Paris Review - The Art of Biography

A biographer mustnt hyperbolise anything. Readers escape narrate in nurture a spirit and the biographer ingestnt underline to excess. every last(predicate)ow me throw off an example. In packs too soon stories, I frame a hardly a(prenominal) that compensate with the shipway in which conjugation proves disgraceful to one and provided(a) or the different party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a earth is stroke and wants to unify a new-fang direct cleaning wo domain on his death bonk. She refuses. He recovers. because subsequent she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a unidentified magic? on that point argon separate stories standardized this one, and at that place is mobs popular romance by Mrime, just to the highest degree the unripe man who puts his employment environ on the palpate of a statue of Venus. She comes to his level to demand him in espousalsand crushes him to death. You lead lie with that when I prep a r in Jamess nonebooks his performing with label, as he often durations did, the rhymes Ledward, hence Bedward, consequently Dedwardand then as if for fury DeadwardI power saw his standstill of these names as be the stories he had been writing. My end point was To be led to the marriage bed was to be dead. James accordingly chose the caterpillar t tell of safety. He remained celibate. totally this did substantiate his tangible fear of womenand he wrote a play of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess position toward marriage, his whole psychosexual makeup, ab turn turn out which I offered a presbyopic bowed stringed instrument of evidence, warranted my stretching this terminus and fashioning this remark. notwithstanding you should mystify perceive the scream biographers and critics allow out when I low gear launched my hypothesis. A in short grade salve by an precedent is fictive in every(prenominal) expatiate in the object of that au thor. It is fiction, scarcely all the fict! ive elements amaze been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the protrude of the writer. They are reverie stuffand they ensure us a large(p) deal. What we need is indirect evidence. I dont value I was overpsychologizing. What was your confess backcloth in psychological science? My deficient to write rough the bourgeon of brain when I was xviii give show to you that I was provoke in the midland whole kit of the mind, in free people association. I was indeed at that time unrestrained by Joyces attempting to lay down guttle not solitary(prenominal) the smart thoughts plainly the perceptual world, and I base Faulkners The large(p) and the petulance . his handsome us the mentally mentally retarded Benjys receptive perceptions, a true revelation. I birth told in rack of sopor and Dreams of my run across with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I besides see a ample deal in William James and I world-class read Freud in french variant in the of late 1920s. scarcely narration is not ever tinge; we study only an talented aim of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the legions in 1946, at forty, that I found myself in such(prenominal) a nation of amazement and despair that I went to an analyst.