II. STATISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In Stephen Conner, the poorhouse prefect, Updike has very consciously constructed an embodiment of the American welfare state. As the archetypal bureaucrat, his character has been crafted meticulously to personify everything that Max Weber had both admired and feared in modernity: he is rational and efficient, cold, calculating, and dull. He draws the legitimacy for his authority from legal–rational grounds – he was appointed by the federal government – and his office is covered with the state-issued credentials to prove it. His power to command and coerce is rooted in his control over resources (food and medical care) and in his monopoly over the legitimate means of violence in the poorhouse that is literally maintained through the presence of the only firearm on the grounds located in his office closet (tellingly, the only time it is used is to kill a cat we are specifically told has “flaunted his authority”).Footnote ⁹

Conner is obsessed with order and results, and spends his time compiling balance sheets and longevity reports. “Everything Conner did, he did for a reason; his actions were glass,” the narrator observes. Early on, when Conner begins to ponder Hook's animosity towards him, he suggests, “there must be a rational cause that has set him against me” (17–18). His thought is so rationalized that when he talks to Amy Mortis, an older inmate, about heaven, “He wondered if, technically, she was a dwarf. He wondered what the technical definition of a dwarf was” (106). That he flees into scientific ruminations during a spiritual conversation is telling: the first thing we are told about Conner is that he

Although he is described as “devout in the service of humanity,” much like the doctor in The Karamazov Brothers, Conner too appears as a great lover of humanity who can't stand human beings. In constructing Conner in such a way, Updike has precisely embodied Weber's description of modern bureaucrats as “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”Footnote ¹⁰

Conner also projects a distinct architecture of power. The poorhouse grounds that serve as the domain of his control are surrounded by a daunting wall. His office, which oversees the entire complex, is located in an isolated cupola on the fourth floor of the poorhouse and “was approached by four flights of narrowing stairs, troubles for these old people … The altitude of the office assured that it would seldom be visited” (13–14). Although Mendelssohn, his beloved predecessor, chose the office for its discreet exit (he was a drunk), Conner likes it for the access to power that it affords him: panoptic, legible and superior, the perspective Conner maintains from his towering office is that of an administration rather than an administrator: “from this height the people in the crowd appeared to bumble like brainless insects, bumping into one another, taking random hurried courses across the grass” (155). In reading this, one cannot help recall the scene in Orson Welles's The Third Man (1949) in which the villain, Harry Lime (played by Welles), stands atop a Ferris wheel overlooking Vienna and justifies his actions counterfeiting deadly medicine in a Kafkaesque manner. “Look down there, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” Lime asks. “Nobody thinks in terms of human beings; governments don't, why should we?” Lime and Conner share a rare quality: “seeing” in terms of a state, they are unable to distinguish between individual and collective.Footnote ¹¹ In crafting the architecture of the poorhouse this way, Updike was consciously aware of the relationship between space and power. As he observed in a retrospective essay,

That Conner is constructed to “see” like a state is emblematic of the creative manner in which Updike has translated the analytical qualities of social science into fiction. What is remarkable about his depiction of Conner's poorhouse is how accurately it meets the criteria for the modern forms of governing that had shaped the New Deal's state-centered liberalism – a criteria meticulously outlined in James C. Scott's seminal study of state power Seeing Like a State (Updike would later give a speech aptly titled “How Does the State Imagine?” that distinguished between individual and bureaucratic forms of imagination).Footnote ¹³ Although most of Scott's case studies pertain to authoritarian regimes, “the granddaddy” of all high-modernist experiments, in Scott's words, was after all the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority.Footnote ¹⁴

For Scott, there are four distinct elements that define the modern state. The first is “the administrative ordering of nature and society” pursued through “the state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions.”Footnote ¹⁵ This quest for standardization and legibility is exactly what TPF opens with: Conner has put nametags on all the poorhouse chairs in order to regulate where each resident may sit. Just as Conner oversees the inmates' actions from his broad cupola windows, everything he does is aimed at “admini-stration” (as Hook mockingly pronounces it): he has standardized the health services to operate with the efficiency of a factory line, leisure has been regulated, the food service is supervised, and even the tables for the fair have been arranged along strict geometric lines.

The second element that Scott identifies is “the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress” that expresses “the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.” Accordingly, Conner's actions are all empirically based and couched in scientific terms: he refutes religion with theories of paleontology, defends his atheism by citing psychological experiments, believes that meteorology will soon be able to control the weather, and anticipates the day when modern medicine will cure the world of all its ills. At one point, he goes so far as to remark, “Everything, potentially, is a science, is it not?” (49). For Scott, overwhelming faith in science must be coupled with aesthetic sensibility, since “the carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense.”Footnote ¹⁶ It is no coincidence, then, that Conner is also an aesthete: beyond the fact that he “liked things clean,” we are told, “The sculptor has his rock and the saint the silence of his Lord, but a man like Conner who has vowed to bring order and beauty out of human substance has no third factor” (16). This penchant leads Hook to sardonically tell him, “had you and your kind arranged the stars, you would have set them geo-metrically” (114).

The third distinguishing element of Scott's modern state is its authoritarian willingness and ability “to use the full weight of its coercive power” towards centralization.Footnote ¹⁷ Conner uses his coercive power – or the threat thereof – to reorganize the poorhouse and enforce order: his sidekick Buddy is instructed to kill a stray cat that had been smuggled into the grounds (since it threatened what was deemed to be public welfare); similarly, he physically removes Hook's cigar from his mouth after he had been “forbidden” from smoking. That Conner's rigid mode of administration is constantly contrasted with the more lax, personable – but dangerously incompetent – regime of his predecessor, Mendelssohn (who in a Weberian sense enjoyed a “charismatic” source of legitimacy), is a reminder that the successful reordering of the poorhouse – people were living longer and feeling better – was only possible through the centralization of power.

Scott's final criterion for the high-modernist state is also the only one absent from Updike's poorhouse: “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist.”Footnote ¹⁸ TPF early on establishes a subtle democratic tone that tempers its authoritarian bent. Conner himself suggests this when, in response to Amy's complaints of feeling powerless, he proclaims, “That's just the way I want no one to feel. I'm an agent of the National Internal Welfare Department and own nothing here. If it is anyone's property it is yours. Yours and the American people's” (43). Not only does he justify his actions in democratic terms, but he does so in capitalist ones as well. “Part of my policy has been, within the limits of the appropriations, to give the residents here some sense of ownership,” Conner tells an inmate who inquires about the assigned seating. “It strengthens, in my belief, rather than weakens a communal fabric to have running through it strands of private ownership” (19). The fact that the inmates threaten to “write our grievances to the government in Washington” and that in a climactic scene later on they redeem some democratic agency when they symbolically rebel by stoning Conner with the same stones he had made them clear from the broken poorhouse wall (the narrator accordingly observes that they “had shown there were rights,”) is also germane: it serves as an explicit reminder that, for all his power, Conner does not rule the poorhouse as an autocrat. And it helps us realize why Updike called the novel “a deliberate anti-Nineteen Eighty-Four.”Footnote ¹⁹ Ira Katznelson has recently claimed that the New Deal sustained “complicated and sometimes unprincipled relationships between democracy and dictatorships.”Footnote ²⁰ And, indeed, by clearly outlining the similarities and differences between his fictional poorhouse and Orwell's dystopian Oceania, Updike has constructed Conner's poorhouse to appear interchangeably democratic and authoritarian in reflection of the contradictory new liberal tradition he had perceived to be taking root in America.

Updike's unusual decision to interrogate American society through the metaphorical prism of the federal poorhouse is apposite since the poorhouse symbolizes the quintessential task with which the state-centered liberalism that emerged out of the New Deal had primarily been concerned: public welfare.Footnote ²¹ As William Leuchtenburg argued in his history of the New Deal,

Conner's poorhouse closely resembles the New Deal state: everything he does – sending inmates to the infirmary, forbidding them from drinking alcohol, or persuasively urging them to stay out of the sun – is indicative of his attempts to actively promote what he believes to be their welfare. In this regard, the explicit designation of Conner's poorhouse as maintaining sole responsibility for the inmates' sustenance and welfare (“these people, having yielded all authority, looked beyond themselves for everything,” the narrator observes) reflects upon the distinct trend towards statism that, as David Plotke has argued, had been the central hallmark of the New Deal state.Footnote ²³ Furthermore, the motif of adolescence – the inmates are constantly referred to as children – illuminates an inverted reality in which the elderly have reverted back to dependency. That Updike chose to populate the poorhouse with mostly blue-collar artisans, farmers, and laborers is symbolic of the traumatic shift in the lives of many Americans who, in the wake the Great Depression, had been relegated to an unfamiliar state of government dependency.Footnote ²⁴

Just as Conner's poorhouse resembles the American welfare state, it is Conner himself who all too often resembles its loyal servants. Dedicated to pragmatic solutions, scientific management, secular humanism, and bureaucratic organization, Conner is a caricature of the managerial class of administrators who implemented the New Deal. “The Reformers of the thirties abandoned – or claimed they had abandoned – the old Emersonian hope of reforming man and sought only to change institutions,” Leuchtenburg explained. “The liberal activists grasped only a part of the truth; they retreated from conceptions like ‘tragedy,’ ‘sin,’ ‘God,’ often had small patience with the force of tradition, and showed little understanding of what moved men to seek meaning outside of political experience.”Footnote ²⁵

Conner personifies these qualities: he is an avowed atheist who believes in an abstract goodness of men; like Rousseau, he fears that the corrupt institutions – like the broken poorhouse managed by his predecessor – have led them astray (“Man was good” he thinks to himself, “There was destination”). He has no familial longings or sexual desires and fails to register any experiences outside work. Accordingly, the past in his eyes weighs heavily upon the present, and he considers tradition an impediment to progress that must be discarded (“When would they all die and let the human day dawn?” he wonders). As an Apollonian at heart, he has no awareness of the tragic and can barely stand, let alone understand, any Dionysian impulses for emotional or spiritual fulfillment. Ironically, this mechanical embrace of life has left him aloof from, and unappreciative of, the imminent death present around him. When he asks Hook, in a heated exchange over his methods, “Is it the wish to eliminate pain that strikes you as amusing?” Hook responds, “Indeed not, but it is an error now to believe that the absence of evil will follow from the elimination of pain” (108). Unconcerned with the tragic implications of the human condition, Conner, like many New Dealers, set out to solve material scarcity without paying attention to the spiritual vacuum left behind.

While Conner represents a new stage in the development of American liberalism, he also demonstrates a novel understanding of liberty that underscores it. The concept of “positive liberty,” as Isaiah Berlin had coined it, is concerned with answering the basic question “what, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?”Footnote ²⁶ Updike's TPF answers this question clearly: it is the state personified by Conner that claims the power to do so. What is used to justify such intervention, explains Berlin, is the pursuit of liberty in a positive sense that actively seeks to obtain a certain self-mastery. Rooted in the Enlightenment's quest to liberate man from his “self-imposed immaturity,” positive liberty strives towards transcendence, and is accordingly dedicated to actively promoting the freedom to become that which one potentially could be. Although Berlin was not necessarily opposed to pursuing positive liberty, he was worried about its potential for self-corruption. “The real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual … as a social whole of which the individual is an element or aspect,” he wrote. The problem with this conception of liberty, Berlin feared, is

Although Updike never studied with Berlin when he taught at Harvard, he had read him as a student and was familiar with his ideas.Footnote ²⁸ It is therefore quite understandable that Conner is committed to promoting individual liberty in the positive sense. This is how Updike's narrator describes him: “The limits of being a poorhouse prefect chafed a man dedicated to a dynamic vision: that of Man living healthy and unafraid beneath blank skies, ‘integrated,’ as the accepted phrase had it, ‘with his fulfilled possibilities’”(65). Conner even admits that poverty “isn't a positive thing; it's a lack. The scientific state adds; it takes nothing away” (118). What essentially justifies his actions is the liberation of man in the positive sense – by making him healthy and productive – in order to enable him to fulfill his destiny of self-mastery. This is accordingly his idea of heaven:

A concentrated melange of Plato, Condorcet, Marx and Le Corbusier, Conner's idealized America reads like a lost passage from Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station – a book Updike knew well from college – in the sense that it too combined an array of utopian schemes to remake society.Footnote ²⁹ But it is this secular messianism that is also meant to give us an explanation for Conner's actions. He is no “tyrant” in the classical sense – despite being called such; instead, by observing that “his intensions were wholly good” and that his was “a work of love,” Updike reminds us that like many well-intentioned, albeit misguided, administrators before him, Conner has allowed the ends to cloud his judgment of the means. When he confides to Lucas, one of the inmates, “I want to help these men hold up their heads, to retain to the end the dignity that properly belongs to every member, big or little, of humanity,” he is answering that basic question Berlin posed by suggesting that it is the state's responsibility to employ its power in the private sphere to ensure the physical welfare of citizens indispensable for securing their metaphysical welfare (19).

There are several subtle ways in which Conner does this. First, we can locate his penchant for the promotion of positive liberty in the way he justifies the enforcement of certain regulations: whether he is commanding Lucas to attend the infirmary, forbidding Hook to smoke, or urging Amy to move her table into the shade, he couches these policies in terms of their own welfare and as the products of what “should” be, in his rational universe, their own free will. This is especially evident in his dialogue with Amy:

In this exchange, as in many others, Conner's stubborn attempts at imposing order are not authoritarian or oppressive as much as they are altruistic and paternal; the new liberal state that he embodies has similarly undertaken to actively promote the welfare of its citizens since it has concluded, as Berlin had warned, that it is a better judge than they are of how to do so.

III. THE VIRTUES OF LIBERALISM

Although Updike regretted framing Conner in a one-dimensional manner that, like a straw man, inadvertently served to aggrandize Hook – he even conceded that “the novel is at its weakest with Conner,” who “should have been more” – this salient literary failure that somewhat undermines the ideological balance of the plot ironically helps shed greater light on the political problems that it deals with.Footnote ³⁰ Whereas Conner, the metaphorical manifestation of New Deal liberalism, is the forward-looking man of tomorrow who employs the institutional tools of government to reorganize society, Hook, his archrival (Conner fears he was “capturing the domain”), is emblematic of yesterday's America and its classical liberal tradition that refuses to be organized as such (41). As the oldest resident, the ninety-four-year-old Hook belongs to a vanishing breed whose “day of authority had set” and in whose place a new generation of technocrats like Conner has arisen (136). In many ways, the chief concern of the novel is to interrogate the implications of this changing of the guard. Updike, who conveyed an empathy toward Hook which he had not bestowed upon Conner, betrayed his social and political concerns when recalling, “I suddenly wished to write a memorial to it, a book about America changing … I was trying to do any number of things some of which I've forgotten. I was trying to say something about what I felt the condition of America was in 1957.”Footnote ³¹

Hook and the liberal tradition he embodies represent the declining forces at the expense of which such changes were, in Updike's mind, taking place. Unlike Conner's regimented world governed by rules and regulations, Hook is a creature of habits: he is a man of custom rather than law who has a “customary” seat in the poorhouse, regularly smokes four cigars and exercises daily. His proud stewardship of a customary America from which the centralizing forces of the modern state have been absent is embedded in his name, “Hook,” which, as George Searles has observed, links past with present.Footnote ³² Like Henry Adams, Hook is a life-long educator who ironically appears uneducated for the modern world: he often laments the “busyness” and shoddy workmanship of the mass-produced industrial economy against which he compares the dexterity and artisanship of old-world craftsmanship (“modern day workmen are not what they were”). When he looks out to the developed lands surrounding the poorhouse, his nostalgic impulses lead him instead to see the urban ravaging of what had once been a pristine nature.

Highly attuned to the sensory experiences of life, Hook embraces the ecstatic potentialities invited by his senses and is imbued with an Emersonian reverence for nature. He doggedly defends his freedom to think – for instance to believe in God in the face of Conner's obtrusive atheism – and to do as he chooses with his ailing body (like smoke cigars and sit wherever he wants). In constructing him in such a way, Updike admitted that there is “a philosophical ambition here; an attempt, no less, to present the meaning of being alive, as conveyed by its sensations. Our eager innate life, rebounding from the exterior world, affirms itself, and the quality of affirmation is taken to be extrinsic, immanent, divine.”Footnote ³³

Given Hook's heightened sensitivities it is understandable that he retains a palpable religious commitment. Suspicious of Conner's secular humanism, he believes in a strict interpretation of Scripture, subscribes to divinely ordained virtues, and practices “unrelenting faith.” “Now, it has never been claimed, that the Creator's mind is a book open for all to read,” he contends during an argument with Conner over the existence of God. “This I do know, that that part of the uni-verse which is visible to me, as distinct from that which is related to me, is an unfailing source of consolation. Dumb creatures are more than their skeletons” (114). What is apposite about Hook's faith is that it is not necessarily blind; the conscious distinctions he makes between essence and being, his penchant for rationally based deduction, and the fact that the narrator frequently reminds us that Hook not only was an educator but also continues to be an educated man who reads the papers every day, all suggest that his faith is also grounded in reason. This is an important distinction: instead of reducing Hook to ignorance or zealotry, Updike complicates his character by advancing through it a scholastic synthesis of faith and reason that attempts to reconcile the two elements. When Hook talks about religion, he lays forth a rational skepticism that is specifically a posteriori: he points toward the immaculate nature of flowers, lobsters or the stars as indisputable products of creation. “It seems implausible,” he tells Conner, who insists that creation was an “accident.” “I do not quite see how any amount of time can gener-ate something from nothing” (113). Updike, who had labeled Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae the most important book of the last millennium and closely studied – and admired – scholasticism at Harvard, had affirmed that TPF had indeed been “sketched along Thomist lines.”Footnote ³⁴

Echoing Updike's instinctive Lutheran pessimism towards human nature, Hook's faith seems to stem from practical political as much as spiritual concerns.Footnote ³⁵ This leads him to dispute Conner's utopian vision of a potential society expunged of evil:

Without the internal mechanisms of restraint provided by religion, Hook fears there will be no restraining human inclinations for evil; the only preventive measure, therefore, was obedience to religious commandments. As Hook explains, “Now Nero murdered his mother as the logical out-come of his philosophy. What surprises me in this day and age is that everyone doesn't do the same. Make no mistake. There is little store of virtue left” (161). That he explicitly defines virtue here as “obedience to the commands of God” suggests that he also considers the political merits of religion as a potential bulwark against an increasingly decadent secular and materialist society.

It is telling that alongside his fervent religiosity the only personal information shared about Hook's past, other than that he was a teacher, has to do with his firm political inclinations. As a teacher, Hook mastered two subjects: nineteenth-century American politics and Roman history. Interestingly, both of these symbolize golden ages of the republican tradition that Hook personifies. Committed mostly to a set of rural, communal, populist, agrarian and artisanal, democratic, and religious values, it is fitting that these quintessential republican qualities are also Hook's most distinct features: he is a product of the past rooted in the traditions of a bygone America; he laments the development of urban society that has ravaged the pastoral paradise; often extols the virtues of personal responsibility, faith and craftsmanship; and is suspicious of science and encroaching bureaucracy.Footnote ³⁶

In his historical analysis of republicanism in America, Daniel T. Rodgers observed that “no term was more central to the republican paradigm than ‘virtue.’”Footnote ³⁷ That Hook is committed to cultivating virtues and couches much of his rhetoric in such language is quite telling of certain republican dispositions that are constitutive of his traditional liberalism. On one hand, Hook, who “speaks with individual life,” preaches the merits of self-reliance, and stubbornly refuses to conform to Conner's depersonalizing regulations, retains what one critic called a “Kierkergaardian sense of spiritual individuality.”Footnote ³⁸ But his uncompromising individualism is coupled with a salient communal, artisanal, and religious spirit. Although difficult to conceptualize theoretically, Hook's hybridized brand of liberalism essentially personifies the unique synthesis of liberal and republican values that James Kloppenberg had identified as constituting “the virtues of liberalism” in America:Footnote ³⁹ concerned with community as much as with individualism, Hook's dual conception of virtue, which he confidently describes as “a solid thing, as firm and workable as wood,” is framed not only in moral terms but also in a classic republican manner that considers virtue an

The liberal–republican synthesis that defines Hook's persona is firmly established by the historical context in which Updike has consciously placed him. As a devoted man of what was once the Progressive Left, it is not surprising that we are told that ”Hook conceived of himself as a politician”: he constantly argues politics with Amy, who admires William McKinley, while he extols Grover Cleveland and offers a remarkably Beardian explanation for the Civil War as a clash of economic interests.Footnote ⁴⁰ His salient Populist–Progressive affinities help explain why his hero is William Jennings Bryan. “Now, that McKinley was nothing but Mark Hanna's parade uniform,” Hook tells Amy. “The man he beat was twenty times his greater, and he did it in the strength of New York and Boston money. Bryan” (29). Later on, when Conner mentions Bryan again, Amy emphasizes that “Hookie's always talking him up to me” (43). Given Hook's admiration for Bryan and his perennial advocacy of his beliefs – many of which defined pre-New Deal liberalism – it is impossible to overlook the metaphorical significance and not reimagine the personal confrontation between him and Conner on political grounds as symbolic of competing visions of American liberalism that developed in the wake of the New Deal.

Although Bryan's tarnished historical image has become commensurate with intolerance as the result of his participation in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” (made infamous by the film Inherit the Wind in 1960, which Updike saw – and tellingly disliked), Updike has presented through Hook a more sympathetic and complex portrait of the “Great Commoner.”Footnote ⁴¹ (It hardly seems a coincidence that the longest and most profound dialogue in the novel is about Creation and eerily mimics the memorable trial scene from Inherit the Wind). Historian Michael Kazin has argued that Bryan's ideas had symbolized “the romance of Jefferson and Jesus.”Footnote ⁴² And indeed, what characterized Bryan – like Hook – was the attempt to navigate the sweeping challenges of modernity with a traditional compass. When Bryan warned, “take sentiment out of life and there is nothing left,” or declared that “the individualist, while contending that the largest and broadest development of the individual, and hence of the entire population, is best secured by full and free competition, made fair by law, believes in a spiritual force which acts beyond the sphere of the state,” he was advocating a religion that sought a way to preserve meaning in an increasingly meaningless reality.Footnote ⁴³ As many historians agree, Bryan, who unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic nominee for President three times (1896, 1900, 1908), was one of the last disciples of Jefferson and his brand of a liberal–republican synthesis that sought to fuse Lockean–liberal ideas of natural rights, limited government, and free markets with classical republican beliefs in community, social equality, direct democracy and cultivation of virtues.Footnote ⁴⁴ Walter Lippmann observed that what Bryan and his followers truly opposed “from the bottom of their souls” was the forces that “upset the old life of the prairies, made new demands on democracy, introduced specialization and science, had destroyed village loyalties, frustrated private ambitions, and created the impersonal relations of the modern world.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Despite his religious fundamentalism, Bryan's politics were practical: he advocated the expansion of the federal government (and supported tariff reduction, progressive income tax and antitrust legislation) and believed in the redeeming potential of science to improve people's lives. The key distinction, however, between the old and new forms of liberalism that the TPF outlines is that Bryan, unlike Conner, embraced these modernizing mechanisms in order to defend and enhance – not replace or attenuate – individual liberty. By declaring that “the chief duty of governments, in so far as they are coercive, is to restrain those who would interfere with the inalienable rights of the individual,” Bryan made the classic liberal argument for expanding government solely in order to restrain other elements – in this case uncontrollable market forces – that were decimating the private sphere and encroaching upon the democratic sovereignty of the people.Footnote ⁴⁶ The problem with Conner's “new” liberalism, in other words, was not the means that it employed but the ends for which it employed them.

Leroy Ashby observed. “It was one thing for scientists to apply their new discoveries to technological matters; it was quite another for experts to tread onto the more subjective terrain of values and habits.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Just as Bryan had opposed pretentious claims of science to redefine value, Hook resists Conner's encroachments only once they sought to do the same by challenging his faith or dictating what he could do with his body.

Postwar liberalism's inability to delineate means from ends and employ its power to augment rather than undermine individual liberty and democratic sovereignty had gradually engendered suspicions among many Americans who felt that the federal government, like Conner, was concerned not with securing the public welfare but with dictating it. These concerns initially voiced by Bryan eventually exploded in opposition to the New Deal. That is why it is also fitting to consider Hook not only as a disciple of Bryan but also as an echo of those voices of protest that his suspicions helped feed. Despite the authoritarian and anti-Semitic bent that marred the populist movements behind Huey Long and Father Coughlin, as Alan Brinkley averred, they

Whereas Conner had pursued positive liberty in order to facilitate transcendence and self-mastery, Hook was more concerned with preserving liberty in its negative sense from external intervention – in this case Conner's regulations. As Berlin had put it, the question with which negative liberty was primarily concerned is: “What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”Footnote ⁴⁹ Inspired by the classic liberalism of John Locke and J. S. Mill, Berlin envisioned the boundaries of negative liberty as defending the sanctity of the individual sphere from all external forces not directly – and adversely – affected by it. The problem, however, as Berlin conceded, was that men “are largely interdependent and no man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way.”Footnote ⁵⁰

That Updike was conscious of these theoretical dilemmas was evident in the fact that he had explicitly couched the question of the inmates' liberty in the discourse of rights. One of the first things revealed about Conner at the onset of the book is that he is disturbed by a letter of complaint he received from a resident of the nearby town. When one of the inmates enters Conner's office, we are told “his eyes glancing to the letter; help not hinder, I myself, and rights leaped from between his fingers” (16, original emphasis). The letter periodically resurfaces to weigh heavily on Conner's mind. Although the initial mention hints at its preoccupation with the inmates' rights, the (misspelled) letter's content, once revealed, clearly manifests this concern:

The dilemma regarding rights that the continued presence of this symbolic letter in Conner's pocket sustains throughout the novel is sparked when Gregg, a somewhat malevolent and reckless inmate, cries out in a typical spat of rage, “I'll kill the rotten queer. I have rights” after Conner disposed of the diseased cat he had smuggled into the grounds – a remark which leads Hook to respond, “No, now, you don't, if truth be known” (127). What is telling about this exchange over rights is how Updike set it up: “Hook recognized in the small man's melting eyes signs of madness that created a hazard for them all, and the old disciplinarian showed as he said, ‘Why, it was better to put it out of its misery than let it linger’” (127). Whereas Hook had been resisting Conner's attempts to regulate his mind and body, this confrontation with Gregg is indicative of a deeper understanding that the individual sphere cannot be left unregulated; like Berlin, Updike may actually be implying that the individual is free to pursue personal welfare as long as it doesn't clash with that of others – in this case by endangering other residents' health. That Hook shares Conner's concern with Gregg's “hazardous” behavior and endorses his response suggests that even while protecting individual liberty, we must be careful to restrict its boundaries when the collective welfare is at stake.

The question of when to limit individual freedom is directly addressed in an incident involving Mrs. Lucas's parakeet. The bird, which is caged in her room, is occasionally allowed to fly around the poorhouse corridors. “Poor thing has to have some exercise, you can't ask it to sit there like a stuffed ornament, in my daughter's house it had great freedom. It can't have that freedom here, but it has to have some,” Mrs. Lucas explains. “In my daughter's house the cat caught it and took off its tail feathers – that's the final result of all the freedom they gave it” (68). The metaphorical significance of the scene is clear: there is such a thing as too much freedom and just as the parakeet could not be released in order to protect it from the cat, the inmates themselves cannot be liberated from all authority. Even the boundaries of negative liberty must therefore be carefully fixed, not necessarily because the inmates may hurt themselves, but because dangerous others – like Gregg – may do it to them.