THE SELFISH AND SENSITIVE, SNOBBISH AND EMPATHETIC RAINER MARIA RILKE
Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke
By Ralph Freedman
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 640 pages, $35
Like all real poets, who must be uncompromising perfectionists in relation to their art, but must also possess a feeling heart and a streak of emotional impulsiveness in order to have something to write about, Rainer Maria Rilke lived a life of contradictions. He could be selfish and indifferent to the welfare of others, virtually abandoning his infant daughter and ignoring repeated summonses to his father’s death bed. Yet he was exquisitely sensitive, subtle and mystical, a poet whose lyrics reflect a struggle to reconcile the world’s beauty with its pain. He was ambitious, a snob and an esthete, but he wrote verse in the voices of the downtrodden and the outcast–“The Song of the Orphan,” “The Song of the Suicide,” “The Song of the Dwarf,” “The Song of the Idiot.” His empathy made him exclaim to his friend and confidante, Lou Salome, “Oh, Lou, I’ve been tormented so much because I understood all these people.” In short, Rainer Maria Rilke, arguably the greatest German poet of the 20th Century, spent his brief and difficult life in what he called “making objects out of fear”–transmuting his terror and doubt and occasional joy into poems.
It is precisely this process that Ralph Freedman addresses in “Life of a Poet,” announcing in his preface, “This biographical narrative explores the reflections and distortions of Rainer Maria Rilke’s life in the mirror of his art.” Freedman’s evident awareness of the difficulty of this undertaking may be what accounts for the rather subdued tone of his narrative.
Freedman’s strengths as a biographer–and they are indispensable–are the respect he bears for his subject, the maturity of his judgment, the thoroughness of his research and his vast erudition. Together they prevent him from committing the sin that many biographers commit and that Hamlet decries when he accuses Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern of attempting to “pluck out the heart” of his mystery–that of assuming that another human being, acting with the full, unpredictable force of passion, imagination, intelligence and whim, is a puzzle that can neatly be solved. Freedman knows that what lies at the root of personality and the process of creation are exquisitely complex mechanisms.
Indeed, we find Rilke agonizing over this very point midway through Freedman’s narrative. The year is 1912, and the poet has already established the pattern of his life; traveling restlessly across Europe, rushing into feverish intellectual intimacy with young women but frequently withdrawing when they respond more concretely; and living on an income scraped together from art criticism, slender royalties and the kindness of friends and patrons. Nevertheless, his reputation continues to grow. Although his chief period of sexual and emotional intimacy with the remarkable writer Lou Salome took place several years before, Rilke yet regards her as his greatest intimate, calling her the one person who understands him.
As 1912 ends, he is plunged into despair by the unpredictable nature of his art. He has been working as if possessed, telling a friend, “I am writing like a madman . . . the voice that uses me is greater than I.” He adds, “I rustle like a bush in which the wind is stirring, and I must let it happen to me.”
To become an instrument in this way is both ecstasy and terror. But there is something more frightening than being overmastered by one’s art and that is to feel that sense of possession drain away, so that talent, willpower and the craving to succeed remain, but not the demon or angel that compels the flow of great verse. There were several periods in Rilke’s life when he wrote with the frenzied assurance of someone taking dictation from the muse, sometimes producing 30 poems in a week.
There were also years when he wrote nothing. The difficulty of what he had undertaken made him despair. Even as he began what is often regarded as his greatest work, the “Duino Elegies,” he seriously considered psychoanalysis, then drew back, writing to Lou Salome that Freud’s method would damage his art and leave him with “a self corrected with red ink like a child’s exercise in school.”
His decision not to use analysis to relieve his suffering rested on advice received years before from the sculptor Rodin, to let his life and personality be utterly consumed in the service of his work. This idea resonated in a later poem about St. Francis, who was in Rilke’s words “devoured . . . (and) so fully enjoyed that now the entire world was filled with the resplendent taste of his essence.”
As this passage illustrates, Rilke’s work blends vividness with obscurity, concrete images with ideas difficult to grasp. Wisely, Freedman, a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton and author of a biography of Herman Hesse, does not attempt to clarify Rilke’s work to the point of simplicity. Instead, he gives us a thorough understanding of the ideas shaping the lines. Gradually we arrive at a sense that the reality Rilke strove to present was the reality of the world as it is experienced by a particular person, in the mind and emotions. “Do not be misled if I often call up images of the past,” the poet wrote. “Even what is past still exists in the fullness of its present, if instead of focusing on content we focus on intensity. . . .”
Acknowledging the power of the mental life, as Rilke did, it is not surprising that he attributed an illness arising in 1925 to psychological causes. Nevertheless, weakness and other physical symptoms must also have suggested a more disquieting conclusion, for during this period he also chose an epitaph for himself: “Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,/ To be nobody’s sleep under so many/ Eyelids.”
Freedman is eloquent on the subject of this austere, haiku-like utterance. And he reminds us that the last phase of Rilke’s illness was ushered in by his cutting a rose for a female visitor, and being pricked by a thorn. The ensuing infection, which finally permitted the disease to be identified as leukemia, hastened his death.
In concluding, Freedman writes of a memorial service oration that “characterized Rilke in a way that would have met most precisely with his life’s purpose–being praised as the master of the craft.”
