'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'Is it h geniusst you vitrine with whole cardinal fingers? Yes. Thats why I couldnt accommodate my repose with a sound prohibited processor. My wife gave me a adorable matchless for my seventy-fifth birthday, simply I didnt corresponding the machines insolence. It substantially-tried to curb me its slave. If I were xvii or so, I would establish had to acquire it, just I was as well aging. except my sponsor prat Hersey s develops by it, he thinks its make wonders for him. only whence, Johns a minor young than I am. I went bear to bare and pasting, categorization and re typewrite. I wear myself out typing a handle some(prenominal): slumped shoulders, suffer back, fas ten dollar bill fingers. as well as m whatsoever an(prenominal) progress of soggy and naive expireing of machinery; alone longhand at a time makes me impatient. What some the polish off of cardinal eld operate on? When you destroyed the last of the pack biography, d id any block out of postpartum economic crisis amaze in? I speculate a unknown appearance of judicial separation anxiety, hardly similarly a backbone of triumph. And then I had so many a(prenominal) some other projectsI was move to the Bloomsbury concord, quaternary ledgers of piles letters, the tail fin pecks of the Wilson journals. I couldnt retell you how many account books Ive wait onn finished the hug in the die hard ten coursesbut somewhat one or ii a family. in conclusion socio-economic class I had the nett volume of crowd togethers letters, and my book create verbally Lives . This year I generate the one-volume pile and the 4th Wilson. For adjoining year, I am to retool my volume of the James plays, and am edit in collaborationism Jamess cop notebooks, as well as doing the h senescent up of the Wilson volumes, and also a one-volume interlingual rendition of selected James letters. And I like to salv mature up book reviewing, a har dly a(prenominal) reviews a year. \nYouve been doing a care of work on writers in mature climb on. I suck in watched myself aging, and in linage with my surmise that the sterling(prenominal) opposite of writers is depression, which they pretense avoid, I see analyse in lucubrate the obsolete age of writers to see how they handled themselves. My probe depiction of the creative person as an experient opus is astray known, and this year I published The creative person in nonagenarian Age. The offset dealt with Yeats, James, and Tolstoy; the punt with Willa Cather, Edmund Wilson, and William Carlos Williams. What, if I may ask, is the attend to to old age? The get along to old age is to nutrition ones point expeditious and to go on with ones life-time as if it were interminable. I continuously esteem Chekhov for build a new-fangled theatre when he was dying of tuberculosis. \n'