392 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
and reminding him that "it was her exclusive privilege to wash his
gloves" (von Hattingberg, 133)! A stark poem of 1915 describes the
relationship, very much as an object-relations theorist might see it (I
quote Michael Hamburger's translation):
Oh, misery, my mother tears me down.
Stone upon stone I'd laid, towards a self
and stood like a small house, with day's expanse around it,
even alone. Now comes my mother, comes and tears me down.
She tears me down by coming and by looking.
That someone builds she does not see.
Right through my wall of stones she walks for me.
Oh, misery, my mother tears me down.
His mother's unseeing gaze tore down his effort to build his experiences into a self; the gaze of the perfectly understanding woman
would build it up again. Except, of course, that only a "pure" self
could be shown to her.
It is not clear exactly what went wrong between Rilke and Benvenuta. He was terrified of actually meeting her - terrified, in part,
of his own capacity for coolness and withdrawal. Yet it was not a
simple case of the reality deflating the expectation. A few weeks
after they met, he was talking of "stay(ing) together all our lives";
and she was the one holding back. Though herself divorced, she was
conventional enough to be bothered by his having a wife and child.
Moreover, the dark, suffering side of his personality troubled her
deeply. She had had two frightening encounters with his sudden
psychosomatic illnesses; and an early letter about the "evil" and
"sickness" he found in himself "almost finished everything" (19).
Their climactic quarrel seems to have come when Rilke read her his
essay on dolls. Benvenuta had had an uncomplicated, confiding
relation to her doll, as a child; and she found the peculiar bitterness
of the essay "horrifying," to the point that she had to play a Bach
fugue to clear the air. There are probably a number of subtexts here.
Rilke's hatred of the too-responsive/unresponsive, "soulless" doll
may be a deflected hatred of his mother by way of the little-girl
identity she forced on him; so that Benvenuta may have felt his
barriers against women rising up unconsciously as he read-or,
indeed, motivating the reading. (The glorious rocking-horse, by
contrast, is praised for its power to carry him off over "famous
