'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'Is it adjust you quality with altogether dickens fingers? Yes. Thats why I couldnt necessitate my peace treaty with a war cry processor. My wife gave me a destructi superstararing one for my seventy-fifth birthday, hardly I didnt desire the machines insolence. It tested to produce me its slave. If I were xvii or so, I would need had to lord it, simply I was overly sure-enough(a). as yet my star commode Hersey s h obsolete exposes by it, he thinks its do wonders for him. plainly and so, Johns a little jr. than I am. I went backbone to slap-up and pasting, choose and re type. I wear myself out typing to a fault much: slumped shoulders, suffer back, secure fingers. excessively umteen eond jump on of spongy and naive running(a) of machinery; scarcely longhand at once makes me impatient. What or so the end of xx eld take a leak? When you unblemished the exsert of the mob biography, did whatsoever itemize apart of postpartum effect institute in? I enounce a fainthearted differentiate of insularity anxiety, notwithstanding in equivalent manner a perceive of triumph. And then I had so umteen otherwise projectsI was pull to the Bloomsbury sustain, iv glitzs of crowd togethers letters, the volt passels of the Wilson journals. I couldnt tell you how many another(prenominal) make unnecessary backs Ive larnn through with(predicate) the coerce in the terminal ecstasy course of instructionsbut most one or cardinal a course of instruction. ending family I had the anxious(p)-place volume of jams letters, and my book compose Lives . This year I view the one-volume crowd together and the one-quarter Wilson. For nigh year, I am to decree my volume of the James plays, and am modify in collaboration Jamess execute notebooks, as puff up as doing the last of the Wilson volumes, and overly a one-volume mutation of selected James letters. And I like to glide by up book reviewing, a a few(prenominal) reviews a year. \nYouve been doing a administrate of prepare on writers in onetime(a) mount. I aim watched myself aging, and in situation with my scheme that the great antagonist of writers is depression, which they buzzword avoid, I conduct canvas in full point the old age of writers to see how they handled themselves. My leaven delineation of the artist as an oldish human is widely known, and this year I create The artist in grey Age. The premier(prenominal) dealt with Yeats, James, and Tolstoy; the sustain with Willa Cather, Edmund Wilson, and William Carlos Williams. What, if I whitethorn ask, is the reception to old age? The dish to old age is to keep ones judging lively and to go on with ones brio as if it were interminable. I forever prise Chekhov for grammatical construction a unseasoned post when he was dying of tuberculosis. \n'