Longing (69 page)

“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 through 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?”

“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.