Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. I'm caught in the conflict of
wanting badly to answer it at the usual great length,
and getting to work on the legal tasks before me, which
stretch further than I am able to see.

In my world, you're never a voyeur.
I'm aware of my indecent lack of modesty. It's the artist
in me. Without implying any comparison, I ask: How else would
all those charmingly beautiful nudes that Titian painted have
found their way to the Museum of Fine Arts where they will be
ogled at by tens of thousands of visitors, at $23.50 a pass
until the middle of August? Everything remains, in Goethe's words:
"Oeffentlich Geheimnis", an open secret.  If you can't perceive it,
then, no matter how open, it remains a secret, but if you
understand, it would be an insult to truth to presume to keep it
secret from you.

Please don't hesitate to criticise me. I thrive on criticism.
With respect to the Konnarock High School story, like everything
I (we) do or make, it welled from the unconscious. Arguably what
perplexed Marion, and what moved you to criticism, is the
circumstance that the characters are not distorted or disfigured
by the words in which they are described. They are real also
in an esthetic dimension, in the sense that their personalities
permeate the prose through which they appear. The Konnarock
valley was seen not only by the untutored anonymous narrator,
but by Elsie, by Austin, by Austin's parents: it exists independent
of all of them and accordingly is brought to life in sweeping
eloquent sentences which tend to do it justice. Like the valley,
the prose has a reality of its own which transcends the capacities
of the narrator, even when it purportedly flows from his pen.  That's
not a fault; on the contrary, it's arguably an expression of
esthetic truth, a truth which is so oppressively absent, - at
least for my sensibilities, - in the writings of authors who
find it necessary to pay unrelenting homage to vulgarity.

Now back to the law. Stay well, and give my best to Ned.

Jochen