You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett Page B

writing of the inconsolable loneliness she had felt during the first year of her own marriage and that she had believed Westhoff was the only person in the world who could alleviate it. Now she had to face the painful likelihood that their paths would never cross again.
    As Becker slipped into depression, Modersohn blamed it on Rilke and Westhoff. He complained in his journal that they never bothered to ask his wife about her work, nor did they ever visit. Now Rilke had displayed an inexcusable arrogance with his claim that Becker should remain on the other side of Westhoff’s gates until Rilke’s “lofty wife . . . opens them up,” Modersohn wrote. What about Becker? “The fact that she is somebody and is accomplishing something, no one thinks about that.”
    Selfish or not, Rilke was not exaggerating the hardships facing his new family in those days. His fatherhood status had disqualified himfrom the college stipend he had been receiving from his uncle Jaroslav’s estate. He wasn’t making much money from his writing, either. Critics had panned his recent story collection, The Last of Their Line , and bookstores were scarcely selling it.

    Rilke’s wife Clara Westhoff with their daughter Ruth .
    Meanwhile, art exhibitions he had organized in Vienna and Berlin fell through. Publishers passed on his book proposals and newspaper editors had been rejecting his applications for art critic positions. He thought he might eventually be able to cobble together enough assorted university credits to eventually earn a doctorate degree, but that, too, would require money he did not have.
    Rilke’s father offered to help him get a job at a bank in Prague, but the poet only replied that the suggestion made him physically sick. It would mean giving up all he had struggled for and going back to the very thing he had fled. It would be “a frost, in which everything would have to die.” He knew his father meant well, but why couldn’t he understand that this profession would destroy his art? Why did art have to be seen as arrogance? To Rilke, art was his duty, no less compulsorythan some treated military service. Rilke decided he would rather starve, and let his family starve, than work as a bank clerk. That fate “would be like death without the grandeur of death.”
    Finally, in the spring of 1902, the German publisher Richard Muther told Rilke about his series of artist monographs which would include volumes on Manet by Julius Meier-Graefe and on Leonardo da Vinci by Muther himself. He knew Rilke had just finished the Worpswede monograph and suggested the poet write one on Rodin. The pay was a paltry 150 marks, but Rilke desperately needed the money and accepted the offer on the spot. Privately, he also saw it as a way out of the house and out from under the oppressive routines of domesticity. He longed “to feel, to be, real among real things” like he had been before his marriage. If he went to Paris, he would be able “to work in the libraries, to collect myself, and to write about Rodin whom I have loved and revered for a long time.”
    Rilke’s decision to leave town just a few months after having a baby struck some as unforgivably selfish. “How appalling: first marry and have a child, and then think about how to earn a living,” wrote Modersohn in his journal. But Westhoff could not have objected too strongly because she used her connection as a former student of Rodin to facilitate an introduction. She sent the sculptor a letter including some images of her work as a reminder. At first, no response came. As it happened, Rodin was in Prague at the time, attending one of the largest surveys of his work ever staged. After that, Rodin traveled to Vienna to see the Secession Exhibition and visit with Gustav Klimt, who had just debuted his monumental Beethoven Frieze there. When Rodin saw the painting in person, he took Klimt’s hand in his and said,