55 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerThe Spectator Bird
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
The day of Césare’s visit, the gathering storm breaks, bringing powerful winds, power failures, and “horizontal” rain that finds its way into Joe’s living room and soaks some of his books. Worse, the house loses power, which means no stove or running water. Added to this, their (late-arriving) maid informs them that the culvert on their property is blocked, causing water to pool on the driveway. Ruth is in a frenzy about the lunch for Césare, and Joe goes to clear out the culvert with a shovel. Deep in his labors, he sees Césare and Anne pass him on the driveway in a BMW, half an hour earlier than invited; apparently mistaking him for a paid laborer, they do not stop to chat.
The power returns before lunch, and Ruth is able to prepare and serve her excellent food, but Joe senses that Césare is bored. Césare denigrates both Joe’s new life as a retiree and the rural isolation of his home. Further, he tells the young and pretty Anne McElvenny, with whom he is probably having an affair, that Joe was far more dynamic and congenial when he lived in the city. Césare says all of this in the most jovial way, but Joe feels that he means every word. Césare seems to confirm this by leaving earlier than expected. Walking his guests out with an umbrella, Joe feels much worse than he did before Césare’s visit: dull, depressed, “self-exiled,” and at least 10 years older.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
That evening, Joe reads more of the journal to Ruth, which has become a nightly ritual. They are now living on the Havnegade, a waterfront promenade in Copenhagen, sharing quarters with an “indigent” Danish countess whose reduced circumstances have forced her to lease rooms in her cottage to tourists. The countess is about 40 years old, tall, and quite attractive, with a regal bearing. To Joe, this makes it all the stranger that her husband reportedly ran out on her, and all the more poignant that she must share a small, sparsely furnished cottage with strangers to make ends meet.
Joe and Ruth find the countess extremely good company, full of gossip about the aristocracy of Scandinavia and Northern Germany, many of whom are relations, and especially about the Danish royal family, for whom her father was Hofjaegermester, lord of the hunt. Another of her relatives, the Danish author Karen Blixen, known to her readers as Isak Dinesen, has long fascinated Joe, and the countess promises to arrange a visit. Bregninge, the village where Joe’s mother grew up, lies within the countess’s family estate on the island of Lolland. The countess offers to drive them there and show them the family castle. However, as she wishes to avoid her brother, to whom she has not spoken in years, she will have to consult with her brother’s wife to select a date when he will be away.
Joe is enchanted by the countess, who reminds him of a princess from the Brothers Grimm, though he is still mystified by her fallen circumstances. Later, when he and Ruth take her to the opera in Copenhagen, they are astounded that not a single person will talk to her. At this point in his journal, Joe records the countess’s full name: Astrid Wredel-Krarup.
The next week, Joe and Ruth answer a knock at the countess’s door and meet her estranged husband, a handsome, impeccably dressed man with a surgically repaired harelip. Afterward, Astrid confides in them that her husband has asked her to take him back but that her gorge rises at the idea. She reveals that her husband was a “quisling”: a traitor who aided the Nazis during the occupation of Denmark. For Joe, this answers the mystery of why Astrid was shunned at the opera.
The countess describes the Nazis’ attempts to “buy” her cooperation in their propaganda efforts, which enraged her. She even bought a pistol to defend herself from their overtures. Her husband Erik, however, “caught the Nazi disease” and served two years in prison for his presumed collaboration (78). The government seized all lands belonging to the couple, forcing Astrid to support herself by leasing rooms and by designing prints and wallpaper. Meanwhile, she fiercely advocated for the release of her husband, for whom she still felt some loyalty. When he was released, he immediately left her for another woman. Feeling no sympathy for him, she now refuses to take him back.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Revisiting the Denmark diary is painful for Joe since it reminds him of how much he has aged in 20 years. He would prefer not to share it with Ruth, but she is an “exorcist” who believes in complete honesty in marriage, and once he revealed its existence, sharing it with her was inevitable. Their nightly readings have become a “marital communion that her soul craves” (84), and he cannot deny her this after so many years of stonewalling. Besides, doing so might make her suspect that something happened in Denmark that he would prefer to hide.
Part 2, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Anticipating Césare’s visit, Ruth suggests the author would liven the place up like a “waterspout.” This proves prophetic, though not as she hoped: Rains pummel the hills, but Césare himself is the storm. He bursts into their cloistered world as yet another portent of aging and mortality. Joe’s glimpse of his own “dullness” through the urbane Césare’s eyes makes Joe feel 10 years older, and “without the grace to be content with what [he] chose” (62). His sense of self, always tentative, has been swept away, like the loose branches and roots down his culvert. This lunch, so labored over and so rejected, represents Joe’s lowest ebb in the 1974 portion of the novel and continues to develop the theme of Choice and the Inevitability of Regret.
Joe remarks that the Denmark trip was just “another happening,” no different from the botched luncheon with Césare, but these decades-old events take up half of the novel. However, their importance resides not so much in their impact at the time as in how they reverberate in the present, which Joe can’t see yet: After the luncheon, he “resents” that anyone should think him in need of “repair.” Stegner suggests otherwise stylistically. The 1974 passages read almost like journal entries themselves, with a frequent use of present tense that suggests Joe is changing in real time: “Tonight, unless Ruth’s headache alters the plan, I suppose I shall have to read another installment” (63). This blends past and present, suggesting the pervasive and flowering seeds of one in the other.
In Copenhagen, Joe continues his penchant for viewing life and people through the lens of literature. One moment, Astrid is a princess or sorceress from the Brothers Grimm, the next she is Emily Dickinson hiding behind her door. Such allusions heighten the atmosphere of mystery and drama, developing the theme of American Deracination Versus European Gothic: Joe is now in the land he associates with literature—Europe—but the darkness of several of the allusions cast doubt on whether that is a good thing. The allusions also seem to clue Ruth in on the complications to come: For the first time, she realizes that the journal readings aren’t about “pleasure.” She suspects that her husband, who always bewails his life as too passive, was not “spectator enough” in this particular case, and she suspects that this journal will reveal the details.
Joe is disturbed by this curiosity: His impulse is to push back at Ruth’s “exorcism” of his feelings and past. This has always been a sore point between them. However, there is at last a vehicle and an agreed-upon daily process for the two of them to share a part of their past that has long troubled them. Both look forward to the nightly installments with some trepidation: Neither is sure what will happen as a result of reading about long-ago events.
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