Down and Out in Paris With Rainer Maria Rilke

“Paris is a difficult place,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a friend on New Year’s Eve, 1902. “And the beautiful things here and there do not quite compensate for the cruelty of its streets and the monstrosity of its people.” Then 26, the writer had recently moved to the city from the German countryside, leaving behind his new wife and their young child. His plan was to work there for a year and send money to his family, which had been relying on a trust fund that his father had abruptly withdrawn. For reasons that remain hard to pin down, however, he stayed for six years, without warming to the cruel streets and monstrous people or, for that matter, earning much money. It was a period of loneliness and frustration, during which he was wracked with doubts about his art. And yet a part of him seemed obscurely drawn to its hardships. In “Turning Point,” a poem about spiritual growth, he quotes as an epigraph these lines from the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Kassner: “The road from intensity to greatness / passes through sacrifice.” His fictional record of Paris would likewise turn on ascetic withdrawal and renewal.1

Rilke began work on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) soon after arriving in the French capital and labored over it for the next six years. Its long gestation contrasts with his poetry, which came to him sporadically, apparently without effort, in bursts of divine inspiration. (The Duino Elegies was composed in the span of a few weeks, in 1910 and 1921.) Not that the prose narrative required much research or preparation on his part: Framed as the journals of a young poet in Paris, it hews closely to his experiences and draws freely, at times verbatim, from his letters. The project’s difficulty was rather internal in nature. Along with the New Poems (1908), which were composed during the same period, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s first mature book, in which he began to transmute private obsessions into the themes that would shape his oeuvre: the mysteries of perception, the dilemmas of love, and the search for spiritual meaning in a godless world. Malte’s journal can be understood as dramatizing that process. “Each section of The Notebooks must be taken not just as a fictional diary,” Benjamin Lytal argued in a 2008 essay for The Nation, “but as an artistic effort designed by its fictional writer to solve some emotional problem and reach some height of beauty and insight.”2

As much a series of prose poems as it is a novel, The Notebooks matches the literary heights of Rilke’s finest verse. The book is doubly interesting as a document that “comes from the epicenter of Modernism” and that consciously responds to the “contradictions of that moment,” as Lytal noted. Disturbed by the sights, sounds, and smells of Paris, which send him into a crisis, Rilke’s alter ego provides a sensory account of urban modernity that complements the psychic and social accounts of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. That Malte’s passionate grousing about the industrial metropolis shades into a nostalgia for the feudal provinces only adds to the interest Edward G. Snow’s new translation is an opportunity to revisit this elusive masterpiece, whose “close-knit prose,” Rilke believed, “was a schooling for me and an advance that had to come so that later I could write everything else.”3

Rilke arrived in Paris hoping that a wealthy benefactor would house and sponsor him. When that didn’t pan out, he settled for a bohemian, downwardly mobile lifestyle, moving from one hotel room to another, without finding a regular job. (“I am poor. I do not suffer from poverty because at bottom it refuses me nothing.”) His wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, joined him a year later, but their marriage soon fell apart, after which he more or less abandoned their daughter. He spent his days in libraries and museums, immersed in Baudelaire, Ibsen, Cézanne, and above all Rodin, about whom he was commissioned to write a monograph by a small German publisher. He befriended the master and was even hired as his secretary, only to be dismissed within months, “like a thieving servant,” over a misunderstanding. The ordeal no doubt hardened Rilke’s aversion to honest labor. Thereafter he relied on aristocratic patrons, who hosted him for long spells in chalets and châteaus across Europe, most famously in Duino on the Adriatic coast.4