The Spectator Bird

“He has always been hungry for some continuity and assurance and sense of belonging, but has never had ancestors or descendants or place in the world.”

Joe has no surviving children, and his ancestry is a mystery to him: He knows very little about his parents and nothing about their family lines. Most Americans, he feels, suffer from a sense of “deracination” or rootlessness; they lack the continuity and stability of living in an ancient place rich with the history and culture of their bloodlines over many generations. Joe feels this lack more than most Americans, and his existence itself seems a strange accident: the product of a short-lived union between two drifters. Joe’s only child was a drifter as well, a “beach bum” who drowned as a young man. Now 69 years old and in failing health, Joe feels acutely that when he dies he will have left no roots, forward or backward.

“I wanted to own a past the way Rødding owned his.”

Eigil Rødding, the mysterious brother of the countess Joe meets in Denmark, appears in many ways to be Joe’s opposite. A creator, not a facilitator, Eigil is an industrial baron who has invented numerous hybrids of flowers and grain and turned his huge complex of farms, stockyards, and processing plants into a model of efficiency. Eigil also claims to have documented 6,000 years of his ancestry on the island where he has his estate; he even keeps a private museum that includes an ancient bog-mummy that somewhat resembles himself. Joe, yearning desperately for belongingness, once envied Eigil’s ancestral land with its deep, nourishing roots and only later realized the downsides of having so much history. The countervailing trade-offs of American Deracination Versus European Gothic are key to Joe’s ultimate acceptance of his life.

“Oh, his poor dim dependable unimaginative not very attractive life that was supposed to appreciate like a Treasury bill. Ah Bertelson! Ah, humanity!”

On the cruise ship that takes Joe and Ruth to Denmark in 1954, Mr. and Mrs. Bertelson are fellow passengers, a couple of elderly Swedish Americans returning to Europe to enjoy retirement. Joe has contempt for their dullness, prudishness, and naivete, and his feelings do not soften much even after the husband dies of a heart attack. The last four words (a reference to Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener”) suggest that Joe recognizes a common plight in Bertelson’s meager life and deluded dreams, making his scorn for the couple seem excessive; for instance, he refuses to comfort the dead man’s widow, claiming it would be “hypocrisy.” He seems particularly offended that the Bertelsons regarded him and Ruth as “allies” since he too was making a pilgrimage to his Scandinavian roots. This raises the possibility that he sees too much of himself and his own wasted life in Bertelson.

“Look at him. He was once a man of the world, he had juice in him, he liked conversation, excitement, people, crowds, pretty women, literary discussion. Now he sits on a cow pad and consults the grass. He pretends to be on the shelf.”

A famous Italian author who was briefly one of Joe’s clients, Césare Rulli functions as a friendly antagonist for Joe. Gregarious, loquacious, and charmingly uninhibited, Césare is a lover of stories, experience, women, and the city. He embodies the sort of life Joe might have had, as well as the sociability he has abandoned since retiring to the country. His visit to Joe and Ruth’s house in the rural hills of northern California deeply disturbs Joe, giving him a view of himself through the eyes of a more virile, successful man and making him feel dull, obsolete, unmanly, and “ten years older” (62). That this depressing lunch takes place during a howling rainstorm suggests further parallels with Mr. Bertelson, who was buried at sea amid a storm.

“And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world’s great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.”

Césare’s lunch visit makes Joe reflect on life and how little it resembles the Italian’s colorful novels. Its randomness often has no peaks or troughs that would force one to act before it is too late. Joe had every opportunity to forge an exciting career of his own; instead, he followed the easy, calm, dull one that led him here. The kitchen metaphor anticipates the one cited at the close of the book about the bird who flies the length of the feasting hall and disappears, leaving not a trace. Also, like much of the novel, it evokes the legend of the Fisher King, in which the Holy Grail is carried from one end of the feasting hall to the other without stopping. Humans as well as birds may get only one chance at transcendence.

“In our relationship with Astrid Wredel-Krarup, and in the recollections that my diary brought back, I wasn’t quite spectator enough.”

Joe foreshadows the trouble to come, signaling the importance of Astrid and the diary itself, whose events have appreciated in a way Mr. Bertelson’s life did not, becoming more momentous in retrospect. Joe sees himself as a “spectator bird,” a creature who has flown the long length of an exciting feast-hall or kitchen (i.e., a life) without truly taking part; with Astrid, however, his flight wavered. For once, Joe regrets something he did rather than something he did not do.

“To have me admit to yearnings and anguishes, even if they threatened her, would allow her to forgive and pity me, and since she has trouble getting me to hold still for outward affection, forgiveness and pity are not unimportant. […] What I felt reading that diary, and what I somehow can’t tell her or talk about with her, is how much has been lost, how much is changed, since 1954. I really am getting old.”

The longtime bone of contention in Joe and Ruth’s marriage resides in the “callus” he prides himself on: the stoic withholding of his feelings and his reluctance to accept the tender mothering that she longs to give. Ruth is forever looking for insights into his deeper feelings and the barricaded parts of his past. Even unflattering truths, she thinks, would bind the two of them closer. Joe feels threatened by this and even compares her to an exorcist or a “witch” hellbent on collecting his nails and tufts of hair for a binding spell. He rationalizes his feelings by telling himself how devastating it would be for her to find out how deeply he regrets his past. Nevertheless, he will continue to read her the journal because to refuse to do so would upset her more.

“No, Denmark did no more than thicken the callus. It was something I survived. Left to myself, I would deal with it (I tell myself) as Catarrh deals with his leavings in the flower bed.”

Joe claims that without Ruth’s knowledge of the journal and her gentle coercion to read it aloud, he would bury the feelings it elicits without a trace. He claims that the Denmark trip was not a particularly significant event in his life, but Stegner has already foreshadowed that the reading of the journal will be significant. A notable aspect of the parts of the novel set in the present (1974) is their use of present tense, which gives them an unfolding character, like entries in a journal themselves. Not only does this blur the lines between 1954 and 1974, making each equally vivid and dramatizing how one has germinated in the other, but it captures Joe’s anguish. He is caught between two selves—two lives—in real time and does not seem to know what will happen.

“‘Mr. Allston is not the way Americans are supposed to be,’ she said. ‘Why is he not loud and insensitive? Why does he not think all things can be bought with money? Why does he respond to beautiful things? Why is he so nice?’”

Astrid labors under her share of stereotypes about Americans, but Joe’s spontaneous U-turn in the stretch of blossoming beechwoods does seem out of character. A new, springlike spirit has taken residence within the prickly middle-aged man who spent much of the ocean crossing sneering at his fellow passengers. His U-turn (emotional and literal) is the start of the mutual attraction between the two of them; toward the end, she will allude to it as the moment she came to “know” him.

“It’s too bad you don’t know Eigil Rødding. There is an accumulation, if you like accumulations. There is a house with an attic.”

Brilliant and sphinxlike, Karen Blixen sees Joe’s longings for a “safe” home for the naivete it is, hinting that there can be such a thing as too much history. Her reference to an “attic,” coming from a master of the Gothic, evokes stories such as Jane Eyre and helps prepare the reader for what is to come. In the mythic subtext of the story, she represents both the Sphinx, who tests Oedipus with riddles, and Morgan le Fay, who misleads Galahad on his search for the Holy Grail.

“It is good that Eigil has inherited his father’s gifts, because some of the experiments involved species that do not breed quickly like mice or guinea pigs, and so take many years.”

Blixen drops hints of monstrous things with the most innocent of words. Joe describes her as “witchlike” and “malicious,” and she clearly anticipates that Joe will learn some truths that will disconcert him. She even looks forward to seeing the fruits of his disillusionment, bidding him goodbye with the words, “If you find it possible, come and see me again after you have been to Ørebyslot. I am curious to know what a returning pilgrim would find” (99). It may be part of her creative impulse to experiment with people in this way—i.e., to create stories, just as Eigil experiments with human breeding in his attempts to create a new genotype. This indicates that the creative life, which Joe longs for, gathers “accumulations” as well.

“In rejecting me he destroyed my compass, he pulled my plug, he drained me. He was the continuity my life and effort were spent to establish. I have been guilty of making first Ruth and then Curtis into barricades behind which I could take shelter.”

The drowning death of Curtis, which might have been suicide, was the impetus for their pilgrimage to Denmark. Curtis moved in “raffish” surfing communities and never had a steady job or fixed address, which was anathema to Joe, a self-described “nester” who revered stability and rootedness. Joe feels he might have burdened Curtis too much with his dreams of planting the beginnings of a family tree. His son might also have been a flesh-and-blood surrogate for the literary legacy he once dreamed of—something to carry his name into the future. Curtis instead rebelled, and Joe’s anger and recriminations might finally have pushed him over the edge. Joe’s nest partially died with Curtis, leaving him again adrift.

“The cultural amputee is still trying to scratch the itch in the missing limb.”

Joe’s journal alludes to his finding the cottage where his mother grew up, but the bland structure sparks no affinity or belongingness in him. As it happens, the cottage has been spruced up and refurbished, probably by Eigil, so that it looks like a “postcard,” devoid of any hint of the dire poverty that might have driven Joe’s mother to emigrate. Though small and unassuming, the cottage and its history are fraught with what Blixen calls “accumulations,” and there is an unsavory reason why Eigil has taken such good care of it.

“The wicked brother. I had seen him plenty of times, without the feudal trappings—a muscular bulldozer, a pusher-arounder.”

Eigil thrives on adversity and is used to bending others to his will: people, animals, objects, plants, and principles. He is a man who respects others only if they can butt heads with him and remain standing. The irony is that Joe thinks he knows Eigil’s “type,” which may be true, but only in a general sense; a bully is a bully, but Joe has never met anyone quite like Eigil.

“If only it could be done scientifically, that was what my father always said. He didn’t mean to play Hitler, he was not interested in tyrannical eugenics or Brave New Worlds. He meant only that if there could be a controlled experiment over a good many generations, a demonstration clear enough to show the superiority of method over accident.”

Eigil distinguishes the old count’s Mendel-derived theories of human breeding, which both father and son have put into rigorous practice, from the genocidal race theories of Adolf Hitler. In reality, Eigil betrays significant interest in the eugenic possibilities of creating “a race of supermen” (142), of which he counts himself almost a member. Nevertheless, he claims that his father never thought of forcing his notions of genetic perfection onto others. This argument proves just as disingenuous as it sounds. Both father and son used destitute peasant women as human guinea pigs in incestuous breeding experiments, while banishing others who were “in the way,” such as Joe’s mother. Moreover, Eigil’s practice of shooting stags who have “bad horns” lest they pollute the bloodlines of his future hunting trophies betrays the selfishness of his notions of genetic hardiness.

“If my mother had stayed in Bregninge and been subverted by the old count instead of coming to America and marrying an alcoholic skinhead on the C.M. and St. P., I might now be running my hand through hyacinthine locks instead of over a naked skull.

The chances we take, getting born so accidentally.”

Half facetiously, Joe ponders what might have been, had his mother stayed in Denmark: He might have reaped the benefits of Rødding’s “superman” eugenics and been spared many of the humiliations of old age. As it was, his mother left Bregninge and mixed her genes with the equivalent of one of Eigil’s stags with bad horns. However, as Joe himself suggested to Eigil, a bad-horned stag, or a bald-headed man, might possess some genetic advantages invisible to the eye.

“Shall we remember that evening at the opera and ask ourselves if there was something besides hatred of treason on the minds behind the eyes that watched you?”

Joe’s misunderstanding, which came from his not wanting to arouse suspicion in the public affairs officer, has planted dark suspicions about Astrid in his head. His new contempt for her suggest jealousy; at the very least, he feels betrayed by what he perceives as her utter lack of candor and now doubts almost everything she told them. Previously, he saw her as a martyr who was being shunned solely for the sins of a husband she despised. Now all of her charm, spontaneity, artlessness, and openness seem like a masquerade.

“He thought people didn’t understand. He thought he might discover things that could be discovered in no other way. That was what Karen meant about Dr. Faustus.”

The reference to Faustus recalls Joe’s own Faustian pact, in which he traded his soul (his artistic promise) for the security of a steady job and a stable life. Aage Rødding’s pact was the exact opposite: To create “wonders,” he sacrificed both his respectability and finally his life. Joe might take a lesson from this: Creative ambition has its own “accumulations” and, as Rødding, Blixen, and even Césare illustrate, can feed off of others. For Joe, the road not taken might have led to danger.

“From times to times men of our family had got peasant girls in trouble—there really was something like the droit de seigneur, and Rødding blood is in the veins of many Lolland families.”

Droit de seigneur means, literally, “the right of the lord” and describes a form of rape, mostly associated with medieval times, in which powerful men sexually exploited peasant women. Though it likely did not exist in the highly codified form later writings claimed, coercion of poor women certainly took place. Astrid says not only that her forefathers were guilty of the practice but also that they kept detailed records on both victims and offspring. This is in keeping with the Gothic turn the story has taken. It also evokes the meticulous record-keeping of the Nazis, particularly Josef Mengele, who was fascinated by genetics.

“I walked up and down the drive gritting my teeth, with tears in my eyes—Marcus Aurelius Allston, the spectator bird, having the feathers beaten off him in a game from which he had thought he was protected by the grandfather clause. That other night, Midsummer Night twenty years before, filled his mind as moonlight filled the hilltop where he walked.”

As a “spectator bird,” Joe has never truly joined life’s feast, yet now he feels a rage of guilt over one stolen kiss. The full weight of his life’s many sacrifices buffets him as never before: The light, lofty bird turns out to have “encumbrances” after all.

“There I stood holding her cold hand, running my thumb over the smooth knuckles as if I had rights in her skin, and yet feeling how remote she was, lost in some medieval curse or spell, hypnotized by duty or noblesse oblige or whatever it was. I smelled the faint mildewed odor of her sweater, and it made me angry that she should have to wear such things, worn out, left over.”

On first meeting Astrid, Joe compares her to “a princess in a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm” (68). Astrid’s downfall was no fault of her own but caused by the males in her family, and Joe longs to rescue her, like a knight. However, part of her “medieval curse” is her sense of her duty to her husband and friends, which include Ruth, as well as her knowledge that Joe too has loyalties he cannot shirk.

“What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? […] Had I gone through my adult life glancing desperately sidelong in hope of diversion, rescue, transfiguration?”

Pacing up and down a hill in the cold, as if performing penance, Joe struggles to process the breakdown he experienced while confessing to Ruth about the kiss with Astrid. He has suppressed so many of his feelings for so long that his reaction takes him by surprise, and he puzzles over its cause, which he suspects is more than just guilt.

“It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good.”

In an epiphany that is the crux of the story, Joe realizes what has been important to him all along. He has never been a creature of impulse, and his rationality has always allowed him to navigate his choices with clear eyes. There will always be regrets: Choices and free will are meaningless without them. Joe puts the chimera of “fulfillment,” along with Césare Rulli, behind him.