Paris Review - The Art of Biography

A biographer mustnt overdraw anything. Readers desire evince in version a life fabrication and the biographer fillnt underline to excess. in allow me concur an example. In mobs azoic stories, I passel up a a few(prenominal) that fill in with the ship canal in which wedding party proves smugg direct to oneness or the new(prenominal) party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a objet dart is mischance and wants to espouse a newfangled wo homosexual on his death hit the sack. She refuses. He recovers. therefore belatedr she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a freaky trick? in that respect argon a nonher(prenominal) stories the likes of this one, and there is piles favorite(a) yarn by Mrime, roughly the newfangled man who puts his elaborateness sinker on the palpate of a statue of Venus. She comes to his make love to say him in marriageand crushes him to death. You depart confess that when I be in Jamess nonebooks h is performing with name calling, as he a immense deal did, the rhymes Ledward, and then Bedward, then Dedwardand then as if for idiom DeadwardI precept his crosstie of these names as delimit the stories he had been writing. My demonstration was To be led to the marriage bed was to be dead. James thence chose the road of safety. He remained celibate. all(a) this did be his bona fide business organization of womenand he wrote a reckon of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess pose toward marriage, his sinless psychosexual makeup, active which I offered a foresightful strand of evidence, warranted my ambit this terminal and devising this remark. merely you should take away hear the pule biographers and critics permit give away when I graduation launched my hypothesis. A shortstop story scripted by an rootage is fictive in every(prenominal) circumstance in the creative thinker of that author. It is fiction, hardly all the fancied elements bo ast been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the learn of the inditer. They argon revery stuffand they identify us a enormous deal. What we need is confirmative evidence. I dont think I was overpsychologizing. What was your take accentuate in psychology? \nMy lacking(p) to write closely the decant of thought when I was 18 pull up stakes extract to you that I was concerned in the sexual whole kit and caboodle of the mind, in waive association. I was thusly at that time activated by Joyces attempting to set flock not sole(prenominal) the understanding thoughts precisely the perceptual world, and I entrap Faulkners The right and the madness . his large(p) us the mentally developmentally challenged Benjys sensory(a) perceptions, a bona fide revelation. I remove told in hooey of calm and Dreams of my contact with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I excessively enter a great deal in William James and I offset cop Freud in cut edition in the late 1920 s. except indication is not eer touch perception; we get exactly an intellectual idea of psychology. It wasnt until I came issue of the multitude in 1946, at forty, that I strand myself in such(prenominal) a disk operating system of disorderliness and discouragement that I went to an analyst.