In Defense of Reliant Novels, or: Questioning Some Dubious Estimations About Historical Fiction

Over at the Critical Mass literary blog, one of the current PEN/Faulkner Award judges, Molly Giles, offers a glimpse of her experience sorting through the boxes and boxes of books by prospective awardees. Her observations are interesting, and strike me as much more well-considered and humane than the run-of-the-mill cynicism of other lit-judge reflections regularly showcased in the realm of literary gossip (which often feature comments such as: "I got so sick of reading I started looking for reasons to quit a book; if a novel used first-person present-tense I immediately threw it aside and reached for the next.")

Literary judging is, fundamentally, an elite privilege. It therefore carries with it a kind of moral responsibility. Ostensibly, a judge is commissioned to prize great literature, wherever it is found, and seek its furtherance. Thus the judge ought to take pains to ensure that his or her range of consideration is as broad and inclusive as possible. In other words, merely reviewing the latest Roth, Delillo or Updike — or lavishing the better part of one's attention upon titles already widely embraced or copiously reviewed while merely skimming work by an unknown — does nothing for the cause of furthering this country's contemporary literature. Then again, perhaps an award can never suffice for that.

But Giles certainly deserves applause for breaking the mold with her affirmative and uplifting perspective, as revealed in statements like: "Few of the titles I loved were publicly visible."

And while it’s often impossible to know, as a novelist, just how fully ignored or engaged one's work may be by readers, let alone by award judges, I found it heartening to note, near the close of her comments, that my new book Lost Son did receive consideration (see her embedded reference to a novel she read -- or at least looked at -- about Rilke).

“Month after month I did nothing but read,” Giles reports,

“I hunkered down, hooded over. Finally, the last box was emptied. A bare space glimmered on my dining room table... I had twenty-six pages of single spaced notes, a new trifocal prescription, a deep respect for my two fellow judges, who had been sweet tempered and supportive, and I’d been in the company of some of the most wonderful writers in America.

What did I learn?

That most of what gets published deserves to get published.

That most of what deserves to get published also deserves to be showcased in bookstores, airports, and book clubs—and is not. Few of the titles I loved were publicly visible.

That best-selling authors write as well as writers no one has ever heard of.

That many writers no one has ever heard of should be best-selling authors.

...That American writers write about war, but not about this war.

...That American writers prefer the past to the present: the bulk of the novels I read were historical fictions, many of them based on real people. While I enjoyed reading about Woody Guthrie, Florence Nightengale, Errol Flynn, Rilke, Hitler, Byron, Pocahontas, Stephen Crane, Edward Curtis and William Blake, among others, I wondered why…why rely on the known instead of the invented? Some novels even recycled fictional characters: Huck Finn’s father, Gregor Samsa. My conclusion: it’s easier for novelists because this way they know the end.

“Huck Finn’s father” refers to Jon Clinch’s impressive novel, Finn. And the Gregor Samsa reference, I believe, is to the wonderful Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen (which I wrote a brief review of last year). “Errol Flynn” denotes Margaret Cezair Thompson’s The Pirate’s Daughter (with which my book shares a colophon). “Pocahontas” signifies Matthew Sharpe’s surreal Jamestown.

While Ms. Giles’ reflections as an erstwhile judge deserve praise for thoughtfulness, I’m chilled by the dismissiveness of her final remarks, the nonchalant disrespect they exhibit.

If we want to ponder why novelists write novels based on real people or preexisting fictional characters (a subject well worth discussing), we shouldn’t allow an essential question to elude us in favor of one that is implicitly ungenerous. Most certainly the question should not be, as Giles puts it: “Why rely on the known instead of the invented?” Phrased this way, the prompt itself already contains a preemptively qualitative judgment, implying not so subtly that the writers of these works look for ("rely on") shortcuts, and find them in the existent narratives of another person’s biography or another writer’s plotline instead of writing ("inventing") something of their own. Given a question so erroneous, it’s no wonder Giles offers so crass an answer: “It’s easier for novelists because this way they know the end.”

It’s easier. Now, there’s a sentiment unbefitting the largesse Giles has already demonstrated. Why insinuate authorial laziness, rather than grant that some more honorable artistic impulse may motivate such novelists?

To be fair, Giles is not writing a critical essay here. Her tone is offhand. Maybe she thought her cursory estimation would best serve her closing — and coming from a novelist would supply a dash of wryness. But she ought to remember that she’s writing as a judge, and her observations will be read as those of an arbiter of literary quality.

Were Giles to examine at length the matter she briefly raises, I should hope she would reach a more worthy conclusion — and that her colleagues in award committees and critical circles would do likewise.

First, of course, they would need to revise the question. And a more responsible question would be: “Why return to these known stories?”

I pose that question to myself now, wanting to grant it the thought it deserves. As one who has novelized the life of Rilke, I could give my own extensive answer — but I’ve already done so elsewhere.

Rather than repeat myself, I want to quote E.L. Doctorow, a gifted novelist with a long career of “relying on the known” in such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and most recently The March, the 2006 winner of … well, the PEN/Faulkner Award.

In his marvelous essay “Notes on the History of Fiction,” Doctorow makes numerous cogent observations on the very subject which, when briefly raised by Ms. Giles, evokes only her condescension.

Doctorow’s piece is worth quoting at length, but I’ll start with three sentences:

“Common to all the great nineteenth-century practitioners of narrative art is a belief in the staying power of fiction as a legitimate system of knowledge. While the writer of fiction, of whatever form, may be seen as an arrogant transgressor, a genre-blurring immoralist given to border raids and territorial occupations, he is no more than a conservator of the ancient system of organizing and storing knowledge we call the story. A Bronze-Ager at heart, he lives by the total discourse that antedates the special vocabularies of modern intelligence.”

Ms. Giles, I fear, would disagree. Her disparaging remarks suggest a critical inclination to divorce modern fiction entirely from what Doctorow calls “the total discourse.”

In fact, whether Giles is being tongue-in-cheek or not, I feel she evinces an apparent fallacy in contemporary literary perception. It’s precisely because this fallacy finds voice in such an obviously thoughtful person that I can’t help but wonder just how insidious, how little observed, the shallow idea might be even in those disseminating it. Giles’ casualness in letting it slip leads me to suspect that it’s a notion of some currency — one getting passed around like a pathogen. Its hosts may hardly notice it, though they’re transmitting it wherever they go.

The fallacy, of course, is this: The novelist who employs the age-old device of retelling, who looks to “the known,” who dares to rummage in history, biography, or indeed literature itself, is inevitably a kind of cheat, a lesser talent, one too lily-livered to make up his own damn story. The only truly worthy novels of today are those that rely exclusively on authorial invention, those in which the author does not already “know the ending.” Historical, biographical, or lit-spinoff novels, on the other hand, reflect little more than the novelist’s cheap “reliance” upon events or imaginations not his own.

The sophism is clear enough if we follow the embedded logic, which insists that history, biography, and literature are at once inflexible and exhausted — that they cannot possibly accommodate imagination or invention. Indeed, Giles absurdly indicates that the ending of any “reliant” novel can only mimic the “known” ending of the story that forms its basis — never mind whether the reliant novel prefers intimate characterization over historical explanation, like Karen Fisher’s magnificent PEN/Faulkner finalist A Sudden Country, whether it delights in the inventively askew as does Olsen’s Anxious Pleasures, or proves merely obliquely referential to its historical basis, like Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

My Rilke novel, I must protest, does not end with the poet’s death. Though the novel begins from the “known” record of Rilke’s life — and his death will indeed remain the conclusion of that ever-expanding record — my narrative of Rilke operates by methods of inquiry distinct unto itself, therein becoming its own uniquely inflected record, and thus naturally culminating in a unique conclusion.

Every fictional narrative, whether or not emergent from an actual history or preexisting story, will lay down its own laws. In order to be sustained by the author and absorbed by the reader as literature, it will demand invention at every turn. The reliant novelist’s work therefore, if not harder than the “inventor” novelist’s, is most certainly no “easier.”

I’ve described Lost Son as a letter sent to a ghost, which is my way of highlighting the very personal nature of the novel, for the book does not purport to be — and is not interested in being — an authoritative portrait of Rilke, a known story retold. The creation of fiction based on the life of a poet as legendary as Rilke can only be a personal process, and that personal process — the important process of seeking to understand, assimilate, and perhaps digest and transcend one’s influences — is as much the theme of my narrative as are the events of Rilke’s life.

Thus, Lost Son opens with an epigraph by author and critic Lee Siegel:

“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.”

Lost Son, being personal and subjective, being the record of one individual search for understanding, is a new story.

Ms. Giles, apparently, is an academic. Is her fallacy university-born? (Surely it doesn’t come of her role as an author.) I admit that I share Thoreau’s innate mistrust of institutions (“Wherever there is a lull in truth,” said old Henry, “an institution springs up”), so I suffer an involuntary wariness toward academe where it professes to nourish and sustain literary art through drills in technique, the doctrinal enshrinement of certain great texts, or consensus opinions in workshops — pedagogical approaches that risk breeding what Frank Lloyd Wright called the incubus of habit that besets the mind. Wallace Stegner (a creative writing teacher himself) was referring to this very incubus when he spoke of where critics go wrong:

“They tend to run in pack … For ten years at a time a single critical attitude rules, and a limited range of books is praised, a special vocabulary springs up, bright graduate students catch the tone and lingo and write (and here is a case of writing with an eye very definitely on an audience) to please the reigning critics rather than to discuss a new book in its own proper terms … Being so pluralist a nation, we ought to have pluralist literature and pluralist literary criticism. The fact is that nothing in so much as our literary criticism do the forces of fashion and stereotype take over.” *

Elsewhere, Stegner was equally perceptive and outspoken regarding the kind of learning universities ought to foster:

“What we most need is neither generalists nor specialists, but specialists who can generalize and generalists with a specialty... Try self-consciously to produce specialists and leaders in [a] pre-professional college, and you will, I am convinced, produce half-men, limited men, men with imperfect vision and low horizons.” **

I can’t help feeling that Giles’ bizarre notion ought to elicit a bold question. We know our universities are fast becoming the last bastions of learned literary appreciation in this country, as good review publications dwindle to ever smaller numbers and independent bookstores fold in the shadows of corporations. In the absence of any substantial system of literary patronage, universities are among the last incubators, even, of new literature; while BookScan figures bar the development of healthy young novelistic careers, witness how many of our nation’s wonderful literary journals are produced under the auspices of institutions. And given this state of affairs, this cocooning-away of literature, further separating the art of fiction from “the total discourse” and moving it toward classification as a discreet (even arcane) discipline, we must ask ourselves how many unexamined critical biases are incidentally produced? Do MFA programs, given their dynamic of a collective criticism, unwittingly (I emphasize unwittingly) propagate such biases? Could an idea like the one at hand — that historical novels are not real novels — ever emerge spontaneously and isolatedly? Or mustn’t some vector, perhaps many vectors, such as those in the social-literary culture of an institution, be responsible?

Who can say? Not I, certainly. I won’t pretend to draw conclusions here. I just wonder.

In the end, of course, such questions are diversions from the more material concerns: 1) That we recognize this particular bias to be an emperor lacking clothes, and 2) that we examine an emphatically current artistic impulse as it deserves to be examined, in a conscientious, responsible, and respectful manner. If American writers today “prefer the past to the present” we ought to allow for the possibility, at least, that a certain artistic merit, and maybe even artistic significance, underlies this tendency. Better that than to leap to the disheartening conclusion that novelists today shun invention and scramble after the easy and well-known.

I only bring up universities because Doctorow’s eloquent apologia continues with an insightful observation about them — or about their essential irrelevance to the novelist (Doctorow has taught at NYU):

“[The] gift of the [novelist’s] practice seems to come of its inherently solitary nature. A writer has no credential except as it is self-awarded. Despite our university graduate programs in writing there is nothing that licenses a writer to write, no equivalent of a medical degree, or a law degree or a Ph.D. in molecular biology or divinity. Writers are on their own. They are specialists in nothing. They are liberated. They can use the discoveries of science, the poetics of theology. They can ventriloquize as anthropologists, report as journalists; they can confess, philosophize, they can leer as pornographers, or become as wide-eyed as children. They are free to use legends, myths, dreams, hallucinations, and the mutterings of poor mad people in the street. All of it counts, every vocabulary, every kind of data is grist for the mill. Nothing is excluded, certainly not history…

“The writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth…the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel…That the public figure of historical consequence makes a fiction of himself long before the novelist gets to him is almost beside the point. Once the novel is written, the rendering made, the historical presence is doubled. There is the person and there is the portrait. They are not the same, nor can they be.”

And here we find supported with glorious authority a truth I noted earlier about the novel as an art form.

The novelist’s portrait, if it is a serious work, is an entity in itself, raising concerns wholly unique to the sensibility from which it emerges, and plumbing depths not yet plumbed in any such manner by the historical or biographical records that precede it.

Put another way, the narrative of a historical, biographical, or lit-spinoff novel moves along an arc no less autonomous or artistically absolute than that of any other good novel. That this arc is rooted under a larger factual arc does not alone make it a mere narrative excrescence — nor a simple plagiarism of the past. If it is truly a novel, it throws its own parabola, whether it involves so-called known figures and events or not. If it is truly a novel, its locus lies wholly within itself.

What’s more, we might further consider the nature of the “known” upon which the novelist in question “relies.” Surely history, biography, and enduring literature are far more personal, and therefore perpetually subject to interpretation, than Ms. Giles allows by her concluding slur (“easy endings”).

Where is the authoritative account of the American Civil War to assure us we know that story once and for all? — and I mean no disrespect to the massive achievements of Shelby Foote. Where is the conclusive life of Thomas Jefferson or John Brown, Marie Antoinette or Albrecht Dürer? Where the inarguable commentary on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? A billion radii can be drawn to these everlasting centers of human thought, event, and persona — which is the very reason we revisit them our whole lives long. In fact, we tend to find them, after the passing of years, accentuated with meaning entirely new to us. Surely Ms. Giles, being an author herself, cannot believe these enduring narratives to be as static as she inadvertently propounds.

And she must agree that the novel, that most prismatic of art forms, by its excursive and complicating points of view, by its use of the endlessly lithe and subjective medium of language, by its prodigal narrative descants, its soul-scouring close-ups and chronological curlicues and go-anywhere frames of vision — surely the novel is uniquely suited to present us with two (or two-hundred) fresh explorations of an event or a person we thought we “knew.”

The successful historical, biographical, or lit-spinoff novel can function as something far richer than a faithful reiteration. It can remind us powerfully of the ambiguity reigning over our impersonal history just as it reigns over our ostensibly personalized present. It can remind us that the realms of the human, being inexhaustibly various, are ultimately unknowable, and therefore a source of never-ending mystery and discovery, vast spheres for never-ending excursions.

A reliant novel might well reawaken us to the hollowness of dogma, the flatness of much inherited understanding, and the human responsibility to gaze long at our own predecessors, our own defining events — to judge them if we must, but to do so by virtue of a humanizing complexity and a non-trivializing empathy.

In my case I find my novel’s main character, Rilke, subjected to a speciously “defining” force exerted upon him by the generations who try to understand his work. He must weather the curse of all legendary figures: turned into a spokesman for a certain way of life or a certain artistic manner. Coerced into this posthumous mouthpiece role, he gets a violently polarized reputation. He’s either adored as a saint of modern poetry, or reviled as a profligate husband and father.

But conducting my own novelistic inquiry into Rilke’s story, I know that neither of these two extremes can truthfully reflect this bygone figure. And meanwhile, I seek to create a work that illumines and affects. I wish to stir in readers a resonant equivalent of what Rilke’s story stirs in me. That task can only be undertaken in a manner deeply personal, humane, and probably more self-revealing than Rilke-revealing. And so the resulting novel, I believe, is something much more storied, much more necessarily inventive than a known tale retold.

Doctorow continues with a further salient point:

“The scholarly historian and the undocumented novelist make common cause as operatives of the Enlightenment. They are confronted with faux history as it is construed by power, as it is perverted for political purposes, as it is hammered into serviceable myth by those who take advantage of its plasticity.”

One might amend this comment to note that the biographical novelist, too, is often confronted with faux biography as it is construed by hagiographers, iconoclasts, cynics, or old associates or cousins nursing a grudge. But, says Doctorow,

“The novelist is alone in understanding that reality is amenable to any construction placed upon it.

“The historian and novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian’s work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people.”

The reliant novel, by taking us back to those old imaginative centers in its expeditions of invention, inquiry, and enrichment, is nothing less than a reconnaissance mission of the human spirit back into itself.

So, why create a novel that revisits a “known” story? Sven Birkerts, in his brief essay, “Biography and the Dissolving Self” (1994), may provide one answer with regard at least to biographical fiction. His is a cultural interpretation which insightfully considers our zeitgeist of “fragmentation,” “abstraction,” and endless bureaucracy:

“More and more we find ourselves living at a remove, with the feeling that life has gone blurry, has lost its singular intensity; we feel our coherence dissipating among needs, obligations, and great troves of competing stimuli… [but] burrowing into a life, the reader experiences clarity and purpose by proxy. It is an exalting baptism. For one thing, the circumstances of earlier times were, if not simpler, then more resonant, and felt more authentic… Things seemed to have density, weight—to matter… Biographical narration itself is premised on coherence and meaning. The biographer almost occupationally views his subject as living under the aspect of a singular destiny, with everything around him contributing to press his experience into its intended shape. Which of us feel some comparable sense of destination about our premillennial lives?” ***

Why start a novel from a “known” story?

I have my own intuitions, which tell me authors do so — and will continue to do so — because such work may serve to bind human beings to one another across time, battle lines, and social divides. Because such work may help us by its arresting humanity to become more expansive, imaginative spirits, to traverse and restore even those realms that were formerly but great black spaces where inspiration had stagnated or empathy withered.

……………………………………
Each of the following reliant novels offers the reader far more than a known story retold or an all too familiar ending recycled. Each will reward your attention abundantly:

-Wintering by Kate Moses (about Sylvia Plath)
-I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall (about Lewis & Clark)
-Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje (about jazz legend Buddy Bolden)
-The Master by Colm Toibin (about Henry James)
-Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin (another remarkable work about Kafka’s Gregor Samsa)
-Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman (about Mary Cassatt and her sister)
-The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen
-A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher (about the Oregon Trail)
-The March by E.L. Doctorow (about General W.T. Sherman’s infamous march)
..............................................

Quotations used in this post:
* On Teaching and Writing Fiction by Wallace Stegner, Penguin Books 2002
** The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner edited by Page Stegner, Shoemaker & Hoard 2007 (letter to David Packard, May 1959)
*** Readings by Sven Birkerts, Graywolf Press 1999

A Darkened Cinema

Writer and film director Anthony Minghella died today in London. He was 54 years old, and my favorite living filmmaker. His movies, all made from Minghella-authored scripts, are:

Truly, Madly, Deeply
The English Patient
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Cold Mountain
Breaking & Entering

Minghella was also an accomplished playwright.

This man's work has been a primary and enduring source of inspiration to me since I first viewed The English Patient on the big screen in 1996.

Today the storytelling world has lost a great light, and young writers have lost a great teacher.

Art Awakens Us: The Diving Bell & the Butterfly

“Being, in excess, wells up in my heart.”–Rainer Maria Rilke

The most powerful works of art connect us to ourselves and each other. They awaken us, un-distract us, and bring us home to the substance of life: a touch, a taste, a color. They affirm human existence in its romance and tragedy alike. Our time here is brief, they remind us; we are duty bound to savor the wonders around us while we may.

Like Rilke wrote in his Ninth Duino Elegy:

…To be here means so much / …everything here, all this that’s disappearing, seems to need us, to concern us, in some strange way, / we who disappear / even faster!

Good art touches us at our own uniquely human core. I believe it resonates on a level profoundly more intimate than the “everybody’s reading it, seeing it, listening to it” craze often sparked by honors bestowed upon a book, a song, or a film from this or that committee of judges.

So maybe it’s fitting that this little film review should concern a quiet little movie nominated for four 2008 Academy Awards, which remained conspicuously absent from the proceedings onstage at the Oscars last week, for while viewing this film I had one of the most astonishingly personal, emotional art-experiences of my life. Actually, I phrase it badly to say I viewed the movie at all; I inhabited it, would be more correct. It’s called The Diving Bell & the Butterfly.

Based on the true story of Jean Dominique-Bauby, an elite epicurean from the French fashion world, the movie explores Jean’s bodily and spiritual trauma in the aftermath of a devastating stroke that left him paralyzed at age 43. At the start of the film he awakens from a 20-day coma to find himself surrounded by doctors who inform him he’s “locked in,” that is, afflicted by a rare syndrome that leaves him fully conscious and capable of normal thought, but unable to move or speak. He can blink his eyes, nothing more.

From this place of bleakness and despair, an unthinkably expansive journey begins. In a mesmeric approach to the paralytic’s story, director Julian Schnabel puts the viewer directly into Bauby’s body. We see through the stricken man’s eyes and are privy to the murmurous narration of his thoughts. We are “locked in” as he is. A shutter closes on screen whenever we blink. It’s a startling out-of-body experience. With Bauby, we suffer one eye being sewn shut (to save it from infection); in a wheelchair we’re pushed down a hospital corridor and catch glimpses of our contorted face reflected in a window; our limp body is submerged in a tank, sponged and scrubbed by orderlies.

We are completely dependent upon the doctors and hospital therapists, and very soon we come to love these people. They are good-hearted and generous of spirit. They are beautiful.

Bauby’s real story culminated in the publication of a memoir about his experience, entitled The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. Amazingly, he “dictated” the book in the midst of his paralysis, blinking his single good eye as a means of selecting, one at a time, each letter of each word he wished to use. In the film, we participate in Bauby’s first slow attempts at this process.

Eventually Schnabel’s camera pulls back. We glimpse Bauby from the outside. And though we’re now looking at him, we remain inside him. Because the trance of the film’s empathic opening lingers, we’re attuned to his interior world as we watch him in his wheelchair, his hospital bed—and also in memories from before the stroke, when he was in his physical prime. Through it all, this interior world becomes a luminous, living place.

This man has lost everything: his body itself, the pleasures of movement, sensation, privacy, personal freedom—but his spirit is alive and well, perhaps even freer than ever. The “locked in” man transcends his condition. He imagines, loves, and creates, and we are swept along on this spiritual journey.

Bauby wrote in his memoir:

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

Schnabel’s film positively resonates with the preciousness of life in all its sensual particulars. It explores how art and imagination liberated one human spirit; how, even in his “broken” state a man could celebrate the pulsing beauty of existence. And where Jean Dominique-Bauby is set free by his own art, thoughts, dreams, and memories, we too are set free through the art of the film that tells his story. We take flight into him, as he takes flight into the gifts of life.

It’s an experience equivalent to what Rilke describes later on in his Ninth Elegy:

Between the hammer strokes our hearts survive / like the tongue / that between the teeth / and in spite of everything / goes on praising.

I emerged from The Diving Bell & the Butterfly renewed, inspired, and alert to a fresh immersion into my own senses. This film is a gift.

[Note: Rilke translations here are by David Young.]

This post also appears at Soul Shelter

The Web of Influence

Over at the website of the Poetry Foundation, writer Geoff Dyer has a thoughtful essay entitled "Genius Envy" which deals with Rilke, Rodin, Cezanne, the photographer Edward Steichen, and the web that connects them all. Dyer explores how artists of different disciplines have inspired one another, and how in experiencing the world's great works of art we are all inevitably led to meander through this web of inspiration, tributes, references, and poetic iterations.

I believe this idea is one of the major themes in Lost Son, and Dyer articulates my own sense, while writing the novel, of beholding ever-unfolding vistas (in my case, from Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Clara Westhoff, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Rodin, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Cezanne, Baudelaire, Eugene Atget)....

Here's a bit from Dyer's piece:

"Rilke struggled to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality—his ability to create things—into the “thing-poems” [Dinggedichte] of 1907-8.

As the young Rilke had come to write about Rodin and his work, so the young Edward Steichen came to photograph Rodin and his creations....Rodin became convinced not just of Steichen’s individual talent but of photography’s viability as an art form.

....Whatever your starting point, whether your particular interest is poetry (Rilke), photography (Steichen), sculpture (Rodin), or fiction (Balzac), you will, so to speak, be led astray. After this meeting there will be dispersal. And the dispersal will lead, in turn, to new meetings, new convergences....

In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography."

The Rilke/Cezanne connection is likewise discussed by W.S. Di Piero in his essay "Only Collect," also at the Poetry Foundation website.

Rilke's Birthday - "He Will Be Spacious"

Today is the birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague in 1875. One of the world's greatest poets, Rilke is the main character in my recent novel, Lost Son.

Here’s Rilke at age 23, writing in his journal during his first stay in Florence, overflowing with fresh impressions upon seeing some of the western world’s greatest works of art. In substance these youthful thoughts are already quintessentially Rilkean, as though the young poet is laying the foundations of a religion all his own.

The translation is by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, from their beautiful Diaries of a Young Poet:

“Know then that art is: the means by which singular, solitary individuals fulfill themselves. We have all been born in chains: they have them silver-plated or gilded. But we want to rend them; not through ugly and brute force; our desire is to grow out of them.

“Know then that the artist creates for himself—only for himself. What for you becomes laughter or weeping, he must shape with the hands of a wrestler and raise it up out of himself. In him there is no room for his past; and so he gives it a separate, independent existence in works of art. But only because he knows no other material than that of your world does he place them into our days. They are not for you. Do not touch them, and regard them with awe.

“There is an unspeakable brutality in the present-day relationship of the crowd to the artist. His confessions, which helplessly take refuge in the forms of common things, are regarded by the many as no different from those things. All have their hands on them; all may pronounce what is to their liking and what does not suit their whim. All take the holy vessel into their hands as if it were an object of daily use, as if it were a possession that at any moment they might break without punishment: defilers of the temple!

“Therefore the artist’s way must be this: to bridge obstacle after obstacle and to build step after step, until at last he can gaze into himself. Not straining, not forced, not on his tiptoes: calmly and clearly as into a landscape. After this return home into himself, deed after deed will be a leisurely joy; his life will be a creation and he will have no further need for the things that are outside. He will be spacious, and all maturity’s extent will be inside him.

“The artist’s work is a putting-in-order: he places outside himself all things that are small and transitory: his lone sufferings, his vague longings, his fearful dreams, and those joys that will fade. Then the realm inside him becomes spacious and
festive, and he will have created that worthy home for—himself.

“Often I have such a great longing for myself. I know that the path ahead still stretches far; but in my best dreams I see the day when I shall stand and greet myself.

“Once during this last dear winter we talked about it: whether the creative person is qualitatively different from the others. Do You remember? [note: Rilke is addressing Lou Andreas-Salomé.] Only now do I know the answer. The creative individual is the more spacious person, the person out beyond whom the future lies. The artist will not for all time endure alongside the man. When the artist, the more mobile, the deeper of the two, becomes ripe and strong enough to engender his own kind, when he lives what now he dreams, the man will wither away and little by little die out. The artist is the eternity that juts into our days.....

“....Give art your protection, so that it does not learn of the day’s quarrel; for its homeland is the other side of all time. Its struggles are like the storms that bring the seed, and its victories are like springtime. Its works are: unbloody sacrifices of a new covenant....

“....Every artist is born in an alien country; he has a homeland nowhere but within his own borders. And those of his works that proclaim the language of this homeland are most deeply genuine....”

See also Cunningham's "Rainer Maria Rilke: Myths, Masks & the Literature of a Life"

No Country for Old Men

This weekend found me in a movie theatre, transfixed for the better part of two hours by the Coen brothers' very worthy adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. It's been a long time since a film has gripped me as intensely as this one did. An especially odd experience, given that adaptations often addle.

I hope, if time permits, to jot here a few thoughts about the film before long. For now, I thought I'd direct readers to my recent essay, "The Art of Reading Cormac McCarthy," which appeared in the last issue of Poets & Writers magazine, and which I've just posted in full at my main author website. You'll find the article linked under "Shorter Works."

Keats's Birthday

On this day in 1795 the great English poet John Keats was born. His life was a tragedy. He was orphaned by the age of 15 and died in Rome at the age of 25. But his slim body of work lives on, often held to be second only to Shakespeare.

I post the following chilling poem in the spirit of Halloween. It's thought to be a fragment from a longer work that Keats never completed.

This living hand, now warm and capable...

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed -- see here it is --
I hold it towards you.

Rilkean Dance

A new London staging of the French ballet Giselle, the brainchild of 19th-century intellectual Théophile Gautier, incorporates Rilkean thoughts and images. As reported in the Guardian:

"The clue to the piece's real agenda lies in the title, a sly borrowing from a collection of poems and essays by German writer Rainer Maria Rilke. What [choreographer] Miller is actually doing is using the Giselle story to express aspects of Rilke's philosophy...Throughout his life, Rilke insisted that 'one is alone' and that lovers are, at best, 'the guardians of each other's solitude'. Miller graphically illustrates this in a tableau in which Giselle and Albrecht are slumped on child-sized chairs in tender mutual incomprehension. Giselle is in her wedding dress, he is carrying flowers. Rilke constantly returned to the idea of death as transformation and to the image of flowers, particularly roses, as a metaphor for both.

So this is really a piece about life-change. In Miller's version of the ballet, Giselle's mother encourages her daughter to dance (rather than forbidding her because of her weak heart), because only by risking death, metaphorical or otherwise, can transformation be effected. As Rilke writes: 'Only someone who is ready for anything, who excludes nothing, can relate fully to another.'..."

Listen Online: A Reading from LOST SON

Back in August, I recorded a 20-minute reading from Lost Son for The Writer's Block at KQED radio in San Francisco. I chose the section in which Rainer Maria Rilke first meets Lou Andreas-Salomé.

You can now listen online.

Rilke Week

It's "Rilke Week" over at the literary blog, Chekhov's Mistress.

Cormac & the Coens

A suprising second public "appearance" by Cormac McCarthy in a single calendar year, this one in Time Magazine, where he chats with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose adaptation of No Country for Old Men opens November 9.

If only the editors of Time had been wise enough to publish the full conversation, and not just this edited version...

The New York Prodigal Son

The New York Sun, in an October 5 description of a Manhattan art exhibit called "The Art of Forgiveness: Images of the Prodigal Son," deploys a number of literary references, including a mention of Rilke's own rendition of the Biblical parable:

"In his semi-autobiographical "Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910) writer Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875–1926) argues that the story of the prodigal son is about a young man "who did not want to be loved," and who therefore rejects suffocating family affection in order to express his own personality: "Shall he stay and pretend to live the sort of life they ascribe to him, and grow to resemble them in his whole appearance?" By fleeing family smothering, Rilke's prodigal son obtains special powers: "I believe that the strength of his transformation consisted in his no longer being the son of anyone in particular. This, in the end, is the strength of all young people who have gone away." "

Sarkozy et Rilke

This recent Newsweek article, Sartre, Meet Sarkozy, mentions that the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a self-proclaimed man-for-the-common-man, was unsure how to pronounce "Rainer Maria Rilke." (Not an uncommon problem, but interesting to note an occurrence of Rilke's name in the realm of national politics and major media. Incidentally, it's "Rīner Maria Reelk-uh").

"The acclaimed novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza (best known, perhaps, for her play "Art") was allowed to follow [Sarkozy] throughout the campaign and write an unexpurgated book about it. Even if she were to massacre him, he said, he'd come out of it with his reputation enhanced. Now a best seller, Reza's "L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit" is not always complimentary. (In one passage, Sarkozy calls Reza just before a big speech and asks her how to pronounce the last name of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She says he has it right. He's not sure and drops the name altogether.) But Sarkozy was correct about the overall effect of the book. It makes him look like a down-to-earth man of action even as it associates him with a French intellectual world he eschews: a neat trick indeed."

Lou & Louis

In Louis Menand's latest New Yorker article, "Drive, He Wrote," which deals with Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, Menand refers to Neal Cassady as "the Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, of postwar American culture."

At my redesigned and expanded author website, I've just posted some notes regarding Lou that I made in 2001, at the start of my work on Lost Son.

Rilke's Mâitre

Continuing the theme of the Rilke-Rodin relationship from my last few posts, here's a 3.5 minute, slightly discursive, but compellingly personal audio commentary on the two artists (courtesy of "Engines of Our Inegnuity," a radio show from the University of Houston).



Photo at left: La Priere by Rodin (1909)

"It Seemed to Me That I Had Always Known Him" : Rilke & Rodin

On this day in 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin met each other for the first time. For the 26-year-old poet particularly, the meeting was a life-altering event. Rodin's powerful influence changed the course of Rilke's art forever. His Rodin study is one of his most glorious prose works. When that book was finally translated into French so Rodin himself could read it (around 1905), the sculptor avowed it to be the finest interpretation of his work, and soon after invited Rilke to live at his estate in Meudon outside Paris.

On September 2, 1902, the day after first making Rodin's acquaintance, Rilke wrote to his wife Clara describing the meeting. His reverance for the master is already clear:

"Yesterday, Monday afternoon at three o'clock, I was at Rodin's for the first time. Atelier 182 rue de l'Universite. I went down the Seine. He had a model, a girl. Had a little laster plaster object in his hand on which he was scraping about. He simply quit work, offered me a chair, and we talked. He was kind and gentle. And it seemed to me that I had always known him. That I was only seeing him again; I found him smaller, and yet more powerful, more kindly, and more noble. That forehead, the relationship it bears to his nose which rides out of it like a ship out of harbor...that is very remarkable. Character of stone is in that forehead and that nose. And his mouth has a speech whose ring is good, intimate, and full of youth. So also is his laugh, that embarrassed and at the same time joyful laugh of a child that has been given lovely presents. He is very dear to me. That I knew at once." (from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1920; W.W. Norton, 1945)

This letter is the basis for my own rendition of the meeting in Lost Son.

From left: Rilke, Rose Beuret (commonly referred to at the time as "Madame Rodin,") and Auguste Rodin

Rilke's New Poems (Neue Gedichte) bear evidence of the hours upon hours the poet spent in the presence of Rodin's sculpture. In 1908, while Rilke was living at the somewhat derlict Hôtel Biron, an 18th-century chateau just a block from Napolean's tomb, he invited Rodin to visit. Rodin was so taken with the Hôtel Biron that the following day he leased the entire ground floor for use as his studio. Eventually he purchased the estate, and it is now the Musée Rodin.

The Musée Rodin / Hôtel Biron today.

The Rilke-Rodin friendship continues to fascinate. Just two weeks ago, a docu-drama concerning the famous meeting premiered on Arte TV in Europe. Below is an image of the two principal actors: Cyril Descours as Rilke and Jacques Bondoux as Rodin.


Here's an excerpt from Lost Son. It is September 1, 1902 and the poet has just sat and talked with Rodin. Now he's exploring the sculptor's studio:

You move through the atelier, light-footed and slow. A great deal to look at here, the Master's creations bristling on all sides, and it's very strange to have the creator himself close at hand all the while. The rasp of his stylus is the only sound in the room. Passing amongst the works, you have a strange sensation of being waterborne, of drifting. It occurs to you now that each of these figures is an island of sorts. Rodin is alone in his work, as is most every artist. These figures stand up out of his aloneness. Yes, so an artist has rights to nothing but his solitude, from which he raises monuments. Though the whole world may give its heart to an artist's creations, his loneliness shall never be circumscribed by love. Rodin's fame bears no connection to his greatness -- nor even to this work of his; to watch him now, across this terrain of his labor, it seems very clear: fame is but a thing that tries to circumscribe his loneliness. Meanwhile, he keeps working day by day, quietly as in this very moment. This Master whose name pours from the mouths of countless men -- this Master goes on working as if unknown, as if nameless, alone to himself in his Paris atelier on a Monday afternoon.

Find LOST SON on the rue Princesse

Lost Son is one of just 14 featured hardcovers at the famous Village Voice Bookshop in Paris! Merci beacoup, Village Voice.

Rilke in Paris: 105 Years Ago

On this day in 1902 Rainer Maria Rilke arrived for the first time in Paris. He was twenty-six. He and Clara Westhoff had been married for a year and a half. Their daughter Ruth was 10 months old.

Rilke came to Paris alone, and Clara planned to join him after an indefinite period. Little Ruth would be cared for by Clara's parents. Rilke and Clara didn't know how long they would remain in the city, but they knew their quaint household in Westerwede, in the north of Germany, would be dissolved.

Rilke's main purpose in journeying to Paris was to make the acquaintance of Auguste Rodin and write a monograph about the great sculptor. The monograph had been commissioned by the Berlin publisher Richard Muther.

Paris proved an immediate shock to the poet. His accomodations were shabby, and he found the Latin Quarter claustrophobic and bristling with squalor. Paris generally seemed to him a city of the dead. His arrival there marked a major turning point in his life and his art -- and thus would prove a landmark moment for modern literature.

Out of Rilke's experiences in Paris came the remarkable book on Rodin, and -- eventually -- a magnificent novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as well as the New Poems (which include "The Panther," "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," and many other famous works).

At the beginning of Lost Son, Rilke has just made this signicant arrival, and the city quickly sends him reeling:

'The City was against me. It rose up before my life and was like an examination I could not pass.'


Three long days alone with Paris. It seems a lifetime of sorts. Rainer walks about in a troubled thrall. The dim crevasses of the Quartier Latin digest him and even for his Baedeker he is lost. He must widen his stride to overstep lank piles of trash heaped in the streets, pockets of dross and litter amongst the cobblestones. Rag pickers trundle toward him steering their rude and wobbling carts and he must stop and turn himself flat to a wall to let them by. In the grim fissures of lanes or alleyways sallow people stand amidst the puddles in sagging clothes, back between the houses where the huge worms of the pipes droop from the walls like vermin killed and curing. He sees small children peering up from sullied basement windows: pale hairless wastrels like moles. And just as the gutters along every street bear the sluglike flow of fluids, so does a strange and abounding fear coagulate in the very air, hardening into sound till it seems some discarnate voice is spluttering the name of this place with malfeasant insistence: ParisssParisssParisss! A name somehow reptilian, infernal in its pop and hiss: Parisssss. Fork-tongued city. It's fast becoming his private capital of fear.

And yet it is a great city, and not without beauty, certainly not -- and isn't that natural: for such dread to be bedfellow to such beauty? At the end of this momentous apprenticeship beginning now in Paris, Rainer Maria Rilke will write:

'The beautiful is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still unguardedly endure, / and we admire it so because it spurns us, stopping short of our destruction.'

But these streets. These streets engulf the poet as they have long since engulfed the gaunt gray man he sees daily guarding the door of Saint Etienne du Mont: the man's rheumatic hand cupped in front of him, his dumb mouth contorted in an effort toward words. The man tries and tries, but never speaks. And it seems he means to utter some inexpressible gratitude, with never a thought of whether a single charitable coin has fallen to his big-knuckled hand.

Rainer sees at once how easily he himself could go under in that manner, this city's sea of anonymity churning him down and his every word snared fast in its greasy undertow.

He's to meet Rodin on first September, when the sculptor expects him in his Paris atelier. Till then, in his sordid fifth-story silence, the poet wrestles with the need inside him. Need that incessantly makes itself felt but cowers when he gives it leave to come forth as work. He sits at the broken desk, the window open at his side, and the need is a confused shudder; he cannot tell its meaning. He waits at the desk, full of readiness. The need won't slacken, and neither will it bring anything forth. But Rainer does not move from the desk, for this time spent at the desk is the reason he's come to this city. For this he's abandoned everything, in order, perhaps, that everything might return to him somehow.

Outside, far below in the street, people are laughing. Laughing and running. Feet tromping by in breathless clatter. And it's the laughter of something big and profoundly contemptuous. The clatter of everything within him: running away....

Rainer Maria Rilke: Myths, Masks, & the Literature of a Life

Louis Menand's discussion of "the biography business" in his August 6 New Yorker article, "Lives of Others," contains several observations that interest me greatly in light of my own biographical adventures researching and composing my novel about Rainer Maria Rilke, Lost Son.

Menand emphasizes that the task of biographical objectivity is a fundamentally impossible one, because "people lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the 'real' person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance."

Laying Menand's comments into the context of Rainer Maria Rilke's life, we find this gauntlet of public-versus-private assuming a new and compelling intensity.

If ever a life demanded a biographer rely upon letters and diaries, it was Rilke's. For biographical fodder we have his poetic corpus and published prose works, a few journals, some remarkable accounts by friends and contemporaries, and Rilke's more than 11,000 letters. Astonishingly, all the material, at every juncture, presents an image of Man and Work unified—in other words, we find a figure who lived in a state of ceaseless poetic disposition.
For Rilke the line between public and private did not exist. He presented to the world the persona of the unadulterated artist (committed wholly and exclusively, at every private hour, to his work) and he seems to have embodied this persona in all his private moments as well.

But biography demands that the biographer bifurcate his subject. As Menand notes, the actual person must be isolated from the public persona. It's an art of balanced scrutiny into the particulars of a life, in search of the peculiarly 'real' figure behind the familiar public performer. The expert on a famous life works in sympathy to the reader's desire to see the masks of the famous dead pulled away. Indeed, at their most cynical, biographers are sophisticated iconoclasts, presenting a biographical logic of reduction (often in the form of psychoanalysis). For example, it was Henry David Thoreau's latent homosexuality that provoked his fierce espousal of solitude (rather than Thoreau's natural inclination to be alone with nature and the whim of his thought).

Certainly, though, the wish to de-mask the famous dead can be understood on a very human level. With the passing of time our great ones become more legend, less human. The loftier their exaltation, the more their power to inspire us pales. Conversely, if our famous foregoers were evil they become hyperboles of infamy. We find it impossible to draw morals from their stories. How to learn from human failures of the heart if the failers had no hearts to begin with? Demigods, be they evil or beneficent, are little use to posterity. We want to preserve the humanity of our famous dead. As Menand puts it, "Biographies of the powerful and famous that humanize their subjects may play some kind of egalitarian social role."

In his remarkable study, Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks & the Man, H.F. Peters addresses the special challenge confronting a Rilke biographer: "The true poet is both a man transformed and a transformer. He has no other function. Outside his work he may be a philistine, a fool, or a criminal. What he is does not matter provided he turns it into poetry. The crux of the Rilke problem is that he turned his whole life into poetry. That is why it is so difficult to isolate the man." (p.33—my emphasis).

Rilke's mask never dropped. So can it be called a mask at all? "He willed to be an artist," Peters writes, "even if it meant the death of the man: that is the real meaning of the Rilke myth." (p.46)

The "Rilke myth" is exactly what so fascinates the poet's biographers: the paradox of a life that is thoroughly documented and yet simultaneously traceless. We cannot separate the man from his image. Rilke consciously managed to make himself into art. Mythmaker and hero were one in the same.

The poet's 11,000 letters were written tirelessly over a 35-year period. He took immense pains with each of them, composing page after page in his gorgeous, calligraphic script. Frequently he re-wrote whole sheaves rather than stand for ink blotches or unsightly deletions. Most letters he copied by hand and neatly filed for his own records. His letters make him one of the greatest self-chroniclers of the 20th-century, and at every phase it seems he was intently constructing his own persona. In his final days, Rilke expressly approved the publication of his correspondence, saying it constituted an important element of his work.

The letters rehearse the story of his life, from his very unpromising beginnings, through his ongoing tribulations of homelessness and alienation, adoration and heartbreak, his incapacity to be loved, his brushes with incandescent beauty—all experienced in the name of art. Finally, he even records his pains while lying at the threshold of death from leukemia at age 51.

Writing to Magda von Hattingberg on February 8, 1914, Rilke uses an image of construction when speaking of his own existence: "My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?"▫

A later revealing letter, written in December 1922 to a young admirer, shows Rilke explicitly acknowledging his lifelong labor of constructing, through his art (in Rilke's case this term includes personal letters), his own valid and meaningful myth. He points his correspondent directly to the persona he's fashioned: "I direct you further, out beyond me, to the figure I am building for myself, outside, more validly and more lastingly. Hold on to that, if it seems big and significant to you. Who knows who I am? I change and change. But it is the boundary of my transformation, its pure rim: if it radiates love to you, deeply, good: then let us both believe in it."**

Louis Menand wonders "whether the bits and pieces on which biographical narratives are often strung are not a little arbitrary...Once these 'pivotal moments' or primal episodes get established in the literature, they acquire an unstoppable explanatory force." Indeed, in Rilke's case, it's the biographical subject himself who established the pivotal moments—and given that a literary master outlined the events, it's no wonder their 'explanatory force' has proven unstoppable.

Rilke strung his life-narrative onto an armature of a few very key episodes, obsessively and repeatedly testifying to their importance. They include: being raised as a girl by his mother following the loss of an infant daughter prior to his birth; suffering, as a young and sickly boy, five miserable years of military school; having a superstitious spirituality instilled by his mother early on, accounting for his lifelong sensitivity to ghosts and the subharmonic vibrations of the spiritual; his artistic coming-of-age under the influence of Lou Andreas-Salomé, mother-figure and muse; his reverence before the Master Rodin, who became father and idol in one.

Menand observes, "All any biographer can hope, and all any reasonably skeptical reader can expect, is that the necessarily somewhat fictional character in [a biography] bears some resemblance to the person who actually lived and died, and whose achievements (and disgraces) we care to learn more about. A biography is a tool for imagining another person, to be used along with other tools. It is not a window or a mirror."

In Rilke's case, the "necessarily somewhat fictional character" is all we have. Even reports by his friends corroborate the image he projected in every moment of his personal life—a poet's image.

Stefan Zweig's remarks upon Rilke's death appropriately invoke the metaphor of construction: "No one has fully known his inner life...devout stonemason on the never-to-be-completed cathedral of the language. [He toiled softly,] silently as with all great work, remote from the world like all that is perfect."

"One felt him," said Edmond Jaloux, "without interests on earth, his face ever turned towards those verities which are never expressed."

Rudolf Kassner commented famously, "Rilke was poet and personality even when simply washing his hands."

Paul Valéry called him "a man who more than anyone else possessed all the wonderful anguish and secrets of the spirit."

And Lou Andreas-Salomé, who enjoyed a greater, longer intimacy with Rilke than anybody, said: "Deep in the heart of anyone who saw it happen, a realization remains of how little could be done to alleviate Rainer's final loneliness, which his hand blocked from vision for a moment only, on the mountain's peak, shielding him from the abyss into which he sprang. Those who saw it happen could only let it happen. Powerless and reverent."* And in another place, Lou wrote: "Were this loner, who was isolated in death, still with us, I believe he would feel most immediately at home in the deepest anonymity of his work's effects."†

Rilke's "necessarily somewhat fictional character" and his poetic work existed in a powerful symbiosis. He could not produce art except within the personal cosmogony he'd created—and that cosmogony itself could not endure without the body of work to express it and sustain it. In this sense, Rilke did no "pretending" or "performing" that might enable a biographer to sever the man from the work. Is he who devotes every waking hour to pretending really a pretender? Sometimes, perhaps, authenticity is more than a matrix of involuntary attributes; sometimes it's produced by a matter of pure will. Rilke's ghost continues to demand that his life be studied in whole—man and work as one.

Donald Prater concludes his remarkable biography, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, with these cogent observations: "He reached out toward experience of the senses in the real life he praised, but constantly drew back again into an essentially unreal existence, 'ahead of all departure', to transform into the language peculiarly his own the 'glorious tapestry' of the world and of human emotion. In the process he transformed himself. The Rilke that emerges from the poetry and the letters is a construct, an ideal self...The friends who were so eager to help him were probably as far from knowing the real person as many who are beguiled by his words today or who add another stone of interpretation to the mounting edifice of Rilke scholarship."(p.411)

Given the imperviousness of the Rilke myth and the Rilkean demands it continues to place on the researcher, given the fascinating circumstances in which the poet worked to establish the myth (for himself and the sake of his art more than anything), I believe the "necessarily somewhat fictional character" of Rainer Maria Rilke is marvelously suited for exploration in a novel. He fictionalized himself, made himself into a work of literature—something essentially dreamt-up.

Rilke's self-created literature of a life continues (as all great literature does) to resonate the human, the true. I hope Lost Son resonates too.


▫p.27 of Rilke & Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence; translator Joel Agee (Fromm, 1987)
**p.312 of Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910-1926; translators Jane B. Greene & M.D. Herter Norton (W.W. Norton, 1972)
*p.84 of Looking Back by Lou Andreas-Salomé; translator: Breon Mitchell (Paragon House, 1991)
†p.127 of You Alone Are Real to Me by Lou Andreas-Salomé; translator: Angela von der Lippe (BOA Editions, 2003)

Cormac McCarthy Honored in Britain / Discussed in Current Poets & Writers

Cormac McCarthy has just been awarded Scotland's distinguished James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Road.
On a relevant note, my essay "The Art of Reading Cormac McCarthy: The Darkness & the Light" appears in the new issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (Sept/Oct 2007). Here's a snippet:

"Inexplicable things (the undeniable presence of evil in the world, the confounding absence of God) are the chief preoccupations of McCarthy's corpus. As Roger D. Hodge wrote in Harper's Magazine last year, McCarthy's characters are "fugitives from the present who go forth into to the rotten holdings of the vanquished in search of something they cannot name." And in exploring what is essentially unaccountable, McCarthy's narration shuns explication with obsessive consistency. His novels are constructed entirely of evocative scenes. This is why his stories burst open within the reader like pellets of gas, seeming to imbue us with their haunting imagery.

"McCarthy writes the way a shaman heals, invoking and exploring a spirit world of sorts, peculiarly American in its vastness, its rugged desolation, its inhabitation by almost nothing but individual destinies often at war with one another. In each of his novels we find ourselves on this cruelly gorgeous, unforgiving metaphysical plain. It's a realm of raw and raging energy."