Book Report: You Must Change Your Life

17. Rachel Corbett, You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (2016) (8/14/23)

The phrase "You must change your life," which is the final line of Rilke's poem "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," always intrigues me. It is a noble quest, especially if by "change" one means do better, become more comfortable in your skin.

Given the evidence of this book, maybe Rilke (1875–1926) succeeded, to the extent it's even possible. He accomplished so much, and died, arguably, at peace, though despite much torment during his lifetime.

As for Rodin (1840–1916), he went from sublime success, after a self-made coming-up, to a rather difficult end, largely because the world kept changing around him. As it does.

I enjoyed this book, and learned a lot. I had not known anything about either of these men's lives, especially not that they had known each other: Rilke came to the older sculptor as a disciple, became his friend, then his secretary, before a falling out or two, the last one final. Many other famous individuals—Tolstoy, Nijinsky, Freud, Cézanne, Balthus—feature, as well as the various women in both men's lives (who, not surprisingly, got a bum deal). Paris is, arguably, also a character in the book, with all its changes over the decades covered.

I only marked one passage (simply because I got lazy), an early one about Rodin as an aspiring young artist. He found a drawing teacher, Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, "who would first correct, then truly open, Rodin's eyes." The "correction" refers to Lecoq's discovery that Rodin was extremely nearsighted. But more important was the professor's assignment to his students to go to the Louvre and simply observe the paintings. "They were told not to sketch them, but to truly memorize their proportions, patterns and colors," then, later, reproduce them from memory.

It was in many ways a traditional, mathematical approach to form and dimension that was in line with the curriculum at the Grande École [the fine arts school, to which Rodin applied but was turned down]. But Lecoq had a different goal in mind. He believed young artists ought to master the fundamentals of form only so that they might one day break them. "Art is essentially individual," he said. The purpose of the memorization exercises was actually to allow the artists time to acknowledge their reactions to a picture as its properties unfolded to them. Did a gently arched line produce feelings of serenity? Did a densely wound shadow evoke anxiety? Did certain colors trigger memories? Once artists could name these associations they could then begin to harden their own pooling sensations into external forms of their making. Ultimately, Lecoq's modern method encouraged artists to draw things not strictly as they appeared, but as they felt and seemed. Emotion and substance became one. 

The book begins with Rodin and ends with Rilke. It is a dual biography, but one comes to know Rilke better over its course—as the young man trying to answer the question "How should one live?" For Rodin, the answer to that was simply "Travailler, toujours travailler," and although Rilke took that advice to heart, he also seemed to know there was more to it than that. As he says of the protagonist of his (semi-autobiographical) novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, "I am learning to see. I don't know why, but all enters into me more deeply and nothing remains at the level where once it used to cease."