You Must Change Your Life (28 page)

The dancers reminded him of something ancient, as if they had leapt out of a temple's bas relief onto the stage. Or perhaps from the side of the cathedral; in their perfect equilibrium and antique grace they recalled the stone angel that Rodin and Rilke had admired in Chartres two years earlier. But only now that he had seen the Cambodian dancers had he understood the beauty of the angel. He'd returned to Chartres to look again at the statue and felt modernity and antiquity, religious rite and artistic rite unite within him. “This angel is a figure from Cambodia,” he now said.

The day after the performance Rodin had visited the troupe at the gardens of their guest villa to observe and draw them. When they had left for the next stop on their tour to Marseilles, he followed. Within a week Rodin had produced a full 150 watercolors of the dancers.

Forty of those were among the more than two hundred drawings on view at Bernheim-Jeune when Rilke visited that fall. The dancers had no faces, only wildly outlined limbs blanketed in sweeps of rich color. The lightness and mystery of these drawings left Rilke “in a state of blissful astonishment,” he wrote. He returned to the gallery again and again. After several days of this he could not bear to keep his excitement to himself any longer. He wrote to Rodin to tell him how many mornings he'd spent with the drawings. Then Rilke wrote another letter the following week to say that they were
still
having their effect on him. “You have entered far more deeply into the mystery of the Cambodian dances than you realize,” he said. “For me, these drawings were a revelation of the greatest profundity.”

Rilke then boarded a train east to begin a reading tour and avoid another Parisian winter. He made his first stop in dreaded Prague, at
the literary club Concordia, where the audience that November evening looked old and dull. Among its members were his mother and her friends, the “ghastly old ladies that I used to wonder about as a child,” he said. Phia Rilke followed her newly famous son around, clinging to him and bragging to anyone who'd listen. She was still the “pitiful, pleasure-seeking creature” that Rilke remembered, still stubbornly pious, and in denial of her age. Every time he saw her it was “like a relapse,” he once said.

He read a few selections in progress from
Malte
and the
New Poems
and then went to a tea hosted by an old mentor. He was disheartened to see that the party was populated by all the same faces that were there when he left Prague a decade earlier. He would have liked to leave town immediately, but instead spent four long, obligatory days there visiting old friends and family.

When it finally came time for him to check out of his hotel, the concierge notified him of a letter that had arrived from Paris. Rilke recognized the familiar seal; it was from Rodin. He carefully opened the envelope, which broke at long last the year-and-a-half-long silence with his former master.

Rodin had written to ask the poet his opinion about a man by the name of Hugo Heller, who owned a bookstore in Vienna. Heller wanted to show some of Rodin's Cambodian drawings there to coincide with an upcoming talk Rilke was giving on the artist. Rilke, who was on his way to Heller's shop in Vienna at that very moment, was happy to send Rodin his assurances of the man.

The letter to Rilke, written by a secretary and only signed by Rodin, was no grand gesture. But it elated the poet all the same. He analyzed every word, pointing out to his wife how Rodin had used the affectionate address,
Cher Monsieur Rilke
. The artist also told him that he planned to have Rilke's second essay about him, published that year in the monograph and reprinted in
Kunst und Künstler
magazine, translated into French so that he could read it.

Rilke tried to temper his excitement but could not stop himself from replying immediately. He told his wife that he had responded
“just as factually, but spoke of all the matters that had accumulated.” At the very least, Rilke knew that reopening the lines of communication with Rodin would make many practical matters in his life much easier. Building a reputation as an expert on an artist with whom he could not contact had proven troublesome. Already he had had to admit to
Kunst und Künstler
that he could not ask Rodin for images to run with the article.

When Rilke arrived in Vienna he discovered another letter from Rodin. This one was longer, with a clearer conciliatory tone. Rodin had now read the magazine essay and found it to be “
très belle
.” To Rilke's amazement, he went on to invite the poet to visit him the next time he was in Paris. “We have need of truth, of poetry, both of us, and of friendship,” Rodin told him. There were “so many things, so many things” to discuss: the nineteenth century shift from idealized forms in art to naturalized ones, and why Rodin now believed it had taken so long for his own work to come into style. Come anytime, he told Rilke. He always had a room waiting for him at his old
petite maison
in Meudon.

“I could hardly believe it and read it over and over,” Rilke wrote to Westhoff. “The dear, just man who lives things so honestly from his work outward! The just man. I have always known that he is that, and you knew it too.”

This time Rilke let his euphoria pour out in his response to Rodin. “I have an infinite need of you and your friendship,” he wrote. He also knew that he'd made great professional strides on his own since their break and now stood on more equal ground with his former master. “I am proud that I have advanced sufficiently in my work to share your glorious and simple desire for truth,” he wrote.

By then Rilke's publisher was in the process of printing a second run of his sold-out
Book of Hours
, the text that was to be the most widely read in his lifetime. Rilke had even started behaving a bit like the literary celebrity he was becoming. He now wore a fashionable black cloak to his readings and approached the lectern with confidence, peeling off his gloves and slowly lifting his eyes to meet the audience. He spoke with a “full, resonant voice that had nothing of boyishness or
immaturity about it,” recalled the writer Rudolf Kassner, who saw him speak at the event in Vienna. Afterward, the poet shook hands with guests who crowded around to greet him.

Rilke had even managed to win over his harshest critic in recent months: Paula Becker. She wrote to him in October to tell him how much she, too, had enjoyed the new Rodin essay. In her journal, she wrote, “It seems to me that the youth with his fragile exuberance is vanishing now and the grown man is beginning to emerge with fewer words but which have more to say.”

WHEN PAULA BECKER
had told Rilke that she was leaving Paris and going back to her husband in Worpswede, she had neglected to mention that she was also pregnant. Now her due date was one month away and she spent nearly all her time at home, reading, painting when she felt up to it and fantasizing about Paris, as always.

She had heard about the Salon d'Automne and how “fifty-six Cézannes are on exhibit there now!” as she wrote to her mother. The painter remained one of only about three artists who had struck her “like a thunderstorm.” She and Rilke had not kept in close touch since he had distanced himself from her in Paris, but she knew that he had written lengthy letters on Cézanne to Westhoff and she asked her friend if she would send them to her. “If it were not absolutely necessary for me to be here right now, nothing would keep me away from Paris,” she told Westhoff in October. Westhoff promised she would do better than that and come read her the letters personally.

Becker gave birth to a daughter, Mathilde, on November 2. A few days later, Westhoff arrived at her friend's bedside with Rilke's letters on Cézanne in hand. Becker was weakened from what had been a long, painful labor that ended with the doctor chloroforming her and delivering the baby with forceps. But Becker smiled sweetly at her beloved friend and Westhoff promised to return in a few weeks to read to her when she was feeling better.

Two weeks later, Becker finally rose from bed. She sat at the mirror
in her nightgown and braided her long golden hair. She wove it into a crown around her head and pinned roses to it from the vase on her nightstand. The room had been filled with candles and flowers sent by friends and family. It looked as beautiful as Christmas, she thought.

She called out for someone to bring her Mathilde. When the baby was brought to the bedroom and laid in her arms she felt a sudden weight in her foot. It was as heavy as iron. She lay back to elevate it and gasped, “A pity.” A moment later, she was dead.

The doctor ruled the cause of death an embolism. She was thirty-one years old. Westhoff was traveling in Berlin then and did not hear the news until a week later when she returned to Worpswede, as promised, to see Becker and read her the letters. She arrived early in the morning and walked up the birch-lined path that the friends had “so often walked along together.” On the way she picked a bouquet of autumn flowers for her. When she went to the house she found it empty. Modersohn was gone, Becker's sister had taken the baby, “and Paula was no longer there.”

CHAPTER
13

T
HE NEWS OF BECKER'S DEATH REACHED RILKE IN ITALY
, where he was taking a vacation after his reading tour and visiting a new love interest, Mimi Romanelli. Just ten days into his trip, he packed his bags and returned to Germany. He stayed with his family there over Christmas and for nearly two months afterward. He fell ill with a flu that kept him bedridden for a month and compelled Westhoff to care for him, even though their marriage had long since existed in name only. Rilke even put up a picture of Romanelli in the house and apparently Westhoff agreed that she was very beautiful.

Once Rilke felt well enough he went back to Italy, but by then his desire for Romanelli had faded and a longing for Paris had taken its place. He traveled the country up and down for two months, during which time he remained all but mute on the subject of Becker's death. It would take a full year for his guilt to find its expression.

The poet made his return to Paris on May 1, 1908, and this time he did not go back to his and Becker's usual hotel on Rue Cassette. Instead he subletted from a friend a tiny studio in Montparnasse, on the Rue Campagne-Première. “Scarcely three steps wide and three
long,” it was hardly as nice as Westhoff's palatial apartment in the Hôtel Biron, but it would do for now.

Rodin had invited Rilke to stay in his old room in Meudon two more times, but the poet had grown less and less committal as the days wore on. His once-beloved cottage now sounded like a cage. Even if he was no longer bitter over the treatment he had endured from Rodin, something had changed in him. His subordinate position to Rodin had come to embarrass him and, in later years, he would deny ever having been his secretary at all. When the literary historian Alfred Schaer once asked about his early influences, Rilke adamantly downplayed the “rumor” of his old job as “not much more than an obstinate legend” emerging from the fact that he once assisted Rodin with his correspondence “temporarily, for five months (!).” It was as Rodin's
student
, Rilke clarified, that he had really come to know the sculptor.

Rilke politely declined Rodin's offer to stay in Meudon, writing that he had fallen behind on work and needed to lock himself up at home for the time being. But he looked forward to arranging a meeting at a date sometime in the near future, he said. This was not altogether untrue since his publisher did expect him to complete the
New Poems
by the end of summer.

Rodin did not get the hint, writing back the same day: “Come to Meudon tomorrow afternoon, if you can.”

Nearly three months passed before Rilke wrote to Rodin to tell him that he was still “locked in my house like a nut in its fruit.” Again Rodin responded instantly, writing that he was happy to hear the poet was working with such gusto, but couldn't he come for dinner some Sunday soon? “It would be a pleasure to see you, to talk, to show you the antiques,” Rodin wrote. Once, while the poet was out the artist came by and left a fruit basket on his doorstep.

Rodin, it seems, was lonely. In the years since he had moved to Meudon, Paris had become the city of the Moulin Rouge, of stand-up comedy and gay bordellos. Twenty-four-hour electric lamps now outshone the dappled sunlight that had inspired the Impressionists of the previous generation. Meanwhile, Picasso and other young émigrés had
led the settling of Montmartre, forging an inextricable link between the art scene and the neighborhood's notorious nightlife.

Rodin once tried to go out to a Montmartre cabaret with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. A fog of smoke hovered overhead in the basement club. Drunks slumped in their chairs, their heads occasionally bobbing back to life when the perfumed breeze of a can-can dancer passed in the audience. Rodin admitted to being “very scared” of this raucous crowd. The women with their advancing cleavage, over-rouged cheeks and piles of “love locks” were too crude, while the men seemed like sinister wastes of time and money.