Contemporary Authors

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013563 Corbett, Rachel, 1984- author. You must change your life : the story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin / Rachel Corbett. First edition. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. pages cm PT2635.I65 Z66144 2016 ISBN: 9780393245059 (hardcover)

• Rachel Corbett Home Page - http://www.rachel-corbett.com/about/

  Rachel Corbett is editor of Modern Painters and the author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (September 2016, W.W. Norton). Her writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, New York Magazine, and others. She received degrees from the University of Iowa and Columbia University. Originally from Iowa, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Corbett, Rachel. You Must Change Your Life: The Story of
Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin
Erica Swenson Danowitz
Library Journal.
141.12 (July 1, 2016): p84.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Corbett, Rachel. You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. Norton. Sept. 2016.336p. photos, notes,
index. ISBN 9780393245059. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393245066. LIT
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A quick glance at the title suggests a self-help book, but the words are actually taken from the poem "Archaischer Torso Apollos," part of a
collection Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) dedicated to sculptor August Rodin (1840-1917). Journalist Corbett presents the story of how, despite
a 35-year age difference, the sculptor and poet developed a relationship that began in 1902 as a mentorship and evolved into a complicated
friendship fraught with disagreements and reconciliations. Rilke served as Rodin's secretary, and what he learned about art from his employer
influenced how he subsequently wrote (such as the Apollo poem). This biography describes their early years, their struggles for acceptance, their
liaisons with various women, and their creative connection to Paris. Corbett also presents the world in which the pair lived, fin-de-siecle and early
20th-century Paris. She depicts intellectual and social scenes where an eclectic group of individuals could be found, including writer and
filmmaker Jean Cocteau, artist Paul Cezanne, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and dancer Isadora Duncan. The book includes personal letters and
documents from the Rilke family archives as sources. VERDICT A riveting study of friendship, this well-researched biography will attract a
variety of readers, especially art history and German literature enthusiasts.--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib.,
Media, PA
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Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Danowitz, Erica Swenson. "Corbett, Rachel. You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin." Library Journal,
1 July 2016, p. 84+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302703&it=r&asid=cbab9d7079927b89f27cbbf578920ccf. Accessed 4 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302703

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You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria
Rilke and Auguste Rodin
Publishers Weekly.
263.22 (May 30, 2016): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin
Rachel Corbett. Norton, $26.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-393-24505-9
First-time author Corbett traces the lives of two great artists, poet Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Auguste Rodin, in a smartly written biography.
Corbett begins, somewhat shakily, by sketching in Rilke and Rodin's lives before their meeting. Despite these two mini-biographies being roughly
equal in length, the Rodin piece feel rushed and the Rilke piece feels drawn out. When they do meet, the book kicks into gear. Corbett skillfully
tracks Rilke's process of finding his artistic voice, and by the time of Rilke and Rodin's famous split, though it's clear that both could be rather
unpleasant people, the reader fully sympathizes with their pain over their estrangement. The pair's eventual reconciliation is thus all the more
satisfying. Also of note are the book's glimpses of the figures in orbit around Rodin and Rilke's story, including George Bernard Shaw, Jean
Cocteau, and Paul Cezanne, as well as Louise Andreas-Salome, a poet who was Rilke's lover and muse, and Clara Westhoff, a student of Rodin's
who eventually married Rilke. Rilke and Rodin, both intriguing figures in their own right, are only the more fascinating when treated together as
fellow artists and close friends. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary LLC. (Sept.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin." Publishers Weekly, 30 May 2016, p. 45. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454270605&it=r&asid=b3e21d5bf171982020678382d0c42a79. Accessed 4 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454270605

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Briefly Noted
Jamie Fisher
The New Yorker.
92.29 (Sept. 19, 2016): p89.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text: 
Briefly Noted
You Must Change Your Life, by Rachel Corbett (Norton). The author, an editor at Modern Painters, tells the story of the poet Rainer Maria
Rilke's fractious friendship with the man he called his "Master," the much older sculptor Auguste Rodin. The book, which covers the lives of both
men, illuminates their central-if not always enthusiastic-roles as the Belle epoque gave way to the avant-garde. The true subject, though, is Rilke's
desolate but fascinating inner life and the effect it had on his poetry: as Corbett writes, he "believed that art was its own kind of death because it
consumed the artist." This empathetic and imaginative biography, deeply researched, is anchored by the friendship between two of the twentieth
century's greatest artists.
Tong Wars, by Scott D. Seligman (Viking). This wild ramble around Chinatown in its darkest days-when tongs, or gangs, warred for control of
opium dens and illegal gambling rooms-is a colorful study of Tammany Hall-era Manhattan. Constructed from a vast trove of primary-source
materials, such as the New York Post (which was as gleeful about Chinatown bloodbaths then as it is about celebrity gossip today), the book
chronicles gang brawls that took the form of pranks (enemies trapped in a basement, in two feet of standing water) and murder (during a play at
the Doyers Street Chinese Theatre, gang members fired guns into the audience, knowing that rivals were in attendance). Other details reveal some
of the stereotypes that the Chinese, or "Celestials," in nineteen-thirties slang, faced, including a bizarre court proceeding in which a white attorney
insisted that the Chinese defendants be sworn in by burning paper and lopping off a rooster's head.
The Heavenly Table, by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday). Set on the border between Alabama and Georgia, during the Great War, Pollock's
second novel is centered on the Jewetts, a family of poor sharecroppers. When the father dies of a heart attack, his three sons shoot their landlord
and begin a picaresque life on the run. Pollock's characters-often down-on-their-luck types-are rendered with a cartoonish intensity, from a wellendowed
outhouse inspector to a boy discovered in a Cincinnati hotel "with a woman's wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed
like a cast-off shoe." The novel is bawdy but grim; the "heavenly table" that the Jewetts believe is their inheritance stands in contrast to the
miserable kingdom that Pollock describes, in loving detail, here on Earth.
Mercury, by Margot Livesey (Harper). After his estranged wife makes a terrible mistake, the protagonist of this consuming novel must choose
between the well-being of his family and his own integrity. Through recollections from both spouses, the events that led to the destruction of their
serene, shared life are revealed: his father's long battle with Parkinson's; her fixation on a beautiful horse in the stable where she works. The novel
explores themes of honesty and understanding by showing the impact that obsessions-grief, rapacity-can have on a marriage.
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Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Fisher, Jamie. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 89. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464676839&it=r&asid=c082285c2d53007df4d570d0c867785f. Accessed 4 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464676839

Danowitz, Erica Swenson. "Corbett, Rachel. You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin." Library Journal, 1 July 2016, p. 84+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302703&it=r. Accessed 4 Feb. 2017. "You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin." Publishers Weekly, 30 May 2016, p. 45. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454270605&it=r. Accessed 4 Feb. 2017. Fisher, Jamie. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 89. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464676839&it=r. Accessed 4 Feb. 2017.

• Harvard Review Online
  http://harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu/?q=features/book-review/you-must-change-your-life-story-rainer-maria-rilke-and-auguste-rodin
  Word count: 859

  Harvard Review Online
   
  You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin
  by Rachel Corbett
  reviewed by Erik Hage
  January 24, 2017

  One of the more interesting psychological approaches to close relationships is self-expansion theory, which holds that individuals have a fundamental motivation to expand—and that one of the ways in which they achieve this is through the formation of close bonds with others. This theory is often applied to friendships between creative pairs. One can see, for example, how poet Emily Dickinson, in fusing herself to writer and activist Robert Wentworth Higginson through letters, sought to absorb his perspectives and knowledge as a means of fostering her own growth. There are many other examples in literature: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, or Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

  Rachel Corbett doesn’t cite self-expansion theory in her penetrating and teeming book You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, but this critical biography is very much about the creative expansion of the Prague-born Rilke, who was still a struggling poet in his twenties when he came under the spell of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, then a lionized master in his sixties.

  Rilke first met Rodin in 1902 after being commissioned to write a monograph of the sculptor. He approached the artist as a biographer and critic, probing his worldview and his works. A few years later, he became Rodin’s personal secretary. But it is Rilke’s inner life and development that is the main subject of this book. Rilke, under the spell of Rodin, attempts, in Corbett’s words, a “kind of alchemy of mediums”—that is, he seeks to merge Rodin’s artistic perspectives and intentions into poetic form.

  Immersed in his study of the sculptor, Rilke unfolds within himself. As Corbett tells it, “He had observed and considered Rodin’s art from every angle and it had changed the way he saw the world.” Despite somewhat of a language barrier—Rodin spoke only French, and the German-speaking Rilke was still learning the Gallic tongue—Rodin framed out lessons for the younger man, the most pressing being “Travailler, toujours travailler. You must work, always work.” Such was the impact of Rodin that one can trace many of his lessons in the pages of Letters to a Young Poet, the widely read collection of Rilke’s advice to Franz Xaver Kappus.

  Corbett’s lithe prose animates Rodin’s artistry, too: “Rodin manipulated light to enhance the sense of movement in his figures,” she writes. “When the geometry of the planes aligned just right, light would coast and dart across the surfaces and create the illusion of motion.” She is equally adept at rendering the two men in physical space, her writing suggesting Rodin’s own work. “[Rilke’s] face gathered to a point right where his nose joined a few droopy whiskers. He was twenty-six years old, narrow-shouldered and anemic, while the stout Rodin, then sixty-one, plodded around heavily, his long beard seeming to draw him even closer to the ground.”

  Corbett synthesizes her rigorous and far-reaching research into a narrative that spins well beyond Rilke’s development and the sometimes turbulent relationship with his mentor, while still remaining grounded in that reality. Multiple historical contexts serve the story: Fin-de-siècle Europe, the dawning of Freudian psychology, the advent of movements such as Cubism and Expressionism, the urban phantasmagoria of pre-World-War-I Paris, and the cataclysmic war itself. Corbett also draws us into the later lives of the two men, particularly that of Rilke who, having eventually entered the rarified air of his own creative success, often denied that he was ever secretary to the legendary sculptor. She is also frank about Rodin’s chauvinism and erotic fixations—and about Rilke’s strange, sad solitude.

  This is a vibrant, clear, and intelligent work, and Corbett, an executive editor of Modern Painters, has taken hold of a great topic. This is a relationship that has not been thoroughly explored before, but she also understands that the intimate dynamics of the bond itself can’t sustain a lively and fully fleshed-out book. Rather, Rilke’s development becomes the whirlpool’s center, with so much more circulating around it, including Rodin.

  The concept of empathy is central to You Must Change Your Life, both as an emerging art philosophy and as a subject for psychologists in the early twentieth century. Empathy draws Rilke into a deep understanding of Rodin and his art and fosters his own self-expansion. Similarly, Corbett’s deeply empathetic perspective illuminates Rilke’s development in its many shades.

  W. W. Norton & Company, 2016
  $26.95, cloth, 9780393245059
  About The Author
  Erik Hage is the author of The Melville-Hawthorne Connection: A Study of the Literary Friendship, and Cormac McCarthy: A Literary Companion, among other works. A former journalist and editor, and a regular reviewer for Choice (Association of College & Research Libraries), he is a department chair at the State University of New York at Cobleskill.

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/0525ea9e-8f07-11e6-8df8-d3778b55a923
  Word count: 805

  You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett review — Rilke and Rodin

  The choice is between happiness and art in this portrait of an inspiring yet destructive friendship

  October 14, 2016

  by: Francesca Wade

  Walking across Paris in 1902, the aspirant poet Rainer Maria Rilke fell into step with a man suffering from the neurological disorder known as St Vitus’s Dance. Transfixed by this involuntarily jerking body, and feeling the other’s limbs “no longer distinguishable from mine”, Rilke found himself “will-less”, following the man through the streets, his own route to the library forgotten. “There is nothing real about me,” Rilke later wrote to his former lover, Russian-born philosopher Lou Andreas-Salomé.

  Insecure and plagued by self-doubt, Rilke had an extreme propensity to identify with others that was “both his greatest poetic gift and probably his hardest-borne cross”, concludes New York-based arts writer Rachel Corbett in her enjoyable biography of the brief, intense relationship between Rilke and Auguste Rodin.

  Aged 26, Rilke had come to Paris to write a monograph about the 61-year-old sculptor who, he considered, “has no equal among all artists now alive”. In a desperate letter written shortly after they had met for the first time, Rilke revealed to Rodin the depths of his existential confusion, and the store he set by his hero’s example: “It is not just to write a study that I have come to you, it is to ask you: how should I live?”

  Neither Rodin nor Rilke took straightforward paths to the life of a successful artist. Born in Paris in 1840, Rodin was withdrawn from school at 14 and sent to train as a commercial craftsman. He was three times rejected from the École des Beaux Arts, and was shunned by the establishment when he first exhibited his exuberant, kinetic sculptures in Paris. Even when he became the world’s highest-paid artist, thronged by admirers from Isadora Duncan to George Bernard Shaw and receiving prestigious public and private commissions, he attracted opprobrium for the preponderance of nude models in his studio and for his unconventional working methods (he would lay out food and wine and watch the models wander freely, until a chance movement caught his eye).

  Rilke, born in Prague in 1875, was cosseted by a socially ambitious mother, then bullied and isolated at military academy and business school. At an artists’ colony at Worpswede in Germany, where he stayed in 1900, he met his wife Clara Westhoff, herself an artist and a former pupil of Rodin’s; two years later, when the opportunity to visit Rodin in Paris arose, he left her behind with their young daughter Ruth.

  “How should I live?” The question resounds throughout Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, sent to his correspondent Franz Xaver Kappus, a military cadet torn between the army and a literary career, between 1903 and 1908, at the height of Rodin’s influence on his malleable disciple. Utterly single-minded in his dedication to his art (“Work, always work” was his mantra), Rodin shunned all distractions, including the increasingly pressing claims of those dependent on him. To his wife, somewhat callously, Rilke passed on Rodin’s response when asked how best to balance art and family commitments: “One must choose either this or that. Either happiness or art.”

  Corbett draws out a fascinating subplot in the friendship between Clara Westhoff and her fellow artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, both attempting to negotiate marriages without renouncing their own talents and ambitions: their failure casts a sober shadow over the romantic figure of the uncompromising male artist in the foreground of this book.

  Corbett’s narrative is pacy and vivid, though her breathy writing (“if Rodin was a mountain, Rilke was the mist encircling it”) can occasionally grate. Her interrogation of the artistic process is nuanced, and she subtly traces the ways in which Rilke’s examination of Rodin’s technique stirred a shift in his poetry from work centred on interiority to his celebrated “thing-poems”, inspired by concrete objects and external experiences (both men found inspiration in trips to the zoo).

  Neither subject comes off especially sympathetically. Rilke eventually rebuffed his former idol, and the elderly Rodin strikes a pitiable figure, increasingly paranoid and isolated from his family and the younger generation of artists. Even sadder is Rilke’s late realisation of the sacrifices that following his mentor’s uncompromising method had entailed. When Kappus admitted in 1908 that he was planning to join the army rather than focus wholeheartedly on poetry, Rilke did not attempt to persuade him otherwise: “art too,” he wrote, “is only a way of living.”

  You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, by Rachel Corbett, WWNorton, RRP£20/$26.95, 320 pages

• New York Journal of Books
  http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/you-must-change
  Word count: 844

  You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin
  Author(s):
  Rachel Corbett
  Release Date:
  September 5, 2016
  Publisher/Imprint:
  W. W. Norton & Company
  Pages:
  336
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Lew Whittington

  Rachel Corbett is editor of Modern Painter magazine and her arts coverage appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her first book You Must Change Your Life examines the unwieldy relationship between sculptor Auguste Rodin and poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Corbett writes in her introduction that she was introduced to Rilke’s writing when her mother gave her a copy of his artist survival guide Letters to a Young Poet.

  Rilke’s book is his own declaration of independence after years as Rodin’s slavish disciple, as he tried to realize his own artistic voice. Corbett makes this a cautionary tale of toxic hero worship with a measure of a bromance of artistic egos.

  Rilke met Rodin in 1902, when he was just 21, on assignment to write a short biography of Rodin, who was 62, an artistic lion in winter. Later Rilke became Rodin’s secretary, lived on his estate, insulating the master from business problems and fielding his personal correspondence.

  Rodin wasn’t anyone’s disciple. He grew up in a poor working class family, and his father wanted him to become a lawyer, but he wasn’t interested. In the mid-1800s Paris was being rebuilt by German engineers, and Rodin pursued a life of a tradesman, but showed such talent working with materials that he entered Petit Ecole and immediately advanced as an illustrator and sculpture.

  He rebelled against the overt nepotism that installed privileged artists to the Grande Ecole that secured career paths. Rodin was rejected from the staid conventions of arts establishment and initially was mostly ignored in France, while being lauded as a defining innovator in England and Germany.

  Matisse and Picasso were the architects of new concepts in art that flew in the face of classicism and forged the aesthetics of abstract realism. Rodin similarly struck out on his own; he changed an art form from its rigid classicism to more expressive medium. Rodin’s sculptures were eventually lauded for their kinetic energy and earthy expressionism. Rodin was a personal and artistic voluptuary.

  By the turn of the century Rodin was the revered as a French master, and increasingly self-absorbed, he treated everyone around him like an indentured servant, including his lifelong partner Rose Beuret, and further treated his devoted son with abject distain. His destructive affair with fellow sculpture Camille Claudel caused her lifelong difficulties, and she had to go to great lengths to be artistically recognized separate from Rodin’s reputation. She even exhibited a revenge statue depicting the lecherous old artist debasing his models.

  Meanwhile, Rilke’s marriage to sculptor Clara Westhoff was not as destructive, but still dysfunctional, even though they remained devoted to each other. Rilke’s obsession with Rodin’s life and philosophy was such that at various times his marriage and relationship to his infant daughter verged on abandonment.

  Corbett’s expose of the plight of gifted women artists at that time struggling to be taken seriously by the misogynist art establishment is deftly recounted. Westhoff eventually sought refuge with Paula Becker, her lifelong friend and fellow artist. They rejected their proscribed roles as spouses of artists and eventually rebelled to pursue their own professional lives.

  Rilke’s relationship with Rodin came to an abrupt end when he inadvertently overstepped his position as his secretary and Rodin fired him and unceremoniously tossed him out. But by this time Rilke was starting to come into his own. Even as he was fighting bouts of writer’s block and depression he was in fact becoming a successful writer and that rarest of creatures, a poet with rich patrons. He also cleaned up his personal relationships to an extent and rebuilt his life, until WWI changed the fates for everyone in Europe.

  All of this drama plays out as the old world empires were disintegrating and the social, political, and modernist revolutions in art were coming to the fore. Corbett’s authority in condensing art history, academics, and theory is rigorously laced through the book. The book is peppered with cameo portraits of luminaries from other spheres who revered Rodin including Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw, and Sigmund Freud. All of their careers are set against the backdrop of the art and literary worlds of Europe at the turn of the 20th century and the years leading up to WWI. Corbett’s eloquence and dramatic lens is fully focused throughout.

  Lew J. Whittington writes about the arts and gay culture for several publications including Philadelphia Dance Journal, Dance International, CultureVulture, and Huffington Post. His book reviews and author interviews have appeared in The Advocate, EdgeMedia, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rachel-corbett/you-must-change-your-life/
  Word count: 356

  An exploration of “two artists fumbling through the desultory streets of Paris, finding their paths to mastery.”

  In 1902, living near the artist colony in Worpswede, Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and his wife, Clara Westhoff, had a new child when Rilke received a commission to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rilke left his family and traveled to Paris to meet the man for whose art he had a near-religious devotion. In Rodin, he expected to find a muse, a master, and a savior. He asked, “how should one live?” When Rodin replied, “work, always work,” Rilke took it as gospel, leading a mostly solitary life and devoting himself to his poetry. He sacrificed his family for his art; never mind that his wife was a talented sculptor. Rodin and Rilke established an immediate rapport, and the artist extended an open invitation to the poet. It was not an easy trek, but the monograph turned out to be a wonderful philosophy of creativity. Art Newspaper correspondent Corbett’s deep knowledge of her subjects accessibly reveals the strong connections—and various differences—between the two men. Rodin never questioned why he was an artist, unlike the metaphysical Rilke. Rodin’s influence on Rilke drove him to seek the maturity he was lacking for his craft. Rilke learned to empathize with inanimate objects and to appreciate abstractions, making his poetry sculpturally composed. Rilke also became Rodin’s secretary, living in the artist’s home until Rodin overreacted to what perhaps was only an overstep by Rilke in responding to a patron’s letter. Rodin fired him on the spot, and the two didn’t speak for months. That period was just what Rilke needed, as he realized that Rodin cast a diminishing shadow and that “art too is only a living.”

  For lovers of poetry and art, an excellent look at two men of incredible talent—and how they handled it.
  Pub Date: Sept. 6th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-393-24505-9
  Page count: 336pp
  Publisher: Norton
  Review Posted Online: June 22nd, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016

• Artnet News
  https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rodin-rilke-corbett-paris-666908
  Word count: 1309

  People
  Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke Had a Strange, Moody Friendship

  Rachel Corbett's elegant 'You Must Change Your Life' traces the paths of the sculptor and the poet.

  Jonathon Sturgeon, September 23, 2016
  French sculptor Francois Auguste Rene Rodin (1840 - 1917) in his museum at Meudon. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

  Empathy—the idea, the thing itself—whirls through Rachel Corbett’s elegant new study of Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke like a wind. After all, the title of book, You Must Change Your Life, which comes from Rilke’s famous “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” implies a measure of empathy: you only tell someone to change if you care about them. Rilke and Rodin, it turns out, cared about each other in strange ways.

  The relationship between the master sculptor and the pupil poet, we learn, was both tempestuous and tranquil. There were gusts of empathy between the two men at times, coming especially from Rilke’s direction; at other moments: the stale air that arrives with hurt feelings and broken promises.
  Recommended Reading
  The Art Books Our Editors Are Reading This Summer

  By artnet News, Aug 9, 2016

  Those who have read Rilke’s Auguste Rodin will sense his religious devotion to the sculptor, who taught him the art of “inseeing” and provided a model of the artist’s life. (Rodin’s mandate: work, always work.) Rodin, too, sensed Rilke’s fidelity to him. Upon reading a French translation of Rilke’s monograph, Rodin immediately hired him as a secretary. Nine months later, the pair parted acrimoniously when Rodin—who is presented as brilliant, egomaniacal, magnetic, and aloof—flew into a rage over a harmless letter.

  corbett_large

  Corbett, an editor at Modern Painters, arranges the artists in a biographical dance, one that carefully traces their steps together and apart. We begin in Rodin’s cosmopolitan Paris, in 1840, the same year, Corbett notes, that Zola and Monet were born. The nearsighted youth, living in the city of Baudelaire and Haussmann, was a poor student who came late to sculpture. But after he met Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the teacher who corrected his vision, Rodin’s obsession began to flourish.

  At the Petite École, Corbett writes, Rodin “finished lessons so quickly that the teachers eventually ran out of assignments. He did not care to socialize with his classmates; he wanted only to work.” Corbett lends an air of inevitability to Rodin’s talent, one that was noted by his legion of admiring artists, writers, and lovers. His rise was a matter of time, even if he was ignored by academic art institutions early in life. It was all a question transmission—another of Corbett’s themes. Lecoq simply turned on the faucet by giving Rodin the paradigm of the committed artist.

  Rilke’s path was more circuitous. Born to a liberal family in Prague when Rodin was 35, the young Rilke was dressed as a girl by his mother and called “Sophie.” (His given name was actually René.) When he came of age, his parents sent him to a military academy in hopes that he might achieve the officer’s rank that eluded his father, but the students there saw him as “fragile, precocious and a moral scold”—qualities that linger with him throughout the book, until he emerges from Rodin’s shadow as a major writer.
  The Trocadero seen through the base of the Eiffel Tower during the Paris exhibition of 1900. (Photo by London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images)

  The Trocadero seen through the base of the Eiffel Tower during the Paris exhibition of 1900. (Photo by London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images)

  Much of Rilke’s youth, Corbett demonstrates with layers of anecdote, was spent in search of a master. The first of these was Lou Andreas-Salomé, the philosopher and muse that Friedrich Nietzsche called “by far the smartest person I ever knew.” In 1899, the married Andreas-Salome, for whom Rilke felt a “reckless passion,” took the feeble young poet to meet Tolstoy. The meeting did not go well.
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  Corbett’s chapters alternate between poet and sculptor until the pair converge, when the ambitious yet unremarkable Rilke, again in search of a master, travels to Paris to write his monograph on Rodin. Even at this early stage, he was one of many Rodin’s true believers. Another was Clara Westhoff, the sculptor whom Rilke would later marry and repeatedly abandon on his vocational wanderings around Europe. It’s one of the many virtues of Corbett’s book that the women in the story are given their due; many, like Westhoff, were talented artists in their own right.

  But nearly everyone was infatuated with Rodin, whose tireless labor and genuine artistic newness, combined with his factory-like output, made him the darling of writers and artists in broader Europe, even as his sculptures occasionally scandalized conservative taste in Paris. Corbett’s treatment of this intellectual scene is impressive. There are cameos from Jakob Wassermann (whose lone work published in English is arguably the most horrifying book ever written about marriage), the sociologist Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, H.G. Wells, and many others.
  Poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) with his wife, sculptress Clara Westhoff, circa 1910. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  Poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) with his wife, sculptress Clara Westhoff, circa 1910. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

  Corbett carefully draws out the relationships between these figures, who were all reckoning, in different ways, with the pressures of an emerging mass culture on the lives of individuals. And few of these artists and thinkers were as staunchly individualist as Rodin and Rilke. Their kinship, for better and worse, relied on a shared belief about the vocation of the artist—that it was supreme: no relationship, duty, or family obligation should get in the way of his work.

  The question of how much great artists should care—about one another, family, art—is, of course, a matter of empathy. Corbett goes to great lengths to show that empathy was an invention of the 19th century. And it seems at times that Rodin and Rilke struggled with the practice of empathy, as if—like their own art—it was a genuinely new and difficult thing to comprehend.

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  Yet the self-centeredness of Rodin and Rilke, alongside their obsession with artistic transmission between masters and pupils (hence Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet), also happened to generate lasting art. Corbett’s analysis reaches its fruition in a stunning passage on “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” one that brings together her talent for reading both visual and poetic forms. Her observations unite the two masters aesthetically (as well as historically). “One can almost hear Rodin’s voice speaking through the stone,” she writes, “like the oracle to which Rilke had once asked the almighty question, ‘How should I live?’”

  The book concludes at a moment when the historical avant-garde is beginning to rebel against the attitude of Rodin and Rilke. The mass, in a way, swarms the individual; yet the questions remain the same. “How should an artist live?” Corbett’s penetrating story does not—as Rilke or Rodin would have—offer instruction. She relies instead on the rich examples that emerge when an artist’s life is examined with great care. Felt in this way, Rilke’s injunction—to change your life—can seem as heavy or as light as the wind.

  Jonathon Sturgeon
  Deputy Editor

• Quarterly Conversation
  http://quarterlyconversation.com/you-must-change-your-life-the-story-of-rainer-maria-rilke-and-auguste-rodin-by-rachel-corbett
  Word count: 1601

  You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett

  Review by Edward A. Dougherty — Published on December 12, 2016

  You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett. W. W Norton. $26.95, 320pp.

  In You Must Change Your Life, Rachel Corbett writes a dual biography of monumental figures in the artworld, a book that feels comprehensive but that only requires under 300 pages (30 of which are notes). We get to know both the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the sculptor Auguste Rodin as persons and artists, as Corbett relates their marriages, major works, and personal crises. To add new dimension to these biographies, she illuminates how their relationship is at the heart of Rilke’s most famous book in the U.S., Letters to a Young Poet. So framing their story presents and questions the advice Rilke gives about the artistic life, its sacrifices and burdens, and its implications for love, marriage, and family life. Corbett also traces significant ideas about the new science of psychology, turn-of-the-century Europe, and artistic developments. And she does it all in such enjoyable prose that You Must Change Your Life is an intriguing network of ideas and movements, a companion that makes for hard parting.

  In her Introduction Corbett says she was given Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when she was twenty, noting that reading his words was “like having someone whisper to me . . . all the youthful affirmations I had been yearning to hear.” Later, having established both artists’ childhood, she introduces Franz Xaver Krappus, 19, who picked up an early volume Rilke’s poetry and “settled into the grass.” This young cadet, disaffected by his military training, was attracted to the poet’s rebellious verse that subverted romanticism. After a former teacher informs him that Rilke had been a student at that very school, Krappus writes to the poet, enclosing a few of his poems and seeking advice on both writing and life. We nod along when Corbett observes that “Rilke was hardly qualified to give career advice at that point in his life.”

  He had published but had not found his direction as a writer. He had submitted his monograph of the sculptor, though, and Corbett reveals just how much Rodin’s influence shaped the advice he passed on to the younger Kappus.

  Rodin, on the other hand, was successful enough to erect a pavilion at the World’s Fair of 1900, filling it with 150 of his own sculptures, and Corbett’s dual biography shows just how different Rilke and Rodin were. She establishes this contrast early on, saying, “Rodin was a rational Gallic in his sixties, while Rilke was a German romantic in his twenties. Rodin was physical, sensual; Rilke metaphysical, spiritual. Rodin’s work plunged into hell; Rilke’s floated in the realm of angels.” When they first met, the sculptor in his studio is “lionesque,” while the poet comes off like a “mouse.” And yet, despite these difference, what drives the book is “how tightly their lives intertwined . . . and how their seemingly antithetical natures complemented each other.” Corbett successfully draws a portrait of each as an individual in alternating chapters, tracing the basic biographical outlines behind each man’s major works along the way. But she also unspools for us the knot of influence they had on each other and how their interaction went on to shape artists from John Paul Sartre to Henri Matisse, George Bernard Shaw, and Constantin Brancusi.

  Corbett’s storytelling is outstanding. Not only does she offer minute details for great effect, she’s also sifted a daunting amount of source material and rendered only the most relevant elements for her purpose. Given the stature of each man and his work, this is no small task. She further paces these stories for greatest impact. For example, in 1905, the well-established Rodin and his 33-year-old friend, the painter Ignacio Zuloaga, visit Spain. A Basque, Zuloaga proudly showed the master some of his homeland’s masterpieces, but Rodin quipped that El Greco “doesn’t know how to draw” and so tries to talk the younger artist out of buying a painting of his. Such a detail reveals Corbett’s even-handedness, allowing Rodin to be a towering figure, but a flawed artist and flawed man. Later, her storytelling skills deepen the significance of this incident. She recounts how Picasso returns again and again to the apartment of his fellow countryman to view the El Greco. He said that The Vision of St. John “confirmed his ambitions for Les Demoiselles,” his own work that Corbett claims “came to define the end of one era and the beginning of another,” the introduction of Cubism. There’s a similar convergence when Rodin creates a bust of George Bernard Shaw, and the playwright goes on to create a story of a man who “sculpts” Eliza Doolittle into a lady.

  With similar efficiency Corbett is able to trace complex interrelationships these two men had with women, despite the austerity of intimacy (Rilke called it an “ascetic covenant”) and even misogyny they displayed. Rilke would not have met Rodin had the sculptor Clara Westhoff not been one of his students at his Institute Rodin. (How he was able to open his own school, having been rejected as a young man by the Grande École and the Salon exhibitions for years is another story worth reading, marking an earlier artistic hinge-point in France.) She had returned to Germany, joined a group of artists living in the countryside. Through a different acquaintance, Rilke was brought to Worpswede. There he met Westhoff, whom he married, had a child with, and largely lived apart from for most of their lives; how Corbett handles these intricacies is interesting to read. He also meets the painter Paula Becker at Worpswede, and her tragic story is related as she reflects on the Rilkes and their devotion to Rodin. Again, by employing details that serve these stories, Corbett relates the essential influence of, among others, the sculptor Camille Claude and Lou Andreas-Salomé.

  Andreas-Salomé is the remarkable hub of another cycle of dynamics. Not only was Rilke one of her lovers but the pair of them make a pilgrimage to Russia to visit Tolstoy, and even after their affair had cooled she remained his confidante and guide. Her advice is crucial to his development; having taken his practice of “inseeing” to a limit with objects, as directed by Rodin, he reached an impasse when it came to human suffering. Corbett portrays urbanization in Paris as an assault, as violent in its poverty, disease, and filth as the American tenements. Of course, this disturbs Rilke. Andreas-Salomé is able to reframe his despair so that he can redirect his energy into The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the book he is most famous for in France, and the one that influenced Sartre and “helped shape the language of Existentialism.” Later, she becomes a student of Freud’s, to the point that “Freud entrusted her with treating his own daughter, Anna.” The developments of this new science of the mind are a major theme in You Must Change Your Life, one that educates and illuminate these artists’ explorations. Later, when Rilke wonders if this talk therapy would help him, she initially counsels him to seek psychotherapy, but later shrewdly advices him to return to Paris, instead, and immerse himself in its harsh realities.

  Rilke’s various sojourns in Paris are intricately entangled with his relationship with Rodin. He initially moves there to do a monograph of the sculptor, but his underlying motive is to find a mentor. He was adrift artistically, and Tolstoy had rebuked him and Andreas-Solomé twice. Rilke’s esteem for the sculptor bordered on devotion; he asked in a letter after Rodin agrees to be the subject of a monograph: “Does anyone exist, I wonder, who is as great as he and yet is still alive?” After the monograph was finished and finally translated into French so Rodin could read it, Rilke responded to Rodin that he was excited: “It is the need to see you, my Master, and to experience a moment of the burning life of your beautiful things that excite me.” Hired as Rodin’s secretary, the poet was happy to continue his apprenticeship with the master. When he is summarily dismissed over an incident that reveals Rodin’s pettiness, Rilke is deeply wounded. Years later they reconcile, and Rilke writes a second monograph of the sculptor; Rodin writes a treatise on Gothic Cathedrals, hearkening to the past as a model for the future. However, a wrenching World War redirects the European civilization, affecting both men directly and their communities profoundly.

  It is Rilke’s ultimate reconsideration of the great man’s advice, which he had passed along to the even younger Krappas, that makes You Must Change Your Life a wise book. Not only does it unify the biography and context of Letters to a Young Poet, but as Corbett presents the evolution of each man, each artist, she allows readers to integrate the lessons for themselves.

  Edward A. Dougherty is Professor of English at Corning Community College. He is the author of many collections of poetry. Visit his website for more information about him, where you’ll get the latest about his new books, Grace Street, a collection of lyric meditations, published by Cayuga Lake Books, and Everyday Objects (2015, Plain View Press).

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