The Spectator Bird

Joe’s journal picks up on May 13 with a discussion of Astrid’s extreme isolation in her own country, which helps explain why he and Ruth have become so important to her on such a short acquaintance. He adds that she has set a date for their visit to her family castle (May 20) when her “wicked” brother will be away. Joe hopes to combine the trip with a pilgrimage to Bregninge, his mother’s village. On May 16, Joe drives the three of them to visit Karen Blixen. He is so taken with the “Druidical” beauty of the spring landscape that he abruptly makes a U-turn to drive again through a particularly lovely corridor of flowering beechwoods—a spontaneous action that surprises and delights Astrid.

They find Blixen working in her garden, and at first Joe has trouble reconciling this “tiny creature” with the bold huntress and elegant “plantation-owner” of Out of Africa. They discuss Africa, and Joe bridles at her suggestion that her present life, tending her beautiful garden, is not true life but just “safety.” As an American with no roots to speak of, he says he would be happy to have a “home” like hers: a clearcut place of origin, with well-documented ancestors, artifacts, and ancient bloodlines. Blixen counters that this “history” he longs for would inevitably include unsavory things as well.

Knowing that the three of them are on their way to Lolland, Blixen mentions Astrid’s brother, Eigil, as an example of history’s “accumulations.” She notes Eigil’s similarities to his father, the Hofjaegermester. Astrid blushes, but Blixen persists, dubbing the deceased count “the Doctor Faustus of genetics” and describing him as a man obsessed with breeding both flora and fauna and creating extraordinary hybrids (97). Denmark in general may be predictable and “safe,” Blixen says, but Bregninge and the surrounding estate are not: The count has left his mark on them, and Eigil has been following in his father’s footsteps. Unlike Astrid, Blixen refuses to judge Eigil, not even his practice of seducing peasant women; she cannot say whether he is good or evil, only that she considers him “fascinating.”

The conversation turns to Joe’s mother, who left Bregninge for America at 16. Blixen wonders aloud whether she was fleeing the old count, or even pregnant with his child. Joe remarks that he does not have to worry about the count being his father: He was born four years after his mother’s emigration.

After leaving Blixen, the three swim in the sound, an idyll that reveals to Joe a “seductive” new side to the countess but also reminds him of his son Curtis. In his journal, he broods on his son’s “rejection” of his values and work ethic, which led to many of their fights. He feels guilty for projecting so many of his own hopes onto Curtis, using him as a “barricade” to make himself feel less rootless and vulnerable. The mystery of who his son was and what he wanted plagues him. Curtis too spent a few months in Copenhagen, and Joe wonders whether he was also hunting for a trace of “home.”

Joe has finished reading the second notebook of his journal, and Ruth is troubled by the breast-beating turn it has taken, telling him, “It’s not healthy to go on grieving forever” (104). He reminds her that he wrote those words less than a year after Curtis’s death, but she says that it was his raw emotion while reading that disturbed her. Joe confides that Curtis’s death is just part of it. His despair is all-encompassing and includes his contempt for himself and for the world: “How to live and grow old inside of a head I’m contemptuous of, in a culture I despise” (105). Ruth begins to cry and points out that Curtis despised the same things he did, so he did not entirely reject Joe’s values. Joe says that makes him even more responsible for their son’s death since he taught Curtis to hate too much, making him give up on life. He also believes that his son took this contempt too far, wielding it as an excuse to be lazy and self-indulgent while renouncing any responsibility to the world and to his family. In his darker moments, Joe sees Curtis, who died in 1953, as a precursor of the “counterculture” of the 1960s and 1970s, with what he sees as its sloth, selfishness, nihilism, and aimless rebellion. Though he claims to have forgiven his son long ago, at times he cannot help but see him as the “enemy.”