Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [108]
In the course of it, within the distractions and constraints of family, Clara and Johannes reached their answer. His letters through the past months reveal that he had already been moving toward his part of it. As for Clara, surely she had not sorted out her feelings. For her there had been too many feelings in too many directions—inexpressible sorrow, romance, inspiration, sexual yearning. The Memory Book shows her exaltation at the beginning of the trip. History will never know what was finally spoken between the two of them in Switzerland, or not spoken. We can only imagine the look in Clara’s eyes, the shock and disbelief and fear, when she finally realized what Johannes had been trying for months to tell her: after all the misery and joy they had shared over the last two years, and the overpowering love that rose out of it, there would be no marriage.
“He broke away ruthlessly,” daughter Eugenie was to write. “My mother had suffered all the more as she could not understand the change in him.”49 Some of his reasons seem discernible. Given the sentiments of his age, which were his own when it came to families, Brahms would have required himself to support Clara and her seven children—but he still had little idea of how he was going to support himself alone. Maybe that contributed to the deeper concern that he had hinted at to Clara: to write music as he must, he had to shut away life, deny himself a family, deny even a beloved woman who wanted and needed him. If he was far from resigned to that, the onus of his task still weighed inescapably on him. And, consciously or unconsciously, Clara’s indomitable strength of will must have frightened him: unwittingly, with the best of intentions, she dominated everyone around her. If they lived in the same house his creative independence could have been threatened. That he would not allow.
If Brahms denied Clara, he also had to deny Robert Schumann, who may have ended his life assuming that Johannes would take care of Clara. If that is true and Johannes suspected it, that would have been a terrible burden: he would have spurned two people he loved, who had done more for him than anyone. Whomever he betrayed and to whatever degree, Brahms felt the guilt from then on. Eugenie wrote: “He had never gotten over the self-reproach of having wounded my mother’s feelings.”50
Clara may have had her own misgivings about marrying someone as young, inexperienced, and egocentric as Brahms. That summer of 1856 she was thirty-six, he twenty-three. She wanted to be done with childbearing and was determined to perform full-time. Yet it is inescapable that Clara did want him, for the same reason she had wanted Robert, however unrealistic that had been. She loved and admired Johannes, and for all her gravity Clara respected passion and had always followed hers, purely and directly. Eugenie: “Her own mind and heart were laid down on such clear and simple lines that she could not enter into the more complex processes of the human soul. She remained towards Brahms what she had always been; she loved him truly and wholeheartedly.… The admiration she felt for the artist was also bestowed on the man.” Eugenie added, “If only she had been able to understand the man as well as the artist!”51 At the same time, Clara was too proud and too recently bereaved, and in some ways too conventional, to make demands on Johannes. It was the man’s part to decide, hers to submit. So he took his first and last opportunity to escape her.
No details of how it transpired survive in their letters or in Clara’s accounts. In 1856, she wrote down what she wanted her children, and history, to know about the relations between herself and Brahms. Her journal, written for the record