Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, transl. Stephen Mitchell, Introduction by William H. Gass, Vintage, New York, 1985

But Rilke had begun to slip out of the knot of his marriage in the moment that he tied it; and as time went on his habit of letting go of things even as he reached out for them would become firmly established… vii

When Rilke went to Paris, he was in full retreat form the noise of infants and their insistent needs; from the dull level of everyday life he had reached the instant his romance with the country cottage had subsided and intimacy’s repeated little shamed had reasserted their reality. viii

…Paris grasped his outstretched spirit with a pair of gnarled and beggarly hands which wrung nothing but outcry out of him, mercilessly squeezing him until body and soul were only a dry husk around rented air. / Rilke had written poems on poverty and death, but up to now he had really known neither. viii

…he struck his poses, and handed out pamphlets containing his work to passers-by on Prague’s more notable streets as if giving away bread to the poor in spirit. At 26… ix

Rodin showed him who he ought to be; Paris demonstrated where and what he really was. x

If Rilke had fled his family, it was with his wife’s leave, for she was soon to follow him, after depositing little Ruth on Granny’s stoop like a basket packed with orphan… x-xi

…Rilke was a master of German prose; that he wrote far more prose than he did poetry; that much of it is as astonishingly beautiful as prose can be, and as terrifying too;… xii

These letters are sometimes shaded by self-pity. They are sometimes too supplicating, dandified, indulgent (the poseur is the other side of this poet); but they are invariably sensitive and thoughtful, often full of the unexpected in being raw, direct, and harsh. Certainly, they are rich, intense, frequently breathtaking: letters that could create a passion and stimulate an affair, for real acts of love occasionally covered the white sheets, and his skillful writer’s hand could manage to touch even the most guarded heart. They are letters it must have taken—sometimes—more than a day to compose and copy over; and for their recipients, hours of rereading and rest before they would be able to recover. Rilke’s writing is breathtaking: it falls upon the center of the spirit like a blow. xiii

These long letters to Lou could not have been dashed off. They clearly come from notes, from prose trials and errors, so that when Rilke revises sections of them for inclusion in the novel, they are already in their third kind of existence. xiii

The novel we have now is made of two notebooks of nearly equal length, yet none of these entries is very notelike, unless a musical meaning is meant. xiv

Malte’s extraordinary lucidity may mislead us about the bars which frame is vision. There is no Rodin in this book to humble Malte’s artistic claims; there is no mention of the glory and the menace of Cezanne, who meant so much to the development of Rilke’s art during the time he spent writing this book; there is no intimation of success or greatness; there are no passages, such as those which occur in his letters to Clara, for all their gloomy remonstrances, which evoke the vitality and sensuality of the city. / There is simply a sudden end to the notebooks, as if their author had no interest in beginning a third, or as if the third were lost, or as if Malte Laurids Brigge were no longer alive. xv

Rilke has little idea where his project is heading…And the pain of Paris has receded somewhat. To finish his work he will have to return to Paris eventually, but the old wounds won’t open as widely as before. How to continue? Worse: why continue? The difficulty is familiar. To rebleed isn’t easy. xvi

He becomes a professional guest; he lives in other people’s houses, in hotels, in rented rooms. Unfamiliar mirrors become his temporary friends. For a time, he resides in Rome. Then he visits Scandinavia. He complains about the uglification of Capri. He lectures: first hither, then yon. In Vienna… xvii

What is said, early in the first notebook, to be “the main thing” (that is, to survive), is no longer, in the second, “the main thing” at all (“the main thing is just to keep drawing,” to remain faithful to one’s art). And the initial commandment: to learn to see, is followed by another, later: to take on and learn the task of love. xviii

The final section of the first notebook, and the initial section of the next, are both given over to a description of the Dame a la Licorne tapestries which are on display in the Cluny Museum, and to the girls who come to contemplate and sketch them. xviii

The objects they wish to reflect on their tablets…are, in their way, eternal objects—images which can be safely, purely, loved…These girls, before they have known the fat but actually fragile pleasures of the flesh, are able to lose themselves in their drawings for a moment; lost themselves…Of course, as ordinary girls—as anybody’s kids—they want to change, grow up, have their loneliness embraced by another’s loneliness… xix

Malte remembers when his mother unrolled for him the antique pieces of lace she had collected. Malte, even more susceptible to “ecstacy” and loss of self as a child than he will be as an adult, is gratefully absorbed into the realms their lacelight shapes create. xx-xxi

These epitomal pages, which are so occupied with ghostlike, archetypal, and mystical episodes, also include this epiphany of their novel’s slow unspooling movement. / Like the tapestries, the laces have a fixed yet enrapturing esthetic design, and their delicate art redeems, from a life of merely “what’s expected,” those women who might have been otherwise wholly wasted. xxi

Because you are loved…you are expected to serve your lover, whose feeling have been left like a kitten in your care…Because you are loved, you work, which is a rival much admired but not more jealously betrayed for all that, will have to step aside so that the loving one can be comforted by your attention, assured of your devotion by the degree to which you are prepared to neglect yourself, abandon your principles, release your dreams. xxii
So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. 3 (opening)

The street began to give off smells from all sides. It smelled, as far as I could distinguish, of iodoform, the grease of pomme frites, fear. All cities smell in summer. 4

The main thing was, being alive. that was the main thing. 4

These are the noises. But there is something here that is more dreadful: the silence. I imagine that during great fires such a moment of extreme tension must sometimes occur: the jets of water fall back, the firemen stop climbing ladders, no one moves. Soundlessly a black cornice pushes forward overhead, and a high wall, with flames shooting up behind it, leans forward, soundlessly. Everyone stands and waits, with raised shoulders and faces contracted above their eyes, for the terrifying crash. The silence here is like that. 5 (complete section)

Today, while I was writing a letter, it struck me that I have been here just three weeks. Three weeks anywhere else, in the country for example, would be like one day; here they are years. 5

When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them. 7

It would be horrible to get sick here, and if someone thought of taking me to the Hotel-Dieu, I would certainly die there…This excellent hotel is very ancient; already in the time of King Clovis people were dying here, in a few beds. Now there are 559 beds to die in. 7-8

When I think back to my home, where there is no one left now, it always seems to me that things must have been different back then. Then, you knew (or perhaps you sensed it) that you had your death inside you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and the grownups a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest. You had it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride. / If was obvious that my grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, still carried a death inside him. And what a death it was: two months long and so loud that it could be heard as far away as the manor farm. / The long, ancient manor-house was too small for this death; it seemed as if new wings would have to be added on, for the Chamberlain’s body grew larger and larger, and he kept wanting to be carried from one room to another, bursting into a terrible rage if, before the day had ended, there were no more rooms that he hadn’t already been brought to. Then he had to go upstairs, with the whole retinue of servants, chambermaids, and dogs which he always had around him, and, ushered in by the chief steward, they entered the room where his dear mother had died. It had been kept exactly as she had left it twenty-three years before, and since then no one had ever been allowed to set foot in it. Now the whole pack burst in. The curtains were pulled back, and the robust light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, terrified objects and turned around clumsily in the forced-open mirrors. And the people did the same. There were maids who, in their curiosity, didn’t know where their hands were loitering, young servants who gaped at everything, and older ones who walked around trying to remember all the stories they had been told about this locked room which they had now, incredibly, entered. / But it was especially the dogs who were excited by this place where everything had a smell. The tall, slender Russian wolfhounds loped busily back and forth behind the armchairs… 10-11

So now he lay, and one might think that he had died. As it slowly began to grow dark, the dogs had one after another slipped out through the half-closed door. Only the stiff-haired setter with the sullen face sat beside its master, and one of its wide, shaggy forepaws lay on Christoph Detlev’s large gray hand. Most of the servants were now standing outside in the white hallway, which was brighter than the room;… 12-13

But there was something more. There was a voice, the voice that, seven weeks before, no one had known: for it wasn’t the Chamberlain’s voice. This voice didn’t belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph Detlev’s death. / Christoph Detlev’s death was alive now, had already been living at Ulsgaard for many, many days, talked with everyone, made demands. Demands to be carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the small salon, demanded the great banquet-hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded the great banquet-hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded that people laugh, talk, play, stop talking, and all at the same time. Demanded to see friends, women, and people who had died, and demanded to die itself: demanded. Demanded and screamed. 13

…it screamed and groaned, it howled so long and continually that the dogs, which at first had howled along with it, fell silent and didn’t dare to lie down and, standing on their long, thin, trembling legs, were afraid. And when, through the huge, silvery Danish summer night, the villagers heard it howling, they got up out of bed as if there were a thunderstorm, dressed, and stayed seated around the lamp, without a word, until it was over. 13-14

And everyone did their daily work badly and forgot to bring in the hay because they spend the day dreading the arrival of night and because they were so worn out by the sleeplessness and the terrified awakenings that they couldn’t concentrate on anything. And when on Sunday they went to the white, peaceful church, they prayed that there might be no longer a master at Ulsgaard: for this one was a terrifying master. 14

…one of the young men dreamed that he had gone to the manor-house and killed the master with his pitchfork; and they were so exasperated, so overstrained, that they all listened as he told his dream and, quite unconsciously, looked at him to see if he were really brave enough to do that. This is how people felt and talked in the whole district where, just a few weeks before, the Chamberlain had been loved and pitied. But though there was all this talk, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev’s death, which had moved in at Ulsgaard, refused to let itself by hurried. It had come for ten weeks, and for ten weeks it stayed. 15

This was not the death of just any old man with dropsy; this was the sinister, princely death which the Chamberlain had, all his life, carried inside him and nourished with his own experiences. Every excess of pride, will, and authority that he himself had not been able to use up during his peaceful days… 15

Still, it hard for me to think…that strangers are living in the ancient, long manor-house…And you have nobody and nothing, and you travel through the world with a trunk and a carton of books and truly without curiosity. What kind of life is this: without a house, without inherited Things, without dogs. 16-17

Today we had a beautiful autumn morning. I walked through the Tuileries. Everything that lay toward the East, before the sun, dazzled; was hung with mist as if with a gray curtain of light. Gray in the gray, the statues sunned themselves in the not yet unveiled garden. 17

I think I should begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight years old, and I have done practically nothing. To sum it up: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad; a play entitled “Marriage,” which tries to demonstrate a false thesis by equivocal means; and some poems. Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines…For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly… 19

How ridiculous. I sit here in my little room, I, Brigge, who am twenty-eight years old and completely unknown. I sit here and am nothing…five flights up, on a gray Paris afternoon… 22

The only area that has remained complete in my heart, I think, is the banquet-hall where we used to assemble for dinner every evening at seven o’clock. I never saw this room by day; I can’t even remember if it had windows or where they faced. Whenever the family entered, the candles would be burning in the heavy branched candlesticks, and in a few minutes you forgot the time of day and everything you had seen outside. This high and, I suspect, vaulted room was more powerful than everything else. With its darkening height and its never fully illuminated corners, it sucked all images out of your, without giving you anything definite in return. You sat there as if you had disintegrated—totally without will, without consciousness, without pleasure, without defense. 25-26

But it began with my laughing. I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop. What had happened was that one evening Mathilde Brahe hadn’t appeared for dinner. The old, almost totally blind butler nevertheless held out the serving-dish when he came to her seat. He remained in that attitude for a few moments’ then, content and dignified, and as if everything were in order, he moved on. 32

But it is another poet I’m reading: a poet who doesn’t live in Paris, a very different one. One who has a quiet house in the mountains. Who rings like a bell in a clear air. A happy poet, who tells about his window and the glass doors of his bookcase that pensively reflect a dear, solitary distance. This poet is the one I would have liked to be. He knows so much about young girls, and I too would have known much about them. He knows so much about young girls, and I too would have known much about them. He knows about girls who lived a hundred years ago, it no longer matters that they’re dead, for he knows everything. And that is the main thing. 42

And to think that I too would have been a poet like this if I could have lived somewhere, anywhere in the world, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one cares about. I would have used just one room (the bright room in the attic), and I would have lived there with my old Things, the family portraits, the books. I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a strong walking-stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Just a book bound in yellowish, ivory-colored leather with an old flowered design on the endpaper: on its pages, I would have written. I would have written a lot, for I would have had many thoughts, and memories of many people. / But life has turned out differently. 43

It was carnival-time, and evening, and the people, with time on their hands, were roaming through the streets, rubbing against one another…Somehow a woman’s shawl caught onto me; I dragged her along, and people stopped me and laughed; I felt I should have laughed too, but I couldn’t. someone tossed a handful of confetti into my eyes, and it stung like a whip. One the street-corners, people were wedged in, flattened together, with no way to move forward, just a gentle back-and-forth motion, as if they were copulating. 48

I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one morning in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it vanished, just as if someone had been taking care of it—: so, here and there on my blanked, lost feelings out of my childhood lie and are like new. All the lost fears are here again. / The hear that a small woolen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steep needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor, and the sickening worry that when it does, everything will be broke, forever; the fear that the ragged edge of a letter which was torn open may be something forbidden, which no one ought to see, something indescribably precious, for which no place in the room is safe enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on granite, on gray granite; the fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsayable,—and other fears…the fears. / I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all. 63-64

Maman had had Ingeborg’s little secretary-desk brought up and put into her own room. I often found her in front of it, for I was allowed to go in whenever I wanted to. My steps completely disappeared in the carpet, but she felt me over the other shoulder. This hand was entirely weightless, and kissing it was almost like kissing the ivory crucifix that was held out to me before I went to sleep. At this low desk, with its drop-leaf open in front of her, she would sit as if at a harpsichord. 87

“Shall we look at them, Malte?” she would say, and was as happy as if everything in the small yellow-lacquered drawer were about to be given to her as a present. And then she got so overwhelmed with anticipation that she couldn’t even unfold the tissue paper. I had to do that every time. But I too was filled with excitement when the laces appeared. They were wound on a wooden spindle, which couldn’t be seen because of all the laces. Then we would slowly turn it and watch the designs unroll, and we were a little frightened every time one of them came to an end. They stopped so suddenly.
First came strips of Italian work, tough pieces with drawn threads, in which everything was repeated over and over, as clearly as in a peasant’s garden. Then, all at once, a whole series of our glances was latticed with Venetian needlepoint, as if we were cloisters or prisons. But the view was freed again, and we saw deep into gardens that became more and more artificial, until everything was as dense and warm to the eyes as in a greenhouse: luxurious plants, which we didn’t recognize, spread out their enormous leaves, tendrils groped for one another as if they were dizzy, and the large open blossoms of the Points d’Alencon scattered their pollen over everything. Suddenly, tired and dazed, we stepped outside into the long track of the Valenciennes, and it was an early morning in winter, the ground was covered with frost. And we pushed through the snowy thicket of the Binche and came to places where no one had ever been; the branches hung downward so strangely, perhaps there was a grave beneath them, but we hid that from each other. The cold pressed more and more closely upon us, and at last, when the tiny pillow lace came, Maman said, “Oh, now we’ll get frostflowers on our eyes,” and it was true, for inside us it was very warm.
When the time came to roll up the laces again, we both sighed; it took so long; but we weren’t wiling to entrust it to anyone else.
“Just think, if we had had to make them,” Maman said, looking really frightened. I couldn’t imagine that at all. I caught myself thinking about little animals incessantly spinning these Things and which for that reason are left in peace. No, of course they were women.
“The women who made these have certainly gone to heaven,” I said, filled with awe. I remember it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked about heaven for a long time. Maman took a deep breath; the laces once again lay rolled up together.
After a while, when I had already forgotten my last words, she said, quite slowly, “To heaven? I think they are completely in these laces. Each one, looked at the right way, can become an eternal bliss. We know so little about it.” 136-138

It may be that I now know something he was afraid of. Let me explain how I arrived at this supposition. Deep inside his wallet there was a piece of paper that had been folded up for a long time, crumbling, broken at the folds. I read it before putting it in the fire. It was in his most careful handwriting, firmly and regularly written; but I immediately noticed that it was just a copy.
“Three hours before his death,” it began, and it referred to Christian IV. I can’t of course reproduce the contents word for word. Three hours before his death he desired to get up. The doctor and Wormius, his valet, helped him to his feet. He stood a bit unsteadily, but he stood, and they put on his quilted dressing-gown. Then he suddenly sat down on the front end of the bed and said something. It was incomprehensible. The doctor kept constant hold of his left hand to prevent him from falling back on the bed. They sat like this, and from time of time the king, thickly and painfully, this unintelligible word. Finally the doctor began to speak encouragingly to him; he hoped to gradually figure out what the king was trying to say. After a little while, the king interrupted him and said, all at once quite distinctly, “O doctor, doctor, what is your name?” The doctor had some difficulty in remembering.
“Sperling, Your Majesty.”
But this was really not the important point. The king. As soon as he heard that they understood him, stared out of his wide-open right eye (the one he could still use) and said with his whole face the single word that his tongue had been forming for hours, the only word that still existed: “Doden,” he said, “Doden.” [death].
There was nothing more on the page. I read it several times before putting it into the fire. And I remembered that my father had suffered enormously at the end. That is what they had told me. 161-163

Girls in my homeland. May the most beautiful of you, on a summer afternoon in the darkened library, find the little book that Jean de Tournes printed in 1556. May she take the cool, polished-leather volume out with her into the murmurous orchard or to the phlox beyond, in whose oversweet fragrance a sediment of pure sweetness lies. May she find it early. In the days when her eyes begin to be watchful, while her mouth, younger, is still capable of biting into an apple and filling itself with pieces with pieces that are much too big.
And then, when the time of more animated friendships comes, may it be your secret, girls, to call one another Dike and Anaktoria, Gyrinno and Atthis. May someone, a neighbor perhaps, an older man who traveled a great deal when he was young and has long been considered an eccentric, reveal these names to you. May he sometimes invite you to his house, to taste his famous peaches or to go up to the white hallway and look at the Ridinger engravings illustrating horsemanship, which are talked about so much that one ought to have seen them.
Perhaps you will persuade him to tell a story. Perhaps there is a girl among you who can induce him to bring out his old travel-diaries; who can tell? The same girl who one day gets him to disclose that certain passages of Sappho’s poetry have come down to us, and who can’t rest until she learns what is almost a secret: that this secluded man now and then liked to devote his leisure to translating these bits of verse. He has to admit that, for a long time now, he hasn’t given his translations a thought, and what there is of them, he assures her, isn’t worth mentioning. Yet he is happy to recite a stanza for these ingenuous friends, if they insist. He even discovers the Greek text in his memory, and says it aloud, because the translation really doesn’t do it justice, and because he wants to show the young people this authentic fragment of the massive, gorgeous language that was wrought in so intense a fire. 238-240

It would be difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of a man who didn’t want to be loved. When he was a child, everyone in the house loved him. He grew up not knowing it could be any other way and got used to their tenderness, when he was a child. / But as a boy he tried to lay aside these habits. He wouldn’t have been able to say it, but when he spent the whole day roaming around outside and didn’t even want to have the dogs with him, it was because they too loved him; because in their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; because in their presence too he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain (251)…No, he will go away. For example, while they are all busy setting out on his birthday table those badly guessed presents which, once again, are supposed to make up for everything. He will go away forever. Not until long afterward would he realize how thoroughly he had decided never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved. He remembered this years later and, like other good intentions, it too had proved impossible. For he had loved again and again in his solitude, each time squandering his whole nature and in unspeakable fear for the freedom of the other person. Slowly he learned to let the rays of his emotion shine through into the beloved object, instead of consuming the emotion in her (254)…How often he though then of the Troubadours, who feared nothing more than having their prayers answered. All the money he had acquired and increased, he gave away so as not to experience that himself. He hurt them by so grossly offering payment, more and more afraid that they might try to respond to his love. For he had lost hope of ever meeting the woman whose love could pierced him (255)…The humble love that his sheep felt for him was no burden; (256)…Now that he was learning to love, learning so laboriously and with so much pain, he could see how careless and trivial all the love had been which he thought he had achieved; (258)…He became totally absorbed in mastering what constituted his inner life; he didn’t want to omit anything, for he had no doubt that in all this his love existed and was growing (258)…Dizzy with fright, they made him stand up, embraced him. They interpreted his outbursts in their own way, forgiving him. It must have been an indescribable relief for him that, in spite of the desperate clarity of his posture, they all misunderstood him. He was probably able to stay. For every day he recognized more clearly that their love, of which they were so vain and to which they secretly encouraged one another, had nothing to do with him. (260)