The City in Eleven Walks/Rainer Maria Rilke & Birgit Haustedt

There is, of course, no shortage of writers who can and will be discussed here in the future and when I originally came up with the idea many names immediately came to mind: Rilke was not one of them. Before the publication of the above book in paperback last year all I knew about him was that he was an Austrian poet and for some reason, his work was difficult-perhaps because there is so little discussion of him in this country at all; especially compared with the many other well known German writers. Rilke (1875-1926) and my previous subject, Flora Thompson (1876-1947) were almost exact contemporaries; apart from that, they could hardly have been more different.

Travel was a way of life for Rilke - he was always travelling. He crisscrossed Europe; he visited Russia and sailed on the Nile - at ease in provincial Eastern Europe as in the centre of Paris. And over and over again he went to Venice; of his ten visits, the first was in March 1897 and the last in June and July 1920. Travel served a single purpose: he was always seeking impulses, stimuli, ideas for his writing. At the same time, he was astonishingly well-read, even by the standard of professional writers. He was both an energetic and voracious reader, but not a systematic one. Rilke’s education was that of an enthusiast, eclectic and erratic, yet he absorbed and distilled a subject with great clarity.

Even more than reading, Rilke loved to walk. He was a passionate walker. A friend who walked with him in Paris went so far as to say that ‘knowing every last corner and depth of a city was his passion……’ This was equally true in Venice. Rilke roamed the city for days on end, sometimes by gondola, but mostly on foot. In 1920, after many years of absence, the poet could still find any street he wanted in the tourist-free northeastern part of the city - and without getting lost, he proudly declared.

He paid attention to everything and everything is translated into the inner world of language. But Rilke does not ignore reality, at least not in his Venice poems. Rilke was not a dreamer merely interested in his own feelings. He wanted always to penetrate to the essence of a city like Venice, behind the facades. He wrote one of his great Venice poems about San Giorgio Maggiore, which portrays Venice as a city made up of endless reflected mirrors - almost a cliché in itself – but in this poem a precise description of the role of the island church in the ensemble of the city’s great buildings:

‘Venetian Morning’ (1908)

These princely – pampered windows see forever
what deigns to trouble us occasionally
the city that perpetually, whenever
a glimpse of sky has met the feel of the sea,

will start becoming without ever being.
Each morning must be showing her the selection
of opals she wore yesterday and freeing
from the canals reflection on reflection
and bringing past times to her recollection:
then only she’ll comply and be agreeing

as any nymph that gave Zeus welcoming.
Her ear-rings tinkling at her ears, she raises
San Giorgio Maggiore up and gazes
With lazy smile into that lovely thing.

Rilke wanted to live humbly and naturally, very much in line with the Lebensreform movement, which was then the fashion amongst artists and intellectuals. Diet was central to their lifestyle: Rilke ate no fish, meat only when there was no alternative, and drank no alcohol. He practised his vegetarianism rigorously. Not quite a vegan then, but along the same lines of many people today, together with the peripatetic lifestyle.

Naturally, he had read the other German greats on Italy including Goethe’s Italian Journey, which he found too sober, and later, Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, straight after publication: the first part he found ‘masterfully direct’, the second - ‘nothing more is told in the second…one watches as it spreads like spilt ink.’

This comment was in a private letter and, in any case, I don’t think Mann, a Nobel prize-winner, would have been too bothered; and his book was to become both a famous film and later, opera.

Despite the heat, the floods, the prices and the tourists, do go to Venice if you get the chance: it remains a great place to walk and will be among the first of the world’s great cities to disappear due to the loss of permanent residents, the inertia of the Italian state and climate change.