Creation (21 page)

Bayfield is ten years younger, and smiles. “What form will your rebellion take?”

“My life moved with painful slowness until I was forty-one. And then, when I realized what I was born to do, my days began to race. That was seven years ago.

“I had come to Europe from the backwoods, unknown, and in Edinburgh the cultivated classes embraced me. I
became famous
,” he says, so baldly it embarrasses Bayfield. “I understood that I would have the chance to create the great Work I dreamed of. But to do it I would be torn away from my life as it was, and would spend years at a time apart from my loved ones.”

T
HE COACH ENTERED SCOTLAND
at ten in the morning on a fine October day in 1826: as soon as they crossed the border from England, the country became beautiful. Audubon hung out the window as they passed the seat of Sir Walter Scott.

“That man has given me such intense pleasure, I want to thank him,” he announced, but the other travellers, scandalized by his suggestion, offered him only a drink of Scotch whiskey.

Edinburgh delighted him, with its spires and steep hills, with the mountain, the sea and the castle. He found a room for a guinea a week: from its window he could see the boats on the Firth. He was not in the city half a day before he walked out to call on five notables to whom he had introductions from Thomas Traill, leaving his new card, given to him by the women of the Rathbone family.

“It is the same card I presented to you,” he tells Bayfield.

Back in his room he unpacked his portfolio and lay his favourite birds around on chairs and tables. He stood a long time in front of his Carolina Parakeets. They winked in full colour, green, orange, yellow, cocking their heads at him and at each other, bills open to strip the cocklebur on which they sat. They were themselves, they were his own, and yet they made him afraid. Abruptly he took them off their tabletops and chairs and packed them away again.

He went for a long walk alongside the public gardens, the poor women in the street reminding him of Shawnee squaws, with their burdens laced to their back by a band across their foreheads. He heard himself discussed. “That man must be a German physician,” or “There goes a French nobleman.” He became aware — or had he always known this, and rather liked it? — that he was extraordinary.

When he returned to his rooms he looked at himself, not his birds. A mirror in a rented room in an unknown city speaks frankly to the question of one’s face. He was forty-one, and he saw, for the first time, a great resemblance to his father, husband of Jeanne, of Sanitte, of Anne.
Hungry
was the word for what he saw. A man gnawed at by hunger, beset by hunger. Hunger for comforts, hunger for acknowledgement, hunger to make a place in the world for his birds, his wife, his boys.
To make the boys better than myself
. He swore to himself that they, Victor and Johnny, would never stand alone and unknown across the wide ocean from loved ones, and know they must conquer the town.

People do not know this face, but they will
.

“F
ROM THAT DAY
,” Audubon tells Bayfield, “Fame coasted down on its great wide wings and seized me in its talons. There I was, helplessly lofted.”

He notices Bayfield’s discomfort. “Am I not famous?” he challenges. He recites again the accolades: that Baron Cuvier of France called his bird portraits ‘the greatest monument yet erected by Art to Nature.’ That the Duc d’Orléans got down on his knees and called him king of bird painters. That the
Baltimore Courier
wrote, ‘His exploits as great as his genius.’”

“Excellent,” says Bayfield. “I am very impressed.”

“Of course I am inclined to agree with the laurels. Yet there are those who call me a fraud and a conniver. My detractors will hold that I am mad until I have proven myself and then they will say they always knew. This is human nature and troubles me little. It is merely the relative proportions of humankind in each camp that concerns me.”

Bayfield could scarcely imagine living with notoriety. “What was it to be seized by this raptor then, Mr. Audubon? I have no desire to be so.”

“What do you seek, then?”

“The approval of my superiors.”

A look of amusement crosses Audubon’s face: this captain is a bit of a prig. “Renown may come to a quiet man,” he says, “and that is a pleasure, I suppose — to be known by your fellows, and respected amongst your peers. Fame is vulgar, to be pointed at in the street, to hear your name on the lips of strangers. To hear stories, both miraculous and vile, circulating about yourself. It is to be mortified and aggrandized in equal measure. You may disdain it, but I courted fame. I acted a grand figure of a man, I told stories of the wild, I gave red Indian calls. I
needed
fame to win my cause. It was a way to make my book of birds a reality. I wanted not just to be the greatest bird artist of my time, but to be known in the world as such. I am. But there is a hollowness now. Fame has consumed my entrails, and played upon the falseness that was in me. Fame may have won, in the end.”

“It is not the end,” says Bayfield, distressed. “You said to me yourself you have only come halfway.”

L
IZARS, THE ENGRAVER,
was the first to be astonished by the Birds. The others followed with dizzying speed. Within a week, one hundred drawings were hung and displayed. The newspapers published such glowing accounts of Audubon that he was embarrassed to walk on Prince’s Street. His evenings were given over to long dinner parties and meetings with men of such achievement that he was abashed in their presence. It was their wives, so often great beauties, and intelligent too, beside whom he was seated. He made certain the wives were entranced. But even when they were, he was certain they noticed the inferiority in him. When he went home to his rooms at night, he wrote to tell Lucy. It was the only way he could be sure that it was truly happening.

The invitations fell through his landlady’s door. Somehow during this time he painted the Wild Turkey with nine young. Lizars made it his first engraving. Audubon was amazed in his own turn. How adroit he was to form all the lines exactly the opposite to
Audubon’s drawing, using it only to copy! Audubon’s work astounded the rest of society. Artists and naturalists like Selby and Jardine came to his rooms for lessons.

“I came to understand that
big
was necessary,” says Audubon to Bayfield. “To be large as life. Myself and the birds. Nothing reduced. Nothing to limit the grandeur. I determined, in calm moments during Edinburgh’s romance with me, that I would publish the
Birds
at my own expense with a list of three hundred good names. That the Birds must be life-sized. The pages double elephant portfolio. It went against the advice of my friends. But I wanted it that way. I made a pledge to myself. I would give over my life to this endeavour no matter what I had to sacrifice — even those who loved me.”

Through all this he was alone: his letters took a month or more to reach Lucy and he had not heard from her at all. He went to parties where a great many glittering ladies and gentlemen grazed. He would stand as motionless as a heron and, when he dared to, look around himself, and often, as he was Mr. Audubon, the great artist from the frontier, no one would come near. Then a lady would float to his side and, by speaking to him, ease his shyness.

“I came to understand myself as I understood a bird. Now
I
was the creature from the wilds never before seen.
I
the subject of fascination, and others making a replica of me. There was the portraitist, making me stand for dull hours as if shot, stuffed and wired.”

The snow had fallen on the hills of Edinburgh by then and his new friends insisted that he wear his wolf-skin coat for the portrait. And he did. If the head were not a strong likeness, he joked, perhaps the coat would be! He saw it when it was done and was horrified; his eyes looked not at all human but like the eyes of an enraged eagle.

The strangest was the man who studied heads. George Combe showed up in Audubon’s rooms early in his weeks in Edinburgh, and chatted with the men of learning who gathered there. He said little about the birds, but offered that Monsieur Audubon had a most particular head, and that he would like to make a cast of his skull. Audubon was pleased; the shape of his head must be of interest even to himself, now that he was becoming famous.

A week later, at the end of a tiresome dinner at a country house, Combe came upon Audubon as he sat apart from the company on a chair in the corner. Combe wore spectacles over large, ice-blue eyes. His hair had vacated his head in order to make his own skull available for examination. It was a large, high, domed head, and his eyebrows, which were black and furred, sat a long way down from the top; more than half of his face was forehead, a frank, wide forehead with three even lines across it like the lines on a musical score. Combe enunciated his theory; a head of a certain shape implied particular strengths or talents in the owner. “Your head,” he said, pacing in a circle around Audubon’s chair, “is unique. But so I would expect it to be.” His long, knobby fingers seemed to twitch. He asked if Audubon might come to the next meeting of the phrenologists’ society, and Audubon agreed.

On the night of the meeting, which was a chill, foggy evening in November, he mounted the steps of an elegant Georgian mansion to be greeted by a phalanx of men, with one lady amongst them, wringing their hands and bobbing at the sight of him. He was not introduced, for he was a subject, Exhibit A.

He sat on a stage on a wooden chair with his back to the audience, a huge white bib tied around his shoulders, no part of him visible but his head. Audubon wore his hair long; sometimes he tied it back, sometimes he allowed it to flow. He’d never in fact liked to bare his head, considering it a little small for his height. George Combe begged his pardon before lifting his hair off his neck and tying it out of the way. There was a circle of candles around him. He felt he was posing for an oil of the head of John the Baptist on a plate.

The master phrenologist emerged from the wings, to restrained applause. He wore a black university gown. His skin was an unhealthy grey, and his eyes flickered half shut as if the candlelight was too bright for him. Standing centre stage, he could reach out and touch Audubon’s head.

Combe made the introduction.

“Our master here has no knowledge of our kind volunteer tonight. Only shall I say that he has a particular calling and an unusual way of life. He is, in his field, eminent.”

“
That the Birds must be life-sized.
The pages double elephant portfolio
.”

The phrenologist stretched his arms high, letting his sleeves fall away from his wrists. His hands were large, fleshy, insistent. He first pressed the flats of his palms slowly over the whole of Audubon’s head and face. He dug the rounded ends of his fingers into Audubon’s skull. He turned and lifted Audubon’s head on his neck, describing in a toneless voice his discoveries: a flat nape, hollows behind his ears, a certain ridge across the back of his head that ran between his ears. He measured the cranium over the top, from ear tip to ear tip. All the while his fingers prodded and pushed, and in their pushing, shook with excitement. Audubon understood all too well the shaky fingers. He was the bird in the hand, snatched from its habitat. He was to be proof of a theory. As the fingers roved and probed his skull, a chill worked its way up his spine. He shivered under the white draping; he felt his captivity.

The phrenologist spoke.

“It is in fact a small head. But the muscles of the neck tell me that the man himself is tall and strong. He is a little primitive: his head slopes back quickly from the eyebrows. His forehead flows backward, rising to the height of the crown, which tells me he is unlearned, close to the animals. He is not a parlour creature, not an intellectual.”

Audubon began to feel quite separate from his head. He could see it, floating in the air ahead of him. The phrenologist took his chin in one hand, the back of his head in the other, and measured, describing a particular arc here, a nodule there.

“One is reminded of certain African mammals — the gorilla, yes? But in direct contrast to that is the aquiline nose, evidence of the high born, of a fascination with detail, or a Mediterranean antecedent. A very mixed parentage. The deep eye sockets suggest restlessness and passion. He is genial on the whole but quick tempered. Here, just here, the line, which should be smooth from temple to temple, is oddly uneven. It meanders, in fact, showing a great inconsistency of character.”

The man’s hands roamed more urgently over the territory of Audubon’s head, and seemed now to be expressing irritation with what they found. Devoted but faithless. A dangerous split in his personality … “There is one other man alive whose head has these
characteristics. I am reminded now of, I am reminded of the great poet, of Byron.”

The audience gasped.

Audubon was flattered. Byron, indeed!

“B
YRON
,” says Bayfield. It has been said before. And now he can see why. Both men show what ordinary mortals might consider a triple insolence; they had beauty, talent, and a ferocity of spirit. It is bound to raise hackles.