Santa Claus of Loneliness

RAINER MARIA RILKE, THE YEARS IN SWITZERLAND by J. R. von Salts, translated by N. K. Cruickshank. 321 pages. University of California. $7.50.

"The Santa Claus of loneliness" was W. H. Auden's tag for his fellow poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke did not look like Santa Claus--more like the man who shot him. Beneath a nobly domed forehead, pale eyes glared out from a meanly featured face. This repellent countenance would on rare occasions be relieved by an unpleasant smile. Yet for all his unprepossessing appearance, he had the pride of Lucifer himself. He insisted on his aristocratic descent.

Christianity may call all men sinners. Not Rilke. "Perhaps I am not a sinner," he would say.

Rilke was a solitary who spent, according to his French master, Paul Valery, "eternal winters long in excessive intimacy with silence." Such a man does not leave the makings of a lively biography. But out of his elected silence Rilke drew such lyrics that men have searched the bare facts of his life for the sources of his mastery.

Inner Space. The facts are bare indeed. Born in Prague 88 years ago, he died of leukemia in Switzerland in 1926; the events in between are almost ac counted for by the names of the countries he visited or lived in (Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Italy) and the handful of friends he made--the most important of them women. These ladies included the Princess of Thurn and Taxis and the fabulous Lou AndreasSalome, who was his elder by 14 years and who deeply impressed--besides the poet--Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. His love for Lou Andreas was a lifelong though mostly distant affair, interrupted briefly, as Biographer von Salis dryly observes, by his marriage to Clara Westhof. In an age that is congesting toward total togetherness, when even a Wordsworth can only wander lonely as a crowd, the solitary figure of Rilke commands something somewhere between awe and irritation. He sought Weltinnenraum--literally, "inner-world-space," the landscape of the mind that can be seen only by introspection.

Were it not for Von Salis, personal knowledge of this most private of men would be largely left to the colored memoirs of the ladies of his life. Von Salis, formerly professor of history at the Swiss Institute of Technology, was a young man when he knew Rilke during the last seven years of the poet's self-exile in Switzerland, and his partial biography has been a primary source of countless articles and other writings on Rilke since it was first published in 1936. It has now appeared for the first time in English, translated by Norah Kelsall Cruickshank, an English poet.

Von Salis' book begins with the poet in the summer of 1919, after "five impenetrable, sterile years, interrupting all genuine life." War was intolerable for a man who found civic peace too much. He had been drafted into the German army, but the minute the war ended he fled to Switzerland, "as animals go when the closed season is over."

In Switzerland he attained a sort of civic asylum. Patronesses supplied chalets and chateaux. He completed the Duino Elegies, begun at Princess Thurn and Taxis' castle on the Adriatic near Trieste; she celebrated the event with a ceremonious visit, during which the poet recited the whole work to her.

Nameless Shame. Von Salis has few such events to record: A visit to an abandoned chapel to put flowers on the altar or "a feast of reconciliation" (i.e., a chat) with a tardy postman are typical adventures. By common standards, Rilke did not "live" at all. The events of his life took place within his poetry.

In Rilke, says Critic Hans Egon Hol-thusen, "we see the conquest of an originally Christian soul by an anti-Christian consciousness." In one short poem Rilke presents Christ's imagined prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane:

I am alone with all men's grief

Which I essayed to heal through Thee

And Thou art not.

O nameless shame . . .

Then they recounted that an angel came.

Why an angel?

It was night that came

And played indifferently with the leaves.

But Rilke's hard-edged cynicism is not to be equated with the currently fashionable syndrome of despair. He believed in no hereafter, but he accepted death as a just price for the gift of life. He is the voice of all whose worship goes to no Creator but to Creation itself. When he came to write his will, Rilke included a lyrical conundrum in which life and death became one in the symbol of the rose, whose loveliness contains nothing.

Rose, of pure contradiction, delight

in being no one's sleep under so many lids.

The complexity of his thought, and art are more clear in the German, where Lider (eyelids) also suggest Lieder (songs).

The paradox followed Rilke in a final irony. Picking such a rose in his garden, he pricked his finger. The puncture did not heal, and from this small clue his doctor discovered that Rilke had leukemia in a rare, painful and eventually disfiguring form. "Life is a glory," were among his last words.

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