The Search for Lou

I have often been asked how I came to write a book about famous historical figures who had a secret case of syphilis, me with no medical degree, not an academic. I have a short answer — that I became curious about Nietzsche’s questioned diagnosis when I was reading about his friendship in 1882 with a young woman from Russia, Lou Salomé.

Having this website, a place to ponder randomly, I started to think about how this 19th-20th century woman has enhanced my life.

When Rudy Binion completed his massive biography Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple, he published an essay, “My Life with Frau Lou,” about the joy, I am tempted to write esoteric joy, and frustration he experienced tracking this most elusive subject. When Fred Peters finished his biography, My Sister, My Spouse, he wrote a similar essay, “My Search for Lou.” After uploading articles on this website of my own search for Lou (and Nietzsche), which began more than fifty years ago, I thought back to when I had first heard of Lou.

Nietzsche class, 1965.

It was in a philosophy class at Bucknell University in 1965, the middle of the semester, a Spring day in Pennsylvania, and the professor, Joseph Fell, had taken a break from discussing Nietzsche’s writing to telling us about his life.

Bruno Bettleheim said that the outcome of therapy is already to be found in the first session. In a sense this class was like a first therapy session, if I consider that I have spent so many years relating in one way or another to that simple story.

The story:

In 1882 Nietzsche (37) had an intense intellectual friendship for less than a year with woman, Lou Salomé (21), who had been raised in a German community in St. Petersburg and who had come to Europe to study. They had a falling out in December. Nietzsche, in poor health, wandered and wrote until 1889 when he had a breakdown and was taken to an asylum. He spent the last eleven years of his life insane. I remember Joe said he asked, “Didn’t I once write great books?”

Lou, who went on to be a writer of fiction and essays, was acquainted with many 19th and early 20th century European intellectuals, writers and artists. She had a love affair with the poet Rainier Maria Rilke. And in her later years she was dear friend, student and colleague of Sigmund Freud. She spent her last years as an analyst, seeing patients and writing about psychoanalysis.

I remember looking out the window at the beautiful Pennsylvania Spring weather, the brick, green grass and trees of a rural campus, and thinking, someday I’ll find out more about this woman.

In 2016 I returned to Bucknell for a colloquium honoring Joe. Before that, I enjoyed reviewing the thick folder of letters he and I exchanged over fifty years. We had both studied the Palmer method of penmanship. Many of our letters were about Lou.

A biography of Lou: My Sister My Spouse by H.F. Peters

Years after that class I remembered having been curious about Lou and so, on the advice of a clever therapist who in the first session (again the first session idea) said the only thing wrong with me was that I was bored and what would I do not to be? — and I blurted out, find out about Lou Salomé, and he said —so do that. I looked for her in my local library. I found one biography, My Sister My Spouse by H.F. Peters. He wrote a sweet tale beginning with her sliding across the polished floors of the Czar’s Palace in St Petersburg where her father was a general in the Czar’s army. Peters wrote, in a style much like a romantic novel, of the story Joe Fell had told in that class — of her time with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, and of her celibate marriage to the Orientalist professor, Karl Andreas. Told by Peters, Lou’s was a simple story of an extraordinary woman who lived in a time that could be romanticized.

The Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud Biographers

At this time there was no Internet — no Google, no Amazon, no email. It seemed that Peters’ biography was a dead end in any search for details about this woman’s life—until I thought of looking Lou up in the indexes of biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud, many of them in my county library. Following this trail, I found that Nietzsche scholars blamed Lou for their hero’s depression in December 1882; they echoed his vicious demolishment of her. After praising her in the early months of 1882, in December he switched to denigration calling her “a thin, evil-smelling monkey with false breasts.” Then, the Rilke biographers were in love with her. And finally, the Freudians found the mature Lou to be a well-known literary figure, intellectual— and mysterious. She brought with her the mystique of having been Nietzsche’s friend in 1882, a formative year for his later philosophy. Freud found her to be exceptional and the scholars, with exceptions, agreed. The Freudians revered Nietzsche and so were curious about Lou, who would not speak of him.

So here were three Lou’s of three different ages, portrayed almost like three different women. Perhaps I found her so intriguing because in a way my life has had three similar distinct interest patterns.

Farrar, Straus, & Giroux June 1, 1992

One day, out of the blue, a letter arrived from John Glusman, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus, Giroux. He wrote that although my biography of Lou Salomé was probably already under contract, if not, he was interested.

Since I had no intention of writing a biography of Lou, this came as a shock.

I had forgotten that a year before I had written a postcard to The New York Times Book Review asking for information for a biography of Lou Salomé. Since there was so little information about Lou available in English, and that paltry amount being mostly out of print, I thought of collecting what I could find to donate to some unknown future scholar.

Of course nothing came of John Glusman’s request.

But I did receive many other responses to my post card. I heard from Bill Schaberg who was writing The Nietzsche Canon, a sculptor who was making abstract stainless-steel sculptures of Lou, Nancy Salomé, who was married to one of Lou’s brothers, a gentleman who had met Lou when he was a child, and a book by someone who had Lou as a therapist.

I was grateful for John Glusman’s letter. To get a request from a Senior Editor at a major New York publishing house without getting an agent or submitting a book proposal, could be a writer’s dream. But it was quite clear that John Glusman’s interest was not in me — but Lou.

Frau Lou, by Rudolph Binion.

How many people today remember going to a card catalogue to find a book?

Lou’s married name was Andreas, so when by chance I looked that name up in the card catalogue of the San Anselmo library, I found Rudolph Binion’s biography Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple in a back shelf at the San Rafael Civic Center Library. Published in 1965, it hadn’t been checked out in more than twenty years. The librarian, who said it should have been put in a sale bin years ago, gave it to me.

I spent months reading Frau Lou. Binion had been given access to Lou’s archive by her executor, Ernst Pfeiffer, and his pains-taking translation of letters and diaries resulted in a massive biography with thousands of footnotes and endnotes. His relationship to her was one of love and hate. On one page he praised her amazing intellect, on the next he called her a moral monster — much as Nietzsche had gone from praise to denigration. His issue with her was that he felt she did not always tell the truth (in particular about her friendship with Nietzsche) in her journals. He got an extension from Columbia, where he was compiling this manuscript as a doctoral thesis, and rewrote the text to accommodate her “perfidy.” Then, having concluded he still had not pinned her down, he ended by throwing up his hands in despair in a final chapter: “Beyond Frau Lou.” She eludes me at every turn, he said. Later he lost his job at Columbia due, he said, to Frau Lou.

It seemed that the massive manuscript of Frau Lou, finally published by Princeton in 1965, would have been a late work in a scholar’s life, and so I wondered if Binion had left an archive that could sort out the many questions about Lou that he raised in his text. I discovered that Binion was a psychohistorian and that his Lou archive had been donated to Brandeis. I called the Journal of Psychohistory on the off-chance someone connected with the publication would know. The editor, Lloyd de Mause, answered. He said: Oh, Rudy’s in Paris. He would love to hear from you.” And so I wrote to Rudolph Binion who responded of course I could access his Lou archive. I booked a flight to Boston.

Dusty archives

A friend said, “You could take a vacation anywhere in the world. And yet you choose to go to Boston in the winter and spend time in a dusty basement in a Brandeis library to handle papers written by a dead woman in a language you can’t read.” She had a point.

Rudy was tall, with bright blue eyes and slight limp from a botched surgery after a mugging in Boston Commons. I waited for him outside his office, reading his Hitler book that would have meaning for me later on. His voice was sharp and shrill and he created emphasis by stabbing his index finger in the air. He greeted me, and disarmed me, by saying, “I was too hard on Lou.” I went to his class. He lectured on Thomas Mann for an hour, barely taking a breath. I wish I had a recording. We talked for hours. He knew so much about Lou. And it was clear he was not at all finished with her, despite how many years had passed.

Nietzsche, a shadow lurking in the Freud circle—letter to Rudy January 24, 1993

When I returned to San Francisco from my trip to Boston and the hours of conversation with Rudy, although I had answered many of the questions arising from reading Frau Lou, our talks had generated even more. Being the age Lou was when she joined the Freud circle, I focused on those years, in particular reading biographies of Freud and his colleagues, having had enough of Nietzsche— or so I thought, because everywhere I turned in the Freud group, there was Nietzsche. Lou wrote, “He was like a ghost among us.” A friend gave me a copy of a manuscript of Ron Lehrer’s soon-to-be-published book on Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought and I began a correspondence with Ron, who had information about how Freud had sent his friend Josef Paneth to spy on Nietzsche in Sils Maria. I pondered how Freud must have enjoyed being a mentor to mature Lou where Nietzsche had failed so dismally with young Lou. And then I noticed that Jung, who did a five year seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, had an affair with Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian who had certain similarities to Lou, and that Rank, who idolized Nietzsche had an affair with Anais Nin, who said Lou was her mentor. And that Heidegger, who wrote extensively (four volumes) on Nietzsche, had an affair with young Hannah Arendt. I wrote to Rudy about this pattern.

Dear Rudy,

Since I returned from Boston, I’ve been fiddling with an idea that what you called Lou’s “Nietzsche complex” motivated not only Lou afterward, but a whole century of scholars, who have found the incomplete nature of their relationship problematic, whether you define it as Nietzsche’s rejection of Lou, or his betrayal of her, or her rejection or betrayal of him.

I’m calling it “TheEternally Recurring Tale,” told in many voices, tracing where and how a certain mythology has been passed from scholar to scholar. Your advice to be skeptical of the syphilis theories is much to the point: I have so far found 13 (!!) different theories of if, where, and how Nietzsche may or may not have gotten it. [Note from 2019—and look where that led!]

So far so good. But recently I’ve been tracking down something that leaves me on less firm ground That is—I’m wondering if some of the Nietzsche scholars may have repeated the Eternally Recurring Tale in their lives as well as their writing, consciously or unconsciously — and with this leap I’m in the field of psychohistory, am I not? Unholy Trinities everywhere.

I’m finding that Freud, and the entire Freud circle, was much more influenced by (obsessed by) Nietzsche—than perhaps either the philosophical or the psychological literature usually reveals. So my question is— how did the disaster with Lou in December 1882 affect the group of psychoanalyst/philosophers who learned from Nietzsche and Lou (Sister Brain) that philosophy comes from a philosopher’s experience?

Hunch so far is that the answer to your question when I visited you — “How could it be that Freud was so taken in by Lou?” might be that he was succeeding where his primary mentor failed: that is, in making Lou his disciple.

Freud the philosopher/theoretician felt himself to be in Nietzsche’s shadow—scooped everywhere. But Freud the clinician (and well-adjusted healthy progenitor) had the upper hand in observing, and diagnosing Nietzsche’s character and medical condition. Finally, Freud the man could succeed as Lou’s friend.

And he succeeded magnificently with her by encouraging her independent thought, where Nietzsche had tried to control her and make her his heir. Nietzsche to Lou: “I never thought about asking you first about your willingness: “You weren’t supposed to notice how you came to this task. I trusted those higher impulses which I believed you to have. I thought of you as my heir.” Major mistake because Lou from the beginning (as stated so well in her letter to Gillot about her independence) never liked to be told what to think or do. So you ponder “Even in her rituals she was unreliable: to be self-consistent she should, for instance, have defied him more drastically” —and I wonder if she didn’t defy (though she frequently disagreed with) Freud because she was, with him, completing, and healing, her own Nietzsche myth?

Federn says of Nietzsche: is there anywhere that he did not anticipate us? Lou said: All my life I’ve been waiting for psychoanalysis. To bring these two quotes together, does Lou mean that she had been waiting for a structure (psychoanalysis) and an activity in the world (being an analyst) and a friendship (the reliability of Freud as consistent friend and mentor) to live out the Nietzschean philosophy (her own Nietzschean quest) that had previously not found expression?

So there are two Lous in the Freudian group mind: the 21 year-old from the gossip and mythology of 1882, and the 50+ year-old real woman who showed up on their doorstep, the companion of Freud who always had some special mother status, was never part of the competitive fray of the sons.

Freud’s pleasure in this success seems straight-forward. But with the sons, the repetitive tale becomes interesting— and problematic.

What do you make of this — Sabina Spielrein comes to Jung as a patient. She is a young, beautiful, very intelligent Russian woman, in terrible health, traveling to the West for a cure, to study, and to be free from the chaperoning of her mother. She becomes Jung’s patient and his disciple; they talk and write, developing ideas that are remarkably Nietzschean (the shadow, animus-anima, the metaphysical historical unconscious, on and on). There is a nasty rejection-betrayal involving a jealous woman (probably Emma playing the Elisabeth role here), and a horrendous letter to the mother in Russia. Sabina, who never gets over Jung, goes on to become an analyst, and friend, colleague and disciple of Freud. She attends the Wednesday meetings. I sketched out three pages of parallels with Lou. Strangely specific things—like giving Jung a poem about pain that is meant to be set to music.

Jung traipsed around Basel gathering all the scuttlebutt he could about Nietzsche, attended Nietzsche’s university, knew Overbeck, knew Nietzsche’s syphilis doctor, read Rohde, knew Wagner’s milliner. That was a very small circle, and Jung knew them all; they all gossiped.

One theme runs through the literature — the wish on the part of scholars for some kind of sexual success between Lou and Nietzsche. Of course it didn’t happen. Nietzsche is clear about this over and over; this is a love that would only makes the gods jealous.

So what to make of the fact that the relationship between his patient-disciple-friend Russian Sabina was definitely sexual? Was Jung completing he myth, was any connection with the young Lou conscious, is there no connection? Am I seeing something that is not there?

Later on of course there were hostilities with Lou herself because she sat at Freud’s table during the break-up between Freud and Jung. She writes specifically of Jung’s hostility. And she’s barely mentioned in the Zarathustra lectures— 1,500 pages. Jung merely alludes to a “bird of prey” and Toni Woolf pipes in for the record, “That would be Lou Salomé.”

And when Jung dreams of “Salomé” right after his break-up with Freud, as an erotic young woman who follows a prophet, when he hears a voice that tells him if he doesn’t analyze this dream he must shoot himself with his bedside revolver, Jung sees no Lou association. Odd? [Note from 2019: the publication of The Red Book, Jung’s “Nietzschean quest” written at that time but not published until in 2009 adds much depth and detail to this story.]

And then there’s Rank and his passionate sexual involvement with Anais Nin, his patient, wayward disciple-candidate, who trained with him to be an analyst. Was Anais Rank’s Nietzschean quest?

Rank’s parallels with Nietzsche from an early age, including fear of hereditary brain softening, are quite remarkable. The love affair between Rank and Anais was just published in the latest volume of her diaries, Incest. Rank, according to her executor [and husband: Anais was married to two men at once; neither knew of the other] Rupert Pole, encouraged Anais to become her father’s lover and abandon him as a way of completing her relationship. Rank and Freud at that time were just figuring out the implications of Oedipus. Anais wrote that Lou was her mentor. Lawrence Durrell wrote to Anais, “I have always thought of you as a sort of incarnation of Lou Salomé (Anais, who glorified Lou, was of course not too wild about you!) [Rudy later told me that Durrell refused to have lunch with him because of his treatment of Lou].

I found two others that fit the pattern, a Nietzsche scholar, love affair with young woman disciple, nasty betrayal, she goes on to find another major Nietzschean as a mentor and life-long friend.

So many questions. Did Nietzsche ever live out any of his sado-masochistic fantasies on trips to the South? What exactly did Lou do in Bayreuth that irritated him so much? How did Nietzsche feel about Wagner’s relationship with Ludwig? How much did she tell Freud—everything, right? Imagine saying to Papa Freud “I’d rather not talk about it.” ! What was Elisabeth hiding, and what did she know about her brother’s syphilis? (She’s the one who commissioned the report that he got it from a cigar.) What is in the restricted Jung letters, or in Sabina’s restricted file at the Burgholzli?

Well.

Thank you again for all the time you spent with me, especially when you were in the midst of major warfare with the French. [Claude Lanzmann was trying to have Rudy’s Hitler book banned in Paris]. A friend sent me an article, “Blood Sin, Syphilis and the Construction of the Jewish Identity,” which maybe of interest to you as part of your study of Nazi disease metaphor. It’s a nasty article; let me know if I should send it.

I continue to apply my technicolor scholarship to Frau Lou with good success, constantly amazed at the amount of information you captured.

Cheers,

Deborah

Rudy’s response:

April 11, 1993

Dear Deborah,

For someone who only last fall was uncertain where to plug into the Lou story, you’ve sure pulled a scintillating switch. Your prospective Eternally Recurring Tale is the one thing done or doing in that whole area since I left it that has me sitting up and taking notice and, in fact, sitting on the edge of my seat. My mail is so backed up just now that your grand letter would fade before I answered it in kind. May I therefore answer in viva voca instead? I’ll be in your vicinity for a few days beginning March 4 . . . A “crazy digressive footnote” for your collection: How could Lou have hinted that Nietzsche might have kissed her when his moustache made that a physical impossibility? Keep leaping intuitively, so long as you land on your feet!

Best, Rudy

My Technicolor Scholarship

Before I went to Boston, in an attempt to unravel the complex text that was Frau Lou I photocopied the chapter about 1882 and highlighted it with markers: yellow for dates and events, green for quotations from letters, blue for historical context, and finally, pink for Rudy’s comments and interpretations. I then typed the letters in one file, over time adding to it from other sources, and I typed the story, the events by date, as another file. Over time, I’ve used these two documents to identify where various biographers have deviated from the story with interpretations that are passed from one to another. When I showed the highlighted copy to Rudy, he called it my technicolor scholarship.

Sex and Marriage in the Eternally Recurring Tale

March, 2019. I have just read, or rather skimmed the relevant parts, of the two most recent biographies of Nietzsche and I can easily conclude that there is still no agreement about what happened between Lou, Nietzsche and Ree.

To summarize the theories: Nietzsche fell in love with Lou and proposed marriage (the general theory of Nietzsche scholars); Ree did as well; Nietzsche had Ree propose on his behalf; if there was a marriage proposal it was not conventional because (1) Nietzsche had said he could at most marry for two years and (2) Ree said sex disgusted him; Nietzsche and/or Ree were gay and/or bisexual; the marriage proposal was to save her reputation or Nietzsche’s (his concern for his pension and what his mother and sister might think) if they were all to live together; there was no marriage proposal—Lou made it up to (1) enhance her reputation (2) to cover-up Nietzsche’s being gay. One could write excessive tomes on each theory.

What remains are the passionate intellectual conversations between Lou and Nietzsche at a time when he was just developing a philosophy that would have such an incredible impact. Scholars who have tended to think that his heated enthusiasm for their passionate conversation must have had a sexual basis — how could a mere self-educated girl have understood Nietzsche when scholars even today writing dense theories of this thought can’t sort him out — miss how he was at the time desperate when his philosophy was just developing, when he had only a few readers, and when he thought he could change the world, for someone to listen to him. Lou listened.

Writing with Rudy

Rudy wrote beautiful, complex, convoluted sentences packed with information. When reading Frau Lou I alternated between appreciating his language and being frustrated at the difficulty in establishing context. One psychoanalytic paragraph that has been ridiculed for its Freudian language seemed to have been Rudy’s attempt to psychoanalyze Lou a la Freud but upon tracing the footnote to an endnote and deciphering the code of the endnotes, it suddenly became clear that Rudy had translated a paragraph from Lou’s diary where she was analyzing herself. I grumbled that I would like to translate Rudy into English. So much required unpacking, which Rudy was always pleased to do in person or correspondence.

Looking at Frau Lou again after many years, I am once again impressed by how much information Rudy managed to put in one book. He did so as follows: many pages — 587— of small print, paragraphs that often went more than a page, quotations fragmented within paragraphs, and a complex system for footnotes at the bottom of the pages referring to endnotes, and finally, because he rewrote the entire book, the two drafts seem like layers— a palimpsest. While doing research, he collected thousands of hand-written notes on scraps of paper.

At first we wrote letters, Rudy’s sometimes typed but more often written in tiny twisted script that took a long time to decipher. When we each got email (for me I recall it was 1994, shortly after Nietzsche’s 150th birthday when I attended a Nietzsche Conference in Illinois), we began writing frequently, often several times a day, a bit like how letters were exchanged in the 19th century when mail was delivered throughout the day.

Rudy was an amazing editor. He would edit anything I wrote, either in email, or if I sent him something in the mail, he would cover it with tiny red ink squiggles and send it back, often taking the time to suggest replacement words or phrases. I think he was incapable of reading without editing, which made him hyper-critical of much that he read that was published. I would polish something and still Rudy would find things to correct.

A former student of Rudy’s said, “Rudy can spot a misplaced comma across the room.” His perfectionism led him to withdraw a book that was already printed when he noticed that an editor had added a mistake in how possessives were handled and repeated it throughout the text. He would rather not publish a book he had worked on for years than have it go out with a grammatical error.

My wish to edit Rudy when I was reading Frau Lou came true when he started sending me drafts of what he was writing. My main editorial suggestion was for him to add road signs when he was assuming a reader knew something they could not know without more explication. Often I would want him to give up virtuosity for clarity, with shorter sentences and paragraphs, if a sentence required multiple readings to decipher. What I lacked in professional training, I made up for in tenacity. We would sometimes exchange emails for days arguing over a single sentence or even word.

We had the most fun with what Rudy called “e-swirls”— emails made up of complex sentences that went on for pages without paragraph breaks, without a thought of a critical reader, stream-of-consciousness but with punctuation. If he was lavish with praise for my e-swirls, he was equally dismissive of anything academic. “You would be a DUD as an academic,” he wrote, and “You edit me so well because you never learned to write academic prose.” I got in the habit of writing for myself in a blank email and then cutting and pasting it into a WORD file as a way of avoiding stilted “term-paper style” — something I still do.

When after years of doing e-swirls with Rudy I sent my first chapter of Pox to JoAnn Miller, my editor at Basic Books, she said “This is good; you’re on the right track— but cut all your sentences in half.” She was right. But Rudy went ballistic.

Rank, Anais and Linde Salber

Although I wrote about Otto Rank’s interest in Nietzsche in a dramatization of Freud’s 1905 Nietzsche evenings from Rank’s point of view, I didn’t finish putting together the association between Anais’s idolization of Lou, her love affair with Rank, and her becoming a lay analyst. Anais kept showing up in my life.

I first heard about her when I was living at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, which had been closed by the French government. (The chapter I wrote for a book on the history of Shakespeare and Company and my photograph that was published in Vanity Fair is posted here). We were told not to open the door for anyone but Henry, Larry or Anais. We all were reading her literary diaries and her novels and so when I returned to the states and was working at Esalen Institute, I suggested to Andra, the program director, that we invite Anais to speak. Her lecture sold out and then we spent the weekend with her in a residential workshop in Marin County. On the way to the airport, Andra asked her why her diaries were so tame when her life obviously was not at all. Anais said when all the people she wrote about were dead, the unexpurgated diaries would be published. We didn’t expect ever to see that happen, but Anais died not long after and Rupert Pole, her Executor, Editor and one of her two husbands, published the four diaries that corresponded in time to the four cleansed ones. Incest revealed her love affair with Rank (and her father), in a way not complimentary to Rank.

Anais liked the batik pillows we had in the window seat at Esalen so Andra sent her two of them. She asked me to buy her an accordion pleated batik diary in Japantown which I did. I said that the accordion form didn’t allow her to remove any pages. She said she never edited anything in the original copies of her diaries, taking excerpts for publication. Anais’s writing was an attempt at complete honesty, though her short published literary diaries were clearly styled to make her look good. She did not have that luxury when Rupert edited her life posthumously.

After the workshop, we scheduled a showing of Robert Snyder’s film about her, in which she reveals that Lou is her role model. That was a tense day because the film showing sold out, but the film didn’t arrive until right before the screen time.

Here’s a fragment of what Anais said about Lou: “I can tell you so many reasons why I love Lou Andreas-Salomé: not only because she created the kind of freedom women today demand, but because she created it for herself in an impossible period, at a time when women were not even allowed to study in universities.”

I contacted Rupert when I heard that Linde Salber, a professor from the university in Cologne, and author of a biography of Lou in German, was going to visit him because she was writing a biography of Anais. Linde was also coming to the Bay Area to deliver to Anais’s brother in Oakland an enormous suitcase packed with letters from Anais to her mother. I invited her to stay with me. I had somehow imagined Linde as a much older German professor, so I was surprised when she showed up, lugging the suitcase, being young with spikey blond hair. We had a wonderful time discussing Lou and Anais and Nietzsche. She was troubled by the patriarchal academic hierarchy at the university, where she taught along with her husband.

We then went to Los Angeles to housesit for Rupert. Many of Anais’s unpublished letters to Henry Miller were there, as well as the batik journal I had sent to Anais.

After that, I went to the UCLA library archives and read some of Anais’s journals. They required white gloves and no writing tools. What stood out was the everyday aspect of her recording of her life — the hundreds of pages of shopping lists, what she ate — with occasional passages that formed the substance of her published literary journals.

I forget how it happened but Linde and I ended up in Cambridge at the same time but we did and so we stayed with Rudy. I was very excited to spend time with my two favorite Lou biographers but I didn’t anticipate that Linde would be hostile to Rudy for his treatment of Lou, or that they would fight about Freud. If Rudy had begun as a Freudian, by the end of Frau Lou he was not a fan of psychoanalysis whereas Linde had been analyzed by Anna Freud’s friend, Dorothy Burlingham.

Writing “Nietzsche’s Secrets
In 1996, Ron Lehrer wrote to me about a Nietzsche conference in Manchester, England. I decided to attend. By then I had developed an alternate theory about the events of 1882, the Eternally Recurring Tale, and the generally accepted idea that Nietzsche fell in love with Lou, proposed marriage, and that her sexual rejection of him was what caused his suicidal depression in December of that year. On breaks and at meals I asked the various Nietzscheans to tell me the story of Lou and Nietzsche as they understood it, confirming what I thought— that there was a generally accepted story passed from one to another.

Ron was working with two other Nietzsche scholars (Weaver Santaniello and Jacob Golumb) to put together a book on Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. They invited me to contribute, which I did. My chapter, “Nietzsche’s Secrets” appeared in the book published in 1999. And so I thought I was finished with the story of Lou and Nietzsche.

Mollie Peters and her husband’s archive

While researching the Freud circle kept me busy, I was woefully short of information about Lou beyond Frau Lou. I was not an academic scholar and I didn’t read German, let alone the complex sentences in very difficult German in Lou’s hand-writing that Rudy had spent so many hours deciphering, copies of which I got from his Brandeis archive. It is as if she is trying to reduce the whole universe to one pious syllable, he wrote. Nietzsche tried to teach her to write aphorisms but that was not her style.

And so I thought of finding out if there was more to be learned from H. F. Peters’ romantic biography. Peters was a professor at a college in the Northwest. I found his phone number and when I called, his wife Mollie answered, or rather his widow. Peters had just passed away at Christmas.

I expressed condolences. Mollie said her husband died at his desk and she had not been able to enter the room since. In fact his Christmas present was still unopened on his desk. I called her a year later and she had still not been able to enter that room. When I called her a third time, she said a number of scholars had called wanting to see her husband’s papers, but my timing was good, as was, perhaps, my polite persistence. She agreed to let me come and visit.

Mollie picked me up at the airport and we drove to their cottage by the sea, Neahkahnie Beach, Oregon, for the weekend. She was the owner of a company that specialized in translations, and she said she had a project to complete, so she let me spend the time alone in her husband’s office. In addition to writing about Lou, Peters had written another book about Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth and one about Rilke. For this book, Peters, had access to Elisabeth’s Nietzsche archives at Weimar. His closets were full of copies of documents, articles and notes.

Among the treasures I found were a biography of Nietzsche by Mazzino Montinari published in a magazine format, much like a webpage, a locked diary of Fred’s that I gave to Mollie, and a trunk filled with letters sealed with wax from Fred to his first wife when he was returning from World War II.

The final day of the weekend I opened a closet in the corner and found a packet of letters wrapped in ribbon from Lou to Lou’s lover, Dr. Friedrich Pineles’ (aka Zemek) sister. I felt a physical shock, holding these letters written by Lou, stamped, and mailed to this woman. Lou had beautiful handwriting. I felt a sudden urge to steal them. There is a scene in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession where a biographer finds original letters from his poet in a library box. He cannot resist stealing them. I felt a dizzy temptation. But I didn’t. And now I wish I had asked Mollie if I could have one or buy one or even copy them all, since they would probably reveal much about Lou and her relationship with Dr. Pineles, who may have been the father of a baby that one way or another did not come to term. Rudy would have loved to translate these letters.

At the end of the weekend Mollie seated me in front of a fire and gave me a glass of sherry. She said she had a special gift. It was a photocopy of the unpublished manuscript of her husband’s essay: “My Search for Lou.”

Fred’s Search for Lou—The Chivalrous Gentleman - or Not

In his biography of Lou, Fred quotes an anonymous “learned and chivalrous old gentleman”:

"There was something terrifying about her embrace, elemental, archaic. Looking at you with her radiantly blue eyes she would say, ‘The reception of the semen is for me the height of ecstasy.' And she had an insatiable appetite for it. When she was in love she was completely ruthless.... She was completely amoral and yet very pious, a vampire and a child." (Peters, My Sister, My Spouse, 263).

Voracious, destructive sexuality defines Lou's character in much of the literature, often referring to this anonymous quote, the source of which Fred reveals, in the unpublished manuscript Mollie gave me, to be psychiatrist Viktor Emil von Gebsattal (1883-1976), a member of Freud’s circle. Here the "chivalrous" old gentleman adds that he considered Lou to be a nymphomaniac.  

It’s easy to imagine Emil sitting in front of a fireplace with Fred, perhaps sipping sherry (as I did with Mollie), and bragging about his affair many years before with Lou. Perhaps Fred agreed to anonymity or maybe Emil assumed his comments would be off the record. He almost assuredly was not thinking then that Lou kept a diary with observations about him, or that her executor, Ernst Pfeiffer, would decades later make her diaries available to Rudolph Binion, or that Rudy would publish Lou’s notes on Emil in his biography, or that a woman (me) even more decades later would find Fred’s revelation of Emil’s name and put it all together with Rudy’s writing about Lou’s diaries. Or that letters between Lou and Rilke discussing him as Rilke’s wife Clara’s analyst would be published and add to the story. Another surprising link: Gebsattal was Martin Heidegger’s psychiatrist for a few weeks when Heidegger suffered a breakdown at the end of the war in 1946. (And he published an article on “The World of the Compulsive” in Rollo May’s Existence, Basic Books: 1958).

Here is how it fits together:

Lou and Gebsattal both attended the 1911 Third Annual International Psychoanalytic Conference in Munich; she was with her lover Poul Bjerre, who had written on Nietzsche’s madness. In September 1913 Lou lived with Gebsattal for several weeks. At the time he was thirty, she fifty-two. A moral philosopher to begin, he had by the time of his brief association with Lou, become a doctor and a member of an outer ring of the Freud circle.

A great love affair did not grow out of this brief liaison, at least for Lou.

In January 18, 1915, Gebsattel wrote to her:  "Is it not obvious, dear Lou, why someone disoriented should come to you -- to you who, joyously at home in life with your infinitude of blissful composure, are yet able, by a miracle of sensibility, to look out to one who is estranged from life? Does he not see in your secure homelikeness a possibility of his own in effigy? Is it not easy for him to fall into the error of believing that he could, by embracing this possibility in effigy, turn into you by magic enchantment, so to say, filling himself full of your world-fed livingness? So long as he does not know himself, is there not something maybe of self-seeking perfidy and of predatory cruelty about him such that he would gladly have become you while still seeking himself, would in fact have gobbled you up skin, hair and all? And did not that 'compliancy' and 'understanding' of mine as applied to your person merely tend to the insidious atrocity of vampirishly gobbling  [italics mine] selflessness and starved lust for life mendaciously posing as love?

 In Gebsattal's memory, or at least in the apparent safety of a supposedly anonymous interview with Peters years after Lou's death, she had switched places with him as the predator, the vampire, the one without a self. The psychoanalytic jargon of oral fixation, the expression of Gebsattal's own neediness, had become the source of truth about not his, but Lou's, behavior.

Lou did not pursue the relationship. In her diary she wrote, in Freudian language of the time, that Gebsattal was “a mixed compulsive and hysteric ... whose unabreacted material emerged from the depths so ghostly as merely to haunt his consciousness without being acknowledged as his."   (RB, p. 407 from Lou’s Diary of 1916).  Gebsattal's unacknowledged depths continue to haunt the literature, as scholars fantasize a vampire Lou created by her insecure short-term lover.

And why am I taking so much space here to digress about Gebsattal? Because of all the names connected with Lou, I find him to be the one of the most reprehensible.

Vicious Biographers

Scholars have for over a hundred years glorified Lou, created her as a Muse with glowing adjectives, much as Nietzsche did in the early days of their friendship only to follow him in name-calling, as he did in December 1882. They have tried to define and criticize her sexuality, finding her to be either too sexual or not sexual enough in different contexts. Here are a some of the confused references to her sexuality: she was compulsively sexual, a nymphomaniac, a slut, promiscuous, frigid, a cocktease, a femme fatale, chaste as a Carmelite, a moral monster, a heteira, the Witch of Hainberg, a manipulative coquette, a castrator, immoral, evil, a freak, a hermaphrodite, bixsexual, a lesbian, and a woman who drove men to suicide.

Or — a Cannibalistic Virgin. In Fred’s study I found a published article from a magazine with this passage: “it is not unlikely that inside this perfect disciple there lurked, until the very end, a cannibalistic virgin . . . That a woman at once brilliant and, in her Aryan way, beautiful could lend certain men her ear so intently yet refuse them entrance by any other orifice proved ambiguously overwhelming." (Frederick Browne, p. 102).

Walter Kaufmann - Frau Lou and a source of the Lou Nietzsche (love) story

While I was at Bucknell, I was on a committee to choose speakers for an annual colloquium. The first year, I invited Rollo May, who had been the professor of my professor, Ernie Keen, from whom I took a class in existential psychology. As Rollo’s student guide, I was able to spend time with him. He was quite inspiring, both because of his putting Nietzsche in the context of existential psychology and because he loved to write. We stayed in touch after Bucknell. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me for the University of Chicago, but when I was accepted he suggested that instead of cold, academic Chicago I might enjoy going to Esalen Institute in California where very interesting work in conscious research was happening. And so I went to California instead and worked at Esalen for four years where I started a bookstore on Union Street in San Francisco and attended workshops on weekends. Some of my happiest days were managing the small bookstore and working with a close-knit staff. I also attended San Francisco State where I got a masters in literature. At Rollo’s 80th birthday party, as we were saying goodbye he said, “The next time we see each other, we will be with the angels.”

The year after Rollo spoke at Bucknell, we invited Walter Kaufmann. If Rollo was an inspiring mentor-type, I recall very little about the time with Kaufmann, except taking him to a fraternity party where he hoped to speak to Susan Sontag with whom he had been having a row. She was dancing in a dark corner and refused to speak to him. There was a huge snow storm that weekend and Kaufmann’s plane was grounded, so several other students and I drove him overnight to Princeton where he was addressing the chapel the next morning. We played Jefferson Airplane music. All I remember from that weekend was Susan Sontag suggesting that the best way to improve your life was to chew your food slowly.

Kaufmann’s Portable Nietzsche did much to establish Nietzsche as a household name in English-speaking countries and Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, which tried to cleanse Nietzsche from post WWII Nazi associations, is noted on Amazon as “the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured.” And so it is not surprising that he is also the source of so many subsequent tellings of the Eternally Recurring Tale of Lou and Nietzsche as an ill-fated love story.

When I discovered Frau Lou, I was surprised to see that Kaufmann wrote the introduction. The manuscript of Frau Lou was probably on his desk at Princeton while he was speaking at Bucknell. In a revised edition of his biography, Kaufmann rewrote the Lou-Nietzsche story to incorporate what he had learned from reading Rudy — that Lou did not tell the truth about 1882 and the hypothetical marriage proposal, but he leaves it at that— that Lou was a “fabricator” as was sister Elisabeth, dismissing both women in a sentence, not asking why she was lying or what she was lying about. And so the story remained unchanged, except that Lou was even more the villain.

Bill Schaberg, being an antiquarian bookseller as well as the author of The Nietzsche Canon, sent me a copy of a first edition of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche biography, which I compared with his rewrite after he had read Frau Lou. Comparing the two stories, and curious how Kaufmann came to use Rudy to make Lou even more of a target for Nietzsche scholars, I contacted the Princeton archive where a helpful librarian found and sent me a photocopy of the original Kaufmann typed chapter with his handwritten edits. (This was before anything was digital). Kaufmann skipped that Rudy had concluded in his “Beyond Frau Lou” chapter that he had given up trying to figure out why Lou had “fabricated” and just left it that she was a liar who had rejected Nietzsche’s advances. So it’s not surprising that so many scholars just paraphrase Kaufmann when it comes to Lou.

Nietzsche’s syphilis, migraines; Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Mueller

Because syphilis is often mentioned in Nietzsche biographies, I wondered where it fit in the story of 1882. Looking up syphilis in Nietzsche biographies, I found there to be no agreement about when he contracted it, how it affected him—or whether he had it at all. Various biographers reported that he was infected in a brothel in Cologne, or in a homosexual brothel in Genoa, or that he got it passing a cigar in the military, or that he was self-infected. I put together a list of thirteen contradictory theories of his syphilis—all presented without question: a humorous document since they couldn’t all be right. A porter took Nietzsche to a brothel where he found the piano to be the only thing in the room with a soul; he played a bit and then ran. Scholars assume he must have gone back. It was Jung who spread the homosexual brothel theory to the Freud group after he visited the university at Basel where Nietzsche taught. And Elisabeth commissioned the health commissioner to spread the cigar theory to save her brother’s reputation when P.J. Moebius revealed Nietzsche’s neurosyphilis in 1902. He wrote, “If you find pearls [in Nietzsche's writings], don't think that they all are genuine. Be suspicious, because this man has a sickness of the brain." Nietzsche was never known to have had sex with a woman, nor was Paul Ree.

From Claude Quetel’s excellent History of Syphilis, I learned that untreated syphilis, that is syphilis before penicillin was discovered to be effective in 1943, could result in many health problems over a lifetime — hence it has been called “The Great Imitator” of other diseases. A frequent complaint was recurrent severe headaches.

Lou wrote a study of Nietzsche, one of the first, published in 1895, five years before his death. In the introduction, Sigfried Mandel wrote that Nietzsche experienced migraines. He mentioned Oliver Sacks’s book Migraine. While I was reading Lou’s book, I was enrolled in a class at U.C. Berkeley on “The Damaged Body in Literature”. The professor, Matt Soyster, mentioned that he was writing a letter to his friend Oliver Sacks, and so after class, I asked him if he would ask Oliver if he thought Nietzsche’s migraines might be the result of syphilis. In the next class, Matt had a response from Oliver saying that Deb should contact his friend Jonathan Mueller, neuropsychiatist and Nietzsche scholar, who would be very interested in that question.

I called Jonathan, who was eager to discuss Lou, Nietzsche, and his migraines. We both lived in San Anselmo and so we met in a coffee shop there, and talked about Lou and Nietzsche for hours. Jonathan lent me three most useful books: Middleton’s collection of Nietzsche’s letters, Karl Jaspers study of Nietzsche’s neurosyphilis, and the two volume (1,500 page) set of Carl Jung’s Zarathustra Lectures, a seminar that was held between 1934-39.

Nietzsche’s 150th birthday

In 1994 I attended a conference for Nietzsche’s 150 birthday at the University of Illinois at Allerton— “Nietzsche’s philosophical Thought and its Contemporary Significance”— with days of lectures by Nietzsche scholars. I stayed in a white house that looked much like the Sils Maria house Nietzsche stayed in. Although I had gone expecting to learn more about the Lou-Nietzsche story, I found out that these very serious philosophers for the most part had little interest in biography, and when at meals and on breaks I asked about Lou and Nietzsche, I got the usual implausible love story. One elderly scholar told me he avoided learning anything about Nietzsche’s life because it took away from his study of the philosophy. I attended several long days of lectures and a very enjoyable evening recital of Nietzsche’s piano music.

I told several people of my friendship with Rudy and my interest in Frau Lou. One woman warned me against working with Rudy because — “he’s a necrophiliac.” I later figured out that she was referring to his beautiful art book Love Beyond Death, The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts—about the eroticization of death in19th century art and literature.

Sad news arrived on October 15th, Nietzsche’s birthday. Sarah Kofman had chosen that day to commit suicide, dreadful news for her colleagues, in particular her collaborator, Duncan Large.

In 2000, one hundred years from Nietzsche’s death, Richard Schacht, the coordinator of the conference, published nine of the conference lectures in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. The introduction summarizes a theme of the conference— the attempt to identify changing schools of interpretation over time, in brief, from the proto-Nazi (Russell), the humanistic existentialist (Kaufmann) and the metaphysician (Heidegger) of what was then a half century before to the post-structuralists with appropriate names attached. He pointed out that Nietzsche interpretations are very different on either side of the English channel.

Today, twenty-five years after that very enjoyable conference, skimming Schacht’s book of essays, I remember the experience I had at Allerton and that is, I find myself clueless trying to get meaning from philosophers who are writing about Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself is an (inspiring) delight to read, with his charming complexly twisted aphorisms, but philosophical essays about Nietzsche make my head spin. I cannot summarize them into anything that means anything to me. Briefly, there is a level of abstraction in these essays that seems cut off from Nietzsche.

And that returns me to thinking about Lou and Nietzsche conversing like devils ten hours at a time, at a turning point in his philosophy. What would they have thought of this conference of scholars?

Lou attends The Third International Psychoanalytic Conference—Weimar 1911

Reflecting on the Nietzsche 150th birthday celebration I attended when I was fifty, and how what was most interesting then were the conversations on breaks and at meals, leads me to reflect on the Third International Psychoanalytic Conference that Lou attended in Weimar on September 21-22, 1911 when she was fifty. What might have conversations been like as these founding members of the psychoanalytic movement wandered around talking to one another on the grassy lawns of the hotel in Weimar?

This conference was a turning point in Lou’s life because it introduced her to what was to become her career—practicing psychoanalysis and writing about it—until a few years before her death in 1937. And was the beginning of the friendship with Freud that was such a rich experience for both of them. After the conference, Lou wrote to Freud asking him if she could come to Vienna to study with him and to attend his Wednesday night meetings. He said yes. In this picture are forty six of the fifty five attendees. Lou is in the front row wearing a fur wrap.

Here are a few random thoughts:

1. Freud and Jung were on good terms in 1911. Jung was elected President of the organization. In the picture, Freud is standing on a box and Jung is slouching so that it appears that slight 5’6” Freud appears taller than robust 6’2” Jung. They split up in 1912 and at the 1913 conference, they were openly hostile. Freud, who in 1911 had referred to Jung having “a kind of robust gaiety and exuberant vitality” then referred to “the brutal Jung and his henchmen.”

2. Lou attended as the guest of her lover, Poul Bjerre, a Swedish psychiatrist and Nietzsche scholar who had written a book about Nietzsche’s madness (The Genial Madness). The syphilitic origin of Nietzsche’s madness had been revealed by P.J. Moebius in 1902.

3. In the two 1908 Wednesday evening discussions about Nietzsche’s posthumously published Ecce Homo (written in 1888, the year before Nietzsche became overtly insane), Freud discusses Nietzsche’s paresis and speaks of “Nietzsche as a homosexual.” This group, then, would have seen the friendship of Lou and Nietzsche as that of an intellectual young woman and a gay man, an interpretation that has been lost in current scholarship. I wrote a dramatization of these two evenings from the viewpoint of Otto Rank as the secretary taking the notes of the Wednesday evening meetings that were published in four volumes.

4. Lou brought with her the rich mythology of having had intense conversations, sometimes for ten hours “like two devils conversing” with Nietzsche twenty-nine years before. Those who so revered Nietzsche must have been intensely jealous. And yet in 1911 in this group, she refused to speak of him, adding to the mystery. There are many indications that she was not reticent about 1882 in her conversations with Freud later on.

5. Lou’s Nietzsche biography had been published in 1895. (Elisabeth’s biography of Nietzsche, which was highly critical of Lou, was published later.)

6. Since the conference was in Weimar, several people were able to visit Elisabeth at the Nietzsche archive. I wonder if they told Elisabeth that Lou was there.

7. Jung was at that time working on his Red Book, the lavishly illustrated leather diary of his “Nietzschean descent into the unconscious” that was kept secret until it was published in 2009.
   

UCSF Langley Porter Grand Rounds—1998

Quetel’s History of Syphilis mentioned three nineteenth-century figures who were known to have had syphilis: Gustav Flaubert, Guy deMaupassant, and Robert Schumann. Curious how biographers would write about syphilis in the stories of these three men, I started reading about their lives.

One day Jonathan called to tell me that there was going to be an event honoring Peter Ostwald, who had been a psychiatrist at Langley Porter, UCSF. Ostwald had written a book about Schumann. The subject of the event was to be the syphilis hypothesis. Jonathan suggested that I speak to the conference coordinator, Craig Van Dyke, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry. We met and discussed Ostwald’s book. He asked me if I knew anyone who could speak at the event, which was a year away. Would I be interested in speaking? Me?? Absolutely not! I was not a doctor or a scholar or a public speaker.

But once I was home, I couldn’t give up the idea. It was a year away, a small group of interested doctors— why not? So I said ok.

When I discovered John H. Stokes’s Modern Clinical Syphilology, a massive medical textbook about syphilis before penicillin, I had what I needed to put Robert Schumann’s illness, especially his late-stage neurosyphilis, in perspective. I could say that Peter Ostwald was correct in saying that there was no proof that Schumann had syphilis, no laboratory test, but despite that there was sufficient circumstantial evidence that it could not be ruled out.

As the date got closer, I realized I was in big trouble. The event was not an intimate seminar but a major event including all the psychiatrists at Langley Porter — plus the Bay Area History of Medicine Club— plus the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The week before I went to the auditorium at USCF. I stood at the podium. A sympathetic custodian turned on the sound system and let me speak on the microphone to the empty room. I found that although my voice is soft, with a microphone, I could speak with confidence.

The event turned out to be a full auditorium with standing room only.

My friend Alan Lakein gave me lessons in speaking, helped me organize the short talk, and listen to my presentation many times over.

My final terror (and is not public speaking a major fear of many?) was that I could be rendered speechless by stage fright. And so I got a prescription for inderal, a performance anxiety drug.

The event could not have gone better. A doctor friend in the audience said that everyone shuddered when I mentioned the physician’s chancre— infection contracted on a finger when gloves were not used in gynecological examinations. I made a comparison between Robert and Clara Schumann and Peter and Lise Oswald, which made her very happy.

So it was over and I was finished— with speaking, with syphilis, with Nietzsche. I would keep quietly reading about Lou and that was all.

Or so I thought.

A fax from Rosalie Siegel, International Literary Agent

November 10, 1998

Soon after the event, I received the following fax from Rosalie Siegel:

“I rarely write to authors I have not met expressing interest in projects in the works, but I must say I am very intrigued by the subject of your forthcoming book. Do you have a literary agent? Are you seeking representation? One of the reasons I am most interested in the subject of the book stems from my representation of Beth Archer Brombert’s recently published biography of Manet . . . Beth discusses both Manet and his father’s death in their fifty’s from syphilis . . . I will look forward to hearing from you. I am in New York City today.”

Could I do this? How could I not try?

And so I began the most wonderful friendship with my dear agent Rosalie. Authors often say their agent is their favorite person in the world. So it was with Rosalie.

She helped me craft a book proposal, which we sent to major New York publishers.

When I received an offer JoAnn Miller, a Senior Editor of Basic Books, I enthusiastically accepted. How could I not? Basic had published The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas Salomé in 1964.

Trip to New York a few days after 9-11, 2001

About a week after 9-11, I flew to New York to see JoAnn Miller and review my manuscript.

Looking up at the building with Basic Books in large letters, I realized that Basic authors supported this impressive establishment, mostly those with substantial sales, but smaller titles were also part of the project. I was one of them now. So was Lou, who was still in print fifty years later. The challenge of writing a book that would justify JoAnn’s faith in me was overwhelming.

JoAnn took me lunch and then I walked to the site of the disaster. I photographed the ruins. On the news on 9-11, the air was filled with smoke and floating paper. How was it possible that thermite that would melt a steel building would leave so much paper in the air? The streets had been cleaned. But I found one piece of paper that had flown from one of the Twin Towers. The heading was Contingency Plan Development. And near the bottom was this poignant line: “What is the worst that can happen?” The author was one of the casualties.

Writing Pox

When I had received the signed contract from JoAnn, my friend Mark Dowie said, “Now yours troubles really begin.” Returning to the Bay Area, my life was now run by something new: a book deadline. Jim Fadiman, well-known for his one-liners, said “You can write a book. You can run a business. You can have a life. But you can only do two at once.” I found if I concentrated on the book, I had trouble focusing on the business. And vice versa. So I developed a method of spending thirty minutes on the book— reading, researching, taking notes—and then thirty minutes on the business, making phone calls and so forth. This method of focusing on a writing project in thirty minute segments, developed by Neil Fiori, worked splendidly. I alternated between the book and the business thousands of times, with occasional periods of intense concentration on one or the other. So I didn’t have much of a life. The pages piled up. At some point I realized that the challenge was cutting the text down to the limit of 256 pages.

Spirochetes Awake!

A Debate with Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis researched desert spirochetes. She hypothesized that spirochetes entered the earliest living cells billions of years ago. The undulating motion of spirochetes evolved into structures with similar shapes or motions in the human body: cilia and sperm and neurons and dendrites. I introduced my chapter on the History of Syphilis with her historical perspective.

Lynn’s publisher was Basic Books. One day her editor asked her to wait in the office next door. In JoAnn Miller’s office she found a copy of Pox. She wrote me a five-page hand-written letter and included numerous articles she had written on spirochetes. We had wonderful conversations. One day she called me to tell me I had to read about something new— neuroplasticity.

Nietzsche turned the corner to insanity on January 3, 1889. Because he was showing the prodrome of paresis before then, I wrote,”It isn’t as if armies of spirochetes woke suddenly from their slumber to drive him insane.” The story of Nietzsche’s sudden plummet from the most advanced thought of his time to raving dementia is often told as if there were a razor’s edge demarcation between sanity and tertiary syphilis, as if on January third armies of spirochetes woke suddenly from decades of slumber and attacked the brain, instead of the biological reality that paresis is a gradual process presaged over many years. Lynn wrote about the dormant round form of spirochetes. She found dormant spirochetes in desert sand and brought them back to her laboratory where she watched them come to life en masse when she introduced favorable conditions. And so she thought it possible that Nietzsche’s insanity did happen with a sudden awakening of masses of spirochetes. We had a fascinating debate. I suggested that we could both be right.

Lynn wrote “On Syphilis & Nietzsche’s Madness; Spirochetes Awake (Daedalus Vol. 133, No. 4, On Human Nature [Fall, 2004], pp. 118-125]. She reviewed Pox in The Chronicle of Higher Education. She spoke about it on Cambridge Forum. And she wrote a similar article: ”Syphilis and Nietzsche’s Mad Genius.” The article was published on November 23, 2011, the day after she died.

Eugene Farber, MD—specialist in Dermology and Syphilology

In the early years of the twentieth century when incurable syphilis infected as much as one in ten people, many doctors specialized in the sister disciples of Dermatology and Syphilology.. Eugene Farber, MD, chair of the Dermatology Department at Stanford, was one of the last board certified Dermatology-Syphilology specialists.

Dr. Farber had retired from Stanford and had a psoriasis clinic in Palo Alto. When I called him to see if I could speak with him, he said yes— if I could pass a test. Who first saw the syphilis spirochete under the microscope? I went completely blank. I could not think. Just as I could feel he was about to hang up, I blurted out Fritz Schaudinn, parasitologist of ducks and owls.

Dr. Farber and I met numerous times in his office when he was between patients. As much as the syphilis textbooks were fascinating, speaking with someone who had been in the trenches in the syphilis epidemic was inspiring. Dr. Farber gave me one tidbit of advice: “Always look for the prodrome.” I didn’t know what a prodrome was so I looked it up: an early symptom indicating the onset of a disease or illness. The prodrome of paresis was the change in behavior that was typical before the onset of madness (Nietzsche, Randolph Churchill.) One book, Paresis, published in 1913 was particularly detailed in its description.

He lent me his “treasure,” a book of delicate watercolors of syphilis chancres and rashes. I photographed them.

When I completed my chapter on Hitler’s cardiac syphilis, I took it to Dr. Farber. The hypothesis that Hitler had Parkinson’s Disease was confusing. When I met with him, he said he was too busy to read it. I said I was about to go to press and was unsure if I could go out on such a limb with Hitler. He sat down and read it right away. He said that he had often had patients with both Parkinsons and syphilis so that wasn’t a problem. And he wasn’t sure there wasn’t a causal link. Do I dare publish this? He responded,”This absolutely has to be published.” And so I did. I was saddened to hear Dr. Farber passed away soon after.

Researching syphilis

Sir William Osler wrote “He who knows syphilis knows medicine.” I began collecting nineteenth and early twentieth century syphilis medical texts. These books allowed me to identify transition dates in advances in knowledge about diagnosing syphilis. I obtained the key texts by Osler, Hutchinson, Kampmeier and Fournier. The most useful was Modern Clinical Syphilology by John H. Stokes. The first edition, published in 1934, was superseded by a revision, and then by the extensive 1943 edition which had two coauthors and included collaborative research by the universities of the Cooperative Clinics Group.

Key dates were 1895 when Alfred Fournier linked an early syphilis infection to the multitude of recurring symptoms, giving syphilis the name “The Great Imitator,”also 1895 when Sir Jonathan Hutchinson lectured on the link between an early infection and late neurosyphilis, known as paresis, or General Paralysis of the Insane, and 1905 when the causal spirochete was first seen under a dark field microscope by Frtiz Schaudinn.

Oscar Wilde’s Middle Ear—November 25, 2000

My Oscar Wilde chapter was almost complete —especially when I discovered a friend of his had written”Oscar knew himself to be syphilitic” —when, as I was driving into the driveway of friends in Palo Alto for Thanksgiving dinner, I heard a BBC review of an article just published in The Lancet by two doctors proving that Wilde did not have syphilis. If their argument was valid, I would have to amend or delete my chapter.

Later that night I downloaded the article. I was ok: the authors had suggested that Oscar’s middle ear infection was not caused by syphilis, as if questioning one symptom would throw out the whole complex diagnosis. But I would follow up on that one symptom.

I emailed one of the authors, Ashley Robins, a South African psychopharmacologist:

Dear Dr. Robins:

In your Lancet article, you suggested that a diagnosis of meningoencephalitis secondary to chronic suppurative otitis media puts an end to speculation that Wilde might have suffered from and died of syphilis. In Synopsis of Clinical Syphilis (C.V.Mosby 1943), James Kirby Howles wrote that in cases of tertiary syphilis of the middle ear “Gumma may simulate acute purulent otitis media.” Given Howles statement, do you think it possible that Wilde’s suppurative otitis media might have had a syphilitic cause?

Best wishes,

Deb Hayden

Dr. Robins responded and then I replied to him. Our emails—“spirited but amicable” in his words— went on daily for months. He would email me during the day from Cape Town and I would often stay up late, surrounded by open syphilis texts. My response would appear in his inbox the next morning. If he was formal and yes, patronizing, at the beginning, by the end, we were writing warm personal messages.

Ashley was writing a book about Wilde and I had my chapter to complete. As an MD and a Wilde scholar, his detailed input made my hypothesis about Wilde very much better, and for my part I gave him medical information from my rare 19th century medical texts that was not available to him.

At the end, Ashley suggested we co-author a paper for the Oscar Wilde journal comparing 19th century and 20-21st century diagnostic technique as a two-part dialogue, and so we did. We agreed that while a preponderance of circumstantial clinical and biographical evidence could make a strong case for syphilis, as it did in Wilde’s life, a doctor today would not be content without laboratory confirmation. So while a hypothetical gumma could not prove syphilis, a possible cholesteotoma could not rule it out.

One of the most fascinating aspects of 19th century syphilology was the cleverness and tenacity necessary to make a diagnosis of a disease that was epidemic when there was no laboratory confirmation to be had. If laboratory confirmation had been necessary then, there would not have been a single case of confirmed syphilis in the 19th century.

In Modern Clinical Syphilology, John Stokes wrote of the need for detective zeal in identify this master of dissimulation.

When Ashley’s book Oscar Wilde: The Great Drama of His Life was published, I was pleased to be included in his syphilis chapter.

The Book Jacket

Rosalie had included in my contract the right to approve the book jacket, which was a good thing because the image that was published in the advance catalogue was a disaster. It showed a young woman in a turban with hideous oozing sores on her face. The sixteen figures in my book all had secret, invisible syphilis, very different from the manifestation of the disease thought to be syphilis in the sixteenth century in Naples. I wrote a frantic email to the publisher, saying among other things, that I could never do a book signing surrounded by this disastrous inaccurate image. The head of publicity emailed to the department: Since the author feels so passionately about this, we should lose the pustules. They assigned me a new designer, and together we came up with the final jacket, a skull with lightning flashing inside, in synch with what Nietzsche and van Gogh both said about feeling lightning flashing in their brains. The typeface was silver, the color of mercury. I couldn’t have been happier.

The first review: New York Times: “Feared by All, even Giants and Tyrants, by Natalie Angier -January 1, 2003

Finally the manuscript was complete. At the deadline I was challenged by obtaining rights, photographs, the index, and the bibliography, in addition to a final unexpected chapter: James Joyce.

A high point in my life, one shared by many first-time authors, was opening the package from Basic and holding the actual book in my hands. Then came the tense part of waiting to see if anyone would review it, or buy it. I sincerely feared being demolished by the reviewers— if anyone even noticed it. I wanted good reviews so Rosalie and JoAnn would be pleased.

When I asked Jim Fadiman what I should ask for from my publisher, given the number of sacred cows I had taken on, never mind the number of doctors and biographers I had disagreed with, he said, “A witness protection program.”

Then, on New Year’s Eve at midnight, a friend emailed me the a prepublication review in The NewYork Times. By Natalie Angier, science writer.

From The review:

“In the view of Deborah Hayden, syphilis has been vastly underrated as a force in shaping human history. It has been misdiagnosed, misinterpreted, dismissed and denied. Syphilis, she says, is '‘the disease that dare not speak its name,'‘ particularly not in association with the names we know: the geniuses who revolutionized art, music and literature, the statesmen who helped shape democracy, the tyrants who sought to obliterate.”

Even if it all went downhill from here, I could bask in the enjoyment of this lovely review from The New York Times.

Peter Byrne: Muckraker—a very scary review June 15, 2003

Peter Byrne, an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Weekly called to set up an interview to review Pox. This was the first review after Natalie Angier’s splendid one for the NYT, so I was pleased— until I checked out Peter Byrne. Peter was known as a muckraker. I got a copy of the SF Weekly and saw a letter to the editor by one of Peter’s marks: it began, “Peter Byrne has his head up his ass.” I read his past articles. He went for the jugular, writing exposés of political figures.

I met Peter at my home. He had read Pox carefully and had excellent questions. He left with an armload of syphilis texts that he borrowed to read. Then I found that he went to my office and questioned my staff. When we spoke again and I asked him what his questions, and his interest in my business, had to do with the book and he said he wasn’t writing a review— he was writing a feature article on me.

This was very bad news. And it got worse. Peter had in mind a feature article—and not just that, a 5,000 word cover story. He sent a photographer to my house. The photographer said syphilis was a noir topic so would I wear something black. I wore a white blouse and a black jacket. He tried different poses. He wanted me to wear a sweater and lean over syphilis texts with a rose in my teeth. Joking around to relax me had the opposite effect.

I told a friend how terrified I was and she said, yes, but do you have anything to hide? Well, no. Just don’t let him see how scared you are, she said. But when I next talked to Peter, who wanted to schedule follow-up interviews, I confessed how nervous I was. He said, don’t worry—I like your book. And you believed him? said my friend.

Early in the morning I waited by a kiosk for delivery of a copy of the 600,000 copies being distributed. There I was on the front page—with Abraham Lincoln and the heading Disease Detective.

The article was fine. Peter liked the book.

Soon after, Peter left the SF Weekly and wrote a biography of a theoretician of parallel universes and the concept of mutually assured destruction in the cold war for Oxford University Press.

He and I became friends. We drove to Sonoma to research Jack London, considering co-authoring an article on his syphilis.

The London Review of Books

The Basic Books publicity department did an excellent job. I was reviewed widely and I got numerous requests for interviews and readings—in particular several from the BBC. My enthusiasm for the subject erased any residual stage fright, although I always had a bit of trepidation before interviews. My favorite review was an article in The London Review of Books by Hugh Pennington. He wrote:

Deborah Hayden’s book reminds us of the havoc syphilis wreaked in the pre-penicillin era, and examines its effects on the lives of the famous, on composers, poets and writers: Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Wilde, Nietzsche, Joyce, Karen Blixen, van Gogh. Hayden reminds us, too, that politicians – Hitler, Abraham Lincoln and his wife – can, like anyone else, catch sexually transmitted diseases. Her approach is profitable and her choice of sufferers sensible: many of them left records of their views – and fears – about syphilis and its effects on their thinking, so that her accounts are more than just clinical studies. Inevitably, her case histories have a strong forensic flavour. She has had to arrive at a conclusion about the syphilitic status of her subjects on the basis of incomplete and circumstantial evidence, and under the handicap of denial and concealment; most people do not publicly, or even privately, admit to a syphilitic past.

Oliver’s Blurb

Jonathan gave me Oliver’s address in New York and I mailed him a copy of Pox. A week or so later, I received a three-page hand-written letter from Oliver. In it he told of diagnosing tertiary neurosyphilis in an elderly patient. When he told her he could relive her symptoms with penicillin, he said she told him she would not want to give up the euphoria.

Basic was gathering blurbs from reviews for the paperback. A blurb from Oliver would be amazing, but JoAnn said not to bother to ask: Oliver never gave blurbs.

One night I was having dinner with a friend, and he said if you could have any wish, what would you ask for? I blurted out: “An unsolicited blurb from Oliver Sacks.”

The next week Jonathan invited me to a fund-raiser for a neurology organization in Marin County. Oliver was the speaker. As I was putting appetizers on a plate, Oliver came up to me and said how much he had enjoyed reading Pox. “Your passion for the topic shines through every page.”

I was speechless: here was an unsolicited blurb from Oliver Sacks!

The next day I emailed his assistant, Kate Edgar, and said that Oliver had said something wonderful about my book and my publisher would never forgive me if I didn’t ask, even though I know Oliver doesn’t give blurbs. Kate got back to me right away: “Oliver would be delighted to give you a blurb. Remind him what he said.” I emailed back what I remembered, and she responded, “Oliver says he could do much better than that.” And he did. The paperback has this on the front cover:

“POX brings out the extraordinary range of symptoms that syphilis can have, how it affected innumerable lives (including those of many famous artists and savants), and how it is still very much around, and not just a historical curiosity. It is excellently researched and vividly written, and Hayden's passion for the topic shines through on every page.”

 —Oliver Sacks, MD, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

C.J. Chivers, Lenin and Syphilis June 2004

One day I got a phone call from C.J. Chivers, a New York Times journalist working on the Moscow desk. He asked me if I would read an article by two Israeli psychiatrists, published in a European journal, hypothesizing that Lenin had syphilis. This would be big news in Russia. An embalmed Lenin was lying in state in Moscow. Chivers sent me the article, which made a good argument that Lenin probably had syphilis. At the end of his life, he summoned many of the foremost syphilis physicians and researchers from Europe to consult. I recognized several of the names. Chivers and I spoke at length about techniques of diagnosing syphilis before penicillin. I felt something more was needed. He mentioned that Lenin had been treated with Salvarsan, Paul Ehrlich’s “Magic Bullet,” that at first was thought to be a cure but did not pan out over time. Treatment with Salvarsan made the point; no one would choose to be treated with this toxic arsenical if there was a doubt about the diagnosis, and especially if the leading voices in the field concurred. But using the journalist interviewing me as a source on this was not good journalism. Chivers gave me the email addresses of the two psychiatrists in Israel and they confirmed the Salvarsan. They had included it in their article published in Israel but for some reason it had been deleted in the European version. I contacted Chivers who went to press with his article. In it he says I describe myself playfully as a syphilographer. The article was published in Moscow and again in the NYT with this color picture of Lenin Since his deadline had been a few days away and I was dealing with multiple time zones, I had to time my calls. “Don’t you ever sleep?” asked Chivers.

Christopher John Chivers is a Pulitzer Prize winning war journalist whose latest book is The Fighters.

High Hitler: The History Channel — Andy Webb’s Interview

Just as I was feeling complete with promoting the book, I got a call from Andy Webb, a producer for the history channel, wanting to interview me for a special on Hitler’s health at the end. As much as I wanted to say no, I imagined what JoAnn would say if I turned this opportunity down. And yet it terrified me more than anything so far. Film was so much more challenging than radio. The Hitler chapter was so complex, I couldn’t imagine a brief segment getting it right. And imagining this project being shown in Germany— me proposing Hitler had syphilis— yike.

Andy and his camera man came from London and took me to dinner. The scope of his project was to interview various people about Hitler’s health at the end, including Leonard Heston on Hitler’s use of amphetamines, hence the title “High Hitler” as well as the Parkinson’s theory. Leonard and I had corresponded. I stayed up all night reviewing my information. A few hours before they arrived, I realized they would be filming and so I did a mad dash to straighten up. My goal was not to laugh or even smile because of how that might look out of context.

Andy was an excellent interviewer and it all went well — except that my usually calm Tibetan Terrier Rugby would not relax. I locked him a back room and still he kept barking. Finally, the cameraman took him for a walk and Andy filmed while asking questions.

When the final piece was aired, it seemed at first that Andy had chickened out on doing the syphilis part. But then at the end, in the last few minutes, he says — but maybe there was another reason for Hitler to hire Theodor Morrell, a syphilologist, to be his doctor. And he did a splendid job. Bob Berger, a Harvard cardiologist who had been very helpful to me, was interviewed about the main point— that Hitler was not suffering from neurosyphilis, but from tertiary cardiac syphilis. Bob demonstrated holding a model of a heart.

And Andy highlighted the one-line that was the smoking gun that Rudy and I had discovered one long weekend when we exchanged 135 emails— that Hitler’s two doctors —Morrell and Brandt — were the authors of the secret dossier that revealed to Himmler that Hitler was in the final stages of syphilis.

Andy’s project has aired for years on the history channel. A friend recently said my face popped up on tv while she was on the treadmill at the gym.

For a long time it was posted on youtube: High Hitler. My part starts at 32:51 minutes.

And so I was finally finished with Pox.

Rudy and Elena Visit, June 2007

Rudy, his wife Elena and I spent the day at Stinson Beach. While they were here, Rudy wrote this sonnet, which he included in his only book of fiction and poetry: Flights of Fancy.

Deborah

She levels with the treetops, and the hills
Beyond them, from the terrace where she sits.
Her inner world conjoins the calm that fills
The scene around her with the trial of wits

That constitutes her private life behind
The terrace doors, her running struggle to
Compose with fact and fancy in her mind
And then in texts that give them their fair due.

What do the trees and hilltops round about
Know of an author's turbulence within?
Vegetatively they do without
That groping for fit forms to say things in.

And yet those forms, each time her work is done,
Rejoin the forms of nature one on one.

Returning to Lou

Pox was a grand digression from my enjoyment of studying Lou’s life, although not from my friendship with Rudy who was with me every step of the way. When my deadline was approaching and JoAnn said the catalog was already printed (never mind that it featured the dreadful pox-covered original jacket) so I couldn’t have an extension, I realized my manuscript was a disaster. The research was done and the logic and style were ok, but the manuscript was a mess. Rudy was there for me. He invited me to the East Coast. With his ex-wife Alice we went to the Cape for a week and stayed at a renovated church they jointly owned. Rudy packed away in an upstairs room and read every word, covering the manuscript with his red ink squiggles. I felt guilty, especially since he had an infection in one of his eyes, but I accepted his generosity because I was desperate.

The last few weeks before the deadline were dreadful, as I struggled with photo permissions, the index which the publisher had wrecked, and had to be redone by hand, the bibliography — and entering Rudy’s edits. My friend Beth Kuper stayed with me for a few days as we struggled to get the logistics done, and also to write the conclusion. She took a picture of me lying on the couch with my dog on top of me, paws in the air, looking very much like a two corpses. She was saying, “One more sentence. You just have to write one more sentence.” All in all I was very happy with Basic as a publisher, especially the work of the publicity department, and if I had complaints, never mind: JoAnn forced me to get it done. And I survived. As I mailed off the final package (this was in the twilight zone of digital and most of the work was by hand), I imagined myself as as exhausted dog having run from California to New York collapsing on JoAnn’s doorstep with the manuscript in my teeth.

What I had figured out about the syphilis question was that Nietzsche was suffering from various illnesses typical of progressing syphilis in 1882 when he was having his passionate conversations with Lou, but it’s unknown whether he connected his many days of physical misery with an earlier infection. The link between syphilis and the many illnesses of its progression was not discovered until 1895 by Jonathan Hutchinson. The relationship with Lou was not sexual. And syphilis was not infectious after the first two years or so. Nietzsche’s paresis was revealed by P.J. Moebius in 1902. Elisabeth made it public by trying to deny it in her biography of her brother. Elisabeth was vicious toward Lou in that book but Lou ignored her; a copy of the book was in her archive with the pages uncut. Freud spoke of Nietzsche’s syphilis in his 1905 evening. Lou joined the Freud group in 1911 so it isn’t clear when she found out. She certainly didn’t know in 1895 when she published her Nietzsche book.

Freud encouraged Lou to come to her own defense against Elisabeth’s attacks and she refused. She would not speak of her painful time with Nietzsche, other than to Freud. She would keep Nietzsche’s secrets.

This week I watched The Audacity to be Free, the story of Lou’s life, on Netflix. I had dreaded watching this film because of how inevitable a disappointment it would be, but instead I was surprised and delighted. The casting— young Lou, older Lou, Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud, Andreas—all looked so much like the original people that it was almost as if they had come to life. Movement and color added to what previous had been black and white photographs. The writer-director, Cordula Kablitz-Post, had read a Lou biography when she was seventeen and had worked for years to raise money to make a film.

I would only make a basic change: her Nietzsche is healthy and love-sick. I would show how physically sick he was then — 118 days out of a previous year — and of course I would honor Nietzsche’s own words, in a letter from July 1882 to Peter Gast that this was not a love affair:

Dear friend, you'll surely do us the honor of keeping the notion of a love affair far removed from our relationship. We are friends, and I intend to hold this girl and her trust in me sacred. Besides, she has an unbelievably firm character and knows exactly what she wants -- without consulting or caring about the world's opinion.

Lou loved her dogs. Delicate Rilke once gave her a dog because he could not stand the pain of losing one of his own. Lou took her dog with her on her trip to Russia. Rudy and I emailed about Lou’s dogs. She had a poodle. I assumed it was a standard poodle. But Rudy told me, no, she had a small poodle.

Perhaps if I were to make one other change in Cordula’s lovely film, I would add a dog.

The End

February 12, 2019. Lou’s birthday. A storm threatens to turn off electricity.

Much has been written about Lou since the only information I could find about her was Peters’ sweet biography. I just ordered a book with a substantial list of the current books about her, leading me to think of all the other women, and men too, who have spent time with the memory of Lou, and what that has meant in their lives. Over the years I have enjoyed reading about her and thinking about her and writing about her, though with no desire to publish anything. It has been more like a one-sided friendship, but one that has taken me to places I never would have considered — certainly not to writing a book about syphilis.

When I notice similarities in the events of our lives, I have lost track of whether it is because I have copied her, consciously or not, or because I chose her as my historical favorite person because of my high regard for so many aspects of her life, or maybe just because of a similar ancestry: Rilke tracked Lou’s ancestry and I recently tracked mine, and there we are, with ancestors close to each other in two small towns in Germany in the 1600s. When Lou was twenty-one, she left Russia to go to Europe to study. When I was twenty-one, I left the United States to go to Europe to study. I have enjoyed tracking similar experiences.

Cordula’s film uses as a frame Lou dictating memories to Ernst Pfeiffer. She died soon after that, when she was 76, leaving her archive and the job of writing her memoir to him. I was grateful watching the film that Cordula chose to end the film there, without including the next year or two, Lou’s illnesses and death.

Rudy’s Memorial

Rudy died in 2011. I wrote a memorial about his obsession with Lou for Clio’s Psyche.

When I told the sad news about Rudy to Rosalie, who was also Rudy’s agent, she responded, “Rudy was a gentleman scholar of the old school. It is indeed the end of an era.” Sadly, so it is.