Some Notes on Musil and Rilke
"This gemlike stillness amid a never-halting movement"
In 1904, Musil found Rilke very helpful in the difficult seduction of a woman he had met at a party while still together with Herma Dietz, his working-class mistress. He had received the allowance to visit this woman, whose name was Anna, and “Everything was going along in a nice, controlled way,” i.e., without the dangers of violent Greek passion, until—“a decisive turn”—the afternoon when he read her Rilke. No, before that even, something else—a presentiment of some similarity to…Valerie. “The parallel grabbed me. I had the desire then and there to relive the Valerie epoch” and there was a “morbid attraction” in this “deja connu,” something that convinced him he had to win her. And then came “that afternoon”—the afternoon of Rilke:
“I tilted back in a tall chair and intoned. My voice had something priestly raw and excited in it—hesitant ardor of a Marian prayer. Along with this, R[ilke’s] splendor. Without injuring the mood, I explicated. I celebrated my view of love, more or less. It gripped me to exhaustion. Her also. I managed to raise our personal relationship to its extreme. And this time with each other was as if we had slept a night together. Since then, I long for her and she shows me that she loves me.”
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In 1925, Musil was a member of the “Group 1925,” an organization of what Döblin described in retrospect as a collection of “the best anti-fascist writers of the time.” When Rilke died on December 29, 1926, Musil was at the head of a faction who wanted to hold a memorial event in his honor. Others, the most far-left members, led by Berthold Brecht, not only opposed the memorial for the “bourgeois Rilke,” but, left the group in protest when Musil’s side won the day., The event, where Musil spoke, was held at the Berlin Renaissance Theater on January 16, 1927.
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Musil’s speech, Walther Petry writes, probably went over the heads of most of the audience. Along with his praise of Rilke as perhaps “the greatest lyric poet” in Germany since the middle ages, he used the platform to both question the scales used to judge greatness and to indict the cultural establishments of newspaper and feuilleton writers for giving Rilke’s death—which might have been an occasion for national mourning—about the same amount of attention as they would a premiere of a play. Of course, he was speaking about the problem of his own perceived neglect and his concern about the assessment of his own genius when he maintained that “Rainer Maria Rilke was not made for these times”. “This great lyric poet,” Musil continued, “did nothing more than bring the German poem to perfection for the first time.” But the listener was not to misunderstand: Rilke was “not a [solitary] pinnacle of his times, but one of its heights…” and by the word “perfection” (which could also be translated as completion”), he further did not mean the word as a “superlative,” but rather in respect to one particular attribute of Rilke’s poetry—an aspect that turned out to be manifest in Rilke’s use of metaphor.
The epigones of Goethe, he maintained, put too much emphasis on form and not enough on content—on the idea—which, in turn, led his contemporaries to veer too far in the other direction, eschewing form and depending too much on something else; under the influence of French writers such as Baudelaire and Verlaine and Americans like Poe and Whitman, the vogue for self-realization battled against formal superficiality. Although self-reflections seemed to win the upper hand for awhile, the old classical ghosts reared their heads yet again, showing how very difficult would be the task—Rilke’s task—of creating a new kind of poetry that was neither mired in one or the other camp. What was it then that Rilke did that was new? Hard to describe, but Musil began with one’s impression that:
“Not only scarcely a poem, but scarcely a line or a word sinks from the level of the others, and one has the same experience through all of his books. There is an almost painful tension, akin to an act of precipitous daring … Neither before him nor after him has this lofty and yet even impression of tension been reached, this gemlike stillness amid a never halting movement.”
As if he were describing the characteristics of his own “other condition,” he writes that “Rilke’s poem has something wide open about it; its condition lasts like an elevated pause”—and this something is generated by Rilke’s (and Musil’s own) use of the metaphor:
“One can say: in the feeling of this great poet, everything is metaphor, and—not merely metaphor anymore. The spheres that are usually separated into category types seem to unite into one sphere of their own. Never is something compared to something else—as two different and separated things…for even when that happens sometimes or if it is sometimes said that something is like something else, in that same moment it seems as if it had been that other thing from the beginning of time. The particular qualities have become the shared qualities of all! They have separated themselves from things and conditions, they hover in the fire and in the wind of the fire.”
In short, “the metaphoric is here in earnest to a high degree.” Musil then asked his listeners to consider one last related quality of Rilke’s poems (and, again, Musil’s own work): Rilke’s works do not present a world of security, wholeness, or emotional or moral certainty—in this way, they were works that correspond to the ethos of their own time. There are, Musil says, two kinds of poems. One that functions in relationship to the world of certainty as an “addition, relief, an ornament, uplift, outbreak, short interruption and sublimation,” a poem that expresses merely certain and singular feelings; and another kind that cannot forget the “hidden unease, uncertainty and fragmentation” of the world and that expresses “the feeling of the whole, which the world rests upon like an island.” The second was of course Rilke’s poem—and every metaphor he used was a metaphor for this state itself. A state of infinitely suspended, open-ended analogic inter-relation and necessary incompleteness, the state where Musil himself lived: When Rilke
“[S]ays God, he means this state, and when he speaks of a flamingo, he means this state; therefore, all things and occurrences in his poems are related to each other and trade places like the stars that move without our notice. He was in a certain sense the most religious poet since Novalis, though I don’t know whether he had any religion at all. He saw differently. In a new, interior way.”
And this differentness, this new way of seeing,—explicitly enjoined in Rilke’s novel Malte Laurids Brigge and by his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” which tells the viewer, the reader, “You must change your life”—must have been close to what Musil was looking for in his “other human being,” for he ended his eulogy with the prediction or hope that Rilke’s new way of seeing might be a guide—that he could in the future be a Fuehrer—towards a new picture of—or way of being in—the world.
Whether the audience understood this rather abstruse, serious and wide-ranging speech—which oftentimes seemed to lose track of the subject of the memorial—the aesthetic experience must have had its effect. When the red velvet curtains of the Renaissance Theater in Berlin opened, Petry noted that one “could not suppress a certain astonishment to find the speaker, whom one had not expected to see on the stage yet, seated on a chair next to a little nearby table upon which the manuscript lay, curtained off from behind and on each side by velvet drapery.” Musil, in a dark blue velvet suit with two buttons that set him off dramatically—dissonantly—from the golden yellow of the backdrop, suddenly stood up and began to read in a very lively but harsh fashion. “His eyes had the double task of reading the words and, while his mouth spoke them, of elevating their effect by creating a hypnotic contact with the audience.” After about three or four pages, Musil sat down, seemingly strained by the effort, and unbuttoned his slightly constraining jacket, but continued on in the same intense fashion.
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In his diary around 1928, he summarized his relationship to Rilke as artist, noting the “first love” of the poet’s book on the Worpswede artists’ colony (1903); the later indifference; the irritation and love for him that arose as part of his competitive raillery with his friend Johannes von Allesch. Then indifference again, followed by love after his death. “And then the oscillation”—referring back to the question raised in his speech of how to assess genius—"how much should I criticize him; how much should I elevate him?” Over the next few months, despite these old and new misgivings, Musil would work with Döblin, Hofmannsthal, Kerr, Hauptmann, and others to try to set up a prize fund for authors in Rilke’s honor, using money from Otto Weininger’s brother, Richard. But by July the plan collapsed due presumably to the withdrawal of funds.
Rilke and Clara Westhoff-Rilke in Westerwede (near Worpswede), 1901
Writing a book about Goethe, an 18th-century writer, is difficult enough, but I can scarcely imagine trying to fathom Musil's (and Rilke's and Brecht's) world.
This is fascinating, thank you!