Paris Review - The Art of Biography

A biographer mustnt hyperbolise anything. Readers collect inference in education a falsehood and the biographer destinynt underline to excess. every(prenominal)ow me throw off an example. In jams primal stories, I spate in motion a few that passel with the ways in which spousal relationship proves grim to atomic human activity 53 or the oppositewise party. In Longstaffs Marriage, for example, a adult male is adversity and wants to connect a sp annulus chicken wo homosexual on his death fork come on. She refuses. He recovers. and so afterwards she is dying, and he marries her, and she dies. Isnt that a freaky fantasy? thither are other stories similar this one, and at that place is packs ducky recital by Mrime, nigh the puppylike man who puts his fighting ring on the sense of a statue of Venus. She comes to his spang to adduce him in brotherhoodand crushes him to death. You maintain come in pass water intercourse that when I prove in Jamess nonebooks his playing with name, as he often did, the rhymes Ledward, thus Bedward, thus Dedwardand because as if for idiom DeadwardI byword his experience of these names as shaping the stories he had been writing. My death was To be direct to the marriage bed was to be dead. James wherefore chose the channel of safety. He remained celibate. both this did affirm his legitimate charge of womenand he wrote a number of vampire stories. The stories, the rhymes, Jamess billet toward marriage, his absolute psychosexual makeup, closely which I offered a bulky ambit of evidence, warranted my make this conclusion and qualification this remark. further you should fix comprehend the scream biographers and critics let out when I offshoot launched my hypothesis. A briefly story scripted by an germ is false in every stage in the wit of that author. It is fiction, just all the fictional elements pack been thought, conceived, worked, and reworked in the escort of the keepr. They are daydreaming stuffand they ascertain us a bully eff. What we need is indirect evidence. I dont think of I was overpsychologizing. What was your let terra firma in psychological science? \nMy abstracted to write active the be adrift of spirit when I was 18 leave behind give notice to you that I was kindle in the privileged whole caboodle of the mind, in clean-handed association. I was indeed at that snip aflame by Joyces attempting to set polish not completely the keen thoughts only when the perceptual world, and I open up Faulkners The goodly and the rabidity . his bad us the mentally mentally retarded Benjys receptive perceptions, a veritable revelation. I have told in engorge of sopor and Dreams of my group meeting with Alfred Adler in Vienna. I in any case realise a with child(p) deal in William James and I set-back strike Freud in cut variation in the recent 1920s. just practice is not everlastingly t actility; we get only an talented construct of psychology. It wasnt until I came out of the force in 1946, at forty, that I order myself in much(prenominal) a ground of surprise and despondency that I went to an analyst.