You Must Change Your Life (33 page)

Like many of Gide's books, Rilke's philosophical novel attracted more of a cult intellectual following than a popular mainstream audience. But Gide helped bring
Malte
to a wider readership in France the following year when he published excerpts of it in
La Nouvelle Revue
. The writers would go on to swap translations of their parallel books: Rilke rewrote Gide's
Prodigal Son
in German, and Gide translated
Malte
into French. Rilke said he was amazed that anyone could so ably translate his “inaccessible prose” into a foreign language.

In the United States,
Letters to a Young Poet
cemented Rilke's celebrity more than any of his other books; in France, it was
Malte
. When the complete French translation came out in the early 1920s, the book's themes of alienation, futility and consciousness pushed to the extreme helped shape the language of Existentialism in the decade to come. Jean-Paul Sartre largely modeled his 1938 novel
Nausea
after
Malte
. Rilke's protagonist's desire “to have a death of one's own” informed Sartre's belief that life is but a long unfolding of death. “You had your death
inside
you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and grown-ups a large one,” Malte says in the book. “You
had
it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride.”

Rilke's struggle to write
Malte
had felt a bit like this long-gestating death. The self-destructive book had grown and grown inside him until at last it came into its own, was published and left Rilke feeling hopelessly barren. No amount of acclaim could undo that. Rilke believed that art was its own kind of death because it consumed its artist. The only way to go on was to begin the process again. But for Rilke that now seemed impossible. How could he bear to endure that suicidal cycle again? What would he even write about? Perhaps Malte had already said everything Rilke wanted to say. Maybe it was time to enter a more practical profession now, like medicine, he thought. Apart from artists, Rilke believed that doctors were the people who lived closest to god.

He wondered to Andreas-Salomé whether the book had left him “stranded like a survivor, my soul in a maze, with no occupation, never to be occupied again?” So far, his choice of paths typically deposited him in one of three corners: Paris, Italy or Germany. Maybe he needed to try another direction. So desperate to escape the pattern of his old life, Rilke packed his bags in November for uncharted territory: Africa.

The French fascination with “primitive” art and the “untamed” minds of its makers—what Claude Lévi-Strauss later dubbed
la pensée sauvage
—drove many artists to visit the country's colonies in North Africa in the early twentieth century. The Orientalist mythology had inspired Rodin's Cambodian drawings, while André Gide said the five years he spent traveling the lonely deserts of North Africa shaped his writing above all else. Now, following in Gide's—and Westhoff's—footsteps, Rilke set out for his own African journey in late 1910, a copy of
Arabian Nights
in hand.

Arriving first in Tunisia, Rilke felt the presence of divinity around him as never before. He was shocked at how palpably Muslim the colonies felt. In the holy Tunisian city of Kairouan, “The Prophet is like yesterday, and the city is his like a kingdom”; in Algiers, “Allah is great, and no power but his power is in the air.” He considered meeting one of Gide's lovers in Biskra but decided against it once it became evident that the man might be impoverished enough to rob him.

After a few weeks he began to wonder what he was doing there. The colorful textiles, the white architecture and the spice-filled souks impressed him, but mostly the trip felt like an extravagant waste of time and money. It was procrastination, plain and simple, he realized, and an unfortunately costly way of doing it. Before he left, a dog bit him in Tunisia and he figured he deserved it. The dog had “simply expressed in his own manner that I was completely in the wrong, with everything,” Rilke wrote.

A few months after he returned to Europe, another chapter came to a close. His correspondence with Westhoff had grown less frequent, sometimes at his encouragement. Once he suggested that she “write only briefly, we each have so much else to do.” When she did send mail, it mainly consisted of impersonal matters, like feedback on his work, or texts that she had typed for him. Thus, it was not altogether surprising when, in mid-1911, Westhoff asked for a divorce.

Rilke did not object. He sympathized with his wife's dilemma, lamenting to Andreas-Salomé how she was “not with me and yet cannot move on to anything free of me.” He believed that Westhoff had never fully come into herself as an individual, instead devoting her life to Rilke and the “alternating function of ingesting me and expelling me.” He supported her decision to leave Ruth with her parents for a while and undergo psychoanalysis in Munich with the young doctor Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, a friend and sometime lover of Andreas-Salomé. Rilke hoped the therapy would succeed in ridding her mind of his presence—“(apparently a pest in her nature after all).” Then perhaps she could resurrect herself as the young woman she was before she met him, and make a path of her own this time.

Rilke wrote to a lawyer in Prague to explain that the couple had been living separately for years and requested legal documents now only to validate a situation that had been the reality for some time already. But the poet quickly learned that a divorce would not be so simple, and the amicable nature of their relationship would do little to ease the bureaucratic nightmare that lay ahead.

Because Rilke had failed to officially leave the Catholic Church
until after his marriage, he was bound to its stringent divorce policies. Meanwhile, the couple's residencies in various countries over the years complicated matters of jurisdiction further. In the end, Rilke spent a small fortune on lawyers' fees and still was never able to finalize the divorce before his death.

CHAPTER
16

I
N OCTOBER 1911 THE STATE ORDERED ALL THE TENANTS
of the Hôtel Biron, including Rodin, to leave the premises by the end of the year. The government had still not officially declined Rodin's proposal for a museum, but at the same time there were too many doubts to go ahead with it. Some officials opposed it on principle, holding the belief that museums should never honor living artists. Others argued that Rodin's sacrilegious display of nude drawings in a former convent should alone disqualify his proposal. It had also occurred to the state to use the palatial property for its own interests, perhaps as government offices or a hotel to house foreign dignitaries.

Rilke hired movers to pack up his room that month. One of them estimated that the books in his library alone would require seven crates. He put it all into storage and wrote to Princess von Thurn und Taxis to inquire if he might visit her again at Duino. He did not know whether he would be better able to concentrate this time or not, but he hoped at least to find some quiet time to work on a few translations.

By then, Rilke had lived in Paris longer than any city except Prague. Although it would continue to lure him back as a visitor over the years, any lasting tenure in the city was now coming to a close. Rilke believed a place should function less as a home than as
a vantage point, and other views awaited him now. “Paris is itself a work, a huge, wearing work which you accomplish without noticing it,” he once wrote. He finally felt like he had mastered its crowds, its language, its art, and taken from it all he needed to write the
New Poems
and
Malte
. “I have it to thank for the best work I have done so far,” he decided.

The princess told him she would send a car and driver to pick him up. He could stay in Duino as long as he wished. Rilke disliked cars in theory—even typewriters were too modern for his bohemian tastes—but he was secretly thrilled to travel in such luxury. He directed the chauffeur to take his preferred route, through Avignon and Cannes, then on to San Remo and Bologna. It would take nine days to reach Duino and to leave behind “the memorable, the tiresome, the strange house in the rue de Varenne” for good.

RODIN, ON THE
other hand, had no intention of leaving. He was incredulous that the city wouldn't jump to accept his generous gift. Refusing to accept the government's order, he went straight to the press with the news that the city wanted to deny the public a free museum. To win over journalists who were less sympathetic to him as an artist, he launched a campaign to landmark the building as a historic monument.

By the beginning of the following year, Rodin had enlisted the support of several key editors and preservationists. He and his friend Judith Cladel also gathered signatures from leading artists and patrons for a petition protesting Rodin's eviction. They passed out brochures including statements from Monet and Anatole France supporting the proposed museum. “No one is more deserving than he of such special honors,” testified Debussy. Perhaps most importantly, in January 1912, Rodin's old friend Raymond Poincaré was elected prime minister of France.

But just as the tide seemed to be turning in Rodin's favor, it crashed to an abrupt halt in May. A public spat had broken out between Rodin
and the editor of the newspaper
Le Figaro
over a recent performance of the Ballet Russes in Paris. Sergei Diaghilev had worried that the final scene of the ballet,
Afternoon of a Faun
, might cause a stir when the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky pantomimed an orgasm. Sure enough,
Le Figaro
's editor, Gaston Calmette, wrote a front-page story decrying Nijinsky's “vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of heavy shamelessness.”

Calmette's opinion was in the minority among artists, many of whom had collaborated with the dance company over the years. (Matisse, Picasso, and Coco Chanel all designed costumes for them.) Rilke, too, was so moved by Nijinsky that he once said the desire to write a poem about him “haunts me, it keeps on calling to me: I must, I must . . .”

Rodin agreed to write a piece for a rival newspaper,
Le Matin
, defending Diaghilev's serpentine star. “When the curtain rises to reveal him reclining on the ground, one knee raised, the pipe at his lips, you would think him a statue; and nothing could be more striking than the impulse with which, at the climax, he lies face down on the secreted veil, kissing it and hugging it to him with passionate abandon.”

The editor of
Le Figaro
retaliated, writing that he was not surprised that Rodin would defend the indecent performance. After all, Rodin was responsible for producing an even lewder spectacle: that of his own nude drawings, desecrating the walls of a convent. It was a blasphemy that only “swooning admirers and self-satisfied snobs” would condone. But then Calmette delivered the nearly fatal blow: “It is inconceivable that the state—that is, the French taxpayers—has paid five million francs for the Hôtel Biron, simply to house our richest sculptor. This is the real scandal, and it is the business of the government to put a stop to it.”

The provocation quickly led other newspapers to pile on the outrage. One published a cartoon of a nude model asking Rodin where to put her clothes. He responds, “Next door in the chapel.” Never mind that Rodin was far from the only tenant in the building, that he didn't
live in the chapel, and that he of course paid rent. The press delighted in the scandal and soon highlighted the questionable reputations of Rodin's other housemates, namely Édouard de Max, who also had been accused of turning the chapel into a den of iniquity. The bathtub he had installed in the priest's sacristy became the linchpin of a Catholic campaign against the tenants.

Rodin immediately regretted making the rare decision to participate in a public controversy. The denouncement was so targeted and scathing that the damage to his campaign felt insurmountable. At the end of May, his friend Count Kessler saw how devastated Rodin was and assembled Nijinsky, Diaghilev, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal into a “war council” to meet with him and devise a plan of action on his behalf.

A trembling Choiseul answered the door. Teary-eyed, she told them that Rodin was “taking this very hard,” as if “someone had wilfully destroyed one of his finest marble statues.” She vowed that if the government forced him from the building she would personally ensure that not a single Rodin sculpture would stay in France.

Rodin emerged then, looking disheveled. Choiseul swept a strand of hair from his forehead with a diamond-weighted hand. He told them that he was not as vengeful as his lover. If he had retaliated against every attack in the press he would have spent his whole career on the battlefield and never made any work. There was not much Kessler's “council” could do now except drink their tea and try to console the old man.

The face-off between Rodin and the media dragged on for months until Poincaré's cabinet made its historic decision to accept Rodin's donation and grant his request to remain in the building, as its sole occupant, for as long as he lived.