His passion changed the power of observation

Great talents have deep roots. Richard Rhodes illustrates this with his “John James Audubon: The Making of an American,” an unpretentiously titled book that is more than a mere biography: It is a comprehensive history of a man and his era. Through the circuitous paths Audubon’s life took from the moment of his birth until the publication of “Birds of America” -- a tribute to what he called the “feathered tribes” of his adopted country -- Rhodes breathes life again into the world in which Audubon lived.

Audubon’s talents, along with fundamental insecurities that would make him shy in public, are rooted in layers of family secrets and historical upheavals that shaped his ambitions and flaws. He was born in 1785 as Jean Rabin, the illegitimate son of French navy officer Jean Audubon and a chambermaid in Ste. Domingue (later to become Haiti). His father plucked him from the island and brought him to his residence at Coueron, near Nantes, where he gave Audubon his name. In his adult life, Audubon would claim that he was born in New Orleans to a Spanish woman of extraordinary beauty.

Revolutionary terror in France deprived him of the possibility of a formal education and left him with a lifelong dislike for haircuts, the last step before putting a man’s head beneath the guillotine. Years later, when he peddled his book in Europe, his odd outfits, his long hair falling on his shoulders and even stranger accent would draw stares in Liverpool, London and Paris.

The turmoil in France, and fears that he might be recruited into the revolutionary army, prompted his father to send young Audubon across the Atlantic to a plantation he owned in Pennsylvania, where he would meet Lucy Bakewell, his future wife. Audubon, later to change his name to John James, would claim -- even to Charles Napoleon, the French emperor’s nephew -- that he had studied under Jacques-Louis David, court painter to Louis XVI and later to Napoleon. Unable to disprove him, Rhodes hints strongly at evidence that it would have been unlikely that the naturalist, who never mastered oil painting, took lessons from the French master.

Rhodes coincides with Duff Hart-Davis, whose “Audubon’s Elephant” takes its name from the double-elephant folio -- 29.5 inches by 39.5 inches -- on which Audubon’s drawings for “Birds of America” had to be engraved. Even these generous proportions barely accommodate the lifelike portraits of some of the larger birds, which forced the naturalist to cram them within the frame in striking poses, like the whooping crane bending its long neck to eat a baby alligator.

How each book handles an incident in Audubon’s life illustrates the difference in style between Rhodes, a historian who won the Pulitzer for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” and Hart-Davis, an English journalist lauded for his “Fauna Britannica” and his columns on country and nature. In 1818, Audubon played an elaborate prank on Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a quaint naturalist who stayed with him for a few weeks in Henderson, Ky. Audubon described 10 fantastic species of fish in the Ohio River, most famously the “devil-jack diamond fish.” The gullible Rafinesque called the nonexistent fish “the wonder of the Ohio” and published Audubon’s account in a slim book, “Ichthyologia Ohiensis,” unleashing a scientific controversy that raged for years until the joke was finally exposed.

Rhodes gives a detached account of this episode, while Hart-Davis, who considers the joke unnecessarily cruel, vividly relays the story. He tells it from the point of view of a prompter who witnessed the joke from backstage, presenting Audubon as a mischievous actor describing a fish with bulletproof scales, “cut like diamonds,” complete with a drawing.

Rhodes and Hart-Davis agree that a visit by Scottish ornithologist Alexander Wilson marked a turning point for Audubon, who for the first time appeared to consider printing his drawings. Wilson’s eyes opened wide in surprise when, upon seeing the drawings, so superior to his own, he was told that they wouldn’t be published. Perhaps, Rhodes speculates, Wilson, a man of surly disposition, was amazed or relieved that he would be spared a competitor. Yet his surprise apparently prompted Audubon to realize that his drawings were unique.

Hart-Davis chronicles Audubon’s editorial adventure, which, costing what would be the equivalent of more than $2 million today, seems more comparable to producing a movie than publishing a book. For a man who had been jailed for debts stemming from failed businesses, it was an enterprise of Napoleonic proportions, as he himself was inclined to see it. “Fortune, if not blind, certainly must have her lunatic moments,” a perplexed Audubon wrote. Audubon wound up at the doorstep of Robert Havell’s engraving shop in London, and much of the glory that Audubon’s illustrations enjoy today is owed to the Havells’ exquisite technique for hand-painting the large engravings.

The Britain that emerges from Hart-Davis’ account is a much gentler place than Dickensian accounts would suggest. The Rathbones, a large Liverpool clan, would become a second family to the naturalist, who records many instances of joy at their Greenbank estate. Two already established naturalists, Sir William Jardine and Prideaux John Selby, take drawing lessons from Audubon in Edinburgh. It is “like a dream that I should have come from America to teach men so much my superiors,” he confesses. The Royal Society of London made him a fellow. And he met a character straight out of Dickens, a Baron Rothschild of the fabled fortune. The wealthy banker, stunned upon hearing what he owed for the volumes of “Birds of America,” exclaimed, “What! A hundred pounds for birds!? Why, sir, I will give you five pounds and not a farthing more!”

Audubon’s efforts to publish “Birds of America” pale in comparison to the hardships he endured as a businessman in a country of boundless wilderness. Washington, D.C., is depicted as a desolate place -- “a rude outpost, where gangs roamed and few chose to live,” Rhodes writes, and where congressmen walked down from boarding houses to shoot at birds. Rhodes’ book might have benefited from only a passing reference to the strains on Audubon’s family life caused by his prolonged absences from home -- on expeditions or in Britain -- and from less extensive quotations of letter exchanges with his wife. This, coupled with overly detailed references to peripheral characters in Audubon’s life, sometimes shifts the focus away from the main subject.

Audubon’s apparent simplicity, often stemming from his shyness, did not deter vicious attacks, or perhaps even attracted them, especially from George Ord and Charles Waterton, two now largely forgotten naturalists who devoted many years and pages to tarnishing Audubon’s reputation. In Scotland, he met Sir Walter Scott, a figure of legendary status for him. Dumbfounded in Scott’s presence, he could hardly utter a word, prompting Scott to write that “simplicity” was his “predominant characteristic.” Toward the end of his life, he showed symptoms of developing, perhaps in a more primitive guise, “that common failing of naturalists” that English travel writer Bruce Chatwin identified in Darwin: “To marvel at the intricate perfection of other creatures and recoil from the squalor of man.”

Before Audubon’s lifelike portraits, birds were drawn from dead, stuffed specimens, much as paintings of roses or a bowl of pears. “The paintings were so big, so bold and so blazingly coloured, so full of energy and violence, that they caused a sensation,” writes Hart-Davis. “Here were birds twisting in flight, birds climbing, diving, screeching, birds fighting.” With Britain in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, both authors reckon, it is unsurprising that Audubon’s illustrations succeeded as well as they did. After all, here was a basic tenet of life in nature, survival of the fittest, played out among birds and unforgettably captured for future audiences to behold. *