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writing—eventually ending up years later at Skidmore College in upstate New York. On this vast, leafy campus at the foot of the Adirondacks, I’d been teaching comparative literature and conducting writing seminars in poetry, and now I faced the reward for all my labors—a sabbatical to finally write what I had always been putting off. For a writer, deciding just which topic will conquer one’s procrastination is a terrifying prospect matched only by the one certain fate of any writer—the blank page.
But I didn’t seem to have to choose; the topic seemed to choose me with the arrival of a package one afternoon in late spring as I was preparing my last classes before my long-awaited break. My mother, who was moving out of the family home into an independent care facility outside of Pittsburgh, had sent me an old hatbox full of Oma’s personal papers. My eyes scanned the contents—a daybook, a dictionary, a postcard, a pearl hat pin, a dried corsage of white roses, the wedding certificate of one Cosima Niemann to Carl Lippe. Nothing before 1938, I thought, just the torn cloth arm of a doll with an exquisite porcelain hand. My fingers traced the perfectly formed old script and my mind worked its way back to that wandering child who in making the crossing had become my grandmother. And I remembered our last talk. Her gift and my promise to find Lou.
It was time, I thought. Over the years I had collected bits and pieces—an obscure monograph here, chapters from multiple biographies of her conquests—Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud—critical psychoanalytic essays and her own highly abstract, elusive, autobiographical prose. But all these were like shards in a mosaic that never fit. Forming no coherent image. No singular voice. Oma was right after all.
I resolved to write her story not as others saw her but in her own voice. To concentrate I decided to rent a remote camp in the North Country from an environmentalist friend, a Scotsman, who was off doing research for the year in the Arctic. He warned me that I’d be “having it lonely up there,” he’d send postcards via carrier pigeon or musher, and that I’d know the winter ended when I heard the bear cubs falling out of the trees. But there was no better solitude, no more open space than that blank page of the Adirondack sky. In short, it was the perfect writer’s retreat.
And so that is how this, Lou’s story, began, with a hatbox of memories, the gift of a book and a deathbed wish to find the sender. As I came to hear her story, I could not predict how all those things would intersect. But she would tell me in time.
And as I came to discover, the genius of Lou was much more than physical. Her genius was her willful hold on the imagination. And indeed when I would stray away to the research and all the other voices, she would call me back with a clear voice to her story. She began her telling in the thirties, about the time when Oma was escaping Poland, and then she sank way, way back into the pillow of memory, to her mother and her Russian childhood. And she took me there and I listened. This muse to so many had now become my own. She spoke and I wrote.
This is her story, the truth about Lou.
—Anna Kane, Blue Ridge Camp, 2006
Improbable Beginnings: Reclaiming a Life
All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
—R.M. RILKE
The truth is, dear (and this may have been a fatal flaw of mine but one I was born with) . . . ever since I can remember I was drawn to the white flame of genius. As if genius possessed that necessary fire that would blaze open the floodgates of my small world to untold vistas and carry me down a raging river of thrills far beyond my native peasant Russia. I was a girl. I never thought to get stuck in the muck of some tributary. I never thought of an end to that adventure—smack into a delta. I was too young. Thank God for that!
Genius was, of course, not “genius” at all; it was something much more explosive, visceral. Oh yes, duplicitous. It promised spiritual flight and not incidentally, earthly pleasure—essential nutrients for my all-too-hungry body and willing soul. Restless girl that I was. I was like a darting goldfinch lighting but for a moment on some programmed path too deep and distant for my quivering body to know. So I tasted morsels of forbidden knowledge as they were shamelessly fed to me from the hand of these tutors of my experience and, well yes, then true to my nature, I took wing.
However bold, however quick to the challenge of these suitors I may have been, I was terrified too. But I must have loved the danger. Throughout my life I marveled at how the calm mind of genius could destroy and envision in the same moment a blueprint for resurrection. One man proclaimed the death of God in the middle of St. Peter’s Basilica. He had another plan. Another cried the creation of the angel within the self-imposed exile of his dark dank Swiss tower. And still another mused on the sanctity of sexual desire, while stroking the austere head of one of his antiquities and quietly puffing a cigar way past midnight in the pristine consulting room of his Viennese home.
These encounters, when it comes right down to it, amounted to nothing less than erotic blasphemy. An undressing of the soul without ever having to disrobe. There was no stasis in the presence of these men. Something was always about to happen. The earth would literally shift beneath my feet and the only anchor that saved me from being dumped off the universe was the hand extended to steady my step and eyes that held me in rapt attention. So, yes, I gave myself over willingly, that is, to a point ...
This is precisely how so many have regarded my life for all these years. In the relentless hold of genius. And I have not bothered to correct them, though it’s never been my way to bask in reflected glory. I, Lou Salomé, have been viewed by fellow artists, the dearest friends and ardent critics alike, not the least of whom was my mother, as a mere appendage, an accessory to the crimes of genius, and that too, I fear, will be my legacy. My fiction—the wildfire of my imagination—the bloodletting of my passion—all but forgotten, I’m now known somewhat as a literary collector and visionary brooder.
No doubt my memoirs, my journals, my critical essays throughout the years have only contributed to the startling misconception of being serial muse to countless artists and by extension, midwife to some of the most sublime inventions of twentieth-century art and ideas. Vicarious interloper that I seemingly was.
If the truth be told, I think I was always more enamored of the art than the artist. As far back as I can remember I tended to value the message more than the messenger. I don’t know its root cause. But I recall as a child spying the blue gentian flowers, the bluebells, along the roadside to our summer estate and naming them one by one—Sasha, Katarina, Misha—only to find myself crestfallen at the door. I’d picked them; I’d picked them all and there they were crushed in my small palm. I was ever distracted into remote corners of reverie. Hmmm, that was the artist in me perhaps. Incurably romantic, disturbingly unfeminine!
From the very beginning I lived in an imaginary world, often to the neglect of those around me. You see, it was the idea that transported me. The person did not, as dispensable as the body is to the soul. People might come and go but the flight of their words was enduring, my glint of eternity. Youth is so blissfully blind. And age, well, age is rueful and forgiving. I didn’t know then what I do now, that their words would be all I was left with. No, back then their disembodied words became the lingua franca of my life’s travels. The part of them I could take with me. ... And so, though I surely let go of some friends too soon or may have let others down (I had my reasons), I never did forget them.
Especially not the poet. He wouldn’t let me. His words held on. They were his soul. So he didn’t leave this world, but lodged inside me, as if waiting to speak. No, I could never forget my Rainer, and neither will you, child. When you hear my story.
My life is the story of love’s attraction and its puzzles with pieces missing. And though I always knew there was something magnetic drawing me to these luminous men, I knew too that they seemed to have been drawn to me. That’s the part I’ve never understood. The me I couldn’t face, the child I never saw. Can we ever know the muse?
I am old now. And for once in the looming eclipse of a crystal night when the world seems asleep to the throat-hold of fascism and