Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  IN THE FALL of 1906, Rainer Maria Rilke found himself stranded in Berlin, a city he despised, after a row with Auguste Rodin, who had employed him as his secretary, forced him to leave Paris. Unable to find a sponsor for a projected pilgrimage to Greece, he reluctantly accepted an invitation from his loyal patron Alice Faehndrich to spend the winter at her villa in Capri. She installed him in comfort at Villa Discopoli, on the Via Tragara, and left him very much on his own. The conditions were ideal, and he stayed for six months, but Rilke was never at a loss for things to complain about. In his letters from Capri, most of them addressed to his wife, he continually lamented that he was not in Paris, where he could see Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe whenever he pleased, and he whined about the sirocco, like one of the querulous old ladies in South Wind.

  He even contrived a grievance with the island’s beauty: “Always I grow really melancholy in such beauty-spots as these, faced with this obvious, praise-ridden, incontestable loveliness.” To seal his case that Capri is a “monstrosity,” he likens the island to Dante’s Paradiso, “stuffed full of beatitudes all hopelessly heaped together, without form, with no gradation of light, full of repetitions, composed, as it were, of simpering, seraphic vacuity.” Yet amid the irritating hyper-refinement and self-pity, Rilke captures the essence of Capri’s eternal fascination to minds formed by classical ideals: “Where the few stony paths stop, there is the sea once more, or rather another sea, a sea through which Odysseus might come again, at any moment.” Anticipating Norman Douglas (whom he did not meet), he declares, “This is Greece, without the art-objects of the Grecian world but almost as though before their creation … as though even the gods had still to be born who called forth the torrent of ecstasy that was Greece.”

  Rilke’s most substantial work on Capri was his translation of Elizabeth Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, which he described as “crystals of feeling, so clear, so right, shiningly mysterious.” The same phrases may be applied to a sonnet he wrote in Capri, “Song of the Sea.” Subtitled “Capri, Piccola Marina,” the poem brings us back to the cove where August von Platen set his ode to the island’s fishermen, and, like Platen, Rilke is moved by the sublime majesty of the island’s geography. It is a slight work, a breath of pure poetry at once sharp and soft, thoughtful yet unencumbered by heavy ideas. The American poet Louise Bogan described it as a poem that “rises and subsides like a wordless cry,” one “whose subtlety should warn off any translator from an attempt on it.” At my request, Matthew Gurewitsch came up with this rendering, as literal as possible, he said, apart from the occasional leap of faith:

  Ancient breath off the sea,

  wind of the sea by night:

  you come here for no human;

  if someone is watching,

  then he must see how he

  may endure you:

  ancient breath off the sea,

  which blows

  as if only for primal rock,

  space all aroar

  tearing in from afar …

  Oh, how the fig tree feels your power,

  heavy with fruit

  up in the moonshine.

  When he was in Capri, Rilke held himself aloof from the foreign artists and writers resident there, with their scandals and quarrels and romans à clef—with one exception. He set as a major goal of his sojourn on the island to meet Maxim Gorky, who was living in exile in a villa on the outskirts of the village with his common-law wife, Maria Fyodorovna Andreyeva, formerly a leading actress at the Moscow Art Theater. The encounter took place just days before Rilke left for Paris.

  Born in Prague and educated in Austria, Rainer Maria Rilke cultivated an identity as a man without a country. As if to prove the point, he declared after his first visit to Russia, in 1899, that it was his spiritual homeland. He was under the powerful influence of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche’s former lover and one of the most remarkable intellectuals in Europe at the time. She took Rilke as her protégé and lover when he was twenty-two and she was thirty-seven, apparently with the consent of her husband, Friedrich Andreas, an Orientalist, with whom she lived in a white marriage, in Berlin. A native of St. Petersburg, she taught Rilke Russian, and by the time of the inspirational visit to Moscow he was reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. In a letter to Andreas-Salomé in 1903, Rilke wrote, “The fact that Russia is my homeland is one of the great and mysterious certainties by which I live.” Very mysterious: in another letter, he called Moscow “the city of my oldest and deepest memories.” Yet there must have been some grounds for the fantasy; when he met Tolstoy, who knew about such things, the novelist proclaimed Rilke to be “the eternal Russian.”

  It would be hard to imagine two men more different in background and temperament than Rainer Maria Rilke and Alexei Maximovich Gorky: the dreamy, cultured German poet, who lived the life of the mind in isolation from the social turmoil of his times, immersed in dreams of antiquity, and the unpretentious self-educated author of gritty plays and stories about the wretched of the earth, a man at the vortex of Russian revolutionary politics, for whom history existed only as a cautionary guide to the glorious, classless future of mankind. When Rilke made his desire to meet him known, Gorky, always happy to meet anyone, invited him to drop by. At Gorky’s house, just below the Krupp Gardens, the two writers sat and talked shop for an hour or two. The meeting went no better than might have been expected.

  One of the few surviving eyewitness reports of Gorky’s activities in Capri is that by Vasily Alexeyevich Desnitsky, a revolutionary literary critic. In an untranslated reminiscence, he wrote that Gorky delighted in his compatriots’ roughhousing at an unidentified inn (certainly not Morgano’s café). “Alexei Maximovich laughed to tears as one of the entertainers jumped up and down with a paper tail tied to his coat,” Desnitsky wrote. “We onlookers tried to light the tail with a match.” It is easy to imagine the revulsion that Rilke, the refined, mystical poet, suffering acutely from the excessive, Dantean loveliness of Capri, would have experienced witnessing this low manifestation of the great Russian soul that he laid claim to. The writers’ meeting was cordial but pointless except to give them the satisfaction of having met, to check each other off a list, a matter of much greater importance to the caller than to his host.

  Three weeks afterward, in a letter to Karl von der Heydt, a banker who dabbled in literature, Rilke wrote, “I have seen Gorky. One evening I sat with him at a round table. The melancholy lamplight fell upon everything equally without picking out anybody in particular: him, his present wife, and a couple of morose Russian men who took no notice of me.” The colloquy began in Russian, but Rilke’s side of the conversation was halting, so they switched to French, with Maria Fyodorovna translating. “As a democrat Gorky speaks of art with dissatisfaction, narrow and hasty in his judgments; judgments in which the mistakes are so deeply dissolved that you are quite unable to fish them out.” Gorky the man made a more favorable impression: “He possesses a great and touching kindliness (that kindliness which always makes it impossible for the great Russians to remain artists), and it is very moving to find on his completely unsophisticated face the traces of great thoughts and a smile that breaks through with an effort.”

  No record survives of Gorky’s immediate impressions, but Desnitsky, who must have been one of the morose Russians who paid no attention to Rilke, recalled “a comically puzzled expression” on Gorky’s face during the conversation. Drawing on Desnitsky’s recollections, Alexander Kaun, Gorky’s American biographer, wrote in 1931 that Gorky “showered his visitor with questions as to his familiarity with a number of German and French writers. Rilke’s answers were to the effect that he had met this man once or twice, that he was not acquainted with the other, that the third had sent him his book, that the fourth was a charming fellow, and that they were quite friends, and so on.” Gorky was shocked by the gaps in his guest’s reading. Many years later, Gorky recalled the meeting with Rilke with scorn: “When one meets men of letters, concerning literature one receive
s by the way of a reply not an evaluation of the author’s work but comments such as these: ‘He’s a nice chap, a gay blade, a drunkard, a ladies’ man.’ This reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke. When he was asked ‘What do you think of Peter Altenberg?’ he replied, ‘I think I once had lunch with him on the Prater.’” Altenberg was a popular author of short stories set in Vienna; Gorky must have expected his guest to be brimming with opinions about him. Altenberg was not a giant, but how could Rilke have been in doubt as to whether he had lunched with him?

  Rilke’s letter to Karl von der Heydt radiates arrogance: one might say that the mistake in his ridiculous assertion that kindliness prevents great Russians from remaining artists is so deeply dissolved that it cannot be fished out. Yet he did perceive the essential, irreconcilable opposition between himself and the “democrat Gorky.” He wrote to Heydt, “You know my persuasion that the revolutionary is the diametrical opposite of the Russian: that is, the Russian is supremely qualified to be one, much in the same way that a lace handkerchief is very nice for mopping up ink, taking for granted, of course, a complete misuse and ruthless misconception of its true properties!” Gorky is arrogant, too, in his dismissal of Rilke’s critical powers because he said he thought he had had lunch with Peter Altenberg. The younger, less experienced guest was nervous; he wrote to Heydt about his difficulties speaking Russian “under the stress of the moment.” Some writers prefer to reserve serious criticism for written expression and not to waste their powers on table talk. Yet Gorky must have felt Rilke’s supercilious conceit, and if his guest made any reference to his mysterious certainty that he was Russian in his soul, one may easily imagine how Gorky would have received such a fanciful notion. More likely, Gorky realized at once that he was meeting the sort of man capable of likening the Russian people to a lace handkerchief, in other words a milksop who could never comprehend the great historical struggle that was taking place. No doubt he was happy when his tiresome guest left so he could go down to the inn with the lads and have a few laughs.

  * * *

  GORKY’S SOJOURN IN Capri presents a unique puzzle: although he stayed there for seven years, and evidently loved the place, the island had no discernible influence on his creative work. It was one of his most prolific periods, yet the novels and stories he wrote there are all set in wintry Russian darkness. He and the Russian writers and thinkers who visited him in Capri were too busy thrashing out their polemical disagreements to take much notice of their surroundings, and when they did, it was only to test and refine their evolving political philosophy. The Russian cadre was not standoffish so much as isolated, both by language and by their all-consuming political mission. As a result, apart from Rilke’s arrogant account of his afternoon chez Gorky, the surviving testimony is sparse.

  Again, the most vivid impressions come from Compton Mackenzie, in his memoirs. When he called on Gorky, he wrote, the house “was full of Russians talking incessantly and playing chess.” He and Gorky often went together to the little cinema in the village. Conversation was difficult because Mackenzie’s Italian was as limited as Gorky’s French. Nevertheless, Mackenzie thought that Gorky enjoyed their nights at the movies, “a restful contrast to the incessant talking of the refugees from Tsardom in his own house.” Mackenzie described him as “a tall lanky man, his head always out-thrust as he walked.”

  Norman Douglas recorded a dramatic incident he experienced with Gorky and Maria Fyodorovna. When they stopped by his house for a visit one day, no sooner had Douglas poured them a drink than “there was a loud bang at the door, and the woman who ran the small wine shop close by … rushed in to tell us that a foreigner had shot himself on the Punta Cannone,” formerly the Malerplatte, the Painters’ Plaza, very nearby. The foreigner was a young visitor named Heinrich Lieber, who had called on Douglas a few days before to seek his advice about an affair of the heart. Lieber, in the terminal stage of an incurable disease, had conceived a great passion for a Capriote youth who did not reciprocate the feeling. Lieber told Douglas that he had no reason to live except to have that boy: “It was his last hope of joy on earth, and rather than suffer disappointment he would kill himself and be done with it.” Now he had made the attempt.

  Douglas and Gorky ran to the Punta Cannone and found Lieber “writhing on the ground with one of those absurd Browning pistols beside him.” The bullet had gone straight through him. It had missed the heart, but he was bleeding badly. There was no time to be lost. Douglas wanted to get a shutter from his house and use it as a stretcher to carry Lieber down to the village, but Gorky did not rise to the occasion: “After a minute or two he sat down on the wall, rolled himself a cigarette, and began to smoke. I can still see him sitting there and letting his eyes wander over the landscape, which is certainly worth looking at from the Punta Cannone. There he sat with that careworn countenance of his, smoking. Gorky was bored. He was bored with this exhibition; he had gone through enough of that kind of thing.” A neighbor showed up and took charge of the situation, and soon Lieber was on his way to the hospital in Naples, where he survived the wound.

  Gorky’s house was virtually a hostel for a ceaseless flow of Russian visitors, not all of them revolutionists. When Feodor Chaliapin, the great bass of the opera stage, came to Capri, in 1917, Gorky ghostwrote his autobiography for him, out of friendship. Gorky’s most prominent guest was Lenin himself. After Lenin’s death, in 1924, Gorky wrote a slim book of reminiscences, which provides rare glimpses of the revolutionary leader in repose. In Gorky’s telling, Lenin never took a moment’s holiday from his historical mission; every word he spoke was infused with ideology. In Days with Lenin, Gorky wrote that Lenin possessed a magnetic quality “which drew the hearts and sympathies of the working people to him.”

  Lenin endeared himself to the island’s fishermen by mastering the art of fishing “with the finger,” using the line without a rod. He spoke no Italian, but the local folk, “who had seen Chaliapin and many other outstanding Russians, by a kind of instinct put Lenin in a special place at once. His laugh was enchanting—the hearty laugh of a man who, through being so well acquainted with the clumsy stupidity of human beings and the acrobatic trickery of the quick-witted, could find pleasure in the childlike artlessness of the simple in heart.” A fisherman named Giovanni Spadaro, an old man with a great white beard like Tolstoy’s (who had been a favorite model of Christian Wilhelm Allers), declared, “Only an honest man could laugh like that.”

  In Capri, Lenin was always gathering economic and sociological data for his evolving ideology. “He asked in detail about the life of the Capri fishermen, about their earnings, the influence of the priests, their schools,” Gorky wrote. “I could not but be surprised by the range of his interests.” When Lenin found out that the local priest was the son of a poor peasant who had been sent to study at a seminary on the mainland and then returned to the village, he commended this policy to Gorky as a clever way of commanding the proletariat’s loyalty to the church.

  The Russians in Capri spent little time with other expatriates. Gorky wrote, “With equal enthusiasm [Lenin] would play chess, look through A History of Dress, dispute for hours with comrades, fish, go for walks along the stony paths of Capri, scorching under the southern sun.” Frequently, after a long and bitter political wrangle, he would plunge into a game of chess, but “when he lost grew angry and even despondent, like a child.” A chess match between Gorky and Lenin in Capri was recorded; Lenin lost.

  Apart from being furiously productive at his writing, Gorky principally occupied himself in Capri with opening a school for the proletariat. “The primary work of the revolution I considered to be the creation of the conditions which would lead to the development of the cultural forces of the country.” With that objective in view, he established the Free Association for the Development and Spread of Positive Science and invited prominent Russian scientists to come to Capri to teach there. The academy provoked a quarrel that was the beginning of his falling-out with Lenin. Here, Gorky understates th
e case: “I differed from the Bolsheviks on the question of the value of the role of the intelligentsia in the Russian Revolution.” Lenin, in fact, loathed the intelligentsia. His view, of course, was that the primary work of the revolution was the total annihilation of every vestige of the ancien régime. No one, least of all Lenin, could doubt Gorky’s loyalty. In the early days of the struggle, the royalties from his novels and stage plays, such as The Lower Depths, a sensational worldwide hit, were one of the Bolsheviks’ major sources of funding. Yet Lenin did not care if the workers read books. He thought that teaching chemistry to Italian fishermen was a stupid waste of money and time.

  Gorky was in a unique position to question the leader of the revolution about its nihilistic tactics. In Days with Lenin, he recounts a “repulsively memorable” anecdote about an event that occurred after his sojourn in Capri, when peasants occupied the Winter Palace of the Romanovs, near Petrograd, and “a great number of priceless Sèvres, Saxon, and oriental vases had been befouled by them for lavatory use.” Yet Lenin was intolerant of any criticism of the tactics of his revolution, which committed outrages that went far beyond the use of imperial vases as chamber pots. “What do you want?” he demanded of Gorky. “Is it possible to act humanely in a struggle of such unprecedented ferocity? Where is there any place for soft-heartedness or generosity?” Gorky for his part took a dim view of Lenin’s unconditional patriotism. In Capri, while Lenin was watching fishermen disentangle their nets, which were torn and snarled by sharks, he remarked, “Our men work more quickly.” When Gorky cast doubt on this observation, Lenin retorted in vexation, “H’m, h’m. Don’t you think you are forgetting Russia, living on this bump?”