It's silly to explain somebody's writing, or thinking, from his biography, but it's almost as silly to consider it thoroughly irrelevant. Apart from this "somebody," even separated from this person, a biography can always be interesting because of its details. Now I will delete a name in the following paragraphs. They are all taken from this single name's bio. Who can it be? Can you guess?
(1) [X's father] did seem to savour the macabre. He once took the surrealist painter Andre Masson, whom he had met through a mutual aquaintance and who became his patient, to see the corpse of a child with a curious lesion that exposed parts of the brain membrane. Masson was inspired to make a sinister whirling drawing which he gave to his doctor. For years it hung on the wall of X's study.
(2) Asked what he would like as a reward for passing the concours, X immediately asked for German lessons.
(3) X always devoted his Augusts to his mother. [...] X's visits to Le Piroir always coincided with the gherkin harvest and one of his self-appointed tasks was to scrub the little vegetables before pickling them in vinegar to make the year's supply of cornichons.
Surrealism, German, cornichons. And inevitably a color of existence arises, irreversibly, from these mere three elements.
Biography is inescapable. But he may have preferred it to be altogether abolished. One's wish seldome comes true. One's biography is, after all, a sort of void left out in the space by one's leaving this life shared more or less with uncontrollable others.
