Catching up with the March 21 issue of The New York Review of Books, I read (in a review of the Penguin edition of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time) that Marcel Proust disagreed with Sainte-Beuve's biographical approach to literary criticism: "A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices."
In the same issue, the reviewer of William Egginton's book The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality has a bone to pick with the author's inclusion of biographical details along with the "drama of ideas" that illuminates this study. The reviewer approvingly quotes David Foster Wallace's negative remarks about a Borges biography that views his work in the light of his "emotional states and tragic love life." According to Wallace, this makes no sense because Borges was a Neoplatonist who believed that the self is an illusion.
But here's the thing: writers can hold all manner of arcane and complicated beliefs about the self, yet they cannot control the way their life experiences seep into their fiction. That's because writers are human beings, not intellectual automatons. Egginton suggests that Borges wondered if having accepted an invitation from the Chilean dictator August Pinochet made it impossible for him to receive the Nobel Prize—and that this thought about a road not taken influenced the short story "Garden of Forking Paths." To me this sounds eminently plausible.
I can't resist adding that reviewers who wrote that my biography of Elizabeth Hardwick did not accord her the full gravity of her intellectual position as a doyenne of American letters seemed not to realize that she was also a fallible and crisis-ridden human being, a woman who had to deal—for about one-third of her life—with an immensely gifted husband (the poet Robert Lowell) who was constantly falling prey to episodes of bipolar disorder that wreaked havoc with her attempt to lead a normal married life. And although she had remade herself as a model New Yorker, her personality was also formed by her Kentucky youth; most obviously, she never lost her Southern accent. These facts in no way detract from her accomplishments as a literary personage. But they must be taken into account in any truthful account of her life.