Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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11 January 1933

My dearest Annerl!

What wonderful Christmas gifts you’ve bestowed on me! And so soon after the complete works of Chekhov for my birthday! What can I say? Clifford might be more capable of finding words to express his joy . . . . . . but Etl? He can only sit before this hoard of wonderful, warm, colourful, intimate, elegant things – all chosen by his Annerl – and attempt to suppress the emotion he feels welling up inside him. For an Indian howl of victory might arouse suspicions, and he can’t do somersaults and cartwheels in the apartment because he doesn’t want to destroy the furniture! But what else could the pigskin case be for if not to carry my travel documents to Europe? The smell of the leather! The refined elegance of every seam! The sunlight hue that I learned to love through Annerl! The practical compartments! The silky softness with which this case caresses the hand! The irresistible perfection of the thing! I’ve never owned anything like it. And I shall never use it for any lesser purpose than for my jubilant return to Annerl! The gloves are perfect for winter in Paris – – perhaps for autumn days in the Spanish mountains with the car! (In Waldfrieden I just wear rough work gloves). Where will you be? Will it be cold enough for these gloves, wherever it might be? The same goes for the socks and neck-ties. I won’t use them until I set out on my next trip to Europe (there were seven pairs of socks instead of the six you mentioned in your note!). And the wonderful scarf, silk woven through wool, in such deep, warm colours. The red braces! You’ll soon see for yourself how well they suit me! For next winter I’ll buy myself a thick pair of tweed knickerbockers, then I can wear them with the heavy woollen stockings. Sporty! I’ll give Heinzl the fabulous handkerchief and neck-tie set because they’ll look elegant and dignified with his spanking new suit, his Fifth Avenue shoes and the chic grey hat he wears at a tilt. Also, Heinzl has just (on 4 January) celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday in otherwise rather dismal circumstances. Your gift (which he must have received by now) will have cheered him up more than all the many ‘happy returns of the day’ he will have heard from all his half-baked acquaintances. Mama was really pleased with her Provençal headscarf and sends heartfelt thanks. Edda has not yet received hers because I’ve put it with a nightdress that mama wants to send her but hasn’t yet finished adjusting. But I already know how much my sister will appreciate the headscarf and how touched she’ll be to have received it from you incomparably lovely people.

The Frigor chocolate was so good, so fine, so irresistible and so appetising that I’ve already devoured the lot. Piece after piece, it melted on the tongue, with my eyes half closed (breathing slowly and deeply, blowing the air through my nose, not letting anyone or anything disturb me!). Fougère Royale and Frigor, ‘La Beauté Masculin’ (according to the label), shall also remain unopened until such time as I need La Beauté again! And may the lucky buddha bring that day ever closer for me!


12 January

Chekhov arrived just after Christmas, in New York. It’s the Constance Garnett translation – the best English translation there is – and just as good as the best German versions. While I had the collected volumes on my lap (there are thirteen of them) I read a couple of volumes through in the first few days – and you know what Chekhov has to give. Since then I’ve read another couple of volumes. It is wonderful how this man developed as an artist. The stories he wrote as a young man are really just little sketches that don’t go all that deep, don’t have much to say and, though they’re fluent in expressing what little they do have to say, they aren’t particularly accomplished. But he kept on writing and writing, looking ever deeper, was always able to find a more descriptive word, a more polished form, his spirit matured and his heart grew bigger until it was human, direct, all-encompassing; and then, as the consummate artist who was no more conscious of technique than of breathing, as a divinely matured man to whom nothing was foreign, nothing incomprehensible, he wrote his immortal masterpieces. Whole human fortunes on a couple of pages, simple, moving, vivid, powerful. As in VANKA and VEROTCHKA and EASTER EVE and THE DARLING. I want to read the most beautiful ones again, with you. You should read them to me in German.

Before I went to bed last night I was reading from Matthias Claudius and from Angelus Silesius. It’s remarkable and reassuring that so many disparate philosophies, worlds apart and mutually irreconcilable though they might seem, ultimately lead to one and the same thing. Silesius, as a Christian, the ‘Cherubinic Pilgrim’, sings:

The rose is without wherefore; it blooms because it blooms,
It regards itself not, asks not whether others see it.

Krishnamurti think people can attain immortality and fulfilment by rejecting Christianity, science, ambition, striving, prejudice, regret, doubt, retrospection and prognostication. He looks for the development of man in liberation and simplification, above all in liberating the imagination from its spectres, so it can be entirely present in the NOW, so the soul can empathise with the whole world and incorporate the whole world, without memories that condemn, without plans or desires for the future, without selfish passions, with only a boundless love that identifies the self with the world. Does Silesius’s little verse not say the same thing?

Dr Alfred Adler gives the following as the aim of his individual psychology: that people should put aside their desire for power and achieve understanding through scientific logic, that the greatest happiness is to be found in adaptation and not in social distinction. He spends volumes and volumes showing that the malady of our civilization consists in a neurotic desire for power on the part of individuals and whole nations, that it can only be remedied by a logical deconstruction of the neurotic impulses that invariably drive people to want to demonstrate their own superiority over others. Silesius simply says: ‘It regards itself not, asks not whether others see it.’ I find it heartening to see how so many different thinkers, people who never knew each other, are actually all after the same thing. If one day there are enough people who WANT the same thing, patiently continue to WANT it and are guided by the same vision, then someday utopia will come – either here or on some other planet.

Among all my books here I recently found my two wonderful volumes on botany and zoology. This got me thinking how fun and exciting it would be if we (you and I and our kids) had a little microscope and could study the plants and the minibeasts of St Tropez. Not s-t-u-d-y so much as have fun exploring things and marvelling and rejoicing at the wonders of the natural world and discovering new things every day.

I want to read all the books on the Dorothy Lewis book list you sent me. So far I’ve only laid hands on a copy of SANCTUARY. But don’t send anything. I have enough here for the winter. And for my summer reading I’d like to choose my own books! From your bookcase!

The excerpts from Freud were really interesting and have inspired me to go back to my former interest in psychoanalysis and to study it more seriously. There are also some outstanding professors at the Sorbonne for that. We’ll see. I’m sure I’ll find something. Who knows what opportunities will present themselves before the autumn semester begins?

I’m not surprised about Glaser. Please send me anything you can find out about him, because I’m writing a novella about him.

Heinzl’s business was bankrupt. The last thing he tried also went up in the air. Quite literally. He’d invested his money in a liquor distillery. Just two days after he bought the shares, the police raided the distillery. There was a huge shoot-out and one of the employees was shot dead. The stills exploded in all the commotion and the whole building went up in flames. It was just a lucky coincidence that neither Heinzl nor I were there at the time supervising the staff, as we’d planned to be, because you can’t really rely on these bootleggers. And so we finally had to give up the apartment, as we should have done months ago. On the first of January I came out here to Waldfrieden to continue with my writing. Heinzl wants to find a little place in New York because he thinks he’ll be able to get a job through one of his old contacts. Christmas in New York was the traditional family holiday, festive, happy, lovely. For once the awkward nervous tension and irritability of our co-existence as a family was entirely absent. And so we sat around the rug by the candlelit tree, opened our brightly wrapped parcels and enjoyed ourselves like kids again. It’s a shame we can’t show each other the same goodwill all the time. Instead, the four of us tear each other to pieces (often in the subtlest ways) and can’t possibly live together under the one roof. I was the only one who could tolerate and get along with everyone else, perhaps because I was the newcomer, and so I always had to play the conciliator. But even my tolerance was often just an external pretence, and all too often I felt the need to up and leave, cursing under my breath. But enough of that. Christmas was nice. As nice as it could possibly have been for Clifford without Ellen. For such candlelit festivities and fresh salads seasoned with parsley and . . . . . for two will not be this intimate anywhere in the whole wide world until Cronos and Fate arrange for it to be just as nice for Ellen and Clifford again. Not long now! It can’t be long now!


13 January

How I should like to show you the woods that hem us in here, Annerl! The silver-grey trunks of the beech trees, the ragged, dark, nocturnal red-brown firs, hemlocks and spruces, and here and there a little birch wood, as white as sugar cakes and bridal veils and hare furs and virgin snow. The soft, dry, deep carpet of moss, needles and leaf litter on the forest floor. And the tranquillity of hearing nothing but your own breathing, your own heart beating. Any sense of belonging to human civilisation evaporates. You become part of the soul of the trees, the earth, the wind – and not just a part, the whole soul. However quietly you walk, a single leaf being crushed underfoot makes a terrific noise. Then you have to stand quite still, barely breathing, and over the beating of your own pulse you somehow start to hear the pulse of the primordial world. A pulse that seems to have an almost supersensory, otherworldly beat. And yet, once you become aware of it, its mighty rhythm fuses earth and sky, constructs every individual thing out of everything else, then destroys and rebuilds it again.

Now, though, I need to put on my big boots and run to the post if I’m going to get this letter off today. We give the post to a farmer who lives on the other side of the woods, two kilometres from here, and he gives it to the postman, who then takes it another twelve kilometres to the post office. I’ll take a rucksack and a hatchet because Mrs Twitchell, a wonderful eighty-five-year-old farmer, promised to give me a load of apples, and on the way home I need to deal with a couple of dead trees which have fallen on the path.

Annerl! . . . . . See you soon! . . . . . . .

Yours,

Etl

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