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     With respect to my account of the Vietors' visit in
Virginia, I have one correction, and one postscript.

     The correction: the name of the train was not
"Birmingham Special" which left Washington in mid afternoon
and roared through the Southwest Virginia valley non-stop in
the middle of the night.  The Vietors' train was called "The
Pelican". It ran from Washington to New Orleans, and had
Pullmans from as far away as Boston.

     The postscript: After Professor Vietor died, I went out
to buy a black tie and paid a condolence visit to Frau
Professor. Her name was Beatrice.  She was a devout Roman
Catholic; I believe she had been an actress or a singer.  She
shared neither her husband's intellectual acumen nor his
enlightened Protestantism.  After his death she made the
rounds of Cambridge bookstores to complain that the Harvard
University Press translation of his Goethe book was not on
display.  I think she was his second wife, and that they had
no children; but that Professor Vietor had an son from a
previous marriage who had a government job and lived in a
Virginia suburb of Washington. But I am stretching memory
and perhaps imagination.

     In any event, the visit was notable for Frau Vietor's
expression of friendship for my mother, and by her statement,
previously quoted, that an examination in Konnarock by my
father 16 months previously might have saved her husband's
life. When I asked her to give me one of his books, - I was
familiar with his discreet style of annotation, and longed
for the opportunity to retrace his thinking,- Frau Vietor
became cool and distant. She knew that I had the key to his
office in Widener; it was, if I remember #445 on the fourth
floor. When I went there a day or two later, to hold my own
private personal memorial service for him, my key no longer
opened the door; one of the maintenance men told me that Mrs.
Vietor had arranged for the lock to be changed.  I think she
was paranoid, like her friend, my mother, and feared I would
steal his books.

     My undergraduate honor's thesis was on Lou Andreas-
Salome.  She was of a Russian family living in France, a
sensitive and gifted young woman, with whom Friedrich
Nietzsche fell in love, and with whom he had, as I remember,
a passionate correspondence that shed much light on his
difficult personality. The relationship could not and did not
last; some years later Lou Salome married an academic named
Andreas.  I think he was a philologist of some arcane
language, - but again my memory might deceive me.
Subsequently she became the friend, godmother, confidante,
muse and perhaps paramour of Rainer Maria Rilke, travelled to
Russia with him in 1900 and introduced him to the Russian
mysticism which moulded Rilkes spiritual experience in that
decade of his life and led to the composition of his
"Stundenbuch" (Book of Hours), his first substantial volume
of poetry.  Facing the title page is the inscription: "Gelegt
in die Haende von Lou", (Placed in the hands of Lou). Lou
Salome remained Rilke's spiritual protectress for the rest of
his life. Much of his work is dedicated to her. She survived
him by many years.

     Inasmuch as I was seeking honors in history and
literature, my thesis was reviewed by only one member of the
German Department.  (The historians on the panel couldn't
have cared less.)  The German department member was Stuart
Atkins who aspired to be a Goethe scholar but who had been
made academically invisible by the shadow of Karl Vietor.  I
had never condescended to take any of his courses, because I
knew, hard as he tried, Atkins couldn't speak German, didn't
even understand it.  My tutor Klemens von Klemperer (who
later became professor of history at Smith) expected me to
get a summa. (So did I.) Vietor said he thought the choice of
subject felicitous, and advised me to submit the manuscript
to PMLA. At the same time he complained how much trouble PMLA
had given him with _his_ submissions.  I don't think he
himself had read my thesis.  In any event, Stuart Atkins got
even with me, said my thesis deserved only a magna,
"because the material has not been fully assimilated by the
English speaking part of the author's mind," an evaluation
which I, in arrogance and vanity, translated to mean that
Stuart Atkins wished he could speak and read German as
fluently and effortlessly as I. In any case, I survived the
magna.  Nonetheless my thesis soon became a source of
profound embarrassment for me, so much so that after I gave
up on PMLA, I never reread it.

     So far as Lou Salome was concerned, I was embarrassed in
the first place, because within a year or two of my thesis,
was published the correspondence between Lou Salome and
Rilke, and perhaps other source material, which I purchased,
but likewise refused to read, -it stands on one of the
shelves in the dining room, - material timely access to which
would surely have profoundly altered my thesis.  That was not
my fault, but disconcerting nonetheless.

     More serious was the obvious disparity between my own
youth, - I was a mere 18 years old, with no inkling of what
Eros would do to mind and body, and the fateful liaisons I
undertook to describe, with grave philosophical and literary
implications that I purported to interpret.  Only the
experience of forty, fifty or sixty years could do justice to
so problematic a topic. I should been asked to write on some
other subject. I understand now that what I was really doing
was trying to anticipate the story of my own life. Obviously
in the fog of my anonymity, Nietzsche and Rilke emerged,
however awkwardly, as conceivable role models, but _my_ Lou
Salome existed for me in those months of my life, only in my
longing, hardly even in my imagination.  In this instance, I
consider it a blessing that undergraduate honors theses are
so quickly and so thoroughly forgotten.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
