My Father on the Verge of Disgrace by John Updike
"My Father on the Verge of Disgrace" by John Updike is an initiation story set in rural Pennsylvania during the Great Depression and World War II, exploring themes of familial dynamics, societal expectations, and the loss of respectability. The narrative is presented through the eyes of a young boy who grapples with the precarious situation of his father, a former china salesman who struggles to maintain dignity as a high-school chemistry teacher. The boy's pride in his father's position is tempered by anxiety, particularly as he witnesses incidents that threaten his father's reputation, such as questionable relationships with students and financial struggles.
As the story unfolds, the boy's understanding of his father evolves; he sees his father as both a figure of authority and a source of vulnerability. Their relationship deepens when they become partners in navigating the challenges of daily life. The father's role as the "faculty clown" becomes a pivotal moment for the boy, highlighting the complexities of identity and the fear of disgrace. Ultimately, the story illustrates the journey from childhood fears to a more nuanced comprehension of adulthood, culminating in the realization that living on the edge of disgrace is an inherent part of the human experience. Recognized in the anthology Best American Stories 1998, Updike's narrative deftly captures the trials of growing up, blending elegance with visceral detail.
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My Father on the Verge of Disgrace by John Updike
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1997 (collected in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, “Rabbit Remembered,” 2000)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“My Father on the Verge of Disgrace,” like other Updike works (for example, The Centaur, “Pigeon Feathers”), is an initiation story set in rural Pennsylvania before and just after World War II and typically carries a heavier weight than its slight appearance. The story is almost anecdotal in its first-person narration: A young boy living in a large house with his parents and his maternal grandparents during the Depression worries that his father will “fall from his precarious ledge of respectability.” His father lost his job as a china salesman the year the boy was born, and it was three years before he found a position as a high-school chemistry teacher. The house they live in—purchased by the grandfather during better times—is too large for the family, and they have to economize. Two incidents epitomize to the boy his father’s precarious position, one involving his father’s relationship to a fellow teacher courting a student, the other the fact that the father sometimes has to borrow from the high-school sports receipts to cover household expenses. Although the boy is proud of his father’s position in town, he shares his mother’s anxiety about him.
During World War II, things ease, and the father finds summer work, but when the boy enters the high school, he discovers more to worry about. The father is “the faculty clown,” the boy discovers, confirmed in the annual faculty-assembly program when the father plays Thisbe in a scene from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to the delight of students. “This had to be ruinous, I thought. This was worse than any of my dreams.” After the war, the family moves to a smaller house in the country, and the boy and his father become “a kind of team, partners in peril, fellow-sufferers on the edge of disaster” driving to and from school every day. The boy survives adolescence and its fears, he concludes, and “By the time I went off to college I no longer feared—I no longer dreamed—that my father would be savaged by society.” The boy has learned an important lesson for adulthood, that “part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.”
The story was selected for the Best American Stories, 1998, and it is easy to see why. Updike’s prose carries readers through a recital of some of childhood’s pitfalls and sketches out the Oedipal conflict, all in a style that is at once elegant and amazingly physical. The details of Updike’s fiction just nail down even more forcefully the significance of this story of the uneasy journey to adulthood.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.
Greiner, Donald. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984.
Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
Newman, Judie. John Updike. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998.
Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Uphaus, Suzanne Henning. John Updike. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.