Longing Read online

  Longing

  J. D. Landis

  Praise Quotes

  —Los Angeles Times

  “J. D. Landis has produced a book as haunting and complex as the music of his subjects … I know no book that marries art and life so seamlessly; ‘If music be the food of love, here we have a feast.’”

  —Nicholas Delbanco, Author of The Beaux Arts Trio

  “Charged with the drama of passion, unrecognized genius, madness, and early death.”

  —Newsday

  “A magnificent novel—brilliant, stylish, passionate, and rich with wit and wisdom. J. D. Landis knows these complex people, artists and scoundrels alike, by heart; and he summons up the world they lived in with firm authority and authenticity. Longing is a triumph of imagination and intelligence.”

  —George Garrett, Author of The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You

  “Witty, precise, rich in historical detail … No couple better sums up the brilliance and intensity of the Romantic Age than Robert and Clara Schumann … Landis has a wonderful capacity for writing dialogue that sounds as if it’s coming off the top of the characters’ heads.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The themes of music, desire, and melancholy dominate this compelling novel … A nuanced examination of lives marked by tenderness, lost innocence, and longing.”

  —Library Journal

  “Glorious fiction … Finely crafted … [A] riveting tale of romantic longing … Rather than strive for literary or stylistic effect, Landis relies on the truths of Schumann and Wieck’s passion, writing with earnestness, playfulness, and fervor characteristic of the era he chronicles. Expansive and engrossing, this is historical fiction at its best, true to its subjects and steeped in the past.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A gripping real-life story full of love, music, madness, and intrigue. Brought to life through a fictive lens, this tale is utterly realistic in its history and wonderful in its sentiment.”

  —Booklist

  For Denise

  (“Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us”)

  and for Benjamin, Jacob, and Sara

  and in memory of

  Eve S. Landis

  (October 29, 1910–February 9, 2000)

  My first reader

  I am grateful to

  Walter Bode, Emma Cahill, Nicholas Delbanco,

  Henry Dunow, and Leslie Gardner

  for advice, support, reprieve.

  Author’s Note

  The epigraphs are archival. The characters are historical. The dates of events and correspondence are, when verifiable, authentic. The rest is fiction masquerading as fact, and the reverse.

  Prologue

  Endenich

  JULY 23, 1856

  If you want to penetrate the mind of an artist,

  you must visit him in his studio.

  Robert Schumann

  He lies in bed, waiting for Clara.

  Southeast, over the roofs and spires of Bonn and across the Rhine, his favorite river until it belched him back, the peaks of the Siebengebirge will not relinquish the sun. Each morning they grasp it at their back and tease him with it. Guess which hand.

  He has played the same game with his children. Of them all—eight, when he counts the dead Emil—he misses most the one he’s never seen. Felix. The mathematics of conception have proven sporadically diverting. Or what passes for diversion in an institution such as this, which, to give it its name despite the civilized beauty of its gardens and the willingness of his half-deaf doctor to engage in endless, intimate conversation, must be called a madhouse:

  Felix Schumann, born June 11, 1854, three months, seven days after his father had been taken to Endenich. Had begged to be taken to Endenich, though it was the sort of place he feared above all others. (Probably because he’d always known he’d end up in one. He used to fear death, too.) Conceived, therefore, September 1853. Which was precisely the month there appeared at their door in Düsseldorf an angel, a demon, a child-voiced boy of the vaguely familiar name Johannes Brahms, with long blond hair and blue eyes and strong hands and a face merely beautiful until he played the piano, and then it was transfigured.

  Were he to have another son, which seems out of the question considering the fact he hasn’t even seen his wife in the nearly two and a half years since he was taken to Endenich, he would name him Johannes. A daughter: Clara.

  And if Johannes Brahms were indeed the father of Felix, and therefore his wife’s lover, he would be Robert’s lover as well, for an absent husband resides as much within his wife as within Endenich, and her pleasure therefore becomes his own and the possession of her, too, the possession of himself.

  He longs for her. Cut off from her by mountain and valley, so much space and time between themselves and peace, happiness and suffering, he longs. That’s what desire turns to over time: long-ing. It doesn’t become merely protracted with the passage of the days and nights but intensifies into what seems an eternal cupidity. It becomes an emptiness unrelieved by either imagination or memory.

  It’s an emptiness he’s fed, ironically, by refusing to eat. He stopped eating in order to die. Therefore, Dr. Richarz had him fed with a tube. And a tube down the throat or nose, no matter how thoughtfully it’s been greased, oiled, waxed, or otherwise mollified, in and of itself ruins the appetite. To get him to eat, they destroyed his desire to eat. Where was the satisfaction in starvation after that?

  What they’ve fed him since is some kind of soup whose consistency reminds him of cold semen, washed down with wine because he still loves wine, almost as much as he still loves to smoke. And if there’s any reason not to die it is to continue to be able to have the occasional cigar, preferably during every waking moment, while sitting by one’s smoking stand with an atlas in one’s lap, plotting elopement into the great book of the world.

  Clara has sent him cigars now and then. When he smokes them, and draws the smoke as far down into his body as his weakened breath will permit, he imagines she had touched the cigar and that it is she who enters him, becomes the kind of vapor that invades him as she always has, carried by his blood to the very insides of his eyes.

  But he knows he won’t actually see her until he’s dead, and then what sight he has will be the sight of the dead, which if it’s anything is backward sight, memory alone. Death must kill the present, or otherwise it would be called not death but something else, like lapse or lull or interlude. But at least they would be reunited, not that a funeral makes for a particularly satisfying reunion when one of the parties is the deceased.

  It’s the opposite situation from that experienced by one of his literary heroes, Harry Heine, the greatest poet of Germany, who died scarcely five months ago, this past February in exile in Paris, after eight years in bed. Eight years in one room! Eight years—drugged up on the friendly morphine moxased into the sores kept open along his spine —in what he called his “mattress tomb.”

  Mathilde Heine disappeared from Paris and did not attend the funeral. But she was there when Heine died. Better that than the opposite, better to have one’s wife skip the wake but wake the skipper, as they say cunningly of a sailor finally home and docked between his wife’s legs.

  Schumann has set Heine’s poems to music. But what he sings now to greet the new day are his own silly, unpoetic words, the song he’s been composing in his head because he’s been too weak to walk into his sitting room to work at his piano, his square piano used by his old friend Franz Liszt at the dedication of the Beethoven statue just down the road in Bonn on August 1, 1845:

  I’m ending it in Endenich.

  I’m ending it in Endenich.

  My body’s shrunk, my mind is sick.

  I’m ending it in Endenich.
<
br />   “What is that you’re singing?”

  The sun floats off like a wedding ring from the fingers of the Siebengebirge.

  Day has broken. With the consequent dispersion of the night comes Dr. Richarz, as always.

  “My song.” He can scarcely hear his own voice, which is roupy less with sleep unslept than with death unattained. “The one you detest.”

  “I didn’t hear it.”

  “That’s because you’re going deaf.”

  Dr. Richarz comes closer. “And because you’re whispering, Herr Schumann.”

  “I don’t have the strength to talk!”

  The exertion makes him cough. Phlegm fills his throat like food.

  “I’ve told you before—I don’t detest your song. I merely disagree with it.”

  “We all end up …” Schumann starts to sing, but the words stick within the mucus.

  He tries to sit up against his pillows, but he can’t lift his body with his back or arms or hands. He needs one of those machines that Heine had with ropes and pulleys, though he’d no doubt think of hanging himself with it, just as Heine had considered. But Heine had been opposed to self-starvation on principle, and to Schumann it is the most, which was to say the least, meaningful of deaths.

  What’s the use of losing so much weight if you can’t even raise what’s left of you? He motions for Dr. Richarz to come closer. Only when he can smell the daylight in Dr. Richarz’s hair, and feel Dr. Richarz’s breath give his face its morning wash, does he settle back peacefully onto his mattress.

  Dr. Richarz pulls the sheets and blankets from Robert’s body.

  It always shames him to be exposed like this. He’d been getting rather fat before he came here, his features bloated, even the pupils of his eyes swelled large, to judge from the drawing done of him in 1853, not long before Endenich, by Jean-Bonaventure Laurens, whose sketch of Johannes’s innocent face sits right here by his bed, and not a day goes by, nor a candle-lit night, when he does not gaze into it and try to see himself. And now, because he’s starved himself, he is a skinny thing, almost fleshless, and what flesh remains hangs from his bones like laundry from a string.

  But he’s grown accustomed to the indignity of such exposure as well as to the evidence of an incontinence that even his two frisky attendants are unable to anticipate despite their bedpans and their clucking censure. He permits the doctor his examination.

  “Edema.”

  “Who?”

  “Edema,” the doctor repeats.

  “Beautiful name. Sounds Italian.” He takes as deep a breath as he can, as if memory must be swallowed before it can be released. “I was in Italy once… during a holiday from law school in Heidelberg… eighteen twenty-nine… paintings by Veronese…Tintoretto…a naked tour guide …female. Is your Edema Italian … and is Frau Richarz aware —”

  “Starvation edema, Herr Schumann.”

  “So ‘Edema’ is her surname?”

  Dr. Richarz shakes his head as he comes around from the foot of the bed. “You are suffering from starvation edema. It’s evident from the swelling of your feet. Do you know what your feet are saying to you?”

  “‘Let’s get out of here’?”

  Dr. Richarz does not laugh. No wonder: “That you are dying.”

  Dr. Richarz reaches down to take his hand. This is not something he’s done except to abstract the pulse. Schumann wonders if it is his standard gesture, performed at that moment when he finally gains in himself the courage to speak aloud what he and his patient have been speaking of silently for so long. How difficult it must be for him to lose someone, particularly a formerly robust if melancholy man barely forty-six years old. Endenich is, let it not be forgotten, an institution for those whose minds are sick. And while the health of the mind may, in Dr. Richarz’s passionate belief, be intimately connected to the health of the body, a sick mind is not enough to destroy the body in which it resides. No wonder Dr. Richarz has shoved tubes down his throat.

  “Have you nothing to say? Have I shocked you? You see, the reason I—”

  “Forgive me.”

  “For what, Herr Schumann?”

  “For wanting to die. Do you know the lines from Hölderlin?—‘I remind myself of the terrible truth: I am a living corpse.’ And that was only because he was insane and unable to write!”

  “Can you truly want to die?”

  “Would you not want to die if you were I?”

  “Not until I’d seen my wife.”

  “Can you possibly be so cruel?”

  “I’ve sent her a telegram. She’s on her way here now.”

  “Alone?”

  “With Herr Brahms.”

  “Yes. And what did your telegram say?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t…”

  “Can’t what—hear me? Will you force me to scream?—I can barely talk.” He coughs, dramatically, the way his children would in presentation of embellished evidence.”

  “The end is near.”

  “What?”

  “My telegram. That’s what it said. ‘The end is near.’”

  “I trust you’re not speaking apocalyptically.” Dr. Richarz shakes his head and squeezes Robert’s hand.

  Schumann is overwhelmed with feeling. Whether it is for Dr. Richarz, Clara, Johannes, or himself he cannot tell. But it seems to want to express itself in song.

  In his mind, whatever is left of it—and since it is his own, how can he tell?—he composes:

  I’ll soon be leaving Endenich.

  The way I came, a lunatic.

  But first—I hope it’s not a trick—

  My beloved comes to Endenich.

  Part One

  The Secret Listeners

  Zwickau

  JUNE 8, 1810

  Between end and beginning there will be chaos.

  Metternich

  On the day Robert Schumann was born in this formerly peaceful, formerly populous Saxon town on the left bank of the River Mulde, the loudest cries were not those of his mother, Christiane, being delivered of her sixth child. Her screams were eclipsed by those of her remaining neighbors, some of whom lined the streets and some of whom stood in their windows and all of whom screamed with even more passion and certainly less pain than Christiane Schumann. For who should be riding through town on his way across sweet Saxony, which hung like a plumped penis from the groin of Prussia, but the Emperor Napoleon (who could be heard gaily singing the aria “Gia il sol” from Paisiello’s Nina) and his brand-new, politically correct, lobster-and-sour-cream-ravening eighteen-year-old bride, Marie Louise of Austria, his second choice as a broodmare after he had been embarrassingly rejected by ripe Russian Anna, the fifteen-year-old sister of Czar Alexander. Napoleon had occupied Marie Louise’s country, as he was soon to remove his Léger-tailored suit to occupy Marie Louise herself (with—finally!—an heir, the future King of Rome), and had installed the cunning, ruthless, altogether magnificent Metternich as Chief Minister and Marriage Broker at the same time he disinstalled his own creamily Creole Empress Josephine, though he would never, nor would he want to, banish from his memory the rammish, faithless smell of her.

  As is the case whenever famous people pass through a town, they seem to come and go in an instant, even when their procession has been slow and stately. So it was with Napoleon and Marie Louise. Scarcely had their green carriage entered town from the west behind six Limousin horses than it seemed to disappear into the east, so that many people came to doubt by the end of the day and certainly by the end of the war that the imperial couple had been in their town at all.

  But what no one doubted ever was the passage of Napoleon’s army. Even those who hadn’t seen it remembered it. Through Zwickau that day, and for several days thereafter, marched nearly two hundred thousand men—and a mere several hundred women, all virtuous laundresses and seamstresses, absent Pauline Fourès, the no-longer-exigent mistress Napoleon had taken in revenge either for Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles or for her having nearly ruined h
im by buying five hundred and twenty-four pairs of shoes in the previous year alone. With their ten-mile column of food supplies and their thirty-one million bottles of wine and cognac and their thousand big guns and four thousand ammunition wagons and several million lances, sabers, and smooth-bore muskets, and one hundred and fifty thousand horses and nearly as many cows and their massive bridging equipment and forges, they were on their way toward Silesia and Bohemia, to conquer and thereby bring freedom and the rights of man and Chambertin to eastern Europe. The apple cores and horse manure they left behind seemed to have been left behind for good—their clean and crapulous odors were said to mingle in the air for the next century at least, only to dissipate in 1914.

  Robert’s father, August, was one of the few townspeople who did not stand at his window. This is not to say he stood by his wife either. Her labor was a long one, and while August would now and then look in upon her, hold her hand and with the back of his other attempt to wipe the sweat from her brow on this hot day in early June, he spent most of it in his study, smoking his pipe and working. He had worked, as he recalled, during the births of all his children, though when Laura had been stillborn just the year before he had stopped working instantly and had not gone back to work that day, though he felt quite guilty for wanting to go back to work.

  His work was book publishing. At the time, however, he was better known as a bookseller and so allowed that designation to be entered on Robert Alexander Schumann’s baptism certificate in Zwickau’s Church of Mary, into which even heathens ventured to see the retable done by Michael Wohlgemuth, whose reputation was based not so much on this work as on his having been the teacher of Albrecht Dürer.

  As anyone who has ever been a book publisher, or lived with one, knows, there is no end to the work. For every manuscript you publish, you read, to put it modestly, a hundred; the ninety-nine unhappy authors demand an explanation for your rejection, and so you must dream up something preposterous to tell them so they will not hang themselves on the truth; then you must take that one-in-a-hundred manuscript and read it again so when its author asks you your favorite part you can name ten of them, though it’s never enough; then you must correct the author’s spelling if nothing else and set the book in type and read the proofs and correct the proofs and read the corrected proofs and finally print it and try to figure out a way to sell it; and no matter how you have figured out a way to sell it you discover either that you have printed too many copies or too few, so that either you or your author is guaranteed to have reason to despair.