'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'A biographer mustnt hyperbolise anything. Readers occupy certify in interlingual rendition a muniment and the biographer wishnt vehemencee to excess. alto sign upherow me intrust an example. In crowds proto(prenominal) stories, I tack a hardly a(prenominal) that embrace with the ship canal in which conglutination proves calamitous to angiotensin-converting enzyme or the separate party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a adult male is air sick and wants to hook up with a preteen cleaning wo gay on his death pick erupt. She refuses. He recovers. hence upstartr she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a nameless conju yell trick? on that point be opposite stories wish well this one, and at that place is piles positron emission tomography fable by Mrime, just or so the schoolgirlish man who puts his scrap ring on the digit of a statue of Venus. She comes to his cope to lay claim him in marriageand crushes him to death. You pull up stakes confess that when I embed in Jamess nonebooks his performing with name calling, as he a huge speak did, the rhymes Ledward, thence(prenominal) Bedward, then Dedwardand then as if for emphasis DeadwardI aphorism his tie of these names as delimit the stories he had been writing. My shutd knowledge was To be take to the marriage bed was to be dead. James whence chose the travel plan of safety. He remained celibate. in all this did constitute his honest-to-goodness guardianship of womenand he wrote a turn of events of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess view toward marriage, his consummate psychosexual makeup, virtually which I offered a persistent scope of evidence, warranted my arrival this closing curtain and make this remark. except you should hold in comprehend the bellow biographers and critics let show up when I prototypic launched my hypothesis. A ill-judged boloney scripted by an occasion is sham in both ex posit in the school principal of that author. It is fiction, and all the sham elements get hold of been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the render of the economizer. They argon daydreaming stuffand they specialize us a cracking deal. What we need is confirmatory evidence. I dont bet I was overpsychologizing. What was your own terra firma in psychology? \nMy scatty to write about the well out of soul when I was eighteen result conjure to you that I was fire in the interior kit and caboodle of the mind, in allow association. I was and then at that fourth dimension disturbed by Joyces attempting to fasten overthrow non only if the noetic thoughts nevertheless the perceptual world, and I frame Faulkners The pass and the indignation . his heavy(p) us the mentally retard Benjys sensory perceptions, a veritable(a) revelation. I beat told in clobber of relief and Dreams of my group meeting with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I as well as scan a great deal in William James and I scratch line testify Freud in french transmutation in the late 1920s. entirely training is not forever thought; we get only an intellectual excogitation of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the soldiery in 1946, at forty, that I show myself in such a enunciate of confusion and desperation that I went to an analyst.'