The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  His very long letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 18 July 1903, from which several passages describing his recoil from city life in Paris and his sense of a need to ‘make things out of fear’ are quoted here, is in Rainer Maria Rilke/Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Zurich: Max Niehans Verlag, 1952), pp. 53–65.

  His remarks to his French translator, Maurice Betz, were reported in Betz's Rilke in Paris (Zurich, 1958) and are quoted here from Hartmut Engelhardt's Materialien (see Further Reading), pp. 157–72. Two unused drafts of the opening of the novel, and two discarded versions of the Tolstoy ending, are included in Engelhardt's Materialien, pp. 55–73. The passage quoted in the Introduction is to be found on p. 72.

  Donald Prater uses the word ‘autotherapy’ in A Ringing Glass, p. 173. Ellen Key's remarks on Malte were collected in her Seelen und Werke (Berlin, 1911) and are here quoted from Engelhardt's Materialien, p. 151. William Gass's remark on the closing words of the novel is in his introduction to Stephen Mitchell's translation (New York: Random House, 1983), p. xxiv.

  Further Reading

  The most lucid and judicious critical biography in English remains Donald Prater's magnificent A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Another clear and informative biographical study is Ralph Freedman's Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

  An invaluable explication, section by section, of the entire novel is offered by George C. Schoolfield in his succinct article ‘Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’, in Erika A. Metzger and Michael M. Metzger (eds.), A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2001), pp. 154–87.

  Other articles in English that can be recommended include: Barbara Carvill, ‘Homage á Cézanne: The blind news vendor in Rilke's novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’, and Joan E. Holmes, ‘Rodin's Prodigal Son and Rilke's Malte’, both in Frank Baron (ed.), Rilke and the Visual Arts (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1982), pp. 61–72 and 19–26; Idris Parry, ‘Malte's Hand’, German Life and Letters, NS 11 (1957), pp. 1–12; and Walter H. Sokel, ‘The Devolution of the Self in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’, in Frank Baron, Ernest S. Dick and Warren R. Maurer (eds.), Rilke: The Alchemy of Alienation (Lawrence, Kansas: Regents Press of the University of Kansas, 1986), pp. 171–90.

  For those with German, an indispensable source book is Hartmut Engelhardt (ed.), Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). William Small's Rilke-Kommentar zu den ‘Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) is a detailed gloss that can usefully be read together with Schoolfield's.

  A Note on the Text

  The numbering of sections in the novel, from 1 to 71, is not Rilke's, but was devised by the critic August Stahl in his Rilke-Kommentar zu den ‘Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’, zur erzählerischen Prosa, zu den essayistischen Schriften und zum dramatischen Werk (Munich: Winkler, 1978). It was intended as a convenience, for ease of reference, and has been widely adopted in Rilke criticism. It should be emphasized that these numbers are not part of Rilke's understanding of the text; it was of course part of his conception that the text should read as if it were indeed notebooks, and numbered divisions would have ruined any such illusion. The only major break envisaged by Rilke comes between sections 38 and 39, where the gap left is perhaps intended to signal Malte's moving on from one notebook to the next.

  Footnotes appearing in the body of the text are Rilke's own.

  THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE

  11 September, rue Toullier

  [1] This, then, is where people come to live; I'd have thought it more of a place to die. I have been out. I saw hospitals. I saw one man who tottered and then collapsed. People gathered around him, which spared me the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was inching ponderously along by a high, sun-warmed wall, occasionally touching it as if seeking assurance that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind the wall? I located it on my map: Maison d'Accouchement. Very well. She will be delivered of her child – that is where their skill lies. Further on, rue Saint-Jacques, a large building with a cupola. The map read: Val-de-Grâce, hôpital militaire. That I did not need to know, but it does no harm. The street began to smell from all sides. As far as I could distinguish the odours, it smelled of iodoform, the fat in which pommes frites are fried, and fear. Every city reeks in summer. Then I saw a building curiously blinded with cataracts, unmarked on the map, though the words over the door were still quite legible: Asyle de nuit.1 Beside the entrance was the tariff of charges. I read it through. It was not expensive.

  What else? a baby in a halted pram, plump, greenish, with quite a rash on its forehead. The rash was clearly healing and not painful. The child was asleep, its mouth hung open, it was breathing in iodoform, pommes frites, fear. That was simply the way it was. The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.

  [2] That I cannot give up sleeping with the window open! The trams rattle jangling through my room. Automobiles drive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a window smashes; I hear the laughter of the larger shards and the sniggering of the splinters. Then suddenly a thudding, muffled noise from the other direction, inside the house. Someone is climbing the stairs, coming, coming steadily, reaches my door, pauses for some time, then goes on. And once again the street. A girl shrieks: ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram races up all agitated, then rushes on headlong. Somebody shouts. People are running, overtaking each other. A dog barks. What relief: a dog. Around dawn, a cock even crows, affording balm unlimited. Then quite abruptly I fall asleep.

  [3] Those are the sounds I hear. But there is something more fearful still: the silence. I have a notion that, at big fires, a moment of extreme suspense can sometimes occur, when the jets of water slacken off, the firemen no longer climb, no one moves a muscle. Without a sound, a high black wall of masonry cants over up above, the fire blazing behind it, and, without a sound, leans, about to topple. Everyone stands waiting, shoulders tensed, faces drawn in around their eyes, for the terrible crash. That is how the silence is here.

  [4] I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.

  Today, as I was writing a letter, I realized that I have been here for a mere three weeks. Three weeks in some other place – say, in the country – could seem a day; here they are years. I have resolved to write no more letters. Why should I inform anyone of the changes within me? If I am changing, I no longer remain the person I was, and if I become someone else, it follows that I have no friends or acquaintances. And to write to strangers, to people who do not know me, is quite out of the question.

  [5] Have I mentioned already that I am learning to see? Yes, I am making a start. I have not made much progress yet, but I mean to make the most of my time.

  To think, for example, that I have never consciously registered just how many faces there are. There are a great many people, but there are a great many more faces, for every person has several. There are people who wear the same face for years on end; naturally it shows signs of wear, it gets dirty, it cracks at the creases, it splays out like gloves worn on a journey. These are simple people, practising economies, and they do not change their face or even have it cleaned. It'll do fine, they insist, and who is to prove them wrong? The question, of course, since they have several faces, is what they do with the others. They keep them for best: their children can wear them some day. But it has been known for their dogs to go out wearing them, too. And why not? A face is a face.

  Other people are disconcertingly quick to change their faces, one after another, and they wear them out. At first they suppose they have enough to last for ever,
but hardly have they reached forty when they come to the last of them. There is of course a tragic side to this. They are not used to looking after their faces; the last is worn out in a week, holed and paper-thin in numerous places, and little by little the underlay shows through, the non-face, and they go about wearing that.

  But that woman, that woman: she was wholly immersed within herself, bowed forward, head in hands. It was at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The moment I saw her, I began to tread softly. The poor should not be disturbed when they are lost in thought. The thing they are trying to think of may yet come to them.

  The street was too deserted, its emptiness was wearied with itself and pulled out the footfall from under my feet and banged it about as if it were knocking a wooden clog. The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.

  [6] I am afraid. It is essential to do something about your fear once you are afraid. It would be odious to fall ill here, and, if anyone thought of taking me to the Hôtel-Dieu, I should indubitably die there. The Hôtel is very pleasant, and extremely popular. It is hardly possible to view the façade of the cathedral of Paris2 without the risk of being run over by one of the many vehicles speeding as fast as they can go across the square to the Hôtel. These little omnibuses ring their bells continuously, and even the Duc de Sagan would needs have his carriage halted if some person or other at death's door took it into his head that he had to get to God's own Hôtel. The dying will have their way, and the whole of Paris stops in its tracks if Madame Legrand, the brocanteuse in the rue des Martyrs, comes to this Cité square. It is worth noting that these fiendish little vehicles have frosted-glass windows that excite the imagination quite extraordinarily: it takes no more than a concierge's powers to picture the most extravagant agonies behind them, and if one is possessed of greater imaginative resources, and allows them to wander freely in other directions, there need be no limit to speculation. But I have also seen open hackney carriages arriving, hired cabs with the tops folded down, making the trip for the standard fare of two francs per hour of death throes.

  [7] This excellent Hôtel goes back a long way. In the days of King Clovis,3 people were already dying in some of the beds. Now they die in five hundred and fifty-nine of them. It is a factory production line, of course, and with such an immense output the quality of individual deaths may vary. But that is neither here nor there; it's quantity that counts. Who cares about a well-made death these days? No one. Even the rich, who could afford to die in well-appointed style, are lowering their standards and growing indifferent; the wish for a death of one's own is becoming ever more infrequent. Before long it will be just as uncommon as a life of one's own. Dear God, it is all there waiting for us; along we come and find a life ready to wear on the rail, and all we have to do is put it on. You wish to go, or have to, and that too is no trouble at all: Voilà votre mort, monsieur. You die as you happen to die; you die the death that comes with your illness (and now that we are familiar with every disease, we know too that the various terminal issues are peculiar to those diseases and not to the people who suffer from them; the sick person has nothing to do, as it were).

  In sanatoriums, where people die so readily and with so much gratitude towards their doctors and nurses, you die one of the deaths available at the institution, and are approved of accordingly. If, however, you die at home, the natural choice is that courteous death the genteel classes die, which initiates, as it were, a first-class funeral with its beautiful sequence of funerary customs. The poor stand and gape at a house where these rites are in train. Their death is of course a banal one, with neither pomp nor circumstance. They are happy to find one that more or less fits. They don't mind if it's a little too large, because they can always grow into it. But it's bothersome if the front won't do up or it's tight at the throat.

  [8] If I think of home, where there is no one any more, I have a feeling that at one time it must have been different. In the old days, people knew (or perhaps had an intuition) that they bore their death within them like the stone within a fruit. Children had a small one within and adults a large one. Women bore theirs in the womb and men theirs in their breast. It was something people quite simply had, and the possession conferred a peculiar dignity, and a tranquil pride.

  My grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, visibly bore his death about within him. And what a death: he was two months in the dying, and departed so loudly that he could be heard to the far-flung corners of the estate.

  The rambling old manor house was too small for that death. It seemed as if additional wings would have to be built on, for the Chamberlain's body grew larger and larger, and he was forever demanding to be carried from one room to the next and falling into a fearful rage if the day was not yet done and no room remained in which he had not lain. At such times, he would be borne upstairs, accompanied by the entire retinue of servants, maids and dogs that were forever in attendance, and with the major-domo leading the way he would enter the room in which his sainted mother had passed away twenty-three years before, which had been kept precisely as she had left it and in which none but he was permitted to set foot. Now the whole mob burst in. The curtains were flung open, and the robust light of a summer afternoon strayed inquisitively among the wary, startled objects and turned awkwardly in the wide-eyed mirrors. And the people did the same. There were chambermaids so consumed by curiosity that they knew not what their hands were up to, young servants who gaped at everything, and elder staff who walked about trying to recall what they had been told concerning this locked room which they now had the good fortune to have entered.

  The dogs in particular seemed immensely excited to find themselves in a room where everything had its smell. The great lean Afghan hounds ran to and fro behind the armchairs, worrying, criss-crossing the chambers with lengthy, swaying dance-steps or rearing upright like heraldic hounds, resting their slender forepaws on the white and gold window sill and, their faces eager and alert and foreheads expectant, gazed out to right and left into the courtyard. Little dachshunds the colour of buff gloves sat in the broad, silk-upholstered chair by the window, wearing expressions suggesting all manner of thing was well, and a wire-haired grouchy-looking pointer rubbed his back on the edge of a gilt-legged table, setting the Sèvres cups on the painted tabletop atremble.

  For the absent-minded, sleepy objects in that room it was indeed a frightful time. When books were opened carelessly by hasty hands, rose leaves would fall out and be trodden underfoot; small and fragile objets were snatched up, instantly broken and hurriedly set down again; damaged things were hidden behind the drapes or even tossed behind the gold mesh of the fire-screen; and now and then something would fall, with a muffled thud on the carpet or with a sharp crack on the hard parquet, smashing, breaking with a crashing snap or almost without a sound, for these objects, spoiled as they were, could not survive a fall.

  And if anyone had thought to ask what the cause of it all was, what had brought down the fullness of destruction upon this anxiously guarded room, there could have been but one reply: death.

  The death of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge at Ulsgaard. For there he lay, bulging massively out of his dark blue uniform, in the middle of the floor, and never moved an inch. The eyes in that great and unfamiliar face, which no one recognized any more, had fallen shut: he no longer saw what was happening. At first an attempt was made to lay him on the bed, but this he resisted, for he had hated beds ever since the first nights of his present illness. In any case, the bed up there proved too small, so there was no alternative but to lay him on the carpet as he was; for he refused to go downstairs again.

  There he lay now, looking for all the worl
d as if he had died. Dusk was settling, and the dogs had crept away one after another through the half-open door; only the wire-haired grouchy-looking one remained by his master, one of his thick, shaggy forepaws resting on Christoph Detlev's great grey hand. Most of the servants, too, were now outside in the white passageway, which was brighter than the room; those who had remained in the room stole an occasional wary glance at the great darkening mound in the middle, and wished it were nothing worse than a large cloak slung over some rotten matter.

  There was one other thing, though. There was a voice, a voice that no one had yet been familiar with seven weeks before, for it was not the voice of the Chamberlain. This voice was not that of Christoph Detlev. It was the voice of his death.

  For many a day, Christoph Detlev's death had been living at Ulsgaard, talking to everyone and making demands – demanding to be carried, demanding the blue room or the little salon or the large drawing room, demanding the dogs, demanding laughter or talk or games or silence or all of it at once, demanding to see friends, women, people who were dead, demanding to die – making one demand after another, demanding and shouting.

  For when night fell and the servants who were not in attendance, thoroughly worn out, tried to sleep, Christoph Detlev's death would shout out loud, and groan, and roar so long and uninterruptedly that the dogs, which began by howling too, fell silent and did not dare to lie down but remained standing on their long, slender, trembling legs, stricken with fear. And when the sound of that roar was heard in the village through the wide-open, silver Danish summer night, the people got up as they might in a thunderstorm, dressed and sat wordless around the lamp until it had passed. And women who were shortly to give birth were removed to the furthermost rooms, to beds in alcoves far from hearing; yet still they heard it, heard it as though the roaring were within their own bodies, and they begged to be allowed to get up as well, and came white and great with child to sit with the others with their smudged-out faces. And the cows that were calving at the time were helpless, and their young stillborn, and one calf had to be plucked forth dead, together with all the mother's entrails, when it absolutely would not come. And all the labourers did their work poorly, clean forgetting to bring in the hay because all day long they went in fear of the night, for the rising in terror and the long hours of waking had left them so exhausted that their thoughts were quite scattered. And on Sunday, when they went to the peaceful white church, they prayed for an end to lords of the Ulsgaard manor: for this one was a terrible master. And the minister voiced aloud from the pulpit what was in the thoughts and prayers of them all, for he too no longer enjoyed a night's rest, and had ceased to understand God. And the bell said it too, having found a fearsome rival who roared all night, a rival against whom it was powerless, even when the full weight of its metal was in its pealing. In fact, everyone said it; and one of the youngsters had dreamed he went to the manor and killed their lord and master with a pitchfork; and the others were so tense, worn out and agitated that they all listened attentively as he recounted his dream, speculating unconsciously whether he might in fact be up to doing the deed. And this was how people felt and spoke in the entire district, where only weeks before the Chamberlain had been held in such affection and compassion. But despite the talk, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev's death was installed at Ulsgaard and would not be hurried. It had come for a ten-week stay, and stay it did; and for the duration of that time it was more completely the lord and master than Christoph Detlev had ever been, like a king known for ever to history as ‘the Terrible’.