Clara Schumann was pretty hot.
And that’s when she’s just sitting. Imagine when she’s banging away at the piano. So hubby Robert was a pretty lucky guy. He may have suspected that, since they had 8 children. But it’s not a happy story. Four of the kids pre-deceased Clara, and Robert suffered from mental illness, was institutionalized, and died young (46). Brahms was a close friend and great support to the Schupeople. It was said his relationship with Clara fell somewhere between friendship and love. All of that is to introduce today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac. It’s by Lisel Mueller and is called “Romantics.”
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.
We passed this bush on our morning stroll today. Pine Street in Chatham (NJ).
I think of Clara Barton (fondly) in connection with nursing, of course, but her first gig was as a teacher. She was an excellent teacher and ahead of her time in feminist thinking. She said: “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”
After 11 years at the chalkboard in Massachusetts, she moved to DC and worked in the U.S. Patent Office, quickly rising via promotions and earning the pay of a man. But at age ten she had nursed her brother for two years after he fell off the roof, so there was nursing in her blood. And when the Civil War broke out she saw how much help the wounded needed (and were not getting). Starting with the Battle of Bull Run, a devastating Union loss, she rode around the battlefield in an ambulance offering aid.
After the war, she fought for the establishment of the American Red Cross, having learned about the International Red Cross on a trip to Geneva. It was established on this date in 1881. Barton said: “Everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and nobody’s business is my business.”
She was proposed to by several men, but remained unmarried her entire life. Too busy for that business. Here’s a nice shot of her on her stamp from a series on the Civil War.
At 27A in the puzzle today, “Fruit also known as calabash” was BOTTLE GOURD, and it reminded some of us of Jimmy Durante who was just heading out as I was entering. His famous “good night” always included a “goodnight to Mrs. Calabash wherever you are.” No one ever knew for sure who that was. JD never said.
According to legend in Calabash, NC, Durante passed through the town sometime in the 1940s and made friends with a young restaurant owner, Lucy Coleman. But not everyone agrees that she’s Mrs. C. According to the Internet Movie Database, “Mrs. Calabash” was a tribute to Durante’s first wife, Jeanne Olsen; supposedly, “Calabash” was an in-joke for them. Durante started using the “Mrs. Calabash” line about the time Jeanne died in 1943.
Tomorrow, my students take their final exams. That will wrap up my penultimate semester. A summer class, and then the Fall, and then my ride into the sunset. It’s about time. Here’s a calabash.
See you next time!
The Wellington Files 