Katherine Anne Porter (97 page)

It is pleasant to know that none of this happened to his tenderly nicknamed Benvenuta; she had to a triumphant degree the womanly knack of starving gracefully on the thinnest ration of love, and yet at last spreads her own feast—a strange feast, but her food—out of that famine.

Only once had he succeeded in almost frightening her off. He was admiring some fantastic doll figure, and she protested that the virtue of a toy was in its effect on a child, and she could not imagine an innocent, healthy little girl not being repelled by this monster. Rilke proceeded to rip to shreds her notions of childish innocence, and to explain to her at length the innate corruptness of toys—and quoted also at length from his fierce essay against dolls, published shortly afterwards. She had unknowingly touched him on the quick: his mother had dressed him as a girl, and had given him dolls to play with.

The faithful and patient Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis witnessed not only this love affair at one point, but many others with many other women. She was disconcerted, she wrote in her journal, at the attraction women had for Rilke. Rilke was equally disconcerted many times at the attraction he had for them: it seemed to him that what a man did only for God, a woman did always for a man. For a while he could impersonate a man, imitate his functions passably—provided
the woman was infatuated enough, and most often she was, for women, of all sorts, and for all sorts of reasons, are flattered by the attentions of genius—even he could deceive himself into a plausible enough feeling, or a belief that he felt, or was capable of feeling, a natural, spontaneous sexual desire. But nothing of this could last: in no time at all he was faced with the terrible alternative: to go on with a eunuchlike sniffing and fumbling, or flight—flight in almost any direction, to any goal, even into another trap of womanly tenderness and incomprehension.

He depended in all faith, and with good reason too, on the tenderness and sympathy of women: all of them high-minded, romantic, some of them very gifted, many nobly born and rich: but alas, seekers after a man-god rather than the God in man. By the simplest means, and without any method except that provided by the natural duplicity of his need to be adored and taken care of, Rilke wove his web about them for good. This web was the Word—the Word multiplied, an endless spinning of high, poetic, noble words, flowing easily as a melody carrying with it painless didactic counsel, and if they had not been so flattered, they might have read as we do now the warning between the lines: This is what I have to give, ask for nothing more.

He flattered the soul, or the intellect, or the heart, or all three at once; whatever the individual woman craved that words could supply, he gave her generously. There were more than enough words to go around. Not one of them had any real right to complain, for he was faithful to them all, and he paid them the highest compliment of never confusing one of them with another. . . . And he asked of them all the same thing—that they would save him for himself and from them.

(1873–1939)

S
EVERAL
years ago Ford Madox Ford remarked to me, at Olivet—and to how many others? I don’t know—with a real pride and satisfaction, that he had a book to show for every year of his life. Now he knew as well as anyone that no man can write sixty
good
books, he said himself there were books on that list he was willing to have out of print forever. But at the time of writing them, he had believed firmly each book was going to be good; in any case, each book was as good as he was capable of making it at that moment, that given circumstance; and in any case he could not have stopped himself from the enterprise, because he was a man of letters, born and bred. His life work and his vocation happened to be one and the same thing. A lucky man, in spite of what seems, sometimes, to the onlooker, as unlucky a life as was ever lived.

His labors were constant, his complicated seeking mind was never for one moment diverted from its speculations on the enduring topic of literature, the problems of creation, the fascinating pitfalls of technique, the moral, psychic, aesthetic aspects of art, all art, any one of the arts. He loved to live the life of the artist, he loved to discover, foster, encourage young beginners in what another admirer of his, Glenway Wescott, has described as “this severe and fantastic way of life.” Toward the end, when he was at Olivet, Ford described himself as “an old man mad about writing.” He was not really an old man—think of Hardy, think of Tolstoy, think of Yeats—and his madness was an illuminated sanity; but he had, when he wrote this, intimations of mortality in him, and he had always practiced, tongue in cheek, that “pride which apes humility.” It pleased him to think of himself in that way; and indeed, when you consider his history, the tragic mischances of his life, his times of glory and success alternating with painful bouts with poverty and neglect, you might think, unless you were an artist, that he was a little mad to have run all the risks and to have taken all
the punishment he did take at the hands of fortune—and for what? I don’t think he ever asked himself that question. I doubt greatly he ever seriously considered for one moment any other mode of life than the life he lived. I knew him for twelve years, in a great many places and situations, and I can testify that he led an existence of marvelous discomfort, of insecurity, of deep and pressing anxiety as to his daily bread; but no matter where he was, what his sufferings were, he sat down daily and wrote, in his crabbed fine hand, with pen, the book he was working on at the moment; and I never knew him when he was not working on a book. It is not the moment to estimate those books, time may reverse his own severe judgment on some of them, but any of you who have read the Tietjens cycle, or
The Good Soldier
, must have taken a long step forward in your knowledge of craftsmanship, or just what it takes to write a fine novel. His influence is deeper than we are able to measure, for he has influenced writers who never read his books, which is the fate of all masters.

There was in all something so typical, so classical in his way of life, his history, some phases of his career, so grand in the old manner of English men of letters, I think a reading of his books and a little meditation on his life and death might serve at once as guiding sign and a finger of warning to all eager people who thoughtlessly, perhaps, “want to write.” You will learn from him what the effort really is; what the pains, and what the rewards, of a real writer; and if that is not enough to frighten you off, you may proceed with new confidence in yourself.

1942

(1882–1941)

Boulder, Colorado. July, 1942
. The death of James Joyce distressed me more than any other since the death of Yeats. How the tall old towers are falling: these were the men I most admired
in my youth: I discovered Yeats for myself; he was the first contemporary poet I read, and the first poem was in a magazine in 1915:

If this is not quite exact, it is the way I remembered it for years and years before I saw it again in a collection. But beginning there, and with his
Celtic Twilight
, a book which seems to have disappeared, I followed Yeats with the most faithful adoring love, and discovered a new shining world. Joyce came a little later, but not much. I read
Dubliners
in 1917, and that was another revelation, this time of what a short story might be, even though I had believed that
Chekov
had written the last one worth reading, until then.

As between these two great artists, I should say that Yeats was the greater imagination; Joyce did not have greatness in the grand manner, as Yeats did: Joyce had a dryness of heart, and very limited perceptions of human nature. Yeats
grew
great, the only kind of greatness, really: as if all his life he was fulfilling some promise to himself to use every cell of his genius to its fullest power. Yesterday’s newspaper was just sent over to me with an account of Joyce which reminded me of the day I first heard of his death. He died in his second war exile, two variations of his perpetual exile. He was a homeless man, the most life-alienated artist of our time. Yet more than anybody, he gave fresh breath and meaning to language, and new heart, new courage, new hope to all serious writers who came after him. Rest his soul in peace.

I saw him only once. When I first went to Paris, in February, 1932, he was already world-famous, half-blind, surrounded by
friends all faithful to him, apparently, but jealous of each other, watching him for signs of favor, each claiming to be first, trying to prevent anyone new from coming near him: and on the outer rim of this group was a massed ring of eager followers trying to get into the sacred circle: it was pretty grim to witness even from a safe distance: but he had reached that point of near defenselessness against the peculiar race of people who live in reflected glory: I did not wish to see him, or speak to him—what was there to say? And it was no doubt true that no new acquaintance could do more than disturb or bore him. But I never went near him, and this idea of him was presented to me as the true state of affairs by Sylvia Beach, Eugene and Maria Jolas, by Ford Madox Ford, by all of the many persons I knew there who had known Joyce, and befriended him for years. I think, too, that most of them had quarreled more or less among themselves about Joyce, and in a way, with Joyce himself. Sylvia most certainly had good cause for her belated resentment of his callous use of her life; but no one I knew was really easy in regard to him: he seems to have been a preposterously difficult man to get along with. His blindness was like the physical sign of his mind turning inward to its own darkness: after all, if the accounts now given are true, it seems not to have been the optic nerves but his teeth: and at last his intestines killed him.

One evening a crowd gathered in Sylvia’s bookshop to hear T. S. Eliot read some of his own poems. Joyce sat near Eliot, his eyes concealed under his dark glasses, silent, motionless, head bowed a little, eyes closed most of the time, as I could plainly see from my chair a few feet away in the same row, as far removed from human reach as if he were already dead. Eliot, in a dry but strong voice, read some of his early poems, turning the pages now and again with a look very near to distaste, as if he did not like the sound of what he was reading. I had been misled by that too-often published photograph showing him as the young Harvard undergraduate, hair sleekly parted in the middle over a juvenile, harmless face. The poet before us had a face as severe as Dante’s, the eyes fiercely defensive, the mouth bitter, the nose grander and much higher bridged than his photographs then showed; the whole profile looked like a bird
of prey of some sort. He might have been alone, reading to himself aloud, not once did he glance at his listeners.

Joyce sat as still as if he were asleep, except for his attentive expression. His head was fine and handsome, the beard and hair very becoming to the bony thrust of his skull and face, the face of “a too pained whitelwit,” as he said it, in the bodily affliction and prolonged cureless suffering of the mind. . . .

To those of my own generation and after, I can only say, what would we have done without him? He had courage for all of us, and patience beyond belief, and the total intensity of absorption in his gift, and the will to live in it and for it in spite of hell: and more often than not, it was hell: but as bad and worse things have happened to many quite good men who suffered quite as much, who had no gift, no toy, no special mystery of their own, to console them.

1965

(1887–1962)

Last summer in Paris I went back to the place where Sylvia Beach had lived, to the empty bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and the flat above, where she brought together for sociable evenings the most miscellaneous lot of people I saw; persons you were surprised to find on the same planet together, much less under the same roof.

The bookshop at 12 rue de l’Odéon has been closed ever since the German occupation, but her rooms have been kept piously intact by a faithful friend, more or less as she left them, except for a filmlike cobweb on the objects, a grayness in the air, for Sylvia is gone, and has taken her ghost with her. All sorts of things were there, her walls of books in every room, the bushels of papers, hundreds of photographs, portraits, odd bits of funny toys, even her flimsy scraps of underwear and stockings left to dry near the kitchen window; a coffee cup and
a small coffeepot as she left them on the table; in her bedroom, her looking glass, her modest entirely incidental vanities, face powder, beauty cream, lipstick. . . .

Oh, no. She was not there. And someone had taken away the tiger skin from her bed—narrow as an army cot. If it was not a tiger, then some large savage cat with good markings; real fur.

I remember, spotted or streaked, a wild woodland touch shining out in the midst of the pure, spontaneous, persevering austerity of Sylvia’s life; maybe a humorous hint of some hidden streak in Sylvia, this preacher’s daughter of a Baltimore family, brought up in unexampled high-mindedness, gentle company and polite learning; this nervous, witty girl whose only expressed ambition in life was to have a bookshop of her own. Anywhere would do, but Paris for choice. God knows modesty could hardly take denser cover, and this she did at incredible expense of hard work and spare living and yet with the help of quite dozens of devoted souls one after the other; the financial and personal help of her two delightful sisters and the lifetime savings of her mother, a phoenix of a mother who consumed herself to ashes time and again in aid of her wild daughter.