The Web of Influence

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

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

Here's a bit from Dyer's piece:

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

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

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

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

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

Rilke's Birthday - "He Will Be Spacious"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Country for Old Men

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

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

Keats's Birthday

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

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

This living hand, now warm and capable...

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

Rilkean Dance

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

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

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

Listen Online: A Reading from LOST SON

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

You can now listen online.

Rilke Week

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

Cormac & the Coens

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

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

The New York Prodigal Son

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

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

Sarkozy et Rilke

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

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

Lou & Louis

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

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

Rilke's Mâitre

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



Photo at left: La Priere by Rodin (1909)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Musée Rodin / Hôtel Biron today.

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


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

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

Find LOST SON on the rue Princesse

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

Rilke in Paris: 105 Years Ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

"I'd Like to Be His Brother:"Hermann Hesse on Rilke

Thoughts by the wonderful Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) on the occasion of Rainer Maria Rilke's death:

"When the poet Rilke died a few months ago one could tell clearly enough from the attitude of the intellectual world —- partly from its silence but even more from what was said —- how in our time the poet as the purest type of the inspired human being, caught between the mechanical world and the world of intellectual industriousness, is forced as it were into an airless room and condemned to suffocate.

We have no right to denounce the times on this account. These times are no worse and no better than other times. They are heaven for him who shares their goals and ideals, and hell for him who rebels against them. Now the poet, if he wishes to be true to his heritage and calling, dare not commit himself either to the success-mad world where lives are dominated by industry and organization, or to the world of rationalized spirituality which seems on the whole to dominate our universities, but since it is the poet's single duty and mission to be the servant, knight, and advocate of the soul, he sees himself at the present world-instant condemned to a loneliness and suffering that is not every man's affair. We all guard ourselves against suffering, each of us would like to receive a little kindness and warmth from the world and would like to see himself understood and supported by those around him. So we observe the majority of our present-day poets (their number is small in any case) in one way or another adapting themselves to the time and its spirit, and it is just these poets who meet with the greatest superficial success. On the other hand, others fall silent and come to destruction in the airless space of this hell.

Still others, however —- Rilke belongs amongst them -— take the suffering upon themselves, subject themselves to fate, and do not rebel when they see that the crown that other times bestowed on poets has today become a crown of thorns. My love belongs to these poets, I honor them, I would like to be their brother. We suffer but not in order to protest or to curse. We suffocate in the, for us, unbreathable air of the world of machines and barbaric necessities that surround us, but we do not separate ourselves from the whole, we accept this suffering and suffocation as our part of the world fate, as our mission, as our trial.

We believe in none of the ideals of this time, not that of the dictators, nor that of the bolsheviks, not that of the professors, nor that of industrialists. But we believe that man is immortal and that his image can emerge again, healed of every distortion, freed from every hell. We believe in the soul whose rights and needs, however long and harshly suppressed can never die. We do not seek to enlighten our time, or to improve it, or to instruct it, but by revealing to it our own suffering and our own dreams we try to open to it again and again the world of images, the world of the soul, the world of experience. These dreams are in part evil dreams of anxiety, these images are in part cruel horror pictures—we dare not embellish them, we dare not disown them. We dare not hide the fact that the soul of mankind is in danger and close to the abyss. But we dare not conceal either that we believe in its immortality."
—Hermann Hesse, 1927

This passage is found in the Hesse collection, My Belief, Essays on Life & Art, translated by Denver Lindley.

J.B. Priestley on Rilke

I recently took note of this comment by J.B. Priestley, included at the front of my old UK edition of Stephen Mitchell's The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

"He transformed the German language into an astonishing new poetic instrument, and provided our age with one of its strange disturbing voices...poetry shining through a crack in the mind of the age...art finding a narrow passage between suicide and madness." --J.B.Priestley

Homelands

Some pics from a recent walk in California, through the land of Asher Witherow. Actually, these images were captured at Mount Wanda National Historic Site in Martinez, about 15 miles west of Asher's haunts. John Muir had a house less than a quarter-mile from here, and is buried nearby. He walked these hills regularly. The "Wanda" of the park's name was one of Muir's daughters.


Mount Diablo (in its summer colors).



Valley oaks.



In the region immediately surrounding these hills, there are more than 7 million people leading bustling lives. But up here all is quiet and timeless.



You're alone with the land that preceded the hurry and noise.


Do I miss this country? Sometimes painfully. But then...


...Oregon is not exactly short on natural beauty.

Clara Reads Rilke's "Das Karussell"

Found this fascinating audio file of Clara Westhoff-Rilke reading her late husband's poem "The Carrousel," which describes the colorful children's merry-go-round (still standing) in Luxembourg Gardens. Her reading beautifully captures the lyrical cadences of Rilke's German.

Listen for the rhythmic, recurring line:

"Und dann und wann ein Weißer Elefant." ("And here and there a white elephant")

The audio file can be found in situ at the Rilke-Worpswede website (click on the "audio" link at the upper right).

(The other link at the upper right, "Rilke und Worpswede Bilder," is a lovely musical slideshow of paintings by Worpswede artists who were Rilke's contemporaries: Otto Modersohn, Heinrich Vogeler, Fritz Mackensen.)

Director Remembers Bergman

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.'"

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!”

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.)

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

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)

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).

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?"

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.

Portland Event #2

Tonight I read from Lost Son at 23rd Avenue Books in NW Portland. The event starts at 7:30.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.)

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."

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?"

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.