You Must Change Your Life (5 page)

BY RILKE'S OWN ADMISSION,
he still felt like a child when he arrived in Munich. He moved to Schwabing, a district in the center of town known for a high concentration of students and artists. Apart from Lipps's class, he signed up for courses on Darwin and Renaissance art, taking an especially keen interest in the paintings of Sandro Botticelli, whose sad, pleading-eyed Madonnas seemed to “stand at the heart of the longing of our time.”

Soon enough, Rilke found himself moving within social circles alongside Siegfried Wagner, the composer's son, and Jakob Wassermann, the German novelist. Wassermann introduced Rilke to the work of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose book about a young “dreamer, floundering around in a slough of doubt and self-analysis,”
Niels Lyhne
, would become an essential source of comfort to Rilke for years to come. But even this would not compare with the gift Wassermann gave him when, in 1897, he introduced the poet to Lou Andreas-Salomé. For a woman of any era, Andreas-Salomé's intellectual influence was extraordinary. For a radical Russian feminist in the nineteenth century, it was almost inconceivable.

Louise von Salomé, as she was named at birth, was an accomplished philosopher and writer, but today she is better remembered as a muse. She had rejected two marriage proposals from Friedrich Nietzsche, who once called her “by far the smartest person I ever knew,” and another from Nietzsche's friend the philosopher Paul Rée. Although she didn't want to marry either man, she was fascinated by their minds and suggested they all live together in an intellectual “holy trinity.” Astonishingly, they agreed.

Lou Andreas-Salomé with Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée, 1882
.

A photo taken in 1882 to celebrate their “Pythagorean friendship,” as Nietzsche called it, shows the two men hauling Salomé, then twenty-one, in a wooden cart while she brandishes a whip. The trio's amusement didn't last long, however, before jealousy set in and destroyed the union before it had a chance to materialize. Salomé decided that she wanted to spend the winter in Berlin with Rée alone. He was only too happy to comply, writing, “I really ought to be thinking about ‘the origin of conscience in the individual,' but, dammit, I am always thinking about Lou.”

Nietzsche, feeling betrayed and abandoned, met Rée and Salomé at a train station in Germany only to storm off and never see them again. He wrote a letter soon after to inform them that their cruelty had compelled him to take an “enormous quantity” of opium. But instead of committing suicide, Nietzsche actually retreated to northern Italy, where in ten days he wrote
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, which includes the famous line thought to refer to Salomé, “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”

Four years later, Salomé married the forty-one-year-old philologist Carl Andreas. (He, too, reportedly threatened to kill himself, if she rejected him.) Her consent came with two considerable caveats, however: no sex and no children. She was to remain free to continue her affair with Rée or anyone else she might fancy, and Andreas could also take lovers. She even offered to help introduce him to prospective paramours. The arrangement did not always go smoothly—Andreas fathered a child with their housekeeper, who lived with the couple for the rest of her life—but they never parted.

Andreas-Salomé's main gift was her acutely analytical mind. She had an uncanny ability to comprehend abstruse ideas from the era's most formidable thinkers, often illuminating aspects of their own arguments that they had not even conceived. She was a kind of intellectual therapist: listening, describing, analyzing and repeating back their ideas in order to illuminate the places where shadows fell in their logic.

Rilke added himself to Andreas-Salomé's long list of admirers almost from the moment he learned of her existence. He had just written his “Visions of Christ” cycle, a Nietzsche-inspired challenge to Christian dogma, when an editor friend suggested he read her essay on similar themes, “Jesus the Jew.”

As he pored over her words, an intimate literary kinship formed in Rilke's mind overnight. Soon he began mailing her unsigned poems. She did not learn who this anonymous correspondent was until the spring of 1897, when she paid a visit to Munich. When Rilke heard she was coming to town he convinced Wassermann, a mutual friend, to stage an introduction over tea.

Andreas-Salomé, fourteen years Rilke's senior, arrived to Wassermann's apartment in a dress of loose, cottony layers that softened her muscular contours. She had a wide, Russian face and tied her ashy hair in a tousled knot atop her head. Rilke quickly saw that she was a mesmerizing storyteller. She commanded the room's attention with her direct, matter-of-fact descriptions of people and places, yet, strangely,
she told narratives out of order, without regard to temporality or linearity at all. Rilke gazed at her “gentle dreamy lost smile,” while she remarked later in her journal upon his soulful eyes. Less kindly, she also wrote that he had “no back to his head.”

Rilke was so instantly enraptured with Andreas-Salomé that he wrote to his mother that night to tell her about meeting “the famous writer.” The next morning he wrote another letter, this time to Andreas-Salomé, confessing that the late nights he had spent reading her work had aroused in him a sense of intimacy: “Yesterday was not the first twilight hour I have spent with you,” he told her, adding that he hoped he might one day read her some of his own verses. “I can think of no deeper joy.”

Andreas-Salomé was more compelled by Rilke's “human qualities” than by his poetry at first. She could not remember the verses he had enclosed in those early, unsigned letters, but she reread one of her responses to them now and it led her to believe that she “must not have liked them very much.” She did, however, like Rilke's “manly grace” and his “style of gentle but inviolable control and dominance.” She thought his physical appearance was in perfect accord with his personality. Two weeks after their first meeting they took a weekend trip to a Bavarian lake, where they immediately became lovers.

They spent the next several months together, with Rilke reading to her by day, and Andreas-Salomé cooking borscht for him in the evening. He soon adopted her bohemian habits of walking barefoot and eating a vegetarian diet. And he now shunned stiff professional attire in favor of tunics and loose peasant garb.

Rilke felt for Andreas-Salomé the kind of reckless passion he would later ascribe to young people who “fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion.” Andreas-Salomé did not return Rilke's unhinged adoration, but she began to genuinely appreciate his talent and believed that the qualities she disliked in him could be fixed with a little grooming. She began to mold the poet into
a version of himself that she found more attractive. She advised him to copy her courtly style of handwriting and to cultivate his masculinity. The name René was too French and feminine, she said, and suggested he change it to the sturdier, Germanic-sounding Rainer.

The poet hungered to become her creation. More than his first great lover, Andreas-Salomé was his confidante, his mentor, his muse, even a kind of mother—if not to the young man, then at least to the artist maturing inside him. “I am still soft, I can be like wax in your hands. Take me, give me a form, finish me,” he wrote in an autobiographical story when he met her. Rilke welcomed her rechristening him with this enigmatic new name, which would take on an almost mythical identity of its own. To the author Stefan Zweig, the letters looked as if they ought to be hammered into fine threads of gold. “Rainer Maria Rilke,” wrote another friend, “your very name is a poem.”

Within the year, Rilke dropped out of the university in Munich to follow Andreas-Salomé to Berlin. Her native Russia was becoming a kind of mythopoetic symbol of the Slavic identity Rilke felt he had been denied growing up under the Austrian Empire. She had been teaching him the language, and he now hoped to learn it well enough to translate Russian literature.

In 1899, the pair took their first trip to Moscow together. To outsiders, the tall older woman and the meek young poet did not always register as a couple. The literary critic Fyodor Fiedler mistook Rilke for Andreas-Salomé's “pageboy,” while the writer Boris Pasternak remembered a chance encounter at a train station with the poet and “his mother or older sister.” To confuse matters more, Andreas-Salomé's husband joined them.

But the lovers paid no attention to the gossip. There was only one matter that concerned them in those days: to meet their shared idol Leo Tolstoy. It was no easy task. The novelist, by then retired and in his seventies, was not a welcoming man. He now only wrote bitter screeds denouncing modern art and the godless young people responsible for it. That might have served as a warning to his young visitors, but they were resolute. Andreas-Salomé called on some of her well-placed
Russian acquaintances and managed to secure an invitation to his house for tea.

When they arrived, the stooped old man greeted them grumpily. He was bald, with a white beard that had endured a lot of pulling and twisting. Almost immediately he started shouting at Andreas-Salomé in a rapid-fire Russian incomprehensible to Rilke. But it did not take long for him to figure out that the only reason Tolstoy had accepted the meeting was because he had taken issue with some of Andreas-Salomé's writing and wanted to tell her off. A devout convert to Christianity, Tolstoy told her that she overly romanticized Russian folk traditions in her work and warned her not to partake in peasant superstitions.

The conversation was interrupted by a man's shrieks in the other room. Tolstoy's adult son, noticing that Rilke and Andreas-Salomé's coats were
still
hanging in the hall, had cried out, “What! all the world is still here!” The intruders took that as their final cue to leave and rushed out the door, with Tolstoy ranting behind them the whole way. They could still hear his voice bellowing halfway down the street until finally the sound of church bells drowned it out.

Despite their traumatic introduction to Tolstoy, the pair decided to try and meet him once again the following summer. When they arrived at his country estate this time he gave them a choice between joining his family for lunch or taking a walk, just the three of them. Anyone acquainted with the Tolstoys knew that the only person surlier than Leo was his wife, Sophia, so the guests eagerly accepted the second option. A conversation about literature began benignly enough, but soon Tolstoy started raving about poetry as an impoverished art form. To make matters more awkward for Rilke, the man spoke almost exclusively to Andreas-Salomé, ignoring the poet altogether. Rilke later wrote in his diary that Tolstoy seemed to have “made a dragon out of life so as to be the hero who fought it.”

Rilke might have been more devastated by Tolstoy's rejection had it not given him insight into his next project, a book of poetry in the form of a medieval prayer book. Once he returned to Berlin, he began
writing
The Book of Hours
, a chronicle about his search for a poetic god, which he would complete in three parts between 1899 and 1903. When the book came out, he inscribed a copy to Andreas-Salomé:

LAID IN THE HANDS OF LOU
for all time.
Rainer
.

Rilke largely had her to thank for inspiring what would become the most prominent book of his lifetime. “You took my soul in your arms and cradled it,” he later told her. Her emphatic criticism of his sentimentality had begun to strengthen his verses, while his passion for her drove him to write one of the headiest love poems ever written:

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still
,

Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;

And without any feet can go to you;

And tongueless, I can conjure you at will
.

Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you

And grasp you with my heart as with a hand
. . .

In those days, Rilke might actually have enjoyed blindness if it meant that Andreas-Salomé would guide him. He relied on the care of others to what might seem a selfish degree had he not loved them back just as lavishly. But by the summer of 1900, his neediness started to annoy her. His letters stalked her everywhere she went. Once, in Russia, she left him behind for a few days to visit some family abroad and he threw a tantrum. A letter begging her to return contained some of his ugliest prose yet, she thought, and persuaded her only to stay away longer. Abandoned for ten days, Rilke sank into despair. When she returned to find him trembling and feverish, she announced that she would be returning to Berlin on her own; he ought to make his own plans. She had told him that she longed to “be more by myself, as I was until about four years ago,” when they first met. But privately she
wished in her diary that she could tell him to “go away,
go completely away
.” To achieve that, “I would be capable of brutality. (
He must go!
)”