Andrew Harkiss

Andrew Harkiss is a Yale Forestry School graduate who becomes a central operator in the Breitsprecher timber business, helping restore its fortunes through rapid expansion and intensive harvesting. His career embodies the novel’s tension between forestry expertise and commercial extraction: he can recognize the risks of cutting old-growth forests, yet he defends the company’s practical priorities and turns timber demand into an opportunity for growth.

Identity and Entry into the Company

Harkiss studied at Yale Forestry School and began working for Breitsprecher four or five years before Dieter Breitsprecher described his role to Charley Breitsprecher. Dieter credited him with reviving the company’s cutting operations, entering the balsa trade in Ecuador, and securing timber on the Oregon and Washington coasts. The company, Dieter said, was regaining its lost wealth. Harkiss thus enters the narrative not merely as a forester but as a manager whose decisions are tied directly to the fortunes of a family enterprise.

Dieter praised Harkiss as ambitious and devoted to improving the company. He even paraphrased Émile Coué’s affirmation that Harkiss strove to become better every day and in every way. The praise casts professional improvement as both a personal discipline and a corporate program. Charley, who faintly remembered Harkiss from their brief overlap at Yale, responds skeptically to the image of this polished executive wielding an axe; the contrast between training, appearance, and the physical consequences of logging shadows Harkiss’s promotion of the business.

Redwood Expansion and the Conservation Dispute

After the earthquake and fire in San Francisco, Harkiss moved quickly to meet the demand for rebuilding lumber. Redwood buildings had survived the disaster, making the wood’s resistance to fire especially visible to the public. Harkiss sent workers into the woods before the ashes were cold; they worked whenever daylight allowed, and the mills ran around the clock. The episode presents him as decisive and effective, but also shows how catastrophe becomes a spur to intensified extraction.

Charley challenges the ecological assumptions behind this expansion. He asks how two-thousand-year-old redwoods could be replaced by seedlings, questions the loss of species diversity and soil quality, and raises erosion and watershed protection. He also points to the scale of the trees: redwoods and cedars could measure twenty feet across at the base, requiring springboards to reach narrower trunks above, with substantial timber left wasted. Harkiss’s response is to redirect the debate to Andrew’s operational authority, joking that Charley should discuss the matter with the man who handles the axe. The exchange distinguishes concern for forest systems from the immediate management of harvest, even as Harkiss remains part of a company that Dieter says is replanting a year after cutting and calls the process balanced.

At a family dinner, Dieter tries to raise the West Coast redwood and cedar operation with Harkiss. Sophia objects that she had hoped for a family meal without talk of trees or forest management; she had been enjoying discussion of the company’s rising value and regarded Harkiss’s contribution as part of her own standing. Harkiss counters that trees are the timber family’s bread-and-butter subject. The brief interruption makes forestry not just a business topic but the family’s shared language of status, wealth, and belonging.

Marriage and Corporate Authority

Harkiss is married to Sophia, Dieter’s youngest child, who later insists on a formal role in the company. She tells Harkiss and her brother James Bardawulf that she wants an office, responsibility, and a position of her own. Harkiss replies that she is already a company director whose comments are considered, presenting board membership and influence as sufficient recognition. Sophia rejects that distinction: she wants an identifiable job rather than an advisory presence.

Her demand continues for more than a year. Harkiss tells James Bardawulf that Sophia wants an office and her name on the door, and he disparages the idea that she has a clearly defined role in mind. He also reports that she reacted angrily when he mentioned that the company had discussed selling. His account reveals the limits of his understanding: he recognizes that she will not abandon the demand, but frames it as an inconvenience to be quieted rather than a claim to corporate authority. James Bardawulf proposes that she might take on cultural or community-relations work, while Harkiss says she should write a description of the job she wants. When Sophia’s letter arrives, James decides they can give her the position, but the proposed appointment is explicitly meant to keep her out of business deals. Harkiss is therefore both her intermediary and a participant in a family structure that grants her a title while restricting the authority she seeks.

Management, Succession, and the Company’s Direction

After Dieter dies, James Bardawulf urgently seeks Charley, a major heir named in the will. Harkiss questions the need for a private detective and points James toward practical sources: Dieter’s address book, Mrs. Garfield, and the lawyer Mr. Grey, who may have Charley’s address from preparing the will. He telephones Mrs. Garfield, confirms that the address is in the correspondence file, and helps arrange for Grey’s office to send the necessary papers. James adds a personal letter he has been composing for years. Harkiss’s intervention is administrative rather than dramatic, but it helps convert an uncertain inheritance problem into a direct attempt to contact the absent heir.

In a later period of international expansion, Harkiss argues that newly independent but impoverished countries offer the company access to raw materials, including forests, minerals, and oil. He identifies South America and Asia as opportunities and says the company would be foolish not to enter those markets. The argument extends the earlier pattern of treating timber demand as a chance for recovery, now on a global scale. After James Bardawulf investigates Charley’s notebooks and finds information about tropical trees, Harkiss becomes one of the company figures positioned to benefit from that knowledge.

By the 1960s, Harkiss remains influential in a company whose prospects have weakened. When International Paper has been pursuing a purchase for a year, he proposes selling, dividing the proceeds, and reorganizing the family’s lives, noting that most active company members are nearing retirement. James Bardawulf resists, warning that a sale would not prevent the alleged heirs from pursuing them. Harkiss’s proposal contrasts with the earlier ambition to restore the company through expansion: where he once treated new timber regions as a route to renewed wealth, he eventually sees a sale as a practical exit from a diminished enterprise. Across both decisions, his defining method is managerial calculation, directed toward keeping the business viable or limiting the costs of its decline.