Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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Waldfrieden, Winchester, New Hampshire

13 July 1935

Dearest Annerl!

I think about you all so very much and I’d love to know where you all are and what you’re doing, what plans you’re making, who your friends are. You wrote to me a long time ago (and not at all since) and said you were reading Schleiermacher and that you’d write to me about it. I’d be interested to hear about it because, besides being interested in everything you do, I’ve been thinking about religion myself recently, reading Hauer and Reventlow on the new German faith, Svoboda’s GESTALTEN DES GLAUBENS [forms of faith], Alfred North Whitehead’s RELIGION IN THE MAKING, and I myself am now writing an article about the (unspoken, disavowed) heathen faith of our modern civilisation. This article will probably get published because I’ve talked to the editors of various monthly magazines about the topic, and they all expressed lively interest in my ideas.

You know, Annerl, you’re the loveliest, kindest and, to me personally, the most important person I’ve ever known. In some respects it seems to me that I wasn’t born until I met you, and that I died when I left you – or, when I’m in a more optimistic frame of mind, it seems that these many months and perhaps years spent apart are nothing but a period of preparation for seeing you again. So don’t forget about me completely! My fate is too closely bound up with yours for us to be separated by the Atlantic Ocean, a couple of years and the practical necessities of my ‘career’. Please write me a long letter and tell me how you are – tell me everything! Tell me what you’re doing, what you’re reading, where you live and what it's like there. Tell me how our mutual friends are doing too – Gretl Wiesenthal, Henriette, the Kaulas, the Weiszens or anyone else you’ve been seeing and writing to – the Rupés, the dear folk from Schwaz and above all ‘our’ children!

Heinzl’s wedding here really was a lyrical festival of joy, love, felicity, simplicity. The bride and groom were clearly so in love that despite Heinzl’s emotional intensity and often critical, bitter and difficult personality one couldn’t help but wish them enduring happiness. It was so very different to Edda’s wedding in Groß Rietz: a grand, pompous, aristocratic affair for a young couple who clearly had no idea what it means to be in love, to be engulfed and engrossed in one another! I don’t think anyone at Edda’s wedding who was even remotely acquainted with Edda and Kurt beforehand could believe that this marriage might last. Shortly after the engagement, Kurt’s adorable, witty, straight-talking stepmother told me that Kurt was very fortunate to have found someone as beautiful, intelligent and capable as Edda and that she didn’t know how Edda would be able to tolerate his immaturity. And so it was. And on top of that, Kurt knew nothing about intimacy, humanity, philosophy or empathy. He was just a political fanatic. And the final catastrophe was that Kurt was head over heels in love with Edda, whereas she found him so physically repulsive that she couldn’t even bear to let him kiss her. When Edda told him they would have to divorce, the poor lad cried like a child all night long and didn’t want to allow it. But Edda didn’t give in. And now she’s arranged to do the whole thing from here, so she won’t be going back to Germany at all. It’s strange how one could always tell that fate played no part in Edda’s relationship with Kurt. It was an act of will. She was only ‘in love’ in a very general, literary way. And her ‘marital bliss’ was so literary, unnatural and forced that I could tell even before Christmas, reading between the lines, that she was already embittered, disinclined and unhappy. I was very tempted to go straight to Berlin and bring her back to America. Thank goodness she had the courage and resolve to stand up for herself!

Heinzl’s marriage to Helen (or ‘Robin’, as he calls her) was an absolute necessity of fate, although everything was stacked against it – socially, financially, practically. But the two of them were so profoundly aware that they belonged to one another that all that was surmounted and overcome. May fate continue to smile on them!

Mama’s plans were naturally thrown into disarray by Edda’s decision not to remain in Germany. But Edda has proved so cold and taciturn towards mama, prefers to stay with other friends instead and has so far only been to Waldfrieden for two short visits (she arrived on 31 May), that mama feels completely estranged from her and has decided to move to Munich after all. Of course, I can’t get actively involved in this ‘women’s business’ – not least because I know that situations like this are subject to profound, often less than angelic psychological urges and instincts. Still, I have been able to talk to and reconcile the two of them to the point where the silent bitterness of the initial period has now gone, and they can speak to each other without the ‘frostiness’. Neither mama nor my little sister is to blame in all this. I see it as one of those tragic states of the soul that just can’t be avoided any longer, like hunger or thirst. It’s probably something to do with the deeply sensitive way that injured women defend and assert themselves. And in fact mama’s initial reaction, rather than sympathy for her daughter (and Edda had said: ‘I didn’t think anyone in the world could be as unhappy as I have been these last three months’), was a pathos-laden sigh: ‘Poor Kurt! How he must have suffered!’

A few weeks ago, before I came to Richmond the last time, I paid another visit to the Casanovas. I found them and their Bohemian company absolutely charming. Gracie’s son, the seventeen-year-old, was there – and he is without doubt the most intelligent young man I’ve ever met – debating and chatting with the more mature and by no means stupid adults with an intellectual acuity and mental agility that put everyone else in the shade. In the presence of her son, Gracie was a mature and deeply serious woman, and I found her far more inspiring than I did the first time we met. I was so taken with her and her husband that I’m already looking forward to seeing them when I get back to New York. Gracie’s abnormally precocious son – having scored top marks in every subject at Harvard at an age when mere mortals are still languishing in their preps schools – is going to spend this coming year wandering around Europe. I told him he really ought to look you up. He’s very nervous, quite ugly in appearance and gesticulates and talks in a way that could easily be taken for affectation. But that can’t be held against him. He’s just full of the nervous energy and mental alertness that one usually associates with the word ‘genius’, and that makes it hard for him to maintain his equilibrium. I’m sure he’ll turn out to be a splendid and important chap. As you can imagine, I was telling him about you and the kids and singing your praises as the only family on earth that I could recommend to anyone wholeheartedly and without reservation.

Annerl, I do wonder what has become of you all. Are the kids still the same as ever, or would I perhaps no longer recognise them? Please send me some photographs of you all! I’ll have someone take some snaps of me soon and I’ll send you the results so that you’ll recognise me if I suddenly show up in London! My hair is getting thinner, the stubble on my chin has become denser and needs shaving more often, I wear glasses, to read and at the theatre, and because of all the chaos I see in the world I’m becoming more and more philosophical, to the point where my life risks being consumed, like that of a Buddhist monk, in the contemplation of conciliatory natural laws. For now I can still climb the highest trees, jump fences, swing my axe and muck in wholeheartedly when there’s good-natured fun and mischief afoot. Gosh, I wish I was there with you! Did you receive my last long letter at all, I wonder? It’s been so long since I last heard from you! Please write soon!

Sandy – Roswell Sanders – wrote to say that he wants to come to America in August, to show some paintings and look for work. He wanted me to look up his ‘best friends’ in New York. So I did, and they’re good people. But when it comes to culture, art and interests, they were such hopeless Philistines that we had nothing more to talk about after my second visit. They only knew Sanders when he was still a small-town provincial – they couldn’t possibly understand the reborn Sanders from Cagnes, with his mysticism, his surrealist painting, his astronomy, Tusnelda and their Mediterranean languor. I’m interested to see how these old friends will find each other! Unfortunately I won’t be in New York for the reunion.

Where is Fritz now? I’d like to write to him, because he asked me a favour that I would have liked to have done, though it was impossible at the time. I was to send you some money that was intended for Edda so you could pass it on to young Willink, and Fritz would have sent the same amount in Deutschmarks to Edda in Berlin. But the laws here state that inherited assets can only be compared after a year. So for the time being we’ve only been given ‘provisional amounts’, from which, because of the scandalous exchange rates, I’ve sent Edda just $125 as a direct ‘financial assistance transfer’ so she’d at least have some blocked Deutschmarks. And Edda’s now here in America for the foreseeable future, so I doubt I can be of any help to Fritz. Which is a shame, because it clearly meant a lot to him. I myself feel financially comfortable for the time being with my ‘provisional’ income of $125 per month and the prospect of that being closer to $200 from next December, along with whatever I might be able to earn as a writer. I hope your finances are healthy enough for you to live comfortably and give your children everything you would wish to. All my assets are in the hands of a ‘trustee’ (Fideicommissar? I’m not sure of the German word), so I needn’t do anything other than sign a cheque and release the money once a month.

You know, Annerl, it’s only a year ago that we had Paris to ourselves for a few days and discovered Sables-d’Or! Our quiet street in Paris with the horse-chestnut trees and the cosy little bell tower! The gardens at the Palais Luxembourg! At Sables-d’Or we walked along the broad sand dunes on the beach at sunset, showed each other mussels – you were hatching plans for your kids, and you were in such good spirits, and on the distant headland stood lonely pine trees in black against the glow of the setting sun. I can still see your little footsteps in the wet sand – where are they now? Where are you? What is the enchanted, dwindling time taking from us? This past year has slipped through my fingers, homeless, meaningless – and fate is passing us by without stopping to ask why or wherefore. And I’m still the same homeless, aimless wanderer that I was in that moment when I looked back from my car in Paris on that morning in July and could see you no more.


15 July, morning

As my main intellectual activity recently I’ve been drawing up a system of heathen religion, not as ‘my own creation’ but in the belief that such a ‘system’ or rather that such a profoundly religious type of faith is the only spiritual foundation of our civilisation, albeit an unacknowledged one. Reality – from the knowable to the unknowable – is the divine. The religious aspiration of modern man is knowledge: truth is divine; denial of truth is blasphemy. Pain and tragedy are essential aspects of life; contradiction, internal conflict and lack of fulfilment are essential forms in the temporal movement of life. All these things are therefore also divine; our mystical calling in life is therefore one of constant conciliation with reality – with earthly divinity. In ethical terms this religion of knowledge is manifested as strong positivism: affirmation of life and the world, the urge for action, for the greatest possible fullness of years, affirmation of the sciences and of reason, of nature and art, of man and civilisation. As a universal belief system this religion of knowledge sets a powerful standard for criticism: dogmatism, blindness, narrow-mindedness, falsification and denial are blasphemous because they disavow truth – research, exploration, the creation of new artforms, the expansion of ethical, linguistic, mathematical and mystical boundaries; enlightenment, understanding and reconciliation are all forms of divine veneration because they strive for knowledge of reality and reconciliation with reality. That, in a few words, is what I’m planning to do. As soon as I have some of it in print, I’ll send it to you.

You have no idea, Annerl, just how much I hunger for news from you. Write me a letter at least twenty pages in length, with all the details: mealtimes, walks, books, music, friends, theatre, living arrangements – absolutely everything!

Kisses from Etl

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