Hi Everyone,
I was recently asked to provide an essay on why I wrote my new historical novel, The Audubon Affair, for a literary prize entry. What follows is a shortened version. Yes, the manuscript is out, entered for two literary prizes and finding its way into the hands of interested agents/publishers. If you have ideas re agents or publishers, I am all ears. But first, a few quotes from the authors whose work I used as background research for The Audubon Affair:
“In pliable, precise prose, Hauser’s novel vividly brings to life the wildness of early America, the artist who captured it like no one before or after him, and the smart and resilient woman who married him and found herself thrown into a violent life on the frontier. Hauser takes Audubon’s Haitian roots seriously and lets them guide her creative reimagination of his mesmerizing life.”
Christoph Irmscher, Author & Critic (christophirmscher.com)
“Marlene Hauser’s moving novel vividly illustrates America’s first catastrophic economic depression through the misadventures of Jean-Jacques and Lucy Audubon.”
Andrew Browning, The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression
“The Audubon Affair is a beautifully written escorted tour around the frontier of America and its effect on Audubon and his English born wife Lucy. Her character takes over as she accumulates the strength required to deal with unrealised hopes and mañana dreams. The wish that his flawed genius will save the day ties the reader emotionally to this wonderfully told, and well-researched, story. Highly recommended.”
David Roche, Non Exec Chair, London Book Fair, Chair, Libraro Publishing Ltd, & Ambassador and Senior Advisor, PEN International
So, why I wrote The Audubon Affair:
The Audubon Affair originated from my first sight of Audubon’s 1831 American Egret at the New York Historical Society circa 1982. This male bird set in mating plumage against a night sky caught my attention, its beauty, its struggle (did the artist really need to break the bird’s neck to fit the page?), its mystery: who was this John James Audubon and who was Lucy Bakewell Audubon, his meek and mild, long-suffering wife who showed up as a footnote?
As I had just come off the success of the TV film Under the Influence, and I tended (having also just finished studying fiction and film at Columbia University in New York) to dream in three-act dramatic structure, the Audubon story presented itself whole: Act One, two young immigrants arrive separately in America, one British and the other supposedly French, end up neighbours, fall in love at first sight, then happily marry; Act Two, after many trials and tribulations on the American Frontier, including the disastrous Panic of 1819, once-wealthy husband and wife with two sons in tow end up bankrupt, destitute, with only one glimmer of hope—his absurdly captivating ability to render birds as no one ever has before or after; Act Three, husband and wife rise up, see ‘the birds’ as a way forward and after many twists and turns, The Birds of America (one of the world’s most valuable books and greatest art treasures) is born.
Having grown up in Normandy, Panama and Arkansas, with family in Pennsylvania, the actual locales of this story had deep resonance for me. After studying Audubon’s work, I was touched by what appeared to be a Caribbean influence, and was unsurprised to learn he was not born in France but in Haiti (Saint-Domingue), leaving on or about the time of the Haitian Revolution to meet his father in France, which added a whole new spin to the story (never mind a mother of uncertain origin). I was further intrigued when I learned that his most powerful and authentic work came about during his stay in Louisiana (the northernmost reach of the Caribbean). I think Audubon at that time had come home to himself, to his Caribbean influence, in Louisiana, as in a sense all artists must eventually come ‘home’ to their own true self.
Lucy caught my fancy straight away as I felt powerfully that history had whitewashed her. I write this because after living in England for twenty-five years I have almost without exception never met an Englishwoman who was a long-suffering, shrinking violet. After learning of John James Audubon’s chaotic and traumatic upbringing, I was clear that Lucy Bakewell Audubon had to have been the spine of the family, the making of this man and ‘his’ book.
Originally I had planned The Audubon Affair as a film with myself playing the part of Lucy, and started down that path. I originated the synopsis, drafted a budget, found a conduit for the funds, the West Feliciana Historical Society, and read the one biography of Lucy Bakewell by the late Carolyn DeLatte. Subsequently, in 1985 I played the role of Lucy for the 200th anniversary of Audubon’s birth at his home in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. But when the reality of raising a full budget hit home, as one who refuses debt, I shelved The Audubon Affair. ‘In the future’ became my mantra.
Although I married, got an MBA in Finance and adopted my son, The Audubon Affair continued to raise its gorgeous head, especially in the form of an egret—not necessarily American or white or at night, but it showed up on bread wrappers, works of art, fountains in the middle of London, and when I finally decided, ‘Okay, back to The Audubon Affair,’ an egret showed up on the deck of my garden backing onto the Oxford canal.
So in or around 2021 I began work in earnest on The Audubon Affair, this time as a novel. In the intervening years other writers and researchers had made further enquiries into John James Audubon’s origins and a nude he painted entitled The Fair Incognito in New Orleans during his lean years before Lucy and his sons arrived.
Delving back into The Audubon Affair became more complicated as so much more information seemed to exist, most of it conflicting. While I read widely, I settled on two articles by Christoph Irmscher, The Panic of 1819 by Andrew Browning, the Lucy Audubon biography by Carolyn DeLatte, Audubon’s Journal made during his trip to New Orleans in 1820–21 and the two-volume biography Audubon the Naturalist by Francis Herrick—very difficult to find and arriving with its own Tawny Owl feather bookmark. I liked this work as it was written in 1917, closer to the source so to speak, especially as Lucy’s and John James’s diaries had been destroyed or sanitised to preserve the family’s reputation.
While it may seem clichéd to say so, The Audubon Affair seemed to write itself (especially when the odd ‘he’ often surfaced as ‘I’) and this author was lucky enough to be along for the ride.
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Hopefully, the book will make it into your hands in the not too distant future. Thank you for your many kindnesses over the last several years.
Love,
Marlene
Photo by Terry L. Ladue. Thomas Armstrong and Marlene Hauser, 1985