Under a Wild Sky (36 page)

Attendance at his Manchester exhibition continued to be poor. Some days only twenty or so people came to see it. But people routinely called on Audubon in his rented rooms to inspect his drawings, and some extended invitations to dinner. In late September, Audubon was invited to hunt partridge with a local nobleman, a Lord Stamford. Stamford's gamekeeper provided them with two dogs and guns “no longer than my arms,” Audubon said. It was not yet pheasant season, though the concept of open or closed hunting seasons was completely foreign to Audubon. When a pheasant got up, he reflexively dropped it with a quick shot, oblivious of the fact that they were supposed to be after a different species. Then another pheasant flushed, with the same result. Audubon continued to shoot at every bird he saw—until the gamekeeper intervened and declared a halt to the slaughter. The hunt was most pleasant, Audubon said, and from the rolling hilltops he'd seen Derbyshire, where Lucy's family had once lived. Some days later, Audubon was asked to dinner at the home of Thomas Lloyd, one of the wealthiest men in England. Audubon estimated his assets at £400,000, about $1.8 million then. Audubon was agog at the number of servants who attended their table that evening. He also remarked on how much trouble he was given by the English habit of toasting one another with wine. It was hard to get through such an evening without being in your cups by the conclusion.

Toward the end of September, Audubon moved his exhibition to Manchester's Royal Institution, which offered him free space. Leaving some two hundred of his drawings on display, Audubon returned to Liverpool to visit the Rathbones. Riding atop the carriage so that someone else could have his seat inside, Audubon got soaked in a cold rain. At Green Bank, he was pleased when Miss Hannah asked for his assistance in framing a sketch of himself he'd made for her.

It was on this visit that Audubon received an important introduction. Friends arranged for him to meet with a man named Bohn, a bookseller
from London who was staying in Liverpool. Bohn, who struck Audubon as unusually honest and knowledgeable on such matters, advised him about publishing his work—which Audubon had lately begun to refer to as
The Birds of America
. Bohn told Audubon he should go to London and meet with prominent naturalists there to find out which engravers and lithographers in the city might be up to the job of making colored reproductions of his drawings. He should also visit Paris and do the same, Bohn said, before deciding where best to undertake such a monumental project. Then, rather than wasting months exhibiting his drawings, Audubon should immediately publish a selection of his work and issue a prospectus for the rest. Implicit in this concept was the idea that Audubon would compose some sort of text to accompany his illustrations. The idea of becoming an “author” filled Audubon, a man more at ease in forests and swamps than among words, with trepidation. But this approach, Bohn assured him, would put his work before the largest possible audience in the shortest time. Audubon was all ears, eagerly nodding at everything Bohn said and agreeing that this was a plan he should adopt at once.

But while Audubon did not say so at the time, one of Bohn's suggestions was out of the question. Bohn told Audubon there was a large potential audience for his work among people with taste and the wherewithal to buy an expensive book. These people liked to entertain, Bohn went on, and would likely buy Audubon's book as much for its value as a conversation piece as for its artistic or scientific merits. But Audubon's drawings were far too large for this purpose.
A book made from his life-sized paintings would dwarf everything else its owner possessed—it would be more like a piece of furniture than a functional part of a library or an adornment for a sitting-room table. People would have no place to put it and no inclination to look at it. The result would be sales to only a few public institutions and a handful of blue-blooded dilettantes. Bohn urged Audubon to publish at a drastically reduced scale.

Audubon's resistance on this point was insurmountable. He seems never to have given the idea any serious consideration at all. This was not an insignificant matter, and Audubon's determination to do it his way was in the end one of the hallmarks of his genius as an artist. Audubon saw the world through a lens all his own. And at a time when he was poor and in a precarious state of mind, Audubon's real strength was his allegiance to his personal vision. He could no more produce an image of a bird at a fraction of its size than he could paint one plaid. Drawing his birds life-sized
was not simply a matter of accuracy; Audubon understood that scale was a big part of the impact the images made on the viewer. No one looking at one of Audubon's larger birds—a turkey or an eagle, for example—could fail to be impressed with its magnificence when it was shown as big as life. Whatever this would mean for the eventual sales of his work, Audubon could not know. Sure enough, just a few weeks later as Bohn again looked at the drawings he changed his mind. They should be published full-sized, Bohn agreed. He told Audubon that if he failed to find a publisher willing to do the job, then he himself would find one.

The minute Audubon arrived back in Manchester, he hurried to the gallery to inspect his drawings. He found the doorman drunk. Audubon fired him and then had a look at his birds. In the cool darkness of an empty room far, far from home, they looked “fresh and gay,” as lifelike as he remembered them from the forests of America.

Audubon spent his next days touring the countryside where Lucy and her family were from. He was joined for much of the time by assorted Rathbones, including the seemingly ever-present Miss Hannah. Lucy, who would have been excited to hear of her husband's visit to Bakewell, the town bearing her family name, would undoubtedly have been less thrilled to know that he went with Miss Hannah leaning on his arm, the two of them lost in confused feelings that were neither “very happy nor very sad.”

By the third week of October, Audubon had decided that his stay in Manchester was unprofitable and it was time to move on. But he changed his mind about going directly to London and instead made plans to head north, into Scotland and on to Edinburgh. It was a two-day carriage ride. The driver complained about Audubon's trunk and his oversized portfolio, but the trip was pleasant enough. Four passengers rode inside the carriage and another ten, including Audubon, on top. Audubon was surprised at how rapidly the countryside changed as they passed through it—flat one minute, hilly the next. Dense, inviting forests alternated with open vistas that Audubon found dull. There were black-faced sheep everywhere. Audubon saw some pheasants and thought to himself how much John Woodhouse would enjoy shooting in this place. After a time, the road passed alongside the North Sea, which he found picturesque. At a stopover, Audubon ate fish and took his first taste of Scotch whiskey. The locals drank it like water, he said, but he found it far too strong for his “weak head.” The stage arrived in Edinburgh an hour before midnight on
the second day. Audubon, glancing at the clean, gaslit streets lined with lovely stone buildings, checked into an inn called the Star, thinking that what little he had been able to make out of the city late at night looked wonderful.

Edinburgh, Audubon declared, was the most beautiful city he had ever seen—a gem perched between the Pentland Hills and the point of the Firth of Forth on the North Sea.
The city was arranged on two parallel hilltops, which ran east–west on either side of a narrow declivity. On one side was the “Old Town,” overlooked on one end by the imposing Edinburgh Castle, a centuries-old keep whose foundation incorporated the solid volcanic rocks found atop the highest point in the city. From this commanding height, High Street descended along the spine of the hill, flanked on either side by shops and churches and residences, all built of cut stone mellowed by time to a soothing shade of gray. At the far end of High Street was Holyrood Palace, the twelfth-century abbey that had once been home to Mary Queen of Scots.

On the opposite hilltop—reached by either of two main bridges—was the “New Town,” an orderly grid of stone rowhouses, shops, and pubs of more recent vintage, largely built between 1750 and 1800. Princes Street, a broad commercial thoroughfare, ran right along the edge of the New Town where it faced the old, and rising beyond it was a neat latticework of streets and avenues, strategically interrupted by quiet public squares. On a plain to the south of the city, a wedge-shaped escarpment—a long-extinct volcano—rose sharply to over eight hundred feet. This was “Arthur's Seat,” named for the Scottish legend who supposedly passed some meditative hours there.

The New Town was symbolic of Edinburgh's emergence in the eighteenth century as one of Europe's intellectual capitals.
Home to artists and architects, Edinburgh had also been in the middle of the philosophical movement emphasizing human reason and the fundamental rights of man that had inspired America's founders.
The origins of the modern age still hung in the clear air of Edinburgh. Audubon, well aware that the city was a great seat of learning, hoped to meet its current resident genius, the novelist Walter Scott.

On his first day in the city, Audubon slept late.
He had breakfast at ten, and then found rooms for rent on George Street, a broad boulevard
off St. Andrew Square in the New Town. A bedroom and a comfortable, well-furnished sitting room, from which he could see steamships plying the Firth, was to cost him one guinea—less than five dollars—per week. Later, as Audubon explored the city, he marveled at the castles and parks and could scarcely believe how clean and neat everything was. The cobblestone pavements and broad sidewalks were as smooth and uniform as the buildings that stood in regular formation everywhere.

After a long day hiking through the city, Audubon returned to his rooms thinking he'd like to take a look at his drawings, always a cheering prospect. While Audubon's mental state had improved since he'd gotten Lucy's letters, his moods still fluctuated. As he looked over his birds, Audubon was suddenly seized by a fear that they would never be published. He felt bereft and alone. Later, over dinner, Audubon still could not shake these anxious thoughts. He worried that Lucy was sick, possibly dead. He was unable to eat. As his food sat in front of him getting cold, Audubon felt tears coming on. He rushed from the restaurant to escape this “painful gloom” with a long walk. Back at his rooms later, he calmed down a little. There was a pair of stuffed pheasants in his sitting room. He admired them for a bit and then looked closely at himself in the mirror. Audubon was startled by what he saw—his own father looking back at him. He'd forgotten how much they resembled each other. Before he went to bed, Audubon wrote in his journal that these bouts of despair frightened him badly.
He hinted darkly that he now and then worried he would someday overreact to one.

Audubon set out right away to call on people to whom he had letters of introduction. Nobody seemed to be home. He finally tracked down Robert Jameson at the University of Edinburgh. Jameson was one of the university's most eminent professors, an instructor in geology and natural history. Jameson was also president of the Wernerian Natural History Society, which he had founded in 1808.
Named for Jameson's mentor, a somewhat obscure German mineralogist named Abraham Gottlob Werner, the Wernerian Society was the Scottish equivalent of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The society met on Saturday afternoons when the college was in session, and papers read before the membership were often published by the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
—which was edited by Professor Jameson.

Audubon got a brusque reception from the professor, who seemed busy and distracted. He told Audubon it might be several days before he had time to look at Audubon's drawings. When Audubon mentioned that he also hoped to show them to Walter Scott, Jameson seemed huffy. Scott, he said, was hard at work on a new novel and a biography of Napoleon—he was unlikely to make room in his schedule for the likes of Audubon.

Audubon told himself not to take offense at being so lightly dismissed. After all, he thought, wasn't he just as absorbed in his own work? The next day he took a long walk. Some of the “lower class” women he saw carried loaded baskets on their heads and walked in a pigeon-toed way that reminded him of Indian squaws. He went out to Leith, Edinburgh's port village. It was a beautiful day. A sharp wind rocked the boats in the harbor and waves broke along the shore. On his way back, Audubon was stopped by a woman who was nicely dressed and seemed well-spoken. But she told him she was poor and would do anything for him for some cash. Audubon held out his hands and said he was also poor, and a stranger. Hustling away from the woman, Audubon was shocked when she swore at him. Audubon realized that, even in so civilized a city as Edinburgh, he was an easy mark. He promised himself he'd be more careful. That night he relaxed at the theater, taking in the play
Rob Roy
. When he came home with a cough, the landlady at George Street offered him a glass of grog.

Audubon learned that one of the things keeping Professor Jameson busy was a collaboration with the naturalist Prideaux John Selby and a “Sir Somebody” on an illustrated book of British birds.
The “Sir” was William Jardine, an Edinburgh naturalist of international standing who in just a few years would begin publication of his forty-volume
Naturalist's Library
, an account of the entire known vertebrate kingdom. All that Audubon knew was that these gentlemen seemed to have better things to do than look over his poor drawings. Still, he was feeling emboldened. He no longer suffered embarrassment about his appearance and didn't get flustered whenever someone asked him to open the big portfolio.
He wrote to Victor at Louisville, telling him how fine Edinburgh was, but that he would soon be on his way to Glasgow and then Inverness before returning south, to London and eventually to Paris.