Letters to a Young Poet (10 page)

Neither of the works translated here were published in Rilke's lifetime. Nor are they works in any very strict sense: the
Letters to a Young Poet
are ten letters written over an interval of nearly six years, not intended to be collected nor conceived as a whole; and
The Letter from the Young Worker
was jotted down quickly in pencil and never written out fair or apparently considered for publication. Yet the
Letters to a Young Poet
, since their appearance in 1929, have become Rilke's most widely read book, and the
Letter from the Young Worker
, though not so familiar, has long established itself as a key piece of his prose, setting out his thoughts with unflinching forcefulness. They come from opposite ends of Rilke's writing life. When he wrote his first letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, the ‘young poet', in February 1903, Rilke had several collections behind him but
had written hardly any of the work for which we read him nowadays. The fictive
Letter from the Young Worker
on the other hand was written nineteen years later in February 1922, the extraordinary February when he completed his
Duino Elegies
and wrote the
Sonnets to Orpheus
in what he called a ‘nameless storm, a hurricane in the spirit'. So it belongs to Rilke's maturity, but as well as having preoccupations in common with the poems in whose company it arose, it connects to the letters to Kappus in ways that suggest that some of Rilke's ideas and concerns, and his basic attitude to life, didn't change very much.

Rilke was one of the great letter-writers. He wrote them every day, often many more than one, and really his letters, not all of which have been published, can be considered an integral part of his work, as he intimated himself. He often approached the never-quite-superable task of keeping his correspondence up to date as a way of getting into writing, a way of putting something off and stealing up on it at the same time. The form of the letter, a text addressed to a specific person with no particular constraints, was clearly one which suited him. Quite extensive passages of his novel,
The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge
, were originally written as letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé and to his wife Clara. And the fact that he used a fictitious letter to channel the preoccupations of the
Letter from the Young Worker
shows how instinctive the epistolary form became. Writing letters was Rilke's way of facing up to the world and locating himself in it, on a daily basis, and his poems were a more intense and more intricately ordered variation of the same process.

Franz Xaver Kappus, the recipient and editor of these letters, says in his own prefatory remarks virtually all that is needed by way of introduction to them. He had written to Rilke enclosing some of his own poems on learning that Rilke had once been, as he himself now was, a military cadet and that they even had a teacher in common. This was enough to make Kappus feel that Rilke would understand the dilemma of someone firmly set on a military career but finding that his literary interests were in conflict with it. (In fact Kappus managed a kind of compromise, though not one Rilke would have
approved of, becoming a successful writer of popular fiction after having served and been wounded in the First World War.) For Kappus, Rilke seems primarily to have been the author of
To Celebrate Myself
(
Mir zur Feier
, 1899), which was the last volume of Rilke's poems to be written, with great virtuosity, in a largely derivative Art Nouveau style that was entirely of its time. Some sense of the kind of poetry this was can be gleaned from Kappus's own poem ‘Sonnet', which Rilke returns to him, written out in his own hand, with his letter of 14 May 1904. Rilke's early poems were mostly better than this, but not dissimilar in mood and mode. But by the end of 1902, when he received Kappus's initial letter, Rilke had also published the
Book of Images
in its first edition, and written most of the
Book of Hours
, and these poems, though still not his major work, are already far more individual. In fact Kappus catches him on the point of becoming the Rilke we read Rilke for today: ‘The Panther', perhaps the best known of the
New Poems
, Rilke's first incontrovertibly great book, seems to have been written in November 1902, and
Worpswede
and
Auguste Rodin
, the two books of art criticism which were important stepping-stones towards the syntactical
subtleties and precise apprehensions of the
New Poems
, came out early in 1903. Rilke is coming into his own, and learning at an astonishing rate from the example of Rodin, whose working techniques and general way of being in the world he observed closely while writing his book on him.

Writing to Kappus, Rilke was also taking a sympathetic step back into an earlier stage of his career, so that much of what he says is actually at odds with his own practice at the time of writing and with the preoccupations dwelt on in letters to other correspondents written in the same period. It seems certain that Kappus's situation brought back strong memories of his own younger self and that, especially in the first few letters, he enters into a kind of complicity which draws on their similar experience as cadets and on Rilke's literary beginnings much more than on the insights he was rapidly finding his way to in Paris. One of the key words in the correspondence is ‘deep' and its cognates. Rilke's repeated advice to Kappus is that he should delve down into his own self, that he should not look outwards but within. ‘Do not be distracted by surfaces,' he writes on 16 July 1903. Yet in Paris he had learned from Rodin precisely the importance of
surface as the locus of all that is knowable about the world. One of the most striking things about the
Letters
is that they are precisely calibrated to their recipient, which has obviously not prevented them from having a much wider appeal but does perhaps explain why that appeal is most marked in the young.

To that extent Kappus's title
Letters to a Young Poet
is an appropriate one, but in other ways it is misleading: Kappus sent Rilke his poems and asked him whether they were any good, but he also wrote a letter in which he opened his heart ‘more unreservedly than to anyone ever before' and it is this, more than the verse, that Rilke responds to. Poetry, or even becoming a poet, is only a small part of what they are concerned with. The first three letters do contain some practical advice on writing, including a warning about irony and some suggestions for reading (though what Rilke recommends is not verse but the prose works of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen and the Bible), but always it is advice that applies much more generally than just to somebody wanting to become a poet. And this, of course, is because for Rilke to be an artist was to live one's life properly − the artistic and the existential were
always inseparable. Rilke is much more interested in Kappus the young man, with his various difficulties and questions, than in Kappus the young poet. His only response to the poems, beyond saying that they have ‘no identity of their own' (a comment which, he must have been aware, applied equally well to his own early verse) and that Kappus, not Rilke, must be the judge of their validity, is to select the one he likes best (itself a useful service, perhaps) and to send it back copied out in his own hand so that Kappus can read it as if it were ‘unknown' to him – a reminder of times before the computer or even the typewriter.

During the period when most of the letters to Kappus were written, Rilke was also writing in complete disarray to Lou Andreas-Salomé, turning to her for advice much as Kappus had turned to him. It does seem to be the case that the apparent authority with which Rilke speaks to Kappus comes from a strong sense of how greatly in need he is of his own advice, and that the words are found because it is as much his own dilemmas as Kappus's that he is looking for answers to. Most of the time at least he doesn't dispense hard-won wisdom, but seems to be happening on the hidden structures that make up
his existence, and he shares them as he finds them. Many of his thoughts have something improvised about them, such as when he is entertaining the difficult idea, in the letter of 12 August 1904, that the future ‘comes upon us' much sooner than is actually apparent, and that we are in effect always struggling to catch up with things that have already, unknown to us, occurred. In trying to look at life not as it seems, Rilke is acting according to his own precept of ‘solitude', attending to the world as if for the first time.

On the face of it, although the ‘worker' is writing out of a state of ‘commotion', the
Letter from the Young Worker
is marked by greater certainty. Its tone is firm and clear, and Rilke is not so much discovering truths as finding the best expression for beliefs he had held from very early on. The
Letter
is a polemic against Christianity, and Rilke had begun this in one of his earliest works,
Christ: Eleven Visions
(written 1896−8), a sequence of poems he
never published, in which he has Christ, in various guises, travel through the world that is his legacy, full of remorse for what his teachings have wrought. The
Letter
takes the form of an address to ‘Mr V.', which the manuscript makes clear refers to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian poet whom Rilke got to know in Paris in 1905 and whom he always held in high regard. Verhaeren had died falling under a train in 1916, and Rilke read and reread his work in the following years, especially the posthumous collection
Les Flammes hautes
(1917). In the manuscript, the
Letter from the Young Worker
is preceded by the crossed-out words ‘If I were a young worker I should have written you something like this.' It is a letter to a dead friend, a kind of homage to Verhaeren, whom the worker holds up as a ‘teacher who praises the Here and Now'. He thus sets poetry, which heightens our awareness of the beauty and value of the world we live in, against Christianity, which according to the
Letter
has damaged life and exploited it, diminishing the pleasure we take in the present in favour of the idea of an afterlife: ‘What deceit, to divest us of images of earthly delight in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs!'

Rilke wrote the
Letter
while in the middle of his
great late works, the
Duino Elegies
and the
Sonnets to Orpheus
, both of which can be said to dedicate themselves to the earth. It was written in the pad that also contains drafts of the Tenth Elegy at the beginning and of the Fifth (the last to be written) at the end, and Rilke had by then completed the first part of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
and would shortly write the second. The validation of poetry it contains can be understood as a self-validation, and Rilke's Orpheus is indeed in many ways a counter-figure to Christ, focusing on the ‘earthly' and the ‘Here and Now', words which are common to both the
Letter
and the
Sonnets to Orpheus
. That the
Letter
emerged from such a context, when anyone might have thought that Rilke was taken up with other things, points to the charge of necessity it carries, and this quality is audible in its every sentence, a hard, clear, uncompromising quality which does not eschew the colloquial or the direct but uses whatever means channel its energy best. ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity,' Rilke had written to Kappus in his first letter to him, and this one evidently did. Despite this he made no mention of the text in his correspondence.

Rilke seems to adopt the persona of the worker
as a way of emphasizing that he is speaking out of the present, the ‘machine age' (the worker is a factory-worker who spends most of his time behind a desk and is only rarely on the machines, but this doesn't prevent him from referring to ‘my machine'). There is a comparable attention to modernity, to the machine and to technological advances like aeroplane flight, in some of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
. The worker's first objection to Christ is that he belongs to another era: ‘The conditions he lived in were so very different.' He wore a seamless garment whereas now clothes are bought off the peg, one size fits all. The worker/Rilke does not doubt the ‘core of light' that dwelled in him, just as he does not want to do without God (the
Letter
is not anti-religious), but he thinks the time in which Christ was necessary is long over and that having served his purpose of bodying forth God he should have vanished, ‘without remainder'. Instead, he has become the focal point of a religion and has left the very palpable trace of the crucifix.

The ubiquity of the cross is something that Rilke regards as a misunderstanding: it was meant as a pointer beyond itself, to God, but has ended up getting in the way. Rilke begins a play on words here
whose ramifications run outwards to other of his works in a kind of secret tracery that relates the
Letter
's main preoccupations. He says that the cross was only a crossroads (a point to move on from rather than a destination), where the German word
Kreuzweg
means Way of the Cross as well as crossroads.
Kreuzweg
was a word Rilke was fond of, and it seems to have almost a private meaning for him. This is first intimated in a sentence from his book on Rodin: ‘The person who rises at night and softly goes to another is like a digger for treasure who wants to excavate the great and necessary happiness that lies at the crossroads of [the] sex.' It is then reprised in an erotic poem of 1915: ‘Raised by you the god's form stands / at the gentle crossroads beneath my clothes.' The ‘gentle crossroads' in these lines is the crotch, and instead of a cross there stands a phallic god, which the poem also refers to as a Herma. The
Kreuzweg
is not only a place of suffering, a
Via Crucis
, but a place of pleasure.