Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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523 West 121, New York

4 June 1938

Dear Annerl!

Thanks in no small part to your efforts on my behalf I’ve just won an ‘internship in the guidance laboratory’! We’re all very pleased about it, and I can hardly say how grateful I am to you for putting in a good word for me. The internship comes with a stipend of $300. But that’s the least of it. The important thing is the honour, prestige or whatever you want to call it, and particularly the opportunities it will afford to practice as a psychologist. But even this internship has been the source of some consternation for me. When I learned that I’d been selected I immediately telephoned my mother (who had just arrived from Munich) and told her all about it. She congratulated me sincerely and said she was delighted to hear that I’d be receiving a month salary of $300 even as a student. When I finally explained to her that the stipend is for the whole year and not a monthly salary, she was so disappointed that I was almost embarrassed to have announced such a ‘trifling amount’ with such enthusiasm. If you can imagine that as a telephone conversation, with noisy children at either end of the line, so that everything had to be repeated and enunciated at volume, then you’ll have some idea of what a comedy it was! My mother, by the way, is doing extremely well. (She’s always been prone to minor misunderstandings on the telephone.)

Ross Sanders spent the past winter here in New York, mainly to look for a job for Tusnelda’s son ‘Junior’. His drawings and paintings are considerably better now; they’ve become clearer, stronger, more plastic. Unfortunately he rarely does any work, as in Cagnes. He spent the previous winter in Copenhagen with Tusnelda and the family. He was dreadfully bored there, socially; he said everyone seemed awfully bourgeois. But he spent a large part of his time in the national library, reading mainly communist literature, and now he’s become a passionate communist. Eventually he found Junior a job as a secretary to an attorney, then he immediately left for Cagnes, for his hatred of New York knows no bounds. Once he’s there he plans to put on his walking books and his rucksack and spend a few weeks in the mountains with Tusnelda. He asked after you and the kids and sends his greetings with the hope that he’ll meet you again some day in Cagnes.

Do you remember Lilly and Franz Elsner, friends of Minkus’s family (or are you perhaps better acquainted with them now?)? Frau Elsner wrote me a very sad letter asking if I could help them come to America so they can start a ‘new life’ here. And so with Catharine’s help I discovered an organisation that does what it can to help artists, academics and so on who want to move here from Germany and Austria. The director of this organisation is Mrs Lilly Wittels, 91 Central Park West, New York City (she’s the wife of psychoanalyst Fritz Wittels). If anyone you know wants to emigrate to the USA as a political or racial refugee, tell them they should write a long biographical letter to Mrs Wittels giving their age, place of birth, race, religion, profession, marital status, number and ages of children and so on and so forth. Presumably she then finds wealthy American philanthropists who are willing to ensure that the refugees don’t become a financial burden on the American state.

What will become of Hügelhof, I wonder? I do hope you won’t have too much trouble with it. Here in New York we know a Jewish lady from Vienna, Frau Dr Helene Scheu, from a well-known family of social democrats. Her house in Vienna was seized after the fall of Schuschnigg but released again shortly after that. So she’s hopeful that this ‘revolution’ won’t cause her any further distress – and if that’s the case then goodness knows you ought to be unimpeachable, for you must surely be politically ‘innocent’! – or were any of your relatives in Vienna politically active as opponents of the new regime?

I was pleased to hear about Beate’s success, and the description of your charming and stimulating company. Catharine and I wish we were part of your circle! There can hardly be a family on earth more kind and stimulating than yours! Beate has always been so talented that her success comes as no surprise to me – the only surprising thing about it is the speed at which the years are flying by! I still remember when this beautiful ‘Egyptian’ girl whipped me around the knees with a bouquet of nettles because I’d said she couldn’t have any more of Hanni’s fried potatoes – and now she has a career – in London and Paris! And here I am, a family man! And Annerl has been living in England for years – and is about to become an adoptive Englishwoman! And yet the fleeting years are real and true – I can still see the farmer’s red parasol tumbling down the mountainside in high slapstick somersaults, I can smell the scent of the honeysuckle and the pine needles, I can hear the homely melody of the rain falling on the ivy around the windows at Hügelhof! What a mystery these things are, time and fate and life! And what a mystery the retention of the past in memory (not unlike immortality!), where the magic of lived experience, of the past, lives on as creative and enchanting as ever!

Write to me again soon, Annerl! Lots of love to each one of you, from the three of us!

Etl

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