Works ›The Novel of My Life

Part Two — Life and Work

Chapter 9Marriage TragedyEHETRAGÖDIE

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And then came the wedding! — The friendly Pastor S. joined us together in the Darmstadt chapel. He made a rousing speech at table which began — with an admiring glance at my beautiful mother: “Yes, it is true, the apple does not fall far from the tree; in this case, admittedly, the ‘lovely pear.’”

When Oswald was in a good mood he sometimes called me the “lovely pear” afterwards.

And then this ill-starred marriage began! The “Dilaram” of heart's-wisdom very soon became a “conceited goose.” We moved to Italy. Beforehand we visited the aunt with the legacy, Überson, at Schlangenbad.

We stopped in the Tyrol as well — at Bruneck and Toblach. But I was soon plagued by frightful toothache and nausea. Then we travelled, at my wish by post-coach, over the Alps on Goethe's traces. In Rome we took a furnished apartment in the Capo le Case. I had found an attic studio in the same house. But often it was impossible for me to climb the stairs; I lay powerless and weeping on my bed and cursed the world and life.

In the evenings, after making do in secret all day with a “brodo” — while Oswald ate at the eating-house — he would want to read aloud to me, to “form” me. I knelt on the floor lining a perambulator, and fell asleep over the reading every time. That produced endless sermons. In general, whenever he saw me I was nothing but an “object of education.”1 If I felt a little fresher I went with him to a trattoria in the evening. But since we were living on my money alone, and the journey had already swallowed a tremendous amount, there was perpetual discord again over my choice of dishes on the “lista.” My husband maintained that I always picked the cheapest. With equal justice I could reply that he always chose the dearest.

So the days, the weeks, the months went by, ever less refreshing. Christmas remains in my memory as particularly dreadful. I had bought all sorts of little antique things, and monthly roses and figs. And decked out a little laurel tree with oranges. But Oswald was, as always, dissatisfied with me. He had a way of shrugging his shoulders that drove me wild. In an excess of despair I sprang out onto the balcony. We both leaned heavily against the swaying, rusty iron railing on the fifth floor, and struggled with each other2. —

If the railing had broken! Everything hung by a hair! Yes, that was the first Christmas of my young marriage!

Later we moved to the Via Purificazione. The living room looked out over a beautiful orange garden in which there was digging going on all day. And then, in May, came my first “hard hour.” With unnameable sufferings. But no unnameable happiness followed it. The child, she was sweet, and we called her Ada3, visibly thrived at my breast. But I was very wretched. And my husband, too, complained more and more constantly of his condition. On the twelfth day after the birth Dr. Fleischl declared that it was malaria; that the pernicious form threatened, and that the only salvation lay in departing as though in flight. That afternoon we had been out in a carriage on the Via Appia, on our first excursion, under a blue-grey thundery sky. Unspeakably heavy with sadness the Via Appia lay in the heavy spring air. I was dead tired and exhausted when we got back, but I packed all night.

Next morning, with the help of our landlord's family and the doctor, we drove to the station and took tickets for Florence. There we could go no further. My husband's fever had grown ever more violent. I sought out the German doctor, Dr. Kurz, myself more dead than alive. We stayed a fortnight; Oswald was so weak that I had to feed him, and I not much stronger. And I had the double nursing of husband and child. A good deal lay on me, without any help at all. But little Ada thrived.

Then we were far enough on to be stowed off to Gossensaß again. There, in the glorious Alpine air, we stayed six weeks. Slowly, slowly things improved. The invalid was still so weak that he had to be fed. But the Ibsens were there4, as they were every summer. And they took us up in the most touching way, she who had already given us the only friendly hours we had in Rome. Frau Ibsen sat by Oswald's bed while she sent me out walking with her son Sigurd. She had little Ada on her lap when the child was awake. She even practised changing her. — When things got better after some weeks, Ibsen himself often sat at the bedside of his young friend, whom this honour visibly helped onto his feet a little more with every day.

And then he was well enough for me to take him to Bad Elster, to a friend of his youth who was a spa physician there. He wanted to stay three months, and in that time I was to look for an apartment and furnish it with my trousseau furniture, which was in storage with the carrier. — I undertook the task with zeal and love. The good Munich beer, after the Tyrolean air, had strengthened me again. The child was still at my breast and developing more every day, — I felt something like the joy of life drawing into my soul again. I also felt a strong and scarcely controllable appetite for work. But I could not begin painting until our new home was furnished. In the Findlingsstraße I soon found a suitable apartment with a studio. In those days only the one side was built up, and our front windows looked out over the green Theresienwiese, bounded on the right by the Bavaria and her little wood. On the horizon, in clear weather, the Zugspitze appeared with the whole snow-chain of the Bavarian Alps. How that view delighted me! (For more than five years5 that chain of Alps, often barely visible, dimmed, glowing rosy in the evening sun, was then my best friend, my only comfort, my refuge in every desperate mood. There it shimmered and shone — however far away. So life could not be quite so desperately sad as it appeared to my thirsting soul.)

I found that I had arranged everything beautifully, and was convinced that Oswald must find so too. His letters sounded conciliatory. He too hoped the best of the future.

I almost began to look forward to his return. Everything was prepared to receive him and decked out festively with flowers. I had a new maid, Leni, who promised to be quite useful. Life seemed bearable to me again. I fetched my husband from the station; he looked very well and was completely restored, as I could tell already from his vigorous shrug. Two hours after he had taken possession of the new apartment, inspected everything and criticised it sharply — I was lying in hot tears on my couch again, and he stood in front of it and preached at me for hours, as in the ill-starred Roman days.

Yes, he was quite well again!

So life went on now, day after day, for five years — five eternities, as it seemed to me. I now threw myself into work with burning zeal. Oswald preached. How much he always had to find fault with in me. I was no many-sided, great human being — I was only a little painting-woman6. In the household one heard the eternal creaking of the machine! And this cursed penny-pinching at every turn! (I had earned very little in the past year, and his illness had used a great deal — on top of that the new furnishing of the apartment, and expensive winter clothes for him — I was beginning to be frightened.) But he explained to me every day, in long-winded speeches, that the highest duty of a human being is to form himself. That everything proceeds “storey by storey,”7 that he possessed at least ten storeys in the spirit, and that the lowest of them, earning one's bread, absolutely did not suit him. He had not studied medicine for that, but solely in order to educate himself further. He had told me all this before the marriage. If I was so short-sighted as not to see it, that was my fault alone. I was so small and narrow-minded that I thought I had to economise in small things, on my clothes, on food, on everything. He had believed he was marrying a great lady, whereas I was not merely a little painting-woman but also a narrow, philistine housewife; in short — if everything did not work out, that was my fault alone. He was truly taking quite enough trouble to educate me up to a higher humanity.

He read mainly medical books, which he had the bookseller send him continually. These books cost many hundreds every year.

Now and then he also criticised my pictures or my poems, sharply, but well. Now I know it — his nature mirrored the tragedy of the unproductive man8 who, faced with the one who creates — perpetually irritated — feels his own incapacity to create. At the time I understood nothing of all this; I blamed myself and my own failings. And wept — wept — and often wondered that I had not yet wept myself blind. I withdrew from everything for fear of what it might cost, given my husband's exaggerated demands. But the Prince Regent Luitpold had discovered my studio all the same, and now came every few weeks to see how my pictures were coming on. Once, in his short-sightedness, he nearly broke his neck over the thick head of a black bear. — Baroness Wolfskeel let slip to me on one occasion that he had remarked to her husband that he wondered how quickly the “beautiful Preuschen” had folded up in marriage9.

Ah, that was no wonder, to be sure. I grew unhappier, less satisfied and more anxious every day. How often it happened that I had not a pfennig of cash in the house. In the mornings Oswald went to the “Achatz” for his first drink with Heyse, Laistner and other great men; in the afternoons he often sat beside Ibsen, his other great friend, in the Café Maximilian; and in the evenings he went out with officer friends, in summer to a beer-cellar, in winter to the wine house. When he came back after eleven he would wake me with long-winded tirades and reproaches. I had got into the habit of going to bed at seven and then reading, writing, dreaming. Those were my best hours. When I heard him coming up the stairs I put out the light and pretended to be asleep. But he maintained that the light had only just gone out and that I must still be awake. And the old litany began — and life grew daily more loathsome to me. This called itself a marriage! Our situation became ever more worrying. My bank deposit was almost entirely used up — twenty-four thousand marks10; out of which I had of course already given Oswald a sum before the marriage, to make himself “smooth,” as he put it.

Often, when Leni came into the studio and asked for money for the shopping, I would throw my brushes aside and say: “I have to go out anyway and will bring meat back with me.” Then I would run to the pawn office with some object or other, and bring home meat, and inward despair. —

No, Oswald could not economise; he found penny-pinching ungenteel — and indelicate — — —

Recently, at a party which we attended by way of exception, I had met a new “colleague” of mine, Prince Ernst of Saxe-Meiningen. We both liked him extraordinarily and he asked us to his studio. His serious striving made an impression on me. Soon he returned our visit; soon he was a friend of the house. That was water on Oswald's mill. Now he had a new prince for a friend: he — the friend of Paul Heyse and of Ibsen, the husband of “the Preuschen.” Yes, in spite of everything that weighed on me, I had become fairly well known. I was named as the foremost flower painter. The Prince Regent had frequently bought pictures of mine, but my striving went higher. I turned over great plans. An idea that had come to me years before in the royal crypt of St. Denis11, of the King of Kings, of Death, crystallised in my soul into an ever firmer shape. Our dealings with the painter of old German places, August Holmberg, made the whole setting firm. I made my individual studies in the Bavarian Museum of Applied Arts; a skeleton, which Oswald procured for me from the clinic, was put into my red plush dressing gown; Fräulein von Berckholtz lent me a magnificent ermine cloak, and now the work on the new picture, the later “Mors Imperator,” could begin12.

Shortly before, the Crown Princess had breakfasted with me while passing through, after we had received her at the station with others. Lenbach's smacking kiss on her hand provoked her smile. She quickly withdrew the hand. But Lenbach said triumphantly: “Royal Highness, I am from Schrobenhausen after all!” With this peasant descent of his he knew how to excuse himself for anything. It had almost become a proverb among his friends.

After the Crown Princess's breakfast Oswald could not contain himself for pride.