Audubon’s Sparrow by Juditha Dowd
(Rose Metal Books, April 2020)
–by Bernadette McBride
“What does it mean to sacrifice for someone else’s art?” Juditha Dowd asks in the preface of her newest collection, Audubon’s Sparrow, a biographical portrait based on extensive research and crafted in an elegant tribute to Lucy Bakewell Audubon, wife of John James Audubon. Written principally in Lucy’s voice and by a motif of fictional diary entries, letters, and poems, Dowd’s graceful verse honors Lucy’s story as one of laudable triumph over the crushing financial struggles, deep personal losses, and challenges to hope she endured in offering free reign to her husband’s drive to succeed as an artist. In large part, Lucy made possible Audubon’s success and fame as a respected and brilliant painter of American bird species.
The book begins on the day Lucy and Audubon meet when he visits the family home, and though she thinks his attitude quite “Bold,” still, she notes his long chestnut hair, and thinks him “quite the dandy,” intimating her attraction to him.
As their relationship emerges, Audubon takes her on bird watching excursions, and in “Light,” a poem for him, she acknowledges, “…you have taught me to see / not only the cardinal / but light itself / and the wind in it.” Dowd’s writing here is so crystallized, so spare, it, itself casts light on the page. These lines might offer an indication of Audubon’s growing influence on Lucy and serve as harbinger to what Lucy will encounter as her future with him unfolds.
Eventually they marry and Audubon and Lucy’s brother, Tom, go into business together, but Lucy comes to realize over time, as Dowd shows in the poem “Nero,” that her husband is “a creature… / part this part that / yet neither one reliably,” and again, in “My Husband Does Not Lie”:
…a man like this is not a clerk by nature.
I fear he cannot learn it.
See him with his…
…colored chalks
bending over paper late at night
another candle we can ill afford.
To make matters worse, in addition to the tragedy of their infant daughter, Rose’s death, their perpetual money problems lead eventually to bankruptcy and the loss of their home and belongings, prompting Lucy to lament, in “Ruin”: “Our little daughter, and now our livelihood. / What else…can be torn from us?” This plaint is answered when Audubon leaves home in pursuit of earning money which results in the family’s deepening struggle not only financially, but now with wagging tongues about his absences, expressed in “I Remind Myself About Gossip”:
For his errors… we find ourselves
discredited among people once called friends—
shiftless they name him behind my back
while he is gone to look for work.
Lucy’s usual restraint coupled with her belief in her husband and his art keep her from sharing too often her anxieties with him. But Dowd offers the poem “Audubon Distracted” to illustrate his probable reaction were she to write him again:
Another urgent letter from my wife.
No funds to send her.
…………………………………
It has dawned only gradually how I’ve failed them,
that I must call it that.
Though this serves in part to show readers that Audubon is not completely absorbed in his own aspirations to the dismissal of his family’s suffering, the entry nevertheless ends in such a way as to show he can’t seem to help himself:
Today I’ll seek new students
as I must…
But look, this wing,
………………………..
It needs more contrast…
an apparent indication that he won’t “seek new students” until he finishes his painting.
As it seems the downward spiral will continue and end in total loss, Lucy’s circumstances suddenly change by good news: In “At Beech Woods Plantation, a School” we learn Dr. Provan, a friend, has found her a “position / with a salary and a cottage.” She will teach “music, writing, and comportment” to a family’s daughters and “maybe soon to neighbor girls as well.” Now, independently, she earns enough money to live comfortably and with a sense of security. In addition, it might be said she gains courage to consider a reality to which she has held back giving voice: In “At Dawn Outside My Window,” referring to [their caged] mocking bird,” she asks herself:
Does it tease me with its changing tunes
………………………………
…too confused
to have one of its own?
Perhaps we both are pining…
………………………………..
…for a mate that’s flown.
Her strength shows up again when Audubon writes from England asking her to come and she lets him wonder for awhile what she’ll decide, declaring in “I Will Not Write Tonight”:
…let him swagger
let him have his bright success
and let it keep accounts for him
and share his bed.
Yet the poem’s ending reveals her deeper feelings: “yet somehow / unexpected… / Come for me I write.”
And he does.
Though initially, Lucy can hardly believe her husband has finally arrived, she is nevertheless, overjoyed to see him, and in “Tonight” finds they are indeed “lovers still, / or once again…” even as she wonders, “who are we now, my dear familiar?”
While packing for their journey back to England, though she mourns having to leave her position and her young students, she decides in “Preparing to Leave Beech Grove” to “leave each one with something / in particular to practice…a piece / to polish on her own till someone new arrives to guide her.”
Given the arc of this collection, with its many ups and downs and its focus on the admirable Lucy abiding at home with her children at the mercy of the “unrootedness" of her husband, it’s tempting to give in to feelings of disdain for Audubon. But this is a love story which portrays, in Lucy’s triumph over one obstacle after another, her fortitude in the face of the traditional promise: …for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer… and Dowd handles it with deft precision, offering us enough instances and entries from Audubon’s journal, of his own anxieties as an artist, almost helpless in his drive, as well as his perseverance through the arduousness and length of time it took to have his work finally recognized and published. In the end, Dowd lets us draw our own conclusions.