The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (2 page)

Anyway, Rilke came to hate his native city. His father was a failed army officer who became a petty clerk for the railroad. His mother, a complicated woman, cold and fervent, driven alternately by a hunger for good society and by pious Roman Catholicism, was an affliction to him. There was probably nothing more suffocating than the life of a genteel, aspiring European household of the late nineteenth century in which failure brooded like a boarder who had to be appeased, or like the giant cockroach which was to appear in another Prague apartment in 1915. All his life Rilke carried that suffocation inside him; and it was very much on my mind because I had just been reading Stephen Mitchell’s fresh, startlingly Rilkean translations of the poems. Here, finally, was a Rilke in English that would last for many generations. Walking through European cities with Mitchell’s Rilke in my ear, trying to see with Rilke’s eyes, I could begin to feel in the new downtowns, in the old city squares like stage sets with their baroque churches by the rivers and restored fortresses on the hills, the geography of that suffocation; it flares in the brilliant anger of the
Duino Elegies
—in the Fourth, for example, where the images that the world presents to him seem so much like a bad play that he swears he’d prefer a real puppet theater and imagines himself as a kind of demented critic who refuses to leave the theater until
something
happens:

Or the Tenth, which envisions adult life as an especially tawdry carnival:

This anger is probably part of the reason why the Elegies took ten years to complete. Rilke seems to have needed, desperately, the feeling of freedom which he found only in open, windy spaces—Duino, Muzot.

Wandering the empty Sunday-morning warren of streets off Boulevard St.-Michel, remembering how passionately Rilke had argued that the life we live every day is not life, I began to feel that looking for him in this way was
actively stupid. There was another friend with us, a Dutch journalist named Fred, who was hungry and could not have cared less where Rilke ate breakfast. It was Fred who asked me if I knew the name of the woman who had loaned Rilke a room in Duino Castle. I did. She was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. Trying to imagine what it would mean to have a name like that discouraged me from thinking I would ever understand Rilke’s social milieu. It signified a whole class of people, seen at a distance like brilliantly colored birds, which had been wiped out by the First World War. Fred was in Paris to interview the Rumanian writer E. M. Cioran, who has been called “the last philosopher in Europe,” about the new European peace movement. He pointed out to us the little garret, tucked like a pigeon coop under the roof of a building just off the Place de l’Odéon, where Cioran lives and works, as if he hoped that it would serve as a reasonable substitute, or would at least drag us back to the present. For it was clear that my friend Richard was also looking for something that the memory of his student days in Paris had stirred in him. He had lost some map in his head and felt personally anxious to retrieve it.

And it was clear that he wasn’t going to find it. The transience of our most vivid experience is the burden of another of Rilke’s complaints, the one in the Second Elegy where he compares humans with angels:

We abandoned the search, standing in front of a bar called King Kong, where Richard may have had breakfast in a former life of the establishment twenty
years before and Rilke fifty years before that. The morning had begun to warm up, and the streets filled with people. Like many other young artists at the turn of the century, Rilke was drawn to Paris, and there, under the tutelage of Rodin, he began to be a great writer in the poems of
Neue Gedichte
, but he didn’t altogether like the city, either its poverty or its glamour, both of which shocked him at first and saddened him later. It was hard, watching the street come alive with shopkeepers, students in long scarves, professors in sleek jackets solemnly lecturing companions of the previous night who walked shivering beside them, shoppers already out and armed with that French look of fanatic skepticism, not to set beside the scene the annihilating glimpse of the city in the Fifth Elegy:

The
Duino Elegies
are an argument against our lived, ordinary lives. And it is not surprising that they are. Rilke’s special gift as a poet is that he does not seem to speak from the middle of life, that he is always calling us away from it. His poems have the feeling of being written from a great depth in himself. What makes them so seductive is that they also speak to the reader so intimately. They seem whispered or crooned into our inmost ear, insinuating us toward the same depth in ourselves. The effect can be hypnotic. When Rilke was dying in 1926—of a rare and particularly agonizing blood disease—he received a letter from the young Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva. “You are not the poet I love most,” she wrote to him. “ ‘Most’ already implies comparison. You are poetry itself.” And one knows that this is not hyperbole. That voice of Rilke’s poems, calling us out of ourselves, or calling us into the deepest places in ourselves, is very near to what people mean by poetry. It is also what makes him difficult to read thoughtfully. He induces a kind of trance, as soon as the whispering begins:

Look at how he bores into us. That caressing voice seems to be speaking to the solitary walker in each of us who is moved by springtimes, stars, oceans, the sound of music. And then he reminds us that those things touch off in us a deeper longing. First, there is the surprising statement that the world is a mission, and the more surprising question about our fitness for it. Then, with another question, he brings us to his intimacy with our deeper hunger. And then he goes below that, to the still more solitary self with its huge strange thoughts. It is as if he were peeling off layers of the apparent richness of the self, arguing us back to the poverty of a great, raw, objectless longing.

This is why the argument of the Elegies is against ordinary life. Nor does it admit, as comfort, any easy idea of transcendence. “Who, if I cried out,” the poems begin, “would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” And the implicit answer is “No one.” The great, stormy movements of those poems that seem to open out and open out really aim to close in, to narrow, to limit: to bring us up against the huge nakedness and poverty of human longing. He himself did not necessarily see this project of his art clearly. The Elegies were begun in 1912 and he did not complete them until 1922. The last of them, the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth, were not composed until after he was visited, suddenly, by the early
Sonnets to Orpheus.
In the first of them, he speaks of the mythic project of Orpheus:

It is that hut I want to call attention to. It is how Rilke saw our unformed inner lives—what he is always telling us about ourselves. He was not, in the end,
interested in Paris. There is very little evidence that he was interested in breakfasts (except for one occasion when he first discovered in 1901 a California health food—Quaker Oats—and enthusiastically sent a packet to his future wife, with the recipe—Boil water, add oats.) He is always arguing against the world of days and habits, our blurred and blurring desires, “a makeshift hut to receive the music, / a shelter nailed up out of our darkest longing, / with an entryway that shuddered in the wind.” This hut is the place one means when one says that Rilke wrote from a great depth in himself, and it is, I believe, what Marina Tsvetayeva meant when she said that Rilke
was
poetry. His work begins and ends with this conviction of an inner emptiness. It is what he says at the very beginning of the Elegies:

It even provides a clue to the odd fact that Rilke started writing in French just before his death. The only explanation for it he ever offered was to say that he found the language useful, since there was “in German no exact equivalent for the French word
absence
, in the great positive sense with which Paul Valéry used it.” For what Orpheus has done is to turn the hut of our emptiness into something positive, into a temple, and that is also apparently what Rilke felt Valéry had done. The project of his poetry, then, was to find, in art, a way to transform the emptiness, the radical deficiency, of human longing into something else.

This project was, to some extent, an inheritance—it recapitulates many currents in European poetry in the nineteenth century. The romantic poets at the beginning of it opened up the territory. Hölderlin spoke of a new poetry, almost overwhelmed by the discovery of an infinite human inwardness. And Wordsworth had said that poets had to give that inwardness a local habitation and a name. It is important to remember that when he said this he was still a political radical, sympathetic to the French revolution, who believed that the social and artistic projects were parallel, because after the failed European revolutions of 1848, those two projects were divorced. For Baudelaire, nature had become a temple where one only read symbolic meanings, and the poet, like an albatross, was understood to be hopelessly ungainly on the ground of
social life and graceful only in the air. Poets trafficked with the infinite. In the work of Mallarmé, this led to a changed notion of poetry itself. As the poet pulled away from the social world the words in a poem pulled away from referential meaning. Poetry was an art near to music. It did not reach down to the mere world of objects. It made a music which lifted the traces of objects where they half survived in the referential meaning of words—street, apple, tree—toward a place where they lived a little in the eternal stillness of the poem. Something like this idea—it went by the name of symbolism—was inherited by the last, decadent or Parnassian, generation of nineteenth-century poets. The poem was to have as little commerce as possible with the middle-class world, and the poet, in his isolation, served only his art, which was itself in the service of beauty.