Email to S.F. Chronicle reviewer:
Dear Jane,
As a great fan of Lou's, I find it sad to see that a sensationalistic caricature like Betsy's Piroleau's "Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love" can get published by a reputable house like Viking without at least a little fact checking-- and be reviewed so enthusiastically by the Chronicle.
Deborah Hayden
POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis
Basic Books, 2003
A few notes on your review:
Lou Andreas-Salome was considered a brilliant peer of Sigmund Freud and
one of the founding mothers of psychoanalysis. The toast of 1912 Vienna,
the celebrity author and intellectual wrote more than 20 books, along with
countless essays, articles and reviews arguing, among other things, that
women are the naturally polygamous superior sex. She was also one of the
world's great seductresses. Her list of literally hundreds of lovers and suitors
Not true. Lou kept a very revealing personal journal. I just checked with her biographer, Rudolph Binion, who probably read just about every word she wrote, and he estimated that she had at most nine lovers in her lifetime. (RIlke, Bjerre, Pineles, Gebsattel, Ledebour, Tausk, a Russian whose name we have both forgotten and two others that he wasn't sure of). She was serially monogamous and did not do one night stands.
included Frederick Nietzsche and the nihilist philosopher Paul Ree
(she lived with both in a menage a trois), the poet Rainier Maria Rilke, even Freud.
Lou never lived with Nietzsche and Ree in a menage a trois.They had suggested living together in Paris in the winter of 1883 to be part of the literary circle around Turgenev, but the arrangement was to have been purely scholarly. If you read the exquisite twenty-five-year correspondence between Lou and Freud, you will see how absurd it is to call him a "lover or suitor". Note also that you managed to misspell both Nietzsche's and Rilke's first names in the same sentence. Rainier is the mountain.
One suitor committed suicide for want of her love, and two others, including Nietzsche,
attempted to end it all because their attentions were spurned.
It is highly unlikely that Lou had anything to do with Tausk's suicide. It was Nietzsche who rejected Lou, not the other way around.
And -- hold onto your hats, Barbie wannabes --
she wasn't even particularly attractive.
Oh, please.
"No, she was not very pretty at all," says Betsy Prioleau, author of
"Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love"
(Viking). "She wore no makeup and favored sack dresses.
This only means that she wasn't always concerned with being stylish. Have we confused the clothes with the woman here? Have you seen the picture of Lou standing by the fireplace when she was twenty-one wearing a black dress with a small waist and lace at the collar and cuffs? I saw the original in a glossy print--she is startlingly beautiful there. Having read the coyote ugly description of her in Prioleau's book, I have to wonder if she ever saw a picture of Lou.
When she was with Rilke, she was mistaken for his mother."
So? She was old enough to be his mother.
"Look at Lou Andreas-Salome. She was called all kinds of names in the press and
was never completely accepted. But when she died, even though she was
yellow and had lost her hair due to renal failure, she still had devoted
lovers who waited on her hand and foot. There are worse ways to go."
She had no lovers waiting on her hand and foot when she died.
E-mail Jane Ganahl at jganahl@sfchronicle.com.
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Copyright 2003 SF Chronicle
Hello Jane, I would like to know where to find the essays from Lou Salome in a digital format, I live in Honduras and there are not many resources in that field.
thanks
Posted by: Raúl | March 08, 2005 at 08:58 PM