Reading Rilke Page 11
In the first poem of “The Spanish Trilogy,” he had asked in anguish to be allowed, just once, in just one thing, to achieve the unity of the world with himself: from me, from me, Lord. In a poem called “The Great [or perhaps Vast] Night,” written a year later, in the Paris to which he had returned, the earlier alienation is expressed again, now not in a petition, but in a statement of fact. The poem’s beginning is startling. It suggests that the window represents a larger, more spiritual opening.
Often I gazed at you in wonder, stood at the window
I started the day before, stood and gazed at you in wonder.
The new city still seemed to warn me away,
and the recalcitrant landscape darkened
as if I weren’t there. Even things close by
didn’t care if I didn’t understand them. The street
leapt to the top of the lamppost. I saw how strange it was.
Over there—a room, empathetic, lit by its lantern—
I’d begin to take part; they’d notice, clap shut the shutters.
I stood. And then a child cried. I knew what the mothers
in the surrounding houses could do—
and the inconsolable source of all sorrow.
Or a voice sang, exceeding expectations,
or downstairs an old man coughed reproachfully,
as if his body had it right and the gentle world was wrong.
Then an hour was struck, but I began to count too late
and it got by me. —Like a new boy at school,
when he’s finally allowed to join in,
who can’t catch the ball, and is a bumbler
at all the games the others play so easily,
so he just stands there and stares—where?—
I stood, and suddenly saw that you had befriended me,
played with me now, grown-up Night, and I gazed
at you in wonder. While towers threatened,
while the city surrounded me, its aims still a secret,
and unfathomable mountains pitched their camp against me,
and strangeness prowled in tightening circles
around the random fires my senses set—it was then,
great Night, you weren’t ashamed to know me.
Your breath passed over me. Across all those solemn
spaces, your smile spread to enter me.6
Now Rilke knew what the glue was.
SCHADE
One might sentimentally imagine that Rilke’s separation from his wife, Clara, or his break with Rodin, especially his rejection by Lou, would be decisive in his life. Certainly, the onset of the Elegies was one such stroke, and not altogether salutary in its character either. Taking a more prosaic tack, one could be practical and suggest that the surprising popularity of his youthful prose poem The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke, which furnished him a much-needed income after it was published in a cheap pocket-size edition in 1912, was very significant. The dismal early Paris days were critical. World War I threw Rilke into a profound and enduring gloom—for both personal and humanitarian reasons. That might reach the Top Ten. In lives, it is hard to measure such things. Vital factors are sneaky and, like our internal organs, do most of their work out of sight. With Rilke, however, I think we always need to accept the cliché and cherchez la femme. So near the head of such a list, however suspect such lists of wounds and awards are, I should want to place the death of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the blond painter of Rilke’s Worpswede journal.
In the early days of his acquaintance with the colony’s artists, it is fairly obvious that Rilke was most taken by Paula Becker, and that she responded to his interest is also clear; but Paula had grown close to Otto Modersohn as he waited out his wife’s death through a lengthy illness. He was a painter of some reputation, mostly for work in a style that was called Naturlyrismus, which aimed at not only the adoration of Nature but the veneration of the peasant whose relation to the soil was simple, noble, and direct. Modersohn’s sentiments and Rilke’s Russian boots and tunic would find much to talk about. As a suitor, Modersohn got several things right: he was enthusiastic about Paula’s paintings, which few others were; he found her attitude toward art admirable; and he thought that her personality—“charming, sweet, strong, healthy, energetic”—filled in the blanks in his own. Had Rilke wished to woo her, he’d have gotten off on the wrong foot, for he took no notice of her work, nor did he discuss either Paula or Clara in his Worpswede monograph.
Older, established, with a manner some called “magisterial,” Modersohn’s greatest advantage was the sympathy his ailing wife could elicit for him. In any case, Paula soon, and rather passively, it appears, found herself framed for marriage. Since her middle-class Bremen family was urging her to find a position as a governess, she may have thought that marriage to a painter would be a good escape. She’d have a husband knowledgeable about, and sympathetic with, her aims. To his credit, Modersohn did sincerely encourage and support his wife’s work, but Paula confesses to her diary how little understanding from him she feels she has, and how frequently she weeps. Marriage, she writes, does not make one happier. And now Worpswede is no longer a cozy enclosure. She pines for Paris. From 1903 to 1907 she will make three trips—lasting a month, several months, finally a year. Marriage did not make her happy. Paris did.
Because Paula found it increasingly irritating to have Modersohn’s tutorial eye still following her brush, blocking her way more and more often with cautionary words; and because, at some indeterminate point, she realized that her husband was mediocre and could not lay claim to artistic superiority; because, as a woman, no one expected much of her as an artist; because when she showed her work, it was castigated; because when she painted, she felt she entered her real self; because, as pleasantly vibrant in society as Paula appeared, she was sensitive and shy by nature; because ordinary hausfrau life left her deeply unsatisfied and bored; because … From however many causes, for however many reasons, she became an artistic loner, painting in private and for herself, so much so that after her death, when Heinrich Vogeler and her husband entered her studio, they were surprised to find “a wealth of work” of whose existence they had been unaware.
Because … Clara had become so absorbed in her wifely, motherly life, she had no room in the arms of her intimacy for her formerly close friend, and in a letter Paula complained of the way “the old gang” (as the song says) had been broken up. It was Rilke who wrote back to Frau Modersohn (“exuding oily didacticism,” as Freedman says),1 suggesting that the Rilkes had reached a higher plane.
Actually, the couple’s plane had crashed, and they were scattered about like baggage on incongenial ground. Later, after Rilke and Clara had rid themselves of Ruth and established themselves in Paris, Paula came to visit, but the once happy trio couldn’t play well together anymore, and Paula found both of them—sewn like button to sleeve—to be bores. Even though Paula’s work was slowly seeping into him, Rilke was painfully preoccupied with Rodin, with the unsteady state of his marriage, with the alienation and self-doubt that would fever Malte and pave its pages with exquisite gloom and pain. About this time—the poet could not have failed to perceive it—Paula’s formerly high opinion of him sank out of sight in the sea of narcissism she felt now enveloped him. Both fled the city in the same week.
Three years later, in 1906, they met again in Paris. This time Rilke was breaking up with Rodin, and Becker had officially left her husband. They got on better now. Paula was at her best, painting odd nude portraits of herself. One in particular impressed the poet. Called Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Day, it has a background of pale splotchy wallpaper, and shows Paula, naked to just below the waist, standing slightly sideways and looking askance. The faces she was making at this time were becoming more and more Coptic. Hanging around her neck and falling between her breasts is a necklace of fat amber beads. The beads will show up in a much happier, even finer portrait from the same year. In the Wedding Day painting, th
e colors are washed out and, prophetically, Paula’s belly swells with her future fate; but in the later one her characteristic earth tones return, she becomes a Gauguin native, her lower lip is thick and red, she is holding flowers, there are flowers in her hair and flowers in an Henri Rousseau background of tall leafy stems.
She painted tomatoes, chestnuts, several still lifes with pottery jugs, and fruit in the spirit of Cézanne—a plate of apples sitting beside a green glass. The painter and the poet would meet for dinner at some vegetarian restaurant Rilke had selected, hoping that the asparagus would be delicate and plump, the tips tender. Paula began a painting of her friend at about the same time Rilke was writing his own “Self-Portrait from the Year 1906.”2 The background that fills hers is olive drab, the paint thick throughout—paint in which a pallet knife leaves marks like icing tracks. Rilke wears his hair in a cap, and his Fu Manchu mustache, his goatee, his spade-shaped beard, are as brown as his hair, his shoulders, and his featureless eyes—featureless except for wide red rims which circle them like orbits that hopefully continue to spin although their planets have long ago left them. In both poem and painting the mouth is “made as a mouth is, wide and straight,” but in Becker’s painting the jaw has dropped, the mouth gapes. The pink-rimmed eyes, the pink ears, pink lips, are a Paula Becker trademark. Her figures have grown blocky and brown and worn—worn because the surface of the paint has become streaked and flaky, the colors faded, like the side of an old barn.
From Worpswede calls came which were not satisfactorily answered, so Otto Modersohn, the husband who was supporting his wife in her separation from him, arrives to implore her to return. Paula’s refusal to leave Paris, her insistence on divorce, frightened Rilke, who stopped sitting for his portrait and ducked—as if guilty of some indiscretion—out of sight. The painting remains as unfinished as his self-portrait poem suggests his great work was. Nevertheless, it is boldly signed PMB, the M in the middle still like a river between towns. As long as Paula stayed tied to Modersohn the poet felt safe, and he bound himself to Clara, in a similarly loose yet protective way. Neither could drift off. But now he began to put his customary distance between them.
Rilke, as if he were Achilles in Zeno’s famous race, will grow nearer to each of the women he fancies, reducing the difference to a hair’s width, so long as there remains a space no spark can jump; so if Paula is going to declare to Otto: “I don’t want you as my husband,” and “I don’t want any child from you,” then Rilke will stay clear of her company;3 but when, pressured by her husband, family, and friends, she reconciles, and the couple’s return to Worpswede is announced, Rilke reappears full of warm regard, with photos from his latest journey and an inscribed copy of Book of Pictures, his most recent publication.
If the person of the poet has betrayed his friend, the poet has betrayed his principles. Because he knew … he knew Paula’s situation. He should have supported her separation. But no one—not even Paula’s sister, Herma, whom she loved—not even her friend Clara, whom she’d counted on—no one—no one—did.
Most women in Rilke’s day, unless they were barren or rich, were married off early and sent into a life of loveless broodmaring that led, after an interval that demonstrated their decency, to the bearing, the nursing, the raising, and the burying of children—six, eight, ten—losing their health and figure in the bargain, as well as any chance at achievement. Paula felt the attractions of motherhood, and painted satisfied babies at satisfying bosoms, and children, too, with awe and warmth. But, in addition to the down payment on the child’s life you were making—how many years would each cost, and bluntly, how many paintings?—when you gave birth, you courted Death, who often said, “Come with me.” Had not Paula Becker, relinquishing her art to perform a customary social service, cast away her vocation? Had she not allowed her husband’s lesser talent to dominate and destroy hers? The family may have felt like a fist to Rilke, but its grip kept women home. It held them down and hit them often.
Ultimately, money settled the matter. How would Paula live if Modersohn didn’t support her? She had no training in anything but art; the social status of unwealthy divorced women was shaky; job opportunities for them were few and unscheduled; Paris was expensive (compared to Worpswede); and success for a female in her field was unlikely indeed. The situation forced an accommodation. Economics was the other fist.
Reconciliations have their own momentum. Giving up always goes beyond the given that has been intended. Paula became pregnant during the March of Modersohn’s arrival in Paris, and gifted her husband with a daughter, Mathilde, on the 2nd of November 1907. It hadn’t been that easy, but a prolonged rest was regularly prescribed. The new mother (and now the madonna of the restored family) was to be bedridden until the 20th.
Paula Becker had always believed her life would be a short one. As early as July of 1900, she writes in her diary:
Worpswede, July 26, 1900
As I was painting today, some thoughts came to me and I want to write them down for the people I love. I know I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration. My powers of perception are becoming finer, as if I were supposed to absorb everything in the few years that are still to be offered me, everything. My sense of smell is unbelievably keen at present. With almost every breath I take, I get a new sense and understanding of the linden tree, of ripened wheat, of hay, and of mignonette. I suck everything up into me. And if only now love would blossom for me, before I depart; and if I can paint three good pictures, then I shall go gladly, with flowers in my hair.4
After three weeks, Paula Becker gets out of bed for the first time. Crowned by freshly combed and braided hair, with roses pinned to her dressing gown, she walks slowly from her bedroom, flanked by her husband and her brother in case she should suffer a sudden weakness, into another room, where dozens of candles have been lit and placed about.
You sat up in your childbed
to confront a mirror that gave back everything.
Now that image was all of you, out there,
inside was mere deception, the sweet deceit
of every woman who tries a smile while
she puts on her jewelry and combs her hair.5
Seated in a chair, she asks for her baby to be brought to her. This is done. “Now it is almost as beautiful as Christmas.” She tries to elevate her foot, perhaps to place it on a footstool. And dies then of an embolism. It’s said she said “Schade!”—what a shame.
A year later, after the death of the Countess von Schwerin, too, and then, suddenly of typhoid fever, his Capri hostess, Alice Faehndrich—in short, with death the atmosphere—Rilke wrote a requiem to a woman he would not name. Unnamed even on her monument, I suspect, because Otto Modersohn was, of course, still alive, still there to be hurt, still there to take umbrage at what the work would say. Almost the moment Paula’s poem was completed, Rilke wrote another requiem, this one for a suicide he’d never personally known, Count Wolf von Kalckreuth, but in this case the identity of the dead is prominently displayed.
Paula Becker’s stock as an artist has risen some over the years, but at the time (though one thinks the thought wryly and without vainglory) those who knew her had to believe that the climax of her brief life was the death which occasioned the composition of Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend,” one of poetry’s eternal triumphs.
“I’ve had my dead, and I let them go,” it begins, “and was surprised to see them so consoled, so soon at home in being dead, so right, so unlike their reputation.” (The Elegies will argue otherwise, deciding that “it’s difficult to be dead.”) Only Paula Becker assumes the mantle of the traditional restless spirit and continues to trouble her friend. What is the point of coming back from the dead if it’s only to visit the dead, because everything in this so-called life disappears in the very moment of its brief appearance?
Bitterly, the poet promises to do the things,
see the things, feel the things which the painter didn’t live to enjoy; bitterly he blames her for acceding to custom, abandoning her art, dying a death designed and demanded by an undeserving society, a system she should have opposed; bitterly he accuses her of eating the seeds of her own death, bending her own path from its true course, upending, as if it were an enemy, her proper end; and now she has rejected her death as well, to return, to beg for something from the life she left which can no more be given her; bitterly the poem accuses, not Modersohn alone, not merely Rainer Maria Rilke (who hides now behind the universal), but Men in general for Paula’s premature departure. The social condition in which women find themselves is partly to blame, but the opposition between life and art which society also insists on is a considerable factor. Love demands an increase of freedom for one’s lover, and justice asks that we measure it by the amount we command in ourselves.
“Don’t come back,” the poem ends. Later, Rilke will issue the same command to Orpheus: remain with Eurydice in the realm of the dead. “If you can stand it, stay dead with the dead, the dead have their own concerns.” No longer bitterly, but with a resignation which does not relieve him of his obligations, the poet promises to carry on the task she should have stayed here to perform, but now he asks for her help, if she must come back at all, and if it won’t distract her from her new responsibilities, “since, in me, what is most distant sometimes helps.” The final line, in German, is even more revealing:
Doch hilf mir so, dass es dich nicht zerstreut,