Study the
Panther!
January 10,
2013
John
Banville
Letters to a
Young Poet
by Rainer
Maria Rilke, translated from the German and with an introduction by
Mark Harman
Harvard
University Press, 94 pp., $15.95
For Rainer
Maria Rilke the year 1903 did not begin auspiciously. He and his wife,
the
sculptor Clara Westhoff, were living in Paris, where the poet had come
in order
to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin. The Rilkes were not exactly
dazzled by
the City of Light. In a
letter to his friend the artist Otto Modersohn, dated
New Year’s Eve 1902, the poet spoke of Paris as a “difficult,
difficult,
anxious city” whose beauty could not compensate “for what one must
suffer from
the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the
gardens,
people and things.” A few lines later he compares the French capital to
those
cities “of which the Bible tells that the wrath of God rose up behind
them to
overwhelm them and to shatter them.”
As one may
gather, Rilke did not tend toward understatement, particularly when
speaking of
his physical and emotional health. In Paris he suffered a more or less
serious
nervous collapse, which no doubt clouded his view of the city. Writing
from
Germany in the summer of 1903 to his friend and sometime lover Lou
Andreas-Salomé, he compared his sojourn in Paris the previous year to
his time
at the junior military academy at St. Pölten, where his parents had
sent him as
a boy in need of toughening up: “For just as then a great fearful
astonishment
had seized me, so now I was gripped by terror at everything that, as if
in some
unspeakable confusion, is called life.”
His
description, especially in the long, extraordinary letter to Lou dated
July 18,
of the horrors he witnessed and suffered, was later transferred, in
expanded
form, into the Paris sections of his 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids
Brigge. The people he encountered in the streets, he told Lou, seemed
to him
“ruins of caryatids upon which an entire suffering still rested, an
entire
edifice of suffering, beneath which they lived slowly like tortoises.”
Baudelaire himself could not have written with more disgust,
fearfulness, and
desperation.
From his
earliest days Rilke had been of a nervous disposition, to say the least:
Long ago in
my childhood, during the great fevers of my illnesses, huge
indescribable fears
arose, fears as of something too big, too hard, too close, deep
unspeakable
fears that I can still remember….
His troubles
began at home. Writing in confessional mode in 1903 to the Swedish
writer and
pedagogue Ellen Key, he told of his early boyhood spent in “a cramped
rented
apartment in Prague” with parents—German-speaking, Catholic—whose
marriage “was
already faded when I was born” and who separated finally when he was
nine. His
mother had wanted a girl, and christened her son and only child René
Maria. “I
had to wear very beautiful clothes and went about until school years
like a
little girl; I believe my mother played with me as with a big doll.” No
wonder
he could write to Lou in 1903, when he was in his late twenties, “I am
still in
the kindergarten of life and find it difficult,” and confess that “I
am, after
all, a child in your presence, and I…talk to you as children talk in
the night:
my face pressed up against you and my eyes closed, feeling your
nearness, your
safety, your presence.” As to his actual mother, “I see her only
occasionally,
but—as you know well—every encounter is a sort of relapse.”
Throughout
his life he provided himself with a series of mother-substitutes,
beginning
with the redoubtable Lou and, if he had been able to have his way,
ending with
her, too. In 1925, when he was already dying, he wrote to her in
desperation—“Now I send you this shabby bank note of distress: give me
a gold
coin of concern in exchange for it!”—but her response was as briskly
indifferent as that of Proust’s Mme de Guermantes to poor Swann when he
tried
to convince her that he was fatally ill.1 Yet perhaps we should not
blame Lou
for missing the mortal note in Rilke’s pleas, since he had cried wolf
so often
in the past. Exalted whining was the prevailing mode when he was
writing to his
many lovers, confidantes, and patronesses. Indeed, it is a tribute to
the
compelling force and, one must add, the sweetness of his personality
that so
many of them continued throughout his life to indulge his solipsism and
lavish
self-pity.
Rilke’s
letters are not letters in the usually accepted sense. 2 There is none
of the
chat, the gossip, the backbiting that add spice to the correspondence
between
even the loftiest of souls. The voice here is a rhapsodic drone, and
there is
much introversion—me, me, me, and more me—and windy expatiation on the
joys and
sorrows of composition. He lives in superlatives, in the grand Germanic
tradition,
so that one seizes on the occasional humble fact with the eagerness of
a pig
lighting on a truffle.3 On the other hand, one cannot but be impressed
by the
passionate dedication with which Rilke addressed the task of
living—living as a
poet, that is. He craved solitude—“I am my own circle, and a movement
inward”—and was prepared to sacrifice much to secure it. Having
dithered for a
long time he finally married Clara Westhoff in 1901, but almost
immediately
realized that domesticity held little bliss for him, and quietly
detached
himself from wife and baby daughter.4 As he remarked to Lou, with
devastating
candor, “What are those close to me other than a guest who doesn’t want
to
leave?” Nor did he think he should be expected to earn his bread by the
sweat
of his brow: “The very feeling that there is a connection between my
writing
and the needs of the day is enough to make work [that is, writing]
impossible
for me.”
This, then,
is the neurasthenic young poet who in the late autumn of 1902 received
a letter
from a nineteen-year-old military cadet named Franz Kappus, himself an
aspiring
writer, enclosing some of his poems and requesting guidance and advice
on the
literary life he was embarking upon. Conceive of his surprise and
pleasure when
a few months later, in February 1903, he received a long, earnest, and
thoughtful reply, the first of a series of ten epistles—the Pauline
echo is not
inapt—that Rilke would send to the young man over the next five years. Letters
to a Young Poet is one of Rilke’s most popular books—if we may
call it his
book, since it was assembled by Kappus after the poet’s death—well
known to
poets in their youth and an ideal handbook for beginning writers. Mark
Harman’s
burnished, elegant new translation is the fifth English version, and
likely to
become the standard one.
Although no
doubt Rilke considered Kappus a fellow sufferer caught up in the
workings of
the “officer dispensing machine,” the young man by his own account
seems to
have thoroughly enjoyed his time at the military academy he attended in
Wiener
Neustadt: “Instead of solving higher order equations I solved the
sexual
problem, instead of acquainting myself with spherical trigonometry, I
acquainted myself with spheres that earned me the sobriquet ‘swine.’”
It is to
be hoped that Rilke did not read the biographical sketch of Kappus by
Kurt Adel
from which this debonair confession is taken. More than once in the
letters he
undertakes to counsel Kappus on the more esoteric aspects of sex—sex in
the
head, or at least the heart—and cautions him strongly against indulging
in
irony. By the time Adel’s sketch of Kappus’s life was published in
1920, the
former cadet had become a popular novelist, a fact he alludes to
somewhat
shamefacedly in his preface to
Letters to a Young Poet, where he writes that
after his correspondence with Rilke had dried up, life had driven him
“into the
very areas from which the poet’s warm, gentle and touching concern had
sought
to preserve me.”
Certainly,
in the letters, Rilke sought to guide the young man along that higher
road that
he himself had set out upon so determinedly at a young age. Reading
them, one
is hard put to remember that Rilke was less than ten years older than
the young
man he was advising, for the tone of voice throughout is that of an
elderly
wiseacre who has seen the wide world and learned its sore lessons. In
the first
paragraph of the first letter, written on February 17, 1903, he strikes
a
gravely admonishing note:
I cannot say
anything about the form of your verses, for I find all such critical
intent
quite uncongenial. Nothing could be less conducive to reaching an
art-work than
critical remarks: it’s always simply a matter of more or less fortunate
misunderstandings. Everything cannot be so easily grasped and conveyed
as we are
generally led to believe; most events are unconveyable and come to pass
in a
space that no word has ever penetrated; more unconveyable than all else
are
art-works, whose mysterious existences, whose lives run alongside ours,
which
perishes, whereas theirs endure.
Surely this
is not the same man-child who a few months later will be writing of his
longing
to press his frightened face against Lou Andreas-Salomé’s maternal
bosom and
hide from the world in the warmth of her embrace. As Mark Harman writes
in his
introduction, “Adept since early childhood at playing roles, [Rilke]
puts on a
confident mask for Kappus’s benefit.” No doubt Rilke was seeking to
treat
Kappus as he in turn had been treated by Rodin, the grand maître for
the sake
of whose wisdom and patronage he had been willing to endure the
torments of
Paris the previous year.5 Rodin had taught the young poet valuable
lessons,
lessons that were to sustain him throughout his artistic life.
When Rilke
came to Paris he was still a High Romantic, brother-in-art to the likes
of
Novalis, Klopstock, and the Goethe of Young Werther. Rodin, almost
offhandedly,
pulled the young dreamer’s head out of the clouds and knocked some
common sense
into him. For the sculptor, work was everything: Il faut
travailler—toujours
travailler was his motto. As for inspiration, Rilke wrote, the mere
possibility
of it he “shakes off indulgently and with an ironic smile, suggesting
that
there is no such thing….” These assertions must have struck Rilke like
thunderbolts. Suddenly it was not the emotion or the idea that
mattered, but
the thing.6 Rodin was, above all, a maker of things:
And this way
of looking and of living is ingrained so firmly in him because he
attained it
as a craftman; as he was achieving in his art that element of infinite
simplicity, of total indifference to subject matter, he was achieving
in
himself that great justice, that equilibrium in the face of the world
that no
name can shake. Since he had been granted the gift of seeing things in
everything, he had also acquired the ability to construct things; and
therein
lies the greatness of his art.
For Rilke,
too, the Ding now became paramount. For him, “the history of endless
generations of things could be sensed beneath the history of mankind,”
and his
ambition was “to be a real person among real things” and thus cure
himself of
what he wonderfully called his “breathing difficulties of the soul.” It
was
Rodin, so the story goes, who urged Rilke to take himself to the Jardin
des
Plantes in Paris and pick one of the animals in the zoo there and study
it in
all its movements and moods until he knew it as thoroughly as a
creature or
thing could be known, and then write about it. The result was “The
Panther,”
one of Rilke’s early masterpieces and as revolutionary in its way as
anything
by Eliot or Pound.
Despite what
he had learned at the marble knee of Rodin, however, Rilke had no
illusions
about the solitariness of the artistic project, or its difficulty—“we
must hew
to what is difficult; everything that lives hews to it”—and was
determined to
impress his young correspondent with the hard facts of the creative
life:
Nobody can
advise you and help you, nobody. There’s only one way to proceed. Go
inside
yourself. Explore the reason that compels you to write; test whether it
stretches its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to
yourself
whether you would have to die if the opportunity to write were withheld
from
you. Above all, ask yourself at your most silent hour of night: must I
write?
Thus we see,
behind this admonition, the journey into the self that Rilke had
ventured on,
and the complex aesthetic of inwardness that would find its
comprehensive and
triumphant expression in the Duino Elegies. The world of things is
there,
ineluctable, irrefutable, yet waiting on us and our transformative
powers to
help it achieve its ultimate apotheosis:
Erde, ist es
nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar
in uns
erstehn?—Ist es dein Traum nicht,
einmal
unsichtbar zu sein?—Erde! unsichtbar!
Earth, isn’t
that what you want: to arise within us,
invisible?
Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly
invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!7
For Rilke,
life and the world are all potential. In an extraordinary passage in a
letter
to Kappus from Rome in December 1903, the poet responds to what must
have been
an expression of religious doubt by the young man,8 chiding him for
saying that
he had lost God—“Is it rather,” he asks, “that you never possessed
him?” The
God Rilke speaks of is “one who has been coming, the one imminent for
an
eternity,” and therefore we must live our lives “as a painful and
beautiful day
in the history of a great pregnancy.”
If he is the
most perfect one, must not lesser things come before him so that he
himself can
choose from this fullness and profusion—Must not he be the last in
order to
embrace everything within himself, and what significance would we have
if he,
for whom we long, had already been?
In a similar
vein he inverts our idea of carnal love, denying that it is, as we
imagine, “a
merging, surrendering and uniting with another person,” but on the
contrary “a
sublime occasion for the individual to mature, to become something in
himself.”
This notion of love as consisting of “two solitudes which protect,
border, and
greet each other” leads him on to a radical reassessment of the destiny
of
woman, who eventually will cease merely to “imitate male conduct, bad
and
good,” and become her true self, free of the “distorting influences of
the
other sex.” His thoughts here merit extended quotation:
Women, in
whom life abides and dwells more immediately, fruitfully and
confidently, must
indeed have become in essence more mature human beings, more human
humans than
men, who being light and lacking the weight of bodily fruit pulling him
down
below life’s surface, undervalues in his arrogance and rashness what he
claims
to love. Carried to term in pain and humiliation, this humanity of
woman
will—once she has shed the conventions of the solely feminine through
these
changes in her external status—become evident, and those men who cannot
feel
this coming today will end up being taken by surprise and vanquished.
Hearken, o
Mensch!
Heidegger
once remarked that he was only trying to do in philosophy what Rilke
had
already achieved in poetry. On page after page of these masterly
letters we are
given ample instances of the depth of Rilke’s thinking and the
philosophical
reach of his imagination. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
Heidegger
dwells at length—how else?—on the central function of boredom as a spur
to
human action, as a state of purest potential, a kind of affectless
waiting as
the spirit gathers itself for the leap into deed.
Rilke,
anticipating the philosopher by some decades, writes from Borgeby Gård,
his
refuge in rural Sweden, in a letter to Kappus in August 1904, of the
importance
of being “solitary and attentive” because “the seemingly uneventful and
static
moment when our future enters into us is so much closer to life than
that other
noisy and fortuitous moment when the future happens to us, as if from
outside.”
In another passage, that could be from Emerson or William James, he
urges Kappus,
should he feel there is something sickly in his nature, to consider
that
“sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from foreign
matter,”
and the organism, instead of being treated with curatives, should be
helped to
be sick, “to experience its illness fully and to erupt….”
Above all,
these letters give the lie to the idea of Rilke as hopelessly
self-regarding
and cut off from authentic, “ordinary” life. His tone may be elevated
and his
manner at times that of a dandy—he was elevated, he was a dandy—but the
advice
purveyed in these letters, and the observations and aperçus that they
throw
off, contain true wisdom, and are anything but platitudinous. Franz
Kappus was
a fortunate young man to have found such a correspondent, and we are
fortunate
in his good fortune. Despite all the moaning and complaining; despite
the lists
of illnesses, mental and physical; despite his constant urge toward
transcendence, Rilke was thoroughly of our world. In the ninth and
perhaps
greatest of the Duino Elegies he asks why we should persist in our
humanness,
and offers this beautiful answer:
…weil
Hiersein viel ist, und weil uns scheinbar
alles das
Hiesige braucht, dieses Schwindende, das
seltsam uns
angeht. Uns, die Schwindendsten.
…because
truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently
needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps
calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
7 The
Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen
Mitchell (Random
House, 1982), pp. 200–203. Mitchell’s are the most satisfactory Rilke
translations, although Edward Snow’s The Poetry of Rilke (North Point,
2009) is
indispensable also. ↩
8 It is a
misfortune that Kappus’s side of the correspondence has been lost, for
there
are numerous places where it would be illuminating to know what exactly
were
the questions and observations that Rilke is responding to.
8
It is a
misfortune that Kappus’s side of the correspondence has been lost, for
there
are numerous places where it would be illuminating to know what exactly
were
the questions and observations that Rilke is responding to. ↩