Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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Monday, 19 March

Dearest Annerl!

How are you? How’s it looking with the schools? Did you marry the insulin inventor? Or are you just spending so much time with Clarence that you haven’t got around to writing?

Lauterburg the painter came by unannounced. I showed him all the reproductions I have here, and he was absolutely beside himself with enthusiasm until eventually I gave him that portrait by Lippo Lippi, which he loved so much that he simply couldn’t put it down again. Then he wanted to go to a shop to buy the rest of the reproductions I have. But I didn’t have time. I told him I was in the middle of writing a Tyrolean novella. That afternoon he came back with a fistful of small red poppies – ‘to remind you of the Tyrol’ – and we went to see a Daumier exhibition at the Orangerie together (near the Swiss exhibition). When he realised that his tastes and mine are a perfect match he became extremely talkative, stood gesticulating in front of painting and started raving about the ‘mysticism of space’, which one only finds in the very greatest of painters (Daumier included), and how a masterpiece becomes detached from the worldly objects it represents and becomes a self-contained entity, a world unto itself. He is intoxicated by the all artistic inspiration he finds in Paris and immediately sees everything on canvas (heaps of sand, omnibuses, steamers on the Seine, cranes, rooflines, clouds). His only regret is that he can’t stay here. I’ll introduce you to him sometime. I’m sure you’d like him and get on with him. (I have to laugh when I remember the similar conversations I had back then with Hans Plessen, Sandy, George de Forest Brush (who has paintings hanging in the Metropolitan Museum in New York), and the conversations I’m having now with Lauterburg, which elicited these words from an exasperated Beate: ‘Why do you use those interminable phrases? You’re not an artist!’). Lauterburg tells me he showed a hundred and fifty paintings to the committee for the Swiss exhibition. I wonder whether there’s any intimation of this prolific energy in the painting you call ‘The Magician’? The little gardener, by the way, is meant to be Lauterburg himself.

The Camaraderie Française recently invited me to give a lecture on ‘The World Crisis and the Intelligentsia’ – it was going to be on Thursday evening, and I would have been very glad to have enlightened them all, but there’s also a performance of the Saint John Passion on Thursday evening, and I can’t possibly miss that.


Tuesday, 20 March

There was a gala performance at the Odeon last night: Shakespeare’s TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. With its litany of Homeric heroes, this Anglo-Grecian play seemed outrageously strange in French. But the costumes and stage décor were wonderful. The theatre was packed with high dignitaries, generals in gala uniform and their wives in the most splendid evening wear. I kept thinking how much I would have liked to have had my Annerl next to me in her sweet, shapely and yet so very lovely evening gown. The Americans from the Sorbonne had been given a box, and so they took me along with them. This evening I’m going to hear a lecture from Marcel Prévost at the Sorbonne.

But now I must get down to some work. Hopefully I’ll get a letter from you soon. That’ll calm me down and help me with the writing.

Lots of kisses for you ———

Etl


I made a note of these passages from Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE:

The thoughts of the dying Prince Andrey: ‘To love everything, every one, to sacrifice self always for love, meant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life.’

On Pierre, after the suffering of his incarceration: ‘That seeking for an object in life was over for him now . . . . . . He felt that there was no such object, and could not be. And it was just the absence of an object that gave him that complete and joyful sense of freedom that at this time made his happiness.’

‘Once admit that human life can be guided by reason, and all possibility of life is annihilated.’

Count Nikolay says to Countess Marya Bolkonsky: ‘It’s not those who are handsome we love, but those we love who are handsome.’

‘All ideas that have immense results are always simple.’

From Oswald Spengler, THE HOUR OF DECISION:

‘There is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence . . . . . Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator: he dissects and he reassembles; conception and birth are alien to him.’

‘Conflict is the original fact of life, is life itself.’


[Handwritten note relating to adjacent passage on conversations with artists:]

How insufferably vain this is! But I can’t and won’t accept that I am not an ‘artist’. So until I have published proof of the fact, I shall just have to boast a little about the things that ‘confirm’ it. You’ll forgive me that, won’t you?

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