The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
to long periods of solitude and the opportunity to give uninterrupted devotion to his writing. Clara would come as soon as she could, but they would live in separate quarters, and he intended that they should see each other only on weekends. Ruth, at nine months of age, would be left in the care of her mother’s parents.
My chapter on Rilke’s relationship with Clara offers a detailed examination of his motives for marrying her and the reasons for his decision to give up their home in Westerwede, where he had hoped that they would guard each other’s solitude and foster each other’s writing and sculpture, while raising a child. Here I shall give a brief, selective account of Rilke’s life at the time in order to provide a biographical context for my analysis of the novel begun in January 1904, which draws on his experiences during his first year in Paris.
In the summer of 1902 Rilke’s cousins cut off the allowance which his Uncle Jaroslav had provided for his university studies. Forewarned by his cousins in January, Rilke had begun looking for other means of support, but he was determined never to take the kind of full-time job his father had long been urging on him. The many letters he sent to potential patrons brought little in return. He was commissioned to do a study of the artists whom he had known in the Worpswede colony (in which he had met Clara and her friend, the painter, Paula Becker, while living there during September 1900)—Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn (Paula’s husband), Hans am Ende, Fritz Overbeck, and Heinrich Vogeler, the gifted Jugendstil designer and illustrator, whose work and cloistered style of living he admired. At the time he did not foresee that Paula Becker, who had fascinated him no less than Clara in those heady days of September 1900 at Worpswede, would someday be recognized as the only major artist to have come out of that group. He does not mention her in his monograph on the Worpswede artists. A grant from the Concordia Society of Prague also helped support the couple in Westerwede during the spring of 1902, as did the fees for his book reviewing. But there was nowhere near enough to keep the family of three going.
Rilke had other reasons for breaking up his family. His letters tell us that the little household in Westerwede did not give him the emotional support, nurture, and fulfillment he had hoped for in marrying. On the contrary, his home there had remained painfully foreign to him. For some time his wife and child had seemed unwelcome intruders. Having his own home and family had done nothing to remedy his sense of his unreality. They had only intensified it. He felt that his existence as husband and father, under pressure to find an adequate income, in the village so close to Clara’s parents, was “destroying” him.1 His state of mind in Paris during 1902 and 1903 was influenced by the failure of his expectations that his marriage with Clara would give him the strength he needed to overcome his fears and that a house and family of his own would provide a refuge from the menacing chaos of the world around him without endangering his solitude.2
The focus of Rilke’s working life during his first few months in Paris was Rodin. In chapter 1 I offered some indications of the ways in which Rilke’s study of the sculptor’s methods and his work may have influenced the writing and structuring of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. My chapter on the poet’s relationship with the sculptor provides a detailed analysis of Rodin’s effect upon Rilke and his writing. When Rilke first arrived in Paris, the great artist seemed a center of strength in the frightening disorder of the city. At the beginning of August 1902 he had written to Rodin, addressing him as “My Master,” revealing the extent to which he had idealized the sculptor before meeting him and the nature of his expectations. He expressed the wish that the books which he had published might be in Rodin’s possession. Unfortunately, the sculptor could not read German, and Rilke’s works had not yet been translated. He confessed, “All my life has changed since I know that you exist, my Master,” and he contrasted his own good fortune with that of young aspiring artists who feel forsaken because they cannot find a master who will provide them with “an example, a fervent heart, hands that make greatness” (Letters 1:77).
Warmly welcomed by the sculptor, he was not disappointed. His adulation grew. One can find it in letter after letter during the next few years. Writing to Otto Modersohn on December 31, 1902, after four months in Paris, he described the “cruelty,” “confusion,” and “monstrosity” of the city in which the dying, the physically and mentally ill, the grotesque forms of dehumanization, the people who had lost their way in the city’s noise and chaos and could not find purpose or direction or any sense of self among the anonymous masses, all threatened to overwhelm his sanity. “To all that,” he wrote to Modersohn, “Rodin is a great, quiet, powerful contradiction” (Letters 1:93-94). Possibly, the sculptor’s “example” fostered the artistic mastery, the control and skill which Salomé found, the following summer, in his vivid descriptions of his borderline experiences, the accounts of his own troubled life which he used with slight revisions in creating the Paris existence of Malte Laurids Brigge. (Malte is twenty-eight—Rilke’s age when he began the novel—and lives on the rue Toullier near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Rilke himself had lived during September 1902; even the month is the same.) But for many months even the powerful presence of the “Master” could not effectively contradict the deeply disturbing effects of the city and the multitude of fears which it aroused in the young poet.
“Oh a thousand hands have been building at my fear,” he wrote to Lou in July 1903. The people he saw were “fragments of caryatids on whom the whole pain still lay.... twitching like bits of a big choppedup fish that is already rotting but still alive. They were living on nothing, on dust, on soot, and on the filth on their surfaces” (Letters 1:108-9). His letters and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge make it clear that he was projecting his sense of himself onto these people.
Malte’s thoughts about radical alterations of mind, self, and world teeter on a thin ledge of uncertainty between the fear that he is mentally disintegrating and the hope that he is going through a frightening process which will bring the poet in him to birth. In the following passage he is responding to the dying of a stranger in a crémerie: “Yes, he knew that he was now withdrawing from everything in the world, not merely from human beings. One more moment, and everything would lose its meaning, and this table and the cup and the chair he was clinging to would become unintelligible, alien and heavy.” Malte realizes that something very similar is taking place in him. He understands the experience of someone dying who cannot find anything familiar in the world around him. Filled with fear, he wishes that he could console himself with “the thought that it’s not impossible to see everything differently and still remain alive” (51-52).
Malte wonders if these disturbing changes in him may be a necessary preparation for truly original perception and thought. Near the beginning of The Notebooks he expresses the belief that he is “learning to see” (5, 6). He has discovered that each person has several faces. Some wear the same face for thirty years and keep the others “in storage” (6). These faces will be worn by their children and, sometimes, by their dogs. If we follow Malte thus far, interpretation seems relatively easy. Roughly speaking, a face in this passage seems to mean a personality or an identity. He has discovered that a child may take on a face which has remained hidden in his parent. Often children unconsciously assume the latent personalities of their parents by identifying with them.
Malte does not say all this. But it is implicit in what he does say. And it is consonant with Rilke’s belief, repeatedly expressed throughout the novel and in his poems and letters, that so much of what goes on in the mind and between persons is unconscious. Thinking of mind or psyche as space, Rilke imagines “an interior” inaccessible to consciousness, into which all our thoughts and perceptions sink. We do not know what is going on in the “interior.” But images which come up out of those depths reveal the ways in which earlier perceptions have been transformed there. Malte’s conception of “learning to see” has obvious affinities with Freud’s ideas about unconscious mental processes, though there is no clear evidence that Rilke was influenced by Freud’s theory while he was writing the early parts of The Notebooks: “I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there”