The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
applause “as if to ward off ... something that would force them to change their life.” Her fellow actors feel as if they are in a cage with a lioness (235).
Malte imagines her holding up a poem as a mask. Were Rilke’s poems and his fiction masks behind which he defended his strength and singular gifts from being drained away by the people around him? Did these masks become, paradoxically, powerful, if indirect, expressions of the inwardness which they were hiding? A poet expresses himself selectively in his poems. If we compare the more objective New Poems with his contemporaneous novel, which is sometimes autobiographical, and his letters, we can see that many of his poems, which do not seem to tell us anything about their author, were indirectly self-expressive. In writing about Eleanora Duse, who seemed to him to be very much like himself, was Rilke revealing obliquely that his poems, his novel, and Malte himself, as a fictional surrogate, concealed and expressed him at the same time? Here, too, I wonder if Nietzsche influenced the poet’s thinking. In Beyond Good and Evil, he asks if one does not write in order to hide what is within oneself.1 Kierkegaard, who interested Rilke as early as 1904, argued that all genuinely expressive and original writing is elusive and oblique (as figurative language and irony are indirect), concealing as much as or more than it communicates because the individual is and must remain essentially secret, incommunicable. According to the Danish philosopher, whenever “the process of communication is a work of art,” it is shaped by the underlying sense “that personalities must be held devoutly apart from one another, and not permitted to fuse or coagulate into objectivity.”2
I have mentioned Winnicott’s comment in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment that artists often experience both “the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.”3 Surely this observation fits Duse, as Malte imagines her. But does it describe Rilke?
Rilke’s prose piece entitled “An Experience” tells us that in 1913 he felt he was protected from psychological parasites and cannibals by an invisible barrier which “absorbed any relationship into itself and ... intervened like a dark, deceptive vapor between himself and others,” giving him “for the first time, a certain freedom” toward others and “a peculiar ease of movement amongst these others, whose hopes were set on one another, who were burdened with cares and bound together in death and life.” His inner life, defended by this “intermediate space,” had “so little reference to human conditions, that [most people] would only have called it ‘emptiness.’ “ But this would have been a radical misunderstanding. His “freedom” brought the poet not “emptiness” or illness but “joy” and “converse with Nature” (WSR, 37-38).
Recurrently Rilke saw masking as a defense of inner freedom, power, and creativity. Behind the mask the face was free to grow. This was as true for himself as it was for Eleonora Duse and the Prodigal Son. But, as we have noted, often the use of such a defense is compulsive, and the freedom it affords may be quite limited. At least in Rilke’s imagination Duse was compelled to use her role as a mask by her fear that the audience was devouring her face. In the Prodigal Son episode masking becomes a necessary defense against having one’s face and inner self altered through and through under pressures from one’s family. Still worse, a mask can swallow the face it is meant to protect. I have mentioned the Notebooks entry in which a mask obliterates the child who tries it on. In January 1912, not long before the first Duino Elegy came to him, describing his involuntary identification with people he met, Rilke says that he could step out of his room in an amorphous state of mind approaching chaos, and, suddenly finding himself an object of another person’s awareness, automatically assume the other’s poise. On such occasions he was amazed to hear himself expressing “well-formed things.” His assumption of a poise belonging to the person he met and his involuntary compliance with the other’s expectations of social behavior, masking the “lifelessness” and “chaos” he had felt in himself before these encounters, tended to engulf him, if only temporarily (Letters 2:37).
Reading Rilke’s letters and his biographers, one can see how he developed a persona out of the vocation which was central to his innermost sense of self. He played the role of the poet so well that it helped to win him the acclaim and support of many powerful and wealthy people. This is not to say that they were unaffected by his writings, only that the role the poet played among them made them all the more eager to have him with them, often in their homes, and to become his patrons. It was a mask which obviously reflected, to some extent, Rilke’s sense of himself, but also enabled him to veil and protect his inner life from the admirers who, he felt, were constantly draining his limited vitality and energy away, devouring the distinctive features of his face, the singular man and poet he was. In November 1907, for example, he described his mother’s friends in Vienna as eager to eat him up—though once they’d heard him read, they lost their hunger (see Letters 1:325).
The biographer Wolfgang Leppmann suggests that Rilke’s social personality, manners, and clothes were a protective camouflage which the poet developed to defend his inner freedom against impingements. Leppmann quotes Wilhelm Hausenstein’s sketch of Rilke in 1915: “The poet went about in a navy-blue suit and wore light gray spats. His delicate frame was somewhat stooped. ... His hands moved cautiously, without expansive gestures, in light-colored deerskin gloves. He carried a walking-stick. The presence of a distinguished figure was thus disguised beneath the conventional appearance of a man of the world.”4 Like the role of the poet, this social persona may have functioned in alliance with the “intermediate space,” the “dark deceptive vapor,” which, Rilke felt, defended him from the people around him.
Rilke’s fears of being devoured by those who loved and admired him lead me to wonder if his personas resemble the “false self” which, psychologists tell us, people plagued by such anxieties often develop to conceal and protect their innermost self against such dangers. The question is important because the “false self,” which I shall define more fully, is a self-defeating defense, which ultimately encourages feelings of futility and emptiness and the sense that self and world are insubstantial and unreal.5 Recurrently, at least until 1922, when he completed the Duino Elegies and wrote The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke was haunted by such feelings.
Winnicott observes that the false self usually originates in the failure of a mother to adapt herself with sufficient sensitivity and empathy to an infant’s needs. The mother intrudes her own needs and fears into the child’s consciousness long before he is mature enough to cope with them. Distracted, disconnected from the spontaneous flow of his own feelings and “thoughts” by these impingements, he may split himself into an inner core and a personality or personalities preoccupied with giving compliant reactions to his mother’s pressures and, eventually, to pressures from other people. This outwardly directed part of the infant psyche becomes a false self, governed by the need to gratify and placate other people. While appeasing them, it conceals and protects the inner core, the “true self,” which is as completely divorced as possible from the false self’s need to react to external pressures.6
Compliance is motivated by fear of engulfment, impingement, and depersonalization if one reveals one’s inner self, one’s true thoughts and feelings. But this defensive front may bleed, squeeze, corrupt, or swallow the inner self it is meant to protect. According to R. D. Laing in The Divided Self, the false self is experienced as being governed by “an alien will” or wills. Initially this is a parent’s will, however much it may be disguised. It may control one’s behavior, one’s body, one’s speech, even one’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.7 The false self may be compulsively impersonating as well as identifying with the person whose expectations exact compliance. This concept recalls Rilke’s unhappiness about his tendency to assume the poise of someone else, when, suddenly, he found himself “expressing well-formed things” which had nothing to do with his inner chaos and which completely concealed it. Were his aristocratic persona and the public role of the poet also examples of the schizoid