Todd Field, director of the lit-films In the Bedroom and Little Children (and actor in Nicole Holfcener's excellent Walking & Talking) notes down his thoughts about the late master Ingmar Bergman in the L.A.Times.
"It is hard to believe now, but there was a time when Ingmar Bergman, the poster boy of the European "art house," became unfashionable. He found himself accused of being earnest -- of residing in an austere, pseudo-serious pose. Many of his biggest supporters jumped ship and ran straight to Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave, with the excitement of a hand-held, jump-cut image and cartoon story line. I think this must have really made Ingmar angry. He once famously remarked, 'Godard is a . . . bore.'
Bergman was of the theater first and foremost and stayed with it until the end. He compared theater to a faithful wife -- over his lifetime he would have five wives -- and film to the costly, exacting mistress. But it seems of the two, he was in awe of the mistress. 'No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.'"
DISPATCHES FROM M. ALLEN CUNNINGHAM: author, editor, teacher
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Farewell Ingmar Bergman
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!”
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!”
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.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
LOST SON Events in California, Oregon, Washington
Here's the event schedule for Lost Son, subject to additions and expansions in the coming weeks. Please check back for updates (a permanent link, "Upcoming Readings & Signings," will be found at the upper right).
Thursday, May 31, 2007—Portland, OR
7:30 p.m. reading/talk/q&A & signing
Annie Bloom’s Books
7834 SW Capitol Hwy
Portland, OR 97219
(503) 246-0053
Monday, June 4, 2007—Danville, CA
7:00 p.m. reading/talk & signing
Rakestraw Books
409 Railroad Avenue
Danville, CA 94526
(925) 837-7337
Tuesday, June 5, 2007—Clayton, CA
7:00 pm reading/talk (with a Rilke emphasis) & signing
Clayton Books
5433 Clayton Road, Suite D
Clayton, CA 94517
(925) 673-3325
June 5-9, 2007—San Francisco, CA
Drop-in stock signing
Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
(650) 324-4321
Thursday, June 7, 2007—Orinda, CA
4:00 p.m., reading/talk & q&a
Orinda Books
276 Village Square
Orinda, CA 94563
(925) 254-7606
Sunday, June 10, 2007—San Jose, CA
Book Group Expo
*At 11:30am, Cunningham will participate in a literary salon, "Unfinished Business: the Secrets that Haunt Us" with authors Nathan Englander, Michelin Marcom, Elizabeth Rosner, and host Michael Krasny.
Cunningham will sign books, and will be hanging about the expo for a bit.
Sunday, June 10—2007—Capitola, CA
7:30 pm reading*
Capitola Book Café
1475 41st Ave
Capitola CA 95010
Store: 831.462.4415
www.capitolabookcafe.com
*this is a triple-author reading, also featuring:
Tess Uriza Holthe, author The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes & When Elephants Dance;
and Ann Cummins, author of Yellow Cake & Red Ant House
Monday, June 11, 2007—Corte Madera, CA
1:00 p.m. reading/signing
Book Passage Bookstore
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
(415) 927-0960 / (800) 999-7909
Tuesday, June 12, 2007--Redding, CA
6:30 p.m. reading/signing
Redding Record Searchlight Bookclub Event
Holiday Inn
1900 Hilltop Dr.
Redding, CA
Thursday, June 14, 2007—Portland, OR
7:30 p.m. reading/signing
23rd Avenue Books
1015 NW 23rd Avenue
Portland, OR 97210
(503) 224-5097
Monday, June 18, 2007—Portland, OR
7:30pm reading/talk/q&a & book signing
Powell’s on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR
(503) 228-4651
Tuesday, July 3, 2007—St. Helens, OR
7:00 p.m. book group discussion regarding The Green Age of Asher Witherow
& Reading/talk regarding LOST SON
St. Helens Book Shop
58527 Columbia River Hwy
St. Helens, OR 97051
(503) 397-4917
Saturday, July 21, 2007—Sisters, OR
6:30 p.m. talk & signing
Paulina Springs Bookstore
252 W Hood Ave
Sisters OR 9775
(541) 549-0866
Tuesday, July 24, 2007—Seattle, WA
7:30 p.m. Reading/talk/q&a &signing
Elliott Bay Book Company
101 South Main St.
Seattle, Washington 98104
(206) 624-6600 / (800) 962-5311
Thursday, July 26, 2007—Seattle, WA
7:00 p.m. Reading/talk/q&a & signing
University Bookstore
Seattle, WA (800) 335-READ
Thursday, May 31, 2007—Portland, OR
7:30 p.m. reading/talk/q&A & signing
Annie Bloom’s Books
7834 SW Capitol Hwy
Portland, OR 97219
(503) 246-0053
Monday, June 4, 2007—Danville, CA
7:00 p.m. reading/talk & signing
Rakestraw Books
409 Railroad Avenue
Danville, CA 94526
(925) 837-7337
Tuesday, June 5, 2007—Clayton, CA
7:00 pm reading/talk (with a Rilke emphasis) & signing
Clayton Books
5433 Clayton Road, Suite D
Clayton, CA 94517
(925) 673-3325
June 5-9, 2007—San Francisco, CA
Drop-in stock signing
Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
(650) 324-4321
Thursday, June 7, 2007—Orinda, CA
4:00 p.m., reading/talk & q&a
Orinda Books
276 Village Square
Orinda, CA 94563
(925) 254-7606
Sunday, June 10, 2007—San Jose, CA
Book Group Expo
*At 11:30am, Cunningham will participate in a literary salon, "Unfinished Business: the Secrets that Haunt Us" with authors Nathan Englander, Michelin Marcom, Elizabeth Rosner, and host Michael Krasny.
Cunningham will sign books, and will be hanging about the expo for a bit.
Sunday, June 10—2007—Capitola, CA
7:30 pm reading*
Capitola Book Café
1475 41st Ave
Capitola CA 95010
Store: 831.462.4415
www.capitolabookcafe.com
*this is a triple-author reading, also featuring:
Tess Uriza Holthe, author The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes & When Elephants Dance;
and Ann Cummins, author of Yellow Cake & Red Ant House
Monday, June 11, 2007—Corte Madera, CA
1:00 p.m. reading/signing
Book Passage Bookstore
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
(415) 927-0960 / (800) 999-7909
Tuesday, June 12, 2007--Redding, CA
6:30 p.m. reading/signing
Redding Record Searchlight Bookclub Event
Holiday Inn
1900 Hilltop Dr.
Redding, CA
Thursday, June 14, 2007—Portland, OR
7:30 p.m. reading/signing
23rd Avenue Books
1015 NW 23rd Avenue
Portland, OR 97210
(503) 224-5097
Monday, June 18, 2007—Portland, OR
7:30pm reading/talk/q&a & book signing
Powell’s on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR
(503) 228-4651
Tuesday, July 3, 2007—St. Helens, OR
7:00 p.m. book group discussion regarding The Green Age of Asher Witherow
& Reading/talk regarding LOST SON
St. Helens Book Shop
58527 Columbia River Hwy
St. Helens, OR 97051
(503) 397-4917
Saturday, July 21, 2007—Sisters, OR
6:30 p.m. talk & signing
Paulina Springs Bookstore
252 W Hood Ave
Sisters OR 9775
(541) 549-0866
Tuesday, July 24, 2007—Seattle, WA
7:30 p.m. Reading/talk/q&a &signing
Elliott Bay Book Company
101 South Main St.
Seattle, Washington 98104
(206) 624-6600 / (800) 962-5311
Thursday, July 26, 2007—Seattle, WA
7:00 p.m. Reading/talk/q&a & signing
University Bookstore
Seattle, WA (800) 335-READ
Saturday, April 07, 2007
National Poetry Month is Here
April is National Poetry Month! Visit the Academy of American Poets to discover thirty ways you can celebrate.
And while you're there, take a look at Rainer Maria Rilke's page, complete with bio, Rilkean links, and translations by Stephen Mitchell.
And while you're there, take a look at Rainer Maria Rilke's page, complete with bio, Rilkean links, and translations by Stephen Mitchell.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
The Rilkean Regard
The luminous new novel The Moments Lost by Bruce Olds (appearing next month from FSG) contains the following remarkable passage, worthy of any commonplace book. In addition to being some of the loveliest prose I've read in a great while, the passage includes a veiled reference to the work of Rainer Maria Rilke:
"...she presented him with the orris-work-covered notebook she had purchased for the purpose, instructing him to copy the words conscientiously twice a day, once upon waking, again at bedtime, this midnight lucubration:
'There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be any use whatever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.'
Gautier's words in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin.
And why, she quizzed him? Why was this? How so?
"Because," he intuited, "man is a creature of abject want ahead of fundamental need, base desire before necessity? Because life is a matter of aoristic excrescence? Because fantasia and phantasmagoria, reverie and dream, are more beautiful than brute experience? Because the lyric of a poem sustains life no less than a loaf of bread, and there is no place without eyes to see us. Am I close?" "
There is no place without eyes to see us: Rilke admirers will promptly recognize the antecedent of this line by Olds in the famous close of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" in part two of New Poems:
Da ist keine Stelle / die dicht nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
There is no piece of this that does not see you. You must change your life.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Rilke, Woody, Whoopi, DeNiro, Bono, and Bob: Addendum
Fellow writer Josh K writes in with this addendum to the list of Rilke's influences below:
In Milan Kundera's novel "Immortality" Rilke is called to the Eternal Trial of Goethe, relating to Goethe's treatment of Bettina, and Kundera quotes a passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as Rilke's testimony.
Thanks, Josh.
In Milan Kundera's novel "Immortality" Rilke is called to the Eternal Trial of Goethe, relating to Goethe's treatment of Bettina, and Kundera quotes a passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as Rilke's testimony.
Thanks, Josh.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Rilke, Woody, Whoopi, DeNiro, Bono, and Bob
The year 2007 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “New Poems,” which were born of Rodin’s influence upon the poet, and in which Rilke redefined modern German poetry through his concept of the Ding-Gedicht (Thing-Poem). 'The Panther' is perhaps the most famous of the New Poems.
Today Rilke pervades many facets of our cultural consciousness in ways we might not even suspect. Noted below are just a few facts that reveal the poet's strong connection to contemporary culture:
Bob Dylan has been reading Rilke since 1966.
Actor Colin Firth (The English Patient, Bridget Jones’s Diary) has said The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one of his favorite books.
Actress Jodie Foster adores Letters to a Young Poet. In Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, she says: “When I feel like a failure or have doubts about my work, this is the sacred book I take off the shelf and unwrap, very delicately.”
Actor Ethan Hawke narrated the audio edition of The Poet’s Guide to Life, a collection of new Rilke translations published last year.
Bono, lead singer of rock band U2, has launched a clothing line in which every pair of jeans comes with a poem by Rilke embroidered in the pockets.
Actor Dennis Hopper is photographed here with a volume of Rilke in hand.
Musical group New York Voices released a CD entitled "Ancient Tower" featuring actress Meryl Streep reading Rilke's poetry to music.
Classical violinist Anne Sofie-Mutter has named Rilke as a favorite poet.
Country Musician Ray Wylie Hubbard names Rilke as an inspiration in this NPR interview.
CSI actor Ed Gordon was inspired by Rilke in the creation of his recent book "Letters to a Young Brother: Manifest Your Destiny."
Peter Carey's recent novel My Life as a Fake features a Rilke enthusiast as a principal character.
Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife includes Rilke allusions that are integral to the story.
In his "New Year Letter," W.H. Auden famously (and, contrary to popular belief, not disparagingly) called Rilke "The Santa Claus of lonleliness." He made another reference to Rilke in "Twenty-third Sonnet" (In Time of War):
"Let us remember all who seemed deserted. / Tonight in China let me think of one, // Who through ten years of silence worked and waited, / Until in Muzot all his powers spoke, / And everything was given once for all: // And with the gratitude of the Completed / He went out in the winter night to stroke / That little tower like a great animal."
(The following Auden quote, by the by, would serve as a very apt epigraph to Lost Son: "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.")
Rilke is the subject of an essay by J.M. Coetzee in Coetzee's book Stranger Shores.
A character reads Letters to a Young Poet in the first chapter of Chris Abani's novel, Graceland.
The first full English translation of Rilke's famous correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salomé was published by W.W. Norton last year. It is noted here in The New Yorker.
Erie Chapman cites Rilke frequently in his essays on caregiving.
In the world of film:
Rilke's poem "The Panther" is quoted in the 1990 film Awakenings (starring Robert DeNiro and based on the 1973 book by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks), expressing the emotional undertone of the story.
In the 1993 movie Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, actress Whoopi Goldberg refers to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. That work is also a topic of conversation between several characters in the 2002 movie Igby Goes Down.
Rilke is quoted in Kissing Jessica Stein by a woman looking for a woman in a personal ad. This quote is what moves the main character, Jessica, to answer the ad, despite her presumed heterosexuality.
Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is quoted by Miriam, played by Gena Rowlands, in Woody Allen's 1998 film Another Woman. Additionally, "Rain," the Juliette Lewis character in "Husbands and Wives" is named after Rilke.
Rilke's poem "You Who Never Arrived" is quoted by Faith, played by Marisa Tomei, in Norman Jewison's 1994 film Only You.
Today Rilke pervades many facets of our cultural consciousness in ways we might not even suspect. Noted below are just a few facts that reveal the poet's strong connection to contemporary culture:
Bob Dylan has been reading Rilke since 1966.
Actor Colin Firth (The English Patient, Bridget Jones’s Diary) has said The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one of his favorite books.
Actress Jodie Foster adores Letters to a Young Poet. In Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, she says: “When I feel like a failure or have doubts about my work, this is the sacred book I take off the shelf and unwrap, very delicately.”
Actor Ethan Hawke narrated the audio edition of The Poet’s Guide to Life, a collection of new Rilke translations published last year.
Bono, lead singer of rock band U2, has launched a clothing line in which every pair of jeans comes with a poem by Rilke embroidered in the pockets.
Actor Dennis Hopper is photographed here with a volume of Rilke in hand.
Musical group New York Voices released a CD entitled "Ancient Tower" featuring actress Meryl Streep reading Rilke's poetry to music.
Classical violinist Anne Sofie-Mutter has named Rilke as a favorite poet.
Country Musician Ray Wylie Hubbard names Rilke as an inspiration in this NPR interview.
CSI actor Ed Gordon was inspired by Rilke in the creation of his recent book "Letters to a Young Brother: Manifest Your Destiny."
Peter Carey's recent novel My Life as a Fake features a Rilke enthusiast as a principal character.
Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife includes Rilke allusions that are integral to the story.
In his "New Year Letter," W.H. Auden famously (and, contrary to popular belief, not disparagingly) called Rilke "The Santa Claus of lonleliness." He made another reference to Rilke in "Twenty-third Sonnet" (In Time of War):
"Let us remember all who seemed deserted. / Tonight in China let me think of one, // Who through ten years of silence worked and waited, / Until in Muzot all his powers spoke, / And everything was given once for all: // And with the gratitude of the Completed / He went out in the winter night to stroke / That little tower like a great animal."
(The following Auden quote, by the by, would serve as a very apt epigraph to Lost Son: "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.")
Rilke is the subject of an essay by J.M. Coetzee in Coetzee's book Stranger Shores.
A character reads Letters to a Young Poet in the first chapter of Chris Abani's novel, Graceland.
The first full English translation of Rilke's famous correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salomé was published by W.W. Norton last year. It is noted here in The New Yorker.
And the following Rilke connections from Wikipedia:
Rilke has been celebrated in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gaddis' voluminous novel The Recognitions, and is referred to in Julia Alvarez's novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
J.D. Salinger alludes to Rilke in various works, including Franny and Zooey.
Douglas Coupland quotes Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet in Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.
A Rilke translation inspired Lost in Translation, a celebrated 1974 poem by James Merrill.
Rilke has been celebrated in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gaddis' voluminous novel The Recognitions, and is referred to in Julia Alvarez's novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
J.D. Salinger alludes to Rilke in various works, including Franny and Zooey.
Douglas Coupland quotes Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet in Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.
A Rilke translation inspired Lost in Translation, a celebrated 1974 poem by James Merrill.
Rilke is mentioned in Tennessee William's "The Two-Character Play."
German philosopher Martin Heidegger cites Rilke as an example of the highest form of thinker in his essay "What Are Poets For?" The essay's theme is largely explored through the examination of an "improvised verse" (short poem) Rilke wrote in 1924. Heidegger, sometimes considered the most influential German thinker of the 20th century, ranks Rilke in the German poetic tradition as second only to Holderlin.
Erie Chapman cites Rilke frequently in his essays on caregiving.
In the world of film:
Rilke's poem "The Panther" is quoted in the 1990 film Awakenings (starring Robert DeNiro and based on the 1973 book by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks), expressing the emotional undertone of the story.
In the 1993 movie Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, actress Whoopi Goldberg refers to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. That work is also a topic of conversation between several characters in the 2002 movie Igby Goes Down.
Rilke is quoted in Kissing Jessica Stein by a woman looking for a woman in a personal ad. This quote is what moves the main character, Jessica, to answer the ad, despite her presumed heterosexuality.
Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is quoted by Miriam, played by Gena Rowlands, in Woody Allen's 1998 film Another Woman. Additionally, "Rain," the Juliette Lewis character in "Husbands and Wives" is named after Rilke.
Rilke's poem "You Who Never Arrived" is quoted by Faith, played by Marisa Tomei, in Norman Jewison's 1994 film Only You.
"For the sake of a single poem," an animated short by Shamik Majumdar, a contemporary Indian Animation Film Designer, is based on an excerpt from Rilke's book, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
In the world of music:
The indie rock band Rainer Maria takes its name from Rilke, and at least some of their merchandise bears the poet's image.
The Cocteau Twins song "Rilkean Heart", on the 1996 album Milk and Kisses, is an homage to Jeff Buckley who was a life long lover of Rilke's work.
The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set several of Rilke's poems to music in his Symphony No. 14.
In the world of music:
The indie rock band Rainer Maria takes its name from Rilke, and at least some of their merchandise bears the poet's image.
The Cocteau Twins song "Rilkean Heart", on the 1996 album Milk and Kisses, is an homage to Jeff Buckley who was a life long lover of Rilke's work.
The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set several of Rilke's poems to music in his Symphony No. 14.
The American contemporary composer Morten Lauridsen set Rilke's poem "Les Chansons des Roses" to music.
Pianist Brad Mehldau and vocalist Renee Fleming released an album in which some of the songs are set to Rilke's poems in 2006.
In the world of the church:
Rilke's poem "You, Neighbour God" (from “The Book of Hours”) is included in the most commonly used edition of Liturgy of the hours.
Rilke's poetry is often referenced in the writings of contemporary spiritual teachers such as Jack Kornfield and Stephen Levine.
In the world of the church:
Rilke's poem "You, Neighbour God" (from “The Book of Hours”) is included in the most commonly used edition of Liturgy of the hours.
Rilke's poetry is often referenced in the writings of contemporary spiritual teachers such as Jack Kornfield and Stephen Levine.
Monday, February 26, 2007
What is Lost Son About? I. (Periodic Answers to an Unanswerable Question)
Beginning today, I will be posting periodic replies to the question: "What is Lost Son about?" It's a question as inevitable as it is impossible to answer definitively, because the responses it might elicit from me will change as my own relationship to the novel evolves (and as I come to better understand the book myself).
On the surface, of course, Lost Son is about Rainer Maria Rilke. His life, his work, his loves and friendships and memories and torments and triumphs. But were the question as easily answerable as this, I might not have written the novel at all. Over its five-year gestation period, Lost Son has been driven by more numerous, more elusive, and hopefully more widely resonant impulses than a wish to novelize the great poet's biography.
For this first post, Rilke's work itself provides something of a response. This quote from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge might have served as a relevant epigraph for Lost Son. In a way, the novel's dilemmas are all here: the loneliness of The Poet in this world. His somber restlessness. And a certain need for him to stand in stupefaction before his own destiny, in order to speak of it evocatively...
"And one has nobody and nothing and travels about in the world with a suitcase and with a trunk full of books and really without curiosity. What kind of life is this anyway? -- without house, without inherited things, without dogs.
"Still, if one had at least one's memories. But who has those? If a chilhood were there...it's like something buried. Perhaps one must be old in order to reach back to all that. I think it's good to be old."
On the surface, of course, Lost Son is about Rainer Maria Rilke. His life, his work, his loves and friendships and memories and torments and triumphs. But were the question as easily answerable as this, I might not have written the novel at all. Over its five-year gestation period, Lost Son has been driven by more numerous, more elusive, and hopefully more widely resonant impulses than a wish to novelize the great poet's biography.
For this first post, Rilke's work itself provides something of a response. This quote from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge might have served as a relevant epigraph for Lost Son. In a way, the novel's dilemmas are all here: the loneliness of The Poet in this world. His somber restlessness. And a certain need for him to stand in stupefaction before his own destiny, in order to speak of it evocatively...
"Und man hat niemand und nichts und fährt in der Welt
herum...
"And one has nobody and nothing and travels about in the world with a suitcase and with a trunk full of books and really without curiosity. What kind of life is this anyway? -- without house, without inherited things, without dogs.
"Was für ein Leben ist das eigentlich…
"Still, if one had at least one's memories. But who has those? If a chilhood were there...it's like something buried. Perhaps one must be old in order to reach back to all that. I think it's good to be old."
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Du Einsamster: You Lonely One -- (A Translation from Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)
"Young man anywhere, in whom something is rising up that causes you to shiver, make use of the fact that no one knows you.
And if they contradict you -- those who take you for a nobody; and if they give you up completely -- those with whom you would associate; and if they pretend you don't exist on account of your dear ideas: what is this clear danger, which holds you together inside yourself, compared to the cunning hostilty of later fame, which makes you impotent by scattering you.
Beg no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously.
And when time goes by and you mark your name coming around amongst people, take it no more seriously than everything else you find in their mouths. Think: it has become poorly. And put it away from you. Take another name, any, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from everyone."
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
Junger Mensch irgendwo, in dem etwas aufsteigt, was ihn erschauern macht, nütz es, daß dich keiner kennt...
And if they contradict you -- those who take you for a nobody; and if they give you up completely -- those with whom you would associate; and if they pretend you don't exist on account of your dear ideas: what is this clear danger, which holds you together inside yourself, compared to the cunning hostilty of later fame, which makes you impotent by scattering you.
Beg no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously.
Bitte keinen, daß er von dir spräche, nicht einmal verächtlich...
And when time goes by and you mark your name coming around amongst people, take it no more seriously than everything else you find in their mouths. Think: it has become poorly. And put it away from you. Take another name, any, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from everyone."
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Letters to A Young Poet, Letters to a Ghost
I was fourteen years old when my mother, somehow recognizing my writerly inclinations in a way I could not, put into my hands a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. It was a thin, feather-light edition of Stephen Mitchell’s marvelous English translation. I didn’t like the cover with its bright colors and gaudy font, but upon opening to the first letter of February 1903 I promptly experienced what nearly three generations of readers had experienced before me: the unshakable sense that this missive was addressed directly to me. Come twilight I’d finished the book, and already I wanted to learn more about this letter-writer from ninety years past who seemed to know so much about me and the counsel I so desperately needed in my current day. I could not have known what a lasting presence this literary specter would become in my life, nor how he would haunt my decision to become a writer.
Now, fourteen years and several thousands of travel-miles later, I find I’m the author of a novel about Rainer Maria Rilke’s troubled, triumphant life. Lost Son depicts Rilke in the drive of his all-consuming art as it carries him back and forth across western Europe over the course of fifteen intensely restless years. Perhaps more than any poet of the western world, Rilke was incapable of living one life as a man, another as a poet. Here was a soul who completely lacked the useful mechanism most of us employ to close ourselves off from certain experiences or stimuli for our own well-being. Uncontrollably, every impression penetrated him to his core and became an almost physical vibration within him. It’s as if he was genetically predisposed to poetry--to those profound resonances of which poetry is made. But this resulted in an extreme, at times incapacitating vulnerability to the outer world, and Rilke soon discovered that his sole method of self-preservation would be to control his environment and withdraw into his work as much as possible. Rilke's need to live and breathe his art rendered his loyalties to family and friends extremely complex, and kept him perpetually unprotected, homeless, and poor. It gave him, however, his best poetic works—not a few of which are held to be among the greatest in the world today.
Rilke’s writings, in their powerful and pungent synthesis of mystery, terror, and praise, hold a resonance like no other literary work I know of. The life behind the work tells its own strange, troubling and inspiring story of long sacrifice and sudden moments of transcendence. Rilke’s figure continues to haunt me. Lost Son is the novel I felt I most needed to write in these initial years of my own life as an artist. The book is in many ways the result of a long conversation with a master, a ghost. A reply, perhaps, to those letters I first read at fourteen and felt to be written to me across the span of a century. And hopefully Lost Son is a story of deep, multidimensional humanity.
Now, fourteen years and several thousands of travel-miles later, I find I’m the author of a novel about Rainer Maria Rilke’s troubled, triumphant life. Lost Son depicts Rilke in the drive of his all-consuming art as it carries him back and forth across western Europe over the course of fifteen intensely restless years. Perhaps more than any poet of the western world, Rilke was incapable of living one life as a man, another as a poet. Here was a soul who completely lacked the useful mechanism most of us employ to close ourselves off from certain experiences or stimuli for our own well-being. Uncontrollably, every impression penetrated him to his core and became an almost physical vibration within him. It’s as if he was genetically predisposed to poetry--to those profound resonances of which poetry is made. But this resulted in an extreme, at times incapacitating vulnerability to the outer world, and Rilke soon discovered that his sole method of self-preservation would be to control his environment and withdraw into his work as much as possible. Rilke's need to live and breathe his art rendered his loyalties to family and friends extremely complex, and kept him perpetually unprotected, homeless, and poor. It gave him, however, his best poetic works—not a few of which are held to be among the greatest in the world today.
Rilke’s writings, in their powerful and pungent synthesis of mystery, terror, and praise, hold a resonance like no other literary work I know of. The life behind the work tells its own strange, troubling and inspiring story of long sacrifice and sudden moments of transcendence. Rilke’s figure continues to haunt me. Lost Son is the novel I felt I most needed to write in these initial years of my own life as an artist. The book is in many ways the result of a long conversation with a master, a ghost. A reply, perhaps, to those letters I first read at fourteen and felt to be written to me across the span of a century. And hopefully Lost Son is a story of deep, multidimensional humanity.
Lost Son on MySpace
Visit the new MySpace page for Lost Son (if you can stand the flashing advertisements).
Friday, February 02, 2007
Paris Notes: Rilke, Malte Laurids Brigge, and the Latin Quarter Today
As noted in my previous blog post, Lost Son began as a series of journals in which I often directly addressed my main character, Rainer Maria Rilke. Here follows another entry from those journals. In this one, I began addressing Rilke's imaginary character Malte Laurids Brigge. The entry reveals a little about my process of imagining my way through contemporary Paris into the city Rilke (and Malte) knew, namely: Paris between 1902 and 1909, the years during which Rilke wrote Malte's story in the great novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Though this and other such entries do not appear in Lost Son, I feel that they somehow continue to permeate the book...
Paris: the word has now become an insignia on a postcard, a cliché, a simple idiom for earthly pleasure. But what of Paris as you knew it? Can one even see that world in this one?—this city of innumerable camera flashes and riverboat dinners and mid-bridge kisses, city whose only sighs are those of the soon-to-depart. Do the poor, the hopeful and hopeless destitute, still find themselves packed into the cramped hostelries along the river?
The streets are not acrawl with them these days, at least not within a mile or so radius of the Ile de la Cité (though walk out along the Canal Saint Martin, as I did yesterday, and you might reconsider). Here in your Latin Quarter, they sometimes proclaim themselves with signs—black letters smudged onto flaps of cardboard; and sometimes one sees them dragging about the sidewalks or lurking in doorways, asking for nothing. But the boulevard Saint Michel, in its new sterilized brightness, only reluctantly yields up its memory of the man with the Saint Vitus’ Dance, that ragdoll figure whom you watched with gorgonized awe and later gave to your fictional second self, Malte Laurids Brigge, to evoke in his troubled notebooks.
No, one no longer sees such figures as if seeing a great scream personified. But such figures do remain, just beneath the surface dignity of these clean-swept boulevards, beneath Haussmann’s elegant housefronts. And they are most definitely to be found, like the wastage of long-since defeated, long-since scattered armies, in the twisting streets set back from the river and confettied with rubbish. They’re in every city, no doubt, shall always be. Malte’s disgraced kin—the poor and cursed urbanites who occasioned him to anoint the first blank page of his notebook with those agitated words:
“So, people do come here to live. I would have sooner thought that this is where one dies.”
Already I’ve seen much of these figures—and the conditions on these city streets have greatly improved since yours and Malte’s arrival one hundred years ago, so I can only imagine the things you saw then.
May I tell Malte what I’ve seen in a month’s time, and thereby reveal to him something?…something. Perhaps he’d like to know that the grim spectacles he beheld daily were more than the phantasms of his dark soul. That even today one may witness such things in Paris. So Malte, I hope you’ll find it assuring that I have seen:
…the graying slack-sided man who appeared to suffer so much in the mere act of motion. He seemed to have lost his cane or leg-braces. He was just outside the gate of the Hôtel des Invalides when I saw him. Groping along the wall with splayed hands, his spine bowing backward in the effort to free himself of the wall. To walk.
He wasn’t an extremely old man—just gray-haired, like many not-so-old men. His stiffness seemed to be coming from somewhere outside or just above him; it seemed he was hemmed in by some invisible man-size flange made of most inflexible rubber. A number of people streamed past him and crossed the expansive front grounds to the church door. He hardly noticed them. All his focus was fixed in that labor of getting to the gate—the gate through which those others glided like birds.
I asked myself what you might have asked, Malte. Can it be that some persons, some very small number, are cursed by an imbalance of the blood or the brain or the inner ear to bear gravity’s effect at a volume exponentially greater than most? Because it was something like that with this man.
And then it struck me that the man might well be significantly younger than he looked, but the pressure, the incessant pressure, was speeding the clockworks inside him. I’d been waiting for a traffic light to change and now it was time to cross. In a final glimpse I saw him unmooring himself from the wall and starting forward with tiny, slow, hard-won steps. Before him lay the vast open grounds of the Invalides complex, and high above him the gilded dome stood up in mute and grand neutrality.
There was also this, Malte:
...the man with jowls as loose and pendulous as a winded dog’s. He was crossing the pretty little Place Maubert where the pretty fountain patters, and beyond his slightly disheveled jacket and shirt he was perfectly unremarkable. But when he came closer I saw the white, beaded strings of slaver swaying from his unfurled bottom lip. He brushed past me with a glazed stare toward the gutters, a stare that might—to somebody not looking very closely—appear pensive.
And this:
...the brawny balding man with the sunned skull and the heavy, very capable hands, lying unconscious on his back on the clean sidewalk in the rue de l’Estrapade. Flat on his back in front of the artful ironwork gates of that one bright patrician house, the one that looks like a guidebook photograph. And he wasn’t sidled up to the gate, either—no, he was sprawled at the center of the pavement, a great X of a body, like someone who had fallen from some unreckonable height....
(continue reading this entry in Part II, "Paris Notes Continued," below)
“It ripped me out of myself and put me into their lives, through all their lives, through and through all their beleaguered lives. Often I had to say aloud to myself: I am not one of them, I am going to leave this frightful city in which they will die.”
Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé – July 18, 1903
… Rue Linné, Paris V: the presentRainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé – July 18, 1903
Paris: the word has now become an insignia on a postcard, a cliché, a simple idiom for earthly pleasure. But what of Paris as you knew it? Can one even see that world in this one?—this city of innumerable camera flashes and riverboat dinners and mid-bridge kisses, city whose only sighs are those of the soon-to-depart. Do the poor, the hopeful and hopeless destitute, still find themselves packed into the cramped hostelries along the river?
The streets are not acrawl with them these days, at least not within a mile or so radius of the Ile de la Cité (though walk out along the Canal Saint Martin, as I did yesterday, and you might reconsider). Here in your Latin Quarter, they sometimes proclaim themselves with signs—black letters smudged onto flaps of cardboard; and sometimes one sees them dragging about the sidewalks or lurking in doorways, asking for nothing. But the boulevard Saint Michel, in its new sterilized brightness, only reluctantly yields up its memory of the man with the Saint Vitus’ Dance, that ragdoll figure whom you watched with gorgonized awe and later gave to your fictional second self, Malte Laurids Brigge, to evoke in his troubled notebooks.
No, one no longer sees such figures as if seeing a great scream personified. But such figures do remain, just beneath the surface dignity of these clean-swept boulevards, beneath Haussmann’s elegant housefronts. And they are most definitely to be found, like the wastage of long-since defeated, long-since scattered armies, in the twisting streets set back from the river and confettied with rubbish. They’re in every city, no doubt, shall always be. Malte’s disgraced kin—the poor and cursed urbanites who occasioned him to anoint the first blank page of his notebook with those agitated words:
“So, people do come here to live. I would have sooner thought that this is where one dies.”
Already I’ve seen much of these figures—and the conditions on these city streets have greatly improved since yours and Malte’s arrival one hundred years ago, so I can only imagine the things you saw then.
May I tell Malte what I’ve seen in a month’s time, and thereby reveal to him something?…something. Perhaps he’d like to know that the grim spectacles he beheld daily were more than the phantasms of his dark soul. That even today one may witness such things in Paris. So Malte, I hope you’ll find it assuring that I have seen:
…the graying slack-sided man who appeared to suffer so much in the mere act of motion. He seemed to have lost his cane or leg-braces. He was just outside the gate of the Hôtel des Invalides when I saw him. Groping along the wall with splayed hands, his spine bowing backward in the effort to free himself of the wall. To walk.
He wasn’t an extremely old man—just gray-haired, like many not-so-old men. His stiffness seemed to be coming from somewhere outside or just above him; it seemed he was hemmed in by some invisible man-size flange made of most inflexible rubber. A number of people streamed past him and crossed the expansive front grounds to the church door. He hardly noticed them. All his focus was fixed in that labor of getting to the gate—the gate through which those others glided like birds.
I asked myself what you might have asked, Malte. Can it be that some persons, some very small number, are cursed by an imbalance of the blood or the brain or the inner ear to bear gravity’s effect at a volume exponentially greater than most? Because it was something like that with this man.
And then it struck me that the man might well be significantly younger than he looked, but the pressure, the incessant pressure, was speeding the clockworks inside him. I’d been waiting for a traffic light to change and now it was time to cross. In a final glimpse I saw him unmooring himself from the wall and starting forward with tiny, slow, hard-won steps. Before him lay the vast open grounds of the Invalides complex, and high above him the gilded dome stood up in mute and grand neutrality.
There was also this, Malte:
...the man with jowls as loose and pendulous as a winded dog’s. He was crossing the pretty little Place Maubert where the pretty fountain patters, and beyond his slightly disheveled jacket and shirt he was perfectly unremarkable. But when he came closer I saw the white, beaded strings of slaver swaying from his unfurled bottom lip. He brushed past me with a glazed stare toward the gutters, a stare that might—to somebody not looking very closely—appear pensive.
And this:
...the brawny balding man with the sunned skull and the heavy, very capable hands, lying unconscious on his back on the clean sidewalk in the rue de l’Estrapade. Flat on his back in front of the artful ironwork gates of that one bright patrician house, the one that looks like a guidebook photograph. And he wasn’t sidled up to the gate, either—no, he was sprawled at the center of the pavement, a great X of a body, like someone who had fallen from some unreckonable height....
(continue reading this entry in Part II, "Paris Notes Continued," below)
Paris Notes Continued
(continued from above, Paris Notes: Rilke, Malte Laurids Brigge, and the Latin Quarter Today)
A drizzle had started: sidewalks and cobblestones all splattered with dark, ponderous droplets. There was no getting past the man except by crossing the street; he lay completely in my path, face-up in the drizzle with his big workman’s hands flung out at both sides and rain falling into the blemished palms. He didn’t appear to stir in the least to that coolness on his face. Next to the blue number of a house three or four doors down an engraved plaque was hung which reported, with nearly implausible irrelevance: “Denis Diderot, that great mind of the French Enlightenment, lived here at such-and-such a date.”
What more? There were many…
…the little dark-skinned man whose upper body was disfigured to the shape of a crescent moon. He was at the corner of the rue Cardinal Lemoine and the boulevard Saint Germain when I saw him. Pacing back and forth with a cigarette in his hand. He kept turning and turning on mincing feet: two tentative steps this way, two that way—as though confined in the tiny box of pain that each movement erected around him, as though expecting again and again to find the pain diminished by a simple about-face, again and again coming hard against the pain. The stubby cigarette kept jumping to his lips—quick pert little puff, then down again. He was neatly dressed: a good thick shirt well fitted to his scoliotic trunk and tucked smartly into his trousers. But he looked confused, seized by that distinctive confusion of people lost within themselves. He was still moving back and forth with those little satyr-like steps when I reached the quay two blocks ahead and rounded the corner.
And this, just last night:
...the tawny man on the Pont de la Tournelle: dressed all in brown, and brown himself, his pale skin seized in filth as in tarnished copper.
He was standing against the stone wall of the bridge with one shrunken hand cupped before him—not held forth in confident need—no, but kept close against his jacket, the fingers curled, the plea of the concave palm barely apparent. At his back was Notre Dame. I was watching the vaporous twilight behind the cathedral towers and didn’t notice the man till I’d passed within a few feet of him. He was standing extremely erect, as if rigid with an effort to press himself out of sight, to blend into the waist-high stone wall. Yet his need remained. His need kept his hand aloft in its dimly remembered gesture. There was a tall streetlamp beside him. It flickered aglow with all the other ones along the quay and with those huge nightlamps that enhalo the great cathedral—flickered just as I was going by him. I saw the shapeless bulk of his face: the knife-thin slits where he’d squeezed shut his eyes. He could no longer so much as look to see who his benefactors might be. He was far inside himself and it was purely obligatory to stand there in accord with his body’s need, to permit the hand to importune; he had no part in it. His lips were drawn back, his teeth bared in a deep-breathing grimace. And this was the most painful part of it: he was snuffling, or panting, or giggling—I couldn’t tell which. Sharp spasmodic sibilations almost like words, but not words. None of these people use mere words; Malte, you know this only too well.
I went past the man (just like everyone went past him) and down the stone stairs to the quay where twilight people were loitering in the mild river air. I sat down and watched the boats go by. Sat for an hour or so. And the man remained on the bridge above me. I kept looking up and seeing his brown back and inert shoulders, his brown head turning neither left nor right. The colored lights had come on in the arches of the bridge: bright colors, but they somehow shed a tainted haze. The man stood motionless in the urinous gleam. People went by him. At length I looked up again and he was gone.
But Malte, I may wonder in my time as you did in yours: in what niche does such a man carve his bed by night? Where is the place he returns to? We wonder because wondering gains us a share in the destinies of strangers—and what could better suit the work we do?
Or maybe the man hadn’t gone. Maybe he’d just lain down below the wall where I couldn’t see.
Goodnight, Paris. Goodnight city toward which so much envy flows from all corners of the earth. Again your streets will coil in their knotted courses around me as I sleep. But I am hindered by the labyrinth no more; I’ve long since surrendered. Tomorrow I’ll tarry again. It need not matter that I am lost.
A drizzle had started: sidewalks and cobblestones all splattered with dark, ponderous droplets. There was no getting past the man except by crossing the street; he lay completely in my path, face-up in the drizzle with his big workman’s hands flung out at both sides and rain falling into the blemished palms. He didn’t appear to stir in the least to that coolness on his face. Next to the blue number of a house three or four doors down an engraved plaque was hung which reported, with nearly implausible irrelevance: “Denis Diderot, that great mind of the French Enlightenment, lived here at such-and-such a date.”
What more? There were many…
…the little dark-skinned man whose upper body was disfigured to the shape of a crescent moon. He was at the corner of the rue Cardinal Lemoine and the boulevard Saint Germain when I saw him. Pacing back and forth with a cigarette in his hand. He kept turning and turning on mincing feet: two tentative steps this way, two that way—as though confined in the tiny box of pain that each movement erected around him, as though expecting again and again to find the pain diminished by a simple about-face, again and again coming hard against the pain. The stubby cigarette kept jumping to his lips—quick pert little puff, then down again. He was neatly dressed: a good thick shirt well fitted to his scoliotic trunk and tucked smartly into his trousers. But he looked confused, seized by that distinctive confusion of people lost within themselves. He was still moving back and forth with those little satyr-like steps when I reached the quay two blocks ahead and rounded the corner.
And this, just last night:
...the tawny man on the Pont de la Tournelle: dressed all in brown, and brown himself, his pale skin seized in filth as in tarnished copper.
He was standing against the stone wall of the bridge with one shrunken hand cupped before him—not held forth in confident need—no, but kept close against his jacket, the fingers curled, the plea of the concave palm barely apparent. At his back was Notre Dame. I was watching the vaporous twilight behind the cathedral towers and didn’t notice the man till I’d passed within a few feet of him. He was standing extremely erect, as if rigid with an effort to press himself out of sight, to blend into the waist-high stone wall. Yet his need remained. His need kept his hand aloft in its dimly remembered gesture. There was a tall streetlamp beside him. It flickered aglow with all the other ones along the quay and with those huge nightlamps that enhalo the great cathedral—flickered just as I was going by him. I saw the shapeless bulk of his face: the knife-thin slits where he’d squeezed shut his eyes. He could no longer so much as look to see who his benefactors might be. He was far inside himself and it was purely obligatory to stand there in accord with his body’s need, to permit the hand to importune; he had no part in it. His lips were drawn back, his teeth bared in a deep-breathing grimace. And this was the most painful part of it: he was snuffling, or panting, or giggling—I couldn’t tell which. Sharp spasmodic sibilations almost like words, but not words. None of these people use mere words; Malte, you know this only too well.
I went past the man (just like everyone went past him) and down the stone stairs to the quay where twilight people were loitering in the mild river air. I sat down and watched the boats go by. Sat for an hour or so. And the man remained on the bridge above me. I kept looking up and seeing his brown back and inert shoulders, his brown head turning neither left nor right. The colored lights had come on in the arches of the bridge: bright colors, but they somehow shed a tainted haze. The man stood motionless in the urinous gleam. People went by him. At length I looked up again and he was gone.
But Malte, I may wonder in my time as you did in yours: in what niche does such a man carve his bed by night? Where is the place he returns to? We wonder because wondering gains us a share in the destinies of strangers—and what could better suit the work we do?
Or maybe the man hadn’t gone. Maybe he’d just lain down below the wall where I couldn’t see.
Goodnight, Paris. Goodnight city toward which so much envy flows from all corners of the earth. Again your streets will coil in their knotted courses around me as I sleep. But I am hindered by the labyrinth no more; I’ve long since surrendered. Tomorrow I’ll tarry again. It need not matter that I am lost.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Rilke's Sanctuary: Gaining Entry
Last week found me in Seattle for a stay of several days, during which time I got to spend a good many hours in the surreal, steely grandeur of the new King County Central Library.
It started me thinking about libraries (which I try to visit whenever I find myself in a new city), and about one great European library in particular.
Lost Son began as a series of journals in which I sought to dream up the particularities of Rilke’s life, reaching for an approximation of the workings of his everyday consciousness, noting down important facts and details regarding the historical moment of my story, the poet’s biography, or the character of a place. This free-form notebook process resulted in a number of first-person journal entries in which I addressed the poet directly, imagining myself in conversation with him, even fictionalizing myself to a great degree in order to get as close as possible to the fictional Rilke I was creating -- as close as possible to the tiniest, most personal ramifications of an experience had by Rilke, which my novel might dramatize.
I was afraid they wouldn’t let me in. Weren’t you, also, afraid when you first came here in that disturbed Autumn of 1902? Weren’t you submerged by the institutional grandeur, the stony inner-dusk of the reception hall?—afraid the library wardens would find you, despite the purity of your aims, ineligible for access?
You would explain that you were doing research for a monograph about their great sculptor, but maybe even that would not suffice, for you clearly lacked the brio, the forceful élan of an academic. But thank God: your publisher had written you a letter; your intentions were certified, rendered official.
And how would you have comported yourself in the absence of a letter?
It’s important, for one like me, to wonder such things from this obscure future of mine…
For I was intimidated, yes. How could I explain that I had no very particular use for this library, nothing particular to research?—that all I really wanted was time in this great reading room? Your reading room. Malte’s…Well, maybe I encouraged them to believe I had specific scholarly objectives, or at least did nothing to dispel the impression.
Anyway, they’ve let me in. I have been given leave to sit here like Malte, like you before him, and to read a poet. You and he read Francis Jammes, but I am reading you. What would you think of that?—that I’ve been sitting here in this enormous vaulted chamber in the center of Paris on a day more than a century after you first sat here, under the same opaque oval skylight of the ceiling, and have been reading my English translation of your wonderful, terrible book?
The novel lies close at hand now, its titled cover bared to the ceiling’s natural light, displayed for anyone to see. And who among these many ‘lecteurs’ will recognize the title as they pass along the aisle behind me? Who among them will suffer the quiet unsettlement of recognizing this name, Malte, this book whose existence owes much to this room, this old salle de références? For it was here that an obscure young foreigner, an empty-pocketed poet of twenty-six, was given leave to linger amongst piles and piles of books. (“Probably the most extensive in the world” says your Baedeker of this bibliothèque.) How does that change a place?—that it became a place where an artist with few other hopes, an artist destined to long struggle and distant achievement, found harbor for a while?
Here is Malte:
It started me thinking about libraries (which I try to visit whenever I find myself in a new city), and about one great European library in particular.While working in Paris on Lost Son, my new novel about Rainer Maria Rilke, I had occasion to visit the elegant old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue de Richelieu on the Right Bank. This was a place of great importance to Rilke in his critical days as a poor, struggling, unknown poet and foreigner in Paris. The reading room here became his sanctuary amidst the oppressive squalor and anonymity of the city. And in his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke made the reading room just as important to his poor, struggling alter ego, Malte.
Lost Son began as a series of journals in which I sought to dream up the particularities of Rilke’s life, reaching for an approximation of the workings of his everyday consciousness, noting down important facts and details regarding the historical moment of my story, the poet’s biography, or the character of a place. This free-form notebook process resulted in a number of first-person journal entries in which I addressed the poet directly, imagining myself in conversation with him, even fictionalizing myself to a great degree in order to get as close as possible to the fictional Rilke I was creating -- as close as possible to the tiniest, most personal ramifications of an experience had by Rilke, which my novel might dramatize.Most of those first-person notebook sections were excised from the material that made up the final manuscript of Lost Son. But they were an important part of my process, and I believe they helped create a powerful sense of intimacy in the finished novel. Often, too, these entries first delineated the questions that remain at the heart of Lost Son. Here’s one such notebook entry dealing with Rilke’s—and Malte’s—Paris library in its present day. I found it to be no simple task gaining admittance to the reading room, which is open only to serious researchers…
... Bibliothèque Nationale ...
I was afraid they wouldn’t let me in. Weren’t you, also, afraid when you first came here in that disturbed Autumn of 1902? Weren’t you submerged by the institutional grandeur, the stony inner-dusk of the reception hall?—afraid the library wardens would find you, despite the purity of your aims, ineligible for access?
You would explain that you were doing research for a monograph about their great sculptor, but maybe even that would not suffice, for you clearly lacked the brio, the forceful élan of an academic. But thank God: your publisher had written you a letter; your intentions were certified, rendered official.
And how would you have comported yourself in the absence of a letter?
It’s important, for one like me, to wonder such things from this obscure future of mine…
For I was intimidated, yes. How could I explain that I had no very particular use for this library, nothing particular to research?—that all I really wanted was time in this great reading room? Your reading room. Malte’s…Well, maybe I encouraged them to believe I had specific scholarly objectives, or at least did nothing to dispel the impression.
Anyway, they’ve let me in. I have been given leave to sit here like Malte, like you before him, and to read a poet. You and he read Francis Jammes, but I am reading you. What would you think of that?—that I’ve been sitting here in this enormous vaulted chamber in the center of Paris on a day more than a century after you first sat here, under the same opaque oval skylight of the ceiling, and have been reading my English translation of your wonderful, terrible book?
The novel lies close at hand now, its titled cover bared to the ceiling’s natural light, displayed for anyone to see. And who among these many ‘lecteurs’ will recognize the title as they pass along the aisle behind me? Who among them will suffer the quiet unsettlement of recognizing this name, Malte, this book whose existence owes much to this room, this old salle de références? For it was here that an obscure young foreigner, an empty-pocketed poet of twenty-six, was given leave to linger amongst piles and piles of books. (“Probably the most extensive in the world” says your Baedeker of this bibliothèque.) How does that change a place?—that it became a place where an artist with few other hopes, an artist destined to long struggle and distant achievement, found harbor for a while?
Here is Malte:
“I sit and read a poet. There are many people in the hall, but one doesn’t feel them. They are in the books…And I sit and have a poet. How’s that for a destiny. There are now perhaps three hundred people in the hall, reading. But it is impossible that each and every one has a poet (God knows what they have). Three hundred poets there are not. But see now—how’s this for a destiny—I, perhaps the most dejected of these readers, an outlander: I have a poet. Even though I am poor…”
The domed room is amurmur just now with vast cathedral-like noises that somehow help one to a restful state. For several hours already I’ve been awash in the luminous light from the panels overhead. Every few moments the light has changed character very slightly—from a clear bath-like tone to a flatter, bluish monochrome. If my notebook were an eye it would see me bent in this ellipsoidal surface of light, and around my skull the ageless names of cities twirling like a crown of thoughts. They are inscribed up there in an ornamental wreath. Clockwise, they read: Alexandrie ~ Londres ~ Babylone ~ Vienne ~ Thebes ~ Rome ~ Pekin ~ Jerusalem ~ Paris ~ Byzance ~ Washington ~ Florence ~ Athens ~ Nineve ~ Berlin ~ Alexandrie …
In the end my one book spoke for me and the library wardens gave me admittance in spite of my obvious trepidation, which might have caused them doubt. And what a marvel that was: to have a book and to let it speak!
But why do I feel afraid even now?—afraid they’ll discover I’m guilty of wanting so very little, wanting to just sit here and think on you and Malte and all these things and see how such thoughts help one who hopes to create.
In order to guard myself from undue scrutiny, Malte’s Notebooks are not the sole volume I’ve displayed on the table. For good measure I’ve emptied my bag of all three of its books: one of them an irreproachable hardcover opened to pages with sentences darkly underlined, margins annotated. In plain view amongst the books I’ve also laid my Bibliothèque Nationale researcher’s card. This bright yellow card bears a tiny color photo of me, taken at my researcher’s interview and reproduced instantaneously by computer. What a strange, stern image it is. I see locked in that face (a face surprisingly adult-like) the careful, guarded readiness of one prepared to prove himself. So much anticipative pressure still tense in those features, though the greatest trial—the trial of explaining oneself and one’s intentions (in halting French, of course)—had just been overcome, and leave to enter had been granted, and this picture was but a formality no different than my subsequent payment of researcher’s fees (4.5euro), in order for the coveted entrance to be made at last.
How do we explain ourselves? Perhaps that is the question I wanted most to explore in seeking access to this monumental reading room. Where is the place, the outer everyday place, in which young obscure ones can state simply their desires, their hopes, and find those things legitimized, let alone understood?
Do I overstate the predicament? Surely you wouldn’t think so. The universities that cherish you today, after all, were never your home. You lacked the distinction automatically conferred by scholarly achievements; lacked the fame that alone is the badge of an artist’s relevance in the world. Lacked, often, the proper citizenship…
Where are such a worker’s ‘salles de sanctuaire,’ his by-admittance-only zones—he who lacks this or that institution’s card? Lonely unratified one dressed again in yesterday’s clothing, he who has no name and carries no credentials, he whose shoes, like Malte’s, “are left in objectionable condition”, whose “beard looks somewhat neglected.”
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