Date of Review:

05/27/2007

Published Work:

Lost Son, a novel of Rilke

Reviewer:

Vernon Peterson

Source:

The Oregonian

Review Excerpt:

"Rainer Maria Rilke's poem 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' is about the intense feeling inspired by the fragment of an ancient sculpture he discovered in the Louvre. Great art throws down a gauntlet: 'There is no piece of this that does not see you. You must change your life.'

Rilke responded to that challenge with a fierce, uncompromising loyalty to art. Forsaking family and health, he became the greatest lyric poet of the 20th century. His strange autobiographical novel, 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,' explores the abyss of man's interior life and solitude, sounding what would become a dominant theme in modern art. He wrote forcefully about artists Auguste Rodin and Paul Cezanne. He composed two cycles of poems, 'The Duino Elegies' and 'Sonnets to Orpheus,' in sudden bursts of creative energy that he claimed came to him as a gift, unbidden, with the spontaneity of automatic writing. And he wrote 'Letters to a Young Poet,' a passionate, romantic book that has inspired a will to change in many readers -- although the change from what to what is almost never as clear, or as dedicated, as it was in Rilke's case.  

But Rilke does inspire idolatry. Stephen Spender said that if Rilke cut himself shaving he would bleed poetry. John Banville recently remarked that the poet's 'admirers are convinced that it is to them alone that he speaks, and that they alone can hear the true voice.' 

Certainly one of these admirers is Portland writer M. Allen Cunningham, whose new novel 'Lost Son' is a fictional biography of Rilke, an attempt to re-imagine the poet's inner experience and character: 'his impressions, fears, ambitions, failures, friendships, and triumphs.' 

Rilke's life (1875-1926) was odd enough to sustain narrative curiosity. Raised among the German-speaking minority of Prague, Rilke's 'unfinished childhood' was haunted by his family's memories of a sister who died before he was born. His mother coddled him, dressing him in girls' clothes until he started school, and then, at age 10, his father enrolled him in a military academy, where he was thoroughly miserable. Somehow the damaged child forged himself into a poet of indomitable spirit. He married the sculptress Clara Westhoff, with whom he had a daughter, Ruth.  

But he rarely lived with them. Instead he drifted through many affairs, including a strange relationship with the enigmatic Lou Andreas-Salome, a friend of Nietzsche and Freud and one of the most admired women of the day. Rilke found temporary refuge in many corners of Europe but remained the stateless Romantic his whole life, without ties of family, culture or nation.  

Cunningham's writing is beautiful and fluid. I found myself torn, lingering over passages and yet eager to rush on. The same is true for his much-praised first book, 'The Green Age of Asher Witherow,' a compelling historical novel set in a coal mining town in late 19th-century Northern California. For a writer not yet 30, Cunningham has achieved a mature style and authentic voice in 'Lost Son.' He shows how Rilke cultivated the sense of dislocation that fostered his best work, especially during the years he lived in Paris 'namelessly alone,' witnessing the terrifying scenes he would mold into the feverish visions of his alter ego Malte, the Prodigal Son, 'a man who didn't want to be loved.' 

But I'm not sure it's right to see 'Lost Son' simply as a fictional biography of Rilke. It is also Cunningham's spiritual autobiography, his own fierce identification with the poet's commitment to art. The book begins and ends with Cunningham in Europe re-imagining Rilke's dark existence in the shadows of World War I, a 'nationless figure in a world gone mad with devotion to country.' The story constantly shifts between straight narration and an eerie second-person voice Cunningham uses to address Rilke directly, such as in this episode, when he watches over the poet's shoulder as he writes a letter:

'All the pent-up energy come of being misunderstood spills forth in phrases blunt and biblical. And you are writing to yourself -- to yourself amidst the impediments and unrelenting pressures encountered when one strives to live by an art born of the heart's deep and dumbfounded regions.'

Later he tells Rilke: 'Maybe I am sailing into the past, your past, and maybe this journey will endow me with new depths of feeling.' In these mesmerizing passages, the 'world gone mad' is as much now as then, the striving to live by art as much Cunningham's as Rilke's." —Vernon Peterson, The Oregonian

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