Skilled Heitman engages readers in Birds

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A SUMMER OF BIRDS: JOHN JAMES AUDUBON AT OAKLEY HOUSE
By Danny Heitman
LSU Press, $26.95

Before you can answer the question “Did we really need another book about John James Audubon?” Danny Heitman’s engaging new book has pulled you into a 73-page essay that captures Audubon’s time outside St. Francisville in the summer of 1821. More importantly, Heitman’s essay suggests why the interest in Audubon the artist, outdoorsman and early American marketing man persists.

My introduction to Audubon, the Louisiana man, came not in a book but on the exterior walls of a filling station outside the West Feliciana Parish town of St. Francisville in the 1970s.

The graphic presentation of the bird artist’s presence in town was so “right now” you half expected to see the sharp-beaked Audubon pumping his own gas into a borrowed pickup truck.

Heitman’s essay, color depictions of Audubon’s bird renderings, black and white photos and a sprinkling of contemporary photos of the artist’s haunts brought back memories of that filling station on U.S. 61.

Over 152 pages, writer and illustrations give us a glimpse of Audubon’s stay, what immediately preceded his arrival to tutor 15-year-old Eliza Pirrie at Oakley Plantation, his time as member of the family and his time in the woods collecting (read shooting) specimens and preparing the specimens as models for his paintings.

Heitman’s skill as a writer is matched nicely with his presentation of a subject previously tackled by scholars and Pulitzer Prize winner (for The Making of the Atomic Bomb) Richard Rhodes (John James Audubon: The Making of an American).

Audubon after Oakley is a predictable chapter, but Heitman tells us about Oakley after Audubon, as well.

Audubon met the Pirrie family in New Orleans where the Pirries lived when they weren’t at Oakley. According to Audubon, Eliza’s mother, Lucretia, was charmed by the artist’s singing and flute playing. He was invited to accompany the family back to Oakley as drawing instructor and mentor in the fine arts.

Lucy Audubon had this information in a letter from her husband whose self promotion sometimes crossed the line into fiction.

What is known is that Audubon’s eventual success with The Birds of America came after years of hardship and perseverance.

“We can look at Audubon’s Oakley period the way an archaeologist might mull over an old shard of pottery, using a bright fragment of the past to reveal a larger whole,” Heitman writes. “After all, Audubon’s stay at Oakley can seem a sort of distillation of the themes that followed him throughout his life — the anxious angling for money, the ecstasy of art, the entanglement of scandal and the quest for fame.”

Heitman’s treatment of Audubon’s dismissal as tutor is pure Heitman as readers know Heitman, Advocate columnist and editorial writer.