41.
BRAHMS ON THE TRAIN back to Hamburg, then. Still young, still slender, but already beginning to carry himself with the reserve of a much older man. Hurtling toward his next love affair, and the love affair after that, toward the series of women he will choose because each is impossible to attain. Running through the maze of his heart’s desire, one which will lead him, again and again, to the same plain-faced, plainspoken mother of seven children, fifteen years his senior, mirror of his genius. Home. He will dream of her worn face, the fullness of her body, the broad weight of her hands. He will long for her even as he hates himself precisely for that longing. He will refuse himself the consolation she offers, as well as the consolation of her children, burdened not so much by disappointment as the constant expectation that things will go wrong.
Women are fickle. Whores grow annoying. The young pretty girl who attracts him has nothing of interest to say.
Years later, upon learning she is dying, he’ll clutch at his heart and cry out to a friend, “Apart from Frau Schumann, I am not attached to anyone with my whole soul! And truly that is terrible and one should neither think such a thing or say it! Is that not a lonely life…”*
“Although he loved human intercourse and sought it,” Eugenie Schumann would recall, “he was always on the defensive when he was sought after. He liked to give, but resented demands or expectations. He selected his friends very carefully, and there were not many who passed muster. Once, during the last years of his life, he went so far as to say, in an outburst of moodiness, ‘I have no friends, and if anyone tells you he is my friend, don’t believe him!’ We were speechless. At last I said, ‘But, Herr Brahms, friends are the best gift in the world. Why should you resent them?’ He looked at me with wide-open eyes and did not reply. Brahms undoubtedly has suffered very much. He was very human, as human as one can be, and that is why he was also much loved.”†
How much I have possessed and how much lost! Where did I find the strength to live on for so much longer, and to keep working? Whence comes the courage of human beings? The children—and the artist life; it is their love and the compulsion of art that have borne me up…
—Clara, in her diary, 1884*
The thought of my D-minor sonata proceeding gently and dreamily under your fingers is so beautiful. I actually put it on my desk and gently, deliberately accompanied you through the thickets of the organ point. For me there is no greater pleasure than to be always at your side…
—Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1889*
Sources
Bickley, Nora, editor and translator. Letters from and to Joseph Joachim. London: Macmillan, 1914.
Burk, John. Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography. New York: Random House, 1940.
Harding, Bertita. Concerto: The Glowing Story of Clara Schumann. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
Holde, Artur. “Suppressed Passages in the Brahms–Joachim Correspondence Published for the First Time.” The Musical Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1959): 312–24.
Litzmann, Berthold, editor. Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms: Briefe, vol. 1 . Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1927.
———. Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters. Translated by Grace E. Hadlow. 2 vols. New York: Vienna House, 1972.
———. Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853–1896, vol. 1. New York: Vienna House, 1973.
Nauhaus, Gerd, editor, and Peter Ostwald, translator. The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann: From Their Wedding Day Through the Russia Trip. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.
Reich, Nancy. Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Reich, Susanna. Clara Schumann: Piano Virtuoso. New York: Clarion Books, 1999.
Schumann, Eugenie. The Schumanns and Johannes Brahms: The Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann. Lawrence, Mass.: Music Book Society, 1991.
Swafford, Jan. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
List of Images
1. Good Things I Wish You
2. Priestess
3. The Wine Cellar, 2006
4. Triptych
5. Nothing Is Real
6. Choose
7. Beloved Wife
8. Clara Schumann at Thirty-five
9. The Wife Stands Even Higher than the Artist
10. Restraint
11. Inner Concert
12. Self-Portrait: Gaela Erwin
13. Corner of Ponce and Dixie
14. Mind Full of Confusion
15. Frown
16. Sugar Loaf
17. Schumann’s Beethoven, 2006
18. Interior
19. Blessings
20. Gliderport
21. Things Between Men and Women
22. Düsseldorf, 2006
23. Outsider
24. As Long as I Don’t Take This Step
25. Passions
26. View from the Train, 2006
27. Parted
28. Gersau, 2006
29. Cherub
30. Wherever Life Takes Us
31. Clara
32. Brahms
Notes and Acknowledgments
All clutter-collages were assembled from published texts (acknowledged under Sources), quotes and translations, translations in progress, journal entries, handwritten notes, props, old portraits, new photos—in other words, everything and everything that cluttered my desk during the writing of Good Things I Wish You.
I am grateful to Gaela Erwin for permission to use, on Chapter 13, one of her many exquisite and unique self-portraits. Thanks to Michael R. Ansay for the use of his photograph “Interior” on Chapter 20.
The quotations from Berthold Litzmann’s German edition of Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms: Briefe (cited as Briefe throughout the text) are original translations by Winfried Reichelt.
I would like to thank my first reader, Sylvia Ansay, as well as Dick Ansay (who else could find a laser printer—on sale!—in the mountains of North Carolina?); Carolyn Broadhead; Jan Conner (for stories and a quiet place to write); Preston Merchant and CJ Hribal (for good advice and kind words); Stewart O’Nan (with whom I wrote, over ten years ago, a screenplay about Clara and Brahms); Felicitas Reichelt; the Ragdale Foundation; and the faculty, students, and staff of the MFA program at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, especially Lydia Starling and Pat McCarthy. Shari and Tom Goodmann: this book could not have been written without the music of your friendship and good advice.
I’m grateful to Jake Smith for recovering this manuscript after my old computer crashed and setting me up on a new computer (which had been sitting under my desk for a year because I didn’t have the energy to deal with it). Jake also developed the artistic design of my Web site. Thank you to Tim and Naoko Soderberg for help with my Japanese English and for suggesting the beautiful name Midori. Thanks to Laura Schalk for helping me out with French. Albert Uster, no longer with us, gave me all the right directions for finding exactly the Gersau I wanted to see.
Thanks to my life mentor, Deborah Schneider, for the best line in this book. Thanks to Claire Wachtel and HarperCollins for letting me take a few chances. Thanks to Sanna Mehlin Tilley, Marissa Matteo, Carla Garcia, Yolanda Jiminez, and, most especially, Ariana Ramieri.
And thank you, Genevieve Ansay, for suggesting the pitch-perfect name for the daughter in this book.
About the Author
A. MANETTE ANSAY is the author of eight books, including Vinegar Hill, Midnight Champagne (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Blue Water. She has received the Pushcart Prize, two Great Lakes Book Awards, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of Miami.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by A. Manette Ansay
Blue Water
Vinegar Hill
Read This and T
ell Me What It Says
Sister
River Angel
Midnight Champagne
Limbo: A Memoir
Credits
Jacket photograph © Wojtek Buss/Age Fotostock
Jacket design by Archie Ferguson
Copyright
GOOD THINGS I WISH YOU. Copyright © 2009 by A. Manette Ansay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* Berthold Litzmann, ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853– vol. 1 (New York: Vienna House, 1973), 73 (hereafter cited as Letters).
* Ibid., 88.
* The definitive book on All Things Clara is Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman by Nancy Reich. Also recommended: Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford. Three recent novelizations, in English, include Clara by Janice Galloway, Longing by J. D. Landiss, and Trio by Boman Desai. As an adolescent, I read and reread Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography by John Burk.
* “…my father always scoffed at so-called domestic bliss. How I pity those who are unfamiliar with it! They are only half alive!”—Clara Schumann, in a diary entry shortly after her marriage. Quoted in Gerd Nauhaus, ed., Peter Ostwald, trans., The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 63.
* Nancy Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84.
* Literally translated as “ Wieck sold pianos, gave lessons, and boarded promising students in the upstairs rooms, where he lived with Clara, her younger brothers, and, eventually, his second wife and their children.
* Nancy Reich’s excellent chronology (pp. 17–20) in Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman lists the destinations and durations of Clara’s major concert tours. The figures are extraordinary.
* Nauhaus and Ostwald, The Marriage Diaries, 84.
† Reich, Clara Schumann, 113.
* Ibid., 88.
* Ibid., 86.
* www.schumannzwickau.de.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 157.
* Robert Schumann Haus, Zwickau.
* Berthold Litzmann, ed. Clara Schumann– vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1927), 188 (hereafter cited as Briefe; original translations by Winfried Reichelt).
† John Burk, Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography (New York: Random House, 1940), 324.
* Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books,1999), 611.
* Nauhaus and Ostwald, The Marriage Diaries, 178.
* Ibid., 185.
† Ibid., 199.
* Waterfront bars frequented by sailors.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 1.
* Artur Holde, “Suppressed Passages in the Brahms–Joachim Correspondence Published for the First Time,” The Musical Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1959): 314.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 10.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 142.
* www.gaelaerwin.com.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 143.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 12.
* Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 119.
† Litzmann, Briefe, 61.
‡ Ibid., 37.
* Nora Bickley, ed. and trans., Letters from and to Joseph Joachim (London: Macmillan, 1914), 71–72.
† Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (New York: Vienna House, 1972), 81.
* Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 121.
* www.schumann-verein.de.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 37.
* Bertita Harding, Concerto: The Glowing Story of Clara Schumann (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 134.
† Ibid., 133.
‡ Litzmann, Letters, 33.
* The informal you pronoun Du was used almost exclusively among family members, husbands and wives, and those engaged to be married. Lifelong friends, even of the same sex, age, and social status, used the formal Sie when addressing one another.
* Litzmann, Letters, 20.
* Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 148.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 287.
† Eugenie Schumann, The Schumanns and Johannes Brahms (Lawrence, Mass.: Music Book Society, 1991), 152.
* Bickley, Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 129–30.
* Harding, Concerto, 234.
* “By rights,” Brahms would write to Clara in 1891, “I should have to inscribe all my best melodies, ‘Really by Clara Schumann’” (Reich, Clara Schumann, 202).
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 150.
* Schumann, The Schumanns, 157.
*From the Wieck-Schumann Inner Circle.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 185.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 198.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 222.
† Ibid., 223–24.
* Ibid., 227.
† Litzmann, Letters, 89.
‡ Ibid., 96.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 169.
* Litzmann, Briefe, 125.
† Ibid., 205.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 108.
* Schumann, The Schumanns, 154.
* Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 164.
* Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 119.
* Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 611.
† Schumann, The Schumanns, 156.
* Harding, Concerto, 226.
* Reich, Clara Schumann, 197.
Good Things I Wish You: A Novel Page 14