About Howard Norman: A Profile

More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It's no wonder, considering that most of his work -- including his first two novels,
The Northern Lights and
The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award -- is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1949 to Russian-Polish-Jewish parents, and he went to elementary school in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

What led him north to Canada? "As a kid," Norman says, "I spent a lot of time in bookmobiles and libraries. I went to four different elementary schools. Libraries were the one continuity. And from early on, through books, I projected a life -- I daydreamed north. This is makeshift psychologizing, but perhaps part of it was that such open, vast spaces, such a sense of mystery and severe, compelling landscapes, served to counteract the claustrophobia of an inwardly collapsing home life." His father was rarely home (when he died in 1996, Norman had not seen him in twenty years). His mother secretly cared for other children to make ends meet, which Norman did not discover until he spotted her in a photo, pushing a stroller, in a friend's family album. His three brothers provided no solace, and Norman has remained estranged from two of them. His one source of warmth and refuge was his best friend, Paul, and Paul's family. But then Paul got sick all of a sudden. Two days later, he was dead from a rare blood
disease.

Eventually, Norman dropped out of high school and moved in with friends outside of Toronto. One summer, he went to Manitoba to work on a fire crew, which was mostly made up of Cree Indians, and he was fascinated by their culture, their stories and folktales in particular. Norman devised a plan for his life. He decided he would write about the wilds of Canada and its tribes. During the next sixteen years, true to his word, he would live and work for extended periods in Canada and beyond, in Hudson's Bay and Greenland and Newfoundland.

Toward that end, he received his high school equivalency and studied zoology and English at Western Michigan University, where he met Stuart Dybek. He also worked at the Athena Book Store in Kalamazoo, an old-fashioned basement store crammed with books. The owners, Bernie and Dale Johnson, were Norman's closest friends, and the store was the center of his life; it was there that he found a role model in the naturalist and bird artist Edward Lear. Indeed, Norman developed an obsession with bird art. "Every extra dollar I earned went into a print by Catesby or one of Edward Lear's parrots -- I remember reading Dostoyevsky's
The Gambler, and in a sense recognizing myself. Finally, I kept a few of my favorite works, and sold the rest."

Norman left Michigan briefly for some graduate work at the Folklore Institute of Indiana University, then was offered a three-year fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he was able to focus on his translations. He had a knack for picking up Algonquin and Eskimo dialects -- he's fluent in three and passable in two, a facility that curiously does not extend to any other languages, such as French or Spanish -- and he concentrated on translating Native American poems and folktales. "Through correspondence I had particular encouragement in that work from W. S. Merwin and Jerry Rothenberg; I have wonderful long letters from Merwin, from his first years in Hawaii -- he was very direct in his encouraging of a writing life. And the splendid translator of Chinese travel diaries, Li Chi, was in Ann Arbor then, and she was tremendously generous with her time."

In 1978, Norman put together a collection,
The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree Indians (Stonehill),and for it, he was named the co-winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by the Academy of American Poets, splitting the prize with Galway Kinnell for his translations of François Villon. (To this day, Norman shares his royalties and other honoraria with the Cree community.) Still, he continued his itinerant life as a freelancer, taking on any writing assignment that came his way. He wrote field reports for journals and museums, radio plays, narratives for documentaries, ethnographic studies, children's books, and travel articles, and he worked as an interpreter and a translator for various institutions, including the World Society for the Protection of Animals. He was constantly on the move. "Deep down, I think I still harbored some hope of constructing a life somewhat like my hero at the time, Edward Lear. He was a rather eccentric traveler, and of course a wonderful artist. His travel diaries are at times
painfully revealing, intimate documents of a unique man. Anyway, I had this notion of reporting back from remote places and including my sketches and drawings. An utterly autonomous life. The central failure in my thinking was that I simply could not draw."

All of Norman's far-flung work did, however, serve as a kind of literary apprenticeship. "This is difficult to articulate," he says, "since it didn't involve individual mentors as much as being steeped in -- and influenced by -- very different cultural traditions than my own and, of course, the centrality of oral literature to those cultures. I listened to, recorded, kept notebooks on hundreds of stories. Sometimes under formal circumstances, most often not. And even if you are slow to grasp the true emotional and historical dimensions and generosities of these myths and folktales, still, a lot of it sinks in. The structures, the rhythms, the wild episodes, the sheer inventiveness and unpredictability of incident. Of course, as a Westerner -- an outsider -- one can't ever think in those languages. But you can work at it. I was dogged, if nothing else. One project, transcription and translation of just ten shaman stories from around Hudson's Bay, is just now getting completed almost to my satisfaction, after twenty
or so years. That's pretty much how it has gone for me. Translation was a good education. Sitting at family tables in locales such as Churchill or Eskimo Point, filling notebooks, botching it, botching it, getting a little right. It wasn't romantic; it was just hands-on. And it made life worthwhile for me. I think about translation a lot. I like what Walter Benjamin said: 'A real translation is transparent, it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.' "

Yet the transient life began to wear on Norman. "I was somewhat lost, really. I knew what I no longer wanted to do: work exclusively in remote places. But I was in kind of an agitated state. I turned thirty. I was drinking twenty cups of coffee a day. Cafés. Not much writing. Except that I started taking notes for a novel." Then, in 1981, the poet Philip Levine and his wife, Fran, invited him to Thanksgiving dinner and introduced him to another poet, Jane Shore. "I'd been very ill with pneumonia, and was staying out at Peter Matthiessen's house on Long Island while Peter and Maria were in Mexico, and Franny kept phoning, saying, 'Try and come for dinner.' And I'm glad I did; it was the most important day of my life, meeting Jane."

It was Shore who goaded Norman into working on his fiction. "I mean, she wanted me to be doing
something. Jane had been writing seriously and with total commitment since college. Utterly dedicated to writing poetry and to teaching. I saw that every day. And we had a talk. On one level, it was, 'Well, what do you really want most to write?' But on a more important level, it was, 'Why should I approve of you not trying to write the novel you claim you want to write?' Shortly after that, Gail Mazur asked for something for her issue of
Ploughshares. I gave her some pages from
The Northern Lights -- a beginning -- and, bless her heart, she took them." With the help of a Whiting Writer's Award, he was able to complete
The Northern Lights, in which Norman's childhood friend, Paul, shows up as the character Pelly Bay. "That's the one completely autobiographically-based character I've ever written," Norman says.

Between the book's publication in 1987 and the release of his second novel,
The Bird Artist, in 1994, Norman and Shore moved some ten or eleven times, shuttling between Vermont, Cambridge, Oahu, and New Jersey. Their daughter, Emma, was born in Honolulu in 1988 while Shore was writer-in-residence at the University of Hawaii. That same year, they bought a one-hundred-fifty-year-old farmhouse in Vermont, then promptly packed up and left. "Jane had a fellowship at Princeton, and I began teaching at the University of Maryland. New baby. New house. Employment in different places. It was like the cover of
Psychology Today: 'Need Some Time in a Quiet Place?' "

Despite the distractions, Norman was able to publish a collection of stories,
Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad and Other Stories (Summit), in 1989; another book of translations,
Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples (Pantheon),in 1994; and, later that same year, his breakthrough novel,
The Bird Artist, which had been acquired by Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux
. The book was called "one of the most perfect and original novels that I have read in years" by Richard Eder of
The Los Angeles Times. It was named one of
Time Magazine's Best Five Books of 1994, won the New England Booksellers Association Prize in Fiction, and helped him land a Lannan Literary Award.

Norman had actually started taking notes for
The Bird Artist more than a decade before, in 1980. "I was researching a documentary film in a fishing village in Newfoundland," he says. "I was put up in a church annex, and in that rather spartan room was a lovely watercolor of an ibis wading in the shallows. It was really a very accomplished watercolor. It was unsigned. But at the lower right-hand corner was the date, 1911. I wondered who had painted this ibis, a man or woman, and what must it have been like to have had that particular talent in that particular time and place. Who would know it? How would it be appreciated? I asked around, and found out that the artist was a young man who had been charged with murdering a lighthouse keeper. It was by and large a sordid tale, involving his mother, his half-sister, the lighthouse keeper. He was finally acquitted and went on living for years in his home village, sort of an outcast, but tolerated. He actually published three bird drawings in journals. I own one original. He died in St. Johns,
Newfoundland. Anyway, I stopped researching when what I was finding out-facts-began to trespass on what I
imagined might have taken place."

For Norman, the process of developing fictional characters has always been "an intense act of vicariousness of unpredictable duration. I think it's accurate to say, that, yes, male or female, I'd like to
be the characters I write. Maybe not permanently -- obviously not. But for the duration of the novel, yes, I would like to be those characters in those exact circumstances. To some extent, then, I invent characters out of the longing to be someone else."

This is not to say, however, that Norman is dissatisfied with his present life. Far, far from it. He has a family, a sense of belonging, that he had yearned for as a boy, and they happily divide their time between Vermont and Washington, D.C. He continues to teach one semester a year at the University of Maryland's M.F.A. program, where he is surrounded by "good students, good colleagues." Recently, he completed a collection of translations of Inuit folktales,
The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese, and in August of 1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will be bringing out his third novel,
The Museum Guard, which Norman regards as a departure. "In the past, I'd pretty much tended to write about open spaces, how wilderness and isolation affected character, and so on. But in
The Museum Guard, the attempt is something different. I still work with characters very 'recognizably' born out of my fictional sensibility. But this novel resides largely in interior spaces. Museums, hotel rooms, hotel lobbies. And the larger 'backdrop,' if you will, is Europe -- across the ocean -- and the war building up. History is imported into Maritime Canada in the form of radio broadcasts and Dutch paintings sent to a small museum in Nova Scotia, where an uncle and nephew are the only two museum guards. They are both suffering various forms of unrequited love toward the same woman, Imogen Linny, who is caretaker of the small Jewish cemetery. A painting,
Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, arrives at the museum, and changes their lives."

These days, it is unlikely that Norman will spend much time farther north than Vermont, where he hopes to live year-round someday, but his old journeys to the frozen climes, isolated as they were, still elicit an allegiance. "I once heard someone say, 'I'm going south to Canada.' I liked that sentence a lot."

Margaritte Huppért is a freelance journalist who often writes about American and Canadian authors. She lives and works in Montreal and Paris.