The Internet is full of new news and old, and what surfaced on August 13, 2014 was a piece from the New Republic archives, “John Updike Beautifully Explains How Difficult It Was To Read John Cheever’s Tortured Journals.”

“A journal,” Updike writes, “even when cut to 5 percent of its bulk, reflects real time, where we can experience how sluggishly our human adventure unravels and how unprone people are to change. In a novel, Cheever’s alcoholism would have been introduced, dramatized in a scene or two, and brought to a crisis in which either it or he would have been vanquished. In these journals, the decades of heavy drinking, of hangovers and self-rebukes and increasingly ominous physical and mental symptoms, just drag on.”

Updike adds, “To speak personally, this old acquaintance and longtime admirer of Cheever’s had to battle, while reading these Journals, with the impulse to close his eyes. They tell me more about Cheever’s lusts and failures and self-humiliations and crushing sense of shame and despond than I can easily reconcile with my memories of the sprightly, debonair, gracious man, often seen on the arm of his pretty, witty wife.”

One begins to understand, rereading this in the context of Adam Begley’s recent biography, why Updike was so adamantly opposed to literary biography.