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.