She wore a new ‘terra-cotta’ dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more.
“A Thunderstorm in Town” by Thomas Hardy from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. © St. Martins Press, 1996. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of German composer Johannes Brahms, born in Hamburg in 1833. He began studying the piano at the age of seven, and he picked it up quickly. As a teenager, he would play in brothels and taverns to earn money for his family. He met composer and music critic Robert Schumann when he, Brahms, was 20 years old and the two became close friends. Schumann took the younger man under his wing and introduced him to musical society, calling him a “young eagle” and a genius. Brahms’ musical style was traditional, even conservative, and so he often found himself at odds with the more avant-garde “New German School” composers like Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.
Brahms stepped in to help Schumann’s wife, Clara, with the running of the household when her husband attempted suicide and went into a mental institution. Brahms fell in love with Clara, who was 14 years Brahms’ elder. He wrote to Schumann in the sanatorium, saying, “How long the separation from your wife seemed to me! I had grown so used to her uplifting presence and had spent such a magnificent summer with her. I had grown to admire and love her so much that everything else seemed empty to me, and I could only long to see her again.” Brahms’ love for Clara was unrequited, though, even after Schumann’s death. Brahms never married.
Brahms’ Lullaby is one of the most recognizable melodies in the Western world. Brahms composed it in 1868 for an old friend, Bertha Faber, to commemorate the birth of her second child. The lyrics came from a German folk poem. The lullaby’s real title is “Guten Abend, gute Nacht,” — which means “Good evening, good night” — or the less eloquent Opus 49, Number 4. Clara Schumann played the piano for the piece’s first public performance in 1869.
It was on this day in 1932 that William Faulkner reported to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (books by this author). A year earlier, he had met several Hollywood people at a party in New York City, including the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who suggested that he come to Hollywood and write for the movies. Instead, Faulkner went back home to Oxford, Mississippi, to work on his novel Light in August. By March of 1932, he had completed the manuscript and sent it off to his agent.
Faulkner was in deep financial trouble. He had overdrawn his bank account by $500, and even local storekeepers weren’t accepting his checks. His publisher owed him $4,000 in royalties, and he went to the post office every day hoping a check would come. He asked his agent to try to sell Light in August to a magazine for serial publication, but he had one condition: that they didn’t change a single word. If not, he said, he would go work for the movies, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. His agent didn’t get any takers, but did get Faulkner a contract with MGM for $500 a week. When the publisher who owed him $4,000 officially went bankrupt, Faulkner had no choice but to take the contract. He didn’t even have enough money to send a telegram accepting the offer, so he had to ask his uncle for a five dollar loan. MGM sent him an advance and a train ticket to Culver City, California. Faulkner’s father was so surprised that when his son showed him the check, he asked if it was legal.
When Faulkner arrived at the studio, he was drunk and had a cut on his head. He left the studio and disappeared for nine days, apparently wandering around Death Valley. When he returned, he actually went to work, and became known for how quickly he could write. Before long the respected director Howard Hawks asked to work with Faulkner. The two men bonded over their love of hunting, drinking, and flying, and Faulkner worked on some of his best screenplays for Hawks’s movies, including To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). Although Faulkner worked on more than 50 films over the course of his years in Hollywood, he only got screenwriting credits for six.
It’s the birthday of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born in Votkinsk, Russia (1840). He wrote symphonies, operas, and three great ballets: Swan Lake (1876), The Nutcracker (1892), and The Sleeping Beauty (1889). He said, “I sit down to work each morning at 9 a.m., and the muse has learnt to be on time.”
And it’s the birthday of Victorian poet and playwright Robert Browning (books by this author), born in Camberwell, England, in 1812. His mother was an accomplished pianist, and his father was a fairly well-off bank clerk whose personal library contained 6,000 books. Robert was educated at home, and was a voracious reader from an early age. He loved the Romantic poets, especially Shelley, and at 14 he became an atheist and a vegetarian, to be more like his hero. Browning entered the University of London when he was 16, but grew annoyed at the slow pace within the first year and dropped out, preferring to pursue his own studies. He picked up lots of random information, and his poetry was sometimes criticized for its obscure references.
His relationship with fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett is one of the most famous in English literature. They began a prolific correspondence — hundreds of letters during their 20-month courtship, which began when he sent her fan mail. They eventually eloped against her father’s wishes and moved to Italy. Browning’s poetry was largely overshadowed by his wife’s, at least during her lifetime. She was popular and successful, and a serious contender for the post of poet laureate in 1860, though that honor ultimately went to Tennyson. He generally received negative attention, if he received any attention at all. His long poem Paracelsus (1835) had been well-received, and gave him his entry into the London literary scene, but his follow-up, the experimental Sordello (1840), was ridiculed, and when he and Elizabeth moved to Italy, his critics beat him up for abandoning his homeland. Even his two-volume collection Men and Women — his most widely read work today — barely caused a ripple. He returned to London in 1861 after Elizabeth’s death, and in 1868 he published his first real critical and commercial success, The Ring and the Book.
Browning also wrote several plays, none of them successful. But writing for the stage taught him how to use the dramatic monologue to reveal character, and he adapted it to his poetry. It became a defining characteristic of his work, and his most important and lasting contribution to the art, inspiring the likes of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. He also inspired horror master Stephen King; Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) was the springing-off point for the long-lived Dark Tower series, which King describes as his magnum opus.