The Spectator Bird

In The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Wallace Stegner’s thinly veiled account of his harsh upbringing, a hard-lucker named Bo Mason traverses the American West hoping to make a fortune, or at least eke a living, from one failed venture after another. His wife and children are his mostly unwilling partners throughout his long descent into poverty, violence, and despair amid parched landscapes whose once shining promise has dimmed. George Stegner, Wallace’s father and the model for this luckless character, was, if anything, even more irascible and destructive than Bo: According to Wallace, his father “in his lifetime [did] more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime” (Stegner, Wallace. Qtd. in Bart Barnes, “Wallace Stegner Dies.” The Washington Post, 15 Apr. 1993). One of George Stegner’s financial schemes involved cutting down 200-year-old redwoods to sell for firewood.

Stegner described his child-self as “a little savage” who, like his father, destroyed animals and nature (Stegner, Wallace. Qtd. in Patricia Rowe Willrich, “A Perspective on Wallace Stegner.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1991). Stegner seemingly spent much of his adult life trying to atone for his family’s depredations. One of the leading environmentalists of his age, Stegner had a profound impact on the conservation of California’s natural wonders. This Is Dinosaur, a book he edited in 1956, is credited with having saved Dinosaur National Monument from catastrophic flooding from two dams that had been planned nearby. Stegner was a longtime activist and watchdog against “ecocide” by developers, politicians, and federal bureaucracies, and his ecological ideals found their way into his novels, including All the Little Live Things and The Spectator Bird. In the former, a neighbor of Joe Allston’s shares her passion for ecology, urging him not to kill wild things on his land; by the second novel, Joe has absorbed many of her concerns and takes a dim view of the “subdividers” who are “ruining” the hills where he lives. The Denmark sequences of Bird, particularly Joe’s visit to Eigil Rødding’s grotesquely “mechanized” estate and farms, offer a cautionary tale against monoculture and The Dangers of Tampering With Nature.

Like Bo’s son and Joe Allston, young Wallace Stegner was a “nester” always longing to put down roots despite his family’s constant moves. Joe’s inveterate sense of “rootlessness,” a recurring theme in Stegner’s novels, may lie behind his reflex to “evade” his wife’s sympathy and affection, as well as to avoid sharing his own feelings. Stegner mostly portrays this emotional aloofness as weakness rather than strength. Stegner was known for demythologizing the American West in his works, deflating the romance of cowboy “toughness,” and exposing the essential bleakness of an emotionally distant, taciturn life—especially one spent on the road.

Stegner’s preoccupation with Western themes might have led to his being ignored, to some extent, by the Eastern critical establishment; for instance, the New York Review of Books did not even review his 10th novel, Angle of Repose (1971). Another factor was perhaps his unfashionable antipathy to the “counterculture” of the 1960s and early 1970s, a dominant theme of The Spectator Bird and All the Little Live Things. Nevertheless, Stegner went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Angle of Repose and the National Book Award in 1977 for The Spectator Bird.