Media insist on having a last dig at Updike

John Updike has died, and the Indo printed a short article about him yesterday. The article mostly just gave basic information about his life and work, but contained one rather odd passage:

"Updike was a controversial figure, labelled a misogynist, racist and an apologist for the establishment during a tempestuous career. But his searing wit ensured that his writing, [sic] remained enduringly popular."

Misogynist, racist and an apologist for the establishment? Was Updike ever really accused of this? I purposely did not consult Wikipedia to find out before writing this post, because I wanted to ask the question from the point of view of an educated layman, and see what answer I came up with. I do not remember ever hearing anyone call Updike a racist or a misogynist. Not my father, on whose shelf I first saw his books. Not Mrs G, a very politically-correct, Irish Times-reading teacher who once gave us a passage of Updike's to study in class. Not the Marxist Terry Eagleton, who devotes a good deal of his Introduction to Literary Theory to analysing the first two sentences of Couples. Not Ian McEwan, who was discussing Updike with Jeremy Paxman on TV the other night. If Updike was accused of racism and misogyny, none of these people seem to have cared.

I myself have read two of Updike's novels, both fairly recent. Neither contained anything remotely racist or misogynistic as far as I could see. Indeed, one of them was told entirely from the perspective of a woman, no mean feat for a male writer. They were "pro-establishment" only insofar as they were about white people in small towns and suburbs. (The most objectionable thing about them, as far as I was concerned, was the embarrassing amount of space they devoted to sex. Page upon page of unbelievably tedious descriptions that might have provoked a few giggles from adolescents, but in the end would probably have had even them yawning with boredom. It was as if Updike was defiantly telling the world "I may be old, but I can still write dirty with the best of you!")

So where did the Irish Independent get this extraordinary claim? I suspect that once upon a time, hidden away in the bowels of some university English department, some ageing feminist lecturer with too much time on her hands wrote an article claiming that Updike's work supported patriarchal discourse by its focus on heterosexual relationships, or manifested a subconscious post-colonial fear of the Other by dealing mainly with white people, or some other such nonsense. That obscure tract is now the justification for the claim that Updike was "labelled" a racist/misogynist/reactionary. I may be quite wrong, but I suspect that's how the "controversy" came about.

But what disturbs me is the alacrity with which the newspaper seized upon this silly accusation, triumphantly calling Updike a "controversial" writer. I know, I know, newspapers have to sell copies, and they do so by means of attention-grabbing headlines. But it seems to me that if you truly believe racism and misogyny to be bad things, you will be careful not to ascribe them to people without good reason. You will not bandy the words about carelessly, for to do so is to rob them of their meaning, or at any rate their shock value. Eventually, like the villagers in the tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, people will just roll their eyes and sigh "Here we go again!" each time another accusation of racism/misogyny in high places is levelled. That cannot, in the long run, be good for the fight against racism and misogyny.

RIP anyhow.