The Anti-Aesthetic Aesthetic of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan

 

     Admirers and critics alike must acknowledge that James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan preserves a glorious array of slang from the ‘twenties.  Studs and his young friends on Chicago’s South Side know every mean ethnic slur including some that were unfamiliar to me such as “schonicker” for Jew (though fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow uses it, too).  Their Irish parents may have contributed such Britishisms as “gaffer” and “shag,” while the Black population whose spread dislodged the Lonigans from the old neighborhood contributed “jazz” (in the sense of having sex) and “getting one’s ashes hauled.”  Everything good is “jake.”  Good things may also be “swell,” but this word often carries suggestions of snobbish arrogance.  “That’s a swell suit” means approval but a bit of surprise at the wearer’s implied social pretension.  In Studs’ world one can say “She’s a keen girl” and “keen” carries sexual associations absent from its use today (if, indeed, it is used today). 

     Of course, the elements of a story that are most up-to-date are those that first sound dated and soon require footnotes.  Yet to a twenty-first century reader, it is not the language alone that is out of fashion.  James Farrell himself and his monumental trilogy Studs Lonigan are to a certain extent passé.  With the privileging of the largely European avant-garde tradition and its American lineage descending from Gertrude Stein, with naturalism as a whole démodé, it is little wonder that few critics care to comment on the proletarian novels of the Depression era.  The left-wing views that motivated a legion of agitators among the authors of the ‘thirties are now more likely to be found among the obscure scholarly publications of university mandarins practicing New Historicism or Gender Studies.

     Yet at one time books like Studs Lonigan were not only popular but seemed to many the strongest representatives of American literature, with Studs prominent in most reckonings.  [1]  Readers today might have to think a minute to understand H. L. Mencken’s insistence, repeated at least from 1917 on, that Chicago was the most important city in American literature.  For him the most innovative and authentically American writing developed in the Midwest, the source he thought of “all literary movements that have youth in them, and a fresh point of view, and the authentic bounce and verve of the country and the true character and philosophy of its people.”  In part Mencken’s encomium derived from his conviction that in the West “originality still seems to be put above conformity.” [2]  

     Mencken was surely cocking his snoot at New York City, but the gesture carries a meaning beyond provocation.  If the United States is conceived as the place of liberation from moribund Europe ways, writers from the Midwest and West, further removed from the conservative values and decorum associated with the old wealth of the Northeast and the façade of gentility among the Southern plantation owners, might offer the greatest freedom of all.  Writers from states lying well west of the Hudson River such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edward Dahlberg, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren challenged received ideas in wildly different ways.

     In this American context, influenced by the socially conscious naturalism of Zola, which itself developed from Flaubert and Balzac, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan opus, three novels amounting to nearly a thousand pages, seemed a ground-breaking and monumental achievement.  Farrell’s uncompromising treatment of poverty written on the cusp of the Depression was daring in its sexual content as well as its radical thematic premises. 

     Sex in Studs’ world was often rough and thoughtless.  His story includes descriptions of taboo topics such as masturbation, homosexuality, and gang-rape.  Well aware of the possibility of censorship, Farrell excised certain especially explicit episodes, yet Farrell and his publisher Vanguard remained anxious about the consequences of the content that remained [3].  The original introduction assured readers of the sociological value of the work but cautioned that “it is not for children or for the unsophisticated.”  Its unsparing realism and lack of “prudery” means the book might “shock the naïve adult who has lost touch with youth.” [4]  As a further cautionary move, the 1932 Vanguard dust jacket bore a special notice informing the public that the book was a “clinical document,” directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”  A later edition included a second and bolder introduction, stressing the story’s social implications, in particular the failure of the Catholic Church, as though some ground had been gained in writers’ ability to deal with sexuality [5].  Nonetheless, the book was still to encounter censorship [6].

     No one can doubt Farrell’s role in increasing the writer’s freedom in America.  Whereas Mark Twain had been torn between his rebellious Huck side and his conformist Tom Sawyer tendencies, the milieu of Farrell’s novels is wholly that of his lower middle-class characters, albeit from the point of view of Danny O’Neill, himself on the rise in education and status.  The inclusion of sexual incidents so significant in people’s lives yet long proscribed in fiction is surely salutary.  Furthermore, the open espousal of revolutionary economic views, in Farrell’s case Trotskyite, was novel in his youth, though for a time during the later ‘thirties it seemed as though a good portion of the American intelligentsia had become “fellow travelers.”  Farrell’s role in pushing back sexual and political boundaries is clear.  What has been debated from the start has been the aesthetic quality of his work, whether his fictions possess the style, the beauty to make great novels.   

    The verdict has often been far from flattering.  Most critics, even Farrell’s admirers, concede his weaknesses, prominent among them being a graceless style.  To Alfred Kazin he was the “the plainest” and “most ungainly” of writers; Irving Howe found his prose afflicted by “soggy repetitiveness;” and Mark Shorer observes that “in sheer clumsiness of style no living writer exceeds him.”  The point need not be belabored, since virtually all critics have concurred to one degree or another in defining these weaknesses [7].  Luna Wolf, who worked with Farrell for nine years as a secretary and editor said “He was an extremely creative writer, but he was not a great stylist.  That’s always a problem with his writing.  It’s a shame.  Because he could have been right up there.  It’s terrible that he had this flaw.  He was a writer who, in a way, couldn’t write” [8].

     Farrell was quite aware of modern developments in literature.  He did in fact live in Paris for a year during 1931 and 1932 while writing Studs Lonigan.  His use of popular songs, fragments, newspaper headlines and other materials recalls John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.  Yet, when he attempted a more radical deviation from conventional narrative, as in Studs’ terminal delirium, most of his readers find he had little success.  (He later imagined he might write a Joycean book about O’Neill’s deathbed consciousness.)  While others, like Lola Ridge and Edward Dahlberg, managed to combine a proletarian perspective with innovative technique, Farrell was never at home with anything but straight story-telling.

     It is hardly a justification to claim that, since Farrell’s character were so often bored, asking each other what they should do, seeking intoxication, loveless sex, and risky or cruel pastimes just to get through the day, that readers should feel similar ennui.  The deadening repetition of the daily routine, relieved mostly by suffering, ought, of course, to be vividly portrayed, not reproduced in the reader.  This general truth is apparent in the vernacular, at first quite fascinating, but which becomes tiresome because it is always the same.  The frequent use of vulgarities flattens their impact until the transgressive words fade to having no specific meaning.  Their significance is only general, implying a low social status and a reactive worldview: rough, cynical, semi-anaesthetized, but the same in every utterance.  The worst consequence is that such language, even if it initially shocks, rapidly becomes tedious.

     Yet Studs does retain a readership if no high spot on Parnassus.  How can one account for Studs’ continuing appeal to many readers?  The wealth of local color – not only slang usage, but references to specific Chicago buildings, local politics, and the like – may underly some readers’ pleasure.  Others may applaud Farrell’s principled advocacy for socialism, consistent for a lifetime.  But the primary artistic appeal of Studs Lonigan is paradoxical: the work exemplifies an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.

     Such appreciation of art on anti-aesthetic (rather than non-aesthetic) grounds is not a new practice. The twentieth century produced a theory to explain the beauty of objects considered camp or kitsch, but these are not the only possible categories for ironic appreciation. Some years ago I saw an exhibit of tiny editions of poetry that celebrated poets in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties produced to distribute to friends. Some were mimeographed, all were crude-looking, but this is the very quality that enhanced their meaning for me, indicating unmistakably that the authors were hip enough to cultivate their development with showy disregard for fame and the marketplace.  They intended their work to be defiantly unprofessional-looking.  At the time I myself was making visual poems using paste-on letters, always slightly out of place.  The lack of art school precision seemed just right for broadsides distributed on the street. 

     The shabbiness of the product can be an asset; it can be a seal of authenticity.  I am thinking of a wide variety of examples: Kenneth Anger films or the Cockettes, the off-key ebullience of a Mexican band in the zocalo, the plastic tableware of a marvelous hole-in-the-wall eatery, art brut, the lumpy forms of some Zen pottery, the slapdash simplicity of some graffiti-inspired painting, the creaky voice of an aged Appalachian singer, delivering a tune from a half a millennium ago.  In each case the imperfection seems not just appropriate, but expressively beautiful, however much in contrast to ordinary standards.

     There is a similar technical flouting of the usual rules of art in other writers of whom I am fond. Nelson Algren and then Willard Motley followed Farrell in chronicling Chicago. In Jack Kerouac (and Wolfe before him) the naive sexuality and loping, sometimes wandering, rhetorical periods convey passion and vulnerability. Though many pages of Henry Miller seem to have been hastily written, an intoxicating esprit pervades his narration and, even more, his essays.  His casualness is part of his style and this reader would not have it any other way. Norman Mailer could make stumbling both on the page and in person look like the poignant moves of a great if flawed hero.

     So, while I concur with Farrell’s critics in their negative judgements, I do not regret reading the three volumes of Studs’ life once more. I find in it not just life, but a kind of beauty common as dirt and perhaps sometimes as fruitful.

     At times Farrell can strike just the right note.   Fragments of "Just A Gigolo" are quoted a number of times.  This song was wildly popular, the first hit of Bing Crosby’s long career when it was issued in 1932. In its original form this was an Austrian cabaret song of a hussar fallen in the world to the status of gigolo.  In Crosby’s version the speaker is a WWI veteran in a Paris café who laments; 

 

When the end comes I know

They'll say just a gigolo

As life goes on without me

 

The tone of weary, lack-love suffering, of a life pushed by inescapable currents, directionless, can apply to a poor neighborhood of Chicago as well as to the capitals of Europe.  The confidence implied by the left-wing parade near the conclusion of Judgement Day cannot overcome the pathos of this fragment of song, or the suffering of the lives recorded in the fine detail of Farrell’s memory, not to mention lives not so very different, being lived today on a thousand urban streets, including those of Chicago’s great South Side. 

 

 

 

1.  Vestiges of this prestige persisted.  In 1999 the editors of the Modern Library included Studs Lonigan in their list of the hundred best novels of the century.

2.  The quotations are from the October 28, 1917 Chicago Sunday Tribune.  Mencken also wrote an essay for the London Nation (not to be confused with the American journal of the same name) of April 12, 1920 heralding Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.”  Nelson Algren, a strong but late representative of gritty Chicago realism and left-wing sentiments, cited Mencken’s judgement approvingly in his Chicago: City on the Make.

 3.  One he turned into a short story titled “Boys and Girls” which is included in the Library of America edition of Studs Lonigan.

 4.  Frederic M. Thrasher, “Introduction,” Young Lonigan. Thrasher was a professor of education and author of a study of urban youth titled The Gang.

5.  This was written by University of Chicago English professor and radical activist Robert Morss Lovett.

6.  Studs Lonigan was seized by authorities as obscene in Canada in 1944 and in Philadelphia in 1948.  The latter case led to a significant decision by Judge Curtis Bok who decided in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al. that the works of Farrell, as well as those of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell which had been seized were nothing but “obvious efforts to show life as it is” and could not be suppressed.

7.  Kazin’s comments are in a largely sympathetic obituary in the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1979 titled “James T. Farrell, 1904‐79.”  For Irving Howe, see “Naturalism and Taste” in A Critic’s Notebook and for Shorer, “Technique as Discovery,” The Hudson Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1948).

8.  Robert K. Landers, An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell.  Note the mildly apologetic tone of Landers’ title.  When Wolf left him in 1962 to work at McGraw-Hill, he angrily accused her: “All right!  Go ahead!  Leave the sinking ship!”

9.  The original song was "Schoner Gigolo," (1928), first sung in America by the French star Irene Bordoni.  The song has been recorded by a great many artists, including Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Thelonius Monk, and Louis Prima (for whom it was something of a hit in 1956).

The Phantom of Artistic Truth

     Artists have no privileged access to truth.  This qualification in no way diminishes their expertise in their own métiers.  They are specialists in the making of beautiful objects only and are no more likely than anyone else to have accurate ideas about other topics.  While this proposition may seem self-evident, it nonetheless contradicts assumptions accepted from archaic times until quite recently.  Further, it also challenges the intuitions of many readers who feel they find in works of literature, for instance, a depth of understanding of not only grand themes such as philosophy, divinity, mortality, but also usable lessons in human psychology and the ordering of society. 

     The origins of this idea are ancient indeed.  Though decorative art existed in prehistoric times, much sculpture, poetry, and dance of oral cultures is religious or magical, promising rewards beyond the aesthetic, including otherwise unavailable truths.  The conflation in the roles of poet with wise man and priest is universal at that stage and appears in Classical antiquity as inspiration by the gods or the Muses reflected in the Latin use of “vates” (prophet) for poet. [1]  The archaic kinship of special poetic knowledge with shamanistic trance is evident in the etymology of that Latin word for priest which has been traced to Proto-Indo-European *weh₂t- (“excited, possessed”), the same root that gave rise to Old and Middle English wod meaning mad or frenzied.  In Asia, Africa, and America as well as in Europe, artists were thought to benefit the community by providing the insights they gained from their special insight.  The evidence from modern hunter-gatherer cultures is quite clear.  Artists were considered capable of traveling in supernatural realms and then returning with more authoritative truth than was available to others.  They certainly provided spectacle and entertainment, but they were also considered to be the source of functional answers to the profoundest questions.  What is real?  From where does the rain come?  How should people behave?  What should we do next?

     By historical times a bifurcation had occurring, separating the delivery of messages from higher entities from the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, what the Romans called “nugae” (trifles) meant for amusement.  With the coming of Christianity the source of prophetic wisdom moved from the Muses to the Holy Spirit as Bede’s story of Caedmon‘s inspiration in the field makes clear.  Bede says explicitly that he was given the gift of song “not from people or through people,” but rather, like the apostle Paul, by God himself. [2] 

     In spite of his reaction against a youthful taste for the theater, Augustine had come to allow a place for art if it facilitated access to religious truth and thus promoted salvation.  Due to the authority of the church, the poet no longer needed no longer to communicate directly with deities, allowing others at least vicariously to experience the divine; poets might adopt the more modest expectation of reformulating accepted teaching.  This didactic role is prominent in Philip Sidney for whom “virtuous action” is “the end of all earthly learning,” and poetry, as the likeliest method to “bring forth” virtue, has the “most just title” of prince of all pursuits.  Similarly, even for the atheist Shelley, poets are not merely “the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.”

      The association of poetry with truth likewise is central to Matthew Arnold’s view that only culture could, by influencing people’s behavior, save society from anarchy, and Eliot’s wish to link his art with his Christianity, just as Ginsberg and Kerouac among the mid-twentieth century Beats, who reacted against Eliot, sought to proselytize Buddhism or to reinvent prehistoric spirituality like Snyder and Rothenburg.  All regarded poetry as a unique medium for conveying the highest truth.  

     The same assumption of art as a source of truth is evident in most middlebrow discussion of books (especially in today’s group discussions) which address “issues” raised in reading and insights offered by the author.  Pedagogical practice likewise generally centers on theme.  Teachers will deploy the dreadful expression ”What is the author trying to say?” as though that answer will sum up the reading.  Encouraging students to “learn something” from the text is far more conveniently handled in class than attempting to cultivate a taste for beauty or an understanding of artistic practice. 

     Indeed, through the years, probably the most consistent justification for literature is the claim that it reveals a truth otherwise unavailable.  Yet how might artists attain this privileged access to truth?  They have no unique source of knowledge and must depend like all others, on their own all-too-fallible judgement, sensibility, and experience.  Judging from artists’ biographies and English Department faculty gossip, neither the writing nor the reading of quantities of poetry seems to produce people of extraordinary good sense or exceptional morality. 

     The truth of art does indeed exist, though, in spite of the artist’s knowing no more than anyone else.  It is precisely because no one has privileged knowledge yet everyone is intimately familiar with one version of subjectivity.  Whatever medium might be used, the artist constructs in durable form a work that reflects an individual take on reality, a plausible representation of consciousness, not imitating experience but twisting, altering, and refracting it in ways that paradoxically make it more real.  What art records may not always look sublime, but that is because human experience is not regularly conducted in the empyrean.  Art records human consciousness, drawing on all the objects and events that compose a life, and making concrete not merely an impression of a physical milieu and a set of actions, but adding as well the elements that make life meaningful to our species.  Unlike other fields of intellectual work, the artist’s product incorporates the affective tone which with endless variety accompanies our every moment.  The retreat from pain and pursuit of pleasure that characterizes all conscious life is incorporated into every objet d’art.  The aesthetic imagination is, like our ordinary consciousness, more likely to be directed by irrational motives than by logic, Art can precisely express the contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries everyone experiences but which resist the reductive simplicity of most propositions. 

     In all these ways art delivers the “truth” of human experience far more meaningfully and, indeed, accurately than other modes of discourse.  These very same factors that make human accounts of events significant also differentiate the stories that art tells from those that science relates.  The scientist describes what happens in the laboratory and seeks results that others can replicate, whereas in life every event is experienced differently by each person present and that singularity is as significant as any common ground. 

     Thus art thrives within the limits of subjectivity.  Yet even there its truth is problematic.  From the start it is already at one remove from lived experience.  Rather than trying to reconstruct a photo-realist rendering of memory, the author builds a new one, making aesthetic choices at every word.  Every poem or novel might begin with the words, “This is how someone, sometime, might have thinking; this is what that someone might have seen.”  The reader may then experience, not so much another’s vision of truth as a simulacrum of reality, constructed in imagination, though using, of course, materials derived from the writer’s past.  Using different language, Aristotle described the same contrast when he says poetry is more “true” than history. [4]  

     Artists have no particular grasp on truth other than their skill in putting together what looks to their fellows like a vision frozen in words, sometimes flamboyantly idiosyncratic, sometimes accepted by others who see in it their own humanity in a novel form.  We know nothing but our precious subjectivity and it is there that art makes its stage, there where all that matters most to our species is transacted, there where desire’s imperatives are acknowledged.  In that territory a claim to objective truth seems not so much fraudulent as irrelevant.     

     When Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,“ she implied the same superiority of artistic imaginative truth over mere observed facts.  The obliqueness of poetry arises from the techniques that have been found to be effective in infusing a wholly synthetic representation of experience with those subjective elements ordinarily absent from discourse and in this way lending life and a profounder sort of truth to a fantasy.  Like mythology and religion, art is truer than true, yet the artist crafts a creation without access to any knowledge beyond that possessed by others.  The strength of art lies in fact specifically in the fact that a mediated, obstructed, partially invisible truth is in its very deficiencies a human truth; certainty is unavailable to anyone.  The artist embraces this limitation and proceeds to make something beautiful, meaningful, and moving.  Because the artist is “whistling in the dark,” proceeding with no reassuring foundation of verities, that art is poignant and appealing and human and as true as anything can be on the surface of this dark earth.

 

 

1.  See Vergil, Eclogue 9.34 and Ovid Amores 3.9 and a great many other passages. 

2.  Ecclesiastical History IV, 24.  Bede alludes to Galatians 1:1 which notes in the Vulgate that Paul’s authority came “nōn ab hominibus neque per hominem, sed per Jesum Christum, et Deum Patrem.”

3.  Sidney’s emphasis was surely influenced by the fact that his essay was a response to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579) which was provocatively addressed to him.

4.  Generally translated “more philosophical,” the word φιλοσοφώτερον is rendered “more scientific” in in Poetics 1451b by W.H. Fyfe.  Surely what Aristotle meant was simply “truer.”

Rilke’s Dubious Advice to a Young Poet

 

The first few phrases quoted from Rilke’s letters are followed by the English in parentheses.  Subsequent references in the body of the essay quote my rendering in English with the original German relegated to endnotes.  

 

     Can advice benefit a poet’s practice?  When writers speak or read their work or appear at signings, they often entertain questions from less accomplished authors seeking clues to literary success. Do you write at set hours daily?  Should I pursue an M F. A.?  Do you discuss unfinished works?  Since writing, like weight-lifting, is a performance activity, probably the most reliably useful counsel anyone could hear is simply to write and write some more.  Beyond that writers at all levels of experience must shape their work habits not by reasoning but by productivity.  What proves useful for one young writer may be harmful to another. 

     Most such guidance is ephemeral.  Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is an exception, though it was the recipient, and not the writer, who chose to preserve and publish the letters. [1]  The book is regularly called a classic and Penguin, publisher of an English translation, describes the book as “arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century.”  This opinion is not universal.  To poet J. D. McClatchy, for instance, the letters are nothing but “sententious twaddle” by a “selfish poseur.” [2]  Whatever value critics have found in the book, most have approached the letters as a source of biographical and psychological understanding of Rilke rather than for their value to aspiring authors or as literary theory.  

     While adopting a grand magisterial tone, Rilke himself casts doubt on the value of his teaching by cloaking his subject in mystification.  In the first paragraph of the first letter Rilke establishes his identity as the custodian of the holy unknown by cautioning that poetry’s truth cannot be known, and, if it were known, could not be expressed.  At the very outset the poet assures his young correspondent that most experiences of all sorts are “full of mysteries” (“geheimnisvolle”) and “ineffable” (“unsagbarer”).  The very possibility of meaningful advice is all but denied.  “I can say virtually nothing that might help, that might be useful.” (“Ich fast nicht sagen kann, was hilfreich ist, kaum etwas Nützliches.”)  The poet’s chief concern, he says, is to encounter what is “strangest” (“Seltsamsten”) and “most inexplicable” (“Unaufklärbarsten”) in experience [3].

     Having established that he possesses esoteric secrets, Rilke challenges Kappus to match his own dramatically heroic (if soi-disant) commitment to art, telling him that, unless the younger man feels he cannot live without writing, he should not write at all [4].  If he proceeds in art, according to Rilke “a particularly blessed and pure way of living” [5], he may aspire to create something “very big and infinitely important.” [6]

     Grand this is, if not grandiose, but impossibly vague.  Why should the writer be “purer” than others?  In what way is his work so very important?  This looks suspiciously like self-puffing, unashamedly camouflaged by obscurantism.  The writer works always “in the dark, the ineffable, the unconscious.” [7]  It is fruitless to search for answers [8].  If only one cleaves always to the difficult, our dragons will turn to princesses, since “everything horrible” is likely to be in fact “something helpless that needs our help.”  Apart from this mythic reassurance, the writer should not inquire.  “Why do you want to bother with questions of “where it all comes from and where it is headed.” [9]  One should, it seems, simply live the mystery and seek no explanations.

     Apart from all this self-important sublime ambition cloaked in a smokescreen of obscurity, Rilke does offer a suggestive analogy for the creative process.  Doubtless influenced by Freud, Rilke likens the creation of art to the sexual act, a comparison that in his use sheds little light on either.  His rhetoric resembles that of D. H. Lawrence when he says that in “its pain and its pleasure” the making of art is “unbelievably close” to a sexual experience [10]. 

     Rilke presents a view of sex as a mystical dynamo, distilled and ennobled in an artful thought and serving as well as a wellspring for writers of the future.     

In a single creative thought live a thousand forgotten nights of love, filling it with loftiness and sublimity.  And those who come together in the night, who embrace in swaying pleasure, they perform an earnest labor and accumulate sweetnesses, depth, and power for the lyric of a future poet, who will appear, to say the unsayable bliss.

For Rilke, lovers must “undergo in common, simply, seriously and patiently, the weight [responsibility?] of sex that is put upon them.” [11]

     The comparison is applicable as long as his only meaning is to foreground the urgency and profundity of both aesthetic and sexual experiences, and their link to pleasure.  Where the correspondence breaks down reveals Rilke’s theoretical weakness (and, arguably, the weakness of much of his verse).  For sex is likely to have more to do with desire than with beauty.  In spite of centuries of female nudes in art that conflate appetite and aesthetics, in the end pictures must be judged by the latter.  To a starving person an advertising picture of a pizza may seem the most beautiful thing in the world, but such judgements are not applicable in the realm of art.

     Furthermore, the act of love-making is altogether mutual, whereas the artist makes an object which a reader receives.  The lover has little regard for prior models, while the writer’s work will generally imply the digestion of earlier works in search of significant influence, models, and allusions.  Perhaps most decisively, the lover has no wish to create a lasting object to preserve the passionate night or the entire relationships.  Rilke’s use of the sexual analogy is primarily affective, conveying little more than the emotional intensity he feels proper to art.    

     The sexual image is incongruous with the letters’ insistence on the poet’s lofty solitude.  It is all very well to suggest that Kappus avoid reading the critics, but Rilke categorically advocates a more general isolation to the point that he begins to sound neurotic.  “You are looking outside yourself, and that of all things you must not do now.”  “Dig into yourself.” [12]  What is valid is only that which “comes out of your own will, out of some need of your own self.” [13]  His suggestion is unequivocal: the writer should seek solitude, great inner solitude, going-into-oneself and for long periods never encountering another.” [14]

     While no one will deny that reflective periods are conducive to artistic productivity, this isolation is valuable in combination with the communion with earlier writers implied by influence and the need to communicate with readers.  In particular for a novice, the study of masters and the imitation of great predecessors is valuable in any field.  The complete artistic autonomy on which Rilke insists from the start surely can be justified only with maturity. 

     Some have wondered why Rilke took the time to correspond with this youth, and persisted for years in maintaining their connection, though the poet himself did not envision publishing their correspondence.  Surely the simplest answer is that Rilke was flattered by adulation and welcomed a disciple.  His picture of the grand spiritual mission of the writer and of the deep mysteries in which he deals is surely meant to impress his young admirer.  His conjuring about poetry and sexuality is likely to be just the thing to awe the inexperienced, and his insistence on a heroic aloneness makes him sound like a very belated Byronic hero.  Virtually nothing Rilke says amounts to useful guidance; it seems all designed to promote himself in the role of divine poet.  

     Rilke wholly neglects the roles of craft, convention, and tradition, all critical to a writer’s training.  He implies in fact that enlightenment will descend on the poet is he remains quiet, alone, and attentive.  “All that is necessary,” he says, is “that we are in circumstances that from time to time confront us with great natural things.” [15]  This is hardly a formulation that would serve a learner well. 

     The present focus is on the celebrated letters themselves.  His biographers have recorded a less than flattering portrait of the artist, but that is irrelevant in the face of great poems.  Yet the defects evident from a serious acceptance of the letters on their own terms as advice to a younger artist may appear to the reader of Rilke’s poetry as well: a vague and self-important spirituality, a greater attention to the drama of his own sensibility than to the specifics of a single poem, a privileging of the vaguest of themes over craft, and an exaggerated gravity in which pleasure and beauty, though the motive of every poem, find little place. 

 

  

 

1.  These. letters, written to Franz Xaver Kappus who had first contacted Rilke while still a military academy student, continued until 1928 and were published by Kappus three years after Rilke’s death with the title Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) and frequently reprinted since.  In 2017, the German scholar Erich Unglaub discovered that Kappus’s letters had been stored in the Rilke family archive all along. In 2019, he published both sides of the correspondence for the first time. Last fall, an English translation by Damion Searls appeared.

2.  J. D. McClatchy, “Antagonism: Rainier Maria Rilke,” Poetry, October 2004.

3.  August 12, 1904.

4.  "Es genügt, wie gesagt, zu fühlen  dass man ohne zu schreiben leben könnte, um es überhaupt nicht zu dürfen." August 12, 1904.

5.  “Eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens,” July 16, 1903.

6.  “Sehr gross und unendlich wichtig,”  April 23, 1903.

7.  “Im Dunkel, im Unsagbaren, Unbewussten,” April 23, 1903.

8.  “Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach Antworten,” July 16, 1903.

9.  “Alles schreckliche . . . im tiefsten Grinde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will,” “Wir uns immer an das Schwere halten müssen,”  “Warum wollen Sie sich mit der Fragen verfolgen, woher das alle kommen mag und wohin es will,” August 12, 1904.

10.  “Seinem Weh und seiner Lust,” “unglaublich nahe”  April 23, 1903.  These phrases are followed by a passage remarkable for its time, though having little to do with poetry, in which Rilke denounces selfish, male-centered lovemaking. 

11.  “In einen Schöpfergedanken leben tausand vergessene Liebesnächte auf und erfüllen ihn mit Hoheit und Höhe.  Und die in den Nächten zusammenkommen und verflochten sind in wiegender Wollust tun eine ernste Arbeit und sammelt Süssigkeiten an, Tiefe und Kraft für das Lied irgendeines kommenden Dichters, der aufstehn wird, um unsägliche Wommen zu sagen.”

“Um einfach, ernst und geduldig das schwere Geschlecht, das ihnen auferlegt ist, gemainsam zu tragen.”

12.  In the letter of April 23, 1903, Rilke writes “Read aesthetic and critical essays as little as possible.” (“Lesen Sie möglichst wenig äesthetisch-kritische Dinge.”)  “Sie sehen nach aussen, und das vor allem dürften Sie night tun.”

13. July 16, 1903: “Nehmen Sie das was kommt in grossem Vertauen hin, und wenn es nur aus Ihren Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es aus sich.”

14.  December 23, 1903 “Einsamkeit, grosses innere Einsamkeit.  In-sich-Gehen und stundenlang niemandem begegnen.”

15.  December 24, 1908  “Und, das wir in Vernhältnissen sind, die uns vor grosse natürliche Dinge stellen von Zeit zu Zeit, das ist alles, was not tut.”