Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

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 <title>Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff</title>
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 <title>Heresies Issue #3: Lesbian Art and Artists</title>
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 <publisher>HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics</publisher>
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 Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff
 </head>
 
 <epigraph>Paula Becker 1876-1907<lb/>
 Clara Westhoff 1878-1954<lb/>
 became friends at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen, Germany, summer
 1899. In January 1900, they spent a half-year together in Paris, where Paula painted
 and Clara studied sculpture with Rodin. In August they returned to Worpswede,
 and spent the next winter together in Berlin. In 1901, Clara married the poet Rainer
 Maria Rilke; soon after, Paula married the painter Otto Modersohn. She died in a
 hemorrhage after childbirth, murmuring, What a pity!
 </epigraph>
 
 <lg>
				<l>The autumn feels slowed-down,
				</l><l>summer still holds on here, even the light
				</l><l>seems to last longer than it should
				</l><l>or maybe l’m using it to the thin edge.
				</l><l>The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child.
				</l><l>You’re the only one l’ve told.
				</l><l>I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
				</l><l>Otto has a calm, complacent way
				</l><l>of following me with his eyes, as if to say
				</l><l>Soon you'll have your hands full!
				</l><l>And yes, I will; this child will be mine,
				</l><l>not his, the failures, if I fail
				</l><l>will be all mine. We’re not good, Clara,
				</l><l>at learning to prevent these things,
				</l><l>and once we have a child, it is ours.
				</l><l>But lately, I feel beyond Otto or anyone.
				</l><l>Iknow now the kind of work I have to do.
				</l><l>It takes such energy! I have the feeling l’m
				</l><l>moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,
				</l><l>in my loneliness. l’m looking everywhere in nature
				</l><l>for new forms, old forms in new places,
				</l><l>the planes of an antique mouth, let’s say, among the leaves.
				</l><l>I know and do not know
				</l><l>what 1 am searching for.
				</l><l>Remember those months in the studio together,
				</l><l>you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,
				</l><l>I trying to make something of the strange impressions
				</l><l>assailing me—the Japanese
				</l><l>flowers and birds on silk, the drunks
				</l><l>sheltering in the Louvre, the river-light,
				</l><l>those faces...Did we know exactly
				</l><l>why we were there? Paris unnerved you,
				</l><l>you found it too much, yet you went on
				</l><l>with your work... and later we met there again,
				</l><l>both married then, and I thought you and Rilke
				</l><l>both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness
				</l><l>between you. Of course he and I
				</l><l>have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous
				</l><l>of him, to begin with, taking you from me,
				</l><l>maybe I married Otto to fill up
				</l><l>my loneliness for you.
				</l><l>Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,
				</l><l>he believes in women. But he feeds on us,
				</l><l>like all of them. His whole life, his art
				</l><l>is protected by women. Which of us could say that?
				</l><l>Which of us, Clara, hasn’t had to take that leap
				</l><l>out beyond our being women
				</l><l>to save our work?
				</l><l>or is it to save ourselves?
				</l><l>Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
				</l><l>Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
				</l><l>giving birth to the child.
				</l><l>I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
				</l><l>My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
				</l><l>in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem¬
				</l><l>a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
				</l><l>I was your friend
				</l><l>but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
				</l><l>In the dream his poem was like a letter.
				</l><l>to someone who has no right
				</l><l>to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
				</l><l>who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don’t I dream of you
				</l><l>That photo of the two of us—I have it still,
				</l><l>you and I looking hard into each other
				</l><l>and my painting behind us. How we used to work
				</l><l>side by side! And how l’ve worked since then
				</l><l>trying to create according to our plar
				</l><l>that we’d bring, against all odds, our full power
				</l><l>to every subject. Hold back nothing
				</l><l>because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies
				</l><l>in the things we used to talk about:
				</l><l>how life and death take one another’s hands,
				</l><l>the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.
				</l><l>And now I feel dawn and the coming day.
				</l><l>Ilove waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
				</l><l>come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel
				</l><l>it is myself that kicks inside me,
				</l><l>myself I must give suck to, love..
				</l><l>I wish we could have done this for each other
				</l><l>all our lives, but we can’t...
				</l><l>They say a pregnant woman
				</l><l>dreams of her own death. But life and death
				</l><l>take one another’s hands. Clara, I feel so full
				</l><l>of work, the life I see ahead, and love
				</l><l>for you, who of all people
				</l><l>however badly I say this
				</l><l>will hear all I say and cannot say.
			</l>
 </lg>
				<byline>Adrienne Rich</byline>
 </body>
<back> 
				Several phrases in this poem are drawn from actual diaries and
				letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker, as translated from the
				German by Liselotte Erlanger. (No published edition in English
				of these extraordinary writings yet exists.) Rilke did, in fact,
				write a Requiem for Modersohn-Becker. Perhaps this poem is
				my answer to his.
				This poem will be included in a forthcoming book to be enti¬
				tled The Dream of a Common Language.
			</back>

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