rodin's Work as an Expression of the Modern Spirit,” Andreas-Salomé offered Rilke an unmissable opportunity to visit her in Göttingen. He had just finished revising the manuscript for
The Book of Hours
, which the prestigious publishing house Insel-Verlag would publish in April, and was in high spirits when he set off for the long-awaited reunion.

The stay at Loufried, as the house was called, was everything Rilke had hoped for. The old friends read to each other in the garden and she cooked his favorite vegetarian meals. When her beloved dog Schimmel grew abruptly ill and died, Rilke mourned with her. Watching Andreas-Salomé cry confirmed his belief that “one should not draw into one's life those cares and responsibilities which are not necessary, just as I felt it as a boy when my rabbit died.” When he was getting ready to leave, Andreas-Salomé assured him that a room at Loufried would always be open to him, his green leather slippers waiting by the door.

One can only speculate how Westhoff felt about her husband's reunion with his former lover, whom she had not yet met. Rilke tried to explain that, because Andreas-Salomé played such a formative role
in his “inner history,” she should be considered “indispensable and essential” to Westhoff, too. It's possible that Westhoff did not need any reassurance at all. She had by now left Rome and was setting up a studio for herself in Worpswede, where she could teach art classes and be with Ruth.

Paula Becker was thrilled to hear that Rilke was off on one of his trips “to study something or other.” Now that she had her best friend back in Worpswede the women spent nearly every day together. While Ruth, who was growing into a plump, “cuddly little creature” of four, played on the floor nearby, Becker began painting a portrait of her old friend wearing a white dress and a remote expression. Westhoff posed with a red rose held to her clavicle, her lower lip pressed firmly into the upper. Her eyes are averted to one side, seemingly focused on nothing. They appear useless to her in this moment, as if Westhoff existed so entirely within her own mind that Becker could hardly exteriorize her in painting.

They spoke often about independence—about how Westhoff did not necessarily mind having so much distance from her husband, and how Becker craved more of it from hers. When Rilke informed his wife that Georg Simmel had returned to Berlin from Paris and that the poet planned to travel there next from Göttingen, Westhoff seemed to think it was a good thing that Rilke was “getting to see the intelligentsia of Europe,” Becker wrote.

One cold day in the studio, as Becker scooped peat into the oven, she told Westhoff how badly she wanted to leave Worpswede. Westhoff saw for the first time the gravity of her friend's sadness. As she spoke, “one tear after another rolled down her cheek while she explained to me how very important it was for her to be out ‘in the world' again, to go back to Paris again.” To her, Paris was “the world.”

Becker's depression had become palpable to Modersohn, too. But he blamed his wife's dissatisfaction with rural life on her ambition. For the first time, he disparaged her painting, writing in his journal, “What Paula is doing with her art now does not please me nearly so much as it used to. She will not accept any advice—it is very foolish
and a pity.” Her nude figures with big heads resembled the primitive paintings that had come into fashion in Paris. He thought she should instead be looking at more “artistic” paintings.

Women artists, in general, were too stubborn, he decided. Westhoff was a good example: “For her there is only one thing and its name is Rodin; she blindly does everything the way he does it,” Modersohn wrote. Becker agreed that her friend was still “very much under the influence of [Rodin's] personality and his great, simple maxims.”

For that reason, it was all the more exciting when Rilke rushed Westhoff a letter that fall bearing incredible news from Rodin. The poet had spent nearly three weeks in Berlin attending Simmel's lectures; then, the day before he was scheduled to leave, Rodin sent him a letter. The sculptor had found Rilke's address in Berlin to let him know that he had finally read a translated edition of the monograph. Although Rodin didn't offer any specific impressions of the book, he must have been pleased, telling Rilke, “My very dear friend, I am writing to assure you of the fullest friendship and admiration which I bear for the man and the writer whose work has already had a pervasive influence through his labor and talent.”

Rilke hand-copied the letter for Westhoff so that she could savor each word for herself. The unexpectedly warm tidings from Rodin lifted Rilke's spirits and rekindled a desire to visit him. “It is the need to see you, my Master, and to experience a moment of the burning life of your beautiful things that excites me,” he wrote in his reply. He told him that he and Westhoff were planning a trip to France that fall. Would Rodin be available for a visit in early September?

The artist not only agreed to meet with the couple, he invited them to stay in Meudon as his guests. On the back of the letter, his secretary added a postscript emphasizing that Rodin indeed
requests
that the poet stay at his home, “so you can talk.”

While Westhoff began to fantasize with Rilke about a trip to the chateau in Meudon, with “its garden looking out far and wide,” Becker stood quietly by. “Follow my example,” Westhoff would tell her, and Becker resolved to do just that. She did not yet know how, but she would start
by stashing away every coin she found from that moment on. Whatever it took, she promised herself that she would return to Paris someday.

“
WITHOUT DOUBT THERE EXISTS
somewhere for each person a teacher. And for each person who feels himself a teacher there is surely somewhere a pupil,” Rilke wrote during his first stay in Worpswede. He had been searching then for a mentor to replace Andreas-Salomé, and now he had found himself looking at Simmel as a potential replacement for Rodin.

At the same time, Rodin was searching far and wide for his next pupil. In February 1905, he saw promise in Edgard Varèse, a twenty-one-year-old music student with dark Italian features whom he had hired as a model. As they got to talking, Rodin grew impressed with the young man's interest in reimagining music as sound sculpture. Varèse had been fascinated by Roman cathedrals while living in Turin as a boy and now wanted to translate that style of architecture into “blocks of sound,” as sturdy as granite. Rodin offered him a job working in Meudon as his secretary, with the promise to help him make connections in return. The sculptor had well-known friends in the field, like Claude Debussy, whom Varèse adored.

But Rodin could scarcely find the time to hold up his end of the bargain. In June he left for a road trip through Spain with the painter Ignacio Zuloaga, while Varèse stayed behind answering the artist's mail. On their trip, Zuloaga, then thirty-three, introduced Rodin to bullfighting, which the sculptor found to be a “revolting slaughter.” He then took the sculptor to see the paintings of Francisco Goya and El Greco, which impressed Rodin even less. El Greco simply “doesn't know how to draw,” he muttered over and over. When an art dealer offered Zuloaga an El Greco altarpiece of St. John the Baptist for just one thousand pesetas, Rodin told him he was insane to buy it. Luckily, Zuloaga thought better and purchased it anyway.

Rodin came back from Spain disappointed, and Varèse was not
sympathetic. The young man, who had a hot temper to begin with, was irritated that Rodin had failed to take any meaningful steps to further his career. All the old man did was lecture him with “asininities as if he were God almighty.” Rodin “didn't know a damn thing about music,” Varèse decided, and, in September, he called him
un con
—an ass—and stormed out of the studio.

A decade later, Varèse moved to New York and almost single-handedly pioneered its electronic music scene. “We have actually three dimensions in music: horizontal, vertical, and dynamic swelling or decreasing,” he once wrote. He wanted to invent new instruments to add a fourth dimension, “sound projection—that feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of being reflected back . . . a journey into space.”

As luck would have it, Rilke's train delivered him back to France within a week of Varèse's departure. It was nearly three years to the day since the poet had come to Paris for the first time. As he took a walk on his old route from the Luxembourg to the Louvre by way of the Seine, he sensed that little had changed. His favorite vegetarian restaurant was still there and he stopped in to order the usual: figs, melon, artichoke and tomatoes with rice.

But when he arrived in Meudon, where he planned to stay for ten days, he realized that much had changed for Rodin. The artist had made vast improvements to the estate, which was far more functional now, if not quite modern. He'd added electricity and built new studios and housing for his growing army of assistants. He had also purchased an adjacent plot of land where he installed the neoclassical façade and several columns from a castle he'd salvaged at the old site of Château d'Issy after it had been bombed in 1871 and left for ruin. “Much more world has grown about him,” Rilke wrote. “It is wonderful how Rodin lives his life, wonderful.”

When he knocked on the door, Rodin greeted him “like a big dog,” Rilke recalled, “recognizing me with exploring eyes.” Rodin inquired about Westhoff, whose father had died abruptly in August, causing her to stay behind in Germany with her mother. Then, as the old friends
visited, Rilke quickly began to realize how dramatically the sculptor's life had changed since he'd met him three years earlier.

After the 1900 World's Fair, Rodin's fame had spread east to Bohemia and west to America, where he held his first solo show in 1903. At home that year he was promoted to commander of the Legion of Honor. He was now the highest-paid artist in the world and aristocrats lined up with blank checks hoping to have their faces immortalized in one of his busts. He now had the freedom to pick and choose whomever he wanted to sculpt and often favored eminent cultural figures, including Joseph Pulitzer, Gustav Mahler and Victor Hugo. Some collectors tried to persuade him with invitations to extravagant parties, but Rodin seldom took pleasure in these events. He'd usually spend them complaining about being tired and then excuse himself early for his nine o'clock bedtime. If the event was being held in a foreign country, Rodin, who spoke only French, would just nod or bow his head when asked a question he didn't understand, amusing his hosts with this strange formality.

Although Rodin was pleased to reap financial reimbursement for his years of unpaid labor, the delayed recognition could never “make good the wrongs . . . done to me—not even if I live for another two hundred years,” he said. Success came altogether too late for Rodin to enjoy it. He never developed a taste for expensive food or material possessions, apart from his art collection.

He also didn't know how to handle the hangers-on who had begun to crowd in his spotlight. Rodin began to suspect his friends of using him for his money and connections. He accused employees of stealing from him. Anytime he tried to help someone, it seemed to backfire.

Rilke began to see how isolated Rodin had become. “My pupils think they have to surpass me, to overtake me,” he told Rilke. “They are all against me. Not one of them comes to my aid.” This was why the master was so excited to see his most loyal disciple again, the one who had returned.