I. The Road to Muzot
In the year 1919, in a Europe exhausted by conflict and its concurrent diaspora, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke could be considered a stateless person, or Heimatlos, with no fixed center of gravity. So Switzerland, the erstwhile sanctuary for Europe’s disaffected writers, artists and pacifists during the war years, willingly presented itself as a potential haven which could fill the void. Rilke, inveterate traveler and hermitage seeker par excellence, was experiencing, at the age of forty-four, a growing need to sequester himself once again, but now to establish a sense of rootedness, such as he had known only in Paris, in the hope of re-encountering the creative élan which had deserted him after the prolonged trauma and dislocation engendered by the war. Paris, both sanctuary and crucible for his breakthrough New Poems (1907–08) and Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), had yet to restore its internationalist equilibrium after the war, and the wound still felt raw; the Paris flat in the rue Campagne Première which he was forced to flee in 1914 as an enemy alien, abandoning all his belongings in the process, had not only been reoccupied but the former occupant’s possessions, including precious books and manuscripts, had also been sold off.
On a visit to Switzerland from Bavaria in June 1919, Rilke suddenly became trapped; he could no longer return to Munich as he had intended due to an abrupt change in the German immigration law. Lacking any viable alternatives, he was obliged to remain in the landlocked neutral country. The following two years saw the poet on a seemingly never-ending tour of Switzerland’s regions and cities, educating himself on the country’s culture and history while keeping one eye open for a potential dwelling place. It is astonishing and revealing just how much Rilke crammed into the months from June 1919 in his quest to secure a refuge until his long-term residence at the chateau of Berg-am-Irchel in Canton Zurich in November of that year. From June to September, he was not only in Zurich but also enjoyed visits or longer sojourns in Bern, Nyon, Geneva, Lausanne, Sils Baselgia in the Engadine, and Soglio in the Val Bragaglia below.
After some encouragement, he embarked on a highly successful lecture tour between the end of October and the end of November, opening in Zurich, then taking in St Gallen, Lucerne, Basel, Bern and Winterthur. From the beginning of December, he was installed in cosmopolitan Locarno on Lake Maggiore. And the following year, after leaving Locarno at the end of February, he repaired to Schönenberg in Canton Zurich to see in the spring, heading to Venice in early summer, back to Schönenberg for a brief spell, then traveling again in Switzerland over the remainder of the summer and into autumn. The month of October 1920 alone saw him visit Geneva, Bern, Sion and Sierre. A break in Paris, and then he was back revisiting Geneva and Basel in November.
However, all the time Rilke was discerning the landscapes and cities that communicated most intimately to him, bookmarking those to which he would return. The grandiose majesty and cold Nietzschean anonymity of the High Alps were not for Rilke, and the popular touristic stations and Alpine chintz were anathema; in contrast, it was the lower-lying landscapes that appealed to him. Eventually, it was the gentler, more companionable viticulture landscape of the Valais along the valley of the Rhone—an area he was unaware of until a Swiss friend drew his attention to it—that spoke most powerfully to him.
Rilke had first encountered the Canton Valais in October 1920. This rural landscape of vineyards and meadows adorning the steep slopes of the Rhone valley, a haven as yet undisturbed by the materialist modern world, made an admirable impression that remained with him. From mid-November, Rilke had begun a long winter residence at Berg-am-Irchel in Canton Zurich, courtesy of a beneficent countess. Now, as spring beckoned, the poet was obliged to move on. Once again Rilke’s burgeoning contacts in Switzerland solved his looming vagrancy, the prieuré d’Etoy, midway along the northern Swiss shore of lac Léman (or Lake Geneva), would provide lodgings until the end of June. Here Rilke could gaze out across the vast lake to the Alpine massif rising above the Haute Savoie on its southern side, receive visits from the likes of the Princess Marie Thurn und Taxis or the poet Countess Anna de Noailles, and honor invitations to dine with the Swiss-French writer-biographer Guy de Pourtalès who happened to occupy rooms in the chateau next door.
Rilke’s then partner, Baladine Klossowska, or ‘Merline’ as Rilke called her, was anxious to leave Berlin and join him at Berg, then later at Etoy. Both were aware that the cardinal purpose of Rilke’s Swiss wanderings was to track down an anchorage. But in letters exchanged through May 1921, they fretted over what this destination might be, for though Merline wanted to stay with Rilke, she was nonetheless fully aware that this must be primarily his creative enclosure and that, as ever, the poet’s vocation was sacrosanct. Merline spoke of her intention to go to Ticino, but Rilke seemed set on Sierre. On 11 June he excitedly pens from Rolle: ‘Come, come, come! . . . Your idea of Muzzano is perhaps justified, yet it can’t dislodge the vision within me which remains so powerful of Sierre, it is there I see us with such assurance that I almost believe we must be there.’1 Merline was finally persuaded and she joined Rilke at Etoy on 19 June. On the 23rd they left for Sierre, checked into the Hotel Bellevue in the center of the old town, and immediately began looking for a cheaper alternative.
They searched in vain; a little house in Sierre was offered, another in Sion, none seemed right; then a medieval tower at Goubing which seemed ideal but alas was occupied. Their despondency grew. Almost at the point of a melancholy departure from Sierre, Rilke, while returning from the train station with their tickets, happened to shelter from a rainstorm beneath the shop blinds when in a window he spied a postcard showing a medieval chateau, a slender tower situated in a place called Muzot above the town; it stated ‘for sale or rent’. Muzot? He had never heard of it. He soon learned it was pronounced ‘Musotte’. The advert invited visits, so they went right away, a stiff climb up a winding lane from the town, to find the high wooden cross and the solitary poplar announcing the thirteenth-century tower perched above its vineyard and enclosed by low gray stone walls. A little way up the lane was a picturesque ancient chapel that lay abandoned. In this unforeseen moment, all suddenly seemed to fit and the entranced newcomers stood inside the old tower sensing here was a residence fit for a poet. The history of the ancient building fascinated them: the noble Vaudois family of Blonay and then the Monthéis clan had left their marks; ghosts were even in residence.
And there had been helpful modernizations. In 1903, the by-then-dilapidated tower had been bought for 1,200 francs by a local businessman, M. Raunier, as a working-project pied-à-terre. This gentleman spent considerable time and money on salvaging the near ruins and making them habitable again, installing an outer staircase and porch, two balconies, and a garden on three sides. Now his widow, Mme Raunier, was ailing and the family were letting it go. But how to acquire it? Fate played its hand again, for one of Rilke’s Swiss friends and patrons, the wealthy art collector Werner Reinhart of Winterthur, already happened to be a secret admirer of the little castle; when Rilke approached him, Reinhart saw the opportunity as an intervention of fate and immediately offered to rent it for the poet. In May 1922, he succeeded in purchasing the tower which ensured the security, the permanence Rilke sought. Rilke moved in as the new ‘chatelain’ on 26 July 1921, and through the summer, with Merline’s inspired touch, furnishings, curtains and judicious decoration enhanced the living conditions in the austere and primitive tower. In the autumn, the poet and the artist parted after a halcyon summer of intense companionship, and Baladine returned to Berlin, distraught at the separation she knew had to come despite Rilke’s lofty assurances of their continued entente. Rilke would spend his first winter alone in Muzot but for his discreet housekeeper Mlle Baumgartner, until the emergence of the Valaisan spring proved a catalyst to a creative epiphany. There is a hint of what that might bring in a letter from 31 December 1921 to the daughter of M. Raunier, in which we see Rilke’s preoccupation with resuming serious work after the years of perpetual adjournment:
Your old Muzot greets you as I do; the old manor seems happy to be heated and assiduously inhabited . . . I do hope you can join us for tea one day, but I am presently (after my drawn-out preparations) engaged in work that I should not like to interrupt even for a moment. It is so long since I enjoyed such calm and I have to renew so many threads broken during the terrible years.
Rilke was bewitched by the Valais landscape, which to him represented a beguiling marriage of Provence and Spain, with each walk along vineyard terraces and sun-baked lanes summoning memories of earlier travels. The most revealing letter of his first impressions is that of 25 July 1921 to Princess Thurn und Taxis:
[W]hat strange magic these places have exerted on me . . . ever since I saw them for the first-time last year during the time of the grape harvest. The fact that this countryside is an uncanny fusion of Spain and Provence, had struck me forcefully, for these two landscapes had enchanted me during the years before the war with an intensity unsurpassed by any others. And to now find their two voices reunited in a broad Alpine valley in Switzerland. And this unison does not lie just in the imagination. I have since learned that certain flowers grow here that one only finds in Provence and Spain. And the same goes for the butterflies. Thus, the soul of a great river (and the Rhone has always seemed to me one of the most astonishing) bears gifts and affinities across countries.
Rilke adopted a semi-monastic existence, willingly interrupted by visits from friends, writers, artists and musicians, social intermissions which could dominate the finer months. Assisted by the loyal Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, who had also helped with the tenure at Berg-am-Irchel, and Mlle Baumgartner, Rilke was free to observe the nature around him and absorb the rural life whose centuries-old customs played out in accord with the seasons, often conversing with the local farmers and vine workers who lead their donkeys with bulging baskets of grapes across the meadows. The local workers in turn had a sympathetic respect for this solitary man often seen descending to Sierre for his post or out on his walks, jotting observations in a little notebook. Long treks in the surrounding hills and vineyards, in the dense pine forests of Fjin, and along the glaucous blue-grey waters of the Rhone, pilgrimages to solitary chapels with their rustic Madonnas, or excursions further afield to the chateau de Tourbillon and basilica de Valère at Sion established a new sense of continuity and recurrence for the poet, gradually re-equipping him with the much-deferred inner equilibrium.
As he settled in at Muzot, at the forefront of Rilke’s mind were the Elegies, consolidated in an unexpected surge of inspiration in 1912 while installed at the invitation of Princess Marie Thurn und Taxis in the castle of Duino on the Adriatic coast. The castle, seriously damaged by bombs during the war, was now under repair and the Elegies too needed to undergo a regeneracy, for the first half remained like a road once promising a great destination that had ended abruptly due to a landslip, shorn off by powerful external forces. The fragmental Elegies had become a weight that increased with the passing years and their creator knew he had to make a last bid for the summit of completion before the light faded entirely. Muzot then was to be the place where Rilke would find the longed-for peace and stability to complete the series. In February 1922, in a surge of unprecedented creativity, not only did he produce the remaining six Elegies but out of them also received the unexpected ‘gift’ of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Less known is the fact that in the same prolific year, he also wrote the revelatory Brief des jungen Arbeiters [Letter to a young laborer] and completed his cherished translations of Paul Valéry.
Rilke’s relationship with France and French literature strengthened immeasurably during these years at Muzot. On his continuing travels, he increasingly favored the French-speaking regions of Switzerland, corresponded by letters evermore confidently in French and was producing poems in a language he had not intended as a creative source. This French drive culminated in 1924 when whole suites of poems would be gathered into the collections Vergers [Orchards] and Les Quatrains Valaisans [The Valaisan quatrains], both published in the months preceding his death at Val-Mont on 19 December 1926. Rilke’s long stay in Paris between January and August 1925, which deepened contacts with the French literary world, and finally allowed him to meet and work with his sympathetic translator Maurice Betz, only strengthened this attachment.
II. Letters around a Garden
This slender sheaf of twenty-two letters written in French by one of the key European poets of the twentieth century, whose epistolary legacy famously ran to the thousands, might seem just another overlooked fragment of a vast enterprise—a curiosity. Like many of the correspondences Rilke sustained over his working life with highly cultured individuals who believed in the uniqueness of his gift and the immortality of his poetry, this one was with an intelligent, refined young woman from an aristocratic background, Antoinette de Bonstetten. But it is the reason for Rilke’s connection with Mlle de Bonstetten that is particularly interesting: namely, the garden of Muzot, the first garden for which he assumed guardianship, entailing not only an obligation to it but also the opportunity to revive its original ordonnance. The modest escarpment plot from which rose Rilke’s tower, whose layout he inherited from Raunier, consisted of several long beds dominated by roses and fruit trees, bisected by narrow dirt paths as well as areas of grass and shrubs, giving way beyond the rustic picket fence and stone walls to meadow and vineyard. But over time, elements of the garden had loosed their moorings and all of it had become somewhat disorderly. The tapestry that Rilke imagined had once existed had become unstitched. Rilke famously possessed a special aesthetic admiration for the rose and readily employed it as a symbol, so much so that like the angel it has almost become a Rilkean trope. But essentially, the rose was for the poet a perennially mysterious still-secretive flower despite its iconic status; the subtle gradations of those closely overlapping petals preoccupied him and the incomparable fragrance, more sensual, nuanced and transcendent than any other flower, drew him irresistibly. Most revealingly, the rose finally provided his self-penned enigmatic epitaph: ‘Rose, oh pure contradiction, to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.’
The living roses he was now obliged to tend only deepened this passion, for these were his roses, not those admired in the gardens or parks of the villas and castles he resided in. With his new responsibility as a gardener managing his own plot, the poet wished to return the Muzot garden to something that better resembled its past as a small Valaisan manor house with box hedges and well-maintained parterres of roses. This was not to create anything pretentious, overly rigid or fussy, but more to take back some control over a garden which had run amok, and, more importantly, resurrect the spirit of the original garden as he imagined it. Once the tower interior was renovated, its historic features meticulously restored and enhanced, Rilke could turn his attention to the exterior. He took an active step in seeking counsel for what in his mind had evolved into a distinct project of design and vegetal reinvigoration. He asked for a recommendation. Enter Mlle de Bonstetten. Antoinette had a keen interest in gardening and was following courses in horticulture at the University of Lausanne. Hers was a name communicated to Rilke as a potential advisor for his garden project and perhaps one who might even lend a practical hand. Once the young lady responded, an exchange of letters commenced, lasting from late March 1924 till late October 1926, only two months before Rilke’s death. However, there was a major interruption in the conversation, largely because Rilke spent a significant portion of 1925 in Paris. So in a sense, we have two parts to the correspondence, the brief one of 1924 and the longer one of 1926.
Despite the increasing desire of both parties to meet in person, it took much longer than Rilke had envisaged to finally secure a rendezvous and get down to practical considerations for the Muzot garden. He had written first in the early spring of 1924, expecting a visit from his new consigliere, but fate seemed to be conspiring against them. Rilke ends his first letter of 7 March hopefully: ‘And allow me to reiterate in all deference that Muzotawaits you and hopes for you . . . ’ (p. 5). His last in June ends on a more beseeching, almost desperate note: ‘I am anxious I shall miss you when you return one day via the Loetschberg. Do warn me in good time, I implore you’ (p. 26). But in those first letters from 1924, we also find fascinating passages concerning Rilke’s reflections on Valéry whose work he had been enthusiastically translating, eloquent evocations of the Muzot tower and its environs, and the experience of living in an old manor house without modern conveniences. But most impressive perhaps are the exquisite, poetically imbued observations of the emergence—or more often reticence—of the Valaisan spring, whose sensitivity and refined perception are surely equal to that of anything Rilke wrote.
With Antoinette de Bonstetten delayed in Geneva, Rilke is obliged to write on through Easter and beyond, lamenting in effortless analogies the difficulties facing plants under the unforgiving Valaisan sun that always serves the monopolizing vine first, the sun that ‘commands the flowers brutally’ by ‘fairly yanking’ out the gentle anemones, the sun whose ‘impetuous warmth’ fools the wisteria or lilies into blooming too early so they ‘summon their lovely necklace too precipitously’. In the final letter from 1924, he also writes of his fears for the roses, the diseases and bugs that relentlessly assail them: ‘Do there always have to be so many dangers, so many absurd hostilities, so many threats of malignancy in every garden? Were not the gardens of earlier ages with their simple and pious flowers rather less menaced [. . .]?’
It is unclear who recommenced the correspondence and when—for who can know if letters from later 1925 have gone astray?—but it seems sensible to assume it was Rilke. Perhaps hoping to rekindle his garden restoration that spring, Rilke writes on 24 February 1926 while convalescing at the clinic of Val Mont above Montreux, confessing how Antoinette had often made incursions into his thoughts during his months in Paris the previous year. Flowers are conscientiously exchanged again and mutually treasured, chosen books too; recommendations of books proffer, all in the customary manner of the poet, and a sense of something beyond a mutual interest in plants and literature lingers evermore compellingly in the space between epistles. On 27 March, with his garden authority traveling in his beloved Provence, Rilke writes a relished evocation of the religious festival at Saintes Marie de la Mer in the Camargue that he once witnessed, leading to a recollection of the lonely atmosphere of old, abandoned cemeteries—lines eerily reminiscent of those by the Belgian symbolist poet Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898): ‘And all this auburn and grey abandon, visited by butterflies and almost fused with the vegetation of aromatic grasses, forms a great solar face which perpetually offers to an opulence of forgetting the sum of its hours’.
Still installed at Val-Mont, with only sporadic visits to Muzot, Rilke, in a letter of 15 April, exquisitely expresses his sorrow at Antoinette departing Morges on lac Léman, ‘which, between us, resembles a lovely white page to turn in order to travel from one text to another’. He has received roses from his correspondent, but more than anything Rilke wishes to be out of the sanatorium and with her among his own. ‘I viewed my rose bushes yesterday and I so wish you will come soon and discuss them with me, in their presence, though without forgetting all you had begun to tell me on the question of “untranslatable music”’. We do not know what Antoinette de Bonstetten said on the subject of their ‘untranslatable music’—nor on anything else—since her letters have not been recovered. Thus, while reading the collection, we are obliged merely to conjure from Rilke’s words something of what might have been in her letters to him. The absence of the corresponding letters may seem an impediment, but there are unforeseen dividends to having only a shadow respondent whom we see as if through a gauze, her thoughts and actions indistinct and tantalizingly ambiguous. It makes Antoinette de Bonstetten appear that much more enigmatic and fleeting. The strange atmosphere produced by this one-sidedness serves to better illumine the content of Rilke’s letters, to enhance his reflections, to make more tender his yearning and to frame some of his finest lines. Her fugacious presence also tends to magnify Rilke’s air of vulnerability as his health declines. In some way, the absence of her letters obligates the reader to garner every fiber of nourishment from his; the sacrifice of her own reality, the concealment of her actual words, means Rilke’s voice alone is responsible for presence.
It seems that Rilke had already instigated changes to the garden through de Bonstetten’s advice, but he still longed for her to grace his rose beds with a personal inspection and recommendations for improvement. Thus, on 19 April, he writes: ‘Ah, come, dear Mademoiselle, lend my flowers some ideas. It has always seemed to me that they ponder the void through lack of education’. Then in May, he was left in suspense no longer. Rilke, with his doctor’s tacit agreement, took leave from Val-Mont to meet de Bonstetten in Sierre. Later they ascended the winding road to Veyras, then took the narrow dirt lane to Muzot. Now they finally stood in the garden together discussing plans. On 27 May, a buoyed-up Rilke writes to his friend and confidant Nanny Wunderly-Volkart:
Last Friday I was in Sierre with Mlle de Bonstetten: it was marvelous to look over the garden with someone who has such a deep knowledge of this subject, suddenly all is transformed! We have drawn up the final project for restoration and simplification of the garden scheduled for the end of October. A long parterre of roses, unified (we have to make changes due to the ever-encroaching shade of the chestnuts!) and this edged with box. Box everywhere in fact, replacing the stones. A scattering of bushes here and there. Not much else, but above all some organization, a little order! How long I have had to wait for such counsel: this school of hers in Neuchâtel seems perfect—it will furnish everything and at a very fair price.
The letters between Rilke and de Bonstetten spanned the period of his increasing ill health. Like others written at that time from Muzot, Val-Mont or the Hotel Bellevue, the letters provided Rilke with an indispensable companionship and spiritual underlay during the last, difficult phase of his life when he was unable to travel any great distance and the monotony of the invalid’s unchanging days set in. In certain passages of these letters, Rilke reveals his exasperation as he acknowledges that the body, which generally served him well despite his sensitivity and fragility, had at this point almost betrayingly broken its longstanding harmony with his mind and spirit—a sharp contrast with the past when the body’s accord with mind and spirit had fostered creative growth. Rilke writes in a letter of early May: ‘a malevolent magic (one of those tiny errors which gradually lead to huge deviations) has, so to speak, lead me into the enemy camp’—and later of a ‘discordance’ between his mind and body. This breakdown in the traditional order of a hard-won physiological equipoise aggravated his despondency.
However, friendship and its careful amplification proved a counterbalance to this new reality. The propitious nature of the relationship that evolved between the increasingly fragile poet and the young student of horticulture, to which these twenty-two letters testify, tempered the encroaching isolation of Rilke’s circumstance. And the Muzot garden was transformed at the eleventh hour through de Bonstetten’s direct influence, just as Rilke had intended. For hadn’t he explained to her in the letter of 19 April: ‘Before a house massive and severe as a canon of the Middle Ages, the garden really must extend like the opened pages of a beautiful illuminated antiphony. It must dare over five lines to propose a precise music’? Antoinette de Bonstetten’s verve and knowledge, no less her fateful presence, had helped configure the leaves of those illuminations, to set in train a more harmonious arrangement of notes.
