Today the world is bereft of one of its finest poets. Ingmar Bergman, that sweet prince of cinema, now sleeps...
From Today's New York Times:
In other cases, films were suggested by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, he said, some outside event had turned the key on some deep-seated memory — each film was a projection of some past experience.
“I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” [Bergman] told Ms. Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was — with lights, smells, sounds and people . . . I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.” ....
“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”
DISPATCHES FROM M. ALLEN CUNNINGHAM: author, editor, teacher
Monday, July 30, 2007
Monday, July 23, 2007
Newsweek: Rilke & Banville
In the current issue of Newsweek, Booker-Prize winning novelist John Banville lists the 5 literary works that have been most important to him. Among them are The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Rilke's legendary struggle to complete the great Elegies is captured in Lost Son, including the poet's terror to find himself drafted, at age 40, into the Austrian infantry -- an experience that calls up youthful miseries of his 5 years in military school.
"Is there comfort in knowing that the Fourth Elegy is done? -- does that bring solace while you lie in your numbered bed in the hurtful blackness at day's end, the barracks ashudder with so much sleep? Think on that. Hold it close. It keeps you here in this age to which you've mounted through thick protracted years. Four Elegies done. That won't be changed now, no matter what should happen. And so you are not a boy. Not a boy, alone in his cot in the great unsolitary hall impacted with sleep and bloated nightmare. No, you have traveled long. You have stood at the ramparts above the Gulf of Trieste and have heard what the storm waves said. Princess Marie's old Castle Duino rose up behind you, venerable, unshaken. It had been Dante's brief hostelry some several hundred years ago, or so you'd been told.
Four full Januaries gone since that stormy day above the sea, and an Elegy for each. That is not so paltry. Not at all. Say to yourself now the words of the First:
Strange,
those wishes no longer wished.
Strange,
to see everything, all reference points, fluttering loose
in the room.
And this being-dead is arduous
and full of getting-near-again,
that one may catch scent, gradually,
of a little eternity.
Say them, for you are not the boy who lies prostrate in the dark Kadettenschule dormitory. No, your feet now reach to the end of the numbered bed. You have grown. You have grown through years of work and you are a poet to whom a princess attends -- Doctor Serafico, she has dubbed you -- and four marvelous Elegies are finished already. Say the words and roll to sleep now. In but a few hours the reveille will arrive to decimate slumber. After that there will be nothing but marching.
Nothing.
Do not think of what you may be marching toward."
(Thanks to The Elegant Variation for the Banville link.)
Rilke's legendary struggle to complete the great Elegies is captured in Lost Son, including the poet's terror to find himself drafted, at age 40, into the Austrian infantry -- an experience that calls up youthful miseries of his 5 years in military school.
"Is there comfort in knowing that the Fourth Elegy is done? -- does that bring solace while you lie in your numbered bed in the hurtful blackness at day's end, the barracks ashudder with so much sleep? Think on that. Hold it close. It keeps you here in this age to which you've mounted through thick protracted years. Four Elegies done. That won't be changed now, no matter what should happen. And so you are not a boy. Not a boy, alone in his cot in the great unsolitary hall impacted with sleep and bloated nightmare. No, you have traveled long. You have stood at the ramparts above the Gulf of Trieste and have heard what the storm waves said. Princess Marie's old Castle Duino rose up behind you, venerable, unshaken. It had been Dante's brief hostelry some several hundred years ago, or so you'd been told.
Four full Januaries gone since that stormy day above the sea, and an Elegy for each. That is not so paltry. Not at all. Say to yourself now the words of the First:
Strange,
those wishes no longer wished.
Strange,
to see everything, all reference points, fluttering loose
in the room.
And this being-dead is arduous
and full of getting-near-again,
that one may catch scent, gradually,
of a little eternity.
Say them, for you are not the boy who lies prostrate in the dark Kadettenschule dormitory. No, your feet now reach to the end of the numbered bed. You have grown. You have grown through years of work and you are a poet to whom a princess attends -- Doctor Serafico, she has dubbed you -- and four marvelous Elegies are finished already. Say the words and roll to sleep now. In but a few hours the reveille will arrive to decimate slumber. After that there will be nothing but marching.
Nothing.
Do not think of what you may be marching toward."
(Thanks to The Elegant Variation for the Banville link.)
Friday, July 06, 2007
Interview (Part II): Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas Salome, Clara Westhoff, Paula Becker, Auguste Rodin
The following concludes my interview with Kay Callison. Begin with Part I here.
Do you think Rilke blamed himself for not being there for [Paula Modersohn-Becker] when she decided to go back to her husband?
I think the guilt that he did suffer over that is evident in the Requiem that he wrote for Paula two years later. It is one of his major poems, and it encapsulates all the driving conflicts of his own life – the idea of how strangely separate art and life can seem from one another sometimes, and the tension between this drive for artistic mastery and the resulting tragedy in one’s personal life. It’s all there in that poem.
Can you tell us how Lost Son was inspired, or a response, to Rilke’s big novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge?
Rilke’s novel was largely autobiographical and the germinating notion for me in writing Lost Son was that he himself recognized all these complex dramas in his own life and novelized them to some degree. So why not just novelize the whole life? And in doing that, somehow pay homage to this amazing novel that he did write. So there are certain elements in Lost Son that are inspired directly by scenes that occur in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. These were often scenes that actually occurred in Rilke’s life, so I hope there is an interesting interplay between Rilke’s created work and the life that produced it, and then this later novel created across this generational divide, based on Rilke’s life and what he had created.
When I first read Lost Son I will confess that I couldn’t imagine how you had so successfully described what the streets of Paris actually looked like and felt like and smelled like to Rilke when he first went there and what a shock to the senses it was to him. And then I learned about the photographer, Eugene Atget. Was finding Atget’s photographs of that time in Paris a dramatic discovery for you?
Yes. It really blew my imagination open in terms of how to capture the Paris that Rilke knew. Atget was working at the same exact time in Paris that Rilke was living there and writing his novel, based on his own experiences in Paris. We have a photographic documentation in Atget of what Rilke was documenting in the poetic manner in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. And sometimes you can hold the two bodies of work up next to each other and the parallels are just astounding. What’s more, I found out that they were living in the same apartment building in Montparnasse, at exactly the same time!
Do you suppose they knew each other?
I don’t know! That’s an amazing sort of feast for the imagination. A whole other novel could be written about a speculative friendship between Atget and Rilke. And I’ve been surprised to learn that they haven’t been discussed together much at all, that the connections and parallels between their two bodies of work haven’t been studied more closely.
Did the photographs of Eugene Atget help you get to work on writing this novel?
They did, mainly in the structural sense. Prior to discovering these photographs, the book didn’t start with Rilke’s arrival in Paris, for instance. It took me quite a while to discover that that was the entrée to this book. And that came about through Atget’s work. It enabled me to visualize the terrors that Paris caused Rilke, and to evoke how seeing all that squalor around him could send him reeling back into boyhood. And then we could find out about the relationships that had
formed him and the unique traumatic experiences that had formed his sensibility as a poet.
Well it gave you a physical presence to work with, a real place.
I think that’s a big thing for me as a writer. I’m finding it’s really hard for me to work without a strong sense of place. I need a place that’s kind of a driving character in the story. It helps me inhabit that world, and hopefully evoke it effectively.
So to do research you did travel for 10 weeks in Europe, and follow Rilke’s life path?
I did. That was a ten week pilgrimage in 2001. We went to Prague and we went to Munich where he met Lou and we ended up in the Rhone valley of Switzerland where he lived at the tower of Muzot. We walked around it in the dark. It was a very eerie and vivid experience. Later, I went back to Paris for eight weeks to do more research with the papers and letters.
At the end the novel, the teller of the tale, your persona, walks up to Rilke’s apartment in Munich where he spent those years right after World War I, and meets him on the street. Did you actually have a moment like that where you sensed his presence?
I did, actually, and it was a moment very similar to that one that’s captured at the end of the book, in Munich, on that very street corner. There’s a plaque on the house where he lived. It has his face on it and just a few words to the effect that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived here, in 1917. That was the first moment in 2001 in which I arrived at a place where Rilke had lived and spent a lot of time. It was my first experience of that feeling of living in a certain layer of time that somehow overlaps the layers of time that Rilke lived in that same place. It was a really powerful experience for me.
You have said that Lost Son was in some ways a letter sent to a ghost. What did you mean by that?
Saying it is a letter sent to a ghost is my way of highlighting the very personal nature of the novel. This is in no way a book that purports to be an authoritative portrait of Rilke. Writing a book about a figure like Rilke can only be a personal process, because someone like him, a poet so much larger than life, who’s become a figure of great legend, gets subjected to a force that the generations who try to understand his work exert upon him. He is turned into a spokesman, I guess, for a certain way of life or a certain artistic manner. That in turn creates something of a two camp situation where he’s either adored as a saint [of poetry] or he’s reviled as a profligate husband and father who failed to live up to his duties. The truth is probably neither of those things. It’s always a more deeply human, a much more complex situation than that. So really the only way to approach his story is in a very personal manner.
Can you give your take on the aesthetic that Rilke was studying with Lou and took for himself, the “thing form,” the ding-gedicht? Is that akin to what his contemporary, the great American poet William Carlos Williams, said: “No ideas but in things?”
Absolutely, and I think there’s also a parallel in T. S. Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative, of tying, somehow using an object or a thing to express the secrets of our own inner selves, all of our unfathomable conflicted feelings and emotions. Somehow when you focus your artistic attention on a “thing” and seek to create it as wholly as possible through some artistic discipline, in Rilke’s case, poetry, just by looking at a thing and rendering it, you can plumb pretty deeply a lot of human mysteries.
Right, you generate the higher idea.
Yes, so its not so much about explicitly exploring an emotion on a page as it is about exploring a thing and seeing what that draws out in him. That’s another thing that I love about Rilke! His sense of living in this world that is just teeming with things. As human beings it‘s all we have, really. We are these souls walking around in a world of objects and things and so how can we not have an incredibly intimate relationship to those things and how can they not tell us a great deal about ourselves.
And it would seem that you’ve carried that same aesthetic into both of your novels.
Oh really? I’m flattered to hear that.
The finished novel, Lost Son, is your exploration of the “thing” of Rilke’s life and the times and places he lived in, especially Paris, and I can only imagine what a watershed those photos of Atget’s must have been for you.
Yes, that’s a perfect example of what we are talking about. And that’s funny that you bring up William Carlos Williams, who was a physician, because Rilke always had this joke that started when he was with Lou. He would say well, if it gets to be that my poetry is basically destroying me because of what it puts me through, you know, I’ll become a country doctor somewhere. And he came back to that constantly in his life, in his darkest periods. He would joke to himself, or he would joke to a friend in letters, maybe it’s time to give up poetry and move to a small village and become a country doctor. It was like a fantasy that he held out for himself.
If a reader were to ask you what one important thing you would want him or her to take away from reading Lost Son, what would that be?
I love this quote by Lee Siegel that I use as an epigraph at the opening of the novel. It states the driving spirit of Lost Son: “We must understand one another or die. And we will never understand one another if we cannot understand the famous dead, those fragments of the past who sit half buried and gesturing to us on memory’s contested shores.” When we inherit these legendary poet figures and we’re given their work and their lives, we can take them and try our best to interpret and understand them. But it remains a fact that there are going to be really complex, ultimately unanswerable questions raised by that work and that life. There’s a real value in dwelling upon this kind of life and exploring the questions that it raises, and exploring the tensions within the life and the conflicts that were created within the life. It somehow helps our own humanity become something more expansive, more empathetic, when we can explore those things.
-- Interview conducted by Kay Callison
-- Listen to the podcast of Mark Cunningham on www.unbridledbooks.com
Do you think Rilke blamed himself for not being there for [Paula Modersohn-Becker] when she decided to go back to her husband?
I think the guilt that he did suffer over that is evident in the Requiem that he wrote for Paula two years later. It is one of his major poems, and it encapsulates all the driving conflicts of his own life – the idea of how strangely separate art and life can seem from one another sometimes, and the tension between this drive for artistic mastery and the resulting tragedy in one’s personal life. It’s all there in that poem.
Can you tell us how Lost Son was inspired, or a response, to Rilke’s big novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge?
Rilke’s novel was largely autobiographical and the germinating notion for me in writing Lost Son was that he himself recognized all these complex dramas in his own life and novelized them to some degree. So why not just novelize the whole life? And in doing that, somehow pay homage to this amazing novel that he did write. So there are certain elements in Lost Son that are inspired directly by scenes that occur in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. These were often scenes that actually occurred in Rilke’s life, so I hope there is an interesting interplay between Rilke’s created work and the life that produced it, and then this later novel created across this generational divide, based on Rilke’s life and what he had created.
When I first read Lost Son I will confess that I couldn’t imagine how you had so successfully described what the streets of Paris actually looked like and felt like and smelled like to Rilke when he first went there and what a shock to the senses it was to him. And then I learned about the photographer, Eugene Atget. Was finding Atget’s photographs of that time in Paris a dramatic discovery for you?
Yes. It really blew my imagination open in terms of how to capture the Paris that Rilke knew. Atget was working at the same exact time in Paris that Rilke was living there and writing his novel, based on his own experiences in Paris. We have a photographic documentation in Atget of what Rilke was documenting in the poetic manner in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. And sometimes you can hold the two bodies of work up next to each other and the parallels are just astounding. What’s more, I found out that they were living in the same apartment building in Montparnasse, at exactly the same time!
Do you suppose they knew each other?
I don’t know! That’s an amazing sort of feast for the imagination. A whole other novel could be written about a speculative friendship between Atget and Rilke. And I’ve been surprised to learn that they haven’t been discussed together much at all, that the connections and parallels between their two bodies of work haven’t been studied more closely.
Did the photographs of Eugene Atget help you get to work on writing this novel?
They did, mainly in the structural sense. Prior to discovering these photographs, the book didn’t start with Rilke’s arrival in Paris, for instance. It took me quite a while to discover that that was the entrée to this book. And that came about through Atget’s work. It enabled me to visualize the terrors that Paris caused Rilke, and to evoke how seeing all that squalor around him could send him reeling back into boyhood. And then we could find out about the relationships that had
formed him and the unique traumatic experiences that had formed his sensibility as a poet.
Well it gave you a physical presence to work with, a real place.
I think that’s a big thing for me as a writer. I’m finding it’s really hard for me to work without a strong sense of place. I need a place that’s kind of a driving character in the story. It helps me inhabit that world, and hopefully evoke it effectively.
So to do research you did travel for 10 weeks in Europe, and follow Rilke’s life path?
I did. That was a ten week pilgrimage in 2001. We went to Prague and we went to Munich where he met Lou and we ended up in the Rhone valley of Switzerland where he lived at the tower of Muzot. We walked around it in the dark. It was a very eerie and vivid experience. Later, I went back to Paris for eight weeks to do more research with the papers and letters.
At the end the novel, the teller of the tale, your persona, walks up to Rilke’s apartment in Munich where he spent those years right after World War I, and meets him on the street. Did you actually have a moment like that where you sensed his presence?
I did, actually, and it was a moment very similar to that one that’s captured at the end of the book, in Munich, on that very street corner. There’s a plaque on the house where he lived. It has his face on it and just a few words to the effect that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived here, in 1917. That was the first moment in 2001 in which I arrived at a place where Rilke had lived and spent a lot of time. It was my first experience of that feeling of living in a certain layer of time that somehow overlaps the layers of time that Rilke lived in that same place. It was a really powerful experience for me.
You have said that Lost Son was in some ways a letter sent to a ghost. What did you mean by that?
Saying it is a letter sent to a ghost is my way of highlighting the very personal nature of the novel. This is in no way a book that purports to be an authoritative portrait of Rilke. Writing a book about a figure like Rilke can only be a personal process, because someone like him, a poet so much larger than life, who’s become a figure of great legend, gets subjected to a force that the generations who try to understand his work exert upon him. He is turned into a spokesman, I guess, for a certain way of life or a certain artistic manner. That in turn creates something of a two camp situation where he’s either adored as a saint [of poetry] or he’s reviled as a profligate husband and father who failed to live up to his duties. The truth is probably neither of those things. It’s always a more deeply human, a much more complex situation than that. So really the only way to approach his story is in a very personal manner.
Can you give your take on the aesthetic that Rilke was studying with Lou and took for himself, the “thing form,” the ding-gedicht? Is that akin to what his contemporary, the great American poet William Carlos Williams, said: “No ideas but in things?”
Absolutely, and I think there’s also a parallel in T. S. Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative, of tying, somehow using an object or a thing to express the secrets of our own inner selves, all of our unfathomable conflicted feelings and emotions. Somehow when you focus your artistic attention on a “thing” and seek to create it as wholly as possible through some artistic discipline, in Rilke’s case, poetry, just by looking at a thing and rendering it, you can plumb pretty deeply a lot of human mysteries.
Right, you generate the higher idea.
Yes, so its not so much about explicitly exploring an emotion on a page as it is about exploring a thing and seeing what that draws out in him. That’s another thing that I love about Rilke! His sense of living in this world that is just teeming with things. As human beings it‘s all we have, really. We are these souls walking around in a world of objects and things and so how can we not have an incredibly intimate relationship to those things and how can they not tell us a great deal about ourselves.
And it would seem that you’ve carried that same aesthetic into both of your novels.
Oh really? I’m flattered to hear that.
The finished novel, Lost Son, is your exploration of the “thing” of Rilke’s life and the times and places he lived in, especially Paris, and I can only imagine what a watershed those photos of Atget’s must have been for you.
Yes, that’s a perfect example of what we are talking about. And that’s funny that you bring up William Carlos Williams, who was a physician, because Rilke always had this joke that started when he was with Lou. He would say well, if it gets to be that my poetry is basically destroying me because of what it puts me through, you know, I’ll become a country doctor somewhere. And he came back to that constantly in his life, in his darkest periods. He would joke to himself, or he would joke to a friend in letters, maybe it’s time to give up poetry and move to a small village and become a country doctor. It was like a fantasy that he held out for himself.
If a reader were to ask you what one important thing you would want him or her to take away from reading Lost Son, what would that be?
I love this quote by Lee Siegel that I use as an epigraph at the opening of the novel. It states the driving spirit of Lost Son: “We must understand one another or die. And we will never understand one another if we cannot understand the famous dead, those fragments of the past who sit half buried and gesturing to us on memory’s contested shores.” When we inherit these legendary poet figures and we’re given their work and their lives, we can take them and try our best to interpret and understand them. But it remains a fact that there are going to be really complex, ultimately unanswerable questions raised by that work and that life. There’s a real value in dwelling upon this kind of life and exploring the questions that it raises, and exploring the tensions within the life and the conflicts that were created within the life. It somehow helps our own humanity become something more expansive, more empathetic, when we can explore those things.
-- Interview conducted by Kay Callison
-- Listen to the podcast of Mark Cunningham on www.unbridledbooks.com
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Interview: Lost Son, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salome, Clara Westhoff, Paula Becker, Auguste Rodin
As noted previously in this blog, Kay Callison interviewed me about Lost Son for a podcast. The finished podcast was a neatly edited version of a much longer conversation. Here follows part I of the full discussion.
You’ve put out quite an impressive a body of work for your age, young man! Two large novels -- The Green Age of Asher Witherow and now Lost Son.
Thanks (chuckles).
Both of your novels have been written from history. Is that coincidence?
You know, that’s kind of funny. I guess it is coincidence but I find myself drawn back to that same kind of thing in starting my 3rd novel now, a historical setting, late 19th century. This time it’s my family’s history, but it’s the same experience of sifting through this material and finding the story in it, finding the narrative arc. And I don’t know why I am so drawn to the 19th century. It might be partly that my reading life began with the great 19th century writers, American writers, Emerson and Thoreau. They were my first literary Gods.
When you were 14, your mother gave you a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and that started you on a path to becoming a great fan of his work. But what brought you to write a novel about Rilke?
That was a driving question through the course of writing Lost Son, which was "why am I not writing a biography, and writing a novel instead?" One answer to that is just that I’m not an academic. But the more compelling answer to me, as a fiction writer, was that this life story seemed so rich with dramas and tensions and conflicts and relationships and these really incredibly inspiring moments that it was just ready made for a dramatic, complex narrative. Fiction can be so special and so moving, with the absolute immediacy and absolute intimacy that it creates, so the novel seemed a very suitable way to approach a life that was as special and complex and deeply human as Rilke’s life is.
For instance, one of the first images that came to me was the young Rilke in the outfit of a girl. Something about that really haunted me, and I thought that would be a powerful image to put early in the novel. That aspect of his childhood truly fascinates me -- how it contributed to forming his sensibility; his extreme sensitivity, his lack of any protection in the world, and his total vulnerability to everything around him.
Rilke’s father always blamed Rilke’s mother for everything that went wrong with him, and yet Rilke seemed very devoted to her, as a little boy. When did his attitude change, and why?
I think the turning point came when Rilke was about ten years old. He was sent away to military academy and really left to his own devices among a whole host of boys all two years older, rough and tumble military family kids. Prior to that, Rilke had been raised as a girl, and his mother had inculcated this whole practice of responding to her in a very feminine, very obsequious way. It’s true that in Europe at the time Rilke was being raised it was a pretty common practice for little sons to be raised as little daughters in terms of dress and fashion and even behavior, playing with dolls and what not. But in the context of his family, it was taken to a greater extreme, I think. Biographers speculate that the motivation for that was that Rilke’s mother had lost a baby daughter a year before she gave birth to him and so she was seeking to fill some void.
Tell us about Lou Andreas Salome.
Rilke’s relationship with Lou is really a major chord in this book and its an astonishing story. The year they met, 1897, she was a famous writer in Europe. She had written a biography of Nietzsche with whom she had had something of a romantic liaison that ended badly – for Nietzsche. Essentially she refused his advances, and the speculation was that his madness was partly a result of that. So she was this lady of letters, an accomplished writer, and already known to be the woman who had broken Nietzsche’s heart. Later on, she befriended Freud and became one his first protégés.
The dynamic between Lou and Rilke and then the way their relationship transpired from 1897 basically to Rilke’s death 30 years later starts with a tumultuous affair, during which she became to Rilke a surrogate mother, a sister, a spouse, and a muse, all at once. Then at a certain point she had to cut the cord, and -- as she saw it, for his own well being -- send him off on his own. He was sent reeling from that for a long time, and Lost Son really does seek to capture the enduring love that he felt for Lou, the sense that she was the unattainable romance of his life.
What is your take on her in terms of her relationship with Rilke? Do you see a certain amount of seduction/alienation behavior in it?
Oh! That’s interesting! It was to some degree, I think. But things were complicated. She was 14 years older than he when they first had the affair; and she was married and he was essentiallyan obscure poor nobody, at 21 just trying to fulfill this sense of his destiny as a poet.
It depends on the reader, I guess, but you can read this novel and you can infer that.
Oh sure! Yes! And I like that aspect! I want the book to remain an open question in many regards; for readers to inhabit these relationships and come away thinking about them in various ways. But I’ve been very cautious not to come to a judgment like that, because, in the process of creating this novel, it seemed to me that an explicit sort of perspective like that might diminish the complexity of all the human conflicts that are happening in these relationships.
Now what do you make of Lou’s condemnation of him to his wife, Clara? Lou visits Clara in 1907, long after their affair, and denounces Rilke as “an apostate father and husband,” who anybody in their right mind would send the police after.
Right. That’s a very odd moment in the Rilke-Lou relationship, because they hadn’t been lovers for seven years but they’d been maintaining an avid and really personal correspondence for about a four year period, one of great sympathy and understanding and mutual respect. You wonder how deep her bond was and how much love she harbored for Rilke. And how that influenced this seemingly random attack, in 1907. Did it come from some old wound in her in never being able to fulfill what could possibly have been a great relationship? Because Lou and Rilke were in many ways destined to be together. In any case, she seems to have had some kind of epiphany or come to some place of feeling that she was entitled to judge Rilke, after finally meeting Clara without Rilke’s being there, which I think was a real shock to Lou in some ways. They could relate to each other as the two women who were really the magnetic poles of Rilke’s existence. He gravitated between Lou and Clara, Lou being the unattainable lover muse and Clara the wife, fellow worker, and fellow artist.
Who he has abandoned.
Right, Lou does make that charge. But I think its interesting how Clara responds at that moment. The relationship between Clara and Rilke so fascinates me because she always deeply respected Rilke’s need for solitude even while sometimes urging him for greater intimacy. Their letters on the subject of their lives together when they’re talking about how they’ll manage to live together, or if they’ll manage to live together, are full of this mutual understanding that’s very moving. And after Lou made these accusations in 1907, and Clara was the one who came back and communicated all these charges to him, she says she couldn’t defend him, but she
communicated the news in a way that was very tender. It was almost as if she didn’t know what to make of it. She presented it to him as if to say “I didn’t know what to tell Lou. I was surprised by this. What do you have to say?”
Do you have a sense from reading all the correspondence between Rilke and Clara as to whether or not this really was a mutual decision to live separately, so as to pursue their respective careers?
Well I know that she deeply respected his wishes, and that’s clear in her letters. There’s a real
sense of understanding between them in the correspondence. But at the same time it is interesting to look closely at her letters, particularly early on in their relationship during the time shortly after Worpspede [an artist’s colony of sorts where they met and married], when their correspondence first took off. You get a sense that she is still defining herself as an artist, and she latches onto and responds to Rilke’s ability to articulate his own artistic needs and requirements. And that answers a need in her to define those things for herself. So I think her sensibility of what it meant to be an artist and the importance of solitude and the importance of constant work was nurtured within the context of her developing relationship with Rilke.
The other intensely close and influential relationship on Rilke was with the sculptor, Auguste Rodin, and he too threw him out!
Right. Rilke first met Rodin in 1902. He had come to Paris to write a monograph about the sculptor’s work, and Rodin became something of an idol for Rilke in his manner of working steadily and with this immense and powerful discipline that Rilke had not yet been able to attain in his own work. He quickly saw Rodin’s example as the means by which he could one day rise to artistic greatness. So Rodin became a much admired figure in Rilke’s life and very important to his personal development as a poet.
And then just turned on him. Which he had a habit of doing, apparently. How did Rilke react?
His immediate response was to write a letter to Rodin the very following day. The essence was: "I know you have done this because you have to protect yourself and protect your art. I will take that as an example; and the strength that you have shown in your own discipline and in your own self awareness as an artist is something I will seek to emulate." It was really a remarkable response and a very humble response.
Was that really the way Rilke felt, do you think?
It’s really hard to know, and that’s why he’s an amazing figure for a novel. He is so wholly and entirely a poet that there’s no other way to know him except through the things he created, and a major part of his body of work was his correspondence. He wrote more than 10,000 letters and he’s creating himself as a poet in his letters, just as he is in his work. Beyond that, I think mostly he just felt disowned because he had just lost his own father, and Rodin was like a 2nd father. So he must have thought, “Oh my God, I’m a lost son again.” [after losing Lou]. His life was just a series of events that orphaned him again and again and again. It’s just amazing. And it began early on. First he was a girl. Then he was a military cadet, then he was a business school cadet, and then he was a law student. Then he was a husband, then he was a father, then he was a secretary [to Rodin] and then he became again a soldier [Rilke was drafted into the Austrian army at the age of 40].
And in there he also became a lover to his soul mate, Lou, with whom he felt like he had found “Home,” only to be sent away. Another very important relationship in the novel is with Paula Modersohn-Becker, the painter. Did you bring that forward for the purpose of the novel, or was that friendship indeed as precious and important to him and to Clara as it seems in the novel?
Yes, it was just as important and precious as in the book. Rilke and Clara were friends with Paula from their time in Worpspede around 1900, and Clara and Paula had been friends prior to that. Later on in Paris in 1906 when Paula was there working, Rilke was deeply touched by her circumstances, how she had essentially left her husband against his wishes because she had this passionate belief that she had a destiny as a painter. Early on, Rilke and Paula didn’t see eye to eye on the way he wanted to live, his need to be separate from his wife and daughter. But later on, after several years of marriage, she came to understand it and came to a place in her art, too, where she felt she could identify with that perspective.
(continue to Part II of the interview)
You’ve put out quite an impressive a body of work for your age, young man! Two large novels -- The Green Age of Asher Witherow and now Lost Son.
Thanks (chuckles).
Both of your novels have been written from history. Is that coincidence?
You know, that’s kind of funny. I guess it is coincidence but I find myself drawn back to that same kind of thing in starting my 3rd novel now, a historical setting, late 19th century. This time it’s my family’s history, but it’s the same experience of sifting through this material and finding the story in it, finding the narrative arc. And I don’t know why I am so drawn to the 19th century. It might be partly that my reading life began with the great 19th century writers, American writers, Emerson and Thoreau. They were my first literary Gods.
When you were 14, your mother gave you a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and that started you on a path to becoming a great fan of his work. But what brought you to write a novel about Rilke?
That was a driving question through the course of writing Lost Son, which was "why am I not writing a biography, and writing a novel instead?" One answer to that is just that I’m not an academic. But the more compelling answer to me, as a fiction writer, was that this life story seemed so rich with dramas and tensions and conflicts and relationships and these really incredibly inspiring moments that it was just ready made for a dramatic, complex narrative. Fiction can be so special and so moving, with the absolute immediacy and absolute intimacy that it creates, so the novel seemed a very suitable way to approach a life that was as special and complex and deeply human as Rilke’s life is.
For instance, one of the first images that came to me was the young Rilke in the outfit of a girl. Something about that really haunted me, and I thought that would be a powerful image to put early in the novel. That aspect of his childhood truly fascinates me -- how it contributed to forming his sensibility; his extreme sensitivity, his lack of any protection in the world, and his total vulnerability to everything around him.
Rilke’s father always blamed Rilke’s mother for everything that went wrong with him, and yet Rilke seemed very devoted to her, as a little boy. When did his attitude change, and why?
I think the turning point came when Rilke was about ten years old. He was sent away to military academy and really left to his own devices among a whole host of boys all two years older, rough and tumble military family kids. Prior to that, Rilke had been raised as a girl, and his mother had inculcated this whole practice of responding to her in a very feminine, very obsequious way. It’s true that in Europe at the time Rilke was being raised it was a pretty common practice for little sons to be raised as little daughters in terms of dress and fashion and even behavior, playing with dolls and what not. But in the context of his family, it was taken to a greater extreme, I think. Biographers speculate that the motivation for that was that Rilke’s mother had lost a baby daughter a year before she gave birth to him and so she was seeking to fill some void.
Tell us about Lou Andreas Salome.
Rilke’s relationship with Lou is really a major chord in this book and its an astonishing story. The year they met, 1897, she was a famous writer in Europe. She had written a biography of Nietzsche with whom she had had something of a romantic liaison that ended badly – for Nietzsche. Essentially she refused his advances, and the speculation was that his madness was partly a result of that. So she was this lady of letters, an accomplished writer, and already known to be the woman who had broken Nietzsche’s heart. Later on, she befriended Freud and became one his first protégés.
The dynamic between Lou and Rilke and then the way their relationship transpired from 1897 basically to Rilke’s death 30 years later starts with a tumultuous affair, during which she became to Rilke a surrogate mother, a sister, a spouse, and a muse, all at once. Then at a certain point she had to cut the cord, and -- as she saw it, for his own well being -- send him off on his own. He was sent reeling from that for a long time, and Lost Son really does seek to capture the enduring love that he felt for Lou, the sense that she was the unattainable romance of his life.
What is your take on her in terms of her relationship with Rilke? Do you see a certain amount of seduction/alienation behavior in it?
Oh! That’s interesting! It was to some degree, I think. But things were complicated. She was 14 years older than he when they first had the affair; and she was married and he was essentiallyan obscure poor nobody, at 21 just trying to fulfill this sense of his destiny as a poet.
It depends on the reader, I guess, but you can read this novel and you can infer that.
Oh sure! Yes! And I like that aspect! I want the book to remain an open question in many regards; for readers to inhabit these relationships and come away thinking about them in various ways. But I’ve been very cautious not to come to a judgment like that, because, in the process of creating this novel, it seemed to me that an explicit sort of perspective like that might diminish the complexity of all the human conflicts that are happening in these relationships.
Now what do you make of Lou’s condemnation of him to his wife, Clara? Lou visits Clara in 1907, long after their affair, and denounces Rilke as “an apostate father and husband,” who anybody in their right mind would send the police after.
Right. That’s a very odd moment in the Rilke-Lou relationship, because they hadn’t been lovers for seven years but they’d been maintaining an avid and really personal correspondence for about a four year period, one of great sympathy and understanding and mutual respect. You wonder how deep her bond was and how much love she harbored for Rilke. And how that influenced this seemingly random attack, in 1907. Did it come from some old wound in her in never being able to fulfill what could possibly have been a great relationship? Because Lou and Rilke were in many ways destined to be together. In any case, she seems to have had some kind of epiphany or come to some place of feeling that she was entitled to judge Rilke, after finally meeting Clara without Rilke’s being there, which I think was a real shock to Lou in some ways. They could relate to each other as the two women who were really the magnetic poles of Rilke’s existence. He gravitated between Lou and Clara, Lou being the unattainable lover muse and Clara the wife, fellow worker, and fellow artist.
Who he has abandoned.
Right, Lou does make that charge. But I think its interesting how Clara responds at that moment. The relationship between Clara and Rilke so fascinates me because she always deeply respected Rilke’s need for solitude even while sometimes urging him for greater intimacy. Their letters on the subject of their lives together when they’re talking about how they’ll manage to live together, or if they’ll manage to live together, are full of this mutual understanding that’s very moving. And after Lou made these accusations in 1907, and Clara was the one who came back and communicated all these charges to him, she says she couldn’t defend him, but she
communicated the news in a way that was very tender. It was almost as if she didn’t know what to make of it. She presented it to him as if to say “I didn’t know what to tell Lou. I was surprised by this. What do you have to say?”
Do you have a sense from reading all the correspondence between Rilke and Clara as to whether or not this really was a mutual decision to live separately, so as to pursue their respective careers?
Well I know that she deeply respected his wishes, and that’s clear in her letters. There’s a real
sense of understanding between them in the correspondence. But at the same time it is interesting to look closely at her letters, particularly early on in their relationship during the time shortly after Worpspede [an artist’s colony of sorts where they met and married], when their correspondence first took off. You get a sense that she is still defining herself as an artist, and she latches onto and responds to Rilke’s ability to articulate his own artistic needs and requirements. And that answers a need in her to define those things for herself. So I think her sensibility of what it meant to be an artist and the importance of solitude and the importance of constant work was nurtured within the context of her developing relationship with Rilke.
The other intensely close and influential relationship on Rilke was with the sculptor, Auguste Rodin, and he too threw him out!
Right. Rilke first met Rodin in 1902. He had come to Paris to write a monograph about the sculptor’s work, and Rodin became something of an idol for Rilke in his manner of working steadily and with this immense and powerful discipline that Rilke had not yet been able to attain in his own work. He quickly saw Rodin’s example as the means by which he could one day rise to artistic greatness. So Rodin became a much admired figure in Rilke’s life and very important to his personal development as a poet.
And then just turned on him. Which he had a habit of doing, apparently. How did Rilke react?
His immediate response was to write a letter to Rodin the very following day. The essence was: "I know you have done this because you have to protect yourself and protect your art. I will take that as an example; and the strength that you have shown in your own discipline and in your own self awareness as an artist is something I will seek to emulate." It was really a remarkable response and a very humble response.
Was that really the way Rilke felt, do you think?
It’s really hard to know, and that’s why he’s an amazing figure for a novel. He is so wholly and entirely a poet that there’s no other way to know him except through the things he created, and a major part of his body of work was his correspondence. He wrote more than 10,000 letters and he’s creating himself as a poet in his letters, just as he is in his work. Beyond that, I think mostly he just felt disowned because he had just lost his own father, and Rodin was like a 2nd father. So he must have thought, “Oh my God, I’m a lost son again.” [after losing Lou]. His life was just a series of events that orphaned him again and again and again. It’s just amazing. And it began early on. First he was a girl. Then he was a military cadet, then he was a business school cadet, and then he was a law student. Then he was a husband, then he was a father, then he was a secretary [to Rodin] and then he became again a soldier [Rilke was drafted into the Austrian army at the age of 40].
And in there he also became a lover to his soul mate, Lou, with whom he felt like he had found “Home,” only to be sent away. Another very important relationship in the novel is with Paula Modersohn-Becker, the painter. Did you bring that forward for the purpose of the novel, or was that friendship indeed as precious and important to him and to Clara as it seems in the novel?
Yes, it was just as important and precious as in the book. Rilke and Clara were friends with Paula from their time in Worpspede around 1900, and Clara and Paula had been friends prior to that. Later on in Paris in 1906 when Paula was there working, Rilke was deeply touched by her circumstances, how she had essentially left her husband against his wishes because she had this passionate belief that she had a destiny as a painter. Early on, Rilke and Paula didn’t see eye to eye on the way he wanted to live, his need to be separate from his wife and daughter. But later on, after several years of marriage, she came to understand it and came to a place in her art, too, where she felt she could identify with that perspective.
(continue to Part II of the interview)
Monday, July 02, 2007
Event -- July 3, 2007: St. Helens, OR
Tomorrow evening -- Tuesday, May 3rd at 7:00 pm-- I will be visiting St. Helens Bookshop in St. Helens, OR to discuss and sign both of my novels: The Green Age of Asher Witherow (2004) and Lost Son (2007).
Monday, June 25, 2007
Audio: William H. Gass on Rilke
Here's the audio of a fascinating conversation about Rainer Maria Rilke, with KCRW's "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt and American novelist William H. Gass, author of Omensetter's Luck. Gass discusses his nonfiction work Reading Rilke. The discussion was recorded in 2004. I wouldn't put Rilke's art in the crass, somewhat oversimplified biographical terms that Gass sometimes does, but it's great fun to listen in as he and Silverblatt talk about Rilke's life and work.
A snippet:
Gass: [Rilke] is trying to do something in one sense impossible, and that is to make a verbal object into a thing. And Rodin is teaching him--not only to make works of art from the ontological view, from the point of view of creating being and placing it in the world as solidly as a statue--but also to give it a kind of almost impressionistic, multilayered, multisurfaced effect
that Rodin was getting in his sculpture. But it is also, of course, for Rilke an enormously important time psychologically, because what he's doing when he begins to write The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is to write about a failed poet. And Rilke is seeing himself for the first time as a failure, as someone who is risking a failure, and while he's courting, in order to stay alive (he's getting paid for this monograph on Rodin)--he's courting genius, success, overwhelming success that Rodin is enjoying at this time. Moreover, Rodin is in a sense, from [Rilke's] point of view, coarse, sexually on the rampage... And there's this little Lord Fauntleroy type watching all this, who then goes back to a little squalid room in Paris and can hardly make ends meet, and who is also feeling an enormous amount of guilt, because he has in effect left his wife and small child. It's a mess. And that very mess is something that Rilke was able to make a capital of.
And here's a little bit from Lost Son dealing with these same critical Paris days in Rilke's life. The poet is standing before Notre Dame Cathedral at twilight:
"The cathedral is perhaps the greatest of all this city's things, and it unifies all that surrounds it...What beautiful power it is that this Notre Dame in its grand thingness can take such discordant elements and draw them all into a pure harmonic. Rodin's body of work has a similar power: his sculpture seems to have gathered everything, everything into itself. And Rainer wonders now: How may a poet acquire such ingathering power? How not merely understand the power but acquire it? How construct as the Master does?
Rainer knows he's nothing like Rodin--no sculptor, no craftsman. Enormous hunks of stone arrive frequently at Meudon. The Master orders the stones set down on the lawn that he may circle them with his thoughtful topheavy stride, his hand wandering in his beard. The poet has watched his eyes and seen the visions kindling there. In blocks of intransigent stone, fragments of mountains that move only with the strength of several men, Rodin gratefully receives the heaviness of his work.
Rainer, though, is no sculptor. By what handcraft, then, could he possibly make work of this city's things?--of this city's fear, even, which stands three-dimensional amongst the things? The fear, he sees now, could be a unifying power should one muster the strength to make it such. But what immeasurable quantities of strength would be required? How might he get outside himself and make of himself a hand to grasp Paris and everything Paris stirs up inside?--to give it all a form, a shape?"
A snippet:
Gass: [Rilke] is trying to do something in one sense impossible, and that is to make a verbal object into a thing. And Rodin is teaching him--not only to make works of art from the ontological view, from the point of view of creating being and placing it in the world as solidly as a statue--but also to give it a kind of almost impressionistic, multilayered, multisurfaced effect
that Rodin was getting in his sculpture. But it is also, of course, for Rilke an enormously important time psychologically, because what he's doing when he begins to write The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is to write about a failed poet. And Rilke is seeing himself for the first time as a failure, as someone who is risking a failure, and while he's courting, in order to stay alive (he's getting paid for this monograph on Rodin)--he's courting genius, success, overwhelming success that Rodin is enjoying at this time. Moreover, Rodin is in a sense, from [Rilke's] point of view, coarse, sexually on the rampage... And there's this little Lord Fauntleroy type watching all this, who then goes back to a little squalid room in Paris and can hardly make ends meet, and who is also feeling an enormous amount of guilt, because he has in effect left his wife and small child. It's a mess. And that very mess is something that Rilke was able to make a capital of.
And here's a little bit from Lost Son dealing with these same critical Paris days in Rilke's life. The poet is standing before Notre Dame Cathedral at twilight:
"The cathedral is perhaps the greatest of all this city's things, and it unifies all that surrounds it...What beautiful power it is that this Notre Dame in its grand thingness can take such discordant elements and draw them all into a pure harmonic. Rodin's body of work has a similar power: his sculpture seems to have gathered everything, everything into itself. And Rainer wonders now: How may a poet acquire such ingathering power? How not merely understand the power but acquire it? How construct as the Master does?
Rainer knows he's nothing like Rodin--no sculptor, no craftsman. Enormous hunks of stone arrive frequently at Meudon. The Master orders the stones set down on the lawn that he may circle them with his thoughtful topheavy stride, his hand wandering in his beard. The poet has watched his eyes and seen the visions kindling there. In blocks of intransigent stone, fragments of mountains that move only with the strength of several men, Rodin gratefully receives the heaviness of his work.
Rainer, though, is no sculptor. By what handcraft, then, could he possibly make work of this city's things?--of this city's fear, even, which stands three-dimensional amongst the things? The fear, he sees now, could be a unifying power should one muster the strength to make it such. But what immeasurable quantities of strength would be required? How might he get outside himself and make of himself a hand to grasp Paris and everything Paris stirs up inside?--to give it all a form, a shape?"
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Portland Event #3 -- Powells Books
Monday June 18 -- I read from talk about Lost Son (and sign copies) at Powells Books on Hawthorne. The reading begins at 7:30 pm. This is my final Portland event for a while.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Portland Event #2
Tonight I read from Lost Son at 23rd Avenue Books in NW Portland. The event starts at 7:30.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Book Group Expo Tomorrow
Tomorrow, Sunday June 10, I will be in attendance at the 2nd annual BOOK GROUP EXPO in downtown San Jose, CA. At 11:30 am, I'll participate in a panel with fellow authors Nathan Englander, Michelin Marcom and Elizabeth Rosner. Our discussion will be hosted by KQED radio's Michael Krasny.
BOOK GROUP EXPO was a lot of fun last year, with a full-day schedule of author salons on intriguing subjects. If you are in a book group, or are merely a bibliophile, it could well be worth a trip to San Jose.
BOOK GROUP EXPO was a lot of fun last year, with a full-day schedule of author salons on intriguing subjects. If you are in a book group, or are merely a bibliophile, it could well be worth a trip to San Jose.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Audio Interview
I recently discussed Lost Son with Kay Callison, that should-be legendary interviewer of the American Audio Prose Library. It was a two-hour conversation, but you can listen to some parts of it, neatly edited, in a podcast here.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Cormac Speaks
If you happened to view the historic, first-ever TV interview with Cormac McCarthy on yesterday's Oprah Winfrey show, for godsake don't stop there. Go to Oprah's website and watch the fascinating moments that were left out of the edited conversation that aired.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Event Report: Annie Blooms Books, Portland
Last night was my inaugural Portland reading from Lost Son, held at Annie Blooms Books in Portland's charming Multnomah Village. The event was well attended, and to my delight the majority of listeners were readers of Rilke.
It was a pleasure to gather and discuss the great poet and his work. Below are some snippets from the q&a, approximately recreated (and also embellished, at points, with things I wish I had said).
Gentleman in the back row: Would you speak a little about your feelings on whether Rilke led a "healthy" life?
Me: The question of Rilke's psychological "health" is an interesting one. My novel avoids (appropriately, I believe) a Freudian approach to Rilke, so its narrative doesn't really seek to answer the question in any conclusive way. I will say, though, that Rilke himself acknowledged, through his whole adult life, his own "complexes" and emotional and spiritual dilemmas. He was such an immensely sensitive, self-aware person that it would have been impossible for him to live in any kind of denial about these things. And he was always honest, sometimes painfully so, with those around him regarding his own shortcomings. The possibility of undergoing psychoanalysis was constantly on his mind, though till the end he resisted such treatment, choosing to recognize, instead, that his art was in many ways his own method of working through things (and fearing that pyschoanalysis would "rid him of both his devils and his angels too"). Rilke cherished a quote from Rudolf Kassner, which says: "The road from intensity to greatness lies through sacrifice." So, in a very conscious way Rilke knew that he was giving up a great many things, even perhaps choosing a less-than-happy life for the sake of his work as a poet, which he felt demanded solitude -- and he emphasized that quality of sacrifice. In the end, I believe he spoke his own authentic truth when he said that he could only be a poet -- that a life committed wholly and entirely to art was the only life he could really lead.
Gentlelady in the back row: Was there ever a point during the writing of this novel when you felt overwhelmed or daunted to be writing about somebody like Rilke?
Me: Yes, yes, yes. This novel was in many moments a terrifying journey for me. I mean, here I am, a kid from the suburbs of Northern California writing a novel about one of the world's greatest poets! At many points, I had to wilfully avoid thinking about it in those exact terms, because the material itself, the sheer mass of story and fact that needed to be shaped down to a digestible narrative--that alone was almost overwhelming at times. To entertain any fears about how the finished book might be received would simply have paralyzed me. Writing a novel, after all, is one of the most personal things one can do, and yet this particular novel, given the fame of its main character and the passionate responses he arouses, really felt like a dauntingly public act. In the end, of course, Lost Son is entirely personal, as it had to be. I felt that such a story, dealing with a figure as large and legendary as Rilke, could only be handled as something personal, as an encounter of sorts. In fact, I've been referring to the book as "a letter to a ghost."
It was a pleasure to gather and discuss the great poet and his work. Below are some snippets from the q&a, approximately recreated (and also embellished, at points, with things I wish I had said).
Gentleman in the back row: Would you speak a little about your feelings on whether Rilke led a "healthy" life?
Me: The question of Rilke's psychological "health" is an interesting one. My novel avoids (appropriately, I believe) a Freudian approach to Rilke, so its narrative doesn't really seek to answer the question in any conclusive way. I will say, though, that Rilke himself acknowledged, through his whole adult life, his own "complexes" and emotional and spiritual dilemmas. He was such an immensely sensitive, self-aware person that it would have been impossible for him to live in any kind of denial about these things. And he was always honest, sometimes painfully so, with those around him regarding his own shortcomings. The possibility of undergoing psychoanalysis was constantly on his mind, though till the end he resisted such treatment, choosing to recognize, instead, that his art was in many ways his own method of working through things (and fearing that pyschoanalysis would "rid him of both his devils and his angels too"). Rilke cherished a quote from Rudolf Kassner, which says: "The road from intensity to greatness lies through sacrifice." So, in a very conscious way Rilke knew that he was giving up a great many things, even perhaps choosing a less-than-happy life for the sake of his work as a poet, which he felt demanded solitude -- and he emphasized that quality of sacrifice. In the end, I believe he spoke his own authentic truth when he said that he could only be a poet -- that a life committed wholly and entirely to art was the only life he could really lead.
Gentlelady in the back row: Was there ever a point during the writing of this novel when you felt overwhelmed or daunted to be writing about somebody like Rilke?
Me: Yes, yes, yes. This novel was in many moments a terrifying journey for me. I mean, here I am, a kid from the suburbs of Northern California writing a novel about one of the world's greatest poets! At many points, I had to wilfully avoid thinking about it in those exact terms, because the material itself, the sheer mass of story and fact that needed to be shaped down to a digestible narrative--that alone was almost overwhelming at times. To entertain any fears about how the finished book might be received would simply have paralyzed me. Writing a novel, after all, is one of the most personal things one can do, and yet this particular novel, given the fame of its main character and the passionate responses he arouses, really felt like a dauntingly public act. In the end, of course, Lost Son is entirely personal, as it had to be. I felt that such a story, dealing with a figure as large and legendary as Rilke, could only be handled as something personal, as an encounter of sorts. In fact, I've been referring to the book as "a letter to a ghost."
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Discerning Transitions
Lost Son has now appeared in most bookstores.
To mark its arrival, I post this passage from Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Ibsen is the writer being described here, but for me the following prose articulates my own relationship to Rilke himself, to whom I was first introduced 15 years ago, and well describes my enduring bewilderment and wonder through the years-long process of creating Lost Son.
"There I sat before your books, obstinate man, trying to understand them the way those others do who do not leave you intact, but have taken their portion and are satisfied.
For as yet I did not understand fame, that pubic destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones...
Most lonely one, holding aloof, how they have caught up with you by reason of your fame.
But lately they were against you from the very root, and now they deal with you as with their equal.
And they carry your words with them in the cages of their presumption and exhibit them in the squares and tease them a little from their own safe distance.
All your terrible wild beasts.
Only then did I read you, when for me they broke out and fell upon me in my wilderness, desperate as they are.
Desperate, as you yourself became in the end, you whose course is wrongly entered on every chart.
Like a fissure it crosses the heavens, this hopeless hyperbola of your path, that only once curves toward us and draws off again in terror.
What did it matter to you whether a woman stays or goes and whether someone is seized with dizziness and someone else with madness and whether the dead live and the living appear to be dead: what did it matter to you?
It was all so natural for you; you passed through it, as one crosses a vestibule, and did not stop.
But yonder you lingered, stooping; where our becoming seethes and precipitates and changes color, inside.
Farther in than anyone has yet been; a door had sprung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight.
Yonder where, mistrustful, you took no one with you, yonder you sat discerning transitions."
(This comes from M.D. Herter Norton's now classic translation of Malte, first published 1949 by W.W. Norton.)
To mark its arrival, I post this passage from Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Ibsen is the writer being described here, but for me the following prose articulates my own relationship to Rilke himself, to whom I was first introduced 15 years ago, and well describes my enduring bewilderment and wonder through the years-long process of creating Lost Son.
"There I sat before your books, obstinate man, trying to understand them the way those others do who do not leave you intact, but have taken their portion and are satisfied.
For as yet I did not understand fame, that pubic destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones...
Most lonely one, holding aloof, how they have caught up with you by reason of your fame.
But lately they were against you from the very root, and now they deal with you as with their equal.
And they carry your words with them in the cages of their presumption and exhibit them in the squares and tease them a little from their own safe distance.
All your terrible wild beasts.
Only then did I read you, when for me they broke out and fell upon me in my wilderness, desperate as they are.
Desperate, as you yourself became in the end, you whose course is wrongly entered on every chart.
Like a fissure it crosses the heavens, this hopeless hyperbola of your path, that only once curves toward us and draws off again in terror.
What did it matter to you whether a woman stays or goes and whether someone is seized with dizziness and someone else with madness and whether the dead live and the living appear to be dead: what did it matter to you?
It was all so natural for you; you passed through it, as one crosses a vestibule, and did not stop.
But yonder you lingered, stooping; where our becoming seethes and precipitates and changes color, inside.
Farther in than anyone has yet been; a door had sprung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight.
Yonder where, mistrustful, you took no one with you, yonder you sat discerning transitions."
(This comes from M.D. Herter Norton's now classic translation of Malte, first published 1949 by W.W. Norton.)
Ondaatje & Rilke
Reading Michael Ondaatje's glorious new novel Divisadero, which appears in stores next week, it struck me that the following passage could apply to the character of Rainer Maria Rilke in my own novel, Lost Son.
The "old writer," with his bittersweet message to the boy, seems a Rilkean figure.
"When I wrote, the man said, that was the only time I would think. I would sit down with a notebook and a pen, and I would be lost in a story. The old writer, seemingly at peace, thus casually suggested to Rafael a path he might take during his own life, and taught him how he could be alone and content, guarded from all he knew, even those he loved, and in this strange way, be fully understanding of them. It was in a sense a terrible proposal of secrecy -- what you might do with a life, with all those hours being separated from it -- that could lead somehow to intimacy. The man had made himself an example of it. The solitary in his busy and crowded world of invention. It was one of the last things the writer talked to him about."
The "old writer," with his bittersweet message to the boy, seems a Rilkean figure.
"When I wrote, the man said, that was the only time I would think. I would sit down with a notebook and a pen, and I would be lost in a story. The old writer, seemingly at peace, thus casually suggested to Rafael a path he might take during his own life, and taught him how he could be alone and content, guarded from all he knew, even those he loved, and in this strange way, be fully understanding of them. It was in a sense a terrible proposal of secrecy -- what you might do with a life, with all those hours being separated from it -- that could lead somehow to intimacy. The man had made himself an example of it. The solitary in his busy and crowded world of invention. It was one of the last things the writer talked to him about."
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
McCarthy & Rilke
While reading Cormac McCarthy's play The Stonemason yesterday, I noted this allusion to Rilke's Duino Elegies:
"BEN: The big elm tree died. The old dog died. Things that you can touch go away forever. I dont know what that means. I dont know what it means that things exist and then exist no more. Trees. Dogs. People. Will that namelessness into which we vanish then taste of us?"
Here's Rilke's Second Duino Elegy:
"Like dew from the early grass, that which is ours rises from us
...like the heat from a hot dish. O smile, where do you go? O expression in the eyes:
new warm escaping wave of the heart--;
how it hurts me; we are these very things. So does the world-space,
in which we come loose, taste of us?"
"BEN: The big elm tree died. The old dog died. Things that you can touch go away forever. I dont know what that means. I dont know what it means that things exist and then exist no more. Trees. Dogs. People. Will that namelessness into which we vanish then taste of us?"
Here's Rilke's Second Duino Elegy:
"Like dew from the early grass, that which is ours rises from us
...like the heat from a hot dish. O smile, where do you go? O expression in the eyes:
new warm escaping wave of the heart--;
how it hurts me; we are these very things. So does the world-space,
in which we come loose, taste of us?"
Friday, May 11, 2007
For the Portlanders Among Us
Lost Son is now for sale at Powells Books and Annie Blooms.
In stock at the Powells Burnside, Hawthorne, Airport and Beaverton locations.
For those outside Portland, check your local independent bookstore.
The novel will appear in the Barnes & Nobles and Borders of the world next month.
In stock at the Powells Burnside, Hawthorne, Airport and Beaverton locations.
For those outside Portland, check your local independent bookstore.
The novel will appear in the Barnes & Nobles and Borders of the world next month.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Six Questions About the Novel LOST SON & its Protagonist Rilke
Lost Son tells of the life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Who was Rilke?
That is a bigger question than I could pretend to answer, and Lost Son is less an authoritative portrait than it is a letter sent to a ghost. Rainer Maria Rilke is almost universally recognized as one of the world’s greatest poets. But he is perhaps best loved in the United States for the prose of his Letters to a Young Poet, a slim little volume offering some remarkable, unorthodox perspectives on such things as love, solitude, grief, art, and fate. It’s a book cherished with near religiosity by many people young and old. Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and died at age 51 in Switzerland.
What drew you to telling Rilke’s story?
I am fascinated by how wholly and entirely Rilke lived and breathed as a poet, almost to the exclusion of everything else – and am particularly fascinated by his much-expressed conviction that living this way was his only real method of surviving in the world. One gets the sense, while reading his amazing work, that Rilke was a nerve laid bare to everything around him, that every impression and experience affected him almost physically, vibrating inside him and eventually becoming transformed to poetry. The unique way in which he “utilized” his vulnerability would ultimately take him from provincial-born, sickly, psychologically mistreated child to enduring master artist held dear by readers all across the planet. I wanted to live in, explore, and evoke that strangely inspiring, sometimes disturbing process of artistic development and all its reverberations.
Why did you choose to explore Rilke’s life in a novel rather than a biography?
It seemed that a novel would allow me to explore the poet's remarkable life at a level of intimacy that a more academic format just would not permit. For a figure of such great specialness as Rilke, the fictional form seemed appropriately special. Amidst his powerful poetic output, Rilke authored a single novel called The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It’s an astounding book, pungent and luminous and unlike anything else in the realm of fiction that I know of. Malte is semi-autobiographical, and I’ve always been intrigued by Rilke’s urge to novelize his own life story to some degree. Likewise, I’ve always found his real biography irresistibly intriguing, and I suppose Lost Son first began with the thought, ‘why not take the actual life and novelize it in full?’ – from Rilke’s childhood being raised as a girl and then being abruptly shipped off to military school, to his passionate affair at age 21 with Lou Andreas-Salomé, a famous intellectual 14 years his senior, to his close friendship with the great sculptor Rodin. All the dramas and relationships of a strong novel were there waiting.
What sort of research went into Lost Son?
Well, aside from exploring Rilke’s body of work, I’ve read pretty much all the major titles about Rilke available in English (biographies, commentaries, etc.), but most of those I absorbed early from mere personal fascination, prior to any plan for this novel. Otherwise, I’ve done quite a bit of Rilkean traveling, visiting places of importance to the poet: Prague, Munich, the Swiss Valais, etc. Once I got well into the writing of Lost Son, I traveled to Paris and stayed for a few months in the neighborhood where Rilke lived. In Paris I did a bit of archival exploration, mainly at the Rodin Museum where a great number of Rilke’s original letters to the sculptor are kept. But my research, aside from exploring the available information relating to Rilke’s life, was largely impressionistic: traveling and observing, walking around Paris and doing lots of imagining.
Did you find yourself having to re-order, leave out, or distort biographical facts while writing Lost Son?
The material of Rilke’s life – his experiences and relationships – was so rich already that surprisingly little manipulation of fact was required in order to get to a story of great drama. Lost Son tells Rilke's story quite faithfully.
What’s your favorite work by Rilke?
I think my answer to that will change depending on when you ask me. Right now, I’m most in admiration of The Book of Hours and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
That is a bigger question than I could pretend to answer, and Lost Son is less an authoritative portrait than it is a letter sent to a ghost. Rainer Maria Rilke is almost universally recognized as one of the world’s greatest poets. But he is perhaps best loved in the United States for the prose of his Letters to a Young Poet, a slim little volume offering some remarkable, unorthodox perspectives on such things as love, solitude, grief, art, and fate. It’s a book cherished with near religiosity by many people young and old. Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and died at age 51 in Switzerland.
What drew you to telling Rilke’s story?
I am fascinated by how wholly and entirely Rilke lived and breathed as a poet, almost to the exclusion of everything else – and am particularly fascinated by his much-expressed conviction that living this way was his only real method of surviving in the world. One gets the sense, while reading his amazing work, that Rilke was a nerve laid bare to everything around him, that every impression and experience affected him almost physically, vibrating inside him and eventually becoming transformed to poetry. The unique way in which he “utilized” his vulnerability would ultimately take him from provincial-born, sickly, psychologically mistreated child to enduring master artist held dear by readers all across the planet. I wanted to live in, explore, and evoke that strangely inspiring, sometimes disturbing process of artistic development and all its reverberations.
Why did you choose to explore Rilke’s life in a novel rather than a biography?
It seemed that a novel would allow me to explore the poet's remarkable life at a level of intimacy that a more academic format just would not permit. For a figure of such great specialness as Rilke, the fictional form seemed appropriately special. Amidst his powerful poetic output, Rilke authored a single novel called The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It’s an astounding book, pungent and luminous and unlike anything else in the realm of fiction that I know of. Malte is semi-autobiographical, and I’ve always been intrigued by Rilke’s urge to novelize his own life story to some degree. Likewise, I’ve always found his real biography irresistibly intriguing, and I suppose Lost Son first began with the thought, ‘why not take the actual life and novelize it in full?’ – from Rilke’s childhood being raised as a girl and then being abruptly shipped off to military school, to his passionate affair at age 21 with Lou Andreas-Salomé, a famous intellectual 14 years his senior, to his close friendship with the great sculptor Rodin. All the dramas and relationships of a strong novel were there waiting.
What sort of research went into Lost Son?
Well, aside from exploring Rilke’s body of work, I’ve read pretty much all the major titles about Rilke available in English (biographies, commentaries, etc.), but most of those I absorbed early from mere personal fascination, prior to any plan for this novel. Otherwise, I’ve done quite a bit of Rilkean traveling, visiting places of importance to the poet: Prague, Munich, the Swiss Valais, etc. Once I got well into the writing of Lost Son, I traveled to Paris and stayed for a few months in the neighborhood where Rilke lived. In Paris I did a bit of archival exploration, mainly at the Rodin Museum where a great number of Rilke’s original letters to the sculptor are kept. But my research, aside from exploring the available information relating to Rilke’s life, was largely impressionistic: traveling and observing, walking around Paris and doing lots of imagining.
Did you find yourself having to re-order, leave out, or distort biographical facts while writing Lost Son?
The material of Rilke’s life – his experiences and relationships – was so rich already that surprisingly little manipulation of fact was required in order to get to a story of great drama. Lost Son tells Rilke's story quite faithfully.
What’s your favorite work by Rilke?
I think my answer to that will change depending on when you ask me. Right now, I’m most in admiration of The Book of Hours and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Between Hope and Suspicion: a Translation From Rilke's Novel
This passage comes from Rilke's marvelously singular interpretation of the biblical story of the Lost Son (aka "Prodigal Son") at the end of Malte. My novel's title alludes to Rilke's haunting version of the old tale.
"And the house did the rest. One had merely to enter into its full smell. Already most decisions had been made. Some little thing or other might still be altered; on the whole, though, one was already that which the people here held one to be -- the one for whom they had long ago confabulated a life, from his small past and their own wishes; one who was but a confection of their spliced selves, who stood day and night under the suggestion of their love, between their hope and their suspicion, before their reproach or applause.
"So no use climbing the stairs with whatever unspeakable caution. They are all in the living room, and the door need only be nudged for their glances to find him. He stays in the dark, he will await their questions. But then comes the worst. They take him by the hands, they drag him to the table, and all of them, as many as there are, stretch themselves inquisitively before the lamp. They have it good that way, they keep themselves in the darkness, and on him alone falls, with the light, all the shame at having a face."
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
"And the house did the rest. One had merely to enter into its full smell. Already most decisions had been made. Some little thing or other might still be altered; on the whole, though, one was already that which the people here held one to be -- the one for whom they had long ago confabulated a life, from his small past and their own wishes; one who was but a confection of their spliced selves, who stood day and night under the suggestion of their love, between their hope and their suspicion, before their reproach or applause.
"So no use climbing the stairs with whatever unspeakable caution. They are all in the living room, and the door need only be nudged for their glances to find him. He stays in the dark, he will await their questions. But then comes the worst. They take him by the hands, they drag him to the table, and all of them, as many as there are, stretch themselves inquisitively before the lamp. They have it good that way, they keep themselves in the darkness, and on him alone falls, with the light, all the shame at having a face."
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
Friday, April 20, 2007
Keep Small Media in the Mail
The top folks at the U.S. Postal Service have welcomed a rather insidious proposal from one of America's top media conglomerates, Time Warner, which would saddle small publishers with substantially increased postal rates even while securing rate breaks for large media. Clearly, for the sake of free and varied information in this country, we cannot allow such inequable rate hikes to take effect. Visit the Stamp Out the Rate Hikes website to learn more and sign a petition. Congress needs to hear from you before April 25.
Monday, April 16, 2007
2007 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
Congratulations, Mr. McCarthy. You've deserved this forever. We younger writers are filled with gratitude that you've kept the work coming. We look forward to still more.
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