Reading Rilke (3 page)

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 with 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.

For five weeks Rilke lived quietly among creative people. Worpswede’s simplicities, its communal dedication, its serenity, enchanted him. Here he met his future wife as well as the painter Paula Becker, whom he fancied first. Rilke kept a diary during this time, as he had in Florence at Lou’s behest. Paula appears in it as “the blond painter.” Poetic fragments and prose sketches fill its pages. These pieces often couple roses with sex in a commonplace way, and with death in an ominous one. Paula’s eyes are soft and warm as opening roses, he writes. Light glistens in them as from the tips and breasts of bent petals.

Blooms, as Rilke knew, are all business; they exist for butterflies and bees, but only incidentally for us, for whom flowers are fortuitous. Autumn’s hues are even more serendipital; the function of the leaves has been fulfilled, so they are discarded, they are finished, and their colors are the result of useless residues. The beauty of the world happens only in our eye; even the allure of women is as utilitarian as a wagon’s wheel. The Worpswede light, the way the countryside’s colors glow even on a dim wet evening, the festive stars and the warm windows of distant farms, the comforting purl of a stream: those are the purest accidents. So when one of us turns aside from living in order to admire life; when a rose petal is allowed to cool an eyelid; when a line of charcoal depicts the inviting length of a thigh; we are no longer going in nature’s direction but contrary to it. What
was never meant for us becomes ours entirely; what never had a use is suddenly all we need. Gradually, what Rilke’s Russian adventure had appeared to teach him—how to live in harmony with nature, so appealing to the poet—would prove itself impossible for the poem.