Of course I know that many aging geezers find to our surprise and dismay that we're acting like—well, geezers. We're garrulous, our stories, many of them medical, wander and, worst of all, we talk and write more and more about what we've been and done (or, more rarely, haven't been, haven't done). It's as if we're drawing our life around us like a blanket against the oncoming chill, a psychological equivalent of the theological bookkeeping supposedly done when the earthly package is delivered to heaven's gate for its ultimate disposition.

For those of us who are writers, the autumnal accounting is often but another installment of a long, professional self-regard, one that differs from those of haberdashers and geologists or even historians and literary critics. Writers from Sappho and Hesiod, Catullus and Li Po, the Romantics and the Moderns on down to us have drawn on their lives and feelings for much of their best work. Some have been more embarrassed than I about it. Like Henry James, they've burned their papers and asked friends to destroy their letters; like Eliot and Salinger, they've tried to forbid biographers, or again like Eliot, deprecate the work they regard as personal. (He called his greatest and most influential poem little more than "a lyrical grouse.") When supposedly cajoled into talking about their work, they find various, sometimes quite odd excuses for doing so. Thomas Mann wrote that he was writing about the making of The Magic Mountain because of "the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human." In any event, the interfusions of life and art have been of great interest not just to tabloid columnists and readers but to serious biographers and critics. Perhaps such anti-biographical criticism as that of Richards, Ransom, Tate, and Eliot, and more recently, Foucauldian deflations of the concept of the author flourish as counters to this stoking of the ego furnaces. Despite the intellectual status of the deflations, many intelligent and most unintelligent people remain persistently curious about the relationship of achievements, literary, political, cinematic, athletic and even mathematical—see the spate of recent books about mathematicians—to the lives and psyches of the achievers.

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The kind of self-reflection in which I'm now indulging has been an important element of modern intelligence. Telling the story of the story, publishing the diaries and letters of and interviews with the story-tellers, analyzing and psychoanalyzing them, all contribute to the ever-increasing complication of the self. Judging from the documents we have, I suspect that "ordinary people" today are more complicated—have more going on in them including self-consciousness about it—than the sages and poets of earlier times. Complex as Hector and Hamlet are, they are simpler than many minor characters of George Eliot, Flaubert, Dostoievski, Proust and, say Bellow and McCarthy.

What's true for characters is true for their authors. Modern psychological analysis has played some role in this. Modern authors may, like Kafka, reject analysis out of fear that it will kill their desire to write, or may take to it believing it removes obstacles to writing. Sometimes analysis is but a baffled counterpoint to the interfusion of the writer's life and work.

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Most fiction writers feel free to exaggerate and otherwise alter actuality in the interest of narrative power, although some, like Turgeniev and Babel, have said that they don't or even can't invent anything, actuality being more than enough for their literary needs. Other writers are pulled so strongly by what instigated stories that at times they can't change what another part of themselves, perhaps a cautionary one, wants to. You can see—in his notebooks—so domineering an inventor as Henry James trying in vain to shift the locale of a climatic moment of The Ambassadors from the place—Paris—where the initiating actuality occurred.