Assets & Liabilities of Genius

RAINER MARIA RILKE -- E. M. Butler --Macmillan ($4.50).

Rainer Maria Rilke could serve as a symbol of the best and worst meanings of the word genius. He was a lap dog for cultivated ladies, loveless as a serpent, soaked to the soul in the most indecent self-pity. He was also ruthlessly loyal to the fact of his genius as a poet. Professor Butler looks at him with a level, sane, exacting eye. The result is the first biography and critique of Rilke to be worthy of its subtle, over-culted subject, "the greatest German poet since Holderlin."*

Sigmund Freud himself could not have contrived a ghastlier childhood for a poet. Rilke was born in Prague in 1875. Thanks to his mother he spent his first five years as a girl. Thanks to his father he spent five more years (aged 10 to 15) in the hell of a military school. He came out of it a hypersensitive androgyne, who wrote facile poetry and worse prose, traveled in Italy and Russia, gradually crystallized the beginnings of a serious art in which virginity, roses and death held almost obsessive symbolic values.

At length in 1902, Rilke got a light subsistence job as Auguste Rodin's secretary. Rodin hardly more than noticed him, but from Rodin Rilke learned the gospel of hard labor. Paris, too, exerted an essentially masculine influence, stony, harsh, forcing Rilke to a contemplation of that reality he so dreaded. Whenever he left Paris, he became the pet lamb of one great lady or another, his work sagged into mediocre translations and brilliant, sanctimonious letters. Not to a patron, but to his publisher Anton Kippenberg, Rilke owed the two most productive years of his life: the years in Paris writing the New Poems (fourth-dimensional still lifes) and that semi-autobiographical symphony of fear, the Malte Laurids Brigge (Journal of My Other Self).

Two years before World War I, at Castle Duino in Austria, he was brusquely, briefly seized by inspiration of a blinding ferocity. While it held him he began those Duino Elegies which he thenceforth regarded as the crowning work of his life. But with the war, apathy shut over him. "A born noncombatant," he mainly vegetated in Munich, more & more dependent on the friendship of ladies, writing letters (TIME, June 10, 1940) which combine elegance with self-pity. In the War Ministry, his job was to rule lines on to pay-sheets, "a duty he discharged with meticulous neatness, clad in a fancy-dress uniform." He had no conception of what was going on. Men by the millions were wrought into massive awareness of life & death; Rilke saw only evil and suffering, and little of that unless it frustrated him personally. He committed what is, for any great artist, a mortal error: "he underrated humanity."

In 1919 he left Germany for Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life. He disliked the country intensely, regarded it as "a waiting room plastered with Swiss views." But in the 13th-Century Muzot Castle, he delivered his final elegies: those tremendous, all but murderous mysteries of mind, swarming with "exciting, dangerous, forbidding" angels, which Mrs. Butler calls "the strangest perhaps of all the strange poems our century has produced." Rilke is one of the most difficult of poets to translate; but this passage on angels will faintly suggest both his quality and the violence of the Muzot experience:

Earliest triumphs, and high creation's favorites,

Mountain-ranges and dawn-red ridges

Since all beginning, pollen of blossoming godhead,

Articulate light, avenues, stairways, thrones,

Spaces of being, shields of delight, tumults

Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, singly,

Mirrors, drawing back within themselves

The beauty radiant from their countenance.

Death had a joke in store for the celebrant of girlhood, roses and death. Gathering roses one day for a lovely virgin from Egypt (dry source of all cults of death), he scratched his hand. Shortly afterwards it became clear that Rilke had leukemia, a hideously painful disease of the white corpuscles. This century's great minstrel of death, who dreaded the very word, met it in complete integrity, refusing anesthetic, floated upon the sumptuous hospitality of friends whom he refused to see. "Except for the presence of the doctor and the nurse he died, as he had lived, alone, surrounded by every care and comfort, and suffering the tortures of the damned."

* Whom critics refer to as the German Keats (1770-1843).

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