The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
willingly complied when she insisted that her little boy play the role of a girl to replace the daughter who had died before he was born. As an adult he recalled that she had exhibited him to her friends as if he were a doll. While trying to satisfy her need for a daughter, he encouraged his father’s hope that his little son would grow up to be an army officer and thus fulfill Josef’s frustrated ambitions vicariously. Josef Rilke had been forced out of the army after ten years of service. He had little René doing military exercises and receiving medals. The boy did his best to please him, too.
Phia Rilke wrote verse. She read Schiller’s ballads to her son, persuaded him to memorize and to recite them, and did everything she could to foster in René the desire and the ambition to be a great poet.8 In Ewald Tragy, an early autobiographical novella, Ewald, Rilke’s surrogate, thinks of the mother who has left him as a sick woman who wants to be called “Fráulein,” sitting in a train compartment letting her fellow passengers know that her son is a poet.9 In his letters about his “unreal,” “ghostly” mother, Rilke expressed the fear that he was too closely identified with her, though he had been trying to separate and distance himself from her all his life (Letters 1:147). His devotion to a vocation that conformed to his mother’s wishes and his nearness as a poet to her conception of herself must have troubled him.
Malte’s retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son reflects Rilke’s sense of the ways in which a false self may engulf one as it develops under pressures from one’s parents. Malte imagines that the mask of the false self which grows in response to the expectations, fears, hopes, and relentless scrutiny of a family threatens to become the son’s face. If that were to happen, all distinction between the outer false self and the inner true one would collapse; the former would replace the latter (251-54). A schizoid person lives in uncertainty and danger as he tries to detach and divorce his hidden “true self” from the false one, which increasingly absorbs it.
If a large part of one’s social experience is pervaded by the sense that what one says and does is controlled and shaped by other people and is false to one’s “true self,” relationships and contacts are likely to encourage feelings of paralysis and formlessness. The false self acts as a barrier protecting the inner self from engulfment, but it also confines the inner self, cutting it off from nurturing contacts with other people.10 There are a number of intimations in Rilke’s letters that the roles he played among his aristocratic hosts involved him in deception and self-deception, which were painful and debilitating. The letters suggest that his attempts to exist in harmony with his aristocratic friends forced him to live a dispiriting lie, to enact a false self. He longed to escape from them: “The good, generous asylums, such as Duino was and immediately thereafter Venice ... require so much adaptation each time ... and when at last one has got to the point of belonging to them, the only thing accomplished is the lie that one belongs” (To Lou Andreas-Salomé, December 19, 1912; Letters 2:81).
As for the aristocratic persona, caught in William Hausenstein’s description, it may well have originated in the pretensions of Rilke’s parents and those of his father’s older brother, Jaroslav, a paternalistic uncle, who paid for René’s studies in a commercial high school and then at the University of Munich, and gave his nephew an allowance which lasted until after Jaroslav’s death. This uncle put much time and effort into an attempt to link the family with old nobility. Though he failed to gain legal recognition of any such connection, his nephew, the poet, maintained all his life the myth of noble descent. Phia Rilke, whose father was wealthy and held the title of imperial counselor, no doubt thought she was marrying into a family descended from aristocrats. In her photos she often appears in long black dresses, which give her a rather absurd resemblance to some great lady of an earlier decade, and her striking expression of loftiness fits in with this impression. Josef Rilke was bitterly disappointed when he did not succeed in following the career of a military officer, once the exclusive privilege of the nobility. Later he also failed to obtain a job as the manager of a count’s estate, which would have enabled him and his family to live in the kind of proximity to a noble heritage which his son later found in the castles and palaces of his patrons. Josef’s career as a railway inspector decisively defeated all such hopes.11
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