Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
a long loose coat of yellow nankeen, much the worse of the many rubs it had got in its time and stained all over with the juice of plants … [it] hung loosely about him like a sack. A waistcoat of the same, with enormous pockets, and buttoned up to the chin, reached below over a pair of tight pantaloons … His beard was as long as I have known my own to be during … peregrinations, and his lank black hair hung loosely over his shoulder. His forehead … broad and prominent.
Their meeting was a potentially ghastly slow-motion pileup of awkwardnesses from which they emerged smiling together in perfect good humor. Rafinesque stooped like a peddler under the bundle of dried plants strapped to his back. He walked up to Audubon “with a rapid step” and asked where one could find Audubon, to which Audubon replied, “I am the man.” Rafinesque did a little dance and rubbed his hands. He gave Audubon a letter of introduction from some heavyweight back east, probably John Torrey. Audubon read it and said, “Well, may I see the fish?”
“What fish?”
“This says I’m being sent an odd fish.”
“It seems I am the fish!”
Audubon stammered. Rafinesque only laughed. After that they never quarreled. Indeed, Audubon is the only person on record as ever having actually liked Rafinesque. Both men worked for money in an age of gentlemen herborizers; as children both had been forced by Revolutionary violence to flee happy Francophone homes (Rafinesque’s in Marseilles and Audubon’s in Haiti).
Audubon offered to send his servants for the luggage, but the traveler carried only his “pack of weeds,” or, as Audubon called them elsewhere, “his grasses.” Rafinesque’s other things rode in the unexplained huge pockets and included mainly a notebook bound in oiled leather, linen for pressing plants, and a broad umbrella. He refused to ride the many horses he was offered, saying all botanists ought to walk, to stay close to the earth.
The wreck took his materials and his family and his chance at respectability, but it freed him, too. Things that were not essential—tact, cleanliness, appearance of respectability—peeled away. He became the real Rafinesque only after the wreck. Not that it focused him, so much. The “fatal tendency to scatter” only ever worsened, sadly. Indeed there are those who’d make the whole eight-year Kentucky period coincident with the onset of mental degeneration. And it was:
and his genius grew.
His genius grew as his errors and embarrassments multiplied. That’s what baffles about Rafinesque and always will—he won’t reconcile.
Consider: The Kentucky backwoods are where he gathered most of the material for his masterpiece,
Ichthyologia ohiensis
, rediscovery of which sparked the rehabilitation of Rafinesque’s stature. Yet it was on the same trip that the seeds of his academic shame were sown, for it was then Rafinesque first saw the mounds, the rain-smoothed earthen monuments raised on the landscape by hundreds of generations of Native American builders. “They struck me with astonishment and induced me to study,” Rafinesque says. He notes how swiftly the “earthy remains” were falling to the plow, and would be “obliterated ere long.” There are a few places left in Kentucky, on family farms, where you can see the mounds as Rafinesque did, geometric land sculptures covered with grass, half in the field and half in the forest. He declared it “high time that these monuments should all be accurately surveyed” and undertook the work himself. But the book he produced,
The American Nations,
is an interminable pseudo-scholarly taffy pull of his dream theories on the origin of New World societies, which he contends sprang from a voyage of Mediterranean ur-colonizers, the “Atalantes.” On and on, lineages of chiefs, names, dates, for thousands of years, information that would change everything had Rafinesque actually possessed it, had he not somehow himself been able to sit there and endure the tedium of inventing it.
Not content with farce he descended to forgery, cooking up an entire migration saga for the Lenape Indian tribe. He wrote of having received, in Kentucky, a set of “curiously carved” wooden sticks, the markings on which consumed his thoughts for years, until at last he completed his great decipherment! The sticks themselves had disappeared, tragically. But at least the translation survived. This was the famous
Walam Olum,
which obsessed the pharmaceutical tycoon Eli Lilly his whole adult life and is still taken for real in corners of the scholarly world, though the Lenape scholar David M. Oestreicher definitively revealed it as a hoax in 1994.
There was only one true writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, the Mayan. As it happens, Rafinesque is today considered a “prime mover” in the eventual decipherment of the Mayan glyphs, making him the only thinker ever to have both successfully unlocked the secrets of one ancient language and at least half deviously attempted to counterfeit the existence of another. But it’s the lovely and disorientingly modern poetry yielded up by the
Walam Olum’
s verses, when they are unburdened of scholarly expectation, that deserves honor. The
Walam Olum
is in fact a great mid-twentieth-century American poem, written in the 1820s or early 1830s, and at least half-seriously purporting to date from the dawn of time. It is not a translation but a divination, performed in a state of partial madness by someone for whom English was a fourth or fifth language:
It freezes was there, it snows was there, it is cold was there.
To possess mild coldness and much game, they go to the northerly plain, to hunt cattle they go.
To be strong and to be rich the comers divided into tillers and hunters.
Wikhi-chik
,
Elowi-chik
.
The most strong, the most good, the most holy, the hunters they are.
And the hunters spread themselves, becoming northerlings, easterlings, southerlings, westerlings.
Rafinesque’s virtues are often misplaced in this way. His two-volume
Medical Flora
is in all likelihood literally dangerous from a medical angle (“Dismal, indeed, must be the ‘times,’” reads a sober contemporary review, “that can make an apothecary’s muller of such a learned head”), but the work is filled, too, with sophisticated, rigorous folk anthropology. All along his estimated eight thousand miles of “botanical travels,” Rafinesque consulted Indians, slaves, and poor whites on their practice of herbal and root cures—for snakebite, for cancer. We have yet to mention that his racial theories were as forward-looking as to seem futuristic. It has never been singled out for notice that Rafinesque was the first person ever to deny in print the very existence of race as a meaningful biological idea. “How idle have been the systems and disputes on these colors and on Negroes,” he writes. “It is doubtful even what is a Negro! Since there are presumed Negroes of all colors and hues, with wooly or long and silky hair, ugly and handsome features, &c.” He professed never to have “despised knowledge because imparted by an uncouth mouth.” As a result he preserved much that is precious.
The point is, never listen to him about his own work. He didn’t understand it. He never had time to understand it. His “great poem,”
The World: Or, Instability
, is touchingly inept as poetry, but its long train of self-explanatory endnotes, predating
The Waste Land
by a hundred years, ranks among his finest writings. It’s there he fantasizes about hot-air balloons with sails and steam power and shaped like “a boat or spindle, a fish or a bird.” It’s there he calls for an end to enclosures, a return to the commons. “I hate the sight of fences like the Indians!” he says.
Annals of Kentucky
, the rarest of his books, consists mostly of more Atalantes garbage, but its five-page time-lapse present-tense reenactment of the geological formation of the state of Kentucky is a prose diamond: “The briny ocean covers the whole land of Kentucky … By the operation of submarine volcanoes, the strate of coal, clay and amygdaloid are formed and intermixed … The Cumberland or Wasioto mountains emerge from the sea.” It’s Rafinesque the writer, among all the souls he contained, whom we need to meet. Like Conrad or Isak Dinesen, he made the subtle offness of his foreign inflection serve him in English, finding effects concealed from native speakers. Warning would-be field-workers, he wrote, “You may travel over an unhealthy region or in a sickly season, you may fall sick on the road and become helpless, unless you be very careful.”
Reading this sentence, I remember that Josephine, the “perfid” Sicilian bride, was apparently the last woman with whom Rafinesque shared a bed for longer than an hour, though he outlasted that marriage by twenty-five years and was thirty-two when it ended. He had a strange body. His hips were wide, and he was heavily muscled, though squat. I think maybe naked he looked like Harvey Keitel in
The Piano
, but with a giant forehead, a forehead so large that people in Kentucky couldn’t agree if he was “rather bald” or had “a full suit of hair.” A reporter in Philadelphia during that first, earlier American trip had called him “grotesque.” Audubon’s wife and daughter, at least, had been sweet to him. He became an eccentric uncle in that family. Little misspellings—
drownded, unic, condamned
—give clues to the mustache-twirling stage Frenchness of his accent, which delighted the girls.
By the boat landing, Audubon noticed “some degree of impatience in his request to be allowed at once to see what I had.” Accordingly, “I opened my portfolios and laid them before him.”
Rafinesque gave criticisms, “which were of the greatest advantage to me,” writes Audubon, “for, being well acquainted with books as well as with nature, he was well fitted to give me advice.”
All Americans ought to read, in Audubon’s
Ornithological Biography
, his chapter on their three-week idyll in Hendersonville, in 1818; it’s our Gauguin and Van Gogh, with gentler madness. Audubon writes, “We strolled together in the garden.” They talked and talked, or were silent. They walked in the woods or went river-shelling. Audubon even got Rafinesque to drink brandy, though only by scaring him into arrhythmia, leading him on a snipe hunt in a miles-thick canebrake where it got dark and stormed and a young bear brushed them, and the canes popped in the suffocating humidity like guns, and “the withered particles of leaves and bark attached to the cane stuck to our clothes.” Like scales. Now they were the fishes! Audubon had hunted with Boone and chuckled at such adventures. Rafinesque had shot a bird once. He never got over the “cruelty.” Audubon extended his flask. Wincing, Rafinesque drank, then “emptied his pockets of the fungi, lichens, and mosses which he had thrust into them” and “went on for thirty or forty yards with a better grace.”
Safely home, they sat up over cold meat. “I listened to him with as much delight as Telemachus could have listened to Mentor,” Audubon says. It was hot, and they put the window open; the candle drew bugs. We have, for our still life, Messrs. Rafinesque and Audubon at a table by an open window in the middle of the night in 1818, in Kentucky, a place whose name the inhabitants have for some reason always wanted to mean “dark and bloody ground” but that probably means “meadowland,” and they are joking in a mélange of English and French about bugs on a night of summer weather all central Kentuckians know, of thunderstorms that have given onto an invigorating late humidity. Gazing down on the woods that surround these two like a starless ocean, you’d assume they were the loneliest people on earth, but in fact they’re at rare ease. Inside the cone of their little flame, it’s Paris. Audubon grabs a big beetle and bets it can carry a candlestick on its back. “I should like to see the experiment made, Mr. Audubon”:
It was made, and the insect moved about, dragging its burden so as to make the candlestick change its position as if by magic, until coming upon the edge of the table, it dropped on the floor, took to wing, and made its escape.
Before dawn Audubon woke to uproar. Hurtling through Rafinesque’s door, he found the smaller man leaping naked in the dark, holding the neck of Audubon’s Stradivarius, which he’d bashed to splinters trying to stun small bats. These had come to eat bugs by his still-burning candle. Rafinesque was “convinced they belonged to ‘a new species.’”
A few days later he vanished at evening without a word. He rejoined the ark. “We were perfectly reconciled to his oddities,” Audubon says, “and hoped that his sojourn might be of long duration.”
In ev’ry man we must behold a brother,
A fellow passenger on this sad sphere,
As such must hold him dear.
(From one of Rafinesque’s poems.)
Even the hospitable, large-souled Audubon hadn’t been able to resist a little fun at Rafinesque’s expense—or in Rafinesque’s presence, rather, since the latter remained his entire life indifferent to open mockery, minding only secret conspiracies. For a joke Audubon described imaginary fish to Rafinesque, which the latter in all innocence entered into the ichthyological record; these perplexed Ohio River researchers forever. But it was Rafinesque’s peers in botany who picked on him worst. When he published a paper in the
Western Review
on the different kinds of lightning in Kentucky (the state has fantastic lightning, including a high incidence of “ball lightning,” which my grandfather saw as a boy), the joke among the savants was,
Have you heard? Rafinesque’s found new species of lightning!
With him “all is new! New!” said John Torrey. “He has an opinion that there are no plants common to Europe and America.”