The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Oxford Paperbacks, ISBN 0192818511 |
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This book – hard straightforwardly to call it a novel – is structured around a series of deaths; and intellectually, it takes its structure from Rainer Maria Rilke’s theory of death. Which is:
‘And when I think of the others whom I have seen or about whom I have heard, it is always the same. They have all had a death of their own. Those men who carried theirs within their armour, like a prisoner; those women who grew very old and small and then on a huge bed, as on a stage, passed away, discreet and dignified, in the presence of the whole family, the servants and the dogs. Children, too, even the very little ones, did not die just any kind of death; they gathered themselves together and died as that which they clearly were, and as that which they would have become.’
Death is characteristic, it is inborn. The passage continues:
‘And what a melancholy beauty came to women when they were pregnant, and stood, their slender hands involuntarily resting on their big bodies which bore two fruits: a child and a death. Did not the broad, almost nourishing smile on their quite vacant faces come from their sometimes thinking that both these fruits were growing?’
The book, The Notebook, opens with a date and a location, ’11 September, Rue Toullier’. Malte Laurids Brigge, we slowly and fragmentarily learn, is a Danish poet, twenty-eight years old. He has come to Paris to write (to try to write), to be away from his past in order to be able to think it, to make something of it.
The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge does have a fairly clear structure. The opening entries are to do with the things Brigge notices around him after arriving in his new city: hospitals, the poor. Thereafter, he becomes increasingly preoccupied with his childhood. He tells his family history, the string of their characteristic deaths. He regrets his desultory love for Abelone, his mother’s youngest sister. He becomes ill and convalesces. After this, he starts to become obsessed with the lives and deaths of historical figures: Grishka Otrepioff and Charles the Bold. These are retold in a mesmeric style, always hovering above a definite, applicable meaning. Finally, he interprets the story of the Prodigal Son. This, as he sees it, it the ‘legend of someone who did not want to be loved’. If only by implication, Brigge is thinking about a return to whatever kind of home is left him. Life, for once, not death.
Rilke published the book in 1910, although he had been working on it for a number of years. He was an inveterate keeper of journals, and a great deal of Malte Laurids Brigge is fantasized autobiography. Rilke was all his life bewitched by an idea of nobility. The autobiographical note at the start of this edition puts his own background bluntly: ‘born into the German-speaking community in Prague in 1875, the son of an unsuccessful army officer turned railway employee.’ Laurids Brigge, by contrast, remembers a childhood of great estates, ample grounds, ancestral portraits, Counts and Countesses, unquiet ghosts. (I will come back to these.)
Brigge is impoverished, but his ideas of poverty are strangely reflexive. He wants to be rich again, so that he can live an impoverished life – chosen, though, no longer unavoidable:
‘And to think that I, too, might have become such a poet, had I been allowed to dwell anywhere, anywhere in the world, say, in one of the many closed-up country houses about which no one troubles any more. I would have required only one room – the sunny room in the gable end. I would have lived there with my ancient possessions, my family portraits, and my books. An arm-chair I would have had and flowers and dogs, and a stout stick for the stony roads. And nothing more. Only a book bound in yellowish, ivory-coloured leather, with an antique design of flowers on its fly-leaf: in that book I would have written a great deal, for I would have had many thoughts and memories of many people.
‘But things have fallen out otherwise. God knows why. My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I have been allowed to put it, while I myself – yes, my God! – have no roof over me, and the rain is driving into my eyes.’
The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge is often compared to Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten (a past cult book, under the title Institute Benjamenta) and Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless (a future one). All were written in German, towards the beginning of the twentieth century, and all share a deep subjectivity. Most of what happens in them happens inside an intelligent young man’s head. Yet, and this is one of the really interesting things, they are not at all Freudian. They have an element of Bildungsroman, the story-of-a-soul, but they avoid psychoanalysis, the dissection-of-a-soul. Any insights they offer into what-goes-on-inside-the-head are on the deep levels of image, metaphor, form. The world is seen in a literary way. As Musil put it, in an essay satirizing Freud, ‘I myself grew up without Oedipus’. Which is not to say that Rilke, Walser and Musil were uninterested in the subconscious. Quite the opposite – it is their great shared fascination. However, they are unwilling to maintain a simplistic divide between the conscious and the subconscious. Walser refers to ‘the dream called human life’. And throughout these three books, the waking world is just as likely to be phantasmogorical, and the sleeping world to be rational, as their counterparts. A great deal of light was shed and a great deal of clarity was gained by the torch of Freudian psychoanalysis, but to see something brightly isn’t the same as to see it accurately. There is a lot of mist and fog and cloud and smoke inside all of us – shine too bright a torch on it and it merely turns into a wall of plain white. Owls only emerge at twilight.
There are three great ghost stories in The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. They are untitled, but I will call them ‘Christina Brahe, or The Ghost at Dinner’ (pgs 24-35), ‘The Hand’ (pgs 85-90) and ‘The House Which Was and Wasn’t There’ (pgs 131-137). I don’t know if anyone has ever anthologized these, but they deserve it.
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