The Spectator Bird

For decades, the tender, ever-patient Ruth Allston has been the loving anchor of Joe’s life and career. In his darker moments, he has reproached himself for using her as a “barricade” against the world and his fears of impermanence, acknowledging that she is the cornerstone of his peace of mind and the one mainstay in his life, which lacks any blood relations, family history, or close friends. Ruth provides him with the sense of home that is so essential to him. An admirer of Marcus Aurelius and other stoic philosophers, Joe reveres her patience and quiet strength. Stegner even hints that Joe associates her with his mother, a “saint” who labored at menial jobs to give his childhood some semblance of stability, and whose sacrifices and love he did not appreciate until after her death.

An indefatigable homemaker, Ruth is also a bit of a worrywart who tackles every crisis with “last-ditch desperation” (55). A lot of her worries center around Joe, who all too often ignores her pleas that he not exert himself. She also prevails upon him to socialize more, for his psychological well-being if nothing else. Her socializing influence has often kept him from making a “fool” of himself with his petulance or caustic sense of humor; for instance, it is mostly thanks to her facial “semaphore” that he does not crack a joke about Miss Weibull’s unwed pregnancy. Since Joe’s career as an agent depended largely on his amiability, her influence has undoubtedly been crucial to their livelihood.

Though she provides a check on her husband’s worst impulses, Ruth seems continually frustrated by his reticence in sharing his deeper and more significant emotions. Joe refers to her as an “exorcist” who “has a dangerous theory of complete honesty in marriage” (83). He is reluctant to share with her, though he knows she longs to “forgive” him and love him all the more for his doubts and weaknesses. In the end, he submits to her loving exorcism, acknowledging that she has long been the bedrock of his equanimity, and that any life without her would be fraught with unimaginable regrets.

The novel’s portrait of Ruth is a subjective one—that of Stegner’s first-person narrator. Still, his view of her as an ever-loyal, loving, homemaking pillar of support may strike today’s readers as patronizing, or at least a product of the novel’s time.

A down-on-her-luck countess whose modest cottage Joe and Ruth rent for their Danish vacation, Astrid serves a double function in Stegner’s novel. First, as a particularly well-connected native, she introduces them to the principal locales and personalities of the Danish section of the novel, along with the secrets that will play a major part in its resolution. Second, her “remarkable” personal qualities, including her selflessness, intelligence, sensitivity, and physical beauty, represent a temptation for Joe.

Astrid’s many woes reflect the novel’s debt to fairytales and (especially) Gothic romance. Astrid reminds Joe of a princess from the Brothers Grimm, and her kinship with Karen Blixen, author of Seven Gothic Tales, foreshadows darkness to come. Also like a princess, Astrid grew up in a castle, the lavish and imposing Ørebyslot, on the Danish island of Lolland. Her present, narrowed circumstances are not of her own making, but the result of the behavior of her brother and her husband. At the time of Joe and Ruth’s visit in 1954, Astrid no longer lives with her husband, who betrayed his country and then his wife; she has also cut off all contact with her brother, whose self-centered ruthlessness, even if directed toward scientific ends, is completely foreign to her own nature. She herself is tender, generous, and forgiving, showing loyalty even to those who have betrayed her; she eventually takes her husband back, nursing him through his final illness.

One trait of hers that Joe finds most compelling is the spontaneous joy she takes in simple things, such as swimming or exploring a spring landscape, or even in “off-color” jokes, which, for him, delightfully humanizes her porcelainlike, queenly beauty and refined image. He is also drawn to her stoical fortitude, a trait she shares with Ruth. Toward the end of Joe’s visit to Denmark, when their mutual attraction has entered a troubling new phase, she pointedly reminds him of the duty they owe to their loved ones: Hers will not allow her to betray a dear friend (Ruth) or to leave her husband and family, however they may have treated her. Like Ruth, and like Joe’s long-dead mother, she is to some degree a martyr; the fact that she has borne so much adversity, including the loss of untold wealth and public esteem, and with such stoic equanimity, makes her a marvel to Joe. Nevertheless, since leaving Denmark with Ruth, he has learned to put her out of his thoughts. In his memories, she still wears the aura of a fairytale, enticing and tragic, but less and less substantial over time. Ruth remains the bedrock of his reality.

Astrid’s brother, the polymath owner of Ørebyslot castle, is obsessed with purity, efficiency, and control. Eigil Rødding has converted his family estate on Lolland into a streamlined factory of agriculture, churning out meats, grains, vegetables, dairy, and many other products, all processed by himself to exact specifications and shipped out from a port that he owns. Creator of numerous hybrid flowers and other plants, he is no less a destroyer, having systematically purged his lands of any living thing (weeds, pests, ugly stags) that does not serve his narrowly defined interests. In person, he is imperious, a “pusher-arounder” who issues challenges to strangers on first meeting them; the only reason he talks to Joe is because the latter was able to match him blow-for-blow in tennis.

After their match, Eigil opens up to him about his unorthodox theories, lifted more or less wholesale from his father, whose memory he worships. Though quick to disavow Hitler’s genocidal eugenics, his notions about human breeding and “superman” purity would fit right into Mein Kampf. An amateur archaeologist who curates his own museum of ancient history, Eigil brags that his prehistoric forebears on Lolland raided their neighbors with impunity, fighting off all incursions, so his family’s bloodline is exceptionally pure. Only later do the lengths to which Eigil has gone to breed imperfections out of his bloodline become clear. His methodical, incestuous couplings, a continuation and expansion of his father’s “Mendelian” experiments, lift the story to new levels of Gothic strangeness. Eigil serves as a partial rebuke to Joe’s bloodline-envy, showing there can be a downside to ancient pedigrees, crowded households, and family baggage.