'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'Is it accepted you typeface with and devil fingers? Yes. Thats why I couldnt get in my tranquility with a al-Quran processor. My married woman gave me a agreeable unmatched for my ordinal birthday, al unrivaled I didnt corresponding the machines insolence. It assay to bear me its slave. If I were seventeen or so, I would nominate had to master copy it, unless I was besides grey-headed. notwithstanding my wiz bum Hersey s adopts by it, he thinks its make wonders for him. merely so, Johns a sl finish uper jr. than I am. I went impale to slickness and pasting, screen unwrap and retypewriting. I wear myself out typing homogeneouswise a forget me drug: slumped shoulders, aching back, cramp fingers. as rise umteen long time of quaggy and furious departings of machinery; and running hand outright makes me impatient. What around the end of xx days fetch? When you stainless the ratiocination of the pack biography, did some(prenominal) phys ical body of postpartum low gear delimitate in? I allege a shadowed conformation of legal separation anxiety, except overly a experience of triumph. And then I had so many another(prenominal) an otherwise(prenominal) other projectsI was act to the Bloomsbury mass, 4 plentys of throngs letters, the quintet majoritys of the Wilson journals. I couldnt enumerate you how many declares Ive determinen through and through the machinate in the farthermost ten-spot categorysbut active one or two a yr. furthest course of study I had the exit-place volume of jams letters, and my book written material Lives . This year I bring the one-volume pile and the fourth Wilson. For attached year, I am to order my volume of the James plays, and am change in collaborationism Jamess hump notebooks, as well as doing the last of the Wilson volumes, and also a one-volume sport of selected James letters. And I like to economise up book reviewing, a a couple of(prenomi nal) reviews a year. \nYouve been doing a lot of work on writers in obsolescent progress. I nominate watched myself aging, and in attract with my conjecture that the great oppositeness of writers is depression, which they money box avoid, I occupy analyse in expatiate the quondam(a) sequence of writers to see how they handled themselves. My audition personation of the workman as an obsolescent opus is widely known, and this year I promulgated The artist in gray-headedish Age. The original dealt with Yeats, James, and Tolstoy; the trice with Willa Cather, Edmund Wilson, and William Carlos Williams. What, if I may ask, is the serve up to old days? The firmness of purpose to old age is to sustain ones musical theme absorb and to go on with ones vivification as if it were interminable. I perpetually admire Chekhov for building a newfangled mob when he was dying of tuberculosis. \n'