Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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Paris, Thursday

My Annerl!

Although I still haven’t had a reply to my last two letters, I must write to you again. Partly because I find your silence somehow unnatural and I worry about how you’re doing, partly because I’m often racked with guilt about ever having caused you any mental distress. To me you are the most wonderful human being in the world. And you see, that both torments me and brings me joy. For deep within me I still feel the passionate urge to keep you beside me FOREVER and COMPLETELY, without compromise. I never wanted to acknowledge the difference between the wish and the prosaic everyday possibility. But since it must ultimately be exhausting and even sickening to harbour so fervent and constant a desire for something impossible, the organic self-preservation reaction inevitably had to come, a reaction to liberate me, not from you but from my own boundless passion. If fate had looked more favourably on us, that urge might have found issue in some happy productivity (I’m not just thinking of Quinterln!). As it was, it had to work out a new solitary existence, a new sense of reality. My last attempt to make a compromise with reality (almost unconsciously) was the belief that I might perhaps marry Beate, not because she was Beate but because it seemed she might have been a way of finally binding a part of you to me COMPLETELY and FOREVER. But the reality calls for harsh realisation, without compromise. I have never loved Beate, but you alone. There’s only one Annerl in the world, and there ain’t no changing that! And so here I now stand, and I can see that I’ve caused you pain – goodness knows I didn’t want to – and I myself am now suffering because there’s nothing I can do to change the past now. You know, Annerl, the most intense feelings of happiness, beauty and all-encompassing affirmation that I ever had, I had with you. You are and will always be irreplaceable to me, a confirmation of values that come from you and shine through the whole of mankind, the whole universe. Being estranged from you again even just for a moment would mean being deprived of something I can’t do without. So forgive me, my Annerl, for all the pain I’ve caused you (though in doing so I brought the same pain upon myself!) and write back to me straight away, if only to confirm that you are not so very far away and that you still are and always will be my loyal and trusted Annerl.

Etl

PS The house number of the Hotel de Paris is 24 (not 29) rue Bonaparte. Hopefully nothing’s gone missing! Since you left, I’ve had only three letters from you: from the sixth, the ninth and the thirteenth of March.

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