7 ONE
How to Read Rilke Today
It can only be symbolic to call one of the greatest European poets of the twentieth century the last inward man. Some of us, perhaps at different stages in our lives, will always be attracted to the mystical and the metaphysical. On the other hand, the age of inwardness, the flowering of cultures in the West that were individualistic and reflective, has passed. Rilke himself experienced a great shift in attitude, as more organized forms of religious worship, and faith itself, dwindled in his lifetime. He was never a believer in God. But still the idea, or, rather, the feeling of God, meant a great deal to him. This is one clue to what makes him not only a great poet but an important figure historically. His reputation was at its height, early in the twentieth century, when the cultural momentum was suddenly intensely secular and political. The politically engaged future challenged what art should be. Rilkeās āangelsā and ārosesā suddenly seemed absurdly irrelevant. Yet it seems to me Rilkeās achievement, and his standing, are all the more poignant, viewed from this crossroads in time.
In 1926, when he died aged only fifty-one, āeveryoneā was reading Rainer Maria Rilke, if by everyone we can mean the English novelist Virginia Woolf and, say, the future American art critic Meyer Schapiro, who made his first trip to Europe 8carrying Rilke in his pocket. The Austrian modernist novelist Robert Musil was another huge admirer, while in France AndrĆ© Gide, a delicate novelist caught between religious inwardness and Nietzschean amoralism, and Paul ValĆ©ry, a modernist poet of comparable complexity, had both met Rilke and held him in high artistic esteem.
Musil hailed the richness of Rilkeās language in a lengthy memorial address in 1927. But then, just ten years later in German-speaking circles, and just a little later in Britain, with the outbreak of war, Rilke was no longer relevant. The German critical avant-garde favoured the imagination of Kaf ka, a poet writing a new kind of prose; and Brecht, a poet who wanted to change the world by revolutionizing the dramatic stage.
Itās easy to see why. Rilke was too refined. He appealed to an educated minority. Brecht by contrast was about to transform the lyric poem, and the very concept of theatre, in the hope of addressing the mass of people. His task was to welcome themāand their experience, and their language, rougher and hungrier and more spontaneousāinto the cultural mainstream. Kaf kaās parables of the mysterious ways of authority meanwhile tapped a new kind of political experience. This was how the confused ordinary man found himself up against menacing āhigherā authorities. The pressure of authority was constantly there yet so hard to grasp that it went without a name. Political references back to Kaf ka would abound throughout the totalitarian twentieth century, whereas it was said that Rilke was not political at all. And that was true, though not, as we shall see, the whole story. Meanwhile, I wonder if any account of a great artist read in many countries, absorbed into diverse cultures, can ever be the whole story. GermanyāAustria, France, Britain and the United States all had their particular Rilke timelines in the last century. Within that comparison American readers seemed to have loved Rilke 9uninterruptedly, because he gifted them a moving critique of the pace and style of industrial life, which otherwise they could often not bear. Rilke gave, and still gives, a function for poetry to help any and all of us withstand the materialistātechnological onslaught. He is a secular bulwark, spiritual but not religious, something these days increasingly rare.1
The European timeline reflected the way that spiritual influence became old-fashioned so quickly, with the Continent wracked by war and in political crisis. Poetry modernized itself radically and became more social in the politically charged 1930s, in Germany especially, after defeat against England, and hyperinflation, and the rise of nationalism and organized labour power. England itself followed, but more spasmodically, and at a decadeās remove, and never with quite the same relentlessness. Still, all this, and the speed of change, was a revolution, and, from our point of view here, a revolution in sensibilityāa revolution in the way things were felt and evaluated. This new revolution had everything to do with what āmodernā and āmodernismā in literature meant. Those cultural phenomenaāfor they were more phenomenal than consciously organizedāhad in their turn other causes too.
Two or three decades earlier, above all, there had been an aesthetic revolution, of which Oscar Wilde and Henry James caught the outside edge, and Rilke was touched by it too. Indeed he was closer to the hub of the wheel. He was driving the change. It was there in the way he wrote. He was subjective. He wanted to tell the world about his inner feelings and how hard he found it to place himself in the world. Some of that difficulty had to do with the early years of the twentieth century, and the very way he recorded his inwardness reflected the need to find a new way to say how anxious he was. And yet, at the same time, he didnāt entirely leave the nineteenth century and its calmnessāand in German literature its regionalismābehind.
10I will often talk about āartā in this book. I donāt like āthe artsā because that is already a commercial concept and a commodity. Itās the way art goes because artists have to live, and because people who can afford it, and many who canāt, want art in their lives and find a way to buy or borrow or steal it. But there, Iām saying what they wantāwhat I wantāis art, not āthe artsā. Itās a great need. At the same time the word, somehow misleading in English, doesnāt just mean painting. As I use the word āartā I mean everything encompassed by the German word die Kunst. That includes music, sculpture, poetry and drama. (Film would be there, except itās too early in Rilkeās lifetime, and his particular experience, for film.) The idea of art binds all these creative activities together in a refined, deeply worked response to what is human. Nature may be inimitably beautiful, dramatic, portentous and sublime. We can read many messages into nature. But it can never produce, of itself, what art and artists give us, namely, a record of how the life around us collides with, and stimulates, our imagination.
Take music. Classical music offers a fabulous example of what was happening to art in Rilkeās Austria and Germany in the early twentieth century. Though audiences protested, already Schoenbergās atonal music seemed to express the modern technology-driven condition. It was exciting, bewildering, but also repetitive and seemingly forever unfinished. The sentimental human heart suddenly didnāt know where to take refugeāand nowhere was probably the implicit answer. Face up to modernity, that is, to a certain new kind of bleakness and rawness, exposed by the age of the machine. Donāt hide away.
The neo-Romantic style of composition which preceded Schoenberg was quite different. Schoenberg himself caught the tail end of the fashion, which is why many Romantic listeners prefer the richly textured, but still tonal, early work. Personally 11I love to embed myself in the First String Quartet in D Minor, op. 7. I can find a home thereāthe kind of āspiritualā home Rilke would often allude to, and meaning a home in the imagination. The neo-Romantics were composers like late Brahms and the searingly emotive Hugo Wolf. Their emotionally laden and discordant harmonies pointed ways out of the nineteenth century. But they did not compel the abiding Western tradition to reinvent itself, as Schoenberg did, perhaps regrettably, but necessarily, after he left that op. 7 behind.
Early Schoenberg was in-between, and in-between is roughly where I think we should place Rilke too, between these two moments in music, that is, the last notes of romanticism and the first signs of rupture. Rilkeās intensely individually felt lyrics and his so-called āthing-poemsā, his elegies and his sonnets were new and unique, and yet they could be absorbed into what went beforeāeven centuries before. And so on their evidence Rilke seems, like the earliest Schoenberg, not yet āmodernā enough.
But to call Rilke conservative and exclusively aesthetic-minded diverts attention precisely from what made him new. The world he addressed was losing its spirituality, and just as Schoenberg felt music needed a new language, so Rilke toyed with whether the old language could continue: what it could refer to, and mean, as references like God and the soul lost credibility.
Rilke worked with a limited range of physical experiences. His life had a narrow focus. But his poems grew into huge questions. Born in Prague, in 1875, and living in Munich, he travelled to Italy just before the nineteenth century ended. In Rome and Florence he began to test his secular faith in the great humanist tradition. He went to Russia, spent a year in the north-German countryside, and moved, in 1902, to Paris. Confined to Munich during the Great War he was only modestly peripatetic thereafter, and gratefully accepted a Swiss bolthole purchased in his name for his last five 12years. When he died in 1926, of leukaemia, having struggled with terrible pain for the last two of those years, his poetry was dazzlingly new to his ever-increasing number of readersāand yet still covering ground that preoccupied him as a young man.
And so we go, back and forth, sideways into the new age. What made Rilke creative was how he responded to his limited series of environments. He relished nature and works of art everywhere, and lived among animals, birds and trees, under dark and light skies. The wind and the stars and the soil were strong presences, but people were relatively scarce. He saw them as strangers, mostly, from a distance, although there were a few people he knew well, and studied, and remembered, in a handful of special poems. Meanwhile he loved, and noticed, colours, cathedrals, Greek sculptures and childrenās merry-go-rounds, and flowers. Two of his most famous short poems evoked the hydrangea and the rose, and, like Van Gogh, he was fascinated by once-beautiful forms of lifeāblossoms, most notablyāin decline. But then not only flowers. He spent months of sponsored solitude in some of the minor family houses where the entire European aristocracyāGerman, Danish, Bohemianāwas declining. Whether we read him in the original German, or whether we come to him as the English Rilke, or the French Rilke, of the Japanese Rilke, or read him in Braille, he is a great poet, for the music of his language, and preoccupations like this, that link him to other artists, and to his times.
What made him great though, for it surely wasnāt just some kind of relevance? To repeat the question and anticipate the answer this book gives, I would say he was trying to find a new sensibility for the twentieth century, at a time when a certain style of philosophy had not yet made āthe meaning of lifeā a naive question. His poems concern our gender and sexuality, our sense of what we ought to be doing with our lives, the possibility of the 13existence of God, the charmed kinship with animals which brings us such happiness, the importance of childhood, the attraction of the physical objects we make and buy and choose to live among, the landscapes we respond to, the books we read and the paintings in whose company we live. There is no object under Rilkeās gaze that resists transformation into a feature of a marvellous universe that envelops us in a world that might otherwise leave us restless and afraid.
Human existential identity was the conundrum. Rilke searched not for a definition but for places and seasons that would allow him to speak of it. So it is a marvellous experience to follow daily life with his eyes, through the park and along the street, and occasionally into a more exotic landscape. The search was not for a vantage point but for a metaphor. The metaphor once found, he could transform anything. He doesnāt need clichĆ©d Romantic inspiration to enchant his readers. In his tenth Duino Elegy, for instance, he lists the kinds of places humans frequent: āStelle, Siedlung, Lager, Boden, Wohnortā, and we can immediately feel something significant about ourselves in that thesaurus-like list. Each of those five German words is an approximation or an aspect of something that actually we feel every day. Since they can all roughly mean āplace to liveā the question is: where are we? Where do we dwell? Where do we call home, and for what reason? More questions follow. For instance, in what place do we flower and bear fruit before, like flowers, we too fade and drop? Where do we plant ourselves and where do we flourish? Ripeness is one of Rilkeās preoccupations too, just as much as decline.
How to translate that string of places varies. Itās āplace and dwelling, camp and ground and homeā for Vita and Edward Sackville-West, the very first translators of the Elegies; āplace and settlement, foundation and soil and homeā for the outstanding contemporary translator Stephen Mitchell; āsoil, place, village, 14storehouse, homeā for the eccentric but sometimes illuminating Rilke pilgrim William Gass. (Notes on where to find the various translations are given at the end of this book.) The point though, however more or less successfully the nuances of the original are rendered, is that all kinds of places matter to us: our geographical location, the place we have settled with others, the place we have chosen to rest; where we were born; what is our present address. Add landscapes: mountains, valleys, meadows, streams, the river Nile, the bridge at Ronda, an ancient volcano. And townscapes: marketplaces, post offices. All these ālocationsā bring out features of our human existence to help us speculate on what we are doing here, on this earth, in what Rilke indirectly called our Weltraum, literally the space our world occupies, though also conventionally the universe.2 For me the right translation of the word, or, more often, evocation of the thought, will sometimes be āspace and timeā.
By 1899, as he came of age amidst the most important love affair of his life, and scored his first great literary success, Rilke was well aware of the pressures falling on an idealized conception of humanity. The task of his still nominally Christian generation was crucially to respond to Darwin. Reflecting that challenge of an evolved rather than a divinely created humanity, Rilke occasionally expressed a wish to have studied biology. He did take a class in Munich just as the century turned. But mostly he read a little and improvised.3 The point is that he was caught up in the great onslaught of the secular that followed the collapse of a Biblical version of the past. The avalanche was set in motion by persuasive evidence that it was not a force called God that created the world, according to some divine plan whose alleged goodness and higher rationality had long troubled the critical and the suffering. Evolutionāthough it could be made to include God, by someāwas more plausible. And so Rilke, never in so many words, 15registered the death of God. But like Nietzsche he was radically engaged in seeking āsuperabundant substitutesā for discredited metaphysical consolations, enjoying them even as they faded. Nietzscheās spirit was one of bold independence of mentality and phrase, and, likewise, Rilke sought out those substitutes in his own stunningly rich German languageāa language not āfadedā at all but rather intensely vibrant.
For much of my life Iāve felt drawn to Rilke precisely because in his presence art can still stand in for a dying capacity for spiritual contemplation. But Iāve learnt to approach him now with some reservation. Theodor Adorno, the critic who in 1936 insisted the future was Kaf ka and not Rilke, branded Rilkeās inner life a pernicious escapism, discouraging political awareness. Adorno was also the critic who not fifteen years later declared that āto write poetry after Ausch...
