The World of Yesterday (18 page)

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 George
4
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.

This muted and at the same time concentrated quality of his had a compelling effect on everyone who knew him well. It was unimaginable for Rilke himself to do anything violent, and nor could anyone else in his company; the powerful resonance of his silence dispelled any inclination to make a loud, assertive noise. His restraint was expressed as an educational and moral force, mysteriously exerting continuous influence. After a conversation of any length with him you were incapable of any kind of vulgarity for hours, even days. On the other hand, it is true that this constant moderation of his nature, his unwillingness ever to give himself fully, set limits at an early stage to any particular warmth of expression. I think that few could boast of having been ‘friends’ with Rilke. Almost no one is ever addressed as a friend in the six published volumes of his correspondence, and
he seems to have used the familiar
du
pronoun to hardly anyone after his schooldays. With his extraordinary sensitivity, he could not bear to let anyone or anything come too close to him, and in particular anything strongly masculine made him physically uncomfortable. He found it easier to converse with women. He wrote to them a great deal, and liked writing to them, and was much less constrained in their presence. Perhaps it was the absence of grating, guttural sounds from a woman’s voice that he liked; harsh voices positively made him suffer. I still see Rilke before me in conversation with an aristocratic grandee, his back hunched and his shoulders tense, even keeping his eyes cast down so that they would not show how unwell the man’s unpleasant falsetto made him feel. But it was good to be with him when he was well-disposed to someone; then you felt his inner kindness—although he rarely expressed it in words and gestures—like a warming, healing charisma that reached your heart.

One reason why the shy, reserved Rilke appeared far more expansive in the warm-hearted city of Paris may have been that his work and his name were still unknown there, and anonymity always made him feel happier and more liberated. I visited him in two different rented rooms in Paris. They were both plain and tasteless in themselves, yet the sense of beauty that ruled him immediately lent them its quiet stylishness. He could never take a room in a large boarding house with neighbours making a lot of noise; he preferred an old if less comfortable building where he could make himself at home, and wherever he was his sense of order immediately imposed harmony on his surroundings, in line with his own nature. He never had many things around him, but there were always flowers in a vase or a bowl, perhaps a woman’s gift, perhaps lovingly brought home by himself. And there were always books in shelves on the wall, beautifully bound or carefully covered in paper, for he loved books like pet animals. His pencils and pens lay perfectly aligned on his desk, new sheets of paper were stacked in a rectangular pile, and a
Russian icon and a Catholic crucifix which, I think, went with him on all his travels gave a slightly religious touch to the place where he worked, not that his sense of religion was linked to any particular dogma. You felt that every detail had been carefully chosen and was tenderly cared for. If you lent him a book that he had not yet read, it would be returned to you wrapped in smooth tissue paper and tied with a coloured ribbon, like a present; I still remember how he brought the manuscript of his
Die Weise von Liebe und Tod
—The Song of Love and Death—to my room, a precious gift, and to this day I have the ribbon that was tied around it. But best of all was to go walking in Paris with Rilke, for that meant seeing the importance of the most insignificant things, as if with new eyes; he noticed every little thing, and if the names on the brass plates of businesses seemed to him rhythmical he would recite them out loud. Knowing every nook and cranny of the city of Paris was his passion. Once, when we were visiting mutual friends, I told him that the previous day I had happened to come upon the old
barrière
where the last victims of the guillotine had been buried in the Cimetière de Picpus, among them André Chénier. I described the touching little expanse of grass with its scattered graves, a place that strangers seldom visited, and how on the way back I saw, through the open gate of a convent, some
béguines
5
telling their rosaries without a word, and walking in a circle as if in a devout reverie. It was one of the few times I saw that quiet, self-controlled man almost impatient; he had to see it all for himself, he said, both André Chénier’s grave and the convent. Would I take him there? We went the very next day. He stood looking at that lonely cemetery in a kind of enchanted silence, and called it “the most poetic burial place in Paris”. But on the way back the convent gate turned out to be closed. I was able to observe the silent patience that he had mastered both in life and in his works. “Let’s wait for our chance,” he said, and placed himself, head slightly bent, where he could see through the gate if it opened.
We waited like that for perhaps twenty minutes. Then a nun came along the street and rang the bell. “Now,” he breathed in quiet excitement. But the nun had noticed him standing there in silence, listening—as I said earlier, you noticed everything about him in the air, from a distance—and went up to him asking if he was waiting for something. He gave her that soft smile of his that immediately made anyone trust him, and said frankly that he would so much have liked to see the cloisters. She was very sorry, said the nun, returning his smile, but she couldn’t let him in. However, she said, if he went to the gardener’s cottage next door, he could get a good view from the window on the upper floor. And so his wish was granted in this as in so much else.

Our paths crossed several times later, but whenever I think of Rilke, I see him in Paris. He was spared the sight of the city’s saddest hour.

Meeting people of his rare kind was a great advantage to a novice, but I had yet to receive the crucial lesson, one that was to influence my entire life. It came to me by chance. At Verhaeren’s, we had entered into a discussion with an art historian who lamented the fact that, as he said, the days of the great sculptors and painters were over. I strongly disagreed. Wasn’t Rodin still alive, no less of a creative artist than the great names of the past? I began enumerating his works, and as always when you are opposing a contrary opinion, I soon got quite heated on the subject. Verhaeren smiled to himself. “A man who loves Rodin so much ought to meet him in person,” he said when I had finished. “I’m visiting his studio tomorrow. If you don’t mind, I’ll take you with me.”

If I didn’t mind? I couldn’t sleep for my delight. But when I met Rodin my voice dried up. I couldn’t say a word to him, and stood among the statues like one of them myself. Strangely enough, he seemed pleased with this awkwardness of mine, for
when we left the old man asked if I would like to see his real studio in Meudon, and even asked me to lunch there. That was the first lesson—great men are always the kindliest.

The second lesson was that they nearly always lead the simplest lives. At the home of this man whose fame filled the world, whose works lineament by lineament, were as vividly present to our generation as our closest friends, you ate as simply as at the table of a moderately prosperous farmer—good nourishing meat, a few olives, plenty of fruit, all washed down by strong country wine. That gave me more courage, and in the end I was speaking freely again, as if I had known this old man and his wife well for years.

After lunch we went over to the studio. It was a huge room full of replicas of the most important of his works, but among them stood or lay hundreds of delightful little individual studies—of a hand, an arm, a horse’s mane, a woman’s ear, usually just in plaster. To this day I still remember in detail many of these sketches, which he did just to keep his hand in, and I could talk for hours on end about that one hour I spent in Rodin’s studio. Finally the master led me over to a plinth on which his latest work, the portrait of a woman, was still hidden under damp cloths. He removed them with his heavy, furrowed peasant hands, and stepped back. Instinctively, I cried with bated breath, “
Admirable!
” and was then ashamed of saying something so banal. But with calm objectivity in which there was not a grain of vanity, he only murmured in agreement, as he viewed his own work, “
N’est-ce pas?
” Then he hesitated. “Ah, except there, by the shoulder … just a moment!” He took off his indoor jacket, put on his white coat, picked up a spatula, and with a master’s touch smoothed the shoulder of the soft feminine skin that breathed as if it were alive. Once again he stepped back. “Here, too,” he murmured. Yet again a tiny detail enhanced the effect. Then he said no more. He stepped forwards, stepped back, looked at the figure reflected in a mirror, growled and uttered indistinct
sounds, made changes and corrections. His eyes, which had been full of friendly abstraction at the lunch table, now flashed with strange light; he seemed to have grown taller and younger. He was working, working and working with all the passion and power of his mighty, heavy body. Whenever he took a vigorous step forwards or back, the floorboards creaked. But he didn’t hear them. He did not notice that a young man was standing behind him, never making a sound, his heart in his mouth, happy to be able to watch such a unique master at work. He had entirely forgotten me. To him, I simply wasn’t there. Only his creation and his work existed for him, and beyond them, unseen, the vision of absolute perfection.

This went on for quarter-of-an-hour, half-an-hour, I don’t now remember just how long. Great moments are always outside time. Rodin was so deeply absorbed in his work that a clap of thunder wouldn’t have aroused him. His movements became more and more decisive, almost irate; a kind of wildness or intoxication had come over him, he was working faster and faster. Then his hands slowed down. They seemed to have understood that there was no more for them to do. Once, twice, three times he stepped back to look, without making any more changes. Then he murmured something quietly into his beard, and replaced the cloths around the figure as affectionately as you might place a shawl around the shoulders of the woman you love. He took a deep breath, released from tension. His figure seemed to grow heavier again. The fire had gone out. Then came the great lesson for me, something I could hardly grasp. He took off his white coat, put his jacket on again, and turned to go. He had entirely forgotten me during that hour of extreme concentration. He no longer knew that a young man whom he had taken to the studio himself, to show him the place where he worked, had been standing behind him holding his breath, fascinated, as motionless as his own statues.