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  Despite, as well, the company of Rilke, who is in Berlin at the same time. As for Otto, he and Clara often see each other in the village. A gang of four that everyone thinks is destined to last.

  Rilke sent Paula very precise instructions for their first meeting, with sketch maps of the directions. The tram comes every twenty minutes. He teases her: ‘How’s the cooking going?’ As soon as she leaves, he writes to her again. It is midnight under his green lamp; he doesn’t touch a thing, in order to retain her presence. He looks around at his familiar objects, the Turkish rug, the bedspread from Abruzzi, and the treasured green and gold fabric decorated with his family’s coat of arms. A piece of fruit remains from Paula’s visit. With a beautiful gesture, she had broken it open with her hands; there is a mouthful left. He eats it, to ‘refresh his voice’.

  ‘When will we see each other again? Every Sunday?’

  They see each other every Sunday. She sends him ‘a little thing…just something I’m lending you’. He mustn’t be alarmed by the huge envelope: it is her album of drawings and sketches. Rilke must only begin going through it ‘at the yellow flower’, because before that it is ‘not me at all’. On the other hand, after that point, it is occasionally ‘too much me’. She worries about what people call her coldness. ‘But you understand, don’t you?’ He will see in the album how, in 1898, joy and sorrow did battle inside her. She was twenty-two, in Norway, blowing dandelions on the bank of the Namsen River. She compared the birch trees, their straight strong trunks, with modern women, manly and powerful. She was frightened that she had wasted her first twenty years. Then she saw Heinrich Vogeler fall in love with Martha, but found their relationship too affectionate, too dreamy ever to sustain marriage.

  Rilke replies to this consignment with a magnificent letter. Beneath the exterior of her words, he insists, the big album constitutes precious treasure. It is a broken pearl necklace; he is gathering up the pearls. A single pearl has rolled away and this lost pearl lights up his bedroom. No, she, his dear, serious friend, has not wasted her first twenty years. She has not wasted anything that she should regret. She will feel it in her art. ‘It was, is and will be, and it touches us, in our solitude and in our quiet moments.’

  Rilke speaks to Paula about her art in a way that few people in her circle speak to her about it. Probably in a way that no one else does. He praises her confidence and her strength. ‘And I came to you, the woman artist.’ Die Künstlerin. The drawings she shows him contain the light and the life that are in her. He should have insisted that she show him her paintings instead. A canal with a bridge and the sky, the painting that was behind her when she spoke to him in the studio. But he wanted to ‘see her words’; he didn’t take his eyes off her. Now he misses the painting; he doesn’t have a clear memory of it. Luckily, he remembers another one, ‘the ring of girls dancing around a large tree’. The colours, the movement already perfectly executed, a figure leaning forward, arms around the peaceful tree. ‘It is wonderful to know that my eyes, unconsciously almost, drank in this picture once while you were preparing the tea…’

  No wedding plans from either of them. Reading their letters, it would seem that these two are alone in the world. Those blessed Sundays, and so chaste, so intense. Fromm…

  And then, one day, in a letter from Rilke, Clara’s name jumps out. When Paula comes, next Sunday, the ‘beautiful Clara’ will ‘perhaps’ be there. ‘You will spend the same amount of time with me, won’t you, perhaps even an extra hour?’

  Because Paula hid sketches from Otto, sketches he finds astonishing, he vows to punish her in ways ‘that he leaves to her imagination’. Otto’s tone is not fromm. He complains that Paula never speaks to him about love, only about painting. He takes precautions before posting his blistering letters: his friend Vogeler addresses the envelopes. On the open postcards, the fiancés address each other formally and use ‘Herr Modersohn’ and ‘Yours sincerely’. Paula thinks these complications are somewhat ridiculous, and she worries that her aunt might be surprised by the amount of mail from Vogeler.

  When it comes to love, she does her best. She raises the idea of a child, speaks about Rilke’s poem ‘Annunciation’, which he is reading to her. She says she is holding her hands together in silence; she would like her breath to carry to Otto everything that she does not know how to write to him. Every now and again she attempts a ‘passionate kiss’. ‘These are my love letters.’ She says it is her virginity that is holding her back. She says that she wants to carry her virginity inside her, calmly, devoutly, until the ‘last veils have been lifted’. She says that she is buying nightgowns that are ‘Circe-like’. One evening, she tells him that she is writing to him naked under her dressing-gown, and that her little belly is cold.

  And then she tells him she is tired. That he should leave his little fiancée to her hibernation. That he should wait for springtime. That she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  And could he send her a photo of Elsbeth (the daughter he had with Hélène). And also fifty marks for a little dress from Berlin; but if he can’t, oh well, she won’t be sad.

  Half a century later, Lacan will say that there is no sexual rapport between men and women. More precisely (the first time he formulates the idea): that there is no sexual rapport that can be written about.

  The little dress—it’s her wedding dress.

  Paula’s father writes solemn advice: once married, she will have to submit to the wishes of her husband, and learn to forget about herself, because it is up to the wife to maintain the harmony of the couple. She will have to relinquish any egotism, because it is egotistical of her, for example, to want Otto to move into an old farmhouse that she wants to fill up with old junk, when there is a perfectly comfortable modern house to live in, and she only fixed on this idea to copy Vogeler.

  Woldemar Becker is affectionate, and bad-tempered, and depressed. He is also very ill. He wants to give his daughter a dowry of one thousand marks, a sizeable amount for a retired railway worker. Paula tries to reduce the dowry to two hundred marks. And she asks Otto to visit the sick man. It’s asking a lot, she knows, because it will mean sacrificing a whole day of painting. But he should remember that she is sacrificing eight weeks to learn how to cook.

  Her family, especially her mother, would like her to extend her culinary season. ‘I have used my time well, Mother. But I cannot continue. Something in me cries out for air. And it cannot be silenced.’ Her soul ‘hungers for something profound’, she tells Otto. She wants grandeur and beauty, and thinks she will find them in her marriage. Like Rilke the day before his own marriage, she contrasts the life of cities, hectic and conventional, with the sanctity of work and home. Ingenuous, she tells Otto how much she is looking forward to meeting up in his little bed.

  In May 1901, for their honeymoon, Otto and Paula go on a tour of Germany. Berlin. Dresden. A stopover in Prague. A trip to the Sudetenland to stay with their friend Carl Hauptmann. Schreiberhau (today, Szklarska Poręba, a popular Polish ski resort) turns out to be too much of a tourist destination. They climb up to Schneegrubenbaude in the Krkonoše Mountains, the Giant Mountains (today, Sněžné jámy) on the Czech-Polish border. The Elbe River begins here. It is Germany before the Treaty of Versailles, immense imperial Germany.

  But the mountains don’t appeal to these people of the moorlands. They head to Munich, and finally to Dachau. These days Dachau sounds like an odd honeymoon destination. But the city was then an artists’ colony, one of the more influential colonies after Worpswede.

  Otto is a successful painter. He has just sold a canvas, ‘The Woman of the Forest’, for two thousand marks. Paula joyfully breaks the news to her father on a postcard festooned with a border of sacks of gold. Otto also sends cards of their honeymoon: he draws an elegant Paula in her travelling outfit, Berlin in the background, all domes and churches, and Paula in her nightgown chasing fleas in their Prague bedroom.

  The letters from Paula to her parents are cheerful, despite some odd metap
hors: ‘The waves of another world are breaking over us.’ And: ‘This round-trip ticket of ours is like an iron collar that is going to suffocate us little by little.’ She needs to walk alone in order ‘to smooth out the wrinkles in my head’. She is tired and yearns only to get back to work.

  Not a word, of course, about the first night, and the second, or the third. About the effect, apart from on the fleas, of the Circean nightgowns. Clara and Paula, those alleged virgins, had a much better knowledge of anatomy than most young middle-class German women of that time. And they had painted the misery of the Worpswede mothers, their aching, deformed bodies.

  When her father dies in December, Paula has been married eight months. Martha Vogeler and Clara Rilke are pregnant, but she writes in her journal that she is not yet ready for that. There is also Elsbeth, Otto’s four-year-old daughter, and the love between the two of them is blossoming.

  It would appear that the love between the ardent red-headed king and the little Madonna might only have been consummated with difficulty. Sections of their correspondence imply that genial Otto is waiting, like a steam engine, for the ‘most precious thing in the world’, ‘the pinnacle of our love’, that ‘secret, perfumed happiness’, adorned with Paula’s floral, silken, winged images. But what if these metaphors referred to a baby? And what if it was Otto who was ‘unable to perform sexual intercourse’? This is what Clara hastens to write to Rilke after Paula confides in her, five years later, in 1906.

  Their marriages consummated or not, all these people are dead. When I hear the word ‘consummated’, I think of soup, of globules of fat floating on stock. I’d rather look at Paula’s paintings.

  Bodies turned to dust, disappeared. The nub of their desire, the essence of their ardour, pulverised.

  III

  ‘Dear Clara Westhoff, do you ever feel inclined to visit me at my little studio, at the Brünjes’ house? So much awaits you, including a young wife. But the waiting is becoming long and sad for her. Yours, Paula Becker.’

  There was a first hint of coolness in Berlin, during the ‘culinary century’—when, on her Sunday visit, she found Clara at Rilke’s apartment and she left and Clara stayed. That must have been the day she was told of their engagement, or became aware of it.

  Autumn 1901: Clara Westhoff is heavily pregnant and Paula’s letters go unanswered. Diary entry: ‘From now on, Clara Westhoff has a husband. It seems I am no longer part of her life. First of all, I have to get used to the idea. I am pining for her, because it was good being with her.’

  Suddenly, in a furious letter, Paula accuses Clara of being mean, of forsaking friendship in favour of love in a marriage where she abandons her ego in order to ‘spread it out like a floor cloth on which her king can tread’. She begs her friend to ‘don her golden cloak again’. And she unleashes her ‘hunting dogs’ on Rilke. She takes him to task, him and the pretty coloured seal with which he signs his letters so elegantly. She says that she has every intention of pursuing him, hunting him down. That her heart is faithful, a simple German heart, and that he has no right to trample on her feelings. She accuses him of having bridled her spirit with chains of gold, she whose heart ‘overflows with love like the Ninth Symphony’. She accuses Rilke of loving enigmas, and of hurting her and Otto by being so indecipherable: ‘My husband and I are simple people.’

  It is written with a certain amount of humour, but the effect is brutal.

  Rilke says he does not know what Paula is talking about. ‘Nothing has happened—or rather many good things have happened, and the misunderstanding comes from your not wishing to let happen what has happened.’ He accuses her of not knowing how to accompany Clara in her self-fulfilment. Did she not admire her dear friend for her uniqueness and for her solitude? Clara’s nature is elevated, incomparably strange and distant. As far as beauty is concerned, Paula’s sublime friend has outstripped her. But one day, in her new solitude, Clara will open the gates to receive Paula. Rilke himself stays outside the gates, out of respect. There you have it: the couple, the friendship.

  It is written with a certain amount of poetry, but the effect is brutal.

  Paula stays silent. She will stay silent for a long time. Three months later, in her journal, she wonders what sort of solitude is safeguarded by gates; whether true solitude is not, on the contrary, completely open, even if it means walking hand in hand in the fields.

  Rilke’s response sends Otto into a fury. The metaphor of the gate seems insufferably snobbish to him, and he mocks the heights at which the gigantic Clara must be cruising. Anyway, Rilke is ‘not German’, an epithet adopted by Paula: undeutsch. This word, in the air at the time, is destined for tragedy. It becomes synonymous with non-Aryan, effeminate, decadent, Jewish. By 1933, Nazis are burning undeutsch books: Zweig, Freud, Brecht, Marx, Remarque, Heine, along with Gide, Proust, Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gorki…

  Nevertheless, Otto was the only artist to encourage the purchase of a Van Gogh by the Bremen museum, deeming that art is not concerned with borders.

  On 2 January 1902, in traditional new-year greetings to the Hauptmann couple, Paula pays tribute to three neighbouring births: the Rilkes, the Vogelers and another painter who had just moved into the community, Paul Schroeter: ‘In each home a baby girl is lying in the cradle and it’s all so blissful.’

  On 29 January 1902, in his Diary from Westerwede and Paris, Rilke writes this short note: ‘Weariness. Worries. A year ago today, Clara Westhoff arrived in Berlin.’

  The first letter Clara manages to write to Paula, in February 1902 for her birthday, is interrupted. Ruth Rilke is nearly four months old. When the young mother returns to her letter, she writes:

  I am (in this case, unfortunately) so very housebound that it is impossible for me to get on my bicycle and pedal away as I used to. I can no longer, as I also used to, simply pack up all my goods and chattels on my back and bear them off into another domestic arrangement and carry on my life there for a while—rather, I now have everything around me that I used to look for elsewhere, a house that must be built—and so I build and build. My entire world is here around me.

  Virginia Woolf makes the point in A Room of One’s Own that girls’ education consists in getting them used to the idea of putting aside their egos to look after someone more egotistical. Whether that ‘someone more egotistical’ is an infant or a husband makes no difference: Clara Westhoff, from now on Clara Rilke, is interrupted.

  Rilke to Paula, the following winter:

  Clara wanted to write to you but she is busy with household work, her hands are not up to writing. It is my fault if your relationship with Clara has lost its clarity and simplicity. Because it is I who have burdened this dear and close friend with a new life, and with worries, all of which were unfamiliar to her. It has changed her, a lot. You have the impression that we have become distant, but we have been caught up in distressing and unforeseen problems. Do not forget that we cannot share our worries with anyone. I can’t tell you how necessary it has become for us to remain alone.

  The Modersohns have no idea about the Rilkes’ practical problems. The little tumbledown house in Westerwede, not far from Worpswede, is impossible to heat, and there is no more money. In between feeding the baby, Clara employs her skills as a sculptress to lay bricks. Seeing that he is married and a father, Rilke’s cousins suspend the ‘student’s grant’ he was receiving through a family endowment. And Rilke’s father, who was also helping him to eke out a living, is in financial trouble. He finds a job for his son in a Prague bank, but for the young poet this would amount to renouncing everything he is.

  And Rilke cannot stand the baby crying; it prevents him from writing. Ruth is entrusted to Clara’s mother. The little girl no longer recognises her parents when she sees them a year later.

  Clara’s and Rainer Maria’s life together as a couple lasted less than two years. They never divorced. Every summer they ritually spent several days together with little Ruth. For a long time they exc
hanged long letters. Then Rilke headed off all over Europe. He wrote: ‘She was unlucky meeting me, because I could not nurture in her either the artist, or that part of her aspiring to fulfil the role of a wife.’ Neither Clara nor Ruth were invited to his funeral. A month before his death, enfeebled, he refused to see them, threatening to flee over the border.

  And who today remembers Clara Westhoff? What remains are their numerous letters, and Rilke’s dairies. What remains are their Sundays in Paris, because they only saw each other on Sundays: the Musée Guimet, the Louvre, Versailles, the Jardin d’Acclimatation. ‘Even if nothing more is granted to us than a walk together…’ Yes, what remains are the Sundays with Clara.

  Rilke moves to Paris to write a monograph on Rodin, whom he knows through Clara. He becomes Rodin’s secretary and his friend. He earns his living, and a lot more: Rodin is a revelation for Rilke. He personifies Art, a metaphysical and trailblazing art that immediately devalues the Worpswede group. Modersohn and the others? Overcautious, shut away in their colony. After a visit to Paula and Otto: ‘Nothing gratifying.’ Worpswede: ‘Everything there has become foreign to me.’

  According to Rilke, it is Vogeler in particular who epitomises the artist of appearances. Rilke’s criticism extends to the children of his old friend, two little girls, one of whom has just been born, Hélène Bettina: Rilke considers her first name to be old-fashioned and concludes that this baby, like everything to do with her miserable father, already belongs in the past. An outrageous judgment on the part of a deserting father.

  In 1906, Rilke buys a painting from Paula. He chooses a little portrait, of a small boy with fat cheeks like large drops, the hand of the mother resting, immense, on his shoulder.