The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
The author Howard Norman is a creative person in the sense that he sees and documents the talent in people you might otherwise not be aware of. These would be people of other cultures, speaking other languages, living in out-of- the-way places. In Norman’s case these folks mainly inhabit the far north of North America. His novel The Bird Artist tells the story of creativity happening in Newfoundland, a place where someone farther south would typically think a creative person would be a rare occurrence. In the U.S. we tend to believe that you’ve got to go to New York or Los Angeles to become an artsy, creative person. In his own life and in his characters, Norman shows that is not necessary, at least not always necessary.
In The Bird Artist Norman explores the experience and process of becoming an artist in the person of a fictional teenage boy from Witless Bay, Newfoundland, a real spot on the foggy southern coast of the island. His boy develops into a young man with an aptitude and the survival skills needed to subsist in the culture of this fishing village. But this boy has a drive to be an artist, a realist painter of local birds. It’s what he becomes superb at, and manages even to achieve a certain narrow fame for it. He’s guided along by a distant mentor who insistently and critically tutors him toward some kind of unrealizable perfection. Now as a young man, the artist understands that endpoint: get good enough to be satisfied.
I lived for five summers on Newfoundland during the early years of my retirement. My home was not near Witless Bay, but a 6 hour’s drive north in another small fishing village, slowly morphing then into a tourist economy. It was a partial escape for me from unhappy circumstances in the States. It would have been a permanent move, but for the fact that Canada, especially Newfoundland, doesn’t need more old people. They have enough of their own, many — maybe too many — slipping into declining health and straining the (free) health care system.
My own Newfoundland experience helped me relate positively to Norman’s book. It was fantastically accurate in aligning with my own experience living in an out of the way dot of an island in the north Atlantic.
The locals of Change Islands, where I settled in, are almost universally creative people in some pursuit or other. Living in a small, off island community, they applied themselves to something they could do to keep occupied during eight month long winters after the work of fishing, gardening, laying in firewood, and tending to tourists was done. They became musicians, storytellers, quilters, knitters, painters, carvers. Encountering real examples of people like those in Norman’s novel made the book entirely believable.
Back on Witless Bay, the bird artist sets his course in life and persists, making progress and making mistakes. His conviction in his talent is strong, so strong that he actively resists the urging of his parents to relinquish his home, move to mainland Canada, and become a refugee from his poor material prospects. Because his birds are there where he is, his talent binds him permanently to his community. Staying, of course, stifles his chance at larger fame. But it’s the bargain he makes.
The whole story is a veiled reference to how you might see a creative bent being its own reward, not a pathway to greater recognition and fortune, but to contentment in circumstances where without it you could become complacent and unhappy. Creating is good; it’s a survival mechanism as important as laying in cords of wood for the winter.
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