The Literary Mind: Portraits in Pain and Creativity

This book surprised me. I am usually (rightfully so, I tend to discover) on my guard against phychological attempts at describing authors and their motivations. But I decided to take my chance on this one and was pleasantly surprised. Mainly, because the book, ultimately, is not a psychological intrusion into the inner sanctum of each writer's life examined here. It is ultimately about the absence of what Schneiderman calls "the ability to idealize love objects" in the twentieth century, as compared to the nineteenth. Thus, it is more a history of the breakdown of values (psychological and otherwise), leading to the inability of the characters in the modern novels to fall in love, than the diagnoses of a psychologist poking his nose in where it's not wanted (and liable to be cut off) as so many of these psychological forays into literature are.-The idea of this book then is that the twentieth century artist's pain caused by his alienation from an increasingly impersonal world is the fuel for his creativity, a creativity marred by an essentially escapist motivation, and Schneiderman makes a good case for this perspective.-The problem is that there are too many "ids," "egos," "superegos" and other Freudianisms that bog down the prose. Otherwise, a though-provoking read for all who take literature and beauty seriously.