The Nature of America

John James Audubon
The Making of an American
by Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 514 pp., $30

SOMEHOW, we always think of the Founding Fathers as, if not old, then at least august. But John James Audubon, born in 1785, belongs to the next moment in American history. He exists on the early frontier with those other half-mythical action-figures: Boone, Crockett, Lewis and Clark. Audubon's generation exemplified the brash optimism, untested energy, and above all the youth of the new nation that was just beginning to find its identity. It was no country for old men: In 1810 the median age in the United States was sixteen, and in 1820 56 percent of Americans were under twenty.

Richard Rhodes has fully captured the spirit of this era in John James Audubon: The Making of an American. Rhodes is the author of twenty books of nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and his superb new biography should garner a second Pulitzer. John James Audubon is a study of that moment, during the first great western movement across the Appalachians, when "we began to call ourselves Americans" and the pioneers created the individualism that became so central to our national character.

Audubon was in some ways different from other representatives of his formative generation. He was a non-English foreigner, the Haitian-born illegitimate son of a French landowner and a chambermaid, reared and educated in France. He arrived in the United States in 1803 at the age of eighteen, not so much seeking fame, fortune, or political freedom as fleeing the threat of conscription in Napoleon's army.

But he certainly embodies a quintessential element of the American character: self-reinvention. Rhodes begins John James Audubon with his hero in an archetypal pose: stepping off a ship in New York Harbor, filled with limitless hope, ambition, and self-confidence. In that moment his past--his bastardy, his traumatic experiences of the Terror in Revolutionary France, his "macaronic French-English"--ceased to matter. He would be what he could make of himself, the core of the American credo.

Audubon was, by all accounts, an "immensely likeable" man, handsome with long chestnut hair, an accomplished dancer and fencing master, a crack shot and horse rider, and, for one with such enormous native talent, rather modest in the face of praise. And, oh yes, he painted birds--not exactly a representative occupation in early nineteenth-century North America. In short, Audubon was a classic American mix of Old and New Worlds. He quickly made himself agreeable to Philadelphia society, won the heart of Lucy Bakewell, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, improved his English, and by 1811 set off with his new wife down the Ohio River to set himself up as a mill-owner and merchant of firearms in the frontier Kentucky settlements of Louisville and Henderson.

To Audubon, and to the thousands of others who made that journey down the Ohio in the early 1800s, it was a land of unbounded opportunity and limitless resources. Audubon's journals and correspondence from those early years on the frontier have the feel of an Edenic epic. The casualness with which he records the abundance of such now rare and extinct species as ivory-billed woodpeckers, Carolina parakeets, passenger pigeons, and red-cockaded woodpeckers conveys the fecundity of America's original wildlife more forcefully than any statistic could.

Audubon's stories also reflect the rough-and-tumble, often lawless life of the frontier. At one point he was attacked by a "river pilot," whose skull Audubon fractured with an oar, leaving a dent "about the size of a silver dollar." A local doctor was called for who drilled into the skull and "popped out the fracture with the skill of a coachmaker popping out a dent in sheet metal."

Even the verifiable facts of his life give the feeling of a tall tale: everything and everyone larger than life size. But that is exactly Audubon's appeal, from his legendary marksmanship to his unshakeable self-confidence to his staggering ambition to produce, single-handedly, a work depicting all of the known birds of North America "from life" and in life-size dimensions.

BUT THAT WAS LATER. Until he was nearly thirty-five, Audubon regarded his painting as an avocation. Like most Americans of his age, he aspired to succeed in business, after which he might further indulge his artistic inclinations. Even in those early days on the frontier, however, enterprise required capital, and when the fledgling national banks called in their notes to pay off the balance of the Louisiana Purchase, it sparked the Panic of 1819, during which 80 percent of businesses along the frontier, including Audubon's, went bankrupt. Audubon's failure at Henderson, and the debts he incurred there, dogged him and fed self-doubts for decades afterwards. And yet, having spent five years trying to establish himself as a businessman and failing, he decided to give himself, at last, to his obsession with painting birds and to an unreserved, make-or-break attempt to publish a complete and life-size catalogue of the new continent's avifauna.

ONE OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS of Rhodes's biography is to give us a more complete and complex portrait of Audubon than any previous biography. No mere hagiography, it is full of the contradictions, inconsistencies, false starts and setbacks, pettiness, misunderstandings, and fortuitous events that weave into the life of any real character, even a life of genius. Audubon, like most Kentucky landowners, owned slaves, which Rhodes calls "a moral luxury that hardship would eventually humble and reverse." He consistently admired the Indians' "heroism" and expressed deep sorrow at the removal of the Creeks and Seminoles in the 1830s. A democrat by temperament who castigated the American obsession with outward show of status, he was quite vain about his own personal appearance. Though always conscious of and usually careful with finances, he could impulsively spend $9,400 on matching watches for himself and Lucy.

Audubon was not without great passion and self-confidence, but for a man of such enormous talent and personal appeal he was curiously without ego. Perhaps the dubious circumstances of his birth and social standing reined in his estimation of himself, but certainly an important governor of excessive pride was his strong acknowledgment of the invaluable support, both emotional and practical, that he received for forty-three years from his wife. If this book were nothing else, it would be a moving account of one of the great love stories in American history.

Lucy Audubon has been traditionally portrayed as the long-suffering wife and only parent to the couple's children, set against the image of Audubon as absent husband, failed businessman, and irresponsible wilderness wanderer, neglectful of all but his art. But in Rhodes's version Lucy emerges as a match for her husband in almost every way and a full partner in Audubon's achievement. She shared his love of music and the outdoors, taking daily swims with him across the half-mile-wide Ohio. She coped better than most pioneer women did with the hardships and deprivations of frontier life, losing two of their four children at an early age. And she supported him morally, emotionally, psychologically, and financially.

NOT THE LEAST of Audubon's resources was his ability to learn and work fast. He was, Rhodes says, a "quick study." Fortunately for his biographers, Audubon not only drew and painted quickly and copiously, he also wrote profusely--in journals, letters, and later on, in deliberate narratives of his adventures. Moreover, he was apparently a fairly accurate observer of his own life (though not always an accurate presenter--he tended to embellish and even invent large portions of his autobiography).

On the surface, Rhodes appears to tell Audubon's story largely through Audubon's own words and those of his family and friends, using only documented facts and known historical events. But just below the surface of restrained, objective, fact-based narrative, the writing is bursting with commentary, observation, and conclusion. Rhodes's opinions and personality rarely intrude overtly; rather they are subtly everywhere in the choice, arrangement, and presentation of his material.

When as narrator he does step forth, it is with such broad, informed, common-sense insight that one wishes he had done so more frequently. For instance, though Audubon was a failure in his Kentucky commercial enterprises, Rhodes points out that he showed acute business acumen in pursuing and promoting the publication of his art. (At one point, realizing he needed to go to England to find a printer, he raised $17,000 from dancing lessons.)

Rhodes is particularly good in his defense of Audubon's status as the patron saint of the American conservation movement. Simple-minded contrarians never seem to tire of pointing out that the namesake of the National Audubon Society was an avid hunter who usually shot his subjects before drawing them. Nor did Audubon ever try to hide this. Nearly every contemporary portrait we have shows him holding a rifle. Moreover, some of Audubon's practices are quite disturbing, even by the standards of the age, such as his bizarre attempts to kill a captured golden eagle to mount for painting. (After several failed attempts, including trying to suffocate it with burning charcoal, Audubon finally dispatched the bird by piercing its heart with a long needle.)

IN THE FACE of such reprehensible (by present standards) behavior, it is not sufficient to retort that Audubon was simply following the practice of naturalists before the development of binoculars, when, in order to carefully observe a bird, it was necessary to collect it. Nor is it enough to point out, as Rhodes does, that "Audubon engaged birds with the intensity (and sometimes the ferocity) of a hunter because hunting was the cultural frame out of which his encounters with birds emerged," and "to argue that he should have known better is anachronistic and nostalgic," true as that may be. We rightfully demand more than "normal" and "acceptable" behavior from our secular saints. We require that they transcend their age and lead it forward.

What Rhodes also shows us is that Audubon, although never a crusader, was a man peculiarly alert to his environment and therefore unusually sensitive to the depredation being wreaked on the frontier wilderness, as well as prescient and cautionary about its future. In 1822, far ahead of his time, he warned farmers about overtilling their soil without replenishing its nutrients and defended songbirds, which occasionally took cultivated fruit, for their usefulness in controlling insect pests.

Audubon was also one of the first to recognize that North America's seemingly inexhaustible store of wildlife was finite. Appalled at the wanton collection of seabird eggs on the Labrador coast, he predicted the destruction of these vast avian colonies. (The Great Auk would become extinct a decade later.) He chronicled the enormous changes that had occurred in his beloved Ohio River Valley in the two decades since he had first encountered its wilderness in 1811, and, in perhaps the first environmental jeremiad ever penned in this country, he foresaw the destruction of the American primeval: "Neither this little stream, this swamp, this grand sheet of flowing water, nor these mountains will be seen in a century hence as I see them now. . . . Scarce a magnolia will Louisiana possess. The timid deer will exist no more. Fishes will no longer bask on the surface, the eagle will scarce ever alight, and these millions of songsters will be drove away by man." In his meditations on his desire to paint birds, he inadvertently gives expression to the conflict at the core of Western culture's relationship with nature. With a child's natural avarice, he says, "I wished to possess all the productions of nature, but I wished life with them. This was impossible."

OF COURSE, no one reads a biography of Audubon to learn of his skills as a woodsman or a businessman, to understand his complex relationship with his wife, or to see how he was representative of his age or prefigured its environmental conscience. Without The Birds of America, Audubon would have been merely a minor figure in early American painting, a little-known nature writer, and a colorful subject for an historical journal.

The monumental five-volume, double-elephant folio of The Birds of America remains arguably the most influential work of art this country has ever produced. Audubon's technique of mounting, sketching, and dramatizing his subjects "from life" was revolutionary (most avian portraits in his time were done as rather wooden profiles, illustrations rather than paintings). But he also put the stamp of his personality on the drawings as indelibly and unmistakably as Beethoven's is on his symphonies.

Looking at Audubon's paintings, we realize they simply could not have been made by any other artist, and it is precisely why this is so that previous biographies and studies of Audubon do not--perhaps cannot--explain.

When biographies or Hollywood biopics attempt to dramatize artistic "breakthroughs" or epiphanies (think of Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy or the recent film Pollock), they always seem metaphoric, if not downright silly. Rhodes avoids the fallacy of the artistic epiphany, recognizing that Audubon's genius was a seed that flowered gradually, watered mostly by the persistence and perspiration and aided by ambition, self-belief, luck, and the unwavering support of his wife.

Even in the book's vivid account of the annus mirabilis of 1820, when Audubon made his pivotal trip down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans, gathering and painting specimens in a fever of output--a period when, as Rhodes says, he came into his own as a "mature artist"--there is no dramatic breakthrough. Audubon is simply ready, after twenty years of self-taught apprenticeship, to give himself fully and unreservedly to his art, come what may.

RHODES RARELY BRINGS his considerable analytic and interpretive skills to the paintings themselves. He does, however, advance one provocative theory that is intended to explain the origins of Audubon's singular art, but which also inadvertently helps to illuminate its nature. Rhodes believes Audubon's obsession with birds and his need to reproduce them stemmed from his experience as a child of the French Terror, during which his family was threatened with death and he was surrounded by the seemingly wanton violence and destruction of human life. Thus, Rhodes asserts, "a desire literally to revivify the dead lay at the heart of the boy's struggles to learn to draw birds in lifelike attitudes."

Despite its whiff of pop-psychology, this seems to be bolstered by many of Audubon's own statements. Moreover, though Rhodes does not make the connection explicit, it helps to explain the pervasive strangeness of his art, that curious, pervasive element of violence explicit and inherent in much of Audubon's greatest work.

Audubon's most powerful compositions (with a few exceptions, such as the regal wild turkey cock and the incomparable bursting galaxy of Carolina parakeets) are his depictions of avian predators and their prey. There is something undeniably grotesque and slightly distorted about these paintings, particularly the raptors. His peregrine falcons are wild-eyed, winged hounds of hell, dripping with blood from the ripped breast of their prey and staring out at the observer in impersonal defiance. His red-tailed hawks are splay-footed demons, harrowing and upstaging the purported subject of his bob white quail painting. His golden eagle hovers uncannily in mid-air on folded wings, one of its talons gratuitously piercing the bleeding eye of the white arctic hare in its grip. His snowy owls are moonlight apparitions rather than real birds. Even his Canada goose, among the more bovine of our waterfowl, has an oddly contorted neck, which, with its long, protruding pink tongue, gives it a serpentine look, while its mate, half-concealed in the dark of a cave-like bower, seems to be piercing the abdomen of the other's belly with its beak.

AUDUBON was frequently criticized for these "unnatural" and "extreme" representations, though he claimed that he personally observed every behavior he drew, and later ornithologists have confirmed his observations. But though his "life poses" may be literally factual, they are also histrionic, extreme, and expressionist in style. They may be, as Rhodes insists, "reanimations" of dead things, but if so, they are, like Frankensteinian corpses, reanimated slightly wrong.

Perhaps the distortion arises partly from his method of posing, which was basically to impale his dead specimens on a pattern of spikes protruding from a gridded board. The poses may have been "life-like," but the birds assuredly were not. As dead weights they would surely have slumped, giving a distended and distorted appearance. The effect would have been most pronounced in the larger birds, raptors and the larger waterfowl, particularly when Audubon attempted to show them in the posture of flight.

Regardless, Audubon seems to have reveled in his paintings' dramatic and gory elements. In this sense he brought European Gothicism to American art as Poe brought it to American literature. For all their astounding and accurate detail and "lifelike" poses, they seem otherworldly, and that is perhaps their greatest achievement.

In a short but compressed critical interpretation of the famous painting of a golden eagle, perhaps Audubon's most complex and curious work, Rhodes powerfully articulates some of the core ideas underlying the art and its relevance to contemporary thinking about the relationship between man and nature.

The interpretation is too complex to summarize here, but Rhodes concludes that through its "graphic and precisely-rendered violence," the painting attempts to "restore meaning" to our experience of the wild by connecting the alien experience of wild animals to our own lives without sentimentalizing them. Audubon's art reflects our contemporary vision of nature with the complex and conflicted attitudes it depicts. He was, inescapably, of his age in his practices and many of his attitudes, but he was prescient in the depth and honesty of his art, in which he thought profoundly about the nature of his quintessentially American experience.

Perhaps Rhodes best sums up Audubon's achievement when, quoting John Locke's aphorism that "In the beginning all the world was America," he concludes, "In The Birds of America, Audubon had imagined the world that beginning might have been, a refinement of the actual world he had explored. So also were his birds exceptional specimens, not averages or types."

FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION of The Birds of America and its critical and financial success (the later, smaller octavo edition of the work earned Audubon almost a million dollars), a string of misfortunes seemed to signal that his remarkable luck had finally run out: the death of both of his beloved young daughters-in-law, intensifying bouts of depression and excessive drinking that may have been brought on partly by a sense that his life's work was finished, a falling out with old friends. He roused himself at age fifty-eight for one final, and remarkable, expedition up the Missouri as far as Montana, before his descent into dementia and his death in 1851. This was followed by the business failures and deaths of his sons in middle age, leaving Lucy to survive both her husband and her children in a cruel return to the penury, loneliness, and reduced circumstances that she had suffered for so long.

Such a sad denouement might seem, in words Audubon used to describe the wanton and impersonal destruction caused by a flooding river, an "awful exemplification of the real course of nature's intentions, that all should and must live and die." Yet despite its many hardships and unhappy finale, there is something finally affirmative about Audubon's deeply American life, something that sprang from what he himself called "a heart as well-disposed as ever to enjoying the situation to come."

Robert Finch is the author of five collections of essays, most recently Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays, and is coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing.