The World of Yesterday

  I wandered through the streets, seeing so much, looking for so much else in my impatience! For the Paris of 1904 was not the only one I wanted to know; my senses and my heart were also in search of the Paris of Henri IV and Louis XIV, of Napoleon and the Revolution, of Rétif de la Bretonne and Balzac, Zola and Charles-Louis Philippe, Paris with all its streets, its characters, its incidents. Here, as always in France, I felt how much strength a great literary tradition, with veracity as its ideal, can give back to its people, endowing them with immortality. In fact even before I saw it with my own eyes, I had become intellectually familiar in advance with everything in Paris through the art of the poets, novelists, and political and social historians who described it. It merely came to life when I arrived there. Actually seeing the city was really a case of recognition, the Greek anagnosis that Aristotle praises as the greatest and most mysterious of all artistic pleasures. All the same, you can never know a nation or a city in all its most secret details through books, or even by walking indefatigably around it, only through the best of those who live there. It is intellectual friendship with its people that gives you insight into the real connections between them and their land; outside observations convey a misleading and over-hasty image.

  Such friendships were granted to me, and the best was with Léon Bazalgette. Thanks to my close connection with Verhaeren, whom I visited twice a week at St Cloud, I had been safeguarded in advance from being caught up, like most foreigners, in the dubious circle of international painters and men of letters who frequented the Café du Dôme and were really much the same wherever they went, in Munich, Rome or Berlin. With Verhaeren, however, I came to know those artists and writers who, in the midst of this lively and opulent city, lived in creative quiet as if on a desert island with their work; I saw Renoir’s studio, and met his best pupils. To all outward appearance, the life of these Impressionists whose work now fetches tens of thousands of dollars was just like the life of a petit bourgeois living on a small income—a little house with a studio built on to it, none of the showy splendours of the grand villas imitating the Pompeian style favoured by Lenbach2 and other celebrities in Munich. The writers whom I soon came to know personally lived as simply as the artists. Most of them held minor public office in a job which did not call for much strenuous work. The great respect for intellectual achievement felt in France, from the lowest to the highest ranks of society, meant that this ingenious method of finding discreet sinecures for poets and writers who did not earn large sums from their work had been devised years ago. For instance, they might be appointed to posts as librarians in the Naval Ministry or the Senate. Such employment gave them a small salary and not much work to do, since the Senators did not often want a book, and the fortunate occupant of the benefice could sit in comfort in the elegant old Senate Palace, with the Jardin du Luxembourg outside the windows, spending his working hours writing verse at his leisure without having to worry about getting paid for it. Modest security of this kind was enough for such writers. Others were doctors, like Duhamel and Durtain later; or ran a little picture gallery, like Charles Vildrac; or like Romains and Jean-Richard Bloch taught in grammar schools; they might keep office hours in a news agency, as Paul Valéry did in the Agence Havas, or be assistant editors in publishing houses. But none of them were pretentious enough to base their lives on the independent pursuit of their artistic inclinations, like those who came after them and had inflated ideas of themselves as a result of films and large print runs of their works. What these writers wanted from their modest posts, sought without professional ambition, was only a modicum of security in everyday life that would guarantee them independence in their true work. Thanks to that security, they could ignore the huge, corrupt daily newspapers of Paris, and write without any fee for the little reviews that were kept going at personal sacrifice, resigning themselves quietly to the fact that their plays would be performed only in small art theatres, and at first their names would not be known outside their own circle. For decades, only a tiny elite knew anything about Claudel, Péguy, Rolland, Suarès and Valéry. Alone among the people of this busy, fast-moving city, they seemed to be in no hurry. Living and working quietly, for a quiet life without raucous publicity mattered more to them than thrusting themselves forward; they were not ashamed to live in a modest way so that they could think freely and boldly in their artistic work. Their wives cooked and kept house; it was a simple life and so their friendly evening gatherings were all the warmer. They sat on cheap wicker chairs around a table laid with a plain check cloth—nothing grander than you would have found in the home of the workman on the same floor of their building, but they felt free and at ease. They had no telephones, no typewriters, no secretaries, they avoided all technical equipment just as they avoided the intellectual apparatus of propaganda; they wrote their books by hand as writers did a thousand years ago, and even in the big publishing houses such as the Mercure de France there was no dictation and no complicated machinery. No money was wasted on prestige and outward show. All these young French writers lived, like the people of France as a whole, for the joys of life, though to be sure in their most sublime form, joy found in creative work. These new friends of mine, with their straightforward humanity, revised my ideas of French writers; their way of life was so different from that depicted by Bourget and other novelists of the time, to whom the salon meant all the world! And their wives taught me a great deal about the shockingly false picture we had gained at home, from our reading, of the Frenchwoman as a mondaine bent only on adventures, extravagance and the sight of her own reflection in the mirror. I never saw better, quieter housewives than in that fraternal circle—thrifty, modest, and cheerful even in the most straitened circumstances, conjuring up wonderful little dishes on a tiny stove, looking after their children, and at the same time in sympathy with their husbands’ intellectual interests. Only someone who has lived in such circles as a friend and comrade knows what the real France is like.

  What distinguished Léon Bazalgette—my greatest friend among them, a man whose name is unjustly forgotten in most accounts of modern French literature—as an extraordinary figure in that literary generation was his readiness to lavish his creative powers exclusively on works in foreign languages, thus saving all his wonderful intensity for those people he loved. In him, a good comrade by nature, I met the embodiment of a self-sacrificing human being, truly devoted and seeing his vocation entirely in helping the important figures of his time to be properly appreciated, not even indulging in well-justified pride in discovering and promoting them. His active enthusiasm was merely a natural function of his moral consciousness. Although fervently anti-militarist, he was rather military in appearance, and he showed the cordiality of a true friend in everything he did. Always ready to offer help and advice, staunchly honourable, punctual as clockwork, he cared about everything that happened to others but never sought any personal advantage. Where a friend’s welfare was concerned, time and money meant nothing to him—and he had friends all over the world, a small but select circle of them. He had spent ten years bringing Walt Whitman to the French by translating his poems and writing a monumental biography of him. With Whitman before him as the model of a free man who loved the world, it became his aim in life to direct the intellectual gaze of his nation beyond its own borders, making his countrymen more straightforward and friendly, He was the best of Frenchmen, and at the same time passionately opposed to nationalism.

  We soon became friends as close to each other as brothers; we neither of us felt solely devoted to our fatherlands, we enjoyed serving the works of others devotedly and without any outward advantage, and we saw intellectual independence as the great aim in life. I first came to know the ‘underground’ of France through him; when I read later, in Romain Rolland,3 how Olivier met the German Jean-Christophe I felt almost as if it were an account of our personal experience. But the best and to me the most unforgettable part of our friendship was that it held good in spite of a delicate and persistent problem
which, in normal circumstances, would have been sure to stand in the way of honest and genuine intimacy between two writers. The delicate problem was that Bazalgette, a wonderfully honest man, disliked everything I was writing at the time very much. He liked me personally, and felt respect and gratitude for my devotion to the work of Verhaeren. Whenever I came to Paris, he was sure to be there at the station to welcome me; he helped me wherever he could; we agreed better than brothers on all important matters. But he did not like my own works at all. He had read poetry and prose of mine in the translations by Henri Guilbeaux—who went on to play an important part in the First World War as a friend of Lenin—and he frankly said he did not like them. They had nothing to do with reality, he unsparingly told me; this was esoteric literature—which he hated—and he was annoyed to find me, of all people, writing it. Absolutely honest with himself, he would make no concessions on this point, even for the sake of civility. When he was editing a journal, for instance, he asked for my help—but in finding him German contributors of substance, meaning people who would write him contributions better than mine. He stuck to his guns in neither asking for nor publishing a line by me, his closest friend, although at the same time he self-sacrificingly and without asking any fee, purely out of true friendship, revised the translation into French of one of my books for a publisher. The fact that this curious circumstance never once in ten years made any difference to our fraternal friendship made it particularly dear to me. And no approval ever pleased me more than Bazalgette’s when, during the Great War, I had finally reached a new kind of personal expression in my work, and I destroyed all that had gone before. I knew that his approval of my new approach was as honest as his firm rejection of it had been for the last ten years.

  If I write the great name of Rainer Maria Rilke here in the pages devoted to my days in Paris, even though he was a German poet, it is because I spent most time with him there, and in the best way, and in my mind’s eye I always see his face against the background of the city that he loved more than any other. When I think of him today, and of other masters of words that might have been written in finely wrought gold, when I think of those revered names that shone down on my youth, like constellations far beyond my reach, a sad question irresistibly comes into my mind: can there ever again be such pure poets, devoted only to lyrical form, in our present time of turbulence and general destruction? Am I lovingly mourning a lost generation, one without any immediate descendants in our own days as the hurricanes of fate storm through them? These writers wanted no kind of outward show, not the interest of the public at large, no honours and dignities and profit, all they wanted was to link verse to verse perfectly in quiet yet passionate endeavour, every line singing with music, shining with colour, glowing with images. A guild formed, an almost monastic order in the midst of our noisy lives; they deliberately turned away from everyday life, and thought nothing in the universe more important than the delicate sound—I say delicate, although it will outlast the thunder of our days—when rhyme fitting to rhyme set in motion an indescribable rhythm that, more softly than the sound of a leaf falling in the wind, yet vibrated in the most distant souls. Think how inspiring it was for us young people to be in the presence of such stern servants and guardians of language, admirably true to themselves, loving only the resonant word, a word meant not for today and the newspapers but for what would last and endure. You felt almost ashamed to look at them, for they led such quiet lives, as if inconspicuous or invisible—one in rustic style in the country, another in a small career, a third as a ‘passionate pilgrim’ travelling the world, all of them known only to a few but loved all the more deeply by those few for it. One lived in Germany, another in France, yet another in Italy, but they all inhabited the same homeland, for they really lived only in their poetry. In sternly renouncing everything ephemeral while they created works of art, each also made a work of art out of his own life. It always seems to me amazing that we had such flawless poets among us in our youth. But for that very reason I also keep wondering, with a kind of secret anxiety: can such artists sworn entirely to the art of poetry exist in our own times, in our new way of life, which chases people out of their own peace of mind like animals running from a forest fire? I know that poets do miraculously appear again and again over time, and Goethe’s moving and consoling words in his dirge for Lord Byron are eternally true: “For the earth will bring them forth as it brought them forth before.” Again and again such poets miraculously appear, and at intervals immortality always gives this precious pledge even to the most unworthy of times. But is it not true that ours, of all times, is one that allows no quiet moments even to the purest and most private minds, none of the stillness to help them wait, mature, meditate and collect their thoughts that they were granted in the kindlier, calmer time of the European pre-war world? I do not know how highly all these poets, Valéry, Verhaeren, Rilke, Pascoli, Francis Jammes are still regarded today, how much they mean to a generation that has been deafened for years by the clattering millwheel of propaganda, and twice by the thunder of the guns, instead of hearing this soft music. All I know, and I feel it my duty to say so gratefully, is what a lesson and a delight the presence of such poets was to us, artists sworn to the sacred cause of perfection in a world already becoming mechanised. Looking back at my life, I am aware of no more important part of it than the privilege of being personally close to many of them, often able to turn my early admiration into an enduring friendship.

  Of all these poets, perhaps none lived a quieter, more mysterious and inconspicuous life than Rilke. But his was not a deliberately assumed solitude, or one draped in priestly and mystical airs such as those adopted, for instance, by Stefan George4 in Germany. Stillness, so to speak, formed around him wherever he went and wherever he was. Because he avoided any kind of fuss and even his own fame—that “sum of all the misunderstandings gathering around his name”, as he once aptly put it himself—the wave of curiosity surging around him in vain reached only his name, never the man himself. It was difficult to get in touch with Rilke. He had no house, no address where he could be visited, no home, he did not live anywhere permanently, he held no official position. He was always travelling through the world, and no one, not even Rilke himself, knew ahead of time where he would go next. To his extremely sensitive and impressionable mind, any firm decision, any plan or advance announcement was too much of a burden, so you never met him except by chance. You might be standing in an Italian art gallery when you sensed, without being really aware how or from where, a quiet, friendly smile coming your way. Only then did you recognise blue eyes that, when they looked at you, brought an inner light to animate Rilke’s features, not in themselves striking. In fact his unobtrusive appearance was the deepest mystery of his nature. Thousands of people may have passed the young man whose fair moustache drooped in a slightly melancholy way, and whose rather Slavonic face was not notable for any one feature, without guessing that this was a poet, one of the greatest of our century. The distinctive quality of his restraint became obvious only when you knew him more closely. He had an indescribably quiet way of approaching and speaking to you. When he entered a room full of company, he did it so quietly that hardly anyone noticed him. Then he would sit listening in silence, sometimes instinctively looking up when an idea seemed to enter his mind, and when he himself began to speak it was never with any affectation or vigorous emphasis. He spoke naturally and simply, like a mother telling her child a fairy tale, and just as lovingly; it was wonderful to listen to him and hear how graphically and cogently he discussed even the most unimportant subject. However, as soon as he felt that he was the centre of attention in a company of any size, he would break off and go back to listening in attentive silence. Every movement and every gesture of his was gentle, and even when he laughed, it was a sound that merely hinted at laughter. A muted tone was a necessity to him, so nothing disturbed him more than noise and any kind of emotional vehemence. “People who spout their emotions like blood exhaust me,” he once
told me, “and so I can take Russians only in very small doses, like a liqueur.” Order, cleanliness and silence were real physical necessities to him, and so was moderate behaviour. Having to travel in an overcrowded tram or sitting in a noisy bar could upset him for hours. He could not bear vulgarity of any kind, and although he lived in straitened circumstances, he always dressed with the utmost care, cleanliness and good taste. His clothing itself was a masterpiece of well thought-out and carefully composed discretion, and there was always some unobtrusive but very personal touch about it, some little thing that secretly gave him pleasure, such as a thin silver bracelet around his wrist, for his aesthetic sense of perfection and symmetry extended to the most intimate personal details. I once saw him in his rooms packing his case before leaving—he rightly declined my help as irrelevant—and it was like a mosaic, every single item lovingly lowered into the place carefully left free for it. It would have been sacrilege to destroy that almost floral arrangement by lending a helping hand. And he applied his fundamental sense of beauty to the most insignificant details. Not only did he write his manuscripts carefully on the finest paper in his rounded calligraphic hand, so that line matched line as if drawn with a ruler, he chose good paper for even the most unimportant letter, and that calligraphic handwriting, pure and round, covered it regularly right up to the margin. He never, even in the most hastily written note, allowed himself to cross out a word. Once he felt that some sentence or expression was not quite right, he would rewrite the whole letter with the utmost patience. Rilke never let anything that was less than perfect leave his hands.