You Must Change Your Life Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE

  POET AND SCULPTOR

  PART TWO

  MASTER AND DISCIPLE

  PART THREE

  ART AND EMPATHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  IMAGE CREDITS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  I FIRST READ LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET WHEN I WAS TWENTY years old. My mother gave me the square, slender book with the title words “Young Poet” splayed grandly across the cover in gold script. The author’s name, Rainer Maria Rilke, was strange and beautiful.

  At the time, I was living in a Midwestern college town a few miles from where I grew up, in a mono-colored landscape of bland struggles and unspecial children. Like everyone else I knew, I had no interest in becoming a writer. As graduation loomed, the only drive I felt unmistakably was the will to leave. But I had no money and no clear destination. My mother said she had taken some comfort in the book when she was a younger woman, and thought perhaps I would appreciate it, too.

  Reading it that evening was like having someone whisper to me, in elongated Germanic sentences, all the youthful affirmations I had been yearning to hear. Loneliness is just space expanding around you. Trust uncertainty. Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. Make solitude your home. I saw how each negative in my mind could be reversed; having no prospects also meant having no expectations; no money meant no responsibilities.

  Looking back, I see how Rilke’s advice could be taken rather recklessly. But one can hardly blame him for that. He was only twenty-seven himself when he began writing this series of ten letters to an aspiring nineteen-year-old poet, Franz Xaver Kappus. He could not have fathomed then that they would be canonized as Letters to a Young Poet, one of the most frequently quoted texts at weddings, graduations and funerals alike, and what may today be considered the highest-brow self-help book of all time.

  As the fledgling poet formed the words, the words formed him, allowing us to witness the making of an artist. What gives the book its enduring appeal is that it crystallizes the spirit of delirious transition in which it was written. You can pick it up during any of life’s upheavals, flip it open to a random page, and find a consolation that feels both universal and breathed into your ear alone.

  While the genesis of Letters is by now well known, fewer readers know that the insight Rilke transmitted to Kappus was not exclusively his own. The poet began sending the letters shortly after he moved to Paris in 1902 to write a book about his hero, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. To Rilke, the raw, rough-hewn emotion of Rodin’s art—the hungry lust of the The Kiss, the alienation of The Thinker, the tragic suffering of The Burghers of Calais—gave form to the souls of young artists everywhere.

  Rodin was at the pinnacle of his powers when he granted the unknown writer entrée into his world, at first as his hovering disciple and then, after three years, his most trusted assistant. All the while, Rilke wrote down the master’s every adage and bon mot and often paraphrased them for Kappus. In the end, Rodin’s voice emanates loudly from behind the pages of the letters, his wisdom reverberating from Rilke to Kappus and to the millions of pleading young minds who’ve read Letters in the century since.

  OVER THE YEARS I had heard in passing that Rilke once worked for Rodin. The details rarely went beyond this snippet of trivia, but it always remained a curiosity in my mind. These two personas seemed so incongruous that I almost imagined them living in different centuries or continents altogether. Rodin was a rational Gallic in his sixties, while Rilke was a German romantic in his twenties. Rodin was physical, sensual; Rilke metaphysical, spiritual. Rodin’s work plunged into hell; Rilke’s floated in the realm of angels. But I soon discovered how tightly their lives intertwined: how the artistic development of one mirrored the other and how their seemingly antithetical natures complemented each other; if Rodin was a mountain, Rilke was the mist encircling it.

  As I struggled to grasp how these two figures—one in old age, one as a young man—understood each other, my research brought me to empathy. What we understand today as the capacity to feel the emotions of others is a concept that originated in the philosophy of art, to explain why certain paintings or sculptures move people. Rilke studied the theory in college as the word was first being coined, and soon it appeared in seminal texts by Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Worringer and other leading intellectuals of the time. The invention of empathy corresponds to many of the climactic shifts in the art, philosophy and psychology of fin-de-siècle Europe, and it changed the way artists thought about their work and the way observers related to it for generations to come.

  As the compatibilities between Rilke and Rodin came into focus, so did the point of divergence that eventually drove them apart. Their relationships with women, and what they believed about a woman’s place in society, played a prominent role in the way they saw each other. Both men were attracted to ambitious, independent women, but ultimately married those who sacrificed their own aspirations to support their husbands. Rodin often warned Rilke against womankind’s manipulative tendency to distract men from their work, and for a long time Rilke did not question his mentor’s chauvinist views. But the death of Rilke’s beloved friend, a painter whose genius was cut short by an ill-fated pregnancy, upended everything he thought he knew about what it means to suffer for one’s art.

  In the end, this book is a portrait of two artists fumbling through the desultory streets of Paris, finding their paths to mastery. But more than that, it is the story of how the will to create drives young artists to overcome even the most heart-hollowing of childhoods and make their work at any cost. “You Must Change Your Life” was not just art’s injunction to Rilke, but one which he commands to all the caged, frail, and hungry-eyed youth who hope to one day raise a timid hand in the air, grasp a tool and strike.

  AFTER I READ the last page of the copy of Letters to a Young Poet that my mother had given me, I held the cover closed in my hands for a few moments the way one does when they’ve finished a book they know they’ll never fully get over. Then I flipped it back to the beginning and saw that the book had been previously inscribed to my mother. A friend had given it to her when she was around my age, struggling with transitions of her own. He had copied one of Rilke’s most famous passages onto the inside cover: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” Go, it seemed say. Fling yourself at the unknown. Go where you’re uninvited, and keep going.

  CHAPTER

  1

  ALL ARTISTS MUST LEARN TO SEE, BUT THE IMPERATIVE was literal for young Auguste Rodin. He squinted through five years of boarding school before realizing that the obscurities on the blackboard were the effects of nearsightedness. Instead of gazing blindly ahead, he often turned his attention out the window at a sight too commanding to overlook: the great Cathédral Saint-Pierre in Beauvais, an ancient village in northern France.

  To a child, it would have been a monster. Begun in 1225, the Gothic masterpiece was designed to be the tallest cathedral in Europe, with a pyramidal spire teetering five hundred feet into the sky. But after two collapses in three centuries, architects finally abandoned the job in 1573. What they left behind was a formidable sight: a house of cards in rock, glass and iron.

  Many locals walked by without even noticing the cathedral, or perhaps only half-consciously registering the fact of its enormity. But for young Rodin it was an escape from the inscrutable lessons in front of him and into a vision of endless curiosity. Its religious function did not interest him; it was the
stories written on its walls, the mysterious darkness contained within, the lines, arches, shadow and light, all as harmoniously balanced as the human body. It had a long spinal nave caged in by a ribbed ceiling, flying buttresses flung out like wings or arms, with a heart-like chamber at the center. The way its stabilizing columns swayed in the gales off the English Channel reminded Rodin of the body’s perpetual steadying of itself for equilibrium.

  Although any comprehension of the building’s architectural logic was beyond the boy’s years, by the time he left boarding school in 1853, he understood that the cathedral had been his true education. He would revisit the site again and again over the years “with head raised and thrown back” in awe, studying its surfaces and imagining the secrets within. He joined the faithful in their worship at the cathedral, but not because it was a house of god. It was the form itself, he thought, that ought to drive people to their knees and pray.

  FRANOIS AUGUSTE RENÉ RODIN was born in Paris on November 12, 1840. It was a momentous year for the future of French art, also marking the births of Émile Zola, Odilon Redon and Claude Monet. But these seeds of the Belle Époque would spring from very arid, conservative soil. Shaken by both the Industrial and French revolutions, Paris under the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe was the city of depravity and poverty depicted in Les Fleurs du Mals and Les Misérables. New manufacturing jobs attracted thousands of migrant workers, but the city lacked the infrastructure to support them. These newcomers piled into apartments, sharing beds, food and germs. Microbes multiplied in the overflowing sewer system and turned the narrow medieval streets into trenches of disease. As crowds spread cholera and syphilis, a wheat shortage sent bread prices soaring and widened the gap between les pauvres and the haute bourgeoisie to historic proportions.

  As the city scrambled to register a proliferating class of paupers, prostitutes and unwanted children, Rodin’s father found plenty of opportunity for work as a police officer. Like the conflicted vice inspector Javert in Les Misérables, Jean-Baptiste Rodin patrolled the streets looking for pimps and courtesans throughout the 1832 Paris Uprising, and then later during the 1848 revolution that finally dethroned the king. The job suited the impeccably principled and authoritarian man as he gradually ascended the ranks of the force.

  When the barricades rose that year on the Rue Saint-Jacques, Jean-Baptiste and his seamstress wife, Marie, sent eight-year-old Auguste to the boarding school in Beauvais. There the elfin redhead remained safely tucked away from the bloody riots underway in Paris, which saw Baudelaire charge through the streets waving a gun and Balzac nearly starve to death.

  Auguste was not an impressive student. He skipped classes and received poor grades, particularly in math. Although Beauvais offered an education more befitting of his father’s rising professional stature, the tuition became a burden on the family. After five years, Jean-Baptiste decided not to waste any more money on an education that seemed unlikely to end with a career. When Auguste turned fourteen, his father withdrew him from school. The boy had always enjoyed working with his hands—perhaps trade school would suit him better.

  When Auguste returned to Paris, his hometown was barely recognizable. The previous year, France’s new president, Napoleon III, had appointed Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to modernize the city—or to hack it to pieces, depending on who one asked. An obsessive symmetrist, Haussmann carved the landscape into a vast grid, divided into class-segregated arrondissements. He bulldozed the rolling hills to flatten the horizon and impose a sense of order. He widened the old winding brick streets into paved, barricade-proof boulevards that hindered rebels and welcomed strolling shoppers. A comprehensive cleansing initiative went into effect citywide. Engineers designed a new sewer system so advanced it became a tourist attraction. Aboveground the city installed thousands of gas lamps in the streets to light up the night and ward off criminals.

  From the rubble of tens of thousands of demolished medieval houses rose five-story neoclassical apartments, built from uniform blocks of stone and aligned into neat, rectilinear rows. The rapid construction estranged many Parisians from their native city, replacing the traditional homes with those that seemed to belong to no place or time at all. To many, the continuum of scaffolding on the streets looked less like progress than the skeletal remains of their butchered town.

  For commercial sculptors, Haussmann’s decades-long reconstruction effort meant big business. All of the new building façades needed cornices and stone decorations. The chief training ground for this burgeoning class of craftsmen, as well as for future clock-makers, woodworkers and metalsmiths, was the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques, popularly known as the “Petite École.” Tuition-free, the Petite École was the working-class counterpart to the more prestigious Grande École des Beaux-Arts. While the latter groomed graduates like Renoir, Seurat and Bouguereau for careers as fine artists, it was virtually unheard-of for a student from the lower school to show in the official salons.

  Rodin, having just returned to Paris unclear of his interests or ambitions, enrolled at the Petite École in 1854. He did not yet consider himself an artist, and he certainly did not share the exalted views espoused by the Grande École professors, who compared art to religion, language and law. Sculpture was then, and would always be, first and foremost a vocation for Rodin.

  SOME BIOGRAPHERS HAVE SPECULATED that Rodin’s visual shortcomings may have nurtured his hypersensitive tactile intelligence. Perhaps it explained why he was always holding and rounding out lumps of clay in his palms. Even after he finally bought a monocle, he used it only to zoom in on the smallest of details. Most of the time he worked with his nose pressed flush against the clay (or, as one lover wryly noted, against his models).

  Like most of his classmates, Rodin entered with the hopes of studying painting. But because it was cheaper to buy paper and pencils than paint and canvases, he settled on drawing classes instead. It was a hardship that had the fortunate outcome, however, of laying Rodin in the capable hands of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the professor who would first correct, and then truly open, Rodin’s eyes.

  Each morning, Rodin would gather his art supplies, tie a scarf around his slender neck and set off for his eight o’clock drawing lecture. Lecoq was a squat, soft-faced man, who liked to begin each session with a copying exercise. He believed that keen observation was the indispensable secret all great artists possessed. To master it properly, one had to figure out the essential nature of an object by breaking it down into parts: Copy a straight line from point A to point B, then add in the diagonals, the arcs, and so on until the components take form.

  One morning, Lecoq placed an object in front of the class, instructing students to copy it onto paper. As he paced the aisles between desks observing their work, he noticed Rodin sketching only its crude outline and then making up the details on his own. Rodin did not strike Lecoq as a lazy student, so he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t completing the task correctly. That’s when it occurred to him that perhaps the boy simply could not see. And so it was in a single exercise that Lecoq identified basic myopia as the mysterious ailment that had plagued Rodin for more than a decade.

  The other transformative revelation from Lecoq’s class took Rodin longer to grasp. The professor often sent students to the Louvre to practice observing the paintings. They were told not to sketch them, but to truly memorize their proportions, patterns and colors. The young Rodin passed his adolescence there on benches seated before works by Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens. They were visions that opened up and expanded inside him like music. He rehearsed every brushstroke in his mind so that he could return home at night, still exalted, and reproduce them from memory.

  In his free time, he paid visits to the Bibliothèque Nationale to practice copying masterpieces from illustrated books. He made rough sketches of works by the great Italian draftsmen to take home and later fill in the details from memory. The boy became such a fixture at the library that by the time he turned sixteen he
was one of the youngest students to ever receive official admission to the print room.

  To some, Lecoq’s emphasis on copying seemed to train students only in the reproduction of other people’s art. It was in many ways a traditional, mathematical approach to form and dimension that was in line with the curriculum at the Grande École. But Lecoq had a different goal in mind. He believed young artists ought to master the fundamentals of form only so that they might one day break them. “Art is essentially individual,” he said. The purpose of the memorization exercises was actually to allow the artists time to acknowledge their reactions to a picture as its properties unfolded to them. Did a gently arched line produce feelings of serenity? Did a densely wound shadow evoke anxiety? Did certain colors trigger memories? Once artists could name these associations they could then begin to harden their own pooling sensations into external forms of their making. Ultimately, Lecoq’s modern method encouraged artists to draw things not strictly as they appeared, but as they felt and seemed. Emotion and substance became one.

  Rodin’s individual style started to emerge at around sixteen. His notebooks from the time reveal an artist already preoccupied with formal continuity and silhouette. In what would become a trademark tendency, he began conjoining the figures in his sketches, linking their bodies together into harmonious groupings that would later evolve into the ring-shaped masterworks of The Burghers of Calais and The Kiss.

  Lecoq’s lessons remained with Rodin long after he graduated and had established his reputation over the years as a sculptor of impressions rather than replications. He recalled Lecoq’s training decades later, when tasked with modeling a bust of Victor Hugo, who refused to pose for any prolonged period of time. Rodin seized glimpses of the man as he passed by in the hall or read in another room, and then sculpted the images later from memory. One looks with the eyes, Lecoq had taught him, but one sees with the heart.