Longing (64 page)

Romantic Medicine itself would certainly encourage someone like Herr Schumann to remember, for example, such a romance as this, regardless of the fact that it remained—outside the realm of fantasy and fantasy's normal means of expression in young men—unconsummated.

Organicism would not. A patient must be ripped from his past, protected from it, for within the past, with its roots sometimes cruelly wrapped around the patient's heart, lies the source of the patient's agony. Thus, those closest to the patient were often denied access to him. This frequently brought relief to all parties: The patient was refused permission to receive visits from those who exacerbate the terror his body is causing his mind; and those very terrorists were refused permission to visit their victims, who so often were those they had pledged to God they would love and protect.

In this, Dr. Richarz followed the example of Bruno Goergen, as he had in creating Endenich itself. Dr. Goergen had founded his own psychiatric clinic in Vienna at the turn of the century and had benefited enormously from this sudden accessibility to private care for the disproportionately large number of truly insane people spawned by the wealthy. It was Dr. Goergen who had first forbidden relatives to so much as look in on a troubled kinsman, who, he had noticed prior to this prohibition, invariably misinterpreted his relatives' consoling words as criticism, his fiancée's handwringing as gelding, and the tears and sighs of his collective family members not merely as omens of, but also supplications for, doom. In Bruno Goergen's most widely quoted, if controversial, pronouncement, “The patient all too often sees his dear wife as a mixer of poison, his loving children as demons, his charming home as a prison. He hears voices heard by no one else.”

As he knew was common for many people who were going deaf, Dr. Richarz also heard voices. But while they came not from the mouths of devils, as Herr Schumann reported his did, they similarly called his work into question. They came from himself, his own voice divided, as he felt himself divided, trapped as a doctor between the Enlightenment of the last century and its emphasis upon reason, and the Romanticism of this century and its emphasis upon passion. It was reasonable to assume that people went mad because of a sickness in the brain; it was also reasonable to assume that people went mad because of, for want of a better word,
life
.

Thus he was torn between a desire to chop open Robert Schumann's head to have a look inside, and to talk to him endlessly for as long as it might take to understand what happens when an artist is attacked by his art.

Dr. Richarz was born in 1812, which made him two years younger than Schumann, though each felt the other was the older, the doctor because Schumann had been the conductor of an orchestra (to say nothing of the indisputable fact that he
was
older), and Schumann because he continued to feel he had leapt from childhood to the doors of death without passing through the house of life. Artists were children, waiting for a plate to be passed, too often finding it empty.

The doctor had turned to psychiatry in general and organicism in particular when, as a medical student in nearby Bonn, he had come under the influence of Friedrich Nasse, arguably the father of organicism, to say nothing of having been a friend of Goethe, which did much for one's credibility. Dr. Nasse believed that all mental disease resulted from a disturbance of the heart and a disruption of the circulation of the blood. Therefore, instead of trying to impose his own morality upon his patients to get them to act the way he thought civilized, sane people should act, he treated them with medication (drugs and herbs both, including, during the period of his belief in autointoxication, cathartics) and physical therapy (saline baths, hydromineralization, climate cures, cupping, blistering, and the strangely pleasant, decidedly sensual bleeding by leeches).

After graduating from medical school and thus leaving the profound and benign influence of Dr. Nasse, young Dr. Richarz interned with Dr. Maximillian Jacobi at Germany's largest asylum for the insane, in Siegburg. Dr. Jacobi, however, believed quite the opposite from Dr. Nasse. He was convinced that in at least 80 percent of the mentally ill, their symptoms were caused by problems with hygiene, discipline, and morality. This resulted in an inordinate amount of scrubbing, screaming, and preaching throughout the many buildings of the Siegberg lunatic facility.

After eight years as Dr. Jacobi's closest assistant, Dr. Richarz quit.

“Not in a huff, I take it,” Schumann commented.

“Yes, as matter of fact, in quite a huff,” Dr. Richarz contradicted him.

“It took you eight years to work up a huff?”

“I am a doctor, Herr Schumann, not a musician. In my business we neither write nor receive reviews overnight.”

“So you earn your huffs?”

“The best huffs are those huffed slowly.”

“I should like to write you a Concerto for Huff,” Schumann offered. “But—”

“Now you are having fun at my expense, Herr Schumann.”

“—but no good piece of music has ever lasted eight years. Including Wagner's.”

Dr. Richarz wondered whether this was some sort of veiled reference by his distinguished patient to the fact that a number of his doctors in the past had told him that his mental problems were the result not of his writing his music too slowly but the opposite: His unceasing but obsessively alacritous labor, for example on the epilogue of
Faust
, caused him to display such symptoms as shivering, faintness, pedal frigidity, insomnia, fear of heights, antipathy toward all metal, keys in particular, which meant he kept getting locked out of his own house, just like his famous ancestor Gotthold Lessing, and, of all things, a dread of death. Dr. Helbig, his homeopathic physician at the time, told him these were precisely the symptoms found in mentally ill accountants, which was no surprise to Dr. Helbig, because music and accountancy were sister disciplines, given their governance by numbers. Was it any wonder that doctors, of all professions, most considered their colleagues to be idiots.

Leaving Dr. Jacobi's hugely disillusioning and disillusioningly huge organization, Dr. Richarz did what many idealistic young people do when they discover in a job that they have been violating their own principles at the same time they have been kissing the ass of the megalomaniac who happens to be their boss: He went into business for himself.

In 1844, in Endenich, a suburb of Bonn, he bought a beautiful seven-acre estate that had been owned by the Kaufmann family until during the Napoleonic wars it was taken over by law students from the University of Bonn, which like all good universities must, if it is wise, shut down when the soldiers start following, like a German lecher his German helmet, their bayonets through a city looking for students in whom to matriculate.

Upon his purchase of the asylum, which he came to call, resisting any doctor's natural temptation to give it his own name, Endenich, Dr. Richarz set about remodeling in order to make it the most comfortable, civilized, progressive, expensive, and exclusive private home for the insane in all of Germany. Most of the work his contractor performed was upon the main building, on the ground floor of which were built his examining rooms and living quarters for his nurse. On the first floor, above, was where the patients were to live, fourteen of them, no more. Dr. Richarz had been willing to sacrifice for the intimacy of truly personal care the income to be derived from a larger population of patients as well as the vastly greater amount of autopsy material, which to organicists was a kind of fleshly gold, particularly, of course, the brain.

So it was that when Robert Schumann was admitted on March 4, 1854, he was given a room on the first floor, just over the heavily bolted front door and seemingly cradled by the fanned hands of two adolescent oaks on either side of that door. It should be said, however, that he was one not of fourteen patients but of sixty. Dr. Richarz had either overestimated how much money might come in from so few patients or underestimated how many crazy people were being produced in Germany, particularly in the post-Revolution years, following 1848, a period not unlike that ushered in by Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Duke von Metternich after the Vienna Congress of 1815, in its social stagnation, its authoritarianism, its repression, its failure to unify Germany's thirty-nine separate states, and its utter defeat of the humanistic ideals of romantic liberalism.

Herr Schumann himself was a victim of this postrevolutionary trauma. But he didn't seem to realize it, because while people had been destroyed all around him, the composer not only went on composing but was, by his own admission, as contentedly productive as he had ever been. Whether this was madness or sanity, however, Dr. Richarz was happy not to judge. As noble as it may be to defend one's ideals, one's home, one's children, with force, it cannot be done successfully without losing one's mind. But the same might be said, to judge from Robert Schumann, of the writing of music.

But what music it was! Dr. Richarz was convinced Herr Schumann was a genius. But when he had told him so, Herr Schumann looked at him as if
he
were mad.

Not one to let such a look pass by unremarked, Dr. Richarz said, “If someone were to tell me I am a genius, I would certainly not look at him as if he were, if you will pardon the expression, a madman.”

“That's not a situation you need worry you may encounter,” answered Herr Schumann, in a rhetoric peculiar enough to force Dr. Richarz to ponder just what Herr Schumann might have meant. And by the time he finally captured the meaning of it, his patient was sitting there on the other side of the peculiar double-chair they shared, his hands over his ears, no doubt suffering from one of his aural hallucinations and certainly in no condition to be chastised for his sarcasm. At the same time, Herr Schumann was also staring up with a smile on his face at the stately Siebengebirge behind Königswinter on the far shore of the Rhine from whose waters he had been spared just, perhaps, that he might come here, though Dr. Richarz knew well that neither psychicist nor organicist believed in fate (which is where the Romantic psychiatrists diverted from both and in so doing took him with them down a path that could lead only to further confusion in his quest to understand the workings of at least someone else's mind).

The reason Herr Schumann was forced to stare
up
through his window at the Siebengebirge, and not merely
out
at them, was that he was no longer on the first floor. So great had his fear of heights proved to be that he had had to be moved to the ground floor and thus more construction done, and done quickly, for the nurse's one room was not sufficient as a place for a great composer to live. And so Herr Schumann's living quarters consisted not only of the nurse's old room, which had become his bedroom where he slept and, alas, smoked, in the half-shadow of his narrow French angel bed's canopy, but also of no small portion of Dr. Richarz's old examining rooms, which went into making Herr Schumann's very pleasant sitting room, furnished to his own specifications: with a comfortable fauteuil, in which he seemed able to sit for hours with his smoking stand at his left elbow and an atlas on his lap; this strange dos-à-dos, which had the two of them, and anyone else Herr Schumann might be permitted to see in time to come, sitting with their backs to one another; a delicate teapoy stand, on which, perversely, he insisted only coffee be placed; an ingelnook, in a cranny by the fireplace, on which Dr. Richarz could not imagine anyone sitting; and in the middle of everything the very same square piano played upon by Franz Liszt on that day, not long after Dr. Richarz had first opened Endenich, when he walked down the road to Bonn and saw unveiled in the Münsterplatz a Beethoven rendered not only immortal in bronze but forever beyond understanding.

Endenich

MARCH 17, 1854

I like to watch Johannes while he plays
.

Clara Schumann

“I have been sent to visit my son-in-law,” said Frau Bargiel.

“Sent by whom?” asked Dr. Richarz.

“My daughter, of course. His wife.”

“Sent for what reason?”

“Sent to visit him.”

“No. I meant, sent,
why?
Why were
you
sent? Why did she not come herself?”

“I have been tending to her in Düsseldorf. Young Herr Brahms and I.”

“Is she not well?”

“She has six children and another due in three months. Her husband has been taken from her. No, she is not well!”

Dr. Richarz touched her hand. “Such maternal passion.”

“May I visit him now?”

“No.”

“Is he sleeping?”

“To the contrary, I expect.”

“Then when may I see him?”

“You may see him whenever you like. But you may not visit him.”

“I don't understand.”

“No visitors.”

“But why?”

“Agitation.”

He led her from his office to Schumann's room. There were several small shutters in an exterior wall that looked like decoration and, but for one of them, were—decoration and deflection both. This exception he pushed aside, to reveal a peephole.

He looked first but quickly surrendered his spot to her.

Her son-in-law walked back and forth, back and forth, across his sitting room, heading each time directly for the piano and stopping just before he would bang into it. Finally, however, he did bang into it and fell to the floor.

She gasped.

“He hit the piano?” said Dr. Richarz.

“Yes.”

“And now he is on the floor?”

“Yes.”

“He is squeezing his hands together as if to wring blood out of them?”

“Why do you question when you know?” she asked.

“Agitation.” It was unclear whether this was an answer to her question.

Endenich

APRIL 20, 1854