John James Audubon: The Making of an American - Hardcover

Rhodes, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375414126 ISBN 13: 9780375414121

Verlag: Knopf, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning historian Richard Rhodes, the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.

Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English girl next door, crossing the Appalachians to frontier Kentucky to start a new life, fashioning himself into an American just as his adopted country was finding its identity.

Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds–pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies–and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images. Now he finds his calling: to take his hundreds of watercolor drawings to England to be engraved in a great multivolume work called The Birds of America. Within weeks of his arrival there in 1826, he achieves remarkable celebrity as “the American Woodsman.” He publishes his major work as well as five volumes of bird biographies enhanced by his authentic descriptions of pioneer American life.

Audubon’s story is an artist’s story but also a moving love story. In his day, communications by letter across the ocean were so slow and uncertain that John James and his wife, Lucy, almost lost each other in the three years when the Atlantic separated them–until he crossed the Atlantic and half the American continent to claim her. Their letters during this time are intimate, moving, and painful, and they attest to an enduring love.

We examine Audubon’s legacy of inspired observation–the sonorities of a wilderness now lost, the brash life of a new nation just inventing itself–precisely, truthfully, lyrically captured. And we see Audubon in the fullness of his years, made rich by his magnificent work, winning public honor: embraced by writers and scientists, fêted by presidents and royalty.

Here is a revelation of Audubon as the major American artist he is. And here he emerges for the first time in his full humanity–handsome, charming, volatile, ambitious, loving, canny, immensely energetic. Richard Rhodes has given us an indispensable portrait of a true American icon.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Rhodes is the author of twenty books, including novels and works of history, journalism and letters. His The Making of the Atomic Bomb won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dark Sun, about the development of the hydrogen bomb, was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in History. A Kansas native, he has frequently explored American history and biography in articles for national magazines. He lives in Half Moon Bay, California.

Richard Rhodes’s Masters of Death and Why They Kill are available in Vintage paperback.

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Chapter One

MIGRATION

The sharp cries of gulls wheeling above the East River docks welcomed the handsome young Frenchman to America. Crossing from Nantes in late summer, he had been a month and a half at sea and he was grateful for the solidity of New York cobblestones. That August 1803 he was four months past his eighteenth birthday, barely fledged, but the United States was hardly older: Lewis and Clark were just preparing to depart for the West. His father owned a plantation called Mill Grove on Perkiomen Creek near its junction with the Schuylkill River northwest of Philadelphia, close above Valley Forge, and that was where he was going. His father was a former sea captain and retired French Navy officer who had commanded a corvette in the final battle of the American Revolution. Jean Audubon had sent his cherished only son to America to escape conscription into the forces Napoleon was mustering for his war with England, joined the previous May.

Wherever the young man went he watched the birds. Birds moved through the human world at will. In their large freedom they lived rich lives in parallel with people and people hardly knew. On his passage from Nantes, at the Grand Banks off Newfoundland where his ancestors had fished for cod, far out at sea, he had scattered ship's biscuit on the deck and drawn migrating brown titlarks (American pipits)* down from the heavens to feed. "They came on board wearied," he would remember and write thirty years later, "and so hungry that the crumbs of biscuit thrown to them were picked up with the greatest activity."

He studied birds for the fables they enacted-he carried La Fontaine's Fables with him as a guide-and beyond fable he studied them to learn their habits, the patterns and systems of their lives. Studying birds was how he mastered the world, and himself. Leaving his friends, his father and his country had disheartened him. The long hours of sailing brought "deep sorrow or melancholy musing. . . . My affections were with those I had left behind, and the world seemed to me a great wilderness." Then the New World rolled across the horizon, a real and physical wilderness beyond its settled rim. He had begun drawing birds in France. Now, "prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring." This is retrospect, of course, but it catches the eighteen-year-old's excitement and bravado.

His name-his new name, his name as of the day he had boarded ship-was John James Audubon. In France for the previous ten years he had been Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon. (Fougère-"fern"-was an offering to placate the Revolutionary authorities, who scorned the names of saints.) From his birth on April 26, 1785, until 1793 he had been Jean Rabin, his father's bastard child, born on Jean Audubon's lost Caribbean sugar plantation on Saint Domingue (soon to be renamed Haiti) to a twenty-seven-year-old French chambermaid, Jeanne Rabin, who had died of infection within months of his birth. His father's wife in France, Anne Moynet, a generous older widow whom Jean Audubon had married long before, had welcomed her husband's natural son to Nantes and raised him as her own, but his stigmatic birth was a secret John James was sworn to hide: in France bastard children were denied inheritance.

To complicate his identity further, he began using the name LaForest, enlarging on Fougère: John James LaForest Audubon.

He was taller than the average of his day, lean and athletic, unself-consciously vain:

I measured five feet, ten and one half inches, was of fair mien, and quite a handsome figure; large, dark, and rather sunken eyes, light-colored eyebrows, aquiline nose and a fine set of teeth; hair, fine texture and luxuriant, divided and passing down behind each ear in luxuriant ringlets as far as the shoulders.

Five feet nine is nearer the truth-taller than his father, who was five feet five. His hair was chestnut, his beak of a nose certifiably French. But without question women found him handsome. "He is the handsomest boy in Nantes," his adoptive mother had written her husband once, "but perhaps not the most studious."

He could sing, dance, play the flute, the violin and the recorder-like flageolet, fence, hunt, shoot and ride and draw. He was volatile, excitable and vivacious. Young as he was, people already liked to be around him-men and women both.

Before he could learn American birds he had to learn English. His father had asked the captain of his ship of passage, John Smith, to watch over him. Leaving the ship to cash the letter of credit his father had given him, striding along Greenwich Street above the Battery, John James was staggered by the first symptoms of a life-threatening fever. He remembered it as yellow fever, and it may have been; the jaundicing and frequently deadly infection was a common summer scourge. In 1793 an epidemic that refugees had carried from Saint Domingue had killed nearly five thousand people in Philadelphia, and it had struck again that summer of 1803 in New York as well. Illness made Smith's mission imperative. The captain saw his charge delivered to a boardinghouse outside Philadelphia operated by two good Quaker women and left him in their care. Nursing him back to health, the women taught him Quaker English. He thee'd and thou'd his intimates ever after.

when john james's nurses thought he was well enough to travel, they sent word to his father's agent in Philadelphia, and soon a prosperous Quaker lawyer carriaged to their boardinghouse to fetch the young man away. Miers Fisher had negotiated the purchase of Mill Grove for Jean Audubon in 1789. Twenty-three hundred English pounds in gold and silver-roughly $200,000 today-bought 284 acres of fair Pennsylvania farmland and woods with a two-story dormered fieldstone mansion set high on a steep lawn, stone barns and outbuildings and working water-powered flour and sawmills down the lawn beside the broad Perkiomen. The property was meant to be an investment. Jean Audubon had begun his maritime career at twelve as a cabin boy on his father's merchant ship out of Les Sables-d'Olonne downriver from Nantes on the west coast of France below the Loire. He had advanced to apprentice sailor and eventually captained ships of his own, fishing on the Grand Banks and hauling cargo. Many profitable voyages later, he had acquired a sugar plantation and refinery on Saint Domingue, France's most prosperous colony, where sugar and indigo worked by half a million African slaves supplied two-thirds of pre-Revolutionary France's overseas trade. But slave uprisings in Guadeloupe and Martinique and the first stirrings of revolution in France and on Saint Domingue itself had alerted the shrewd négociant to potential disaster. The funds he used to buy Mill Grove came from the hasty sale of a portion of his Les Cayes plantation. Two years later, back in Nantes and an officer in the Republican Guard, he arranged to have his only son and the boy's younger half-sister, Rose, the daughter of a second, quadroon mistress, delivered to him from Saint Domingue. The ship entered the Loire in June 1791 with Rose listed on the manifest as Jeanne Rabin's daughter, obscuring her mixed race; the revolution that eventually established the Republic of Haiti engulfed the island in August.

At Miers Fisher's country house northwest of Philadelphia young Audubon improved his English further, but by Quaker standards his recreations were shocking. Fisher "was opposed to music of all descriptions," he complains, "as well as to dancing, could not bear me...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375414126
• ISBN 13: 9780375414121
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 528
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar