The Tale of the Poet and the Novelist and Their Passion for Family

A woman, a city girl, stands on the porch of a farmhouse. On the lawn below, a jungle gym dribbles the storm that just passed, but Jane looks beyond it, pointing with real excitement over green hills toward a wet red barn.

In the house, her daughter, Emma, plays computer games with three children who showed up like gypsies in a big white RV.

The woman’s husband, the girl’s father, has momentarily disappeared. Maybe Howard slipped off to his little cabin. Earlier, up on the grassy knoll where the cabin sits, he nodded toward a stand of trees and told the family of strangers--my family--that he once stuck his head inside a bear’s den there.

I can still smell what he described, even though he only mentioned it in passing and the scent of soggy grass is strong.

Howard spent his boyhood burrowing into books about wild places. As a young man, he shot off for the real thing in far off parts of Canada.

Jane grew up in an apartment over her parents’ New Jersey clothing store. The boisterous customers and street noise were her birdsong.

Now she stands on the porch of her Vermont home, smiling, directing a stranger’s attention to the full double rainbow touching down on a distant neighbor’s farm.

I think it’s interesting that Jane and Howard, two deeply different people, found each other and became a family--which is, after all, the institution my own family is on the road this summer to study.

But I’m also telling you about Jane Shore because she’s a poet, and about Howard Norman because he’s a novelist.

When I started planning for this trip, I went to the library and the bookstore. I found sprawling sections on child care and parenting, but little on “family.”

That puzzled me until I decided that family is really what the sections marked “Fiction” and “Poetry” are mainly about.

Howard Norman’s “The Bird Artist” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), for instance, is a tough novel about loyalty, adultery and murder. But its mortar is its intricate exploration of the eternal tensions between individuals and their families and communities.

I read Howard’s book as I fell asleep in quiet New England campgrounds. I awoke each morning in its setting, Newfoundland’s storm-beaten little town of Witless Bay.

In most ways, my family bears no resemblance to those “The Bird Artist” describes; yet there we all were. I read about the protagonists’ sad mother (“ ‘I neither champion nor repudiate my life thus far,’ she said one evening. ‘I mostly feel stuck somewhere in between.’ ”) and remembered my mother’s frustrations; thought in new ways about my wife’s; wondered how my daughters will fare.

I read Jane Shore’s book of poems, “Music Minus One” (St. Martin’s Press), with a similar sense that its families were at once alien and my own.

In a poem called “Heat Wave, Cold War,” she writes about cutting paper dolls on a night when it was so hot that the Chamber of Commerce canceled the annual chicken barbecue and the family sat in the dark in their underwear.

. . . The Cold War was on TV.

My scissors cut along the shoulders, hip,

the perfect neutral bodies.

The Father didn’t have my father’s bald spot,

nor the Mother my mother’s belly.

Their modest children--a girl and a boy--

had underwear painted onto their skin. . . .

I read that and thought not only of my ‘60s childhood, but also about how two months in a 26-foot RV has transformed my family’s sense of modesty and mitigated our illusions, deepening our intimacy.

For a while, at least, I listened to my daughters more closely, trying to figure out what private poems might drift in their minds.

Is there portent, for instance, in this snatch of conversation overheard as our families drive to dinner, our Emily, 10, and their Emma, 9, facing backward in the Volvo wagon, making faces and laughing?

Emily: “Is it fun in winter here?”

Emma: “No.”

Emily: “Why?”

Emma: “Because the snow is up to your neck.”

Emily: “That sounds fun to me.”

Emma: “It’s not.”

Emily: “At least you have snow. In California it’s boring, it’s always the same.”

Through the windows we watch Vermont’s weather go blustery again. Mist rises from fields so layered in green, I’m afraid Californians will have a hard time envisioning it this time of year. Tires slush.

As he drives, Howard blurts something about why he changed landscapes, bolting from his home in Grand Rapids, Mich., at the first opportunity.

He uses the word “claustrophobic.” Then retreats.

After dinner, when we return to their house and eat pastries and sharp Vermont cheddar, I try to pull him back to that. He won’t go.

“It’s almost shocking to me that I spent so much time in very, very remote places and that I wasn’t very reflective about why I was doing that,” he says.

The practical side of why he headed north, earning a living making documentary films and later collecting folk tales, is easy: “I had a desire to put myself into situations in which I had to be competent,” he says. He needed to, and did, face “big opposing forces.”

As for the rest of it, he’ll say only that he grew up without much money and had three brothers, a mother and “a father who came and went and mainly went. . . .”

That said, Howard edges back. “I don’t want to disparage my mother and brothers because I have a lot of love for them. I refuse to throw around terms like ‘dysfunctional’. . . . There’s so much convenient pathology these days.”

*

I float my notion that literature is the crossroads at which readers and writers contend with their humanity, including matters of family.

It seems, I say, that society is being sucked into a spiral: Increasingly we ignore art’s intricacies, seeking answers from more superficial sources: self-help books, talk shows, journalism. As a result, our problems--familial problems in particular--intensify.

Howard nods. “A culture that’s afraid of books and the arts is certain to exacerbate its neuroses.”

He would be appalled at the idea of artist as therapist. And no creative writer wants his work confused with the parallel life he actually lives.

Still, Jane says, it was Howard who helped alert her to her family’s full poetic potential.

She was 32 and a well established poet when she met Howard, then 30. But--as she confided to our daughter Ashley--she still saw writing and family in opposition. As a girl, she associated poetry with “pushing parents away. . . . I’d just retreat to this private world. I would write things they would never understand.”

Besides, “I thought there was nothing interesting about growing up over my parents’ dress store--how bourgeois.”

*

Howard helped her see things differently--perhaps, in part, because he craved what she had.

“When I met Jane’s family, I thought--and this is sad to say--I thought I almost don’t want to look at this too closely because I’ll desire it too much.”

Howard loves Jane, in part, because of the extraordinary “commitment and passion” she brings to her work--and that is his response as a man, not a writer, he says.

As a writer, he adds: “I think it would be really hard to live with someone whose work you didn’t take into your own life and love. You have to know that their level of engagement is as intense as yours.”

Lately, Howard says, he’s been having a dream in which Emma is 25 or 30. She walks into Jane’s study, and one by one takes down the books her parents have written. Howard says it raises only one question for him: “Is Emma able to see, from their work, if her parents are passionate people?”

That night, when we drive our RV back down the hill on which they live, I feel as if we’re leaving a family we know much better than we are entitled, given our brief time together.

But what is passion’s role if not to intensify?

The rainbow that we saw. The bear’s den that we didn’t. They’ll both stick with us. Howard, Jane and Emma will too. And Pam and I plan to read everything Jane and Howard write.

ON THE WEB: Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.