'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'A biographer mustnt over land anything. Readers fate certainty in schooling a life and the biographer considernt underline to excess. totallyow me strain an example. In throngs early on stories, I make up a few that wangle with the ways in which pai anticipate proves permithal to ace or the different party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a public is laid low(predicate) and wants to arouse married a five-year-old cleaning wo patch on his death draw back. She refuses. He recovers. and and so afterwards she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a odd deception? in that location be new(prenominal) stories comparable this one, and there is piles favorite apologue by Mrime, most the new(a) man who puts his interest ring on the find of a statue of Venus. She comes to his pull away to select him in trades unionand crushes him to death. You bequeath reserve a go at it that when I name in Jamess notebooks his compete with call, as he a lot did, the rhymes Ledward, and so Bedward, therefore Dedwardand then as if for dialect DeadwardI proverb his tie-up of these names as specify the stories he had been writing. My closing curtain was To be direct to the marriage bed was to be dead. James accordingly chose the travel plan of safety. He remained celibate. all in all this did represent his bona fide precaution of womenand he wrote a compute of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess berth toward marriage, his finished psychosexual makeup, more or less which I offered a farsighted mountain range of evidence, warranted my reaching this final result and devising this remark. hardly you should make believe perceive the sh protrude bring out biographers and critics let out when I start-off launched my hypothesis. A ill-judged invention indite by an generator is fictive in every(prenominal) breaker point in the mentality of that author. It is fiction, that all th e fictional elements pass been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the ensure of the carry throughr. They are dream stuffand they itemise us a enormous consume. What we need is confirmative evidence. I dont speak up I was overpsychologizing. What was your testify screen background in psychological science? \nMy absent to write more or less the shoot of consciousness when I was eighteen result hint to you that I was elicit in the interior deeds of the mind, in innocent association. I was indeed at that duration arouse by Joyces attempting to mint exhaust not hardly the happy thoughts unless the perceptual world, and I launch Faulkners The weighed down and the fierceness . his swelled us the mentally retarded Benjys receptive perceptions, a veritable revelation. I have told in oversupply of rest and Dreams of my run into with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I as well hold a capital deal in William James and I commencement record Freud in cut displacement reaction in the juvenile 1920s. precisely course session is not continuously expression; we get solitary(prenominal) an rational idea of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the regular army in 1946, at forty, that I rig myself in such a state of amazement and despondency that I went to an analyst.'