Review of The Only Song We Have by Lawrence Kessenich
Published by Pierian Springs Press, Sheridan Wyoming. 2026
Review by Marcus Breen
Creative lives offer insights into the human condition that are not replicated elsewhere. No one reads a biography of a business executive to discover insights about the meaning of life and relationships: at least I don’t. Then again, if I was obsessed with learning the nefarious ways of making money by robbing the poor and enriching myself, then business biographies would take me to the ethically challenged world of all-money-all-the-time, or more technically “economism.” Somewhat ironically, artists and creative people offer insights to the human condition because their work reaches the public through the commercial processes of business.
In contrast, this well-conceived short novel by Lawrence Kessenich illustrates the way in which artistic creativity takes a front seat among those artists who make outstanding contributions to the history of human development and knowledge, while necessarily accepting the less savory work of business. Without the business, it would be unlikely that much attention could be drawn to the artwork, leaving it unsold. This connection to the market, makes the artists’ reputation, and often is the source of an income with which to manage the daily routines of life. Consequently, behind every great sculptor and poet is a committed business network, informed by someone who “gets” the work and commits to promoting and commercializing it.
Of course, as the wonderful, late Australian art critic Robert Hughes pointed out, sometimes the market is the most foolish force at work in bringing ideas to the public that amount to rubbish. Hughes’s excoriating criticism of the “artist” Jeff Koons remains a touchstone for those interested in making distinctions between art as a response to the living world and commercial dross dedicated to decorating over-priced corporate offices.
No such dross is offered in Kessenich’s writing about the relationship between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Artistically, the story Kessenich lays out, offers imagined self-analysis by Rilke of the relationship between himself and Rodin, two very different men who became friends and colleagues between 1902 and 1907. They both worked with and were promoted by art dealers and publishers who saw the brilliance of their work and brought it to the public. By the time Rilke met him in 1902, Rodin was well established, even a European celebrity as a sculptor.
This was an era in Europe when the world of art radiated in, around and from Paris. There was good reason for this, as Kessenich describes Paris in the mind of Rilke, as the magnetic force in European and western artistic creativity. There is good reason for this.
Paris was the foundation place of emancipatory politics, much of it grounded in revolt, committed to removing the feudal system of slavery and monarchical authoritarianism, replacing it with democratic systems of government that continue to resonate today. The political climate that fed Parisian creativity included The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791-1792), a book that contributed to the foundational theory of French and American democratic ideology, published before the first mass working class effort to establish European communism in the Paris Commune (1871). In the latter case, Karl Marx was present through his journalism and his theory, while Fredric Engels’s advocacy for popular government “by the people,” reinforced the power of the revolutionary urge beyond Europe.
Although there is none of this radical political detail in The Only Song We Sing, there is a profound engagement with radical materialism, translated to artistic representation. This occurs through the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. In fact, Kessenich uses descriptions of Rodin’s sculpture-making method to explore the way art makes meaning through the appeal to the material world Rodin experienced then brought to life in clay and bronze sculptures.
This sensibility of experience translated to static imagery, is what makes art either a creative act of resistance in reconceptualizing the human condition, or when it is missing, merely decorative dross. Kessenich describes the divergence between the two characters in this book by drawing on this comparison that drives the dynamic of the characters’ relationship. Put schematically,
Rodin is the materialist, working with his hands to give the clay he molds the representational quality of his experiences. In contrast, Rilke is the idealist, writing poetry from the lofty perch of Germanic disengagement with experience. The book turns around these two philosophical modalities of art practice and theory: materialism and idealism.
As Kessenich has Rilke note in a personal reflection: “For years, I had ignored the physical world, living purely in the realm of thought and feeling and spirit.”
This materialism has a sensuous elements. Rodin had intimate relations with many of the female models who posed for him, suggesting that he was a serial philanderer in a somewhat negative light. Kessenich offers a kind of American morality to this aspect of Rodin’s story. This is aspect of Kessenich’s interpretation of Rodin fails to fully comprehend the uninhibited instincts of the materialist Rodin. He was not married, and as a free man engaged in the realization of the erotic relationships translated into sculpture. There is a kind of puritanism at work here that rejects the urges of lust and desire by Rodin, however much it might be unpleasant to the modern moral mind.
Despite this the relationship between Rodin and Rilke is based on mutual admiration, colorfully traced in The Only Song We Sing. Indeed, the book offers a contemporary vision about the creative communion between two outstanding artists and how they navigated their lives, leading to the curious arrangement in which Rilke became Rodin’s live-in administrator-secretary.
Rodin becomes something of a mensch for Rilke, because he encourages Rilke to write, and more importantly to work like he does, almost non-stop. Kessenich has Rilke ponder:
I was taken aback that the Master would speak about writing poetry, having never written any himself. It is one thing to reproduce or interpret things in clay, marble and bronze, to create something so boldly physical. It is quite another to sift thoughts through the brain and put abstract words on a flat piece of paper. That act was so much more detached from the world, so much more fleeting, so much harder to “work” at, in my experience, because it was so ineffable. I wished I had the talent to form things with clay, to sculpt them from stone. It was so much more “real.” Could I learn from him how to see the world anew? Would the poetry sing itself through me if I could truly see?
Written in the first person – as if Kessenich is Rilke – the story unfolds as the two artists meet and get to know and appreciate each other. It becomes increasingly apparent to Rilke that Rodin’s work is created as an extension of the material world defined by his experiences, this seems to Rilke to be a revelation. The imagined conversations between Rilke and Rodin and Rilke and Rilke’s companion Rose, among others, take place mostly in Rodin’s home and studio in 1902 in Meudon, France, then in Rilke’s mind during his retreats to Paris to write poetry, all while planning and collecting material through interviews and observations of Rodin for a biography.
The tension that emerges in Rilke the poet, as he grows to comprehend what Rodin “the Master” draws on for his inspiration, is effective, if at times unnerving. The material world is something Rilke learns to interpret, by watching the Master.
A serious quibble arises in the language: who these days would want to refer to a great person as “Master” as Rilke does? (For example, not even President Donald Trump’s most ardent MAGA followers take on that disposition). More tellingly, the use of the word “Master,” references the last days of feudal hierarchical relationships. Rilke is corrected to stop referring to Rodin as “Master,” yet almost cannot help himself.
What is more telling for the philosophically inclined, is that the Master-servant relationship was a key aspect of the 1807 book, The Phenomenology of Spirit by the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His “invention” of modern ideas about contradictions as the dialectic, emerged from this study. It is difficult not to believe that Rilke was not playing a little with the idea, as Kessenich has Rilke use the word “Master,” and as it transpires, Rilke becomes something of a slave in the sculpture’s home.
Rilke’s interest in Rodin was partly instrumental, a function of the need for the poet to make an independent living, rather than reply on funds from his father, so that he could write poetry. In fact, it was not as a poet, but as a journalist biographer and commentator that turned Rilke’s hand in a commission to write a Rodin profile that took him to Meudon. This proved to be a welcome turn in the poet’s career, because the book he produced about Rodin became a best
seller across Europe. It also became part of an elaborate series of artists profiles, known as Lives of the Artist Series (still available), with Rilke’s Auguste Rodin one book in the series.
In effect, The Only Song We Sing serves as an introduction to Rilke’s book, August Rodin. Certainly this was the case for me, as I sat out to write down this review.
Re-released in 2004 with a superb introduction, “Rilke’s Rodin” written by Willian Gass, Rilke the writer is revealed with all of his elaborate language elocutions at work. He can be read as the man who Kessenich describes becoming worldly, and as such a materialist, or at least conscious of the value of the world of relationships, objects and contradictions. Here is Kessenich’s Rilke:
You changed my life, Master. You made me learn to stop and truly see the world, to take it in, and reflect on the physical. And that is now being reflected in my poetry. It’s much more grounded. My poems more often revolve around things in the world, instead of abstract ideas in my head. (66)
The end of the story is a testament to the generosity of Rodin towards Rilke. More than educating him about the “real world,” which could then inform his poetry, Rodin showed Rilke a level of generosity and care that is wonderful to consider. After employing him as administrator and a kind of business partner in his home, paying him while encouraging him to continue to write poetry, Rodin then “fired” Rilke so that he could return fulltime to writing poetry. This is how Kessenich presents the story, suggesting that Kessenich too sees and admires the humanity of Rodin, when today, he might otherwise be considered less than remarkable because he employed Rilke to do his business.
For his part, in his book Auguste Rodin, Rilke refers to love. Rodin “learned to embrace this Life with ever more faithful love. It reveals itself to him as if he had been initiated, no longer concealing itself from him, beyond any sign of distrust.” (83)
The collaborations bore incredible fruit for Rodin and Rilke. And now Lawrence Kessenich adds his wonderfully rich contribution.
*********** Marcus Breen is a professor of communications at Boston College.
