Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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Calle Gral. Aureliano Rivera 17-B
Villa Obregon
Distrito Federal
Mexico

13 April 1947

My very dearest Annerl and Beate!

Since you’ve both asked me almost exactly the same questions, I’m writing to you both at the same time so I won’t have to repeat myself. What dramatic adventures the young Clemens has been put through! Poor Annerl! Poor Frau Clemens! But how proud you must be, as mother and wife, to know that he’s now fit and well and on the right path. I’m pleased to hear he’s grown up to be such a steadfast and single-minded young man, for he was such an uncommonly beautiful child that the whole world was inclined to pander to him, to flatter and spoil him, so that one feared he might turn out quite soft in his character and that he’d have a tough time making his way in this awfully harsh world. Congratulations to him, and to you, Annerl – his case seems to be the perfect proof that love is better than discipline.

To answer your questions: first, what brought me to Mexico? From 1935 to 1940 I studied psychology at Columbia University and worked as an ‘intern in psychological counselling’ for a while. But that profession didn’t sit well with me at the time; I got the impression that therapeutic results depend less on the psychologist’s knowledge than on his conviction and powers of suggestion. And I myself was too insecure, too nervous to be able to help people who were sick and sometimes half mad. For that you would need to have an almost superhuman reserve of mental fortitude and strength – which is unfortunately something that almost no practising psychologist or psychoanalyst has. Then, just as I was starting to have serious doubts about my profession, I became obsessed with gouache painting, which somehow seemed to have a liberating effect on me and attracted a good deal of attention from several art dealers and critics. Julian Levy, a famous New York art dealer who seemed quite taken with my paintings, said that no painter or anyone doing anything creative – in other words, any artist – could afford to live in New York in the long term and that a painter ought to move either to the country, to the South Sea Islands or perhaps to Mexico. This advice aligned perfectly with what I’d already been thinking, so we started looking for a house in the country, in Connecticut – but we couldn’t find anything we liked that was also affordable for us. Around this time (spring 1940), various friends and acquaintances started coming back from Mexico, and all of them, without exception, were really enthusiastic about it. So we put all our furniture in an empty barn at my mother-in-law’s place and took off. For me this was especially desirable because at just this time there was a wave of war propaganda and hysteria that gripped virtually everyone in our circle of friends and paralysed all free thought. I’d experienced the First World War as a child, and the scars inflicted back then, by the hatred and persecution of anyone and anything of German origin, were reopened (my mother was German, of course, and the hatred of everything German was therefore something that I could neither understand nor deal with as a child). I agreed with people’s hatred of the Nazis, but when, in 1940, as in 1914–1918, I had to hear from my own relatives, just as I had back then, that lasting peace in the world would never be achieved until everyone of German blood had been rooted out and eliminated – I felt paralysed. And there were very few people who had any sympathy with my conviction that those who thought that must in their hearts have been Nazis themselves. So in that respect the atmosphere in Mexico was incredibly liberating for me: liberation from wartime hysteria, liberation from the almost superstitious adoration of money, the avaricious addiction to money that unfortunately still cripples the intellectual and artistic life of the United States.

You ask what my profession is, what I’m actually doing for a living now. In 1935 my grandfather died and left me a portion of the family fortune – not much, but enough to live on. If it hadn’t been for the inflation and the incredibly high prices, it might have been enough for me and my family to have lived out the rest of our lives in comfort. (Edda, my youngest, will not allow me carry on writing until I’ve explained to her exactly who you are, why I’m writing to you and so on. This would be much easier to explain if you were to send me a few pictures of yourselves. Anyway, I want some pictures of you for myself. I’ll send you some pictures of us, too, once we’ve all been into town together to have some taken.) The little one has just heard a bird in the garden and has run out to see it, so I can continue writing. In practice, then, I have no profession, since I earn no money. But I keep myself busy with painting, and when I’m not doing that I write, and I still hope to earn enough from that to send the kids to good schools someday. The good private schools have become so madly expensive in recent years, and at the same time people say that almost all the state schools are in such a poor state now, morally speaking, especially since the beginning of the war, that it would be irresponsible to send ‘respectable’ children there. For the time being the children are going to a tiny private school here, not far from us, and my mother-in-law, who’s here visiting at the moment, says our children are far better behaved and doing just as well intellectually as the children from the Brearley School in New York, which is one of the best (and unfortunately also one of the most expensive) schools in the USA. Both Catharine and I spend far more time with the children than any of the other parents we know. Catharine teaches them songs, Mother Goose poems, prayers, dancing and so on. I insist on manners, hygiene and so on, and I wrack my brains trying to answer all the thousands of questions they badger me with every day (sometimes out of legitimate curiosity, sometimes just to compel me to spend more time with them). But I also take their questions as an opportunity to explain all sorts of things about art, literature, science, history, economics and so on, insofar as they are capable of understanding such things. I’m also responsible for reading them stories before they go to sleep. I must already have told them many hundreds if not thousands of fairy tales, which I invent on the hoof and soon forget. The children remember these tales so well that they’ve often told me about them years later, when I no longer have the slightest idea where they might have heard such fabulous stories. It’s always hilarious when they remind me that the culprit was none other than myself, and I have to laugh because I’d completely forgotten.

The newspapers are full of highly disconcerting reports of food shortages in England – and everywhere else other than the American continent. It pains me to think of you standing in line to pay for inadequate rations. I wish you were all here, where we have plenty of everything! For the time being, though, you’ll have to accept the handful of ‘dinners’ I sent a few days ago in the form of a couple of CARE parcels (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe). I’m afraid the contents of these ‘dinner’ parcels will be really rather ordinary and won’t come close to providing you with anything like the delicious dishes I enjoyed with you all in Munich, Schwaz, Vienna, Cagnes and so on. Do send me Inge’s surname and address so I can send her something too.

Doreen Lewisohn hasn’t been in touch yet. Even if she is a ‘poor little frustrated spinster’, I’m impatiently awaiting her visit because even just the thought that I might sit down next to someone who knows you and has recently seen you, someone who will be able to tell me all about you, is for me like a large bottle of the finest, most potent champagne.

Lots of love from your old

Ettl

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