His work went well. Within days he had paid a first call on Rodin, and he swiftly established an almost daily routine of studio visits; as the autumn deepened into winter, he found the monograph growing almost of its own accord, and his little book on Rodin, with which he declared himself satisfied, was speedily published, in March 1903. His poetry benefited as well, and the habit of looking fully and carefully at the subject in hand, which he had seen in Clara and which he now acquired from Rodin, bore fruit that autumn in the first of those poems he immediately recognized as ‘new’, one of the most frequently translated of all twentieth-century poems, ‘The Panther’. In letters to Clara, he emphasized the possibilities for work, for a life dedicated to beauty and art, that Paris held for both of them. But, while his regained solitude was conducive to productivity and a sense of aesthetic purpose, the experience of the immense modern city, coming hard as it did upon rural tranquillity and the company of sensitive friends, was altogether terrible and unsettling.
In the following summer, back in Worpswede, he felt able fully to take stock of the impact of Paris upon him, in a letter of 18 July 1903 to his friend and former lover Lou Andreas-Salomé. ‘Paris,’ he told her, ‘was an experience similar to that of the military school; just as in those days I was seized by an immense, fearful amazement, so now I was beset by horror of everything that is known, as if in some inexpressible confusion, as life.’ The Paris he described to Lou was a place where the fear within him had grown rapidly. It was a city where people were merely ‘transients among transients, abandoned and left to themselves in their own fates. One registered them as an impression, at most, and observed them with a calm, objective curiosity as if they were a new species of animal that had of necessity evolved special organs, organs of hunger and dying.’ Among those he observed were the sick being transported to the Hôtel-Dieu, old women, beggars and a man with St Vitus's dance:
And all these people, men and women, who are in some kind of transition, perhaps from madness to health, or perhaps into madness; all with something infinitely delicate in their faces, a love or knowledge or joy, as if it were a light burning just a little dimly and fitfully, which could surely grow bright once again if only someone were to see and help… But there is no one who does help.
Rilke's great terror was that he might become one of them:
Often I had to say to myself out loud that I was not one of them, that I would once again leave that dreadful city where they would die; I said it to myself and was aware that it was no self-deception. And yet, when I realized that my clothes were becoming shabbier and heavier from week to week, and saw there was many a threadbare patch in them, I was alarmed, and felt that I would inevitably be numbered among the lost if some passer-by saw me and half unconsciously counted me as one of them.
Was he himself not as good as homeless? Was he himself not hungry too? Was he himself not poor?
The life we think of as Rilke's – a life of graceful acceptance of patronage freely and gladly given by a number of the wealthy or influential around Europe, from aristocrats to publishers, who themselves felt privileged to be connected with so extraordinary a writer – was one he had as yet barely begun to establish. At this still precarious point in his life, nothing could afford him the certainty that he might not indeed slip into anonymous poverty. Of course his horrified recoil from the street life of a crowded modern city, with its unstable or sick or down-and-out characters, has in it a fastidious hypersensitivity, a revulsion from what his age was learning to think of as the masses, that is not attractive. But the existential panic is overwhelming in its raw sincerity, and cries out to be taken seriously. At the time of his letter to Lou, Rilke did not yet know where that panic might lead him, and in particular despaired of being able to transform it into a thing, an enduring work:
If I had been able to make something of the fears I had, if I had been able to fashion things out of them, things of true repose, which it is serenity and freedom to create and which, once they exist, are calming, all would have been well with me. But the fears that beset me every day roused up a hundred other fears, and, within me, they all rose up against me […]
What he had not yet been able to achieve, Rilke told Lou, was ‘to make things out of fear’.
It is here, in the disturbing experience of Paris, in the first sustained attempt to put that experience into words in this and other letters of summer 1903 to Lou Andreas-Salomé, and in the resolve to ‘make things out of fear’, that we find the seed that grew, over a six-year writing period from February 1904 to January 1910, into The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
The novel is brimful of autobiographical detail, if by that we mean Rilke's own observations in Paris. The woman at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the man coming round the corner from the Champs-Elysées carrying a crutch, the woman pushing a barrel-organ on a hand-cart, the shopkeepers in the rue de Seine, the man selling cauliflowers from a barrow of vegetables, the patients waiting at the Salpêtrière, the women feeding the birds, the man with St Vitus's dance, and (in the second part of the novel, where people seen on the streets of Paris make far fewer appearances) the blind newspaper-seller – all of these will have been seen by Rilke, and some can be discovered in his letters. But once they have been woven into the fabric of the text, their effect ceases to seem merely autobiographical. Instead, the paraded ‘transients’, simply by lacking their names and identities, have the effect of shading Rilke's named narrator with colourlessness. An illuminating comparison might be made with the unnamed convalescent who narrates Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840). The man is defined by the ‘clerks’ and ‘pick-pockets’ and ‘gamblers’, the ‘street beggars’ and ‘ghastly invalids’ and ‘modest young girls’, the ‘drunkards’ and ‘organ-grinders’ and ‘exhausted laborers’ he observes on the city streets – defined (for his existence consists in observing) but not individuated (for he himself remains shadowy and indistinct). Rilke's Malte, like Poe's narrator, is an observer, and the more we are shown the people and things that he sees, the more we become conscious that Malte himself is a blank screen on to which images can be projected, rather than a sharply contoured and richly realized individual.
As the comparison with Poe's story implies, there is a literary dimension to Rilke's purely personal response to the city, a dimension that involves literary responses to the modern city. The experience of cities so populous as to render individuality an anachronistic anomaly was still relatively novel in Rilke's time. His response to it, as transmuted into the Notebooks, takes its place in a fictional lineage that passes from Poe and Charles Dickens through Knut Hamsun and Andrei Bely to James Joyce and Alfred Döblin, writers who all sought to make sense, in very different ways, of the metropolitan onslaught on the self. As cities sprawled, and the crowds inhabiting them became larger, and the technology (first railways and tramcars, then automobiles) became louder and more unavoidable, it could seem that human values and human contact were being stifled. The narrator of Hamsun's Hunger (1890), who spends the duration of the novel wandering the streets of Christiania (Oslo), admittedly bears a family resemblance to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment, 1866), but what is more striking is the frantic, pressured, often panic-stricken nature of his responses to the people with whom he comes into contact. This man exhibits, in every nervous recoil, in every frenetic surge of hope, the sense of dislocation and alienation that was coming to be widely recognized as a characteristic response to the experience of anonymity in the crowded modern city. In its exploration of this traumatic state, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is very much a novel of its time – of the Age of the Masses.
But if the oppressive experience of the city, and his determination to take his fear and make something lasting of it, were the trigger for Rilke's writing, there was more than mere autobiography, and more too than mere ‘autotherapy’ (Donald Prater's apt word), in his conception of his main character.
Rilke had
developed an informed and steadily deepening interest in Scandinavia generally, and Denmark in particular. The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard was important to him, and the Danish novelists Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885) and Herman Bang (1857–1912) meant a great deal in his personal canon; Rilke's idea of dying ‘one's own death’ was perhaps sparked by a passage in Jacobsen's Fru Marie Grubbe (1876), while Malte's mother, with her fear of needles, has been found to owe a debt to the mother in Herman Bang's novel The White House (1898), which Rilke had reviewed in 1902. In the Swedish writer Ellen Key (1849–1926), Rilke found an advocate of his own work who was able to organize invitations to Denmark and Sweden, with the result that from 1904 onwards he had increasing opportunity to steep himself in the spirit of northern Europe. His Danish narrator, complete with his family ramifications and his recounting of the death of King Christian IV, emerged from a real engagement with the literature and history of Scandinavia: in that sense, Rilke's protagonist is a response to the world outside rather than the world within. Though the Notebooks is a work with autobiographical dimensions, its gaze is consistently on other people, other things, other experiences.
Moreover, in long conversations in 1925 with his French translator, Maurice Betz, Rilke left no doubt of his abiding interest in a Norwegian writer of no especial fame, Sigbjørn Obstfelder (1866–1900), whose Diary of a Priest he had read in 1901 and whose posthumous works in German translation he had reviewed enthusiastically in November 1904, when his own work on the Notebooks was begun but not yet far advanced. The journal form of both books may have confirmed Rilke in his instinct to assemble a collage rather than a conventional narrative (though a vogue for writing the ‘papers’ of fictional characters was observable around the turn of the nineteenth century in other writers Rilke was probably reading, from Hamsun and André Gide to Ricarda Huch and Robert Walser); in addition, Obstfelder had died young, and in Paris, and had ‘probably not expressed the full greatness of his noble, troubled soul in his work’, as Rilke put it to Betz, and this evidently appealed to Rilke's sense of the adverse terms on which his own protagonist existed with the world. In the air of crisis that is fundamental to Malte's presence throughout the Notebooks, and furthermore his illness, his consciousness of being the last of his line (his phrase ‘the breaking of the helmet’, after the perforation of his father's heart, pages 101–3, recalls an ancient custom when a great family became extinct), and his self-consciously exquisite taste and rarefied reading, Rilke's Dane of course shares traits with fictional heroes of the fin-de-siècle decadence, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans's des Esseintes (Against Nature, 1884). Here too we are in the presence of a literary craft carefully deliberated and wrought, and Malte's passing remarks on a Charles Baudelaire or Gustave Flaubert only serve to remind us that Rilke was steadily thinking through the fundamentals of his vocation.
Perhaps it would be unnecessary to stress that The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a fiction that goes beyond the autobiographical, were it not that Rilke himself, in comments that allowed Malte the near-autonomous existence of an alter ego, gave frequent reminders that self and fiction are intricately interwoven. Maurice Betz reported him as saying:
The unity I needed was no longer that of a poem but that of a personality which, in all its infinite diversity, had to come to life, from start to finish. The rhythm that forced itself upon me was chopped and broken, and I was drawn in many an unforeseen direction. One moment it was childhood memories, the next Paris, then the atmosphere of Denmark, then images that seemed to have no connection with my own self. At times I well nigh merged into Malte, at others I lost him from sight: if I made a journey, he seemed out of my range, but once I returned to Paris I found him again, more present than ever. Many pages I wrote without knowing what would come of them. Some were letters, others notes, fragments of a diary, prose poems. Despite the density of this prose, which was quite new to me, I was forever groping about or heading off on a seemingly never-ending march into the dark. But in the end it turned out that he really was there, my companion of so many nights, my friend and confidant. He had accompanied me to Venice, he had wandered the streets of Paris as I had, he had stood with me in the shadow of Les Alyscamps, together we had met the shepherd at Les Baux. In Copenhagen I saw him on the Langelinie, we met in the yew avenues of Fredensborg, he recalled the heavily sweet scent of phlox in summer, his childhood was mine, he was my self and was someone else.
What ending can there be to such a book? The question is not only a technical one, though there is a sense in which this compilation of everyday observations, historical reports, ghost stories, childhood recollections and so on need not obviously come to a conclusion. The question is also teleological. To end the existence of so intimate an alter ego would be like ending one's own existence. Goethe had solved this problem, in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by overlapping his own experience and that of an acquaintance who had committed suicide: this gave him the ending he needed, an ending which might conventionally be thought inevitable. Rilke's Malte has been in a state of crisis since the beginning of the Notebooks, and, while it is true that the second part exposes him less to the everyday horrors of the detested city, it is striking that the stories he now sees a meaning in retelling – the death of Charles the Bold, the sermons and recantation of Pope John XXII – draw their power to fascinate from grim physical facts of mortality and equally grim metaphysical dispute over life beyond the mortal. In the first part, the hard dying of Chamberlain Brigge was offset by a relaxed approach to familiar spirits of the dead, and by a steady, quasi-musical movement towards celebration of the senses and of love in the Dame à la licorne tapestries; in the second part, the triumph of love is balanced against the triumph of death, and it is by no means clear which will emerge as the more persuasive, more enduring triumph.
Rilke discarded two versions of an ending that described Leo Tolstoy, whom he had visited in Russia together with Lou Andreas-Salomé. These endings confront Tolstoy's fear of death, which had powerfully affected Rilke, as this extract from the second of his drafts demonstrates:
What if he were to have been right, in all his fear of death, because he would now end his life as one who was interrupted at the very beginning? In that house there was not one room where he had not been afraid of dying. […] And with an unparalleled horror he realized that what was within him was scarcely begun; that, if he were to die now, he would not be capable of living in the afterlife; that they would be ashamed, over there, of his rudimentary soul, and would hide it away in eternity like a premature baby.
To discard writing of this order was surely a wise decision, not only because within itself it is ungenerous in tone, in a way that very little else is ever ungenerous in Rilke, but also because it offers no sense of an ending to the complex of experiences which we have been offered in the name of Malte. In the event, Rilke had it both ways, choosing both love and death. His apparent instinct that the triumph of love should be the greater, an instinct that places him on the side of life and accords well with many passages throughout the Notebooks, was difficult to bring to narrative fruition (since this most plotless of anti-novels conspicuously lacks any significant object of Malte's love – other, that is, than Malte himself). But in ending with his interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son, with ‘that unprecedented gesture that no one had ever seen before, that gesture of supplication with which he threw himself at their feet, imploring them not to show love’ (Rodin's sculpture shows the prodigal on his knees), Rilke contrived to give a new dimension to the self-abnegation he had admired in (women) lovers throughout his text. To set ourselves aside from the love of those who suppose themselves closest to us (so the contention seems to run) is to place ourselves in a position of readiness for a higher love, and by extension a position of acquiescence in death.
This stance, which relinquishes love as it is conventionally known in the home and in the family (and so implicitly vindicates Rilke in the conduct of a life devoted to his art),
prompted Ellen Key to write in her review of the Notebooks, in October 1910, that ‘a spiritual condition such as Brigge's bears within it suffering so great that it occasions suffering in others’. The American writer William Gass wrote more bluntly in 1984: ‘The Notebooks' last words make a dismal sound.’ It may be so. But it is appealing to think that his story of the prodigal was the closest Rilke could approach to a way forward out of the maze of irreconcilables he had written into being. I like to imagine that when Rilke arrived in Leipzig in January 1910, with the manuscript in his luggage and a growing sense of having at last completed an immense and difficult labour that had weighed upon him cruelly for years, and was welcomed into the warm hospitality of his publisher Anton Kippenberg and his charming wife Katharina, and given for a fortnight the services of a typist in a quiet room in a turret of the Kippenberg home, he chose to accept that the Notebooks could quite simply end with that sentence: ‘But He was not yet willing.’ With no need for anything more. For a fiction, like a poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And ‘not yet’ leaves a window open for hope: it does not mean ‘never’.
Michael Hulse
University of Warwick
June 2008
Notes to the Introduction
The jubilant letters Rilke wrote in February 1922 following completion of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus to (among others) Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Gertrud Ouckama Knoop (mother of the deceased Wera, to whose memory the Sonnets were dedicated), Anton Kippenberg (Rilke's publisher) and Lou Andreas-Salomé, are to be found in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1950), pp. 740–55. His letter of 9 February 1922 to Kippenberg, in which he wrote of the ‘storm of spirit and heart’, is on p. 741. His sense of ‘taking dictation within’ was expressed in a letter (now held in the German Literature Center, Pittsburgh) of 7 February 1922 to Professor Jean Strohl, a Zurich friend; Rilke's phrase, ‘une dictée intérieure’, is quoted in Donald Prater's A Ringing Glass (see Further Reading), p. 347.