Paris Review - The Art of Biography

Were any raise? Just two, as far as I was concerned. A good earn around Shakespeare, in which throng asserts Bacon didnt consecrate enough verse in him to lease written the plays and sonnets; and a nonher(prenominal) letter admitting he had written a review of rise Taps . assail Whitman when the volume came out, nevertheless(prenominal) adding that nothing would hurry him to introduce the whereabouts of my disgrace. The whereabouts were precondition in the bibliography I compiled with my collaborator, Dan H. Laurence. \nYou mentioned the mixer notes to Marble. Dont genial notes reveal petty(a) things too? Sometimesdates, names, occasions. Its ever so difficult to date from details of accessible events and by and braggart(a) they remain unrecorded. The swell hostesses frequently dont pull through their memoirs. Also, social notes often are deceptive. angiotensin-converting enzyme never hold ups, when James declines an invitation, whether or not hes indulging in the white lies of social duplicity. You also extension the importance of wash drawing lists, unpaid bills, and tot up stubsthings that might reveal clues to the personality of the subject. mavin never dwells what these things whitethorn reveal. Eliot said, if we found Shakespeares airstream lists, we might genuinely well know nighthing more about Shakespeare. We might know whether he was a man who was scrupulously clean, or whether he was a slob. We might. alto disembowelher these things tell us something. With James, for face, its the handwriting. He use to sign himself, atomic number 1 James, Jr. And aft(prenominal) a while, the jr. got to be less and less. He detest being a junior, he despised number two. dadaism was number one. thither are a lot of juniors ilk that, who try to get around it some way, with numbers for instance: Vanderbilt I, Vanderbilt II, Vanderbilt III, etc.