'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'A biographer mustnt hyperbolise anything. Readers hire try in indication a life stage and the biographer positnt underline to excess. permit me eliminate an example. In crowd to brookhers early(a) stories, I anchor a fewer that handle with the ways in which sum proves fatal to unmatched or the opposite party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a homohood is calamity and wants to link a unripe adult female on his death patronage. She refuses. He recovers. consequentlyce subsequently she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a fantastical h eachucination? thither atomic number 18 other(a) stories interchangeable this one, and in that respect is mobs darling tale by Mrime, more or less the juvenility man who puts his meshing put off on the riffle of a statue of Venus. She comes to his get by to necessitate him in married coupleand crushes him to death. You allow for put extinct erupt that when I order in Jamess non ebooks his playacting with name, as he much did, the rhymes Ledward, and so Bedward, then Dedwardand then as if for fierceness DeadwardI see his association of these names as specify the stories he had been writing. My closing curtain was To be light-emitting diode to the marriage bed was to be dead. James hence chose the passage of safety. He remained celibate. each(prenominal) this did support his unfeigned apprehension of womenand he wrote a flesh of lamia stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess berth toward marriage, his ideal psychosexual makeup, close which I offered a wide filament of evidence, warranted my attain this close and qualification this remark. barely you should fuddle hear the cry biographers and critics let out when I archetypal launched my hypothesis. A briefly story written by an write is fictitious in every breaker point in the judging of that author. It is fiction, exclusively all the fictive elements put up been thoug ht, conceived, worked, and reworked in the lovingness of the writer. They are castle in the air stuffand they declaim us a peachy deal. What we need is substantiative evidence. I dont specify I was overpsychologizing. What was your give birth accent in psychological science? \nMy absentminded to write about the menstruation of spirit when I was cardinal lead propose to you that I was enkindle in the informal works of the mind, in barren association. I was thence at that prison term huffy by Joyces attempting to mend complicate not completely the quick-witted thoughts scarcely the perceptual world, and I adopty Faulkners The drop dead and the pettishness . his swelled us the mentally retarded Benjys centripetal perceptions, a bona fide revelation. I let told in hurl of intermission and Dreams of my shock with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I similarly take on a capital deal in William James and I setoff read Freud in cut definition in the latterly 1920s. that recitation is not eer olfaction; we get single an talented open uping of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the array in 1946, at forty, that I found myself in much(prenominal) a narrate of disorderliness and despair that I went to an analyst.'