You Must Change Your Life Page 4

  In 1899, the pair took their first trip to Moscow together. To outsiders, the tall older woman and the meek young poet did not always register as a couple. The literary critic Fyodor Fiedler mistook Rilke for Andreas-Salomé’s “pageboy,” while the writer Boris Pasternak remembered a chance encounter at a train station with the poet and “his mother or older sister.” To confuse matters more, Andreas-Salomé’s husband joined them.

  But the lovers paid no attention to the gossip. There was only one matter that concerned them in those days: to meet their shared idol Leo Tolstoy. It was no easy task. The novelist, by then retired and in his seventies, was not a welcoming man. He now only wrote bitter screeds denouncing modern art and the godless young people responsible for it. That might have served as a warning to his young visitors, but they were resolute. Andreas-Salomé called on some of her well-placed Russian acquaintances and managed to secure an invitation to his house for tea.

  When they arrived, the stooped old man greeted them grumpily. He was bald, with a white beard that had endured a lot of pulling and twisting. Almost immediately he started shouting at Andreas-Salomé in a rapid-fire Russian incomprehensible to Rilke. But it did not take long for him to figure out that the only reason Tolstoy had accepted the meeting was because he had taken issue with some of Andreas-Salomé’s writing and wanted to tell her off. A devout convert to Christianity, Tolstoy told her that she overly romanticized Russian folk traditions in her work and warned her not to partake in peasant superstitions.

  The conversation was interrupted by a man’s shrieks in the other room. Tolstoy’s adult son, noticing that Rilke and Andreas-Salomé’s coats were still hanging in the hall, had cried out, “What! all the world is still here!” The intruders took that as their final cue to leave and rushed out the door, with Tolstoy ranting behind them the whole way. They could still hear his voice bellowing halfway down the street until finally the sound of church bells drowned it out.

  Despite their traumatic introduction to Tolstoy, the pair decided to try and meet him once again the following summer. When they arrived at his country estate this time he gave them a choice between joining his family for lunch or taking a walk, just the three of them. Anyone acquainted with the Tolstoys knew that the only person surlier than Leo was his wife, Sophia, so the guests eagerly accepted the second option. A conversation about literature began benignly enough, but soon Tolstoy started raving about poetry as an impoverished art form. To make matters more awkward for Rilke, the man spoke almost exclusively to Andreas-Salomé, ignoring the poet altogether. Rilke later wrote in his diary that Tolstoy seemed to have “made a dragon out of life so as to be the hero who fought it.”

  Rilke might have been more devastated by Tolstoy’s rejection had it not given him insight into his next project, a book of poetry in the form of a medieval prayer book. Once he returned to Berlin, he began writing The Book of Hours, a chronicle about his search for a poetic god, which he would complete in three parts between 1899 and 1903. When the book came out, he inscribed a copy to Andreas-Salomé:

  LAID IN THE HANDS OF LOU

  for all time.

  Rainer.

  Rilke largely had her to thank for inspiring what would become the most prominent book of his lifetime. “You took my soul in your arms and cradled it,” he later told her. Her emphatic criticism of his sentimentality had begun to strengthen his verses, while his passion for her drove him to write one of the headiest love poems ever written:

  Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,

  Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;

  And without any feet can go to you;

  And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.

  Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you

  And grasp you with my heart as with a hand . . .

  In those days, Rilke might actually have enjoyed blindness if it meant that Andreas-Salomé would guide him. He relied on the care of others to what might seem a selfish degree had he not loved them back just as lavishly. But by the summer of 1900, his neediness started to annoy her. His letters stalked her everywhere she went. Once, in Russia, she left him behind for a few days to visit some family abroad and he threw a tantrum. A letter begging her to return contained some of his ugliest prose yet, she thought, and persuaded her only to stay away longer. Abandoned for ten days, Rilke sank into despair. When she returned to find him trembling and feverish, she announced that she would be returning to Berlin on her own; he ought to make his own plans. She had told him that she longed to “be more by myself, as I was until about four years ago,” when they first met. But privately she wished in her diary that she could tell him to “go away, go completely away.” To achieve that, “I would be capable of brutality. (He must go!)”

  The impending separation devastated Rilke, but he did not dare defy her. The day after they returned to Berlin he accepted an invitation to visit a friend at an artist colony in northern Germany. It would give her some space for now, but, as Rilke’s verse had promised, she would not be able to swat him away so easily. For the rest of his life, he would cry out to Andreas-Salomé whenever he couldn’t write, or whenever he tumbled into recesses of himself so remote that he feared he might disappear forever. Each time, she would come, take him calmly by the hand and lead him back into the light.

  CHAPTER

  3

  AFTER ABANDONING HIS STUDIES AT THE JARDIN DES PLANTES in the late 1850s, Rodin spent four years working as a trade sculptor and making his own art in the mornings and at night. He rented his first studio near the Gobelins tapestry factory, in an unheated, barely converted horse stable. It cost ten francs a month, which left him with nothing to hire models, who often earned as much in a few hours as he did in an entire day. Instead he was forced to make do with amateurs desperate enough to pose for his poverty rates.

  For a little extra drinking money, an elderly Greek handyman known as Bibi was happy to offer his services to Rodin. The man had a broken nose and such a “terribly hideous” face that Rodin could hardly bear the thought of modeling it at first. It “seemed so dreadful to me,” he said. But the man was cheap and already worked in the studios three times a week as a sweeper, so, beginning in the fall of 1863, Rodin faithfully began to sculpt one pit and furrow after another into a bust, treading across the clay as heavily as life had tread across Bibi.

  Over the next eighteen months, Rodin started to notice occasional glimpses of handsomeness in Bibi’s face. He had a nicely shaped head and, beneath the ravaged façade, there was a certain nobility to the bone structure. His was not entirely unlike the faces on view at the Louvre, Rodin thought, so many of them also being Greek and timeworn.

  The bust Rodin completed in 1863 was a radical departure from the polished portraiture of the day. Baudelaire wasn’t being entirely hyperbolic when he provocatively titled an essay fifteen years earlier, “Why Sculpture Is Boring.” Until then, sculpture had been made almost exclusively as decoration—filigree on a cathedral, for example, or a war memorial in a park. Before the latter part of the century, even the best new sculpture was still being mounted on the sides of buildings, like Carpeaux’s drunken dancers on the façade of the Paris Opera. If a freestanding work made it into a museum, it was probably because its original habitat had been destroyed.

  Whether Rodin knew it or not, his Man with the Broken Nose was a brazen affront to this long, unquestioned tradition. The unknown man’s face would never have appeared on a monument or a building, except perhaps as a symbol of sin. But Rodin’s Bibi was truly ugly, not allegorically ugly. He was a self-contained being, not intended as a denunciation of something else, as Rilke would later notice: “There are a thousand voices of torment in this face, yet no accusation rises. It does not plead to the world; it carries its justice within itself, holds the reconcilement of all its contradictions.”

  The 1864 Paris Salon seemed like the right time for Rodin to introduce the bust to the public. The names of his contemporaries—Monet, Cézanne, Renoir—were s
tarting to become well known, even if they were not yet fully accepted by the establishment salons. Two-thirds of the submissions to the previous year’s official salon were rejected, including Manet’s scandalous Déjeuner sur l’herbe. But they went on view in a separate show, derisively dubbed the Salon des Refusés, which ultimately proved far more popular than the main event, and made Manet a cult hero.

  But before Rodin had a chance to submit his bust to the jury that winter, the temperature in his studio dipped below freezing. The back of the terra-cotta head cracked off and shattered on the floor. When Rodin went to work one morning and saw the mess, he stared at it for a long while and then decided it actually looked better this way. The mask now bore the reality of Bibi and Rodin’s impoverishment on its surface, expressing the coldness of life in a most literal way.

  Rodin submitted the work to the 1864 salon as a mask rather than a bust, but jurors rejected it that year, and again the following year. Rodin did not take the news as hard as he might have in the past. He knew the sculpture marked a crucial revelation, whether anyone else realized it or not. Bibi had taught Rodin that beauty was about truth, not perfection. “There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character . . .” he would conclude. The human being, flawed creature that it is, cannot relate to perfection. But people can empathize with scars, wrinkles and lines, which together add up to the semblance of a lifetime.

  “The mask determined all my future work,” Rodin later said. “It was the first good piece of modeling I ever did.” As he started to acknowledge his talent, he also realized that it came, like many gifts, with a catch. Artistic gifts had to be shared with others or else they lost their worth. The burden fell on him to find an audience and to make seen that which is inherently invisible. As such, many gifts go unrealized, while the gifted go on suffering, carrying the absence inside them like an unreturned love. Rodin, like Rilke, spent his youth crushed under the weight of his gift’s imperative. It was not until 1864 that he met the woman who would act as his witness and committed guardian for life.

  ROSE BEURET WAS EIGHTEEN and already a seasoned laborer when she met the twenty-four-year-old sculptor in 1864. She had recently moved from her family’s vineyard in Champagne to take a job as a seamstress. Down the street from Rodin’s studio, Beuret was stitching flowers to adorn ladies’ hats while he was sculpting them out of stone for a new opera house, the Théâtre de la Gaîté, which was being built to replace the one Haussmann tore down on the Boulevard du Temple, or, as it had become known, the “Boulevard of Crime.”

  Beuret had dusty brown hair that curled around the edges of her bonnet. She had a tough, tense face and easily agitated eyes that impressed Rodin from the start. “She didn’t have the grace of city women, but all the physical vigor and firm flesh of a peasant’s daughter, and that lively, frank, definite masculine charm which augments the beauty of a woman’s body.” He invited her to model for him at once. Beuret, probably welcoming the extra income and a friend in the city, gladly agreed.

  She came to the job as “tough as a cannon ball,” Rodin said. She posed in his cold studio for hours with one arm stretched downward, as if setting a mirror on a nightstand, and the other sweeping up her hair. “I had put into her all that was in myself,” he said of the figure he made in Beuret’s likeness, which was to become his first life-sized figure, titled Bacchante. Rodin worked on it on Sundays and in the mornings before reporting to his job sculpting clay maquettes for the popular Romantic artist Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. While he was saving the money to have Bacchante cast, he set it aside and moved on to other projects. Eventually, he filled his studio and needed to relocate to a larger space. As the movers carried his patient Bacchante away, the figure started to wobble in their arms and fell to the floor. When Rodin heard the crash he ran toward the sound and, to his horror, saw that “my poor bacchante was dead.”

  The flesh-and-blood Beuret would not depart so easily, however. After her first modeling session, “she attached herself to me like an animal,” Rodin said. The pair soon became lovers and formed a formidable partnership built around their labor. Sculpting was Rodin’s job; Rodin was hers. She became his best studio assistant, posing for him in the mornings, then returning again at night to cover the unfired mounds of clay with damp rags to keep them from drying out. She continued working as a seamstress on the side and, every once in a while, Rodin helped her sew buttons.

  Rodin was loath to admit how much he depended on Beuret. When asked about their relationship he would say with a shrug, “It is necessary to have a woman.” But he didn’t believe a man needed a wife, so when she gave birth to their son out of wedlock in 1866 the boy’s birth certificate read Auguste-Eugène Beuret, father “unknown.” Nonetheless, they remained together for the rest of their lives, with Beuret acting as Rodin’s chief adviser, partner, lover and, ultimately, the sustainer of his gift.

  RODIN WENT TO GALLERIES as an observer over the next decade. Eleven years had passed since the Paris Salon rejected his Man with the Broken Nose, and he had not submitted another work since. Sensing that an artist could stake a career on a single statue, he was determined to return only when he had realized a masterpiece.

  He was confident in his technical abilities, but unsure of how to synthesize his miscellaneous education into a proper life-sculpting practice. Lecoq had taught him the rules of attention; Barye taught him movement; but still no one had taught him the human form. So, in 1875, he went to Italy to learn straight from the source: Michelangelo.

  He packed a bag with French sausage so he wouldn’t have to eat the seemingly iron-deficient Italian cuisine, and then boarded a train. He took the scenic route, passing through France and Belgium to see the Gothic cathedrals along the way. “Dinant is picturesque, but Reims, its cathedral, is of a beauty I have not yet encountered in Italy,” he wrote to Beuret.

  All of Florence was celebrating Michelangelo’s four hundredth birthday when Rodin arrived that winter. He visited the Medici Chapel, where Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo de Medici sat in a contemplative pose much like The Thinker would. He went on to examine the contours of every Michelangelo figure he could find in Florence before traveling on to Rome to see the paintings at the Sistine Chapel. The experience totally destabilized Rodin. Every decision Michelangelo made seemed to run counter to what Rodin had learned from the Greek artists at the Louvre. “ ‘Hold on!’ I said to myself, ‘why this incurving of the body? Why this hip raised, this shoulder lowered?’ ” Yet he knew Michelangelo would not have miscalculated.

  Now that he was a student again, Rodin re-created Lecoq’s old exercises, filling his notebooks with sketches “not directly of his works, but of their scaffolding; the system I’m building in my imagination in order to understand him,” he wrote to Beuret. Gradually, “the great magician is letting me in on some of his secrets.”

  When Rodin returned home a month later, he was brimming with ideas. He set to work at once on the statue that would finally win him entrée into the salons. He found his model in a young Belgian soldier with a graceful musculature. The man posed with one fist clutching a spear-like rod, the other hand raised to his head as if in distress. Rodin examined his form obsessively, from the front, back and sides, then in three-quarter profiles. He climbed up a painter’s ladder to capture the view from above, then crouched on the floor to look from below. He spent three months on one leg, and altogether a year and a half modeling each successive contour inch by inch.

  The result was an uncannily realistic plaster man, which Rodin titled The Age of Bronze. His eyes half closed, this was someone who had seen something terrible, as if he had just come upon the slain body of his lover, or as if he realized that he was the one who had killed her. Rodin eventually removed the spear in order to preserve an unobstructed view of the figure’s profile, a decision that only added to the already enigmatic pose.

  The salon admitted The Age of Bronze in 1877. It was received with such enthusiasm that the French government ask
ed to purchase a version of it for the city. But then the salon opened in Paris and Rodin’s fastidious accuracy backfired. Critics complained that The Age of Bronze was too realistic. It was a “study rather than a statue, a too servile portrait of a model without character or beauty; an astonishingly exact copy of a low type,” wrote Charles Tardieu in L’Art. Others went further and accused Rodin of casting it directly from the body, a dishonorable process known as surmoulage.

  The government sent experts to inspect the work in person. They concluded that even if it was not a life cast “in the absolute sense of the word, casting from life clearly plays such a preponderant part in it that it cannot truly be regarded as a work of art.”

  Of all the insults Rodin would endure in his long, controversial career, the charge of surmoulage would rank among the most vicious. It was tantamount to accusing a writer of plagiarism. “I am literally bruised in body and in spirit,” he told Beuret. But he did not show it in the passionate letters of defense he sent to newspapers. He begged officials to look at photographs of his model; they would see that the man was slightly heavier in real life than in the sculpture, proving that it could not be a cast. He rallied a group of the day’s leading sculptors, including Alexandre Falguière and Rodin’s former boss Carrier-Belleuse, to sign a statement refuting the charges of surmoulage. They went on to further praise the statue as an example of “a very rare power of modeling, and even more of great character.”

  Finally, after three years, the testimony convinced the newly appointed arts undersecretary Edmond Turquet. In 1880, he reissued the state’s order for the work in bronze. In an added gesture of goodwill that year, Turquet gambled on the untested artist by awarding him a second commission. The city was planning to build a new Museum of Decorative Arts and sought an artist to design the entrance.