Audubon's excellent adventures

John James Audubon: The Making of an American
By Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 514 pp., illustrated, $30

Biographies of extraordinary individuals are inevitably tales of obsession, an excavation that seeks to unearth the foundation of, for example, an artist's singular aesthetic vision or a naturalist's passion for minute observation or an explorer's quest to make known the unknown world. Rarely, of course, do the artifacts of a life make such archeological digging an easy endeavor. It is far less demanding to recount the procession of events that composed a life than to uncover the very engine that set such a procession in motion.

On the first page of his splendid new biography, ''John James Audubon," Richard Rhodes signals his intention to uncover what fueled the artist's ornithological obsession, his quest to locate and draw every species of bird in North America. ''Studying birds," Rhodes writes, ''was how he mastered the world, and himself."

The need for such mastery, Rhodes argues, was the trauma Audubon endured throughout his young life. The illegitimate child of a French naval officer, Audubon was born in 1785 to a young chambermaid on the island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), where the elder Audubon owned a sugar plantation. But Audubon's mother died in his infancy, and he was handed over to another of his father's island mistresses, a mulatto woman with whom the elder Audubon fathered other children. When the Haitian slave revolt began to percolate, Audubon's father took his son, now 6, to France to be raised by his wife. There, another bloody revolution was taking shape, and the young Audubon would witness much of the carnage of the French Revolution, bodies stacked along riverbanks, men and women guillotined in public squares. When Audubon was 18, his father dispatched him to America to avoid conscription in Napoleon's army. He would make his way, his father hoped, as a businessman.

Instead, of course, the young Audubon's fascination with birds transformed him into an artist, naturalist, and explorer and one of the towering figures in his adoptive country's history. Few, if any, of Audubon's biographers have convincingly addressed the psychological foundation of Audubon's fascination with birds, a quest that would eventually result in ''Birds of America," one of the largest and most expensive publishing endeavors ever undertaken and a work not merely of tremendous ornithological value but of exquisite beauty as well. Audubon himself, despite all that he wrote, offered little more than brief and unconvincing anecdotes to explain his life's passion. As a child, he had passed countless happy hours combing the banks of the Loire River in search of feathers and nests and eggs. And he had watched, he asserted, a pet parrot's brutal demise at the hands of another family pet, a monkey.

Rhodes challenges Audubon's memory. The artist refers to himself as an ''infant" in the anecdote, and could the Audubon family actually have kept a full-grown monkey ''in the cold of maritime France?" Rhodes asserts instead that Audubon ''displaces the violence he experienced as a child onto a cherished bird."

It's certainly true that throughout his life Audubon would use his careful study of birds as a means of understanding human as well as avian behavior. His ''Ornithological Biography," the five-volume text Audubon produced to accompany ''Birds of America," is full of wonderfully anthropomorphic descriptions of birds' mating rituals and squabbling and ingenuity and courage. Audubon also possessed a writer's fondness for metaphor, and since birds were what he knew, they provided a ready store of images. ''Hopes," he wrote in his journal in 1820 when he was 35 and still struggling to support his family, ''are shy birds flying at a great distance, seldom reached by the best of guns."

Rhodes offers a full account of Audubon's despair as he failed again and again in business, persuasively suggesting that these failures owed more to the ever-shifting economic winds of the young republic than to any inherent lack of skill or interest Audubon might have displayed. And as we follow Audubon on his excursions through Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, excursions primarily fueled by economic necessity, Rhodes engagingly presents the development both of Audubon's artistic skill and of his conviction that he must fully devote himself to his art. ''I had finally determined to break through all bonds and pursue my ornithological pursuits," Audubon wrote. ''My best friends solemnly regarded me as a madman, and my wife and family alone gave me encouragement."

This devotion led Audubon to combine pastel and watercolor and pencil in his drawings to produce even the finest detail and the most subtle shading. He placed his subjects in their natural settings, engaged in plucking berries from plants or snatching butterflies from the air or grasping carcasses in their talons. But perhaps Audubon's most significant decision was to draw every bird ''life-size" no matter how small or large it was. ''He had more in mind," Rhodes writes, ''than simply scientific illustration: he meant to make art. Art, an older discipline than science, would substitute its reverberant verisimilitude for the life the bird had lost, revivifying it just as he had fantasized in childhood."

Audubon's decision to depict his birds in this manner made publication of his work difficult, and he would eventually set sail for England in order to find a suitable engraver and willing publisher for his work. Here, of course, Audubon's skills as a salesman and entrepreneur served him well, but in the end the success of ''Birds of America" was dependent then, as it remains today, on the sheer magnificence of Audubon's art.

Ambitious, tireless, hounded by doubt and despair, and ultimately triumphant, Audubon is as complex and fascinating a figure as a biographer could hope to encounter, and with ''John James Audubon," Rhodes offers a superb biography that shares its subject's abiding interest in precise and complete representation.