by J. D. Landis
Schumann balanced the painting on his new inkstand and unfolded the shawl. Tears filled his eyes as the image held beneath his friend’s familiar wrap was revealed. He picked up the painting in both hands and brought it close to his face. “How long I’ve waited for this.”
“She’s been afraid you’ve forgotten her.”
“I could no longer see her. Now I can see her.”
“I shall tell her of your tears, though they’ll bring the same to her.”
Schumann put down his wife’s portrait and wrapped it carefully in the boy’s shawl.
“What else at home?”
“Felix has his first tooth. It’s come in on the bottom, in the front. He feels it with his tongue and tries to see it. He goes quite cross-eyed in the effort.”
Schumann smiled but said, pointing at the hidden woman, “What else of her?”
“She travels. She performs and teaches. She plays my music now in public. She says it reminds her of playing yours—no one likes it!” Brahms in delighted solidarity grasped Schumann by both shoulders. “Verhulst hated it in Holland. Jenny Lind in Hanover. Everyone else everywhere else.”
“Everywhere else where?”
“I have been with her to Hamburg. My mother and father were happy to meet her. They have agreed to let us stay with them in April when we are there for your Manfred. But first we are going to Cologne for the Missa Solemnis.”
“All the better to prepare for Manfred.”
“All the better to prepare for Manfred,” Johannes generously agreed.
“But more of where you’ve been. I am far better able to imagine what hasn’t yet happened than to picture what has.”
“I was with her as well in Hanover. And Lübeck. Then it was time for her to make that trip to Holland. I was filled with terrible pain while I watched her pack. You must be able to remember for yourself. Each piece of clothes, each shoe, each ribbon, each sheet of music is like something stolen from oneself. I couldn’t bear to say good-bye. So I went with her on the river steamer as far as Emmerich. Then I returned home to see to your children in their mother’s absence. But after two days I could no longer bear it. I spent almost all my money to get to Rotterdam. But it was worth it! I was able to keep her company for six days until she left for Utrecht. And I to wait for her in Düsseldorf. But no sooner was she back than off she went again, to Berlin and Danzig and Pomerania, and I to you here to bring you news of her and her picture and cigars and the inkstand you wanted. And now that you have them, you should write to her! There is nothing more I should love to carry back from you than your love in a letter I might give to her with my own hand.”
Schumann looked about him in a panic. “But I have no paper!”
“No paper?” It was impossible from Brahms’s tone to determine what subtle difference there might be between incredulity and disbelief.
“No paper!” Schumann had seated himself aside his new inkstand, pen in one hand, forehead in the other, eyes on the paperless surface before him.
Brahms went to the door and opened it and called out, “Herr Nämlich! Herr Niemand!”
“What is it?” said whichever one of them it was, and with such haste it seemed superfluous to answer him.
“Herr Schumann says he has no paper.”
“More fugues?”
“Stationery.”
“Ah, a letter. To you?”
“What would be the sense of that? To his wife.”
“Of course.” He turned to go. “Paper,” he announced his commission.
“Thank you, Herr Niemand.”
He returned with but one sheet. Schumann remained poised to write, ink dripping off his pen onto the table, which Herr Niemand wiped clean before putting the sheet before him.
“Shall I wait?”
“I think you make him nervous,” said Brahms.
“The moon lightening the sky at full noon,” said Herr Niemand.
“Enough poetry, Herr Nämlich,” said Schumann, waving him off and in so doing sowing beads of ink like bullets across the gray frontage of his uniform.
As soon as Herr Niemand closed the door behind him, but even before he could resume his place at the window in the wall, Schumann attacked the paper before him, bringing his pen down toward it, letting it hover there above the paper without touching it, and then bringing it back, looking at the full quota of ink upon its nib, nodding in agreement with himself that he needed no more ink, and once again stabbing toward the paper, without so much as writing a word or even depositing a dab of ink within the chaste silence.
Brahms took the pen from his hand. “You are overwhelmed with feeling. You have too much to say to say it. Come, let’s play together.”
Schumann resisted for a moment his friend’s hand hooked into his elbow to take him from the paper he stared at quite as if it were the woman herself to whom he could not move the words he held within. Were it not for the portrait wrapped up in the shawl, he would not see her at all.
“What shall we play?” asked Brahms as they walked arm in arm to the piano.
“Do you recall my Julius Caesar arrangement for four hands?”
Brahms grinned. “After you.” He motioned for Schumann to sit at the bench where he would take the lead.
Schumann pushed away and took the left side of the bench. “I am the bass.”
They began together but soon diverted.
Brahms laughed. “We need to practice. I should move in with you.”
“Out of tune,” said Schumann.
“Oh, I should think we’d get along just fine.”
“The piano!”
Brahms rested his head for a moment on Schumann’s shoulder. “I knew what you meant.”
Brahms signaled the time of his departure by retrieving his shawl from around the painting.
“I shall walk you to the station,” said Schumann.
“Are you allowed?”
“Of course. I may go anywhere I like.”
“With the likes of me?”
“I doubt it.”
“Let me get my coat.”
Johannes found Herr Niemand outside the door.
“May Herr Schumann walk me to the station?”
“Ask the doctor.”
“Where is he?”
“Herr Nämlich!”
Herr Nämlich led Brahms to Dr. Richarz.
“May Herr Schumann walk me to the station?”
“Your idea or his?”
“Mine.”
“Tell me the truth, Herr Brahms.”
“His.”
“It doesn’t matter which. Of course he may walk you. Discreetly attended, needless to say.”
“Why did you ask me whose idea it was?”
“How better to learn about someone than to study someone he loves?”
“Why, then, won’t you permit his wife to visit him?”
“She’s never asked to visit him.”
“Only because she’s frightened of what she might see.”
“What she would see would frighten her even more should she come here to see it.”
“It would be worse than she imagines?”
“Her presence would make it worse than she imagines. One step at a time, Herr Brahms.”
“Do you refer to my visits?”
“I refer to the exchange of correspondence between them. No one more than I wishes that they be back together.”
“Except for me.”
Brahms and Schumann walked past the station and all the way into Bonn. They visited the cathedral and the Beethoven monument in the Münsterplatz and then had a glass of wine each at the Star Family Hotel, while Herr Nämlich or Niemand was forced to wait outside in order not to upset his patient.
On the way back to the station, along the Endenich Road, Schumann borrowed Brahms’s spectacles and, until the time at the station itself when he hugged Brahms and kissed him tenderly and reluctantly returned these spectacles, saw himself see himself see the world as Brahms saw it.*
*While it was not to Schumann but in a June 1854 letter to Joseph Joachim that Brahms confessed he “could no longer love an unmarried girl” (in the same letter in which he told their mutual friend, “I often have to restrain myself violently from just slipping my arm around Clara”), he and Schumann had discussed the idea in Düsseldorf. Schumann, in urging Brahms to borrow from his bookshelves Ivan Turgenev’s “Diary of a Superfluous Man,” reminisced about the spring of 1847 when Turgenev’s married mistress and Clara’s great friend, Pauline Viardot, appeared in Dresden in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Turgenev was with her, as was her husband and their daughter, and while the Schumann children played with Louise Viardot, Turgenev spoke man to man, artist to artist, to Schumann, in the first regard telling him he had never understood passion for a young girl and much preferred a married woman and in the second proclaiming, “It is never good for an artist to marry.” It was too late for Schumann (who certainly did understand passion for a young girl) to heed such advice; but Brahms, perhaps because it came from Robert, seemed to take it to heart.
Endenich
MARCH 12, 1855
I can’t stay here any longer; they don’t understand me.
Robert Schumann
“What happened last night? Herren Nämlich and Niemand were most horribly disturbed by your—”
“It was I who was disturbed. They were inconvenienced.”
“By your anoesis.”
“Speak German, doctor.”
“By your delirium.”
“I was pursued by Nemesis.”
“In what form?”
“Female.”
“I meant, was it in your mind, or did it actually appear?”
“She. Nemesis is a woman.”
“My question stands.”
“In the form of a woman, then. A goddess. And she did actually appear. Whether it was in my mind or in the world itself is a question no man can answer.”
“Of course not. Only you can answer that.”
“I meant, whatever happens in anyone’s mind is indistinguishable from what happens in the world. One’s mind is the world. Those who give expression to it are what we call artists.”
“You needn’t condescend to me, Herr Schumann. I am a champion of artists.”
“Is that why you have so many of us here in Endenich?”
“There are so many here in Endenich because they believe what you do.”
“I believe I was pursued by the goddess who allots to mortals a precise balance of happiness and sorrow. ‘The weight of fortune’s smile upon you has been too great,’ she said to me. ‘Wife. Children. Music. Brahms. It’s time for you to suffer.’ You, too, I think, doctor, would attempt to vanquish such a woman. I was frightened. I asked my attendants to lie down with me. They did, on either side, curled up against me. But while both fell asleep, I wept the whole night long in fear and sorrow. I was reminded of the night I learned Schubert died—embraced by sleeping men and yet unshielded from desolation. Nemesis continued to pursue me. I was defenseless.”
“Yet Herr Nämlich complains of a bite upon the hand.”
“How strange. It tasted like Herr Niemand.”
“That’s not funny, Herr Schumann.”
“When you weep, do you say, ‘That’s not sad’?”
“What I find sad is your dream of Nemesis. Haven’t you suffered enough? Isn’t the balance in your life already toward sorrow? Come. Tell me. Fill in the blanks.”
“I was born.”
“I’m not of the school that equates existence with pain.”
“I lived.”
“I’m not of the school that equates experience with anguish.”
“I died.”
“In the river?”
“Here. In this bed.”
“When?”
“I’m not of the school that equates time with experience.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“I take you too seriously to mock you, Doctor Richarz.”
“Is this not the ultimate mockery—to mock and disavow mockery and in the disavowal to mock further?”
“You drive me insane with the curlicues of your mind.”
“I merely express what’s in yours.”
“Well, then, why don’t you fill in the blanks?”
“Because they would be my blanks, Herr Schumann. And you would be bored to death. Doctors are forever students and suffer from the disposition of students, which is to learn partial truths and to impart them as whole truths. But you—you made music, sir. And now, for the most part, you make music no more. Music’s what exalted you, and music’s what cast you down. So let me hear the notes between the notes.”
“We call those rests.”
“Fill in the blanks, Herr Schumann. Or, if you would, the rests.”
“I was born in 1810. I was removed from my father and my mother by illness and war in 1812. I met Agnes Carus in 1824. I was taught by her, without her knowledge but not beyond her suspicion and delight, the perishable pleasures of self-abuse, in case that might be of interest to your investigation. My sister killed herself in 1826. I went quite mad. So did my father—mad enough to die within the year. Schubert died in 1828. I went quite mad. As who wouldn’t? The world should have stopped. But it didn’t. So I went quite mad over that as well. That same year, I met Clara Wieck. She was eight years old. That I didn’t have the sense to fall in love with her immediately, and save myself drunken nights in the arms of people who may not even have existed, has driven me quite mad in retrospect. I became a nine-fingered pianist in 1832. That did not so much drive me mad as result from a madness of which I was not aware. In 1833 I met Ludwig Schunke and in 1834 I lost him. The combination, which itself was entangled within my engagement to, and then my disengagement from, Ernestine von Fricken, if I remember her name correctly, drove me mad. Two years later my mother died. This did not drive me mad. Perhaps that was because at the very same time, my love for Clara Wieck, and hers for me, was acknowledged in the most blissful possible manner. Indeed, I sought life in her arms on my way toward the embrace of the death of my mother. I was madly in love and thus believed that my mind had been freed forever from madness itself. But I hadn’t reckoned with her father. His opposition to our love drove me as mad as did his concurrent approval of my compositions. I’m sure you read about us in the newspapers. We married when she was one day shy of legal age. I surrounded the marriage, on both sides, with music, huge outpourings of music that so long as I was writing it seemed to hold off madness. That and the love of my wife. Who could have guessed that such legal and religious sanction as is granted by state and church would prove so aphrodisiac. And yet, the very avidity of my music- and love-making drove me mad again. Overworked in the former, I accelerated the latter. We had our first child. I wrote my chamber works for strings. I stopped writing. This produced in me a different kind of frenzy—it remained within and ate away at me from the inside out. An artist at work is merely mad; an artist not at work is wholly mad. At the end of 1843, I couldn’t sleep and yet awoke each morning swallowing my tears in great draughts trailing from my eyes. I accompanied her tour of Russia—four months in Russia! It was winter. We froze—where was the eiderdown! I stopped speaking there. People would ask me questions, and I would pull my hair over my eyes and whistle. She answered for me—I loved to hear her French. When one’s lover speaks in a language not her own, she embodies an unorthodoxy quite alluring. She became pregnant for the third time in Russia. Three times in three years! By now we should have sixteen children. If Russia did not make me mad, and it did, returning to Germany should have. And it did. I was dragged around like a disease in search of a cure. We went up the Ramberg, and when I looked down I went mad. We waltzed along the River Bode before descending into the Baummannshöle. I thought of the stalactites as alive, giving forth resounding snorts of endless troubled sleep in which I heard the sounds of Faust’s Walpurgis Night. I was hypnotized and magnetized and hydroized and Dresdenized. But it was only thr
ough the study of fugues that I became better. Counterpoint demands a concentration worthy of the dead. But in 1846 I went mad again—there was a singing, humming, ringing in my ears as I wrote my second symphony. The bassoon in the adagio became a woeful sound that trailed me like a tail. I itched all over but could not reach to scratch because of vertigo. I took the cure at Norderney and stood with Clara in the baths as the water turned red between her legs and our child swam away invisible. I went quite mad all over again. In Vienna too, that year, where she played my piano concerto, and the orchestra my symphony. The reception was very cold. To my music. Not to her playing of it. But she was bitter. I had never heard her so bitter. Finally I shushed her indignation and said, ‘Be calm, dear Clara—in ten years it will all be different.’ It is ten years now, and it is not different at all. I am still sick, and she still plays the piano beautifully. Or does she? Or am I mad to ask? They measured my head that year. Dr. Helbig wanted to make a plaster cast of it. I would not let him but caused him great jealousy when I allowed Dr. Noël to perform a phrenological examination in which he read my head like someone looking for crab lice. Every furrow traced, every fissure tracked, every burgschrund skied and burrowed, every mole and pimple squirmed, every invisible worm sought in vain. And when it was all over … when I had been measured and fractionalized and proportionated, Dr. Noël came to the conclusion, upon the evidence of my very own head, that I am ridden with music and with anxiety. Music and anxiety! Anxiety and music! Dr. Richard Noël must be a genius! Who would have guessed! Music and anxiety. Then came the war. I loved the war. The worse the world, the better I. If that were true for everyone, we’d have no war and I’d be miserable all the time instead of every other year. Have you noticed, doctor? I went mad almost every even-numbered year. Until the war. The revolution saved me. We moved to Düsseldorf, and then I wasn’t mad again until 1851. We lost another unborn child in 1852. I went quite mad. I lost my job. I went quite mad. Brahms arrived. I recovered completely. You see, doctor, I didn’t want to die. I tried to kill myself precisely because I wanted to live. Doctor? Doctor Richarz? Are you awake?”
“If I told you I had gone to sleep in order to listen to you, what would you say?”
