Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. The list for which I owe you
thanks is lengthening: a) The access to the NYT for which I
stubbornly refused to pay but on which now I rely throughout
the day, every day, and b) most recently, your offer to come
to Belmont, if and when we needed help. You should never
forget that this offer is reciprocal. Although for us
to come to St Paul would be impractical to the point of
impossibility, so long as we own 174 School Street -
which he have no intention of selling - there will always
be space here for you. As of 7:32 a.m. on February 8,
Margaret and I are both remarkably well, considering our
ages, Margaret having recovered from three minor strokes,
and I, at least as of this moment, thriving in disdain
of the medical - and dental - professions and in contempt
of the conventional wisdom that the "preservation" of ones
health requires compliance with diverse diagnostic and
therapeutic "guidelines" promulgated by committees of the
various medical specialties. Without doubt there will come
for me a day of reckoning when I am summoned to my doom by
an ambassador of the Establishment, as was Don Giovanni by
Il Commendatore. Here as there, stubborness remains to be
tested.

It's the rule rather than the exception for me to find myself 
at odds with the relics of Roman culture as I understand them.
A case in point: De mortuis nil nisi bonum - which according
to Wikipedia wisdom turns out to be of Greek provenance after
all. I prefer the converse: to say nothing but good of the
living inasmuch as I find forbearance from criticism to be the
cement both of friendship and of familial affection. My mother,
on the contrary, considered failing to pursue vestiges of 
disagreement or imperfection as dishonesty (Unaufrichtigkeits). 

This, I thought, might be the occasion to assemble my memories
of Helmut. I began at the end, with Guenter Grass who characterized
Helmut, the failed publisher who became an attendant to the Nobel
prize winning "ichversessene Kind" as its nursemaid.

"Dem Autor ist der Lektor gestorben.
Nun barmt es, das ichversessene Kind,
als sei ihm die Amme entlaufen."

Although Helmut never discussed his relationship to Grass explicitly,
he left me with the impression that Grass was an employer, "ichbesessen",
to say the least, with whose demands Helmut complied from necessity, -
der Not gehorchend, nicht dem eignen Triebe; and that Grass published
his obituary poem with more than a twinge of guilt for having exploited
Helmut who while he lived was Grass' subordinate and ran errands for his
boss. Had there been more than perfunctory collaboration, there would
have been eloquent prefatory acknowledgements if not indeed collaborative
publication. Grass would have put his name on Helmut's translations and
made them best-sellers. That's not what happened.

The pivot of my own relationship to Helmut was the divergence in out
literary tastes and judgments. We were in agreement about Hoelderlin and
Rilke; but I could not - and cannot come to terms with the contemporary
American "cultural" scene which Helmut found inspiring, and of which
he wanted to become a part - William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, etc.,
and Helmut in turn was offended by my writing, although much too polite
to say so. Perhaps on some other occasion, I'll have more to write on
that topic.

I started to review the more than 100 letters Helmut and I exchanged
over the past 3 years, and discovered that my memory is unreliable.
I must be very cautious when I try to reconstruct our relationship.
This afternoon is much too early to make a beginning of this difficult
but perhaps important task.

I hope that you are beginning to feel better, and I expect to write
to you again, soon.

Jochen