A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  RILKE AND THE REQUIEM

  ENTER Ghost

  “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio,” Marcellus says, because he knows that Latin is the language of the exorcist, a tongue he cannot use himself. Nevertheless, Horatio does not resort to ritual speech when questioning this specter he had, merely moments before, disbelieved in. That Horatio is unsure of the ghost’s nature is clear enough. He accuses it of usurping the night and assuming the form of Denmark’s previous king; perhaps it is a devil in disguise, or some omen of disaster, as when, before Caesar’s murder, the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. Whether annoyed by Horatio’s tone, the lack of deference in his address, or simply because he is not the person sought, the ghost stalks away without a word.

  The play has opened with a hint of what’s to come—the ghost foretold in a phrase—when Bernardo asks “Who’s there?” of Francisco, who is standing watch and should have been the one to challenge. “Nay, answer me. Stand, and unfold yourself,” he properly replies, whereupon Bernardo says, “Long live the king!” The real king, however, has only a half-life now; he remains unavenged, his sins still soiling his unpurified soul. Marcellus will see this figure four times, Bernardo three, while Horatio and Hamlet will meet it on two occasions each; but the ghost will speak only to its son, even refusing, in act 3, to frighten Gertrude when, in her bedroom, it chastises Hamlet for his inaction. The spectral husband feels some lingering propriety, perhaps, when he appears in that place. Certainly the ghost is full of concern for her … but are they real concerns or merely ghostly ones?

  To Hamlet, the immaterial presence of his father says much. Although the king was not properly shriven (“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,” the wraith complains), a service would certainly have been performed (among the populace, there would have been many observances, most likely); but even such an official ritual as the state would have called for has clearly not succeeded in putting to rest the soul of the departed. Hamlet wants to know “Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements.”

  The Protestant Church had insisted that such intercessions were improper, denying Purgatory as a site and a condition, but the king claims to be imprisoned by day in a place that, were he to describe it, “would harrow up [Hamlet’s] soul, freeze [his] young blood,” and “make [his] two eyes like stars start from their spheres.”

  But maybe, in a Lutheran country, no requiem would have been performed, despite the king’s bones having been “canonized.” If so, then the king’s ghostly presence confutes the Protestant claim that there are no ghosts; there are no penitential prisons; and therefore no priest may receive money for saying a Mass on anyone’s afterlife behalf.

  Purgatory, if there were one, was not lacking in those needing a good word—one to improve their condition, another to bail them out. As in our world, some were said to be well-off, feasting like lions, but there were many, to be sure, in need of any push a prayer might give. Fortunately, the Church has thoughtfully provided ample intercessors, whose prayers matter more than most: bishops, mitred and majestic, whose devotions are worth acres; abbots whose priors and deacons can be persuaded to bend a knee on the right behalf; priests, monks, canons, friars who will often work for a full bowl; summoners, suffragans, and pardoners whose sole business it is to empty Purgatory for the price, per soul, of a few pence. But what of those who want not prayers but penalties, who wish that some yet alive would feel hellfire’s lick ahead of their appointed roast? A fancied injustice still appears most likely to stir up their disquiet.

  Of course, ghosts are notoriously indistinct, their presence temporary, so we cannot be certain that the one who confronted Horatio was Hamlet’s father’s; it might have belonged to Andrugio in Marston’s play, Antonio’s Revenge, to mention merely one other resentful and commanding spirit of the many who could have been left behind on the stage from an earlier performance, when the battlements represented a cemetery and the action proceeded between stones rather than upon them.

  Seneca’s ghosts always got things going, and some of his might be hanging about us still, representing to our proud modern period of exile, genocide, terrorism, and assassination their own perilous past. History is always the true ghost, invariably requesting that its own wrongs be avenged, however prolonged the wait, as if shooting an archduke could cure a single social ill, as if, his usurper slain, the bones of a poisoned Claudius would cease their jig.

  Even before Hamlet’s play is performed, the anonymous author of A Warning for Faire Women (1599) complains

  How some damn’d tyrant to obtain a crown

  Stabs, hangs, impoisons, smothers, cutteth throats:

  And then a Chorus, too, comes howling in

  And tells us of the worryings of a cat:

  Then, too, a filthy whining ghost,

  Lapt in some foul sheet, or a leather pilch,

  Comes screaming in like a pig half-stick’d,

  And cries, Vindicta!—Revenge, Revenge!

  So—ENTER Ghost

  From the dim rear of the dining room at Urnekloster, “a slender lady in a light colored dress,” as though borne by a castle draft, floats toward the young Dane, Malte Laurids Brigge. A path is cleared for her by Count Brahe, who holds back Malte’s frightened father to prevent a confrontation. The lady, who is Christine Brahe, passes indifferently through another door without a word.

  Here is a ghost with ancestors, the most significant, no doubt, being Tycho Brahe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, who built a castle near the sea to royally ensconce himself, and an observatory in which to mount his telescope. Losing some of his privileges, he went off, in a huff, to Prague, providing us with a less fictional connection to Rainer Maria Rilke.

  Some ghosts, as we shall see, are no more than faintly lingering presences; others, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, wear both armor and a frown. How came the light-colored dress to its demise, and what has it done to deserve a purgatorial state? The king was not wearing a buckler when he was poisoned, yet he shows himself to Hamlet and Horatio in full armor, suggesting more his present intent than his dress at death; whereas, when he appears in Gertrude’s bedroom to sharpen Hamlet’s blunted purpose, he is “in his habit as he lived”—in short, the ghost has changed from the metals of war to a king’s everyday ermines, something more suitable for a visit to a lady’s bedroom. Certain social amenities are being preserved beyond the grave. The pale glare that the ghost shows Hamlet, though, is so persuasive, it could energize stones.

  ENTER Ghost

  Or a remnant of one. It is a winter evening in the Brigges’ town apartment. Malte is so small, he must kneel in the chair that hoists him to the table where he is coloring a knight astride a strikingly caparisoned horse. He reaches for a much-used red crayon, only to see it roll slowly off the table and fall softly into the long-haired rug below. Clambering awkwardly down, and blinded by the reading light, whose retinal burn his eyes will bear to the base of the table, Malte gropes with his right hand through the rug’s nap, searching for the color. Gradually, his eyes recover from their afterimages, so that he sees his hand and its outstretched fingers, a little like a strange aquatic animal, stirring about as if in remotest independence. Suddenly, out of the wall at the dim rear of the room, comes another hand, larger, thin as its bones, similarly in search of something, and now the two hands slide slowly over the carpet toward each other as if intending to meet by accident. Malte’s initial curiosity turns to terror. He wills the withdrawal of the hand he believes is his and somehow regains his seat in the armchair, only to shiver there, so pale that the look of him causes Mademoiselle, his companion, previously preoccupied by her own reading, to kneel beside him, to shake him still further in her concern, and to cry out his name. Malte tries to speak, but he cannot say a word.

  He has no name for what has happened to him now, but what happened has a description nevertheless, and that description will bide its time—these ghost words will wait their moment—and they w
ill return, forcing him to relive the fall of the crayon, and his vision of the two hands blindly searching the carpet for it, as if the color belonged to both crayon and account, and was therefore equally missed.

  ENTER Ghost

  A large mirror stands in the corner gable room at Ulsgaard, along with closets containing many clothes. Young Malte Laurids Brigge has opened the closets and is trying on some of the fascinating garments—dress coats, uniforms, gowns—as well as masks, Turkish trousers, Persian fezzes, and other masquerade materials, subsequently admiring his costumed figure as it raises its arms and turns gaily around. However, in so doing, Malte bumps a small table, overturns it with all its fragile objects—two porcelain parrots that die in shatters, a candy box that throws its lid, and a vial of perfume whose shivered pieces scatter their scent and spot the floor. In a guilty panic, Malte tries to free himself from his disguise, only to have it cling more tightly to him. The mirror, he thinks, may help him see what he is doing. But then, enormous, an unknown figure faces him, as if a genie had been released from the bottle. It stares from the glass at a Malte who is no longer there; rather, it is this weirdly got-up creature who runs out from the mirror and stumbles down the stairs, fainting into the arms of laughing servants, merely a wordless piece of “whatever” among a crumple of package wrappings.

  ENTER Ghost

  This ghost’s name is Jens Peter Jacobsen. In Schwabing, the university district of Munich, in 1897, Rilke met a dark, short, shabby wannabe novelist, Jacob Wassermann, who was as full of opinions as he was ambitious, hungry, cold, and thin. Rilke had read some Tolstoy, and Wassermann pressed Dostoyevsky and Turgenev upon him, as well. Surprisingly, given Wassermann’s social and historical aims as an artist, he also spoke persuasively of a psychologically centered high-style novel called Niels Lyhne, written by a Dane, Jens Peter Jacobsen. Certainly the two additional Russians encouraged Rilke’s romantic identification with that country, but it was Jacobsen whose personal history intrigued young Rilke, and whose literary practice and artistic aims were enormously appealing.

  Jacobsen regarded most thesis novels, in his words, as “lawyers’ pleadings.” He wouldn’t claim superiority for either the Right or the Left, and was well aware of his elevated artistic status. “I happen to belong to the family of the best,” he said. His father was wealthy, so Jacobsen could afford to be marginal, and was happy to remain in his northwest Jutland village of Thisted. Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis, a disease he fought bravely but futilely for twelve years, until his death at the age of thirty-eight in 1885. For the young Rilke, this tragically short life, with the melancholy and pessimism the disease encouraged, was a further encouragement to think well of the Danes. Jacobsen’s scientific interests, which were serious, allowed him to throw off superstition and to make atheism a central issue in his work, as Rilke would, although for more familial reasons.

  Jacobsen’s second novel, Niels Lyhne, is one of the many texts that haunt The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It depicts the inner states of a unsuccessful poet and persistent daydreamer, while its language celebrates the writer’s failure to find love. Niels is clearly a precursor of Rilke’s Dane. Its namesake has a moony role-playing mother, too. Above all, Niels Lyhne celebrates style. Sensuous and discerning, it could have taught Malte himself how to see. This botanist had an animistic imagination that matched Rilke’s, and it was in his work that Rilke would find human loneliness given metaphysical status. The novel also argued for the hypothesis that we carry our own death deep within us. The novel, which Rilke carefully carried from château to castle, hovel to hotel, helped him finally to accept Ellen Key’s invitation to visit Scandinavia, where, in addition to visiting castles with ghosts, he picked up some of the country’s language, and translated a little of Jacobsen himself.

  Niels Lyhne was not a secret to young artistically inclined Germans. Stefan Zweig said that it was the Werther for an entire generation of German writers, and he extolled Jacobsen as the “poet of poets.” The painter Paula Becker chose the book as her first gift to Clara Westhoff, who would become Rilke’s wife; and Rilke gave Paula his copy of another Jacobsen novel, Marie Grubbe, on whose flyleaf he inscribed some lines in praise of the author. Jacobsen stood for genius unrealized, and his character, Niels, was the specter of such failure, a ghost who said, Remember me: I, who let others lead my life.

  ENTER Ghost

  Our death is born when we are born. Then it will begin to grow as we grow, in our wombs if we are women, in our chests if we are men, as Rilke has written:

  For we are nothing but the bark and burrs.

  The great death we bear within ourselves

  is the fruit which every growing serves.

  The same previously mentioned company of Danes is dining at Urnekloster when Christine Brahe enters again, bearing once more the story of her death into the presence of her appalled family and their friends the way she bore the boy whose birthing killed her. This time, though, when the old chamberlain lifts his glass to the level of his gray chin, Malte’s father masters his emotions, and just as her figure passes behind his chair, he returns the toast, raising his goblet from the table as though the wine were heavy—as though the wine were laden—to the height of a hand.

  ENTER Louis Onze, the Duke of Burgundy’s Fool, in the guise of a dog

  After Rilke had written The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Death, through its badly abbreviated teeth, was allowed to breathe upon the pages, and alter every one of them the way a feeling changes behind a face as fixed as stone. The principal theme of the first Notebook is death, and that of the second love, but the love in this inverted Liebestod has been marinated like the coq in vin. The deaths of part 2 are simply more literary than those that occur in the Danish castles or in the Paris hospitals of the first part. Death can be said to dog our footsteps because dogs do dog them. They are our faithful companions who will bring their love back, though it’s been thrown like a stick, even to our unworthy ghost, whether it haunts invisibly or is sheeted like a sofa for the summer.

  Young Malte comes into possession of a slim book of stories bound in green cloth (a book of the dead, though not in name—its name has been conveniently mislaid), and he recalls for his pages two stories that were willing to be read. I shall permit only the second to trouble us here: that of the downfall of Charles the Bold, the last reigning duke of Burgundy, a man made from the cliché “hot-blooded” by the simple expedient of taking that commonplace quite literally, if only as far as his hands, which would blush when the duke’s high-pitched veins poured into them, putting his fingers in such a fever, each sought cool stone tables and winter benches to rest their tips upon. It was his bloodline languishing within him, and he feared it as he feared no other enemy. This blood distrusted his achievements; there was nothing good enough for it; and it began to want out of the duke’s body the way someone shamed seeks to escape the cause. Other than those intemperate hands, his face remained in one expression, as if it were attached to a cathedral.

  After his catastrophic defeat at Nancy in the Swiss wars, the duke went missing, turning up neither in the carts of the dead nor on the cots of the wounded. His life was so much on everybody’s mind that his reality grew in his absence. And the deep cold froze each memory. One of the duke’s pageboys claimed to have seen the great soldier fall, and he led the searchers over crusted snow to the spot. The earth ground its teeth where they walked. The duke’s fool, whom the court called Louis Onze, ran ahead, pretending to be a dog, leaping and coursing on all fours, nosing the corpses, demanding one of them rise and assume the self they sought, but apparently the dead were satisfied with their situation.

  At last the duke is found facedown and frozen in a pond, one hand hard by, its stiff fingers in a fan. A wolf’s jaw, a sword’s wound, the bite of the ice, had deprived the head of its features; nevertheless there were clues beyond a few snuffed fingers to be looked for—a scar on the throat, an ingrown toenail—but the fool objected to so intim
ate a search, squeamish about such an intrusion, for he felt that his long face, where all the duke’s true virtues were now written, was evidence enough.

  EXIT an Actual Dog

  There are the blind, ill, impoverished whom Malte meets on the streets; there are buildings whose walls are ruinous and provide the poet with paragraphs of surpassing beauty; there is the silence that overcomes a used-up life; there are odors that stay the night in darkened doorways, sounds that give away the location of someone in sorrow: These are the ghosts of what they will become—the ruinous before the ruin. They precede, they presage, they herald a deed before its perpetration the way a pistol’s shot recedes into its wound. There are our memories, ghostly, too, as the duke’s memory was, when his followers looked for him in their imaginations like a pair of lost gloves. There are, of course, the ghosts that hover over the recently departed, released with the last breath from a weary lung; and there are the ghosts who dwell in us, the somewhat living, and greet the ghosts whose roaming time has come. They listen when commanded—List! List! as Hamlet’s own ghost did—and bite the conscience, like a terrier, on the calf … ghosts in plenty … searching … uneasy … but are there purgatories suitable to each kind or requiems sufficient to bring peace to all of them?