“There is no place that does not see you/you must change your life”—Rilke
Lives are nothing if not imagined-- (unmasking the Muse)
From earliest childhood I always loved old houses, loved to spy them from the backseat car window on lazy Sunday afternoon rides in the country or weekend excursions to the Cape. I never tired of imagining the lives lived in the flickering glow of every passing window. I could hear the hilarity of muffled voices home for the brightly lit holiday, the subdued light of lovers old and young conversing, who had been together too long or not long enough, and sometimes the whisper of some lone someone lost in thought, seeking solace in the barely visible twilight of embers.
In that house of my childhood imagination there were always twisting hallways, doors opening and closing to comings and goings, an upstairs and downstairs, the mothballs of my dead grandmother that couldn’t quite stave off the moldy dank smell of cellar decay, and always on the other side just beyond my view a back door escape with a screen door ajar for whoever just left. The gabled houses with their crawlspaces into eaves made it all the better for eavesdropping on every possible creature in the house of my runaway mind, without ever being caught out.
But I especially loved the old paint peeling abandoned ones that held only past lives in their creaking dilapidated bones. I couldn’t resist an old falling down house with great bones. It cried out for someone like me to inhabit it, give it new life. A favorite of mine on the trek to the Cape reminded me of a witch’s hat and when my father approached it, he’d slow down to a crawl and my brothers chimed in a taunting ‘here she comes, your future home’ and as he hit the gas, and squinting at the empty swing on that porch, I could almost see it move. No doubt about it, it was the old dead ones that had all the character, and needed all the help.
Decades later books replaced houses as the repositories of imagined lives for me and I sought refuge in those created havens first as a reader, then an editor and eventually working my way into their interior as an architect/author. The historical novel was the sanctuary of past lives that intrigued me most—it called on the cognitive soul of who we are—memory—to conspire with the most visceral of human urges—the desire to hold on, and invited readers and writers alike to become imposters on the past.
So it was on just such a fictional stage of history that I eventually excavated the remains of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and through the eyes of famed muse Lou Andreas Salome reconstructed their lives. I was sure that in reimagining the dead one could capture some essence of who they really were, something that is either lost or calcified in time, depending upon whether culture has chosen to remember it.
There’s a danger that great writers get calcified in the scribblings they leave behind, that we remember them only in respect to who they’ve become, lending their lives a kind of heroic inevitability, so we never really know them despite the voluminous words left behind. But it seemed that maybe there was a chance at cracking the marble of these greats and getting to their lifeblood through the one woman who had known them all before their fate was cast in stone, before they had the slightest inkling they were the great philosopher, poet or psychoanalyst. My character, the eyes and the voice of my novel was the most elusive of them all, the writer Lou Andreas Salome, which may have made her a fine muse in life but as a character in fiction made her one tough nut to crack, as I would soon discover.
Born just days before the serfs were freed in 1861, Lou Andreas Salome was a child of Imperial Russia (the daughter of the chief officer to the Tsar) and through most of her life she enjoyed the privileges attendant to high birth along with considerable popular acclaim later on as a prolific novelist and critic in Germany. At the end of her life she was denounced for consorting with Jews by the Nazis who after she died ransacked her library in Gottingen and burned her books in the street. Absent the magnetic draw of her personality in life though, her posterity receded into the shadows of her associations.
At 21 she had enchanted the philosopher Nietzsche in his late thirties, in what amounted to a less than May to December flirtation. When the infirmed philosopher met Lou, he was fresh from having been jilted by a fiancée and was more in need of a nurse than a wife. But when Lou spurned him, adding insult to injury, he reacted viscerally to the rejection, calling this young woman he’d known for just a few months ‘a stinky little monkey with false breasts.’ Surely one of the great retorts to unrequited love in history!
She would go on to write the first book-length critique of his ideas, and only as an old woman did she break her silence in answer to a journalist’s query about her relationship with Nietzsche, “If I kissed him, I no longer remember.” At 36 the married Lou would take the young poet Rilke as her first lover and thirty years later he would instruct his deathbed attendant to inform Lou of his illness because ‘She will know.’ And at 50 as a student of analysis, Lou had won the deep regard of Freud. He invited her into his all male inner sanctum of analysts at his ‘Wednesday night meetings,’ kept a picture of her on his desk and wrote to her and sent her patients til her death.
In all of the multiple biographies of these major writers we have undeniable if inconsistent testimony of her importance in their individual lives-- how they saw her. But the question arises, what did she see as one woman encountering all three over a lifetime. If only we knew. For that I would have to get closer to their lives as lived, and imagine my way though much of hers.
Following Nietzsche’s dictum ‘You must write in blood’, I looked for the blood of who these people were in the letters they wrote to one another, the memoirs and all the personal references that might be spotted in their writings. The letters were conspicuous for the gaps they showed at particularly sensitive junctures in their relationships, typically beginnings and endings. They had been either destroyed by correspondents themselves or censored by those that followed them.
How then to get the whole story? It seemed that the only way was to coax the ever-elusive Lou Salome, the muse who knew and had listened to them all, out of the shadows and to let her tell her own story. Of course there were risks. If I gave the muse a voice, would she lose her allure, her credibility? Would the tables suddenly be turned when we found ourselves listening to her? In stepping out of the coy, all-knowing, never telling role, would she lose her hold?
No matter, the experiment proved too interesting to resist. I would jettison the ‘would haves’, ‘could haves’ and ‘must haves’ of conjectural biography and reimagine a life. I would use these historical characters not to construe a completely fictional story, as is most often the case in historical fiction. No I would use fiction to mine historical truth---to propose what may likely have happened. I had a hunch about who this muse was and what motivated her—about what was missing in the official biography. The historical novel with its dual allegiances to history and imagination gave me license to follow that intuition in excavating these lives and calling forth their spirits.
So I did. What I discovered in the artifacts of the words they left behind were the clues to a mystery. This muse was not the coy mistress of popular myth—not the sexual kitten of the Alma Mahler or Cosima Wagner variety. Lou was downright sexually perplexing—a muse that lured but didn’t necessarily submit. As insistent as she seemed to be of sexual freedom, she was oddly withholding.
Where was the sex, I asked? As a teenager, she’d had an affair with a married pastor that was possibly traumatizing. In her twenties, she married a much older man and their forty-year marriage was never consummated. At thirty-six she took 22 year old poet Rainer Maria Rilke as her first lover, or so at least Rilke thought, and from that relationship she became pregnant. Nothing was ever said at the time, because nothing ever was but years later three years after Lou’s death and thirteen years after Rilke’s, the first English biographer of Rilke and coincidentally a woman, writing in 1940 within living memory of her subject and his muse, wrote that Lou had actually given birth to the child.
Gone were the letters they wrote in the throes of their intimate relationship as well as the dozen or so she wrote to the poet nearly thirty years later on his deathbed. But suddenly the fragments of what did remain from that early period, with their references to motherhood whether it was Rilke’s diary written to Lou saying ‘the way of women always leads to a child’ or Lou’s postcard to a friend mistaking her infant daughter’s sleeping smile for her own child’s, began to suggest something and make eminent sense.
Though Lou and Rilke would end their affair after just a few years, they would correspond from great distances of intimacy throughout their lifetimes—a bond punctuated by the exquisite memoir of Rilke Lou wrote three decades later immediately upon his death. Given the assessment of contemporary literary critics of their day and the shards of evidence pointing to their shared preoccupation with motherhood at the time, it seemed perfectly plausible that Lou did bear a child and that it was lost in some way. She very possibly gave it up, returning to her husband, and continuing with her poet lover for another two years, til they finally broke off the relationship and he married a sculptor, fathered a daughter and quickly abandoned both within a little over a year. The ‘all-knowing, controlling, mysterious muse’ seemed in this light a cover for an all too human story.
And so I wrote Lou’s story inventing a present day descendent—a great grandchild of that union who goes about finding Lou and discovers a birthright. Though I’d been warned about messing with people’s preconceptions of muses, my aim was to present a scenario of what may really have happened –a very real child given up—and/or at the very least a telling metaphor for a world lost to us, separated by two wars and a holocaust--the legacy of this enigmatic woman and these extraordinary men.
While some literary heavyweights praised the bold effort, others shouted it down with a visceral ‘how dare she?’ repeating the same inaccuracies plucked from Wikipedia’s official story of who Lou was. What with her polar personality traits as nurturing and manipulating, truth seeking and dissembling, sexually rapacious and frigid depending upon the life drama she found herself in, I began to realize what a perfectly passive and plastic creation the muse was. And I wondered why on earth I set about rescuing this one from her house of mirrors?
In unmasking the muse, would I be questioning the truth of someone else’s story or more specifically questioning their relative importance in her story? Posterity had had a field day morphing Lou into everything from a literary moll to even a biographer’s portrayal of her as a dissembling mad genius who had lusted for her father’s penis through her bowel womb!
I approached Lou not with a bleeding heart but determined to crack the psychological enigma. She had lived her life on her own terms with her private motivations. And so I was hugely drawn to know her. She had once famously said all she wanted to do was a ‘be inside everyone else’s head.’ So I decided to inhabit hers --and to present her as my research beckoned me to imagine her. Shielded at the center of her celebrated associations stood my character, at core simply a woman with a not uncommon secret. The more I came to know her, the more I knew my Lou certainly wouldn’t satisfy preconceptions of her as a mistress or Amazon.
The response that mattered most though, I couldn’t really have predicted. Last fall in response to the copy of the book I’d sent the Rilke Archive, wanting the novel to be in the hands of Rilke’s heirs, I received a note from the director of the archive, Hella Sieber Rilke who is married to the only surviving grandchild, Christoph. Given that Rilke’s daughter had fought off the many immediate posthumous extramarital claims on Rilke’s fame, I found it wonderfully gracious that these descendants would write to thank me for clarifying ‘the most influential of Rilke’s relationships’ that came to life for them and confirmed what they ‘knew and suspected…’ They had endorsed the novel’s truth.
Throughout the period of promoting the book, there were quite striking instances of people --sophisticated readers-- a university professor, a talk show host, and others who seemed to think, despite all statements to the contrary in the novel and its notes, that I the novelist must be my character Anna Kane, hence Lou Andreas Salome’s great granddaughter.
Had I inhabited my character too well, speaking back to us only her words, lending her a literal truth that some readers now took literally? I wondered if film didn’t have a natural edge over fiction in conveying historical biography, if it wasn’t somehow easier to embody an historical character rather than a character’s words. Perhaps in film too you could play the truth more obviously wooing audiences with two clear choices, as in the ambiguity of Isak Dinesen and Denis Finch Hatton’s relationship—did they ever?—against the irresistible charm of Meryl Streep and Robert Redford—how could they not.
Alas, I had no actor to demarcate the line between truth and fiction, only dead greats whose edited scriptural remains left distinct markings of a celebrity past with both public and private faces and a muse whose portrayals in biography, memoir and cultural myth rendered many more persona than Sybil had multiple personalities.
As I searched for Lou, I found her most unmasked in the exquisite memoir she wrote of her beloved Rainer almost three decades after their love affair and directly upon his death. Her memoir was completely devoid of any self-referential note (‘we went here, we met there, he told me…’) but her immediate grasp of his emotional soul was almost palpable and stunningly obvious. And it was in translating this memoir that I became convinced that this muse, this consummate listener, the one whom Freud had celebrated as the ‘smartest woman’ he’d ever known, that she had definitely never let go of her Rilke.
Theirs was a love story that they’d agreed would not be spoken during their lifetimes and that after his death, with the archive’s efforts to silence anything that might tarnish the poet’s reputation, had effectively remained untold. The first multi-volume truly complete edition of Rilke’s correspondence with all and sundry was edited down by Rilke’s daughter in its second edition, to exclude the superfluous and the personal, presumably to protect the living. The muse who had been silent would remain so.
Lou herself was pressured by the Rilke Archive to print a retraction of Rilke’s deathbed statement drawn from a letter to her and cited in her memoir. Rilke who was in the last throes of leukemia had written ”Oh these infernal regions,” and that was far too despairing a final note for the celebrated poet to end on. She yielded to the retraction. Indeed as an old woman Lou had written to Freud that she was most comfortable alone in her house on the hill surrounded by trees she believed were suffused with Rilke’s spirit. That is what mattered to her most –it was about personal meaning and not public sentiment.
And so reading through and between the lines of all they’d written and sent to each other, I sought the truth of who they were in love and how they wished to be remembered in life. To that end, I reconstructed Lou’s life as fiction leaving open the breathing space of a child, given up and lost to two world wars and a holocaust—because much pointed to it, though nothing was left. Or so I thought.
There’s a crime at the heart of every fiction. We novelists are forever guilty of what we haven’t done. And I was reminded of this just a few months ago when I received an e-mail from the great grand nephew of Lou Salome, who had tracked me through a reading I had given in Vermont and was writing to inquire if indeed I was a relative.
The Internet had conveyed both the false rumor of my identity as well as thankfully immediate access to me. I wanted to disabuse him instantly of any illusions of kinship and delivered my ‘Mea Culpa’ of the novelist. ‘No, no’ I protested, ‘I am not a relative but merely a scholar and novelist who has researched and imagined your great aunt’s life.’ I felt myself falling from the pedestal of remembered truth into the quagmire (no, just muck!) of fictional memoir.
He came back to tell about his grandfather, Konrad, (Lou’s nephew) who had made his way to the states in the fifties. He was concerned that Konrad, a very late child of Lou’s brother Sasha, might very possibly be the lost child… He had yet to read the novel but there seemed to be some reason to wonder. He told me that his Konrad had died outside Pittsburgh and that all the Salomes had settled in Bridgeville. I could not help being struck by the remarkable coincidence that Cosima, the Lou connection/ grandmother in the novel, had died outside Pittsburgh and that the descendent writes from Blue Ridge. I had not been aware of Salome descendants anywhere, much less in the U.S.
I had a faint memory of having stumbled upon a ‘Konrad’ somewhere in my research, so I looked and I found the briefest mention of him in a 1934 letter of Lou to Freud regaling Freud with her good fortune this year at being reunited with Konrad, her oldest brother Alexander’s son who had endured so much hardship including imprisonment in the famed Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, and then just as quickly she waxes poetic about another new acquaintance, a young male student to whom she eventually entrusts her entire literary estate a little over two years later. Scouring my Lou books I find a note about Konrad in a biography of Lou written by a psychoanalytic historian who had portrayed Lou as a mad genius and an incorrigible dissembler at heart (obviously covering all the bases).
Konrad, son of Sasha had shown up in 1934 three years before she died and she ‘adopted’ him formally. How oddly symbolic. I am puzzled at the strange poignancy of Lou as an old woman, infirmed and blind, adopting a middle-aged man. There is no clue to her motivation—was she giving him citizenship or was it something more? (Is this the same woman who was too brainy and mannishly cerebral for motherhood—giving birth to only ideas? Such were the rationalizations for her childlessness bandied about at the time and since). There is a hint of some rupture of some sort and then the trail runs dry, all in less than a couple of lines. Alas, she dies shortly thereafter and he disappears and with them both the secret of their reunion extinguished from the official story.
I open an e-mail and Lou’ s grand nephew has sent me a picture of Konrad’s grave with the inscriptions in German of his birth in St. Petersburg and his death in Pittsburgh. He has clearly sensed my own disbelief at the coincidence of life and fiction (my paranoia that some literary nerd out there might be gaming me) and so he’s sending me something concrete—a gravestone along with a deep genealogy to authenticate his story (an ID check). And I think ‘No need, my friend. I’m the one who has written the fiction.’ He has begun reading my books (Lou’s Rilke memoir and the novel) and checks in to say he’s consulted an uncle who confirms the adoption but says he thinks it was thwarted and that Konrad was deeply upset by it.
He asks if he might send me some things I could look at for him, some papers, stories perhaps, there’s not much from Lou, a few icons she collected with her mother in Russia and oh yes, a brooch. I wait a day or two, because I’d rather live with the illusion of the story than reality… and then I need to know. You see in the hatbox of her grandmother’s effects my character receives in the novel, there is a hatpin of pearls and rubies that makes its way from Lou to her great granddaughter, who in finding it says she must make it into a brooch to wear off the mountain. Okay I want the spell broken. ‘By the way, the brooch you mention, can you describe it? What it looks like. Who it came from?’
‘Why of course, it’s in a safe deposit box, I’ll send you a picture.’
The brooch consists of Lou’s father’s medals, pins, most in ruby red and white, given to him by Czar Nicholas and made into a brooch for Lou’s mother. The brooch came from Lou. By now I’m laughing, Pittsburgh, Bridgeville, Blue Ridge, and a god damned brooch that doesn’t even belong in the vocabulary of a modern woman! I resolve not to go there and morph into a critic of my own work.
My e-mail correspondent has now read the novel and indicates in a lighthearted way that he finds the coincidences of fact and fiction a little spooky. I agree, especially because the parallels have nothing to do with the historical Lou but the entirely fictional frame story of her descendents—the one I invented. Nevertheless I assure him I’m the least woo woo person I know and I reason it must be some combination of immersion in research and intuition at work here—though I’m not fully convinced. (I don’t tell him that I am a science editor by day. Don’t want to complicate matters and punctuate an already frustrating conversation with another question mark.)
I think maybe that’s it,--we’ve gotten to the end of the trail, til installments of mixed letters, many written in the code script of old German Sutterlin arrive in my mailbox to reveal shards of a mosaic that is what’s left of Lou. I’m struck by the assurance of her penmanship, the levity and empathy of her writing style. This is one who speaks directly, describes what she sees, knows her mind and does not implore but gets her way. I may not know the context but this person’s presence is right there—Lou---fully felt on the page.
In the novel I create an heir to Lou, a daughter who grows up in Poland and flees to America just after Lou’s death in 1937, escaping the holocaust. Through it all I am wondering how Konrad, this man’s grandfather, came to be a lost child in Lou’s real life drama…How is it that she with no known direct heirs but nieces and nephews in Russia would feel the need at the end of her life to ‘adopt’ this one? And how did he fade so precipitously from the picture?
Alas, a plausible explanation. “My grandfather and my grandmother were interned in a camp in Poland—we’re not sure which. “(I think of all the displaced Germans in the East—some twelve million-- of whom many were held in camps after the war.) “ And then they came to America in 1950. They were swindled and much of their belongings lost in the crossing. They ended up through a church charity relocated to Pittsburgh."
The little I am able to cull from this private correspondence seals Konrad’s special claim to Lou’s legacy and, as is appropriate for the muse, it also leaves a spur of enduring mystery. Newly released from the camps, Konrad writes to various publishing companies exercising his rights as the heir to Lou’s literary estate, referring all contractual details to her literary executor, Ernst Pfeiffer, a student she’d known for less than two years and who upon her death moved into her house on the hill.
A few years later a disconsolate homesick Konrad is writing from Pittsburgh to Pfeiffer who himself has fallen onto hard times and is infirmed, depending on a wife’s income giving music lessons. Konrad now demands to know what has happened to Lou’s original colored notebooks—the ones she named by color, in which she recorded her memories of people famous and not so famous—the ones he had held in his own hands. How could they have gone missing? He knew for himself that only one—precisely the one that dealt with their relationship [Lou’s and Konrad’s] had been destroyed. Where were they now? The question wells out echoing through the years –alas there is no answer. And we are left with the definitive statement that Lou’s record of their relationship had been intentionally destroyed. Why? Who was she protecting?
There is some posturing to and fro between the heir and the literary executor—each staking a claim to Lou’s remains. In the early fifties Konrad warns Pfeiffer not to dare challenge his claim to the estate—it will not hold up in a court of law. In the late fifties he is appealing to Pfeiffer to collaborate in writing Lou’s story once and for all, promising he bears no grudge, but has only good things to say about her. His entreaty falls on deaf ears. Finally a letter in the late sixties in which a rueful Pfeiffer, aware of his own mortality and Konrad’s as well, regrets having squelched Konrad’s plan to write about Lou.
All these remarkably revealing sentiments of threats, secrecy and regret on both sides are couched between bookends of obsequious formal German greetings and caring farewells that reek of some shared dependence. No matter. By then Konrad is beginning to lose his memory. He will soon forget the secret… or that there ever was a notebook. Gradually over the next decade it will all be expunged from his mind-- his age, his homeland, his family, the name of his mother and father, leaving only a gaping brilliant light, and the abiding feeling of loss...of some loss concerning Lou. And that ‘missing connection’ is what will be conveyed to his grandson. The nothingness that is.
***
In the novel, I have a scene where Lou as a little girl is in a sleigh squealing through the streets of St. Petersburg, carrying the coffin of her father, and she’s peering out the carriage window into the hearths of houses passing by, breathing on the ice-encrusted windows to see through. I think of the storied houses of my own childhood imagination. I think of James’ comment on fiction’s power to see into the unseen. I think of art imitating life and life imitating art and my own search for Lou and her circle, and wonder how it could ever be questioned. There’s something both bold and refreshingly naïve about writing historical fiction. We cannot bring them back, but we will still peer inside and tell their stories.
And sometimes we can be startled by the truth of our own reflection. The novel ends on a word found circled in pencil in an old dictionary—Zuruckwerfen-‘reverberation’. I smile at the congruence of truth and fiction- of Pittsburgh, Bridgeville, Blue Ridge and a brooch that seemed to come out of nowhere. I’m moved that my story of Lou and a child lost to the world has resonated with the true heirs of Rilke and Lou. And that just as a great granddaughter in the novel discovers her birthright, my e-mail correspondent has been returned to his origins.
But the forensic humanist in me will always wonder about those notebooks, destroyed or lost, with likely answers to all my questions. And the man whom Lou adopted in old age and who likely knew her story, dying penniless in a Pittsburgh hospital, having lost everything including his own identity. Til one day he emerged in the guise of his grandson writing an e-mail to me about his lineage and asking me what to make of it. What do I tell him? That his grandfather (the youngest child of Lou’s oldest brother born eleven or twelve years after a brood of children) seemed indeed a lost child but not the child of my novel. And that Lou in her denouement behaved not unlike a lost mother making amends with a lost child of her memory or imagination. And then true to her persona as muse receded into the shadows, leaving no trace.
I think of dreaming this novel, as I wrote it. What I’ve come to know is that the real truth is full of dreams not quite realized. And so that’s perhaps why we write at all… to feel their absence, inhabit their space, complete the story. The peculiar gift of fiction.
Lives are nothing if not imagined-- (unmasking the Muse)
From earliest childhood I always loved old houses, loved to spy them from the backseat car window on lazy Sunday afternoon rides in the country or weekend excursions to the Cape. I never tired of imagining the lives lived in the flickering glow of every passing window. I could hear the hilarity of muffled voices home for the brightly lit holiday, the subdued light of lovers old and young conversing, who had been together too long or not long enough, and sometimes the whisper of some lone someone lost in thought, seeking solace in the barely visible twilight of embers.
In that house of my childhood imagination there were always twisting hallways, doors opening and closing to comings and goings, an upstairs and downstairs, the mothballs of my dead grandmother that couldn’t quite stave off the moldy dank smell of cellar decay, and always on the other side just beyond my view a back door escape with a screen door ajar for whoever just left. The gabled houses with their crawlspaces into eaves made it all the better for eavesdropping on every possible creature in the house of my runaway mind, without ever being caught out.
But I especially loved the old paint peeling abandoned ones that held only past lives in their creaking dilapidated bones. I couldn’t resist an old falling down house with great bones. It cried out for someone like me to inhabit it, give it new life. A favorite of mine on the trek to the Cape reminded me of a witch’s hat and when my father approached it, he’d slow down to a crawl and my brothers chimed in a taunting ‘here she comes, your future home’ and as he hit the gas, and squinting at the empty swing on that porch, I could almost see it move. No doubt about it, it was the old dead ones that had all the character, and needed all the help.
Decades later books replaced houses as the repositories of imagined lives for me and I sought refuge in those created havens first as a reader, then an editor and eventually working my way into their interior as an architect/author. The historical novel was the sanctuary of past lives that intrigued me most—it called on the cognitive soul of who we are—memory—to conspire with the most visceral of human urges—the desire to hold on, and invited readers and writers alike to become imposters on the past.
So it was on just such a fictional stage of history that I eventually excavated the remains of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and through the eyes of famed muse Lou Andreas Salome reconstructed their lives. I was sure that in reimagining the dead one could capture some essence of who they really were, something that is either lost or calcified in time, depending upon whether culture has chosen to remember it.
There’s a danger that great writers get calcified in the scribblings they leave behind, that we remember them only in respect to who they’ve become, lending their lives a kind of heroic inevitability, so we never really know them despite the voluminous words left behind. But it seemed that maybe there was a chance at cracking the marble of these greats and getting to their lifeblood through the one woman who had known them all before their fate was cast in stone, before they had the slightest inkling they were the great philosopher, poet or psychoanalyst. My character, the eyes and the voice of my novel was the most elusive of them all, the writer Lou Andreas Salome, which may have made her a fine muse in life but as a character in fiction made her one tough nut to crack, as I would soon discover.
Born just days before the serfs were freed in 1861, Lou Andreas Salome was a child of Imperial Russia (the daughter of the chief officer to the Tsar) and through most of her life she enjoyed the privileges attendant to high birth along with considerable popular acclaim later on as a prolific novelist and critic in Germany. At the end of her life she was denounced for consorting with Jews by the Nazis who after she died ransacked her library in Gottingen and burned her books in the street. Absent the magnetic draw of her personality in life though, her posterity receded into the shadows of her associations.
At 21 she had enchanted the philosopher Nietzsche in his late thirties, in what amounted to a less than May to December flirtation. When the infirmed philosopher met Lou, he was fresh from having been jilted by a fiancée and was more in need of a nurse than a wife. But when Lou spurned him, adding insult to injury, he reacted viscerally to the rejection, calling this young woman he’d known for just a few months ‘a stinky little monkey with false breasts.’ Surely one of the great retorts to unrequited love in history!
She would go on to write the first book-length critique of his ideas, and only as an old woman did she break her silence in answer to a journalist’s query about her relationship with Nietzsche, “If I kissed him, I no longer remember.” At 36 the married Lou would take the young poet Rilke as her first lover and thirty years later he would instruct his deathbed attendant to inform Lou of his illness because ‘She will know.’ And at 50 as a student of analysis, Lou had won the deep regard of Freud. He invited her into his all male inner sanctum of analysts at his ‘Wednesday night meetings,’ kept a picture of her on his desk and wrote to her and sent her patients til her death.
In all of the multiple biographies of these major writers we have undeniable if inconsistent testimony of her importance in their individual lives-- how they saw her. But the question arises, what did she see as one woman encountering all three over a lifetime. If only we knew. For that I would have to get closer to their lives as lived, and imagine my way though much of hers.
Following Nietzsche’s dictum ‘You must write in blood’, I looked for the blood of who these people were in the letters they wrote to one another, the memoirs and all the personal references that might be spotted in their writings. The letters were conspicuous for the gaps they showed at particularly sensitive junctures in their relationships, typically beginnings and endings. They had been either destroyed by correspondents themselves or censored by those that followed them.
How then to get the whole story? It seemed that the only way was to coax the ever-elusive Lou Salome, the muse who knew and had listened to them all, out of the shadows and to let her tell her own story. Of course there were risks. If I gave the muse a voice, would she lose her allure, her credibility? Would the tables suddenly be turned when we found ourselves listening to her? In stepping out of the coy, all-knowing, never telling role, would she lose her hold?
No matter, the experiment proved too interesting to resist. I would jettison the ‘would haves’, ‘could haves’ and ‘must haves’ of conjectural biography and reimagine a life. I would use these historical characters not to construe a completely fictional story, as is most often the case in historical fiction. No I would use fiction to mine historical truth---to propose what may likely have happened. I had a hunch about who this muse was and what motivated her—about what was missing in the official biography. The historical novel with its dual allegiances to history and imagination gave me license to follow that intuition in excavating these lives and calling forth their spirits.
So I did. What I discovered in the artifacts of the words they left behind were the clues to a mystery. This muse was not the coy mistress of popular myth—not the sexual kitten of the Alma Mahler or Cosima Wagner variety. Lou was downright sexually perplexing—a muse that lured but didn’t necessarily submit. As insistent as she seemed to be of sexual freedom, she was oddly withholding.
Where was the sex, I asked? As a teenager, she’d had an affair with a married pastor that was possibly traumatizing. In her twenties, she married a much older man and their forty-year marriage was never consummated. At thirty-six she took 22 year old poet Rainer Maria Rilke as her first lover, or so at least Rilke thought, and from that relationship she became pregnant. Nothing was ever said at the time, because nothing ever was but years later three years after Lou’s death and thirteen years after Rilke’s, the first English biographer of Rilke and coincidentally a woman, writing in 1940 within living memory of her subject and his muse, wrote that Lou had actually given birth to the child.
Gone were the letters they wrote in the throes of their intimate relationship as well as the dozen or so she wrote to the poet nearly thirty years later on his deathbed. But suddenly the fragments of what did remain from that early period, with their references to motherhood whether it was Rilke’s diary written to Lou saying ‘the way of women always leads to a child’ or Lou’s postcard to a friend mistaking her infant daughter’s sleeping smile for her own child’s, began to suggest something and make eminent sense.
Though Lou and Rilke would end their affair after just a few years, they would correspond from great distances of intimacy throughout their lifetimes—a bond punctuated by the exquisite memoir of Rilke Lou wrote three decades later immediately upon his death. Given the assessment of contemporary literary critics of their day and the shards of evidence pointing to their shared preoccupation with motherhood at the time, it seemed perfectly plausible that Lou did bear a child and that it was lost in some way. She very possibly gave it up, returning to her husband, and continuing with her poet lover for another two years, til they finally broke off the relationship and he married a sculptor, fathered a daughter and quickly abandoned both within a little over a year. The ‘all-knowing, controlling, mysterious muse’ seemed in this light a cover for an all too human story.
And so I wrote Lou’s story inventing a present day descendent—a great grandchild of that union who goes about finding Lou and discovers a birthright. Though I’d been warned about messing with people’s preconceptions of muses, my aim was to present a scenario of what may really have happened –a very real child given up—and/or at the very least a telling metaphor for a world lost to us, separated by two wars and a holocaust--the legacy of this enigmatic woman and these extraordinary men.
While some literary heavyweights praised the bold effort, others shouted it down with a visceral ‘how dare she?’ repeating the same inaccuracies plucked from Wikipedia’s official story of who Lou was. What with her polar personality traits as nurturing and manipulating, truth seeking and dissembling, sexually rapacious and frigid depending upon the life drama she found herself in, I began to realize what a perfectly passive and plastic creation the muse was. And I wondered why on earth I set about rescuing this one from her house of mirrors?
In unmasking the muse, would I be questioning the truth of someone else’s story or more specifically questioning their relative importance in her story? Posterity had had a field day morphing Lou into everything from a literary moll to even a biographer’s portrayal of her as a dissembling mad genius who had lusted for her father’s penis through her bowel womb!
I approached Lou not with a bleeding heart but determined to crack the psychological enigma. She had lived her life on her own terms with her private motivations. And so I was hugely drawn to know her. She had once famously said all she wanted to do was a ‘be inside everyone else’s head.’ So I decided to inhabit hers --and to present her as my research beckoned me to imagine her. Shielded at the center of her celebrated associations stood my character, at core simply a woman with a not uncommon secret. The more I came to know her, the more I knew my Lou certainly wouldn’t satisfy preconceptions of her as a mistress or Amazon.
The response that mattered most though, I couldn’t really have predicted. Last fall in response to the copy of the book I’d sent the Rilke Archive, wanting the novel to be in the hands of Rilke’s heirs, I received a note from the director of the archive, Hella Sieber Rilke who is married to the only surviving grandchild, Christoph. Given that Rilke’s daughter had fought off the many immediate posthumous extramarital claims on Rilke’s fame, I found it wonderfully gracious that these descendants would write to thank me for clarifying ‘the most influential of Rilke’s relationships’ that came to life for them and confirmed what they ‘knew and suspected…’ They had endorsed the novel’s truth.
Throughout the period of promoting the book, there were quite striking instances of people --sophisticated readers-- a university professor, a talk show host, and others who seemed to think, despite all statements to the contrary in the novel and its notes, that I the novelist must be my character Anna Kane, hence Lou Andreas Salome’s great granddaughter.
Had I inhabited my character too well, speaking back to us only her words, lending her a literal truth that some readers now took literally? I wondered if film didn’t have a natural edge over fiction in conveying historical biography, if it wasn’t somehow easier to embody an historical character rather than a character’s words. Perhaps in film too you could play the truth more obviously wooing audiences with two clear choices, as in the ambiguity of Isak Dinesen and Denis Finch Hatton’s relationship—did they ever?—against the irresistible charm of Meryl Streep and Robert Redford—how could they not.
Alas, I had no actor to demarcate the line between truth and fiction, only dead greats whose edited scriptural remains left distinct markings of a celebrity past with both public and private faces and a muse whose portrayals in biography, memoir and cultural myth rendered many more persona than Sybil had multiple personalities.
As I searched for Lou, I found her most unmasked in the exquisite memoir she wrote of her beloved Rainer almost three decades after their love affair and directly upon his death. Her memoir was completely devoid of any self-referential note (‘we went here, we met there, he told me…’) but her immediate grasp of his emotional soul was almost palpable and stunningly obvious. And it was in translating this memoir that I became convinced that this muse, this consummate listener, the one whom Freud had celebrated as the ‘smartest woman’ he’d ever known, that she had definitely never let go of her Rilke.
Theirs was a love story that they’d agreed would not be spoken during their lifetimes and that after his death, with the archive’s efforts to silence anything that might tarnish the poet’s reputation, had effectively remained untold. The first multi-volume truly complete edition of Rilke’s correspondence with all and sundry was edited down by Rilke’s daughter in its second edition, to exclude the superfluous and the personal, presumably to protect the living. The muse who had been silent would remain so.
Lou herself was pressured by the Rilke Archive to print a retraction of Rilke’s deathbed statement drawn from a letter to her and cited in her memoir. Rilke who was in the last throes of leukemia had written ”Oh these infernal regions,” and that was far too despairing a final note for the celebrated poet to end on. She yielded to the retraction. Indeed as an old woman Lou had written to Freud that she was most comfortable alone in her house on the hill surrounded by trees she believed were suffused with Rilke’s spirit. That is what mattered to her most –it was about personal meaning and not public sentiment.
And so reading through and between the lines of all they’d written and sent to each other, I sought the truth of who they were in love and how they wished to be remembered in life. To that end, I reconstructed Lou’s life as fiction leaving open the breathing space of a child, given up and lost to two world wars and a holocaust—because much pointed to it, though nothing was left. Or so I thought.
There’s a crime at the heart of every fiction. We novelists are forever guilty of what we haven’t done. And I was reminded of this just a few months ago when I received an e-mail from the great grand nephew of Lou Salome, who had tracked me through a reading I had given in Vermont and was writing to inquire if indeed I was a relative.
The Internet had conveyed both the false rumor of my identity as well as thankfully immediate access to me. I wanted to disabuse him instantly of any illusions of kinship and delivered my ‘Mea Culpa’ of the novelist. ‘No, no’ I protested, ‘I am not a relative but merely a scholar and novelist who has researched and imagined your great aunt’s life.’ I felt myself falling from the pedestal of remembered truth into the quagmire (no, just muck!) of fictional memoir.
He came back to tell about his grandfather, Konrad, (Lou’s nephew) who had made his way to the states in the fifties. He was concerned that Konrad, a very late child of Lou’s brother Sasha, might very possibly be the lost child… He had yet to read the novel but there seemed to be some reason to wonder. He told me that his Konrad had died outside Pittsburgh and that all the Salomes had settled in Bridgeville. I could not help being struck by the remarkable coincidence that Cosima, the Lou connection/ grandmother in the novel, had died outside Pittsburgh and that the descendent writes from Blue Ridge. I had not been aware of Salome descendants anywhere, much less in the U.S.
I had a faint memory of having stumbled upon a ‘Konrad’ somewhere in my research, so I looked and I found the briefest mention of him in a 1934 letter of Lou to Freud regaling Freud with her good fortune this year at being reunited with Konrad, her oldest brother Alexander’s son who had endured so much hardship including imprisonment in the famed Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, and then just as quickly she waxes poetic about another new acquaintance, a young male student to whom she eventually entrusts her entire literary estate a little over two years later. Scouring my Lou books I find a note about Konrad in a biography of Lou written by a psychoanalytic historian who had portrayed Lou as a mad genius and an incorrigible dissembler at heart (obviously covering all the bases).
Konrad, son of Sasha had shown up in 1934 three years before she died and she ‘adopted’ him formally. How oddly symbolic. I am puzzled at the strange poignancy of Lou as an old woman, infirmed and blind, adopting a middle-aged man. There is no clue to her motivation—was she giving him citizenship or was it something more? (Is this the same woman who was too brainy and mannishly cerebral for motherhood—giving birth to only ideas? Such were the rationalizations for her childlessness bandied about at the time and since). There is a hint of some rupture of some sort and then the trail runs dry, all in less than a couple of lines. Alas, she dies shortly thereafter and he disappears and with them both the secret of their reunion extinguished from the official story.
I open an e-mail and Lou’ s grand nephew has sent me a picture of Konrad’s grave with the inscriptions in German of his birth in St. Petersburg and his death in Pittsburgh. He has clearly sensed my own disbelief at the coincidence of life and fiction (my paranoia that some literary nerd out there might be gaming me) and so he’s sending me something concrete—a gravestone along with a deep genealogy to authenticate his story (an ID check). And I think ‘No need, my friend. I’m the one who has written the fiction.’ He has begun reading my books (Lou’s Rilke memoir and the novel) and checks in to say he’s consulted an uncle who confirms the adoption but says he thinks it was thwarted and that Konrad was deeply upset by it.
He asks if he might send me some things I could look at for him, some papers, stories perhaps, there’s not much from Lou, a few icons she collected with her mother in Russia and oh yes, a brooch. I wait a day or two, because I’d rather live with the illusion of the story than reality… and then I need to know. You see in the hatbox of her grandmother’s effects my character receives in the novel, there is a hatpin of pearls and rubies that makes its way from Lou to her great granddaughter, who in finding it says she must make it into a brooch to wear off the mountain. Okay I want the spell broken. ‘By the way, the brooch you mention, can you describe it? What it looks like. Who it came from?’
‘Why of course, it’s in a safe deposit box, I’ll send you a picture.’
The brooch consists of Lou’s father’s medals, pins, most in ruby red and white, given to him by Czar Nicholas and made into a brooch for Lou’s mother. The brooch came from Lou. By now I’m laughing, Pittsburgh, Bridgeville, Blue Ridge, and a god damned brooch that doesn’t even belong in the vocabulary of a modern woman! I resolve not to go there and morph into a critic of my own work.
My e-mail correspondent has now read the novel and indicates in a lighthearted way that he finds the coincidences of fact and fiction a little spooky. I agree, especially because the parallels have nothing to do with the historical Lou but the entirely fictional frame story of her descendents—the one I invented. Nevertheless I assure him I’m the least woo woo person I know and I reason it must be some combination of immersion in research and intuition at work here—though I’m not fully convinced. (I don’t tell him that I am a science editor by day. Don’t want to complicate matters and punctuate an already frustrating conversation with another question mark.)
I think maybe that’s it,--we’ve gotten to the end of the trail, til installments of mixed letters, many written in the code script of old German Sutterlin arrive in my mailbox to reveal shards of a mosaic that is what’s left of Lou. I’m struck by the assurance of her penmanship, the levity and empathy of her writing style. This is one who speaks directly, describes what she sees, knows her mind and does not implore but gets her way. I may not know the context but this person’s presence is right there—Lou---fully felt on the page.
In the novel I create an heir to Lou, a daughter who grows up in Poland and flees to America just after Lou’s death in 1937, escaping the holocaust. Through it all I am wondering how Konrad, this man’s grandfather, came to be a lost child in Lou’s real life drama…How is it that she with no known direct heirs but nieces and nephews in Russia would feel the need at the end of her life to ‘adopt’ this one? And how did he fade so precipitously from the picture?
Alas, a plausible explanation. “My grandfather and my grandmother were interned in a camp in Poland—we’re not sure which. “(I think of all the displaced Germans in the East—some twelve million-- of whom many were held in camps after the war.) “ And then they came to America in 1950. They were swindled and much of their belongings lost in the crossing. They ended up through a church charity relocated to Pittsburgh."
The little I am able to cull from this private correspondence seals Konrad’s special claim to Lou’s legacy and, as is appropriate for the muse, it also leaves a spur of enduring mystery. Newly released from the camps, Konrad writes to various publishing companies exercising his rights as the heir to Lou’s literary estate, referring all contractual details to her literary executor, Ernst Pfeiffer, a student she’d known for less than two years and who upon her death moved into her house on the hill.
A few years later a disconsolate homesick Konrad is writing from Pittsburgh to Pfeiffer who himself has fallen onto hard times and is infirmed, depending on a wife’s income giving music lessons. Konrad now demands to know what has happened to Lou’s original colored notebooks—the ones she named by color, in which she recorded her memories of people famous and not so famous—the ones he had held in his own hands. How could they have gone missing? He knew for himself that only one—precisely the one that dealt with their relationship [Lou’s and Konrad’s] had been destroyed. Where were they now? The question wells out echoing through the years –alas there is no answer. And we are left with the definitive statement that Lou’s record of their relationship had been intentionally destroyed. Why? Who was she protecting?
There is some posturing to and fro between the heir and the literary executor—each staking a claim to Lou’s remains. In the early fifties Konrad warns Pfeiffer not to dare challenge his claim to the estate—it will not hold up in a court of law. In the late fifties he is appealing to Pfeiffer to collaborate in writing Lou’s story once and for all, promising he bears no grudge, but has only good things to say about her. His entreaty falls on deaf ears. Finally a letter in the late sixties in which a rueful Pfeiffer, aware of his own mortality and Konrad’s as well, regrets having squelched Konrad’s plan to write about Lou.
All these remarkably revealing sentiments of threats, secrecy and regret on both sides are couched between bookends of obsequious formal German greetings and caring farewells that reek of some shared dependence. No matter. By then Konrad is beginning to lose his memory. He will soon forget the secret… or that there ever was a notebook. Gradually over the next decade it will all be expunged from his mind-- his age, his homeland, his family, the name of his mother and father, leaving only a gaping brilliant light, and the abiding feeling of loss...of some loss concerning Lou. And that ‘missing connection’ is what will be conveyed to his grandson. The nothingness that is.
***
In the novel, I have a scene where Lou as a little girl is in a sleigh squealing through the streets of St. Petersburg, carrying the coffin of her father, and she’s peering out the carriage window into the hearths of houses passing by, breathing on the ice-encrusted windows to see through. I think of the storied houses of my own childhood imagination. I think of James’ comment on fiction’s power to see into the unseen. I think of art imitating life and life imitating art and my own search for Lou and her circle, and wonder how it could ever be questioned. There’s something both bold and refreshingly naïve about writing historical fiction. We cannot bring them back, but we will still peer inside and tell their stories.
And sometimes we can be startled by the truth of our own reflection. The novel ends on a word found circled in pencil in an old dictionary—Zuruckwerfen-‘reverberation’. I smile at the congruence of truth and fiction- of Pittsburgh, Bridgeville, Blue Ridge and a brooch that seemed to come out of nowhere. I’m moved that my story of Lou and a child lost to the world has resonated with the true heirs of Rilke and Lou. And that just as a great granddaughter in the novel discovers her birthright, my e-mail correspondent has been returned to his origins.
But the forensic humanist in me will always wonder about those notebooks, destroyed or lost, with likely answers to all my questions. And the man whom Lou adopted in old age and who likely knew her story, dying penniless in a Pittsburgh hospital, having lost everything including his own identity. Til one day he emerged in the guise of his grandson writing an e-mail to me about his lineage and asking me what to make of it. What do I tell him? That his grandfather (the youngest child of Lou’s oldest brother born eleven or twelve years after a brood of children) seemed indeed a lost child but not the child of my novel. And that Lou in her denouement behaved not unlike a lost mother making amends with a lost child of her memory or imagination. And then true to her persona as muse receded into the shadows, leaving no trace.
I think of dreaming this novel, as I wrote it. What I’ve come to know is that the real truth is full of dreams not quite realized. And so that’s perhaps why we write at all… to feel their absence, inhabit their space, complete the story. The peculiar gift of fiction.
