Under a Wild Sky, page 27
William Home Lizars was three years younger than Audubon. An artist at heart, Lizars had shown early promise with his richly textured depictions of ordinary events in Scottish life. He’d even had two of his paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1811. But his father’s death a year later had forced Lizars to take over the family printing and engraving concern. He was currently engraving illustrations for at least two major works—Selby’s birds and a volume on human anatomy. Lizars had a thriving business and was highly thought of, though some of his clients worried that he paid his colorists too little to ensure their best efforts.
Lizars studied Audubon while listening to Neill go on about the drawings, in the end agreeing to accompany Audubon back to his rooms for a look at his portfolio. It was still raining as Audubon and Lizars walked toward George Street under a shared umbrella. Lizars talked all the way about what a brilliant illustrator Selby was. Once inside, Audubon offered the soggy Lizars a chair. He opened the portfolio and without saying anything began showing Lizars his drawings, one by one. A look of wonder came over Lizars’s face. After a minute he could not contain himself. “My God,” Lizars said. “I never saw anything like this before!” The next morning, before Audubon had a chance to go anywhere, Lizars was back—this time accompanied by Robert Jameson.
Professor Jameson suddenly had all the time in the world for Audubon. He quite agreed with Lizars that the drawings were extraordinary. After a while Jameson’s praise became so effusive that Audubon grew wary. But he accepted Jameson’s invitation to breakfast at his home the next morning. Later that day, he walked through Edinburgh feeling deliriously happy. In the evening, he stopped in at Lizars’s shop, where he was impressed by Lizars’s skill as both an engraver and a painter. Audubon was also happy to meet Mrs. Lizars, a beautiful woman and the first of such with whom he’d had a chance to spend any time since his arrival in Edinburgh. Audubon, in a rare moment of discretion, kept his appreciation of Mrs. Lizars’s loveliness to himself. He bit his tongue again when Lizars got out some original drawings by Selby and Jardine. They were good, Audubon thought—about as good as what John Woodhouse could do. Was it possible that after all these years his work really was better than anyone else’s? As he walked home through the silent streets just before eleven o’clock, Audubon marveled at what seemed to be happening to him.
And it continued the next day. Over a fine breakfast at Jameson’s comfortable house, Audubon decided he had totally misjudged the professor. The truth was, of course, just the reverse—it was Jameson who had unwisely dismissed Audubon on their first meeting. Now all was forgiven. Audubon thought Jameson’s friendliness all the more remarkable for how supremely intelligent the man seemed to be. Audubon found him fascinating, and was amused by their shared penchant for unfashionable hairstyles. The professor’s, Audubon noted, was done up in multiple parts, so that it went in three directions—right, left, and straight up. Jameson assured Audubon he would do everything in his power—which was considerable—to introduce Audubon and his work to the world of science. Audubon departed, ecstatic, and had barely taken off his coat back at his rooms when Jameson showed up with a crowd of friends to look at Audubon’s drawings. A steady parade continued throughout the afternoon. That night Audubon fell asleep thinking of Beech Woods, imagining himself in bed with Lucy.
Now things happened in a blur. Lizars was positively smitten by the action in Audubon’s drawings—especially one showing a rattlesnake with a group of mockingbirds. When Audubon realized he had not yet shown Lizars some of his larger pieces, he insisted on doing so. Looking at Audubon’s drawings of the wild turkey—one a great striding cock, and another a hen with her brood of chicks—Lizars was moved. He draped his arm around Audubon’s shoulders as they looked at more. Lizars loved Audubon’s drawing of a covey of partridges being attacked from the air by a hawk, and he was delighted by the painting of a whooping crane bending its great neck toward the earth to devour a baby alligator. When Audubon turned up his drawing of the great-footed hawk—the peregrine falcon—Lizars’s arm dropped and he stood stock still. For a long moment he said nothing as he studied the picture, which shows a pair of hawks feeding on two freshly killed ducks. A solitary feather floats in the air above the birds, whose eyes seem filled with a savage lust. Blood empties from a gaping wound on one of the ducks, and falls in hot droplets from a hawk’s beak. For a moment, Lizars was speechless. At last he turned to Audubon. “I will engrave and publish this,” he said.
The room was still crowded with other visitors, so Audubon and Lizars did not strike a deal then and there. But later that day Audubon went to see Lizars—who poured him a glass of wine, followed by three glasses of Scotch. Lizars reiterated his desire to engrave some of Audubon’s drawings. Lizars was impressed with the letters of introduction Audubon showed him. He told Audubon that they’d soon be unnecessary, as it would not be long before everyone knew who he was. That night, Audubon wrote in his journal that he felt at last “fame and fortune” were at hand, and that he could now see to the well-being of his wife and the education of his children. Money, Audubon said, didn’t really matter to him. But it was necessary to have it, and so have it he would, on their behalf. As for himself, all he wanted was a plum for breakfast.
As it was now early November and there were no plums to be had, Audubon settled for boiled eggs the next morning. Soon his room was again crowded. Audubon showed his drawings while Lizars served as a kind of master of ceremonies, ushering the guests in and out at a dizzying pace. One of the people who called that day was the artist John Syme, a young but highly regarded portraitist. Syme and a few others remained with Audubon and Lizars for dinner. It was a lively evening, full of toasting. Everyone present agreed that Audubon should sit for Syme. Lizars immediately offered to engrave such a likeness.
Every day for the next couple of weeks, Audubon received a steady stream of visitors eager to view his work. Everyone who was anyone in Edinburgh was interested—from Sir William Jardine himself to the actress starring in the production of Rob Roy Audubon had attended only days before. Audubon made time to sit for John Syme now and again. What little private time was left to him Audubon used to work on a large oil painting of a hen turkey. When that was done, he amused himself by making a new sketch of his “Otter in a Trap.” Audubon was also in demand as a dinner companion. The “constant round of parties, suppers and dinners,” as he described it, was exhausting. It seemed all he did was eat and drink and show off his drawings. Meanwhile, the local Royal Institution offered him exhibition space. By mid-November, he was earning more than £5 (about $22) a day from admissions.
Audubon and Lizars continued to work out the details of publication even as the engraving commenced. They decided that The Birds of America would be published in installments, or “Numbers.” Each Number would comprise five hand-colored plates from Lizars’s engravings. Audubon knew a separate text would have to accompany the illustrations, but put off thinking about the letterpress for the time being. There was again discussion as to how big the plates should be—Audubon had once more been advised that his drawings were too cumbersome—but he would not be budged. Each Number, in keeping with the concept that had first occurred to Audubon on his long trip back to Bayou Sara from Philadelphia, would consist of a mix of different-sized birds, all full-scale, all printed on the same oversized “double elephant” papers. The initial plate would always be one of his largest drawings. It would be followed by a medium-sized drawing and then three of the smaller ones. Audubon, showing some marketing sense, anticipated that buyers would be so bowled over by the huge opening image in each Number that they would fall in love with the rest as well. But when he saw the smaller birds finally being engraved and colored, he realized how exquisite they were in their own right. Set in the middle of the enormous sheets of heavy paper, the smaller drawings seemed to Audubon to possess an “air of richness and wealth.” A prospectus was drafted to announce the publication. It emphasized Audubon’s long experience on the frontier, promising incomparable illustrations of American birds in their full, life size. The Birds of America, it stated, would be the most colorful and accurate work of its kind, showing both the male and female of those species where the two differed in appearance, and depicting the birds in natural settings, often in pursuit of prey amid lush foliage that was also meticulously represented.
Audubon agreed to pay for production of the first Number, which he would then take on the road throughout England in hopes of securing subscribers for the rest. Each Number was to be priced at two guineas—about $9.45. With upwards of four hundred drawings, a complete set of The Birds of America figured to ultimately cost about $822. Audubon calculated that if he could secure three hundred subscribers he would make a reasonable profit. This all happened so fast that Audubon had no time to worry about the abandonment of his plan to go to London or Paris for a publisher. Lizars’s engravings were, in any case, dazzling. He felt certain that this was the right thing to do, and that he would pursue this course no matter what. Audubon had no illusions as to how easy this would be or how long it would take. It occurred to him that he might never set foot in America again.
Toward the end of the month it snowed, causing Audubon to recall wistfully his last warm November at Bayou Sara. Work on the first Number was going so well that several colored plates would soon be ready to exhibit at the Royal Institution. On the last day of the month, John Syme showed Audubon his finished portrait. It depicted a dashing Audubon in a heroic pose beneath a rose-tinted sky. He was dressed in a fur hunting coat, with leather bandoliers strapped over his chest and a shotgun cradled in his arms, one thumb resting on the hammers. The way his luxurious hair was pulled back from a high forehead and allowed to fall gently past his shoulders emphasized his long nose and large, sensitive eyes—delicate, romantic features that dominated an otherwise atavistic image. Audubon coyly said he wasn’t sure if it was a good likeness, but that it certainly was a fine picture. The next day it was put up alongside his drawings at the public exhibit. Audubon said it felt good to have people staring at his portrait instead of at him for a change.
How could all this happen? How was it that the same man who had been blackballed in Philadelphia was now being lionized in England and Scotland? What explained Lizars’s eagerness to engrave The Birds of America when Lizars’s countryman Alexander Lawson had declared Audubon incompetent and thrown him out of his engraving studio in Philadelphia?
If Audubon was puzzled, he didn’t admit to it. But he must have sensed that his long years of anonymity in the wilds of America, which had contributed to his being discredited in Philadelphia, were seen here in a more favorable light. Audubon knew that the British were enamored of roguish explorer types. One who was then popular was a wealthy and eccentric naturalist named Charles Waterton, who’d made four expeditions to South America, the most recent only two years before. Waterton had written colorful accounts of these travels, and was famous for his claim of having ridden on the backs of caimans. Audubon wondered if he should claim to have done the same with alligators. In any event, Audubon’s lack of training in a scientific discipline did not seem to stand in his way in Edinburgh, as it had in America. Besides, if Audubon could not yet be called a man of science, Professor Jameson had it in mind to make him one.
Jameson urged Audubon to attend meetings of the Wernerian Society, and to present papers there on American zoological subjects. Audubon was understandably intimidated by this prospect. In addition to his shyness, which would surely translate into paralyzing stage fright before a learned assemblage, Audubon worried that he still did not write nearly well enough in English for such a purpose. In fact, Audubon’s English was good. Years of obsessive journal-keeping and letter-writing had given him considerable practice. He still mangled an occasional word, but generally wrote quite acceptably in the stiff, slightly ornate style of the day. Plus, one of Jameson’s colleagues at the university offered to edit Audubon’s papers and straighten them out grammatically. Audubon still hesitated. He asked Jameson repeatedly if this was necessary. Jameson insisted that it was, and that delivering papers to the Wernerians would be the fastest way to become known by the educated and prominent persons on whom he would soon be calling for subscriptions. Audubon also understood that in appearing at the society he would be elected an honorary member—and that this would in turn lead to his election to learned institutions across Britain.
Audubon at first thought he would deliver a paper on the wild turkey, a bird he had observed perhaps more closely than any other, and whose habits he thought the Wernerians would find unusually interesting. But he changed his mind. Instead, he wrote about the turkey buzzard—the bird now called the turkey vulture—taking into consideration some experiments he’d performed on its sense of smell back at Bayou Sara the year before. The paper was adapted from an account he had planned to send to someone else, recast as a letter to Professor Jameson. Audubon completed it in a day, working until midnight. Just over a week later, on the afternoon of December 16, he took a deep breath and headed for the Old Town.
The university, which was on South Bridge Street, was an imposing structure. It faced the street, looking like a great, gray city unto itself. The entrance was a soaring walkway that passed beneath a cupola and opened onto an immense stone courtyard surrounded by tall, colonnaded buildings with high, arched windows and vertiginous balconies. As Audubon walked into the courtyard clutching his paper, plus a portfolio and drawing kit, the sound of his boots echoing over the stones mixed in his ears with the pounding of his heart.
The Wernerians met in a long room with a fireplace at one end. They sat in heavy, high-backed chairs on either side of two large tables. When Audubon walked in, a stuffed swordfish—an object of the day’s discussions—lay on one of the tables. Audubon may have felt a little like the fish. Everyone was eager to meet and listen to the American woodsman. Audubon, who had at the last minute demurred on presenting the paper himself, listened as the society’s secretary read it aloud to the members in his stead. It was substantial, occupying thirteen typeset pages when Jameson later published it in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. Audubon gave a thorough account of the turkey buzzard’s life history and behavior. But he focused on the bird’s sense of smell, which Audubon believed made little or no contribution to its finding carrion on which to feed. Audubon wrote that he had learned when he was very young that turkey buzzards were attracted to carrion by the odor of its putrefaction. But when he began studying the birds in the wild, he became less sure. They seemed quite unable to detect his presence, even when very nearby, unless they saw him. Audubon stated that nature is parsimonious—that creatures may, for example, rely on keen eyesight or a sensitive ability to smell, but not both. To test which sense the turkey buzzard relied on, he had conducted a number of experiments.
In one, Audubon stuffed a well-cured deer hide with grass and placed it in a field so as to make it look like a dead animal. A turkey buzzard alighted on it almost at once, and made numerous attempts to tear into the “corpse.” In a second test, Audubon hid a dead and rotting hog in a ravine, covering it with brush so as to make it invisible from the air. Although the hog soon stank to high heaven under the hot Louisiana sun, buzzard after buzzard soared right over it for days without one bothering to investigate. Audubon then took a young pig down into the same ravine and slashed its throat, allowing the blood-soaked ground to remain in plain sight while he hid the pig’s body close by. Buzzards immediately spotted the blood and, convening on the spot, followed the blood trail to the pig and ate it.
Audubon’s compelling report was well wide of the truth. He may or may not have done such experiments, but he was quite wrong about the turkey buzzard. While it is the case that most bird species have a very poorly developed sense of smell—bird brains tend to have extremely small olfactory receptors—the turkey buzzard is a notable exception. It possesses an acute sense of smell that is especially attuned to a compound released by rotting meat.
But of course none of the Wernerians were in a position to question Audubon. The minutes from the meeting instead praised him for “exploding the opinion generally entertained of the [turkey buzzard’s] extraordinary powers of smelling.” Audubon, gratified by the reception, relaxed a little. He opened his portfolio and showed the members his drawing of the turkey buzzard. They all thought it breathtaking. Audubon then got out his drawing equipment and demonstrated his methods, explaining how he wired birds to a gridded board and then copied them exactly onto paper on which he had lightly drawn matching squares. At the conclusion of the session, Professor Jameson—seconded by Sir William Jardine—nominated Audubon as a Foreign Member of the Wernerians.
Just before Christmas of 1826, Audubon wrote to Lucy. He was in high spirits, despite what had become a grinding routine of dinners and parties that often broke up in the wee hours of the morning, leaving him run-down and headachy. At one point, he went two weeks without dining once in his own rooms. His days, filled with drawing and writing, were exhausting. Still, he seemed to be realizing all his ambitions in one headlong rush. And, after another long silence from Lucy, during which he’d again feared the worst, two letters from her had finally arrived. The news that she and the boys were well made him happy and homesick. Even so, he said, his situation in Edinburgh bordered on the “miraculous.” He expected Lizars would complete the first Number of The Birds of America by the middle of January—a mere six months after he had landed at Liverpool. Audubon thought the engravings were splendid. This was critical, he told Lucy. Even though his original drawings inspired the most effusive praise, if the reproductions were inferior, no one would want them. In the meantime, while Lizars was occupied with the engraving, Audubon’s reception in Edinburgh had become a string of fantastic successes. He told Lucy he would soon be elected to the Wernerian Society. In fact, two of its most esteemed members—the great naturalists Selby and Jardine—had recently called on him two days running to receive instruction in his drawing technique.
