The Bird Artist

Howard Norman

It might've just been the mad ravings of a parrot in Newfoundland lonely as hell.

Elle est retrouvée.

During the hearing in the ninth chapter of The Bird Artist, a man named Rut says: “Ask one question straight out: ‘Is there anyone here in this room murdered the lighthouse keeper Botho August?’ It might get direct results” (208). Mitchel Kelb, the acting magistrate responds “That may be more effective than English proceedings, but it’s not my protocol here.” Rut raises more than a mere issue of protocol. He gets at a central question of language and, by this, life. How directly can we approach reality? Kelb says “The truth doesn’t usually come that quick in such cases, anyway” (208). Quick and direct approaches to reality are not the way of The Bird Artist.

In The Bird Artist truth is not always the straightest or most direct approach to reality. It is a book full of truth, yet very little is written in such a way as to be direct. Fabian begins the novel with his name and where he lives and what he does and says “Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself” (3). While this may seem to be a direct approach to reality, perhaps even blunt, by the end of the novel we find that the reality Fabian truthfully speaks of on page 3 is considerably more complex than such simple statements allow for, which questions the nature of truth and falsehood and their relation to reality.

Truth is not the same as reality. Falsehood is not the opposite of reality. Falsehood is closer to reality than we are willing to believe. Truth is an alliance of senses, consistency between expression and perception. Falsehood is the inconsistency between expression and perception. Falsehood puts the senses at war with each other. As such, we find that all we say and all we write involves some element of falsehood. Even these words here and the definitions I have just given of truth and falsehood are not absolutely true.

Fabian murders Botho August. For the reader there is little doubt of this. Even though Margaret shoots Botho for a third time, the first two shots are enough to kill Botho. Yet during the hearing Fabian is “legally acquitted” (241). However Fabian notes: “A village has an intuition of its own, plus which everyone knows that the truth is larger than the law. Whatever it did not prove, the hearing taught my neighbors that I had murdered Botho August” (241). Despite Mitchell Kelb’s legal decision, Fabian is still known as a murderer. He freely admits to us that he lied: “They had studied my face when I lied” (241). Legally—you might say truthfully—Fabian is a normal man. But in reality he is a murderer. Norman forces us to come to grips with this distinction in many ways throughout The Bird Artist. He lays falsehood and truth next to each other and asks us how much our recognition of either of them affects reality.

Fabian lies and puts the blame for Botho’s murder on Orkney. What does this mean? The reality is not changed. Fabian is still the man who murdered Botho. Fabian still thinks of himself as a murderer as does the rest of the village. So what purpose did this little charade fulfill? Norman wants us to understand that truth, or what we define as truth, often seems to contradict reality. There is a difference between a man who kills another man and a man who is called a murderer.

It is the same difference between a woman who has a secret affair behind her husband’s back and a woman who is known throughout a town as an adulterer. Alaric is secretive about her relationship with Botho until Orkney leaves for Anticosti. And even when Orkney is gone, she still attempts to hide it, although feebly. She claims that Botho is hiring her and gives Fabian pathetic excuses about the necessity of someone else knowing how to operate the lighthouse (90). And when Fabian runs into her on her way to the lighthouse at night, she claims she “was just up to visit Helen Twombly’s grave by moonlight” (99). Why does Alaric bother with the façade? Is there any difference between a secret affair and a public one? Her affair with Botho surely is public. Fabian tells Margaret that he thinks everyone knows about Alaric’s affair (103) and at Helen Twombly’s funeral, a man says, “If Botho August hadn’t been dallying all night with Alaric Vas, we might’ve had the lighthouse’s help and found Helen in time” (121). If people perceive a situation and express it inconsistently with that perception, this is falsehood.

The difference I am speaking of is not a difference of reality. The man known as a murderer and the man who is an unknown killer both live with the reality of bloody hands. The woman who sleeps with another man in secret and the woman who lets it be known that she is loose both have laid in other beds. The difference is a difference of truth.

Margaret recognizes this when she tries to explain her “past” with Botho. She does not tell Fabian clear that she slept with Botho. She subscribes, unwittingly, to Isaac Sprague’s advice: “Bird artists should invoke a bird, feather by feather, not merely copy what we observe in the wild” (15). Margaret says, “Fabian—listen carefully. From Botho August’s bed, you can see so far out across the water. It’s—” (105). Margaret does not try to express the situation as she perceives it; instead she attempts to “invoke” her perception of it in Fabian.

It would be real for Margaret to tell Fabian Botho fucked her. It would be equally real for Kelb to call Fabian a murderer. It is also real when Fabian says his mother is an adulteress. But none of these are truthful. The perception of Margaret has of what she did with Botho is not that she does not want to be with Fabian. She has to invoke the reality of what happened between her and Botho without striking at it too directly because the direct approach to reality would not have been as truthful. If she had simply told Fabian she fucked Botho, it would have belied the reality that she loves Fabian.

In the same way, if Fabian had been convicted as a murderer it would not be as truthful as saying that he is a bird artist. Direct and blunt statements of reality often are too pure to express the truth of the situation. ‘Fabian is a murderer’ does not capture the turmoil of his relationship with Margaret, the circumstances of his mother’s adultery, the weakness of his father, or life in Witless Bay.

Surprisingly, one of the few characters in The Bird Artist who understands this distinction between truth and reality and falsehood is Reverend Sillet. While Fabian is painting the mural in the church Sillet comes to him and says, “I wonder, however, about just what this mural might contain as a higher calling. What the mural might call to in yourself, Fabian. How it can become a redemption. Redemption for you by fixing the truth to the church wall in a way you didn’t with your testimony at the murder hearing.” “You mean what? You want me to show the murder?” Fabian asks. “I don’t want the mural as a confession. No. That’s for Catholics. I simply want there to be some higher purpose involved” (254). Sillet does not ask for a depiction of Fabian shooting Botho. This would be the direct attempt at reality, what Sillet calls a confession. He wants Fabian to invoke the reality of what has happened in Witless Bay in the same way Fabian invokes Helen Twombly. He paints her as a mermaid and is more truthful with that than he would have been had he painted her watering her plants with milk.

So Fabian paints Botho as part bird in the lighthouse and himself as the corpse face down in the mud. He calls Botho the “presiding angel of Witless Bay” (273); Botho’s memory hangs with the village stronger than any rotting corpse could. The reality of Botho’s murder becomes truthful in Fabian’s depiction of it. By putting wings on Botho and placing him in the tower (as well as calling Botho a “presiding angel”) Fabian is more truthful to the village’s perception of the murder. The murder was not a thing of one man shooting another in the mud. It was a public thing. It was displayed and it is not going away.

Fabian places a cormorant on a buoy next to his mother. Cormorants were the one bird he could not draw. Sprague concedes “cormorants can look eerily like a fossil bird come alive in your harbor” (88). But Sprague also cautions that “Bird art must derive its power from emotion, naturally, but emotions have to be tempered and forged by sheer discipline, all of the sake of posterity” (89). Bird art is truth. Truth must derive its power from emotion. Truth must also be tempered by discipline. Emotion paints Sillet levitating but discipline ensures every detail of the man is captured even down to his “button-down shoes” (273).

Invoking truth from reality requires the proper mix of emotion and discipline. The discipline ensures that Fabian tells us in the first paragraph of The Bird Artist that he murdered Botho August. Emotion enables him to tell us the story of his love with Margaret and the beauty of her addiction to whiskey and his reliance on coffee. Discipline keeps truth close enough to reality that it resonates but emotion muffles the picture enough to allow us to feel it fully.

Quoi? L'Eternité.