Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  For a time, he was as obsessed with El Greco as he had been for a while with Zuloaga and as he would be with the lyric all the days of his life, wherever he was. And the fact is that he was never in the same place: between 1910 and August 1914, he spent time in about fifty different places, and one can only assume that, during those years, his life was not spent in any of those places, but in shuttling between them. This wandering had started soon after leaving his native Prague for Munich, Berlin and Venice. Then came his first trip to Russia and, a year later, his second trip, as mentioned above. Paris, Venice, Viareggio, Paris, Worpswede in Scandinavia, Germany, Paris, Rome, North Africa, Spain, naturally, Duino on the Adriatic, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Venice, Paris, Geneva—an utter chaos. It is hard to comprehend where he got the money to afford all this travelling around, still less to help with the upkeep—albeit minimally and at a distance—of his daughter, Ruth, born of his brief marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff: they married in the spring of 1901 and separated in May 1902, and perhaps because of this remained on excellent terms. Apart from the child, the poet owed something else to Clara: she was the one who put him in touch with Auguste Rodin, to whom Rainer Maria Rilke in turn owed one of his very few paid jobs: it is on record that he worked for Rodin “for two hours every morning”.

  Judging by his letters and diaries, Rilke spent his life “waiting” for the lyric and sharing that waiting with various women, most of them aristocratic (at least in name and behaviour) and happy to give him shelter in their various castles and properties so that he could wait more comfortably. He nursed amorous or merely friendly passions for the seductive Lou Andreas-Salomé, the desperate Eleonora Duse, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Baladine Klossowska, Baroness Sidonie Nádherny´ von Borutin, Mathilde Vollmöller-Purrmann, Contessina Pia Valmarana, the pianist Magda von Hattingberg, the Swedish writer Ellen Key, Countess Manon zu Solms-Laubach, Eva Cassirer-Solmitz, Baroness Alice Fähndrich von Nordeck zur Rabenau, Katharina von Düring Kippenberg, Elisabeth Gundolf-Salomon, Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris Crouy, a certain Mimi in Venice, and, naturally, the Countess and Poetess de Noailles, daughter of Prince Bassaraba de Brancovan, and not forgetting, of course, the Princess Cantacuzène. This list appears or deserves to be false, but it is not, although, as regards at least two of these ladies, Rilke met with relative failure: the Countess de Noailles thought him ugly, and the first thing she said to him, as soon as they had been introduced, were these weighty words: “Monsieur Rilke,” she said, “what do you think about love … what do you think about death?” As for the diva Duse, to whom Rilke was devoted, even though he met her when she was old and mad and already in poor health, his intimacy with her was cut short by a peacock which, in the middle of an idyllic picnic on one of Venice’s islands, walked stealthily over to where they were taking tea and unleashed its awful, hoarse shriek right in the ear of the actress, who fled not only the picnic, but Venice itself. In some whimsical way Rilke identified with the peacock, a fact that brought with it strange feelings of remorse and kept him awake all night.

  Rilke’s rapport with animals will be familiar to anyone who has read his extraordinary Eighth Duino Elegy. Dogs seem to have brought out the best in the poet. One need only read what he has to say about a small, ugly, pregnant bitch he encountered in Córdoba and with whom he shared a sugar lump and of whom he writes: “it was, in a way, like a celebration of mass”. She had looked straight into his eyes and, according to Rilke, “in her eyes was reflected all the truth that goes beyond the individual and towards I know not where, towards the future, or towards the incomprehensible”. On the other hand, he felt uncomfortable with children, although they adored him. As for other writers, his extravagant dealings with the ladies doubtless left him little time to speak to them, although he was on superficial terms with a few and, during a stay in Venice, shared a valet, aptly named Dante, with Gabriele d’Annunzio. He did not, however, meet the poet of voluptuousness himself.

  Rainer Maria Rilke, who, before, had called himself plain René Rilke and whom his friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, would call Doctor Seraphic, was, all his life, while he waited for the lyric, a victim of both physical and psychological ills. His close friends barely recall having seen him when he wasn’t suffering or in torment, and he himself was quite frank about mentioning these sufferings in his lengthy letters and diaries: his “constant misfortunes” kept him from “working seriously” even though he was always ready to sacrifice his life for his work (his lyrical work, of course). One example: when he was staying at the sumptuous castle Berg am Irchel, in the canton of Zurich, the distant noise of an electric sawmill on the other side of the park made it hard for him to concentrate and to create his poetry. As far as we know, the writing of the Duino Elegies took him ten years, most of which were spent waiting. When he was lucky, he would hear voices, like that day in January when, amidst the din of a storm, he heard a voice calling him, a voice very close, saying in his ear these now famous words: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks of angels?” He sat, motionless, listening to the voice of God. Then he took out the little lyric notebook he always carried with him and wrote down first those lines and then others that formed themselves apparently involuntarily. By evening, the First Elegy was finished, but, shortly afterwards, God fell silent, apart from a few, profitable, talkative intervals, and Rilke suffered cruelly in that ten-year silence, waiting. One should perhaps ask oneself, though, just how much truth there is in the poet Rilke’s legendary waiting that kept all his aristocrat female friends on tenterhooks, for André Gide—who, although he did not know him well, knew him in his less feminised days—remembered him saying that most of his poetry emerged suddenly and all at once and required only minimal rewriting. He had shown him the lyric notebook, with a number of poems “improvised on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg” with barely a word crossed out.

  Like any good poet, Rilke did a lot of communing, not just with animals, but with the stars too, with the earth, trees, gods, monuments, paintings, heroes, minerals, the dead (especially with women who had died young and in love), and rather less with his living fellow men. The fact that such a sensitive person, so much given to communing, should have turned out to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century (of this there is little doubt) has had disastrous consequences for most of the lyrical poets who have come after, those who continue communing indiscriminately with whatever comes their way, with, however, far less remarkable results and, it has to be said, to the serious detriment of their personalities.

  Rilke was short and sickly-looking, rather ugly at first glance (but less so afterwards), with a long, pointed head, a large nose, very sinuous lips that accentuated his rather weak chin and the deep cleft in it, and huge, beautiful eyes, the eyes of a woman with just a hint of childish mischief in them, according to the description of Princess Taxis. His company was clearly very pleasant, at least to the particular class of lady who most benefited from it. He had many financial difficulties, which did not prevent him from being selective and even critical when it came to food: he followed a vegetarian diet and loathed fish, which he never ate. It is not known what he liked, as regards food or other things, apart from the letter “y”—which he wrote whenever he could—as well, of course, as travelling and women. He confessed that he could only talk to women, that he could only understand women and was only at ease with them. Only for a short time though. “What do you expect?” his friend Kassner said once, when trying to explain Rilke to Princess Taxis after he had run away yet again, “all these women bore him in the end.”

  Rainer Maria Rilke died of leu
kaemia after much pain and suffering, in a hospital in Valmont, in Switzerland, on December 29, 1926, at the age of fifty-one. Four days later, he was buried in Raron, beneath the epitaph which he had previously composed and chosen: “Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy/ of being No-one’s sleep under so many/lids.” Even the gravestone was lyrical, perhaps those were precisely the three lines he had spent so long waiting for.

  Malcolm Lowry Beset by Calamity

  WHEN MALCOLM LOWRY got into trouble in 1946 during his second stay in Mexico and, in an attempt not to be expelled from the country, asked the sub-chief of the Immigration department in Acapulco what there was against him from his previous visit in 1938, the government employee took out a file, tapped it with one finger and said: “Drunk, Drunk, Drunk. Here is your life.” These words are as brutal as they are exact, and perhaps, on more compassionate lips, the right word would have been “calamitous”, because Lowry does seem to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature, which is no mean feat, given the intense competition in the field.

  Most of the surviving photos of Lowry show him in swimming trunks or shorts, but always bare-chested—with a torso like a spindle, not fat but slightly convex. This mode of dress can partly be explained by his numerous visits to places in the tropics or beside the sea and by his great love of swimming. But it would also be true to say that he clearly did not particularly care about clothes: not long after getting married for the second time, he lost a large amount of money after betting badly on the horses and, overcome by remorse, he gave his wife, Margerie Bonner, the slip as they were walking down the street. Margerie spent hours traipsing round Vancouver looking for him and finally tracked him down in a whorehouse, where she found him lying on a filthy bed in his underpants. However, the reason behind his unclothed state was not what one might at first assume, given the nature of the place. Lowry had, in fact, sold his clothes in order to buy a bottle of gin which he had almost emptied by the time Margerie found him. On other more dramatic occasions, he lost all his clothes; for example, in the various fires that destroyed the cabins and houses in which he lived. By some miracle, Margerie saved the original typescript of Under the Volcano from one of those fires. Although it must be said that if it had burned, that would not perhaps have been so very grave, given that Lowry was accustomed to losing originals or having them go astray, and, to rewriting his books again and again. There are endless drafts of that particular novel, as much because of his publishers, who kept rejecting it or demanding yet another rewrite, as because of his own dissatisfaction with it. He spent ten or eleven years on that text, which finally saw the light of day (with considerable success) when Lowry refused to make some last-minute changes urged on him by his publishers. Had he not refused, the novel for which he is famous might well have been published posthumously, like almost all his slender oeuvre.

  Lowry’s rapid descent into alcoholism started when he was extremely young, after a few months spent on board the Pyrrhus, on which he had embarked because he wanted “to see the world” (from which, it must be said, he returned feeling very disappointed), and ended with him ingesting some shaving lotion that belonged to a friend and drinking his own pee while he was a patient in a sadistic hospital. Long before his trip on the Pyrrhus, however, he had already encountered hell during his English childhood, at least so he liked to recount, for several of his nannies had either devoted themselves to torturing him or had tried to murder him. One of them, for example, had taken him and his brother Russell to a lonely heath, where, beneath his brother’s astonished gaze, she had whipped Lowry on his genitals; another had attempted to drown him in a rainwater butt from which he had been saved by a kindly gardener; and a third had wheeled his pram right along the cliff-edge; it is not clear whether or not it was yet a fourth nanny (or one of the three already mentioned) who tried to smother him with a blanket. But whether there were three or four of them, this still seems rather too many nannies for each, independently, to have had it in for him.

  There is no doubt that Lowry enjoyed making up stories, so much so that no one would believe certain tales that were, in fact, true. He had considerable bad luck with animals: one night, he was walking with his friend John Sommerfield through Fitzrovia, a bohemian area in 1930s London, when he saw two elephants on the corner of Fitzroy and Charlotte Street. The friends raced off to warn others, but when they came back, the elephants had vanished and no one would believe they had ever been there, despite the pile of elephantine dung still steaming on the pavement, something that Lowry saw more as a scornful gesture than as proof or even as a stroke of luck. On another occasion, when he was passing a cart, the horse pulling the cart gave what seemed to Lowry a derisive snort (even beasts and inanimate objects were conspiring against him); his response was to punch the horse so hard below the ear that the horse quivered and sank to its knees: although the horse suffered no serious consequences, Lowry’s remorse lasted for weeks. Even sadder was what happened to a poor little rabbit that he was absentmindedly stroking on his lap while talking one night to the pet’s owner and the owner’s mother: the rabbit suddenly went stiff; Lowry had broken its neck with his small, clumsy hands. For two days, he wandered the streets of London carrying the corpse, not knowing what to do with it and consumed by self-loathing, until, at the suggestion of a friend, the waiter in a bar agreed to provide what promised to be a funeral as ordained by the God of all animals.

  Despite these disasters, Lowry had many friends, who all agree that, although he was absolutely impossible, he also had enormous charm and awoke in them an overwhelming desire to protect him. The facts of his life are enough to make your hair stand on end, but when talking about these, it is as well to remember what he himself sometimes said to those close to him: “Don’t take me too seriously”; or indeed as his mentor Conrad Aiken remarked years after Lowry’s death: “His whole life was a joke: never was there a gayer Shakespearean jester. A fact that I think we must remember, when everyone is saying What Gloom, What Despair, What Riddles! Nonsense. He was the merriest of men.”

  Although he played the ukulele, which he almost always had with him, and although, when particularly appalled by something, he used to amuse everyone by pretending to shoot himself in the mouth or hang himself with a rope, it must be said that the facts do a pretty good job of disguising his merry nature, given that apart from the continual drinking, the fires, the visits to psychiatric hospitals, the brief spells in prison, and the more or less genuine suicide attempts, we know that in the last years of his life he also tried on two occasions to strangle his wife, Margerie, who, despite everything, never left him. On one occasion, almost by way of an experiment, he slashed his wrists, and another time, in Acapulco, he swam far enough out into the Pacific not to be able to swim back to shore. His wrists healed and the waves failed to collaborate, just as fate decreed that his hands should not close too quickly around Margerie’s throat and that he and she were not in too isolated a place, where her screams might not have been heard.

  He would have had more reasons of a classical nature to murder his first wife, Jan Gabrial, who, only a month after their wedding, started openly going with other men. His friends describe a pathetic scene in which Lowry was seeing her off on the Mexican bus in which she was about to spend a jolly week with some engineers and how he gave her some silver earrings for her birthday, which was two days later and which they would clearly not be spending together. Apparently, Jan looked at the earrings in some embarrassment, and then, almost angrily, stuffed them in her bag. Both his first and second wives seem to have complained of his poor or, rather, non-existent sexual performance, which might explain
his interest in the bottle and his lack of interest in the whores that time he sold his clothes.

  He had met Jan Gabrial in Spain, where he spent some time accompanying the poet Aiken, to whom Lowry’s wealthy father paid a monthly sum by way of a tutor’s fee. Lowry did not make a very good impression during his stay in Ronda and especially in Granada: at the time, although still very young, he was fat, drank wine all the time, and insisted on wearing huge Cordoban hats of a kind that no one has ever worn. In Granada he soon became known as “the drunken Englishman”; people poked fun and the Guardia Civil were also keeping an eye on him. Aiken’s wife remembers Lowry walking around the city surrounded by a troop of children who were all laughing at him and whom he was unable to shake off. He stopped outside a record shop, listened with an idiotic smile to the flamenco music issuing forth, then proceeded on his zigzag course. The first time that he went out with Jan, Lowry tripped and the two of them went rolling down the Generalife gardens where he landed on top of her. Jan thought Lowry would seize the chance to seduce her, but instead he took the opportunity to tell her the plot of his only published novel at the time, Ultramarine.

  Malcolm Lowry was a funny, friendly, handsome man. During his lifetime, various homosexuals tried to seduce him and, one night, he got so drunk during a visit to two such men in New York that, the following morning, he was not sure whether they had had sex with him or not, although, in this instance, his main concern was that he might have contracted some venereal disease. In his years at Cambridge, another young homosexual threatened to kill himself if Lowry continued to ignore him. Lowry went off to a pub and told some friends, who all said: “Oh, let the bastard die!” Whether because of Lowry or not, the young man took his life that night while the writer was in the pub.