Audubon's "Myself": Anecdotes and Constituent Events

In his short memoir, “Myself,” Audubon assures the reader twice that there are “hundreds of anecdotes” he could share (772, 793). Indeed, he shares a good many anecdotes in this story, but he quickly brushes past most of those hundred (or saves them for another story). This got me thinking about what counts as a mere anecdote and what counts as a constituent event* in Audubon’s life story. Because of my interest in narrative theory, I’m interested in what events get told (and emphasized) and what events get left untold or only briefly mentioned—and why?

Audubon’s first audience in “Myself” is purportedly made up of his two sons, Victor and John, and at first the story does seem like it’s constructed in such a way as to inform these boys about their father’s life—while hopefully exciting and instructing them along the way. The story belongs in the genre of family legend/“how I met your mother” tales. The narrator opens with the constituent events you would expect in a brief family history: a description of each of the narrator’s parents, and an overview of his childhood education. While he makes mention of birds a few times in this first half of his story, these mentions seem to simply to highlight the narrator’s ongoing enjoyment of nature without seeming like central events. What does seem like a central event is the moment when the narrator meets his future wife, the boys’ mother. The style of narration builds suspense: Mr. Bakewell is out, Audubon is shown into a parlor where “only one young lady” sits working by the fire (775). She rises, greets him; they have an awkward conversation; he realizes she’s more beautiful than any of the other girls he’s ever seen; she endeavors to amuse him. And then, the ultimate revelation: “Oh! may god bless her! It was she, my dear sons, who afterward became my beloved wife, and your mother” (775). Here, at least, this seems to be a narrative centered on a young man’s coming of age, a story that will ultimately lead to his sons’ emergence in the world.

But that’s not the story he ends up telling, or at least not the only one. As the narrator progresses through his adult life, sharing tales of travel, encounters with pirates and other scoundrels, and initial attempts to forge a career in industry, he seems to lose interest in the story he originally set out to tell, and family events become passing anecdotes. He brushes over the birth of Victor in one sentence, and he actually forgets to mention his second son’s birth, stopping himself in the middle of a paragraph to say “I have omitted to say that my second son, John Woodhouse, was born under Dr. Rankin’s roof on November 30, 1812” (788). After a brief mention of this son’s early sickness and eventual childhood health, the narrator returns to the action, as if to say, “Where was I?”

In other words, events that seem like they would be constituent events in a story written for the narrator’s sons are turned into passing anecdotes. Towards the end, he admits: “In glancing over these pages, I see that in my hurried and broken manner of laying before you this very imperfect (but perfectly correct) account of my early life I have omitted to tell you that, before the birth of your sister Rosa, a daughter was born at Henderson, who was called, of course, Lucy. Alas! the poor, dear little one was unkindly born, she was always ill and suffering” (793). This passage strikes me as extremely regretful, not only of the daughter’s death but of his neglect of mentioning it until now. Of course his sons would want to hear this chapter in their family history. Audubon’s language, sentimental and nostalgic, seems almost to represent his attempt to make up for his oversight: “your kind and unwearied mother nurse[d] her with all imaginable care, but notwithstanding this loving devotion she died, in the arms which had held her so long, and so tenderly” (793).

But already this family history has gotten away from itself; it has become at least in part a story of the narrator’s struggle with poverty and a story of, despite that poverty, pursuing his real passion. Birds were “the objects of my greatest delight” (785), Audubon writes. I’m not suggesting we judge Audubon for this shift in focus, or blame him for forgetting to mention the births and deaths of his children. It just seems to me that the story he set out to write has changed. He writes most movingly not when he writes about his wife or his children but, I think, when he writes about his passion for birds, especially in the culminating passage where suggests that the woods have become the one setting—and their feathered inhabitants the one kind of company—in which he feels most inclined to worship.

Beth

*H. Porter Abbot’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative defines “constituent events” as those events “central to the forward movement of the story” (188). This is in contrast to “supplementary events”: those events that are not “necessary” to the story—“they seem to be extra” (189). I’ve been talking about anecdotes in a way that considers them as supplementary events. (I’m sure I’ll need to be more precise in my definitions if I write about this further!)