You Must Change Your Life (37 page)

For perhaps the first time, Rodin found himself passionate about politics. He wrote to a pacifist writer who had lived at the Hôtel Biron, Romain Rolland, telling him, “This is more than a war. This scourge of God is a catastrophe against humanity that divides the epochs.” His patriotism hardened, Rodin donated eighteen sculptures to London's Victoria and Albert Museum in November—a gift to his English brothers in the fight against Germany. When he received the unlikely offer of 125,000 francs to sculpt a bust of the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Rodin rejected the commission, saying, “How could I do the portrait of an enemy of France?”

Two months after the fall of Reims, Rodin and Beuret moved on from London to Rome, where he had been commissioned to sculpt a bust of the Pope. Benedict XV had consented to twelve sittings, but dropped out after just three. He did not seem to enjoy holding poses for prolonged periods of time and told Rodin that he was too busy to continue. When an assistant dared bring Rodin photos of the Pope to use a substitute, the sculptor untied his apron and stormed out. A friend who had helped arrange the session ran into Rodin on the Vatican staircase that day. Tears welling in the sculptor's eyes, the man had to help the distressed old artist down the steps.

When the fighting shifted from France to Belgium a few months later, Rodin returned to Paris and continued working on the papal bust. It bore a fine resemblance to the man but, he lamented, it would never be the “masterpiece” it could have been had the Pope cooperated.

WHILE RODIN WAS DISPLACED
from Paris during the early months of the war, Rilke enjoyed an unusually fortunate turn of events. In September, his publisher informed him that an anonymous donor who was going into battle had bestowed twenty thousand Austrian kronen upon him and another poet, Georg Trakl. Rilke never knew the name of his mysterious benefactor, but it was later revealed to be
the Viennese philosopher and steel heir Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had admired Rilke's early lyrical poetry.

To the poet, this was “no less astounding than the existence of the unicorn.” It was the start of an uncommonly comfortable season in Rilke's life. In the summer of 1915, he got a girlfriend, the painter Loulou Albert-Lasard, and a rent-free riverfront apartment in Munich, courtesy of a vacationing patroness. In her living room Rilke gazed daily at a wonderfully strange painting of six forlorn circus performers, Picasso's
Family of Saltimbanques
, which would later make an appearance in one of Rilke's
Duino Elegies
.

But then, at the end of November, Austria began losing ground in the war. The military extended the age limit for soldiers and suddenly Rilke qualified to be drafted and “whisked off to who knows where.” When his birth date was called up for medical board review, officials declared the poet fit for service. He was ordered to report for duty in the mountain town of Turnau in January.

Rilke rushed a letter to Princess von Thurn und Taxis to see if she had any authority to save him from this nightmare. She made every effort to mobilize her contacts, but it was no use. The government insisted Rilke enlist in the second reserve. “I'm scared, scared,” he told the princess.

Nearly forty, Rilke found himself buttoning up the stiff military collar of his youth to report to boot camp. It was just as traumatic as he remembered. The other soldiers still bullied him and, now that he was known once again by his given name René, taunted him for its girlish sound. After three weeks, Rilke's influential connections finally arranged for his transfer to a desk job in Vienna. According to some reports, the princess personally came to the barracks to escort him away.

Rilke's new job was in the War Archives, where he was to write short, glorified accounts of the battles being fought. Rilke loathed this revisionist “hero grooming,” as he called it. Nonetheless, he devoted himself to the task with all the diligence he would normally reserve for his poetry. On one shift, he crumpled up page after page, unable to get the narrative just right. When he explained to his superiors that he was
suffering from writer's block, the colonel brought Rilke a stack of paper and a measuring stick and told him to hand-rule each sheet instead.

“Industriously he drew vertical and horizontal lines, for hours on end. Sometimes the spaces between the lines were only two millimetres wide, but he worked with perfect accuracy and a genuine humility,” remembered one of his colleagues in the department.

Thus, for five months, Austria had its greatest living poet ruling sheets of paper, until the military at last released Rilke from service in June 1916.

THE PAPAL BUST WAS
one of the last works Rodin would undertake in his lifetime. He had returned to Paris “tired; the war overawed him, aroused his fears,” said his secretary, Marcelle Tirel. He spent his last two years sculpting very little at all. He visited the Hôtel Biron now only for important appointments, spending most of his time in Meudon with Beuret.

Some of his friends urged him to marry her before it was too late. It seemed only fair, given her loyalty to him over all these years. Rodin finally agreed and, on January 28, 1917, he married his companion of more than half a century. The mayor of Meudon performed the rite amid explosions at a nearby munitions factory. The couple's son and a few close friends and employees joined, noticing that Rodin smiled throughout the brief ceremony, often eyeing the pastry table. Beuret wore her usual scowl.

A few days after the wedding, Rodin's new bride caught a terrible cough. Between lozenges she confessed to his secretary, Tirel, “I don't the least mind dying,” but she did not want to go before Rodin and leave him alone. Two weeks later, on Valentine's Day, Tirel came home to find Rodin standing in the center of the room staring at Beuret “like a statue.” Tears ran down his face as he whispered, “I'm all alone.” She had died that day of pneumonia. Tirel changed Beuret's clothes into a white dress and they buried her in a joint grave in the garden at Meudon, beneath a statue of
The Thinker
.

The tomb of Rodin and Beuret
.

Rodin's health declined rapidly after that. An infection in his lungs prevented him from leaving Meudon, where he lived out his last months in near-solitude. A resentful nurse kept him caged up in the house like a child, he complained. Only his most devoted past mistresses and a few vulturous acquaintances, hoping to acquire a last drawing or photograph, came to visit him now. His son returned to the house for a while, too, but even he departed after learning that his presumed inheritance would be donated to the state. In the eyes of the law, Auguste was Beuret's son alone and therefore entitled to nothing of Rodin's without a will.

For five days Rodin lay in bed shivering, attended to by three nurses, whom he called “his Three Fates.” On November 18, 1917, water filled his lungs. In his last breath he reportedly groaned a defense of his late hero: “And people say that Puvis de Chavannes is not a fine artist!”

THE NEWS OF RODIN'S
death reached Westhoff before it did Rilke. She was living in Worpswede again, building her final home with Ruth, when she delivered Rilke the sad announcement. She told him that Paris would seem “wholly desolate without him.”

Rilke was about to write Westhoff a belated birthday note when he received her letter instead. Although he and Rodin had not mended their most recent differences, the news devastated the poet, and superseded
all other matters in his life then. “Like me you will be steeped in memories and sorrow and, with Paris and all we have lost in it, will have to go through this now so final loss,” he wrote Westhoff.

He maintained from that day forward that Rodin's influence on him outweighed that of anyone else. Rilke thought that perhaps the artist's death would have been easier to mourn had it not occurred during the war, which would rage on for still another year. But the letters of condolences that started streaming into Rilke's Munich apartment only compounded his sense that life was almost surreally inhumane.

His friend Count Kessler attempted to comfort the poet one day by telling him that he had managed to find some meaning in his time serving in the war. He told Rilke how moved he had been just by the sheer number of men sacrificing their lives all around him.

Rilke dropped his head into his hands. There was nothing meaningful about death during war, he said. The only worthwhile sacrifice was a sacrifice made in the name of art. Only a Rodin bronze, or a Michelangelo marble, or the dark sea at Duino were worth fighing for, he told Kessler. War was merely a pastime for the vocationless.

Kessler confided in his journal that he realized then how little Rilke understood about human nature. Fighting must have been too real, too physical for this poet who lived entirely in the realm of the spirit. Apollo, he concluded, was Rilke's only god.

There was not much one could say to comfort those who, like Rilke, emerged from the war wounded and morale-beaten. But the writer Sylvia Beach saw some hope for Parisians with the opening of the Musée Rodin in 1919. The fighting had delayed its official ratification for several years, but now that the soldiers would “return from the preoccupations of the war to the eternal beauty of art, many will be the pilgrims from all countries of the world to this shrine of beauty, the Musée Rodin,” she wrote. Today the museum remains home to the largest collection of Rodin works in the world. A plaque on the side of the building reads, “In this mansion, to which he introduced Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke lived from 1908 to 1911.”

CHAPTER
19

S
INCE THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR, RILKE HAD BEEN ASKING
himself,
Where do I belong?
There was a time early in the fighting when the sound of soldiers singing on trains filled his heart with pride for his Austrian homeland. But that patriotism deteriorated rapidly as he saw the waste of war firsthand, and he gradually began to align himself with the growing pacifist movement.

He returned to Munich after his release from the military, but felt allegiance to no nation. “I have behind me so many years that are lost or at least have almost eluded me, that I am now ruthlessly living toward a certain inner ownership,” he wrote. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 only confirmed his lifelong sense of homelessness. Suddenly Rilke found himself a Czechoslovakian citizen by law, and yet he didn't even speak the language.

By that time Rilke felt little connection to his native tongue, either. Now that he had mastered French, he could never find the words he needed to express himself in German. Take “palm”: the French had
paume
, the Italians had
palma
, but the Germans had nothing to describe the inner plain of the hand, he said. The closest word Rilke could find was one that translated to “hand plate.” That it conjured an image of
a beggar asking for alms perfectly evoked the impoverishment that characterized the German language to Rilke.

In the last phase of Rilke's life, he settled in a French-speaking region of Switzerland and changed his name back from Rainer to René. Anti-German sentiment still ran high in French-speaking nations then, and Rilke soon began writing in French and even found himself thinking in French. Writing poetry in a foreign language was a challenge, but rediscovering how to express himself made him feel like a child, experiencing the world with new eyes.

BEGINNING IN 1919,
Rilke saw through the emotional “turning” that he felt stirring in him just before the war. He would remain a fundamentally solitary poet, but he was now ready to do the “heart-work” he had denied himself for so long. For once, he wanted to give something to others.

The black-haired Polish painter Baladine Klossowska was still married when she and Rilke first met more than a decade earlier in Paris. Her husband, the German art historian Erich Klossowski, had also written a book for
Die Kunst
, the series of art books that included Rilke's monograph on Rodin. The two writers ran into each other periodically over the years, including in Paris the year after Rodin fired Rilke, and the poet had invited the couple back to his little apartment to hear him read from his
Book of Hours
.