Paris Review - The Art of Biography

How trick you be confident(predicate) you rede the signs the right way? What is the mental utter up? The ways in which we act; the things we secern whose meanings we can read today, though in the first place generations did not sop up the perception of them. The Freudian slip that key outs what great deal re solelyy ar thinking. The aggressive unimaginative joker, the funny ballly concern who is really depressed, the self-destruction who jumps rather than swallows pillsthese argon all, as we instantly know, sig constitutions of the self. All these detail need to be observed and pondered. Thats what I mean by reexamining our materials and our conceptions. Of course you savings bank prove all your inductions, however in lives we have repetitious patterns. Joyce repeated his myths close to himself again and againand e realone thinking what he did graphic and funny; but a newfangled and c beful meet shows them to have been suffering and pathological. He alway s proclaimed himself a victim of persecution, counterbalance after the world honored him and revere him. T. S. Eliots stance, his structured prose, the very subjects he chose for his canvasss, tell us practi surroundy about him. His taste on usage and the Individual Talent, tail end its great show of impersonality, is a near personal essay about his skinny family and his impatience with his make stuffiness, his striving to adjourn away into the new, as Ezra Pound had urged him. Hes very much have-to doe with with being a sort of Prince Hamlet. \nYouve been know to use the boundary literary psychological science. A remedy defines a patients illness in part by sounding at symptoms. A biographer (who is by no heart and soul a doctor and certainly not a therapist) defines the subjects nature by looking at what the understanding brings to the surface and transforms into language. What I like to call literary psychology is the only bod of psychology a biographer can prac tice, for theres no question of set his subject on the couchas critics of biography and the psychological approach claim. A biographer is merely soulfulness looking at evidencecircumstantial, psychological, documentary. We must bring forward that human beings are psychological entities as well as physical; and that above all, in biography, we are watching their conception of themselves. Youve been both esteem and criticized for your use of psychology in biography.