Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “I’d say you’d gone mad.”

  “And yet you expect me to accept that you tried to kill yourself because you wanted to live?”

  “Suicide is always a great crying out for life.”

  “Such is the madness of madness.”

  April 7, 1855

  Beloved Clara,

  I have been reading in my magazines of the death in January of Gérard de Nerval. I sit up in my bed surrounded by innumerable magazines. They swim across and flop upon my legs like stingrays, begging for attention at the price of pain. One ignores magazines at his peril—they multiply with suffocating regularity. (Johannes even sends me back issues of the Signale.) The most recent issue (at least that I have received) of Dwight’s Musical Journal from America says—I have it open to the very insult—“Joachim is injuring himself with the amount of study he accords to the work of Schumann.” When you next speak to Pepi (I am allowed to call him that in the privacy of the nuthouse), please express in a single breath my regrets and my gratitude. Remind him how often people said of you, ‘What is she doing with Schumann?’ when the reference was not even to the man.

  When I read of Nerval, I wept. Not for him. For you. I have always thought of him as your lover, “my Nerval,” as you called him, and so did I tease you with him for all our years since first you went to Paris. La Revue de Paris prints his letters of love to Jenny Colon, which I could not read without imagining they were to you. In this sense, I am Nerval.

  Our lives are parallel. The year I married you was the year he first went mad. Perhaps he knew somehow he’d lost the chance at you forever. He was put into the madhouse of a doctor named Esprit Blance. But it was Nerval who became the esprit, like Plato’s bird I told you of. Heine called him “pure soul.”

  And then, the year we moved to Düsseldorf (which proved that a city can be worse than an insane asylum), Nerval moved back into Esprit Blance’s. And then two years later, when I went truly mad, so did he yet again, so that as I was coming here, he was going back again to his own Endenich.

  But they let him out for good! He put a blue ribbon round the neck of his pet lobster and walked him through the gardens of the Palais-Royal. He put his hat on the head of a hippo in the Jardin des Plantes and said he would have provided his pants too if there were room for the hippo’s ass. He kept around his neck like a cravat an old apron-tie he insisted had been the corset-string of Madame de Maintenon. He threw away what little money he had—literally; into the air, in public, all of it. He slept in the streets without his tepee.

  It was that apron-tie with which he hanged himself off the grating of a flophouse on that same street in Paris where you first saw prostitutes, rue de la Vieille Lanterne. Do you not see the parallel with my own flophouse in Vienna? On Schönlaternegasse!

  A raven, I read, hovered above his corpse. It was not Nerval’s raven. But his lobster had run off somewhere. The hippo was in the zoo, no doubt, unaware of the fact that the man who had given him his hat was dead. But there was the raven, floating just off the hair of Nerval’s hanging head, saying the only words it had apparently been taught: “J’ai soif. J’ai soif.”

  The same words I taught you when you were a little girl! Is it not amazing. That I should have been your Nerval all along.

  I see Heine has written to him, beyond the grave, “Poor child, you deserve every tear shed on your behalf.”

  So do we all.

  Tell our Brahms—your Brahms, my Brahms—that I shall not forget his twenty-second birthday a month hence.

  Comme un oiseau,

  Gérobert

  From the Daily Endenich Log of Dr. Franz Richarz, May 7, 1855

  All day Robert was unsettled. He spouted nonsense loudly and rapidly. When he walked in the garden, such drivel was accompanied by fierce gesticulations. It was not his usual talking to himself. He looked to be trying to fly away. Or to tear away that impenetrable veil that secretes reality from such fanciful notions of beneficent retribution as are entertained by the insane. Back in his rooms, he played the piano for nearly two hours, banging at it crazily and screaming all the while. It made no difference whether we observed him privately through the window in his wall or entered the room and stood by him like a normal audience at a musical soirée. He seemed as unaware of us as of himself or of the sounds he was producing. I cannot call it music. It was the destruction of music. In it I hear the destruction of its maker. (These notes are no place for such sentiment, but I am compelled to add that I am heartsick at the contemplation of this loss. Of music! Of him! Lost! I know no other way to put it.) If music itself could commit suicide, so would it sound. After dinner (which I should record he ate with unruly passion and in amounts unusual even for man who no longer seems to care about his size), he was violent with one of his attendants—he forced him from the room by threatening him with a chair. Feeling that neither the usual copper levigation nor even choloform would sedate him, I gave him an injection of morphine. If only his will to live remained as strong as his will to remain awake. His pattern of insomnia is such that he is touched by sleep at night as often as the rest of us (if I may be unscientific for a moment) are touched by an archangel in daylight. For he did not sleep despite so powerful a drug. He ranted and raved without interruption, in words that could not be understood. Not one of them. Yet they did not sound like nonsense syllables. He sounded drunk, though he was not or we would not have introduced within him the morphine to the wine he’d taken with his huge dinner. Once again, he threatened his attendants when they tried to calm and then to restrain him. I did not want to jacket him. So I withdrew, only to stare at him through the window in the wall until I fell asleep.

  Bruhl

  JUNE 4, 1855

  I had been longing for Johannes.

  Clara Schumann

  “It’s good to meet you finally, Frau Schumann.”

  “And you, Doctor Richarz.”

  “Why Brühl?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why not Endenich?”

  “You don’t want me at Endenich.”

  “Why did you express no desire to come to Endenich?”

  “Let me repeat what I said, Dr. Richarz: You don’t want me at Endenich. Is that not so?”

  “Madam, a woman of your renown and, I am told through the world but sadly not through my own experience, your musical abilities would be welcome at Endenich any time. I’ve never tried to persuade you not to come to Endenich. I’ve merely said I’ve not been able to permit you to visit your husband at Endenich.”

  “And why would I want to visit Endenich if not to see my husband?”

  “To see where he lives, perhaps. To see how he lives. It is a beautiful setting. It is not at all—”

  “My friend tells me.”

  “Herr Brahms?”

  “Herr Brahms. He and my husband …”

  “I know. It is very good for your husband to have such a friend. He’s the only person your husband seems genuinely to want to see. Others have come, you know.” He consulted his papers. “Your own mother, of course, though that was over a year ago. And she has not returned.”

  “You would not allow her to see him!”

  “Oh, she saw him.”

  “She did?”

  “Saw him. Saw him only. I couldn’t permit her to spend time in his presence.”

  “She never spoke of seeing him.”

  Dr. Richarz waved Schumann’s file as if to dispell both truth and falsehood.

  “Perhaps what she saw was not worthy of mention.”

  “This is my husband you’re speaking of!”

  “I meant, Frau Schumann, his actions. Not his person.”

  “Who else?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Who else has seen him … visited him?”

  “Herr Joachim. Herr Grimm, whose name belies his cordiality, though he seems neither the musician nor the intimate to your husband that Herr Brahms is. And there was just last month that old woman who is renown
ed for her affair with Goethe perhaps two hundred years ago. She called me—”

  “Bettina von Arnim.”

  “A shame that her name should be so well known. She called me—”

  “That she is allowed to visit, and I am not!”

  “Her effect upon your husband is negligible. Which is evidenced by the fact that she called me—”

  “My derrière was more intimate with Goethe than her entire body.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Goethe touched me when I was very young.”

  “Where?”

  “Need I be more specific? Is there a medical term that might help you to—”

  “What city? Where did you meet so great a man? He is one of those whose death casts into doubt his ever having actually lived.”

  “Weimar.”

  “Charming place.”

  “Until Liszt moved there.”

  “You know Liszt as well! I saw him at the dedication of—”

  “Herr Brahms told me he walked there with my husband.”

  “Yes. It’s our principal form of recreation at Endenich—to walk into Bonn to pay homage to Beethoven.”

  “That’s not Beethoven. It’s a lump of stone, as Mendelssohn called it … you needn’t ask … yes, he was our friend as well. If you want to pay homage to a musician, do so with Robert Schumann.”

  “I do.”

  “How? By keeping me from him?”

  “By keeping him from you, perhaps.”

  “You won’t let him come home. Do you also keep his letters from reaching me?”

  “How could you imagine such a thing!”

  “I haven’t heard from him since May fifth.” She produced the letter from her handbag and put it on the table between them. It remained in its envelope.* “He writes of being ill at ease but does not explain. He says there will be another letter to follow in two days. That would make it the birthday of our friend. He thought he’d missed the birthday. But he hadn’t. He would have been right on time. But the letter never came.”

  “May seventh, then?”

  “The birthday, yes.”

  He looked at his file.

  “He was not well on May seventh. Perhaps this explains why.”

  “The birthday of our friend should bring him joy, not trouble. He sent Chohannes himself a happy note, together with the gift of the manuscript of Bride of Messina.”

  “And what did you give Herr Brahms for his birthday?”

  “What one always gives—books. Some Dante. Some Ariosto. He may look too beautiful to be bookish. Too exuberant to be imagined in repose with a book on his lap and a cigarette in his hand. But he adores our library. If he weren’t so busy with the children and household matters, I’m sure he would spend more time there than at the piano. Though I did write him for his birthday a Romance in B Minor.* When he plays it, I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t find longing as thrilling as he does. I told him so. He’s not too young to understand me, but he’s too young to understand himself. Longing brings me nothing but pain. So when I hear him play my own piece, it makes my heart tremble with almost unspeakable sadness. I can’t imagine going through that again.”

  “Then he shouldn’t play it for you.”

  “Oh, doctor, it’s not his playing it; it’s my writing it. There’s a luxury in hearing one’s music that quite overtakes the melancholy.”

  “I should like to ask you more about Herr Brahms.”

  “More than what I might have given him for his birthday? Didn’t you think I might find that question presumptuous?”

  “And yet you answered it with such easiness.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “And you hide nothing?”

  “That’s not the same thing. But what I hide, I hide in plain sight. Do I not? He lives with us. He cares for us. I travel with him when I can and miss him terribly when I can’t. We see people together. What they make of us is not my concern. My friends lecture me about him. They tell me to pray and read the Bible. I prefer to read his letters—they contain more solace and virtue than any bible. Jenny Lind tells me she hates his music; it’s full, she says, of what she calls mistaken tendencies. But it’s my mistaken tendencies she means to cite. And I have a very good blind friend, who says she cannot stand the sight of him. Rosalie may have a greater sense of humor than Jenny, but she’s just as rigid in her orthodoxy and the condemnation of me and of him that it incites. Yet it’s he, who turns my friends against me, who is the best friend I’ve ever had. And my husband’s too.”

  “As I said, no one who comes to your husband is welcomed like Herr Brahms. They are like father and son, with the young one the father. And the son, as sons will, adoring the father with unashamed reverence and need.”

  “He loves him.”

  “It is very good of him to visit. When—?”

  “I meant that my husband loves my friend.”

  “He also understands that you love him too.”

  “I have loved my husband since the first moment I laid eyes on him.”

  “I meant that your husband understands that you love the same man he loves.”

  “I love him as I’ve never loved any man.”

  Dr. Richarz leaned toward her across the table. He was trembling quite as if he were the topic of conversation.

  “And your husband?”

  “I love him as I’ve never loved any man.”

  “I see.”

  “If you do, then you ought to be wise enough to cure my husband.”

  “When I say I see what you’re saying, I merely mean I hear what you say. I make no claims to wisdom in the matter. It’s hard enough for me to attempt to understand how body and mind relate; the heart, if I may use so primitive a term for the emotions, is quite beyond me. Or anyone else, I suspect. We have no doctors of the heart. For its troubles and its tempests, there are no cures and no fit counsel. So, yes, I might cure your husband one day, but never you.”

  “Cure him, and you’ll cure me.”

  “Only of your suffering. But who will cure you of your joy?”

  “What I suffer from is joy.”

  “It’s a wonder you aren’t mad as well.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?”

  She prepared to leave. They said nothing more until Dr. Richarz, opening the door for her, slowly completed a question he had begun to ask: “Your husband has taken a turn for the worse ever since what I now realize was the young man’s birthday. Birthdays are strange occasions in an asylum. They mark a sense of life’s end as much as its beginning. Every birth foretells a death, but to the insane such prescience is immediate. Life can become so precious that one throws it away for fear of losing it. I think it would benefit your husband to have a visit from Herr Brahms, if only so he not miss him so much. When do you suppose that might be?”

  “He and I are leaving soon to walk the Rhine.”

  “Perhaps your husband will be able to spot you through his window.”

  “My answer to such sarcasm, doctor, would be to throw myself through his window, should you only permit me that or any other visit. But we are not coming up the river in this direction. We are heading for the Neckar Valley. And on to Heidelberg.”

  “I hope you have a wonderful trip.”

  “By the way, doctor—I know what Frau von Arnim called you. She writes to me. Everyone who visits my husband writes to me. You have no secrets from me when it comes to my husband.”

  “She called me a hypochondriac. I don’t think she knows what it means.”

  “Whatever she meant by it, she was referring to your failure to cure my husband.”

  “If so, then there is a secret.”

  “And what might that be?”

  He said nothing more and headed back to Endenich, twenty-three kilometers distant, while she rode off in the opposite direction.

  September 4, 1855

  Dearest Robert,

  Our anniversary approaches yet again, and I
anticipate, in fear, the silence I have experienced from you for the past four months. Please do not let the day go by without some word. I know a date by itself is of mere symbolic importance, but to me the day we were joined in marriage is the day my life began.

  Do not forget our new address, which I have sent you before to no avail: 135 Poststrasse, where Johannes has a room of his own on the first floor and makes such music there as to reach all the way to you (if only you could hear it).

  A week or two ago we had a terrible thunderstorm that seemed to last all night (worse than the night Marie was born or, I wager, the one when Beethoven died).* The children were so frightened they went right to Johannes. First the little ones, then the big girls. He took Ferdinand and Ludwig on his knees, and the baby in his arms, but soon everyone wanted such comfort and courage. He made room for us all.

  I am leaving next month to play in various cities but will return home briefly for Christmas and can only wish you will too. Before New Year’s I shall have to leave again, this time for Vienna. It will be nearly ten years since we went with Marie and Elise. I shall play your music and Beethoven’s, and if the Viennese still cannot appreciate it I shall never play there again.

  Please, I beg of you, write back to me even if it’s only one word. It matters not what the word is, so long as the word is yours, addressed to me,

  Your beloved wife,

  Clara

  September 10, 1855

  Dear Frau Schumann,

  Your husband is unable to answer your letter of September 4. Far from showing improvement, he has been declining in health. We do all we can to keep him comfortable, and we continue to try to understand what is causing his illness. But I can no longer hold out any hope whatsoever of a full recovery. You would be wise to begin to come to terms with this difficult prognosis and its meaning to your life.

  Yours sincerely,

  Franz Richarz

  January 6, 1856

  Dear Pepi,

  It is three years exactly since our debacle in Hanover. As I am not one to let an anniversary pass without celebration, allow me to thank you again for canceling my string quartet and saving us both the embarrassment we suffered over my Fantasie. What a shame the critics were as deaf as King George was blind.