Genius Envy

How Rodin's failure inspired Rilke, and other curious routes of tribute.
BY GEOFF DYER
In April, the Poetry Foundation cosponsored a panel at the Pulitzer Foundation
for the Arts in St. Louis. Poets Mary Jo Bang, Peter Campion, and Raphael Rubinstein,
as well as writer Geoff Dyer, explored the parallels between portraits in poetry and
the visual arts, jumping off those on display at the Pulitzer's
exhibition "Portrait/Homage/Embodiment." This article by Geoff Dyer is the second
in a series by the four panelists. (Here's Raphael Rubinstein on Jacques Lipchitz and
Gertrude Stein.) On Thursday (December 6), at the Pulitzer Foundation, John
Yau moderates a panel on poetry and visual art, featuring Cole Swensen, Andrew
Joron, and Arthur Sze.

The history of any art constitutes a form of self-commentary, what George Steiner
calls a syllabus of enacted criticism. Within this syllabus there are especially
charged moments when writers or artists deliberately and explicitly address the
work of another writer or artist. The impulse is often elegiac: Auden writes his great
elegy for Yeats (In Memory of W. B. Yeats), Brodsky writes an elegy for Auden
(York: In Memoriam W. H. Auden), and most recently, Heaney composes an elegy
for Brodsky (the cleverly titled Audenesque).

The words of a dead man, writes Auden, [a]re modified in the guts of the living.
These wordsand this sentimentare in turn modified by Brodsky: Thus the
source of love becomes the object of love.

This chain is what I might term a linear tribute in that an artist composes a tribute
to another artist who worked in the same medium. The recent exhibition
Portrait/Homage/Embodiment at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis
presents a series of more complex tributes, in which the source of love in one
medium becomes the object of love in another. Thus we have sculptural essays on
music (Emile Antoine Bourdelles Large Tragic Mask of Ludwig von Beethoven) and
literature (a Jacques Lipchitz bust of Gertrude Stein). These essays highlight the
shifting relation between artist and subject. The relative importance of who the
artwork is by and who or what it is about is always changing.

Every art form has its particular advantages and limitations. It is not unusual for
people working in one medium to envy the freedoms of another. Frank
OHara ponders these matters briefly and franklybefore dismissing themin his
poem Why I Am Not a Painter:
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
 a painter, but I am not.
In keeping with the spirit of the exhibition, Id like to look a little more
patiently at what happens when different media come into close proximity. How do
they affect, or rub off on, each other? To what extent can one art form absorb and
harness the possibilities inherent in another? To do this Ill move beyond the
exhibition and look at a cluster of well-known tributes and some of the tributaries
so to speakthat flow from this cluster. The cluster is composed of a novelist, who
occasions the initial convergence, and a sculptor, a poet, and a photographer who
subsequently find themselves grouped around him.
In July 1891, Rodin accepted a commission to make a sculpture of Balzac. He
hoped to have a sketch ready by November and to complete the sculpture in 18
months. As often happened, though, the demands Rodin made on himselfhis
desire to find and capture the soul of Balzaccame close to overwhelming him.
Claiming to be working on nothing but the Balzac, he nevertheless missed
deadline after deadline.

In May 1894 delegates from the sponsoring committee visited his studio, only to
find that, instead of the expected maquette of the novelist in a monks robe, Rodin
had modeled a naked figure with arms folded over an enormous belly. This, needless
to say, was considered quite unacceptable. Rodin worked on various other versions
but was constantly dissatisfied. Although frustrating for everyone concerned, the
failure was itself a kind of tribute. Balzac, after all, had written a famousalmost
Borgesianaccount of an artists absolute inability to bring a work to the desired
state of perfection: The Unknown Masterpiece (which, incidentally, formed the basis
for the interminable Jacques Rivette film La Belle Noiseuse). Finally, with pressure
and doubts mounting (there was much speculation in the press as to whether he
would ever finish it), Rodin exhibited a plaster cast of his Balzac at the Salon of
1898. The controversy it engendered was as swift as its gestation had been
prolonged. The sculpture had its defenders, but Bernard Berenson sounded the
more typical note: he regarded it as a stupid monstrosity. Insofar as he [Balzac] has
form at all, he looks like a polar bear standing on his hind legs.

A poet gave the best account of how Rodin worked on the statue:
For years he lived engrossed by this figure. He visited Balzacs home, the
landscape of Touraine, which constantly reappears in his books, he read his letters,
studied the existing portraits of Balzac, and he lived through his works again and
again . . . he lived [in Balzacs world] as if he were himself one of Balzacs creations,
unobtrusively inserted among the multitude of existences which Balzac had created.
Rainer Maria Rilke came to Paris to write a book about Rodin in 1902. As
Rodin had immersed himself in the work of Balzac, so Rilke immersed himself in the
work of Rodin. As Rodin had sought to pay homage to the genius of Balzac, so Rilke
sought to do justice to the genius of Rodin. As Rodins sculpture was an essay on
genius by a genius, so Rilkes book became not only a monograph about Rodin but
also a vicarious account of his own genius. Rilke himself was conscious of this,
writing to Lou Andreas-Salom that the book also speaks about me. The portrait
of the artist is also a self-portrait of the poet, and became more so over time as
Rodins huge influence on Rilkes work took shape. From Rodin, Rilke developed his
work ethic (their unrelenting industriousness was one of the traits that Balzac and
Rodin also shared). It was from Rodin also that Rilke became convinced that he
must write about his subjects not as they appeared on the surface but as if he had
inhabited them from within: One might almost say the appearance of his things
does not concern him, he wrote of Rodin, so much does he experience
their being. Rilke struggled to directly translate what he considered the sculptors
most distinct qualityhis ability to create thingsinto the thing-poems
[Dinggedichte] of 19078.

As the young Rilke had come to write about Rodin and his work, so the young
Edward Steichen came to photograph Rodin and his creations. In 1902 he made a
composite image of Rodin silhouetted in front of The Thinker and Monument to
Victor Hugo. In 1908 he made long exposures of the Balzac monument at night.
After seeing Steichens picturesthat is, after the photographer had passed the
ultimate test of doing justice to the sculptors geniusRodin became convinced not
just of Steichens individual talent but of photographys viability as an art form.

It would be nice to be able to square the circle: to report that Steichen later did a
portrait of Rilke at Duino as the first of the Elegies swept through him, or that Rilke
wrote a poem about Steichen. This did not happen. The important thing is that
whatever your starting point, whether your particular interest is poetry (Rilke),
photography (Steichen), sculpture (Rodin), or fiction (Balzac), you will, so to speak,
be led astray. After this meeting there will be dispersal. And the dispersal will lead,
in turn, to new meetings, new convergences.

The relative importance of what a given work is about and who it is by will change.
Suppose, for example, that it was an interest in poetry, in Rilke, that led you to the
encounter with Steichen. If you then follow his subsequent work, you will approach
the famous photographs of W. B. Yeats and Carl Sandburg (Steichens brother-in-
law) as examples of portraiture by an artist as much as you regard them as
portraits of poets. Within the history of photography Steichens most obvious
descendant is Richard Avedon, who, like Steichen, combined lucrative fashion work
with highly regarded portraiture. This, in turn, means that at some point you will
come across Avedons 1960 portrait of W. H. Auden in a snowstorm in St Marks
Place, New York.

If you come from the other direction, to Steichen via Yeats and Sandburg, then you
will end up like Joseph Brodsky contemplating a photograph of Auden: I began to
wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the
visual could apprehend the semantic. You will, in other words, be back where we
started. For every dispersalthere is something almost Rilkean about this, no? is
also a convergence.
So lets look, briefly, at some other possible routes out of and away from that initial
meeting.
After Rodin, the next important influence on Rilke was Czanne. Rilkes Letters on
Czanne reveals the enormous influence of the Czanne retrospective in Paris, in
the summer of 1907. He discovered there not a refutation but an intensification of
what he had learned from Rodin: fruits, in Czannes still lifes, cease to be edible
altogether, thats how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in
their stubborn thereness. And again, as with Rodin (but more confidently and
explicitly now), what he discovers is important primarily for what it enables Rilke to
realize about himself and his own work: Its not really painting Im studying. . . . It
was the turning point which I recognised, because I had just reached it in my own
work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready, probably
for a long time, for this one thing which so much depends on.

The extent to which this breakthrough into limitless objectivity was achieved is
revealed in Requiem for a Friend (1908). The poem was written in response to the
death, several weeks after giving birth, of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (who
had discovered Czanne years earlier). It is, simultaneously, a lament for his friend
and an essay on the art to which they were both indebted:
For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each ones heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didnt say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
(from Stephen Mitchells translation)
There are several directions one might follow from here: From Czanne to
poems by Charles Tomlinson (Czanne at Aix in Seeing is Believing [1960]) and
Jeremy Reed (Czanne in Nineties [1990]). Or, sticking with Rilke and Paula
Modersohn-Becker, to Adrienne Richs important corrective, Paula Becker to Clara
Westhoff (Clara was Paulas friend and Rilkes wife), in which a poet speaks as a
painter addressing a poetthereby offering a crisp critique of Rilke:
Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldnt paint or speak or even move.
My childI thinksurvived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didnt say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day.
In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the
realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in
dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography.

Originally Published: December 5th, 2007