Press Release

Audubon's Watchby John Gregory Brown

• Introduction• About the Author• Praise for Brown's Previous Books• John James Audubon, 1785–1851• An Interview with John Gregory Brown

"Time flies very slow indeed, so much so that it looked as if it Stood Still, like the hawk that Poises in the air over its prey." — John James Audubon

Introduction

These words, written in Audubon's journal and referring to the night of July 31, 1821, when the legendary ornithologist spent the night keeping watch over a dead body, are the seeds of a story that is part historical novel, part Victorian murder mystery. The celebrated novelist John Gregory Brown has written a compelling gothic mystery that rises above the limits of the genre to examine the nature of time, the threat of mortality, and the relationship between life and art.

Audubon's Watch is the story of a fateful meeting between the ornithologist and artist John James Audubon and a fictional physician and anatomist, Emile Gautreaux. In the early 1820s, the real-life Audubon was thirty-six and working as a tutor at Oakley, a sugar plantation in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana. Having failed at various enterprises and unable to make his way as a portraitist, he had just conceived his grand design to observe and draw all of the birds of North America.

In Brown's telling, on the night of July 31, Gautreaux arrives at Oakley with his wife, Myra, to visit the plantation owner. Alighting from the carriage, Myra

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Gautreaux collapses, and in the midst of great confusion it is discovered that she is dead. That evening, the distraught Gautreaux asks the young Audubon to sit with him through the night over his wife's dead body, keeping watch to ward away evil spirits.

During this long vigil, Gautreaux reveals that he believes his wife's death to be not an accident but a murder. Reviled as an anatomist who performed surgery on stolen cadavers in New Orleans, Gautreaux believes that his wife may have fallen victim to his enemies. He implores Audubon to help him find out who is responsible. However, Audubon possesses a secret about Gautreaux's beautiful wife that he cannot confess.

Brown portrays Audubon as a figure of great complexity: both Frenchman and American; both artist and scientist; both aristocrat and wayfaring outcast; ambitious, reckless, daring, and naive—in short, the quintessential nineteenth-century romantic.

Houghton Mifflin is also pleased to release John Gregory Brown's Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery in a new trade paperback edition as part of our Mariner imprint. Winner of the Lyndhurst Prize and the Steinbeck Award, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery is set in New Orleans, where the Eagens, a family of "mixed blood," confront their small tragedies and betrayals. The New York Times Book Review called Decorations, upon its release in 1993, "a beautiful novel," adding, "Artistry like this is unclassifiable."

About the Author

John Gregory Brown is the author of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur. He teaches at Sweet Briar College, where he holds the Julia Jackson Nichols Chair in English and Creative Writing. For Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, Brown was awarded the Lyndhurst Prize (1993), the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Conference, and the Steinbeck Award. He has also received the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellowship (1998–1999) and was a regional winner of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists" competition (1996).

Praise for Brown's Previous Books

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For The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur

"A staggering achievement, John Gregory Brown's complex portrait of a man painted in prose of stark beauty . . . Brown is an astonishing writer: disturbing, odd, but mindful always of the importance of narrative, his ample skills evident in this curious, heartbreaking—and deceptively simple—story of a man broken and bent but not beaten." — Times (London)

"The organizing constructs behind John Gregory Brown's dazzling second . . . are painting—or rather, a series of paintings that Lafleur executes as a talented and ultimately successful adult artist . . . It's impossible to come away from this novel with anything but admiration for the author—especially his imaginative command of language and narrative voice." — Chicago Tribune

"John Gregory Brown's beautiful second novel . . . is a warm assent to the power of acceptance and healing. [The novel] not only endorses the healing faculty of art, but the capacity of ordinary people to transform their lives into joyous celebrations." — San Francisco Chronicle

"If William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor were around to read [this novel], they would say that Brown has honored their legacy once again . . . The beauty of Brown's writing never interferes with the truth he is trying to achieve. It only amplifies it . . . This novel is John Gregory Brown's gift of grace to us." — Los Angeles Times

"The mystery . . . isn't revealed until the final page, and it is wonderful reading along the way. Even if the plot had nothing to offer, Brown's melodic, haunting, and rhythmic prose would be worth the read." — Houston Chronicle

"The narrative adopts the dreamlike coloration of folk art to evoke the pictures that Shelton, now a mournful old man, offers to us as the chapters of his life. With a lyricism reminiscent of Porgy and Bess, the novel animates an exotic time and place, filling it with vividly imagined characters whose dignity in the face of suffering touches the heart." — Boston Globe

"If you're drawn to the timeless themes of Southern literature—race, family, loss and redemption—and to powerfully understated prose, [this novel] will move you deeply . . . Brown's writing is sensitive and full of compassion." — Charlotte Observer

"[This work] is about human passion, human relationships, the recovery of

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lost kin, and the struggle to create beauty, and as such it is a tale with universal appeal. As a suspense story, the narrative builds to a gripping intensity. And it is all told in an elegant, luminous prose that sweeps the reader along. John Gregory Brown is a strong new voice in American (not just Southern) fiction, and his work deserves the widest possible audience." — Dallas Morning News

For Deorations in a Ruined Cemetery

"Beautiful . . . A compassionate vision of human destiny. For a book like this, the label 'first novel' seems grudging and dismissive. Artistry like this is unclassifiable." — New York Times Book Review

"Inspired . . . This is the stuff of which classics are made and what literature, certainly, is all about." — Los Angeles Times

"Lingers with the staying power of memory . . . A sensitive, graceful piece of writing with an emotional candor about it." — Boston Globe.

"An intricate, musical elaboration and exploration . . . The opening sentence [is] a small masterpiece in itself." — San Francisco Chronicle.

"Moving, wise, and wonderful." — Times (London)

"A triumph . . . Brown brilliantly orchestrates his novel through a series of inventive narrative techniques. His treatment of the issue [of race] is compassionate and profound." — Chicago Tribune

"A heartbreaking story of loss and change, rich in a grief-ridden kind of wisdom and told in lyrical prose. It is deservedly one of the more heralded debuts of this publishing season." — New Orleans Times-Picayune

John James Audubon, 1785–1851

John Audubon gave several different accounts of his birth, but the discovery of records in France in the early 1900s established that he was the son of a French naval captain and a French girl who worked for Captain Audubon at his sugar plantation in San Domingo (Haiti). Audubon's mother died shortly after his birth, so his father took him back to France, where he was adopted by the captain Audubon and his legal wife. In an effort to hide his illegitimate birth, Audubon apparently gave different stories and led some people to

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believe he was born in Louisiana or was the son of Louis XVI, the king of France. A book entitled I Who Should Command All explores the possibility that Audubon was in fact the lost dauphin who disappeared from the tower during the French Revolution.

When Audubon was a teenager, his father sent him to manage his plantation near Philadelphia. It was here that Audubon met and married his wife, Lucy, whose support was critical to his success. During his early married years he was unsuccessful in business, and he attained fame as an artist only after many troubled years.

Audubon gained fame only because he went to England, where his work was appreciated and subscribers made possible the publication of his 435 prints (1826–1838). In the 1830s he also wrote his Ornithological Biography, which describes the habits of the birds he drew. He interspersed these bird biographies with stories about life in America during this turbulent period. His writings are now considered a literary treasure.

After his success with birds, Audubon undertook a project to publish drawings of the animals of America. This proved more difficult than he had anticipated, as many American animals were nocturnal and their habits were hard to learn. He was greatly aided by a Lutheran minister in Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. John Bachman, whose daughters were the first wives of his two sons, John W. and Victor Audubon. In fact, John drew more than half of the 155 animal plates, and Victor contributed by drawing many of the backgrounds.

Audubon made a trip to the "western regions" in the 1840s—his last great adventure before his death, in 1851. He chased the great buffalo herds but never achieved his dream of reaching the West Coast. Few men of his age enjoyed such travels. He spent days and weeks in the woods studying birds and animals, and his spectacular drawings depicted scenes he had actually witnessed. His prints are rare today because he insisted on selling them as bound books, never as single prints.

An Interview with John Gregory Brown

Q) The idea for this novel came from a short passage in Audubon's journal in which he refers to spending an evening keeping watch over a dead body. What is it about such an event that captured your

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imagination? In what ways did this reimagined event allow you to examine how John James Audubon the man fit into his times?

A) In the passage in Audubon's journal that prompted this novel, his description of sitting up with the body—standing before it, studying it, and then drawing it—struck me as precisely the process he used in producing his depictions of birds. (He would shoot the birds, fix them in poses with wires, and then draw them.) The combination of beauty and flight with loss and death also seemed to me a remarkable distillation of the nineteenth-century romantic imagination, and Audubon was, if anything, the quintessential nineteenth-century romantic: a seeker of beauty and truth enraptured by the sublime, a wanderer, an outcast, a lover of the natural world.

There were no doubt other factors that made this passage compelling for me. My father, a physician, died not long before I began work on the novel, and I think I was attempting to come to grips both with his life as a physician and with my own life as an artist.

Q) In your research, did you find that Audubon bore the characteristics of the men of his generation? What surprises did you find?

A) There is a grand irony to Audubon's life. He was born on the island that would become Haiti, raised in France, and sent at eighteen to America. He was born to a mistress of his father's who died before Audubon was a year old. Another mistress, a mulatto woman, raised him until his father took him to France to be raised by his wife. I became convinced in the course of my research for this novel that what Audubon wanted more than anything was a home. Given the grandeur of his personality and the nature of his artistic temperament, he chose to establish America as his home by setting out to locate and draw all of the birds that could be found here. The irony of this pursuit, this quest for a home, is that he was destined to spend his life wandering, first in search of these birds and then in search of those interested in publishing and purchasing his work.

I was surprised to discover that despite the thousands and thousands of words Audubon wrote about his adventures, his art, and the birds he studied, he had almost nothing to say about why he had come to love birds so much. It is as though the psychological truth of this passion resided too deep within him, too near his core, for him to truly examine it. This was a wonderful challenge in depicting Audubon, to try to examine this issue while remaining

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true to his character.

Q) What is it that draws Audubon and Gautreaux to one another? Is Gautreaux an actual historical figure, or did you create him? What did he represent to Audubon and to you as you wrote?

A) Gautreaux is a wholly invented character who emerged as I began to research the medical and pathological practices of the period. The study of anatomy was condemned by those who felt that it was a violation of the sanctity of the body, and many anatomists were therefore forced to become graverobbers in order to secure specimens for study. With Gautreaux, as with Audubon, I wanted to examine a character in precisely the sort of detail in which he conducted his own studies. At the heart of any great human endeavor, it seems to me, are conviction and passion, and I wanted to create a character who, unlike Audubon, chooses to abandon that endeavor.

Q) Writing fictional biography presents its own temptations. How did you decide when and where to depart from the known historical record? What advice would you offer to other writers who are considering fictional biography?

A) For me, the primary difference between using wholly invented characters and using actual historical figures in a work of fiction is that the historical figure is a vessel of sorts, into which the author pours the ideas and emotions that he is interested in addressing, whereas with invented characters the vessel must be created along with those ideas and emotions. I did not feel bound by the actual circumstances of Audubon's life as much as I felt they provided a structure, a framework, for the themes I hoped to pursue.

Other authors, of course, might wish to portray a particular historical figure as accurately as possible, and while that is a fine pursuit, it is not necessarily a literary pursuit. Any writer setting out to write biographical fiction should try to understand exactly how he feels about "using" a life for the purposes of his work. The answer is not, of course, a simple one.

Q) You mention Pat Barker's World War I trilogy as a fine example of fictional biography, but the historical characters in her novels, such as Siegfried Sassoon, are less central than Audubon is to your work. Did you feel any apprehension with making a known historical figure the central character of a novel?

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A) My primary concern was to create dramatic and psychological circumstances that were appropriate for the period and for the character of Audubon as I imagined him. Audubon is revered as a great nature artist and is the namesake for the preservation of nature's beauty in this country, but that is a simplification of who he was and how he lived his life, as all who know the details of his life can tell you. If anything, I hoped to create an image of the man that more accurately reflects his complexity—a complexity that we all have in our characters because we are human.

Q) Audubon's paintings of birds rise above clinical depiction and have attained a reputation as art. If you were to examine this work as one examines the work of Picasso or Vermeer, what would you see of Audubon's character?

A) Throughout Audubon's work there is a tension between his scientific and his artistic aims, between his wish to document the truth of what he observed and to create works of art that achieve balance and beauty and complexity. He resolved this tension by drawing birds "in action" rather than in profile—birds feasting on the corpses of other animals or quarreling or singing or hunting. There is a narrative element to many of his works that suggests his love of adventure and discovery and the complexity of social interaction. As solitary as Audubon's life often was, he was very much a social creature, a raconteur, a dandy.

Q) You are married to Carrie Brown, another well-regarded and successful writer. Do your writing lives intersect? In what ways? Is she your first reader, and are you hers?

A) Carrie's success as a writer has been one of the great joys of my life. I read her fiction, as she does mine, from the first halting drafts to the finished product, offering advice and encouragement and praise, all of which are necessary to any artist who sets out to produce a work which may take a very long time to create, with real doubts and missteps along the way. I feel very fortunate to have so adept and perceptive a reader, especially one who understands not only the art of fiction but also the psychological and emotional circumstances that inform that fiction.

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