Dale Salwak, who teaches in the English department at Citrus College in Glendora, California, wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement editor that was published on June 27, 2014:

Updike’s real self

Sir, – Near the end of his review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike (June 13), James Campbell wonders how Updike would have reacted “to seeing the ‘sadly prurient’ details of his moral and mortal failings laid out on page after page so soon after his death in 2009”. In the foreword to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) Updike answers that question. He would be repulsed: “to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!” And in a later piece, “The Man Within”, published in the New Yorker (June 26 and July 3, 1995), he adds: “The trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one”.

DALE SALWAK
Department of English, Citrus College, 1000 West Foothill Boulevard, Glendora, California 91741.