Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  His mother had aspired, when she married, to something grander than she got, though she poured cheap wine into bottles with better labels, and in other ways tried to keep up appearances. During his first year, Rilke’s nurses came and went like hours of the day. His time as a toy continued. Affection, lit like a lamp, would be blown out by any sudden whim. As his parents drew away from one another like the trains his father oversaw, Rilke was more and more frequently farmed out by his mother, for whom a small boy was a social drag, to this or that relation or other carrier of concern. The child began to believe that love, like money, time, and food, was in limited supply, and that any love which went into one life would not be available to go into another.

  My mother spread her presents at the feet

  of those poor saints hewn of heartwood.

  Mute, unmoving, and amazed, they stood

  behind the pews, so straight and complete.

  They neglected to thank her, too,

  for her fervently offered gift.

  The little dark her candles lift

  was all of her faith they knew.

  Still my mother gave, in a paper roll,

  these flowers with their fragile blooms,

  which she took from a bowl in our modest rooms,

  in the sight and longing of my soul.

  His mother’s religiosity was always on simmer, if not on boil, but its turbulence took place, Rilke increasingly felt, in a shallow pot. “I am horrified,” he wrote his lover Lou Salomé, “by her scatterbrained piety, by her pigheaded faith, by all those twisted and disfiguring things to which she has fastened herself, she who is empty as a dress, ghostlike and terrible. And that I’m her child, that I came into the world through a scarcely perceptible hole in the paper of this faded wall.…”

  In his mother’s life, Josef, Rilke’s father, was the principal disappointment. He had had his hopes—to advance in the military—but even years of dedicated service proved unavailing. His upward march was slowed by frequent illnesses, so that he was eventually compelled to accept a minor bureaucratic post with a railroad, where he wore a uniform which bore no medals for valor, let alone persistence. He appeared to be surrounded by bad luck. Josef’s brother Emil died of dysentery, his brother Hugo committed suicide because he had failed, at fifty-one, to advance past captain (suggesting, perhaps, to Josef what he should have done), while the eldest, Jaroslav, damned Josef with his own success, at least in Phia’s envious eyes.

  It was Josef who insisted that the former dollchild Sophie enter military school, where she was miserable but not nearly as miserable as Rilke would be in the myth he later made of it. It was Josef, too, who assumed that the poet the boy began to play at being was his mother’s doing; yet he supported Rilke financially even after his marriage to Clara; then Josef decently died and was out of life’s way, unlike Phia, the empty-garmented ghost, who remained to be encountered in foreign corners, outlasting the poet. Even at the age of forty, Rilke complains in a poem that, although he has carefully built himself up over the years, as if he were as secure as a small house of stone, his mother comes and thoroughly tears him down.

  The church and the military became Rainer’s north and south poles. His mother’s sentimental religiosity provided him with saints and the relics of saints, while his father gave him weights to lift and lead soldiers to arrange. Both realms remained active aspects of Rilke’s personality, providing his poetry with an abundant stock of malleable symbols able to enter and contribute to new contexts.

  Rilke wrote harshly of his mother, but of his father’s shortcomings he was far more forgiving, possibly because his mother hadn’t been. In “A Youthful Portrait of My Father,” Rilke, as he frequently did, winds the poem around a pair of hands.

  Dream-inhabited eyes. The brow as if feeling a feeling

  far away. A fresh wet ring around the mouth:

  smileless yet seductive.

  And beneath the ropes of ornamental braid,

  on the slim imperial uniform,

  both hands rest calmly in the cup

  which encloses the saber’s hilt,

  a clasp now nearly invisible, as if the distance

  they were first to grasp

  had dissolved them.

  And all the rest so self-contained,

  and teetering like a top, as if we didn’t understand

  that deep in its own depths it disappears.

  O fast-fading photograph,

  held here in my slowly fading hand.4

  Illness became René’s first profession. It brought his mother to his side, especially important to him when Josef left the household. The household … where hands are held and hearts are consoled. Kid, Kitchen, Kirk, Koffee in which to dip a Kookie: they add up to Komfort.

  This is love, Rilke is told—and aren’t we all told?—take a look: here are mother and father being nice to one another, exchanging gifts, adoring their furniture, their pets, their child; here is a faintly smiling madonna, and there a stern saint, and now a priest, to whom one is unfailingly polite, next a nurse, a friend, a dog whose tail wags; but on top of what we are told, like a cold hand, soon rests what we see and feel and finally know: the mother who picks us up and puts us down as she would a bit of knitting; the joyful union that parts, perhaps like wet paper, without a sound, in front of our fearful eyes; the cat who sings its sex in the night and runs away; those saints who swallow only candle smoke and say nothing; the dog whose devotions knock us over or dirty our pants; or the priest, with a forced warmth heating his polished face, who twists the arm of an unruly acolyte because the boy doesn’t dare yelp during the service; the nurse who says “good night, sleep tight” over the closing latches of her traveling bags; and finally those friends … those friends who skip scornfully away to play with children who have called us dreadful names: which layer is the layer of love? is it only made of words—that kiss called “lip service,” that caress called “shake hands,” that welcome that feels like “good-bye”?

  During childhood, contradiction paves every avenue of feeling, and we grow up in bewilderment like a bird in a ballroom, with all that space and none meant for flying, a wide shining floor and nowhere to light. So out of the lies and confusions of every day the child constructs a way to cope, part of which will comprise a general manner of being in, and making, love. Thus from the contrast between the official language of love and the unofficial facts of life is born a dream of what this pain, this passion, this obsession, this belief, this relation, ought to be.

  Rilke eventually learned what he thought it was, because, when he sought a mother in his mistress instead of a mistress, leaning, as one into the wind, on Lou Salomé’s spirit, she finally sent him off into the world again—out of her schoolroom, bed, and maternal hug—on account of his increasing dependency, she said, out of her need for freedom to develop, because of her similar hope on her part for Rilke and his art; and although he did not realize it all at once, he would come to understand how we constantly endeavor to match that ideology of romantic love we’ve been taught with the disheartening reality of its practice. Flowers fade, photographs fade, memory conspires, forgetting is a boon.

  Lou Salomé was no ordinary woman. She would not be ordinary even by the standards of our time. A friend of Nietzsche’s, Rilke’s, Hauptmann’s, Freud’s, she was not, like Alma Mahler, merely a collector of geniuses (though she did collect them); she was bold, stalwart, smart, and alluring, a woman who sought her freedom as though freedom’s wings would take her to the fatal flame. Gerhart Hauptmann, when they became released from whatever relation they had, said, we assume dryly, that he “was too stupid for Lou.” Most were. Rilke was. Nietzsche and Freud weren’t.

  She was a true Muse. When she left her men they would throw themselves into the pit and subside, or into their art and succeed. She was a Muse to herself, too, producing a hundred essays and twenty books, although, as one of her biographers, H. F. Peters, remarks, as a writer, Lou “thought with her heart and felt wi
th her head.” Like a whirlpool, she drew men in, then, after a while, she flung them out again. Peters quotes one of her admirers:

  One noticed at once that Lou was an extraordinary woman. She had the gift of entering completely into the mind of the man she loved. Her enormous concentration fanned, as it were, her partner’s intellectual fire. I have never met anyone else in my long life who understood me so quickly, so well, and so completely, as Lou did.5

  Rilke hated to have his mistresses go away mad; he preferred to transform ardency into friendship; but Lou Salomé was the only lover who left him before he could leave her, and this was a bitter experience which estranged them for a time. Eventually, due mainly to Lou’s sagacity, she and Rilke’s wife, Clara, became his closest confidants, his darlings of distance.

  Lou, under the threat of Friedrich Andreas’ suicide, married him (that was a knife he had plunged into his chest and into her horrified eyes); but she only slept with men she wasn’t married to, avoiding, in her sex life, all forms of habit and routine except that one. In Lou, Rilke met his match. Meeting your match may make for a doubled flame, but it will certainly result, quite soon, in two burnt ends.

  They met over tea at the Munich flat of the novelist Jakob Wassermann. At thirty-six she was ten years older than the awkward young poet who had, she told her diary, “no back to his head.” In nearly everything, she was far more experienced than he—perhaps not, though, at taking tea. Or at dispatching overheated notes, which he did the following morning. Her father was a general; her family was esteemed and rich; like most well-to-do Russians she had a French governess, admired her father, had enjoyed her childhood. Although Lou probably never had had enough grip on a faith to say she’d lost it—since, by seventeen, when she set her cap for a popular St. Petersburg clergyman, faith was already nowhere in sight—religious matters were never far from her mind, and she made, for dogma, a natural antagonist. Pastor Gillot had a lap she sat in, and where she also fainted, offering him the opportunity to take liberties, or to demonstrate great self-control (history has drawn a curtain over which); in any case, she seduced him in short order, but only up to the point of a declaration. Caution, in an impulsive person, is always particularly significant, and caution preserved her adorer’s career and earned her his help in obtaining the opportunity to study at the Polytechnical Institute in Zurich (one of the few such institutions that admitted women), where she enrolled to study that for which she had no conviction: religion and theology.

  In unhealthy Rome, where Lou had gone for her health, she met the philosopher Paul Rée, and shortly his friend, the classicist become philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. At twenty-one, Lou Salomé had the sad pleasure of rejecting both men’s proposals of marriage. But she had ménage on her mind, a commune in a cottage; that way, she could keep them about, adoring and busy. She began a serious study of Nietzsche, who had just completed The Gay Science. Many of his ideas would later drift through Lou to land on Rilke’s shore.

  Nietzsche could scarcely manage one wheel, let alone function as a third, and he soon grew jealous of what he saw as Lou’s imbalance of attentions. As a thinker, this fellow Rée was hardly in his class. But she didn’t agree. And did he want to be merely a shareholder in a mistress? Angrily, Nietzsche drove himself away, now describing Lou, as Wolfgang Leppmann reports it in Rilke, A Life,6 as “this dried-up, dirty, foul-smelling monkey with her false breasts.” Lou remained with Rée for several years, during which time she turned down offers from a sociologist and a psychologist before finally accepting another Friedrich, another philologist, Friedrich Carl Andreas, whose self-infliction (which nearly killed him) did compel her to say yes.

  Although Lou saw nothing wrong in going on as they had been, this triangle Paul Rée could not complete, and eventually, in despair, he left her to slide slowly out of intellectual sight. Free as ever to flirt, Lou tantalized an editor in Berlin as well as playwrights in Paris and Vienna before taking up with an exiled Russian doctor she boasted could pull nails out of walls with his teeth. Her lovers were invariably younger but not invariably of the opposite sex, and when she slipped up and became pregnant Lou disappeared from her scene for a few months to tidy things up. Wolfgang Leppmann suggests that she probably conceived a child by Rilke as well.7

  In short, Lou Andreas-Salomé was a woman with her own program, and a past, as Rilke began to discern it, that should have made that program clear and their future plain. Rilke warmly wooed this unknown woman. After he read an essay Lou had lately published—“Jesus the Jew”—he mailed her poems he thought congenial to her point of view. He then arranged to meet for tea, and the morning after sent by messenger a flattering line. He contrived to pop up inside her field of view at the theater. He proposed reading a few of his recently written “Visions of Christ,” persisted to a point near impoliteness, then carried out his threat not once but twice. Rilke also wrote a number of wretchedly overwrought poems in Lou’s honor, including one in which he bears a bouquet of roses through Munich’s Englischer Garten. The poem hopes she will be motherly to the poet’s flowers. Well, she would.

  But Lou was not to be wooed and won by anyone, however enamored. Nor led down another’s garden path, even if rosy. Mothering, moreover, wasn’t on her agenda. Still, a little tutoring, whether in bed or at the study table, could do no harm. There’d be languages to learn, Nietzsche to ponder, cultures to encounter, a temperament to tame and steady. If Rilke had needed a model to guide him in his future relations with women, he certainly would have found it in Lou Salomé, who seduced and abandoned with migratory regularity. As Lou had, Rilke would use marriage as a form of self-protection. And like Lou, he would specialize in dumping.

  A common problem had initiated their relation: how to give meaning to a world that has lost its deity, and thus its purpose and meaning. Lou would ultimately psychoanalyze the need. Rilke would overthrow God in one set of poems and supplant Him altogether in another.

  Lou told Rilke to keep a diary, and sent him to Italy to fill it; she took him along as her lover when she and her husband traveled to Russia; she ordered him to drop René for Rainer (more manly, more German), and to change his handwriting, which, full of obedience, Rilke refashioned into the elegant calligraphy which held all his later poems.

  Rilke was becoming a battered lover. He was fetched; he was sent away; more and more there was another lover present, or a husband, a critic Lou wanted to consult for an article she was writing; and there were women visitors as well whose arrival and departure he had to endure; so that he dangled when he wished to cling. They could be alone, but rarely alone together. He would sulk or (as Lou thought) grow hysterical. She endured his moods with less and less forbearance, eventually seeking the diagnosis of another lover, a physician acquainted with psychiatry, without any sense for the intolerable high handedness of her own behavior.

  Rilke got his wish. Their second Russian journey would be taken without Andreas. They would at last travel to Lou’s land (though she knew only St. Petersburg) and together refresh their creative spirits. Travel, however, is the severest and truest test of compatibility. After spending several weeks in Moscow and learning that Tolstoy was at his country estate, the couple set off to Yasnaya Polyana to pay the great man a visit, full of the presumption of fans who believe their adoration alone makes their idol sacred. For them, the occasion would be unique. To the great man it would be uncalled for and only too common. They arrive in late spring sunshine, a misleadingly propitious sign, and after some searching finally find a servant to carry in their cards. The count, in the middle of another prolonged quarrel with his wife, is in a surly mood. He allows Lou to enter but slams the door behind her and in front of Rilke’s face—a detail Rilke omits in his own account.

  The count tosses the couple into the indifferent company of his son, Sergei, who walks them about before leaving them to their own devices for much of the morning. Their devices are few in number: studying portraits, examining the spines of books. Tick … very slowly �
�� tick. They encounter the countess, who is curt and preoccupied. After all, the Tolstoys have only recently reoccupied their summer place, and the countess is still shelving books. Finally, the great man reappears, and, instead of lunch, leads them on a walk through the garden while he speaks to Lou in a Russian too rapid and colloquial for Rilke to follow, although Rilke claims to have understood every syllable—every warm and animated word—that was not drowned out by the wind. Rilke biographer Ralph Freedman, whose revisionist version I am relying on, shrewdly sums up Lou Salomé’s response: “The extent of the snub, a burden of embarrassment that seemed to have devolved from Rilke upon her, revealing him in all his inadequacy, may have hastened the end of their conjugal phase.”8

  By train, by wagon, by Volga steamer, they reached Kiev, where they stayed in a hotel which appeared to rent rooms by the hour. In Saratov, the horse pulling their cab from station to pier went wild, nearly spilling them into the street. They missed the boat. Then it was Novgorod and finally a small distant village where, in a fit of romantic overreach (which was, alas, characteristic of both), they decided to stay close to the peasants by living next to a barnyard, sleeping on—now—separate straw mattresses, suffering porridge, splinters, and large noisy flies.

  Back in St. Petersburg, after only a day, Lou excused herself and went to Finland to visit her mother, leaving Rilke behind in a rooming house to howl. She stayed away a month, and then the couple—now uncoupled—came back to Berlin and regular business, which was accepting invitations. Heinrich Vogeler, whom the poet had commissioned to do the illustrations for his Stories of God, had invited his “patron” to visit him at Worpswede, an art colony which was located in bog country not far from Bremen—a spare flat land valued for its isolation and its light. The trip offered Rilke much-needed relief, and he arrived, one might say, panting. His dormer room overlooked the kitchen courtyard. From there, like a muezzin, he called out what the housekeeper sourly described as his prayers, and from there he also sallied forth in his Tartar boots and Russian smock to collect the smiles of the local peasants.