Letters to a Young Poet (2 page)

The sympathetic intelligence described here, the kind that leads a man ‘inwardly' to complete someone
else's gestures, is a part of Rilke's poetic genius to be sure (how else could he have written the remarkable poem about the panther in the Paris zoo?). At the same time, this ability to identify with others sometimes led Rilke to lose his own bearings. In August 1902, about six months before these letters begin, Rilke had travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The trip was a turning point in his life: the older man offered a model of how an artist can ground himself in steady, patient work. Nonetheless, Rilke hated Paris. He felt invisible and alone, surrounded by men and women driven like machines, people ‘holding out under the foot of each day that trod on them, like tough beetles'. Their ‘burdened lives', he told a friend, threatened to swamp him:

I often had to say aloud to myself that I was not one of them … And yet, when I noticed how my clothes were becoming worse and heavier from week to week … I was frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them.

In great detail he described the morning when he came upon a man suffering from the nervous disease known as St Vitus's Dance. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Rilke was possessed by what he saw:

No one paid any attention to him; but I, who couldn't keep my eyes off him even for a second, knew how gradually the restlessness was returning, how it became stronger and stronger … how it shook at his shoulders, how it clung to his head to tear it out of balance, and how suddenly it quite unexpectedly overcame and broke up his walk.

Feeling ‘will-less', Rilke followed the man whose fears, he felt, were ‘no longer distinguishable from mine'. Finally he broke away and returned to his rooms, ‘exhausted', used up by someone else's malady. He had been on his way to the library but the trip now seemed pointless; there couldn't possibly be a book powerful enough to expel the thing that had taken hold of him.

In sketching this background to the ‘young poet' letters, I have been quoting from Rilke's concurrent correspondence with more intimate acquaintances.
In the Kappus letters, Rilke sometimes hints at his own difficulties (as when he says that his ‘life is full of troubles and sadness') but, as might be expected, he never lays them out in any detail. The letters to friends are less reticent, however, and one of their surprises is how often Rilke speaks of being anxious and afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid, I think, that he might never become his own person. In the seventh letter to Kappus, Rilke mentions the way in which most people, faced with the difficulties of sexual love, ‘escape into one of the many conventions which like public shelters are set up … along this most dangerous of paths'. Clearly, Rilke himself did not wish to take shelter, but the temptation was obviously there – to settle down, to support his wife and child, to buy himself a good suit, to follow a path that no one could call imprudent. As with many young artists, Rilke had a sense of the land to which his gifts might lead him, but he was also anxious that he might never get there. He lived in fear of two false fates: either that he might end up as lost as the ragged poor who had surrounded him in Paris or else that he might succumb to the safe but numbing comforts of convention.

It is in these terms that I understand one of the
great themes laid out in the letters collected here, the idea that poetic practice requires solitude. In the vision Rilke offers, solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied, and Rilke provides for Kappus (and the rest of us) a map of how to accomplish those ends. The first step is the simple recognition that solitude exists. A lack of connection to other people, after all, is not something we are normally eager to seek, acknowledge or welcome. Rilke himself hardly assented to the isolation he felt during his schooling in military academies (‘when I was a boy among boys, I was alone among them'), nor did he welcome it when he moved to Paris to write about Rodin (‘how alone I was this time among these people, how perpetually disowned by all I met'). In both cases, gloom and fear had overcome him. In Paris, before going to bed at night he used to read the Book of Job for solace: ‘It was all true of me, word for word!'

Compare that touch of self-pity with the advice to Kappus: ‘We
are
solitary. It is possible to deceive yourself and act as if it were not the case … How much better … to take it as our starting-point.' I don't at all mean to imply by this juxtaposition that Rilke is being hypocritical. I mean, instead, to point
to the spiritual intelligence that led him to convert solitude from a curse into a blessing. Rather than continue to suffer under his sense of aloneness, Rilke eventually did what he urges Kappus to do: he turned and embraced it. He took isolation to be a given, then entered and inhabited it.

This trick of reversal, of turning negatives into positives, became a regular part of Rilke's working method. Anxiety, fear, sadness, doubt: there is no human emotion that cannot be upended and put into service. Anxiety, he tells Kappus, should be thought of as ‘existential anxiety', the kind that God requires of us in order to begin. The desire to flee from solitude can be converted into ‘a kind of tool' to make solitude still larger. When doubts arise, simply ‘
school
them': ‘instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers'.

To enter willingly the land of solitude does not, of course, mean that what follows will be easy. In my own experience, embracing solitude brings on another order of difficulties. When I was young and beginning to write, I used to put myself through periods of ritual retreat. I would cut off the telephone and the mail, unplug the television and the radio, take a short-term vow of silence, pull down the
window shades and settle in to work for three or four days. Often on the first day, much to my chagrin, I would fall into a depression. The whole exercise suddenly seemed pointless; I had my pen in my hand but nothing to say.

Something similar used to happen to Rilke. To take a key example, Rilke was living more or less alone in a medieval castle on the Adriatic coast near Trieste when, in the winter of 1911−12, he began to write the
Duino Elegies
. As the owner of the estate, Marie Taxis, reported, the retreat started badly: ‘A great sadness befell him, and he began to suspect that this winter would … fail to produce anything.' As Rilke himself told his patron: ‘Things must first get bad, worse, worst, beyond what any language can hold. I creep about all day in the thickets of my life, screaming like a wild man and clapping my hands. You would not believe what hair-raising creatures this flushes up.'

It is worth pausing over the mention of ‘sadness', both because ‘great sadnesses' figure in the letters to Kappus and because they belong to the geography of solitude. Solitude was for Rilke the necessary enclosure within which he could begin to form an independent identity, a sense of himself free from
the callings of family and convention. Solitude is the alembic of personhood, as the alchemists might have said. And yet its entrances seem to be guarded by feelings that would make most people turn and walk the other way – not just sadness, but anxiety, fear, doubt, premonitions of death, ‘all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit …'

Rilke's simple suggestion is that the discipline of art demands a turning towards, rather than away from, such states of mind. They portend necessary labours and must thus be taken seriously. He asks Kappus to imagine that sadness indicates a moment ‘when something new enters into us' and that we then have duties towards the unfamiliar thing. It may in fact be fate itself, a destiny which, with proper attention, we can absorb and make our own. ‘We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world … If it holds terrors they are
our
terrors' and we should try to love them. They are like the dragons in old myth that, when approached directly, turn out not to be dragons at all but helpless royalty in need of our attentions.

Whatever the exact metaphysics of such encounters, the point is that an exploration of the land of solitude cannot begin until we have accepted
solitude as a fact (‘We
are
alone!') and then faced the minatory moods that stand just inside its gates. And what happens after that? If acceptance comes and sadness is endured, what follows?

What follows is a change of consciousness in regard particularly to time. The very first of Rilke's letters to Kappus distinguishes between life's ‘most inconsequential and slightest hour' and the clearly more desirable ‘quietest hour' of the night. This latter is not, I think, an hour at all. It has no knowable dimension. ‘All distances, all measurements, alter for the one who becomes solitary', especially the measurement of time: ‘a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree …' Creative life contains its own temporality and the surest way to make it fail is to put it on an external clock. Mechanical time makes haste, as it were, but haste dissolves in solitude. In solitude we feel ‘as if eternity lay before' us.

Solitude can also mute the voice of judgement. Kappus included some poems in his first letter and he asked Rilke's opinion of them. Rilke offered one (the poems ‘have no identity of their own') but then set out to interrogate evaluation itself: by what
measure do we reckon a poem worthy or unworthy? Not by any measure that the outer world has to offer. Only one rule applies: ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.' And how might a poet recognize this ‘necessity'? Only by making the ‘descent into yourself and into your solitariness'. In that isolated space, the world's criteria drop away. When Rilke writes in the third letter that ‘an artist … must always remain innocent and unconscious of his greatest virtues', I understand him to mean that questions of good and bad, virtue and vice, are foreign to the absorption of solitary work. As Flannery O'Connor once wrote: ‘In art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.' Such has certainly been my own experience; in solitude (after a few days) the mind that weighs the work withdraws and I simply enter my material on its own terms. I may later find that what I have written is junk or that it is gold, but such labels have little currency in the confines of solitude.

After all this has unfolded – after acceptance has arrived, after doubts have become helpers, after evaluation has quietened down and time has opened up – then what happens?

Then nothing happens. Or, rather, then begins the practice of patience, a virtue in which Rilke had been schooled by Rodin. Rilke eventually published a book about Rodin and there he makes it clear that endurance was a necessary part of the older man's talent: ‘There is in Rodin a deep patience which makes him almost anonymous, a quiet, wise forbearance, something of the great patience and kindness of Nature herself, who … traverses silently and seriously the long pathway to abundance.' In a letter to Rodin himself, written just after the final letter to Kappus, Rilke spelled out one moral of the master's ‘tenacious example': ‘ordinary life … seems to bid us haste', but patience ‘puts us in touch with all that surpasses us'. Practised in the present, patience is the art of courting the future. It belongs to becoming rather than being, to the unfinished rather than the completed. It is not so much suited to heroes as to invalids and convalescents, those who must wait.

The flowering of any creative ‘summer' will come, Rilke tells Kappus, ‘only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day … :
patienc
e is all!' Patience means sitting
with the work even when – especially when – nothing appears to be happening.

The situation in which Rilke wrote the first
Duino Elegy
is again instructive. Marie Taxis later told the story: ‘One morning he received a tedious business letter. Wishing to deal with it right away, he had to sit down and devote himself to figures and other dry matters. Outside a strong bora was blowing …' Descending from the castle to the bastions overlooking the sea, ‘Rilke walked back and forth deep in thought, preoccupied with his answer to the letter. Then all at once … it seemed to him as though in the roar of the wind a voice had called out to him: “If I cried out, who could hear me up there among the angelic orders?”'

Having received the first line, Rilke set to work and, by nightfall, the first elegy was on paper. ‘The
Duino Elegies
were not written,' observes William Gass, ‘they were awaited.' Awaited in patience of course, though in this case patience had a curious added detail, that ‘tedious business letter'. Should we count such annoyances as belonging to the geography of solitude? I think so. They are the distractions that force attention to wander, the catalysts of not-doing. All art requires effort but effort alone does not make
the work, and distractions (so long as they are contained in solitude) are therefore useful. They are like the palladium atom that lets the carbon atoms bond, never itself becoming part of the new compound. That tedious business letter does not appear in the
Duino Elegies
, but there might be no elegies without it.

Here it should be said that Rilke never tells Kappus that a poet might find distraction useful. The letters to Kappus paint a grand portrait of how a poet works, and it will be worth pausing to interrogate that grandeur. I myself have often been put off by the extremity of Rilke's language. His modifiers are consistently superlatives: there is no deep but the deepest, no quiet but the quietest. Works of art are not just solitary but ‘infinitely' so. Rodin did not only teach art but art's ‘profundity and eternity'. References to ‘purity' abound: irony ought to be ‘used purely', feelings ought to be ‘pure', sexuality ought to be ‘entirely mature and pure'.