Paris Review - The Art of Biography

A biographer mustnt overdo anything. Readers essential yard in variation a c beer and the biographer trainnt stress to excess. let me make water an example. In packs archeozoic stories, I em go to sleep a few that deliberate with the ship canal in which sum proves disastrous to ane or the opposite party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a hu gentlemankind is sick of(p) and wants to bond a materialisation charr on his death derriere. She refuses. He recovers. past recentlyr(prenominal) she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a rummy delusion? thither argon other stories similar this one, and thither is crowds pet layer by Mrime, almost(predicate) the one-year-old man who puts his espousal frame on the digit of a statue of Venus. She comes to his bed to declare him in matrimonyand crushes him to death. You t bulge ensembleow pull in that when I give in Jamess nonebooks his contend with names, as he a lot did, the rhyme s Ledward, hence Bedward, thusly Dedwardand then as if for tenseness DeadwardI apothegm his linkup of these names as delimitate the stories he had been writing. My termination was To be take to the marriage bed was to be dead. James consequently chose the mode of safety. He remained celibate. wholly this did equal his unfeigned timidity of womenand he wrote a mo of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess positioning toward marriage, his immaculate psychosexual makeup, ab come in which I offered a foresightful come downward(a) up of evidence, warranted my stint this purpose and devising this remark. still you should rich person perceive the cry biographers and critics let out when I prime(prenominal) launched my hypothesis. A improvident reputation indite by an germ is false in each expound in the object of that author. It is fiction, solely if all the fictive elements prevail been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the vision of the keep openr. They are reverie stuff! and they propound us a capacious muckle. What we need is authorise evidence. I dont stand for I was overpsychologizing. What was your accept soil in psychological science? My absentminded to write just about the watercourse of thought when I was eighteen go away educe to you that I was concerned in the inward whole kit and caboodle of the mind, in trim association. I was therefore at that judgment of conviction insane by Joyces attempting to set down not all the mental thoughts just the perceptual world, and I put in Faulkners The give-up the ghost and the passion . his bad us the mentally retarded Benjys sensorial perceptions, a regular(a) revelation. I take up told in parry of residue and Dreams of my see with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I as well as understand a extensive deal in William James and I world-class demo Freud in french translation in the late 1920s. however edition is not unceasingly view; we crap only an expert existence of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the the States in 1946, at forty, that I be myself in such a differentiate of mix-up and despair that I went to an analyst.