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Reviews of Books
The Making of John James Audubon
Jennifer J. Baker, Yale University
| John James Audubon: The Making of an American. By Richard Rhodes. New York: Knopf, 2004. 528 pages. $30.00 (cloth), $16.00 (paper).Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America. By William Souder. New York: North Point Press, 2004. 384 pages. $25.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).Audubon's Elephant: America's Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America. By Duff Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. 288 pages. $30.25 (cloth), $17.00 (paper).
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In an 1830 letter to Philadelphia naturalist Richard Harlan, John James Audubon lamented how little Americans appreciated his ornithological work. A passage from this letter supports and also complicates efforts to claim Audubon as an American phenomenon: "Where are our Washingtons, Franklins ... nay, even Jeffersons? 'No taste in America.' That is severe judgment indeed—and yet what can we say to the contrary. For my part, was I not an American I might wish to belong to any other portion of the Globe. But America and my Enthusiasm go together, and I hope for brighter hours to come."1 |
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Jaded, perhaps, by years of indifference, Audubon admits of no particular attachment to his adopted country. He could just as soon live anywhere else. And yet, as he concedes, his vocational calling, or enthusiasm, has been inseparable from the American scene. His masterpiece, The Birds of America, was born in its wilds, and the spirit of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson—the gauge by which his disappointments are judged—presided over his artistic coming of age. Audubon admired the Founders for their daring and inventiveness, even if he sometimes felt exasperated with the nation they left behind. |
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This complex American status is central to these three biographies of Audubon. All emphasize that The Birds of America was in many ways an English book, and yet all situate the hunter, naturalist, and illustrator in an American narrative of immigration, exploration, self-making, and entrepreneurship. This maneuver takes its cues from the biographical subject himself. Audubon claimed to have followed Franklin's maxims since childhood and in low moments consoled himself with thoughts of a young ragtag Franklin eating his puffy roll in the streets of Philadelphia. In ways that hint of Alexander Hamilton, Audubon was born in the West Indies, the illegitimate son of a French planter and chambermaid, and, after a brief time in France, fled to the United States at eighteen to escape conscription into Napoleon's army. His biographers have taken these cues and run with them. More than an ecological thinker or artistic innovator, the Audubon of these biographies is the wild, self-taught, and indefatigable American who triumphs against the odds to become his country's most renowned naturalist. Like earlier studies they take for granted that the man's buckskins and long hair were an expression of an untamed American spirit, questioning only whether Franklin's Parisian persona or James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo supplied the inspiration. That Audubon tended to fabricate credentials and spin yarns seems only to confirm his Americanness. Unlike Franklin he could boast authentic credentials when he played the woodsman in the courts of Europe, and yet he was undoubtedly a carefully cultivated artifact. Like many American self-stylists, he prompts us to wonder just where inventiveness crosses over into chicanery. |
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