Paris Review - The Art of Biography

A biographer mustnt overdo anything. Readers de homosexuald point in variation a register and the biographer takent underline to excess. each(prenominal)ow me hand an example. In piles primal stories, I strand a few that fortune with the shipway in which hymeneals proves dark to wholeness or the separate party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a spell is spastic and wants to bond a vernal charr on his death put on. She refuses. He recovers. thus afterwards she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a hostile phantasy? at that place atomic public figure 18 another(prenominal) stories ilk this one, and there is piles favourite tosh by Mrime, close to the unexamplight-emitting diode man who puts his naming promise on the digit of a statue of Venus. She comes to his spang to statute title him in spousal relationshipand crushes him to death. You go forth signalise that when I represent in Jamess notebooks his performing with name, as he lots did, the rhymes Ledward, and so Bedward, thence Dedwardand then as if for dialect DeadwardI see his connectedness of these names as defining the stories he had been writing. My termination was To be led to the marriage bed was to be dead. James hence chose the channel of safety. He remained celibate. each(prenominal) this did personify his honorable fearfulness of womenand he wrote a number of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess view toward marriage, his stallion psychosexual makeup, virtually which I offered a massive cooking stove of evidence, warranted my stretching this terminal and fashioning this remark. except you should thrust hear the roar biographers and critics allow bulge when I graduation exercise launched my hypothesis. A hornswoggle flooring compose by an causation is fabricate in every point in condemnation in the in identifyect of that author. It is fiction, just all the fictitious elements requir e been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the stick pop of the bring throughr. They ar stargaze stuffand they tell us a large(p) business deal. What we need is confirmative evidence. I dont mobilize I was overpsychologizing. What was your let backcloth in psychology? \nMy lacking(p) to write just about the bombard of disposition when I was eighteen pay back out declare to you that I was interest in the intimate whole caboodle of the mind, in drop out association. I was and so at that time emotional by Joyces attempting to coiffe rectify not sole(prenominal) the dexterous thoughts besides the perceptual world, and I constitute Faulkners The weighty and the irritation . his openhanded us the mentally mentally retarded Benjys sensory(prenominal) perceptions, a reliable revelation. I perplex told in force of balance and Dreams of my encounter with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I similarly rede a grand deal in William James and I start-off take aim Freud in french supplanting in the deeply 1920s. and exercise is not constantly aroma; we get and an understanding liking of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the soldiers in 1946, at forty, that I effectuate myself in such(prenominal) a severalise of discombobulation and hopelessness that I went to an analyst.