The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard

      Bradley analyzes the complex relationship between Malte’s responses to these aspects of modern urban life and his efforts to rediscover himself as a writer in his new environment. Malte has broken away from his past life, work, and sense of himself so completely, it seems to him, as he sits in his room, that he is “nothing.” “And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up, on a gray Paris afternoon, these thoughts” (The Notebooks, 22). In his letters Rilke defines Malte’s ultimate failure as a writer in terms of his inability to achieve, except in one or two sections of The Notebooks, what the poet calls “anonymous work” and “objective expression,” exemplified by Flaubert’s fiction, Baudelaire’s poems, and Cézanne’s paintings (Letters 1:311 and 314-16).

      As I have indicated, Bradley discusses Malte’s failure and Rilke’s abandonment of attempts to write prose fiction as reactions to an unsolvable conflict between two opposing sets of aesthetic values. She points to Rilke’s 1898 lecture, Moderne Lyrik, mentioned above in my discussion of Stephens’s book, as one means of understanding this conflict. What interests Bradley in that lecture is the poet’s argument that writing or painting which finds its justification in usefulness and which clings to topics and phenomena of current interest or places itself “in the service of ‘political or social factional interests’ “ (“in den Dienst ‘politischer oder sozialer Parteiinteressen’ ”) is not art, but journalism.15 Opposed in Rilke’s mind to such corrupted forms of writing, painting, or sculpture are “autonomous art” and the self-sufficient work. Bradley links these concepts to Jugendstil art and the French symbolists, and says that Rilke came into closer contact with the aesthetic ideas of the latter through Rodin, during 1902 and 1903.16

      Bradley finds that Malte’s attempts to describe the blind newspaper vendor reveal the underlying causes of his ultimate failure to achieve a new, clear understanding of himself and his task as a writer. Malte’s accounts of the vendor create a double perspective on that blind man. Reading these passages in The Notebooks, one can see him as an exemplary consequence of dehumanizing social and economic conditions, but he can also be seen as a man, “full of resignation” (“ergebungsvoll”), who bears his condition “as a misfortune ordained by fate” (“als ein vom Schicksal verhángtes Unglück”).17 When, after painful failure, Malte at last feels his portrait of the newspaper vendor successfully portrays the man, he takes this as proof of God’s existence, which places him under “a huge obligation.” And he imagines the Creator takes pleasure from his (Malte’s) belief that his experience in struggling to portray the vendor has taught him “That we should learn to endure everything and never to judge” (The Notebooks, 211). Bradley observes that Malte’s conclusions curiously alienate his work (the portrait) from himself. In this respect he reveals a latent affinity with his subject, the vendor, who is obviously alienated from his task, selling newspapers which he cannot read.

      Bradley also sees a connection between an earlier episode, in which Malte’s father forces himself to endure the terrifying visit of a ghost without questioning, and Malte’s belief that his success in doing the portrait of the vendor at last has taught him to endure everything without ever judging or questioning, as the vendor, too, suffers his fate. Retreating from “the position of social and ideological criticism into which he has ventured,” Malte seems frightened by this “function of the writer” into which he has been drawn (“ ... Malte vor der gesellschafts- und ideologiekritischen Position, in die er sich begeben hat, zurückschreckt bzw. dass er sich mit einer sogearteten Funktion des Schriftstellers nicht identifizieren kann”).18 Incapable of developing such critical perceptions in his work, he seems unable to realize the power which comes, as he has understood, from “no longer being anybody’s son” (The Notebooks, 189). If we accept Bradley’s connections, we can follow her argument that he is unable to free himself from attitudes and behavior obviously learned from his father. Here, as elsewhere, her essay reflects an attempt to integrate sociological and psychological insights.

      Bradley sees Rilke abandoning prose fiction for poetry because in the latter he could resolve the conflict between opposing sets of values which ultimately keeps Malte from redefining and re-creating himself as a writer. Freed from the “goal-directed semantics of everyday or commonplace idiom” in an “economically-minded society,” Rilke could make his poetry “an affirmation” of his concept of “autonomous art” (“von der zweckgerichteten Semantik des Alltagsidioms.... eine Bejahung der autonomen Kunst”).19

      Some of Rilke’s later poems do show an interest in social, political, and economic matters, but these are usually of secondary importance, at best. A salient example is Sonnet 11.19, which implicitly attacks bourgeois, capitalist society for its obsession with money and its neglect of the poor. But even in that poem, the poet is not primarily interested in the blind beggar because of the social, economic, and political failures which he represents. He sees the beggar as “the silent one” (“der Schweigende”), standing in the breathing pauses of pampered money, his hand held out by fate. And the poet wishes that someone seeing this “luminous, miserable, endlessly destructible” hand (“hell, elend, unendlich zerstórbar”) might, in wonder, praise its endurance in song which only a god could hear.20

      Although Bradley’s analysis of The Notebooks offers a very partial and limited reading of Malte’s efforts to achieve a clear understanding of his task as a writer as he responds to his new environment, I have given it this lengthy summary in my review of recent criticism because I believe that it serves as a valuable theoretical complement to my own exploration of the novel’s psychodynamics. It also points the way toward the kind of complex, sophisticated discussion of Rilke’s work, in literary criticism with historical and sociological dimensions, which still needs to be done. And it provides an encouraging counterbalance to Egon Schwarz’s heavy-handed attempt, in Das verschluckte Schluchzen: Poesie und Politik bei Rainer Maria Rilke (The Swallowed Sobbing: Poetry and Politics in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Writings) (1972),21 to interpret Rilke’s work and thought in terms of the admiration for Mussolini which the poet expressed in correspondence with the Duchess Aurelia Gallarati-Scotti, and other expressions of the poet’s ideas and attitudes which Schwarz sees as repellently right-wing.