John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
when emerging mass communications trumpeted a triumphalist insistence on the unique achievements of the United States, Audubon became one of the most adulated artists of antebellum America, and certainly the new nation’s first celebrity scientist.9
He also became a businessman, an energetic entrepreneur who not only made a very valuable product, but also marketed it aggressively on both sides of the Atlantic. Audubon typically tried to downplay or disguise the overtly commercial implications of his efforts, preferring instead to portray himself as a man completely committed to his artistic and scientific concerns, too lost in his loftier pursuits to bother having a sharp eye on the bottom line. But in the years before he devoted himself fully to producing The Birds of America, he sought to make a living by investing both his time and money in a variety of business endeavors—a store, a steam-powered mill, a steamboat—that seemed emblematic of the economy of the early American republic. Even though those ventures ultimately failed—or as he would more readily admit, he himself failed—Audubon apparently did not fail to learn about the need for close commitment to one’s work. His own Great Work became both profession and obsession, and he essentially ran the entire enterprise himself, keeping careful track of costs, keeping a close eye on labor, keeping good faith with his subscribers, and often dogging them to keep faith with him. As much as Audubon might resist being seen as a merchant or manager, he could hardly hide the business side of his persona.
But hiding became a central part of his persona. In pursuing his overlapping ambitions in art, science, and business, Audubon developed an elusive and elastic identity. He lived behind a translucent curtain of narrative deception, coy evasion, and outright lies. He could be more than a little loose with the truth about his own life, from his origins (“The precise period of my birth is yet an enigma to me”), to his personal associations (“Daniel Boon … happened to spend a night with me under the same roof”), to his exploits in the wild (“Snakes, loathsome and venomous, entwined my limbs”), to his entrepreneurial interests (“I … only now and then thought of making any money”).10 The American Woodsman served as a usefully mutable character, shifting from one story to the next to suit the need for a particular narrative effect. Much like Melville’s fictional “Confidence Man,” the “real” Audubon became a master of personal deception and reinvention.
With that in mind, this book proceeds from the notion that Audubon’s frequent address to his “Dear Reader” now applies to us, and it invites us to read Audubon not only with considerable admiration for his literary skill, but also with a measure of skepticism about his meaning. Audubon’s writing, exuberant and overblown as it could often be, offers a fascinating entrée into the intersection of American scientific and literary traditions in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of the stories he told about himself, about other naturalists, or about ordinary Americans cannot be read as factual accounts that might yield a single, demonstrable “truth” about the events in Audubon’s life. Quite often, his portrayals of other people create a contrast in character that cast Audubon in struggle against his competitors and detractors, mean-spirited men who would vilify and victimize him but would, in the end, serve as narrative foils for underscoring his eventual success. In other cases, though, some of Audubon’s stories—including some of the more unsettling episodes about violence, race, and slavery—put him in a much less flattering light. It does no good to ignore or quickly dismiss these issues, as most earlier Audubon biographies have, or simply give Audubon a polite pass as being “a man of his time.” Disturbing though they may certainly be, the unsavory aspects of Audubon’s views of society are as important as his views of ornithology, and they have much to tell us about his time, even in ways that Audubon himself might not have intended or even fully understood. In the end, even if we are wise not to take all of Audubon’s stories literally, we still need to take them seriously.
Doing so will ultimately be the best way to take Audubon himself seriously. Rather than trying to discern fact from fiction, it makes better sense to accept the various ambiguities and apparent contradictions in Audubon’s life as a valuable avenue of approach to understanding his place in antebellum American culture. In the end, as much as we might celebrate Audubon’s unmistakable impact in art and science, we must also appreciate the importance of personal ambiguity as a critical element of his identity as the American Woodsman. Taking the full measure of Audubon’s “genius” begins with a fundamental point: One of his greatest creations was himself.
Chapter 1
Becoming Audubon, Becoming American
The precise period of my birth is yet an enigma to me, and I can only say what I have often heard my father repeat to me on this subject.
—John James Audubon, “Myself”
In 1827, when Audubon was in his early forties and just beginning to enjoy the fame that would come his way for the rest of his life, he wrote about his newfound sense of self: “What a curious interesting book a Biographer—well acquainted with my Life could write, it is still more wonderfull and extraordinary than that of my Father!”1 Comparisons to his father aside—and they both lived “curious interesting” lives, albeit in different ways—the problem for any “Biographer” would be that Audubon made it difficult, nearly impossible, to become fully acquainted with several critical aspects of his life. He hid some of his basic biographical information behind a veil of unanswered questions and even outright deception, shading some of the essential elements of his life’s story from historical view. His written depictions of himself, both published and unpublished, offer enough discernible details for a “curious interesting book,” to be sure, but they also suggest a quiet resistance to a deeper level of personal revelation.
Audubon would not by any means be the first or last person to devise an incomplete or misleading self-portrait, of course. People often shape their identities to suit different circumstances, sometimes assuming a dissembling image for a particular situation, occasionally adopting an enduring disguise for life. The bookshelves of autobiography have become heavy with self-serving stories that fabricate various fictions about the writer’s life, and the very act of constructing a narrative requires constructing a selective, sometimes even secretive, sense of the self.2 But in Audubon’s case, this evasive behavior invites us to consider what must be the central irony of his life: For a man who spent so much time and trouble depicting birds so carefully and colorfully, presented in scientifically accurate and life-size detail, he left his own self-portrait remarkably incomplete and ambiguous by comparison, often rendered in sketchy contrasts of black and white.
The Ambiguities of Origin
In the introduction to his major written work, Ornithological Biography, Audubon offers only one short sentence about his beginning: “I received life and light in the New World.” He follows that line with a brief paragraph about his early exposure to nature and “the power of those early impressions,” but he provides little more than that. By locating his first “life and light” in “the New World,” he vaguely creates the impression that he was born in North America; it remains for the reader to infer. A few pages later, he writes that, as a young man, he “returned to the woods of the New World with fresh ardour, and commenced a collection of drawings,” which would eventually become his life’s major achievement, a massive collection of avian art, The Birds of America.3 In both instances, “New World” is a geographically elastic and usefully evasive term, allowing him to avoid being more specific about a particular location. We are left to ask, then, when was he born, and where? Almost immediately, we also ask, who were his parents? And what do we know about Audubon’s birth and boyhood that would shape his later life as the “American Woodsman”? Audubon could not—or, perhaps more to the point, would not—tell us all we might want to know.
He wouldn’t even tell his own family. In a memoir called “Myself,” first written initially for his sons, Victor and John, in 1835, and published only posthumously, in 1893, Audubon opens with an evasion: “The precise period of my birth is yet an enigma to me, and I can only say what I have heard my father repeat to me on this subject.”