You Must Change Your Life Page 2

  IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE Rodin had mastered the curriculum offered at the Petite École. He finished lessons so quickly that the teachers eventually ran out of assignments. He did not care to socialize with his classmates; he wanted only to work. The one exception was his uncommonly supportive friend Léon Fourquet, with whom Rodin shared a love of ponderous debates about the meaning of life and the artist’s role in society.

  The teenagers would stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens wondering whether Michelangelo and Raphael ever despaired for recognition as they did. They fantasized about fame, but Fourquet realized early on that this would be Rodin’s fate alone. While Fourquet would go on to master the art of carving marble—a skill Rodin never learned—he always saw an aura of destiny surrounding Rodin and would later spend several years working for his friend. “You were born for art, while I was born to cut in marble what is germinating in your head—that’s why we shall always be together,” Forquet once wrote him.

  By 1857, Rodin had won the school’s top drawing prizes. It seemed he had excelled at every subject except one, and it was the gold standard of artistic achievement: to render the human body. To Rodin, the human form was a “walking temple.” To model it in clay would be the closest he would ever come to building a cathedral. The human figure had fascinated Rodin for as long as he could remember. As a boy he used to watch his mother roll out and cut cake dough into playful shapes. Once she passed him the floury lump and he joined in, pinching out heads and bulky bodies for his mother to submerge in the bubbling oil. Once the dough men fried to a crisp, she spooned them out, revealing one hilariously disfigured character after another. It was, he later said, his first art lesson.

  But since statue commissions went only to the “real” fine artists, trade schools had no reason to offer life drawing classes. If Rodin wanted to study the human form, he would have to transfer to the Grande École. So, in 1857, at the end of his third year at the Petite École, Rodin decided to embark upon the rigorous application.

  At the six-day entrance exam, Rodin joined a semicircle of painters and sculptors before a live model each afternoon. According to some accounts, he waved his arms so wildly as he worked that the other students gathered around to watch. Because he was already producing the disproportionate, heavy-limbed figures for which he would become famous, his art proved as unconventional as his gesticulating and it was, in the end, too much for the admissions committee. He passed the drawing exam but failed in sculpture and his application was denied.

  Rodin reapplied the following semester, and the semester after that, and was turned away two more times. The rejections sent Rodin into such despair that his father grew worried. He wrote the boy a letter urging him to toughen up. “The day will come when one can say of you as of truly great men—the artist Auguste RODIN is dead, but he lives for posterity, for the future.” Jean-Baptiste knew nothing about art, except that it paid poorly, but he understood the power of perseverance: “Think about words such as: energy, will, determination. Then you will be victorious.”

  Rodin eventually coped by turning against the pretentious academy, which he decided was filled with nepotists and guarded by elites who “hold the keys of the Heaven of Arts and close the door to all original talent!” He suspected that his exclusion had to do with his inability to supply letters of recommendation from renowned artists, which other boys had been able to obtain through family connections.

  Rodin gave up on art school for good. He continued making his own work, but, denied his “heaven,” he stopped copying the idyllic Greek and Roman statues and adopted a kind of aesthetic of survival. From then on, his art was to be grounded in life, in all its unexceptional misery. He began to accentuate forms that clung desperately to their existence, and those that had been grotesquely defeated by it.

  WHEN HE WAS EIGHTEEN, it came time for Rodin to earn a proper living. So, in 1858, he took a job stirring plaster and cutting molds for building ornaments. He was a cog in an assembly line that began with an architect whose blueprints would call for flowers or caryatids or demon heads, which Rodin would then sculpt in plaster. He then gave the model to a mason to reproduce in stone or metal. Finally it went to the construction worker to affix to the side of a building.

  This sculpt-by-numbers approach left Rodin feeling depressed and uninspired. Once he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and for a moment saw himself as his uncle, who had also been a plaster craftsman and wore a smock streaked with white paste. He was starting to believe that this job might be it for him. Perhaps he had been foolish to think he could be an artist. “When one is born a beggar, one had better get busy and pick up the beggar’s pouch,” he lamented to his sister at the time.

  Auguste Rodin circa 1875.

  But the more Rodin eased into the routine of his job, the more a new world began to open up for him there. One day he was gathering leaves and flowers from a garden with his co-worker Constant Simon. After they brought these samples back to the studio to model in plaster, Simon observed Rodin’s technique. “You don’t go about that correctly,” he told his younger colleague. “You make all your leaves flatwise. Turn them, on the contrary, with the tips facing you. Execute them in depth and not in relief.” The form should push out from the center and advance toward the viewer, he explained, otherwise it was merely an outline.

  “I understood at once,” Rodin said. “That rule has remained my absolute basis.” He couldn’t believe he hadn’t come to this brilliantly simple logic sooner. Through the example of a leaf he had learned more than most students did in all of art school, he thought. Young people were so busy copying the sculptures of antiquity that they scarcely even noticed nature. And they were so preoccupied with emulating the latest greats in the salons that they failed to recognize the everyday mastery of craftspeople like Simon.

  Perhaps the monotonous labor he endured now was what the cathedral builders felt when they laid brick upon brick to build their masterpieces, Rodin thought. He did not share their devotion to god, but he did feel a love that intense for nature. Perhaps if he could sculpt each leaf as if it were a tiny act of worship, then he could take pride in his work as a humble servant of nature. After all, no cathedral builder was singled out for his work, nor would glory come to any one building ornamenter. The cathedral was a triumph that belonged to all its artisans, and it would outlive every last one of its nameless makers.

  “How I should love to sit at the table with such stone carvers,” Rodin went on to write. He would later warn young artists to beware of the “transitory intoxication” of inspiration. “Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds . . . everywhere except in schools.”

  Yet Rodin still had to accomplish one crucial lesson from nature, that of the human form. Without access to live models, he settled for studying humbler versions of anatomy. He became a regular at the Dupuytren, a medical museum just down the street from the Petite École. The diseased body parts on view there undoubtedly influenced the contorted shapes of the hundreds of hands Rodin would sculpt over the years, some of which physicians have since claimed they can diagnose by sight.

  Other times Rodin studied animal figures. There were markets all over town for the buying and selling of dogs, pigs and cattle, but Rodin’s favorite was the horse fair on the corner of the Boulevard de l’Hopital, in front of the Salpêtrière psychiatric facility. He watched the owners lead their horses out from stalls and trot them up and down the dirt path. Sometimes he saw the naturalist painter Rosa Bonheur there, dressed as a man to avoid attention as she worked on reproductions of her famous painting The Horse Fair.

  He also frequented the Jardin des Plantes, a seventy-acre menagerie in southeastern Paris that was home to a botanical garden, the world’s first public zoo and a natural history museum, where Rodin enrolled in a course on zoological drawing. It was held in the museum’s dank basement, and an uninspiring instructor lectured Rodin’s class abou
t skeletal structure and bone composition. When it came time for critique the man shuffled between the sculptors’ blocks, muttering little more than, “All right, that’s very good.” The students, bored by the scientific minutiae, amused themselves by making fun of the old man’s cheap suits and the way his shirt buttons fought to contain his paunch.

  In a decision he would come to regret, Rodin dropped out before the end of the term. He later learned that the professor was a true master in disguise: Antoine-Louis Barye, one of the finest animal sculptors in European history. Sometimes called the “Michelangelo of the Ménagerie,” Barye had been examining the caged carnivores of the Jardin since 1825, often with his friend the painter Eugène Delacroix. When an animal died, Barye was first on the scene to dissect it and compare its measurements to those in his drawings. Once, in 1828, Delacroix notified him of a new cadaver by writing, “The lion is dead. Come at a gallop.”

  Barye was a former goldsmith who defied the rigid realism of the day with wildly expressive bronzes. In his hands, a gnu being strangled by a python did not merely collapse to the ground in defeat. Instead, the beast’s body merged with the serpent’s coil as it sucked away its life and identity in what became a potent allegory for the dehumanization of war. Reviewing Barye’s work in the 1851 Paris Salon, the critic Edmond de Goncourt wrote that Barye’s Jaguar Devouring a Hare marked the death of historicist sculpture and the triumph of modern art.

  There was no shortage of demand for work by the great animalier, but Barye was a perfectionist who refused to sell anything that did not live up to his exacting standards. Thus he never earned the money to match his talent and went through life looking like a pauper.

  It was not until Rodin reached middle age that he finally recognized the significance of Barye’s animal studies. The epiphany came to him one afternoon while strolling down a Paris street, gazing absentmindedly into the shop windows. A pair of bronze greyhounds in one of the displays caught his eye: “They ran. They were here, they were there; not for an instant did they remain in one spot,” he said of the sculptures. When he looked closer he saw that they bore the signature of his old professor.

  “An idea came to me suddenly and enlightened me; this is art, this is the revelation of the great mystery; how to express movement in something that is at rest,” Rodin said. “Barye had found the secret.”

  From then on, motion became the dominant concern in Rodin’s work. He began intuiting tiny gestures—the curve of a model’s arm or a bend in the spine—and amplifying them into new, large-scale actions. His human figures took on an animal intensity; in sculpting one especially muscular model he said he imagined her as a panther. Years later the critic Gustave Geffroy identified Rodin’s debt to his old master. Rodin “takes up the art of sculpture where Barye left off; from the lives of animals he proceeds to the animal life of human beings,” he wrote in in La Justice.

  Once Rodin had discovered his task—to express inner feelings through outward movement—his work departed further from that of his historical heroes and began to fall into step with the flux and anxiety of the rapidly modernizing world around him.

  CHAPTER

  2

  IN A CHILDHOOD DREAM, THE YOUNG POET LAY ON A BED OF dirt beside an open grave. A tombstone etched with the name “René Rilke” loomed overhead. He did not dare lift a limb for fear that the slightest movement might topple the heavy stone and knock him into the grave. The only way to escape his paralysis was to somehow change the engraving on the stone from his name to his sister’s. He did not know how to do it, but he understood that freedom required rewriting his fate.

  The fear of being crushed by a rock became a recurring theme in the boy’s nightmares. It wasn’t in every case a tombstone, but it was always something “too big, too hard, too close,” and it often portended a painful transformation; a rebirth contingent upon the downfall of that which came before him.

  Indeed, it was a death that chaperoned the poet’s very entrance into the world, on December 4, 1875. A young housewife from a well-to-do family, Sophia Rilke lost an infant girl a year before giving birth to her only son. From the moment he was born, she saw him as her replacement daughter and christened him with the feminine name René Maria Rilke. Sometimes she called him by her own nickname, Sophie. Born two months prematurely, the boy stayed small for his age and passed easily for a girl. His mother outfitted him in ghostly white dresses and braided his long hair until he entered school. This splintered identity had mixed consequences for Rilke. On the one hand, he grew up believing that there was something fundamentally mistaken about his nature. But on the other, his acquiescence pleased his mother, which was something no one else seemed able to do, especially not his father.

  A young Rainer Maria Rilke, dressed as a girl, circa 1880.

  Josef Rilke worked for the Austrian army as a railroad station master. He never rose to the officer’s rank that his well-bred wife had hoped for, and he spent the rest of his marriage paying for the disappointment. His good looks and early professional promise initially won his bride over, but Sophia prized status above all else and never forgave Josef for failing to bring her the noble title she had bargained for.

  Josef, meanwhile, resented the way she babied René, and later blamed her for the boy’s incessant versifying. He was not mistaken. Sophia had decided that if they weren’t going to be granted nobility, they would fake it, and so she began teaching René poetry in an attempt to “refine” him. She had him memorizing Friedrich Schiller verses before he could read and copying entire poems by age seven. She insisted he learn French, too, but certainly not Czech. Under the imperial rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czech was relegated to the servant classes, while German became the dominant language in Prague.

  Born into this segregated city, Rilke quickly discovered that gender was not the only boundary that proved contradictory in his early life. He was part of Prague’s German-speaking minority, which enjoyed vast cultural and economic advantages over the Czech majority. Liberal families like the Rilkes wanted to live peacefully alongside the Slavs, but they kept to their own schools, theaters and neighborhoods, delineated by street signs written in their own language. Rilke would go on to speak Russian, Danish and French, but he always regretted never learning the language native to his homeland.

  When René turned nine, Sophia left Josef. She had become almost fanatically religious and, as Rilke later reasoned, was a woman who “wanted something indefinite of life.” By that time René had grown out of his girlish looks into a slender, narrow-shouldered adolescent and his parents sent him to live at the St. Pölten military academy near Vienna. Rilke was not opposed to following in his father’s footsteps, but not because he was interested in combat or physical training. He liked the elegant uniform, the order, and the rituals the military represented.

  But Sophia and Josef’s hope that their son might achieve what his father had not was promptly dashed. While the move had succeeded in replacing René’s dolls with dumbbells, it also thrust him into a roost with fifty brutal boys, with whom he had nothing in common. He quickly discovered that life at the academy had little to do with discipline or elegance.

  Young Rilke longed only to join the adult world. He was too intellectual to keep company with the working-class boys and he wasn’t refined enough for the aristocratic ones. Solitude might have suited him fine, but he wouldn’t be so lucky. To his classmates, René was fragile, precocious and a moral scold—all qualities that aligned into ideal crosshairs for bullies. In an account of one of the many attacks he suffered as a boy it becomes painfully clear why he was seen as a target:

  Once when I was struck so hard in the face that my knees shook, I said to my unjust attacker—I can still hear it—in the calmest of voices “I will suffer it because Christ suffered it, in silence and without complaining, and while you were striking me, I prayed to my dear Lord that he may forgive you.” The miserable coward simply stood there for a moment dumbfounded, then burst into a fit of scornful
laughter . . .

  The boy went to the chapel to recover from his beating and to nurse his righteous indignation. It was around this time that he developed the chronic, undefined infirmity that would afflict him for the rest of his life. Some thought Rilke’s mysterious ailments were entirely imagined and, indeed, when a lung infection took the boy out of school for six weeks, he seemed to learn that sympathy could be a deft social strategy. But others who saw him in these states testified that his trembling muscles and pallid complexion were too convincing to discount.

  In any case, the sickroom became Rilke’s sanctuary at military school. It provided immediate asylum from his antagonizers and, more importantly, allowed him time and space to read. Lying in bed, he rolled around with sentences day and night. He cried into pages of Goethe. His grades in literature classes started to improve, though they dropped in fencing and gym. Despite his failing physical education, Rilke still thought he could be a military officer, and at one point tried to prove it to his instructors by writing an eighty-page “History of the Thirty-Years War.”

  At the suggestion of teachers, the boy began submitting poems to newspapers, and several were accepted. He survived on these small consolations until he turned fifteen, when, finally, his parents saved him from that “dungeon of childhood,” as he called the academy. But he fared no better at the business school they sent him to next in the Austrian town of Linz. Noticing with “scorn and uneasiness” that his son was still writing poems, Josef tried to convince René to focus more on his studies and write only on the weekends. He saw no reason why his son couldn’t maintain both a job and a hobby, which was how he saw poetry. But to René, his poems were his “dream children,” and nothing was more upsetting than the thought of sacrificing them to a dull office job. He had decided that the artist who only wrote on the weekends was “not an artist at all.”