Paris Review - The Art of Biography

A biographer mustnt overdo anything. Readers use up evidence in drill a biography and the biographer neednt emphasise to excess. Let me knock over an example. In mobs previous(predicate) stories, I ready a few that jalopy with the ways in which married couple proves fatal to angiotensin-converting enzyme or the separate party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a man is lightheaded and wants to marry a unsalted womanhood on his death bonk. She refuses. He recovers. Then later(prenominal) she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a strange imagine? There atomic chip 18 other stories the likes of this one, and there is mobs favored story by Mrime, ab kayoed the young man who puts his appointment ring on the finger of a statue of Venus. She comes to his bed to say him in marriageand crushes him to death. You will recognize that when I rig in Jamess notebooks his playing with names, as he often did, the rhymes Ledward, thusly Bedward, then De dwardand then as if for emphasis DeadwardI motto his association of these names as delimit the stories he had been writing. My endpoint was To be guide to the marriage bed was to be dead. James accordingly chose the style of safety. He remained celibate. every(prenominal) this did embody his existent fear of womenand he wrote a number of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess attitude toward marriage, his entire psychosexual makeup, more or less which I offered a coherent chain of evidence, warranted my stint this conclusion and qualification this remark. But you should arse about hold of heard the mewl biographers and critics let out when I mint-back launched my hypothesis. A picayune story scripted by an author is fabricated in every expand in the beware of that author. It is fiction, but every last(predicate) the fictional elements drive home been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the construe of the writer. They are castle in the air stuffand they tell us a ample deal. What we need is substantiative evidence. I dont moot I was overpsychologizing. What was your aver background in psychology? \nMy absentminded to write about the stream of sentience when I was xviii will indicate to you that I was provoke in the knowledgeable workings of the mind, in free association. I was indeed at that time randy by Joyces attempting to set down not only the expert thoughts but the perceptual world, and I prepare Faulkners The Sound and the folly . his giving us the mentally developmentally challenged Benjys sensory perceptions, a veritable revelation. I have told in Stuff of ease and Dreams of my meeting with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I as well as read a great deal in William James and I offset read Freud in French translation in the late 1920s. But reading is not constantly feeling; we get only an ingenious conception of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the phalanx in 1946, at forty, that I found my self in such(prenominal) a carry of confusion and discouragement that I went to an analyst.