You Must Change Your Life (27 page)

After a few months of this, Becker's resolve had worn thin. She wrote Modersohn an apology, confessing that perhaps she had been confused. “Poor little creature that I am, I can't tell which path is the right one for me,” she said, and invited him to join her in Paris for a few months. They would work and sleep side by side until, at some point, she got pregnant. By winter's end, he had convinced her to return with him to Worpswede.

Becker's letter informing Rilke of her decision filled the poet with guilt. She did not tell him much, only that she was going home, that she hoped it was the right decision, and that she was happy to hear how rewarding Westhoff's trip to Egypt had been—“If only we can all get to heaven,” she said.

Rilke admitted in his reply that perhaps he had treated her too harshly and been too “inattentive in a moment of our friendship in which I ought not to have been so.” He assured her that she was acting
bravely now, and that her freedom lived inside her, so it would be with her in Worpswede, too.

While Becker learned the bitter lesson that freedom does not always feel free—especially for a woman—Rilke was starting to see that it was not all he had imagined it would be either. It had been five years since he'd knocked on Rodin's door for the first time, and yet he felt more lost in Paris than ever. The city then had felt “strange and frightening right at the first moment and yet full of expectation and promise and necessity to the smallest detail,” he told Westhoff. But the promise that he felt back then had a source—Rodin. Now that that promise was gone, he saw only its loss.

Rilke was consistently reminded of his estrangement from Rodin, whose ubiquitous presence within the city's art scene alienated Rilke from many events. In June he received an unexpected invitation to a Legion of Honor award banquet for the Norwegian painter Edvard Diriks. Rilke hardly had time to savor the surprise before he remembered that Rodin would surely be going. He did not dare face him in public. What in the past “would have been an urgent reason for being there” had become “through the circumstances just as decisive a one for staying away. Strange,” he wrote.

Lonely and purposeless, Rilke fell into a familiar depression as summer wore on. He could not concentrate in his hotel because the next-door neighbor was a student with a medical condition that caused one eyelid to shut while he studied. This sent the young man into such fits of rage that he would stomp around and fling books at the walls. In a way, Rilke sympathized with him, writing, “I at once grasped the rhythm in that madness, the weariness in that anger, the task, the despair you can imagine.” Nonetheless, it also made him want to move out.

Unfortunately, Rilke could not afford any other hotel. He could not even spare the francs to buy books or tea, or take carriage rides. This reality became embarrassingly clear when he offered his money to a carriage driver for a ride one day and the man glanced at the change in Rilke's palm, then chased him out of the front seat and into second class. Rilke rode the rest of the way home underneath the baggage,
“with sharply bent legs, as is proper. That was clear. And I have taken it to heart.”

In the Mediterranean he had longed for Paris. Now in Paris he could think only of German meadows. When Westhoff mailed him a few sprigs of heather from Worpswede, their earthy scent filled Rilke with nostalgia. The aroma was like “tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and shabby like the smell of a begging friar and yet again resinous and hearty like costly frankincense.” His longing to leave worsened as the air chilled into autumn and reminded Rilke why the only thing worse than Paris in the summer was Paris in the winter. “Already the misty mornings and evenings are beginning, when the sun is only like the place where the sun used to be,” he wrote. The geraniums “scream the contradiction of their red into the fog. That makes me sad.” Rilke was just about ready to ride this gloomy cloud back out of town when he was abruptly reminded why the city, despite its difficulties, continued to lure him there time and again.

When the Salon d'Automne opened its doors in October, a mob of people had already assembled on the steps of the Grand Palais, waiting to get in. Entering its fourth year, the show had come a long way since it first launched in 1903 as a scrappy, artist-led alternative to the official salon. Cézanne had derisively dubbed the mainstream show the “Salon de Bouguereau,” after the omnipresent painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, whose slick, schmaltzy nudes the Impressionists despised. (The feeling was mutual at the Salon de Bouguereau.)

The Salon d'Automne promptly incited outrage, particularly at the 1905 edition, when artists including Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain displayed canvases blazing with pink trees, turquoise beards, green faces, and other flagrant inaccuracies. Dubbed the
fauves
, these artists saw color as a tool for expression, rather than illustration. But many visitors simply saw them as “color-drunk.”

By 1907, the public came to gawk, gossip and mock the salon as much as they came to look at the art. At first Rilke, too, was more intrigued by the spectacle than the work on view. But that changed the moment he set foot inside a gallery that was hung top to bottom with
paintings by Cézanne. It was one of two rooms dedicated as a memorial to the artist, who had died the previous year.

This introduction to the painter came late for Rilke, as it did for the many critics who had long dismissed Cézanne for his slanted perspectives, gloomy coloration and seemingly inchoate compositions. Even just two years earlier, at the same salon, the collector Leo Stein watched as visitors “laughed themselves into hysterics” in front of Cézanne's paintings.

That Cézanne spent most of his life on the fringes of society did nothing to win him recognition, either. A Provençal, he hailed from Aix, stayed there, and secluded himself in his studio for most of his life. When local children saw the bushy-bearded man passing through town in his knee-high military boots they threw rocks at him, “as if at a bad dog,” Rilke later wrote. It's possible that Cézanne scarcely noticed; he was so preoccupied with painting that he skipped his own mother's funeral to spend the day in the studio. He rarely bothered to attend his own openings, either, which may have been for the best, given his total lack of savoir faire. Cézanne did not care for bathing and, at dinner, he was known to lap up every last drop of soup and strip each strand of gristle from the bone.

But by the 1907 Salon d'Automne, critics had become increasingly intrigued by the flattened look of Cézanne's paintings. He constructed his compositions out of geometric forms, puzzling together cones, cubes and cylinders with the belief that these shapes were the building blocks of nature, and thus were those most readily apparent to the human eye. This architectural approach naturally appealed to the Cubists—Braque and Picasso, who met each other in Paris that year—and sealed Cézanne's stature as a visionary painter.

Rilke's eyes darted around the fifty-six canvases on view at the salon. There were paintings of workmen playing cards, nude women emerging from a pool, and a self-portrait rendered with what Rilke thought was the “unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.” The poet
decided then and there that, when it came to Cézanne, “All of reality is on his side.”

Rilke returned to the salon the next day, and then again nearly every day after that for the rest of the month. He stared at a portrait of Cézanne's wife seated in a red armchair for so long that the color seemed to flow in him like blood in his veins. This armchair—“the first and ultimate red armchair ever painted”—felt as alive as he was. “The interior of the picture vibrates, rises, and falls back into itself, and does not have a single moving part,” he wrote. After seeing this, Rilke questioned whether the artists whose work hung at the Louvre even understood “that painting is made up of color.”

Each time he visited the show it unleashed new insights and sensations, which he then raced home to record in letters to Westhoff. When he described to her one of Cézanne's “gray” backgrounds, he immediately wrote back with an apology. The pedestrian word choice was unfit for the richly nuanced color Cézanne used. “I should have said: a particular type of metallic white, aluminum or something similar.”

The painter approached color like an archaeologist, starting with its depth and then bringing to the surface the subtler tones contained within it. Thus grays often gave way to folds of violet or melancholy blue, as in Cézanne's paintings of Provence's Mont Sainte-Victoire. “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly,” Rilke wrote.

The poet was so taken by the range of blues in Cézanne's work that he thought he might write an entire book about the color. Because Cézanne never settled for a straightforward blue in his work, Rilke's descriptions followed suit: it was always “thunderstorm blue,” “light cloudy bluishness,” “bourgeois cotton blue,” or “wet dark blue.”

The poet never did write the book on blue, but he did complete the sonnet “Blue Hydrangea,” drafted on blue stationery. In it, he compares the flower's mottled blue leaves to a palette of drying paints. One petal reminds him of a schoolgirl's pinafore. Another one in a paler shade is like the same blue dress years later, after it has washed out and
the girl has grown up. Thus, contained within these tiny petals, Rilke sees a metaphor for the fleeting nature of childhood.

In a single month, Cézanne became the third of what Rilke called his “Homeric elders,” following Tolstoy and Rodin. He began to feel protective of the art at the salon, as if it were his own collection at home. It infuriated him to see visitors complaining that the show was boring, and to observe women vainly comparing their own beauty to that of the ladies in the portraits. When his friend Count Harry Kessler joined him in Paris to see a gallery show of paintings by Cézanne, Renoir and Bonnard, among others, Kessler noticed that Rilke was “so totally obsessed with Cézanne that he is blind to everything else.”

Rilke saw in Cézanne's work a continuation of Rodin's philosophies. Both artists empathized with inanimate objects, with Cézanne painting everyday sights like fruit, jars and tablecloths as if they possessed inner lives. “I will astonish Paris with an apple,” the painter once said. They also both believed movement represented the essence of life. In one of Cézanne's scenes of the Orangerie, he dashed its surfaces with bright streaks of paint that seemed to flicker and jump about the canvas.

Some have said that if Rodin taught Rilke form, then Cézanne showed him how to fill it with color. Or at the very least, the sculptor gave Rilke the framework he needed to appreciate Cézanne. “It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work,” he wrote to Westhoff, who, at the urging of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, published this series of letters as a book,
Letters on Cézanne
, in 1952. Paintings he once would have walked by with only a passing glance now gripped his attention for hours. Rilke suddenly had “the right eyes.”

AT SOME POINT DURING
Rilke's research on Cézanne he discovered their shared affinity for Baudelaire. “You can imagine how it moves me to read that Cézanne in his last years still knew this very poem Baudelaire's ‘Carcass' entirely by heart and recited it word for word,” Rilke wrote in one of the
Letters
.

It was then that he made the connection between the painter and his own work. Rilke had been reading Baudelaire's poem “A Carcass” in
Les Fleurs du Mal
, in which the narrator and his lover stumble upon a dead body. The woman's corpse is rotting and crawling with maggots, yet Baudelaire describes it with the cold precision of a medical examiner. This was what Malte strived to do, Rilke realized. He was still unclear about what should happen to his young protagonist, but “I know much more about him now,” Rilke told Westhoff.

In
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
, Malte comes to the same conclusion Rilke did about Baudelaire. “It was his task to see,” Malte says. He had to look past his repulsion and connect with this corpse, to identify “the Being that underlies all individual beings.” This communion represented the ultimate test: “whether you can bring yourself to lie beside a leper and warm him with the warmth of your own heart.”

To Rilke, an author in perfect mastery of his sight also became a master of his emotions. When artists tried to sentimentalize or beautify their subjects they sacrificed certain perceptual truths; Baudelaire's adherence to observation was what ultimately allowed him to write like a visual artist, molding “lines like reliefs to the touch, and sonnets like columns,” Rilke wrote.

Rilke recognized Cézanne as an artist for whom Baudelaire's challenge was not too great. Cézanne penetrated a thing's innermost reality “through his own experience of the object,” Rilke wrote. But then, to the poet's great distress, the Salon d'Automne closed at the end of the month. Rilke spent every moment of those final days in front of the painter's canvases, absorbing all the colors his greedy eyes could contain before the paintings were hauled off and an automobile show rolled in.

APART FROM THE
Cézanne show at the Salon d'Automne, there was one other exhibition in the fall of 1907 that left a lasting impression on the poet. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune had staged the first major exhibition of Rodin's drawings, and they were unlike anything the artist had shown before.

The previous year, a few weeks after Rodin had fired Rilke, the King of Cambodia invited the sculptor to a special French performance of the Cambodian Royal Ballet. Rodin did not know much about dance, but he found the androgynous ballerinas with their cropped hair and sinewy bodies enthralling. They crouched and shuddered and articulated their fingers in ways he had never seen before. Their bone structures looked as if they had been chiseled in granite.