In my last post, I promised a movie review, and delivered a tangent. You only might get the movie review today, but I’m entering it through a tangent, and bonus book review or two.
My friend Emily had the most religious upbringing of anyone I know. This is in part because Floridian black Baptists and Irish Catholics were vying for her soul. So when she said that another book had replaced the Bible as the most influential on her life, I had to read it. That book was The Art of Seduction
I loved this book, but simply could not read it as a how-to for human interrelations, and can’t claim it has impacted my life, or sheds light on deep inner truths about human nature for me. Others will argue it does, and has. Some would go as far as to call it evil. Maybe I’m just naive. But it’s a fun read; it’s exactly how I would write if I wrote a nonfiction or history book. In fact, the layout, setup, and stylized delivery make me jealous I didn’t think of it first. It appeals to my Jeopardy!-trivia mind-patterns. And it also touched on multiple obsessions of mine. Let’s just say I own three biographies of Lou Andreas-Salomé, two of which are in German; one is written by her sister. I adore Lou. I first learned about her reading Francine Prose’s marvelous The Lives of the Muses
Lou was the original starfucker. Or, as Prose puts it, a “serial muse.” But, in contrast to most muses, she was a brilliant writer, thinker, and artist in her own right. She was born in the Winter Palace in Moscow. Her father was a high-ranking general in the Tsar’s army. As was then the fashion for young aristocratic Russians, she traveled west to become cultured (and to escape a scandal involving her former tutor, a priest!). She met the poet Paul Rée, and he raved about her to a buddy of his; they simply had to meet. Ree’s pal was a stodgy, grumpy, sarcastic German named Friedrich Nietzsche. Where Rée was in love with her beauty, Nietzsche fell madly in love with Lou’s mind: her witticisms, her essays on philosophy, her poetry.
Lou was a magnet for scandal: the highly-unreliable Elizabeth Nietzsche claimed that Salomé, during a visit to the Wagners in Beyreuth, allowed a Russian artist to design a gown on her body. Elizabeth is eminently untrustworthy, or course, because she is a shrewish figure second-to-none in the world of philosophy (other than, possibly, Elfride Heidegger), and also because she and Lou are the protagonists in the most spectacular catfight in the history of philosophy. Mostly because Elizabeth had a not-entirely-healthy fixation with her brother. Let’s just say nobody was good enough for him for her. In any case, the other huge scandal from this era is that Rée, Salomé, and Nietzsche were actually roommates for quite some time, in a three bedroom apartment with no chaperone.
Eventually Nietzsche declares his love, Lou laughs at him, and he goes off in a sulk that produces Thus Spake Zathustra. What did you do the last time your heart was broken? Lou’s wasn’t. She marries a poor slob only notable for contributing a hyphen to her surname, and then moves on to chew up and spit out first Rainer Maria Rilke, and then Sigmund Freud. You can’t help but admire a woman like that. Robert Greene did, well enough to use her as the incarnation of his Female Dandy archetype.
So when, to return to the Royal Flash, which is where I began, when I realized that one of the characters in that movie was named Lola Montez, that name meant something to me. And when I reached for the bookshelf where I keep The Art of Seduction, I knew why. When Lola’s more regular lover (to borrow a phrase from Glen Close by way of Neil Jordan) turned out to be none other than a comical fellow with a ridiculous accent and the improbable name Otto von Bismarck, this is all just a very long and roundabout way of saying that I had no choice but to watch this movie. That’s not the review, but it’s enough, I think.
