Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [206]
Clara’s own sufferings mental and physical were so unremitting after her husband’s collapse, and her resilience so heroic, that when it came to the misfortunes of others including her children, she tended to address them by grieving and weeping and entreating, but left it at that. Suffering was Clara’s normal mode of response, her way of showing concern. Performing was her religion, her only real therapy, and sometimes it was her cross. Besides a steady catalog of cuts, falls, breaks, and sprains, in later years she was afflicted with bouts of what seems to have been tendonitis and bursitis, and often played in wretched pain. If she could move her body and fingers she went onstage, regardless of what it cost her or anyone else. While one can’t exactly say that Clara expected the same of others, her own heroism gave her the hardness we find in her response, say, to Kirchner’s talk of suicide, and finally to the deaths of three children and two grandchildren, and the madness of a fourth child. Few people could match the tragedies in Clara’s life, or the temperamental depression that she survived for over half a century. Part of her hardness was that she knew that.
Clara had not gone to Julie during her ailing daughter’s crisis, and spent no more time than before with her other variously ailing children. She had to have felt guilty over that, somewhere inside her perennially melancholy consciousness, somewhere beneath her ingrained self-righteousness. Brahms’s letter about her performing struck through Clara’s self-righteousness, deep into her guilt. He never quite blamed her children’s sufferings on her career, but in the letter of winter 1868 he came as close to that accusation as he ever dared.
So in their exchanges of 1868 there is a buried dialectic—his anxiety for her children, her guilt over them. And as his letter shows, of the seven Schumann children Brahms’s thoughts were always most on Julie. He deliberately hinted at his feelings for this daughter: “the poor girl (of whom one cannot think without a certain emotion) … only I can’t very well talk to you about it.” Clara did not take the hint. Which is all to say that his anxiety over Clara’s children and the effect of her career on them was not entirely irrational, or misogynistic. Nor was it entirely disinterested. It was permeated by his mounting infatuation for Julie as she reached adulthood. Bluntly: what if somehow Julie died because of Clara’s neglect?
Julie was beautiful, lively, intelligent, ethereal, magical. Men are apt to fall in love with women like her. But Brahms’s passion was hopeless. Given that he was a kind of surrogate father to Clara’s children, his feelings verged on incestuous. His long relationship with Clara made the idea of marrying her daughter nearly unthinkable, an affair more so. Beyond that, this was the daughter of Robert Schumann, his mentor, almost his second father, and Clara had always been to him some inextricable tangle of mother and forbidden lover. Too much was mixed up in Brahms’s feelings beyond attraction and admiration. His fantasy of Julie emerged from that psychological morass, stirred further by his reflexive view of feminine sexuality—and his own—as something for the brothel. Julie herself suspected something of it and avoided his glowing eyes when he came to the house. (That may have played a part in his vile spirits of late, when he visited Clara’s family in Baden-Baden.) For Brahms, Julie was a fantasy part inevitable, part neurotic. When finally confronted by the reality of her life and feelings, which did not include him at all, he would react to the revelation as if it were a betrayal.
THIS QUARREL would not be resolved