Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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Saturday evening

Dearest Annerl!

Your second little note has just arrived, and I’m rushing to reply straight away, if only briefly. First, I’m sending that letter to BÖSKE ANTHEIL, 51 East 55th Street, New York City, USA, back to you so that you can write the name in yourself, since both of the Antheils are themselves conspiracists. They’re prone to find intrigue in everything and to worry themselves about it.

As for me, I’ve become the embodiment of nervous ambition, the animus that sets the keys of my typewriter in motion, nothing more. It can’t be denied that I have reached a turning point in my career. In the past I’ve tried to console myself by attributing my lack of success to my ‘apprenticeship’, but this ‘apprenticeship’ is clearly over. Everything I do from now on should and must bear all the traits of marketable workmanship. My last novella (eighty-four pages) is so much better than anything I’ve ever done before that it makes me want to throw all the old manuscripts onto the fire. But the novellas I write now MUST be even better than the last! And so on! But at some point in the very near future I MUST know whether they are marketable or not! Until now it’s always been a question of whether I give in and let fate get the better of me and move back to America to beg for help as a poor, defeated wretch, or whether I apply myself to the task with fanatical concentration and succeed in the last moment. I sent my latest novella to an agent over a week ago. Unfortunately he’s in New York just now, though he’ll be back at the end of June. By then I need to have lots of new work to show him. His judgement will decide my fate, certainly for the coming months, perhaps for years. Whether I’m happy or unhappy is not a question I can allow myself to think about at a pivotal moment like this. The few ‘friends’ I have are utterly indifferent; whether I see them or not is left entirely to chance. No-one comes to see me and no-one keeps me from my work. ‘Love’ is of course out of the question simply because I can’t leave my work for long enough to find anyone else, but also because ‘gallantry’ has never had anything but contempt for dogged concentration and earnest, though it does pay close attention to money, freedom, fine couture, elegant automobiles . . . . . . whereas real love is a truly rare angelic apparition . . . . . . it may inhabit and animate memory and longing, but in this clattering age of the mechanical typewriter it would only feel neglected and would soon want to take its grievances elsewhere.

Although I was working until one o’clock last night, I woke up at four this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up at half past four and ran to ‘Les Halles’. Onions, carrots, radishes, cabbages piled high, right up to the rafters. But then I came to the flower market, where I was very much thinking of you, Annerl. How you and your children would have loved it! Thousands of flower varieties, bouquets, leaves, grasses and more flowers, a paradise of scents and colours. I turned home just as the sun was coming up, and as I was walking over the Pont au Change to the Île de la Cité the flower sellers were just setting up their stalls, turning the whole bridge into a flower market. What a sight! Suddenly the sun looked down from over the rooftops and the flowers went up in light, brightly illuminated all the way over the bridge. On the Seine down below the red light of the dawn shimmered on crested waves, and in the blue sky above the towers of Notre Dame white clouds drifted through the cold morning air. We should all have been there together. We should all have had breakfast together, with fruit from ‘Les Halles’ and a huge bunch of flowers in the middle of the table!

If only this agent would judge my work favourably! Would we then be able to do something together, for part of the summer at least?

Write to me. Until then a loving kiss. And another for now, for good night.

Etl

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