Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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16 September

Dear Baroness Schey!

My first wonderful breakfast of Shredded Wheat today gave me the impetus I needed to decamp to the children’s room with my most important things (paintings, books, manuscripts, typewriter and so on). The cold, damp north wind also blew the idea into my mind. All the figures I didn’t want as roommates (lovely though they are) have been taken down from the walls and locked in the wardrobe (Madonnas included!). With the vivid and colourful landscapes, the atmosphere in the room is now friendly, intimate and authentic. Undisturbed by the Lindner family, with a view down the valley towards Italy and flowers on the balcony to tend, I’m sure I’ll do some of my best work here.

‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’ is fantastic. I’m learning to appreciate Goethe for the first time. If only I could read day and night! The way he derives philosophical generalities from all sorts of episodes, though without ever straying too far from the sensory realities and particularities of those events, seems to me characteristic of the masculine spirit and a most endearing trait. (What I love about the feminine spirit is its capacity for appreciating the value of events spontaneously and definitively without giving a thought to causes, effects, consistent natural laws and so on.)

There have been two mishaps since I started the housework: the cat knocked a teacup and saucer from the window board and broke the cup, and little glass plate got broken when the wind blew it into the wooden box (it had been by the kitchen window with a globule of fat ever since Katie’s time). I feel ridiculous having to say it was the cat and the wind that did it – like a schoolboy trying to escape punishment. Accidents will happen, but it’s a shame when you can’t say who was at fault so they can learn from it. The ways of cats and those rare moments when the wind gets up are among the many imponderables in the book of fate! Still, the king of the castle (by the grace of his goddess), under whose regime these catastrophes occurred, begs his goddess for forgiveness!

Edl

PS The telephone has arrived since I wrote this, and the postman passed us by without bringing the card I was hoping for. Now a brisk gallop into town!

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