You Must Change Your Life (31 page)

Princess von Thurn und Taxis was not ignorant of Rilke's opportunistic impulses. Of their first meeting, she wrote, “I believe that he was immediately aware of the great sympathy I felt for him and knew he could build on it.” Still, this knowledge did nothing to deter her largesse. The meeting ended with her extending Rilke an invitation to her storied “Castle by the Sea.” For centuries, Duino Castle had served as Italy's elite refuge for artists and intellectuals dating back to Petrarch, who was buried nearby, and Dante, who was rumored to
have written part of
The Divine Comedy
there during his exile from Florence.

The following day, Rilke mailed the princess some roses and a letter thanking her for the lovely afternoon and her generous invitation. More than a much-needed vacation, he already seemed to know that Duino would be his salvation from the last days of the Hôtel Biron.

CHAPTER
14

S
ECRETLY, RILKE WELCOMED THE POSSIBILITY OF EVICTION
. It was an excuse for him to leave the site of so much misery from the past year. The illnesses, the mourning over Becker, the draining battle with Malte—even his faith in Rodin had faltered during his time at the Hôtel Biron.

“He wants to give these rooms up. They have collected so many sad memories for him,” wrote Count Kessler after a visit to the poet's “princely” quarters in October. “So many things that he thought he knew had shown him another side that his entire world had been rocked, so to speak. As one of the things that changed for him, he named Rodin.” When Rilke first met the artist eight years earlier, he saw him as an example of how to live. He told Kessler that, at the time, Rodin had shown him “how an artist growing old could be beautiful. I knew that, or believed to know it, from the example of Leonardo, Titian, etc., but Rodin for me was the living proof. I said to myself, So I too would like to become old in beauty.”

But after a year of living under the same roof as Rodin at the Hôtel Biron, he saw how pitilessly age had treated the sculptor. The older he got, the more he reminded Rilke of a child, indiscriminately pawing at the things he wanted—often women—and sucking on
hard candies whose sweet smell hovered in the air around him everywhere he went.

To Rilke, Rodin's womanizing was an embarrassment and the ultimate French cliché. Once the Apollonian intellectual, impervious to temptation, Rodin had degenerated into the Dionysian hedonist, ruled by the body. It also struck Rilke as a desperate defense against old age. “It suddenly turned out that growing old is something terrible for him, exactly as terrible as for your average person,” Rilke told Kessler. “So he came running here to me one day, seized by a nameless fear of death. Death, he had never even thought of death!”

Before then, Rodin had brought the subject up to Rilke on only one occasion. They had been looking out over the valley in Meudon when Rodin lamented what he saw as the tragic irony of his life, that he had only come to understand the purpose of his art at the point when it was about to all come to an end. The cessation of work—that was the meaning of death to Rodin back then.

But now it was the plain, primitive fear of mortality itself that frightened Rodin. “Things that I had assumed he had made his peace with some thirty years ago have now seized him for the first time, when he's old and no longer has the energy to be rid of them. And so he looked to me, the young person, for help,” Rilke said.

Now that his body could no longer perform the physical labor it once had, his unrealized ideas overwhelmed him. His sculpture had become serialized, and the majority of his large-scale works were being fabricated by others out of town. There was nothing for him to do now except make little sketches and entertain guests at the Hôtel Biron. This was the worst part of all to Rilke—that Rodin suddenly seemed
bored
. “One day he came here to me in the studio and said to me, ‘I am bored,' ” Rilke told Kessler. “And how he said it, I saw how he observed me, how he peeked secretly—almost frightened—to see what kind of impression this confession would make on me. He was bored and seemed not to be able to understand it himself.”

Rodin had never had trouble concentrating in the past. To know that his mind was slipping away from him now, and to have no power over
it, terrified the old man. It had become apparent to others, too. He was often seen wandering around the Hôtel Biron muttering to himself. He forgot about important letters in his pockets for weeks at a time and lost track of which employees he had paid and whether he himself had been paid. When he misplaced something he would overturn drawers, shouting that he'd been robbed, even of something as small as a candle or a book of matches. If he forgot to bring his “Thoughts” notebook, filled with meditations on everything from ancient goddesses to the nature of bulls, with him out to the garden, he would write the notes on the cuffs of his sleeves instead. When Beuret would do the laundry, he'd cry out, “What are you doing? My god, my cuffs!”

The poet could no longer bear to watch his master become such an object of pity. When notice came announcing the sale of the Hôtel Biron, “all the others, as I hear, are inconsolable and spend their time resisting by turns.” But, as he told Princess von Thurn und Taxis, “I am glad.”

OVER THE YEARS,
Rilke had compared Rodin to many different gods. He once called him an “eastern god enthroned,” like the Buddha statue that meditated on the artist's hill in Meudon. “It is the center of the world,” so self-contained and solitary, Rilke had said of it.

Rodin also once reminded Rilke of the god in Genesis. When he sculpted a hand, “it is there alone in space and it is nothing more than a hand. And God made only one hand in six days and poured water around it and arched a sky. When all was completed, he was at peace with it and it was a miracle and a hand.”

Most recently Rilke had called him “a god of antiquity,” and, for the first time, he had not meant it as a compliment. Once Rodin had seemed like a descendant of the great ancient traditions in art; now they held him captive. He was an obsolete god. His decline was now imminent, just as it was fated for every “Too-Great, the Transcendent, the Divine,” Rilke wrote.

In a postscript to Westhoff the day after he had reunited with Rodin at the Hôtel Biron, he fantasized about how his own path to
“divinity” would come to pass. He could no longer stand around in idle worship of Rodin, like trees to the sun. It was time to make his own way to heaven. He was like a forager gathering mushrooms and medicinal herbs, he told Westhoff. Now he would mix them together into a deadly potion and “take it up to God, so that he may quench his thirst and feel his splendor streaming through his veins.”

The Nietzschean tone of this letter is probably not a coincidence. Rilke owned a heavily marked-up copy of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, in which Nietzsche made his famous admonishment to disciples who risk becoming imitators of their masters: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains only a pupil. Why do you refuse to pluck at my wreath? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”

Rilke's letter declares his intent to complete his literary transformation, from the disciple who began the
New Poems
to the Prodigal Son who authored
Malte
. Rilke was now ready to remake himself into the father. That spring, during the months he had declined to see Rodin, Rilke wrote the words that would commence this change.

AT SOME POINT,
we do not know precisely where or when, Rilke came across a statue of Apollo with its head and limbs broken off, and only a naked torso remaining. It may have been a sculpture by Rodin or Michelangelo. Or it may have been the iconic
Belvedere Torso
. Others believe it was the muscular chest of a young Greek man from the ancient city of Miletus, which was on view at the Louvre while Rilke was in Paris.

Whatever the source, the statue inspired Rilke to choose Apollo, the Greek god of music and poetry—the origin of art itself—as his subject for a poem that spring. From this symbol of creative invention, Rilke would write his famous tale of reinvention, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

Rilke understood that god's defining achievement was creating a human form. Yet it had been a year since Rilke experimented with figuration
in his poem “Alcestis,” which had led him to conclude that his relationship to models was “certainly still false.” He went on occupying himself with “flowers, animals, and landscapes” for the time being instead. But a year later, “Apollo” would become for Rilke what
The Age of Bronze
had been for Rodin, his first full-scale figurative work.

For a metaphysical poet trying to ground himself in the physical world, the body of a god entombed in stone was a fitting metaphor. Why he chose a headless, broken god probably had to do with the same reason that Rodin often chopped off his figure's heads, and with them the most expressive features of the human anatomy. A faceless figure could no longer wink at or point to an intention. But to Rilke, Rodin's amputated bodies were no less whole: “Completeness is conveyed in all the armless statues of Rodin: Nothing necessary is lacking,” he wrote in his monograph on the sculptor.

The headless torso was a tabula rasa. To the nonbeliever, it was nothing more than a sleeping stone, but to those who had faith in this kind of god, it became a kind of mirror on which to project their inner lives. This was how Rilke, out of the absences of a broken, anonymous statue, crafted “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” an almost perfect sonnet, the most tightly unified of poetic forms.

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit,

And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

One can almost hear Rodin's voice speaking through the stone, like the oracle to which Rilke had once asked that almighty question, “How should I live?” Rodin had answered then,
work, always work
. And in the beginning of the poem, Rilke seems to obey this directive. He guides us on a perceptual journey down the torso's parts: the eyes, the chest, the hips, the place where reproduction once happened.

Then the encounter transcends his one-sided observation as Apollo begins to look back. The statue does not need eyes to stare, a mouth to speak or genitals to procreate—it carries its own birth inside it, the way Malte carried his death. As the Apollo and Rilke search each other, breaking down the borders that separate them, Rilke starts to relay the experience to the world as a poem.

But then he seems to abruptly decide that a poem is not quite enough. If it were, the sonnet could have ended just before that startling last line, with Rilke remaining a dutiful conduit, a secretary of god. But seeing was not enough for Rilke anymore. He wanted new eyes. He wanted to be not merely in the presence of god, but to become the creator. When Apollo speaks to him, Rilke consummates the empathic union of object and beholder, author and reader. This new being could now communicate; it was whole. Rilke had acknowledged art, gave its god life and it changed him.

THE WINTER THAT RILKE
published “Apollo,” Franz Kappus broke a four-year silence with the poet. He wrote a letter from a remote army
fort to tell Rilke that he had decided to accept a position in the military. He had given up poetry for good.

Rilke responded in his tenth and final letter to the young poet that he had been thinking of him often in recent months and was happy to hear from him again. Surprisingly, Rilke said he was even happier to hear of Kappus's new job. “I am glad you have that steady, expressible existence with you, that title, that uniform, that service, all that tangible and limited reality.”

This courageous career, Rilke wrote, was preferable to those “half-artistic” professions of journalism or criticism for which poets so often settled. Those were pitiful attempts to cling to the art of others, whereas Rilke believed that any artist who approached his work halfway should relinquish it altogether. He'd be better off grasping onto a concrete job, like the military, which Rilke believed would at least keep Kappus grounded in a “rough reality.”

Rilke probably would have been disappointed to learn that, years later, Kappus went on to become a newspaper editor, first at the
Belgrade News
and later at the
Banat Daily
. After fighting on the Eastern Front during World War I, he also wrote several action novels, including the
The Red Rider
, which was turned into a film in 1935. Kappus later admitted that “life drove me off into those very regions from which the poet's warm, tender and touching concern had sought to keep me.”