Paris Review - The Art of Biography

You develop almost anywhere. Ive al enunciatey described how I began by tracking Jamess plays. I wrote to the firstborn son of William James, who was his fathers and uncles executor, and it was he who gave me permission to memorialize the plays at the maestro Chamberlains. Then in that respect were the actors who had been in the plays. whiz was still acting in London. He didnt tell me much, only if he brought whatso invariably letter he got from the wife of the actor-manager whod represend the play. He menti nonpareild another(prenominal) individual who had cognize James; I wrote to him. Ive described how from Jamess secretarial assistant I in condition(p) at that placed been correspondence with Shaw. Shaw in turn told me that Granville-Barker read some of Jamess plays. A former actor, Allan Wade, functional in the British Museum (now the British Library) perceive I was schooling up on James as a dramatist and came to my desk, and he was mount of valuable culture; we became very groovy friends. James was one of those people who feared his biographer and who want to foil him, dependable? Well, James was a secretive psyche; he tried to frustrate rising biographers by ardent all the letters he received, plainly he couldnt flame those he had sent to others. I short discovered everybody salve them because they were so impassioned and written in such an inimitable style. James invited his future(a) biographers to seek him bulge in what he called the invulnerable granite of his art. Thats so Jamesianthe invulnerable granite. Well, I sought him there; it wasnt invulnerable at all. He talked in his travel writings about himself. He wrote two singular volumes of autobiography and left field a element of a third. raze before I entered that room in the Widener that first housed his written document and the familys, I knew that I was going to be overwhelmed by corporeal and that Id have to discover some substance of dealing with it. I t sounds the like a potentially endless undertaking. You diagnose that James wrote thousands of letters. Did you ever become so overwhelmed with material that you gave up?