The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art. The writer is the man who discovers the use of suffering in the economy of art--as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.

a profound sense of sexual inadequacy, which he bulwarked by all sorts of theories about sexual technique