Books: Turn in Louisiana

AUDUBON -Constance Rourke -Ear-court, Brace ($3).

Four miles from St. Francisville. in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, there is an imposing, three-story plantation house called Oakley, built in 1810 by James Pirrie and still inhabited by his descendants. There, in the summer of 1821, a 35-year-old wandering painter named John James Audubon arrived to teach French and painting to 16-year-old Eliza Pirrie. It was almost his first good fortune. He got $60 a month, had his afternoons free, could study to his heart’s content the varied bird life of West Feliciana.

His previous career had been extraordinary in almost all respects except his poverty. His birthplace and” parents were unknown and he had taken the name of a French sea-captain who adopted him during the French Revolution. Sent to Mill Grove, near Philadelphia, in 1803, he quickly learned to hunt, to observe wild life, to make friends with farmers. Tall, strong, impetuous, farsighted, he was an accomplished painter who had studied under Jacques Louis David in Paris, but remained at ease with tough woodsmen and trappers. In 1808 he married a pretty, well-born English girl, soon after failed at a variety of business ventures in New York City, Louisville, Henderson, Ky. He could do sleight-of-hand tricks, was a dead shot and a good fighter, claimed Daniel Boone as his friend. Wandering down the Mississippi after his Kentucky failures, he painted portraits, taught, was at the lowest point of discouragement when the cultivated Pirrie family befriended him, provided his career with its turning point.

Last week Constance Rourke retold John James Audubon’s story in a slender, attractive volume of Americana that was less a biography than a biographical essay on the naturalist. One of the two November choices of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Audubon is beautifully illustrated with twelve color plates, presents a romantic portrait of its hero with most emphasis on his picturesque frontier experiences, his difficulties in England and France, little emphasis on his harsh discouragements. Its high point deals with Audubon’s awakening ambitions in the South. The dramatic bird life of Louisiana, where adroit and playful mockingbirds chase dogs and torment cats, while sparrows look on in excitement’, enchanted Audubon. There he conceived his great and precious folios of the Birds of America that are now collectors’ rarities valued at $10,000. He painted woodpeckers, flycatchers, studied the chuck-will’s-widow that moves its eggs if they are touched, the water turkey that walks on the bottom of streams, the rare scarlet ibis, the “overdressed” white ibis.

Once, caught in a fierce storm, Audubon took refuge in a trapper’s cabin which became so flooded that he had to hold his arms over his head to protect his portfolio. In the midst of his discomfort the storm ended, and he suddenly heard a wood thrush, “a song of a few clear, mellow, flute-like notes falling in gentle cadences.” As he listened he thought that no song could be “so gentle in its last, almost inaudible phrases.” He gave up painting portraits of human beings. “After this,” said he, “I shall follow only the birds of America.”