Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Henry Brevoort Jr. could trace his roots back to the early-seventeenth-century Dutch inhabitants of Manhattan. His family had been a staple in New York business for more than 150 years. His ancestors had a knack for purchasing large, valuable tracts of property; the Brevoort family still owned several significant pieces of land in New York, including productive farmland at the base of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Business, as well as an uncanny aptitude for successful speculation, was in Henry's blood. With his family wealth, reputation, and Dutch ancestry, Brevoort was New York royalty.

  Such distinguished ancestry mattered little to Irving when he was introduced to Brevoort on the Montreal frontier, where he was speculating in the fur trade. What Irving saw was a charming, good-looking, smart young man who was adept at the art of conversation. Irving was strongly attracted to such types—it was John Anderson all over again—and the two young men struck up an immediate friendship. It was the beginning of the closest and most intimate relationship of Irving's life.

  By winter Irving's legal obligations dragged at him, but the distraction of the pen was too much to resist. He wrote two more letters for the Morning Chronicle in late December, this time as “Dick Buckram.” Buckram's voice was more refined than Oldstyle's, but not nearly as funny. Buckram lacked zip. If Irving needed fresh material to fuel his pen in earnest, Peter happily provided a new muse: politics.

  In the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr—who had just been unceremoniously dumped from Jefferson's 1804 presidential ticket—was running for governor against Democrat-Republican Morgan Lewis. Peter Irving still toiled away in the pages of the Chronicle, trumpeting the policies of Burr and his allies and tearing into Jefferson's Democrats. Given the Chronicle’s prominence as Burr's primary mouthpiece, it didn't take long for James Cheetham to turn the wrath of his Jeffersonian American Citizen on Peter and the Chronicle.

  Out of nowhere, a new pro-Burr newspaper, the Corrector, leaped to Peter's defense, scolding the Citizen for its “flagitious conduct.” It was a shame that the Corrector had to jump into the fracas at all, sighed its editor Toby Tickler, “but the good of society requires its execution, and it shall be faithfully performed.”52 In truth, the enigmatic Toby Tickler was none other than Peter Irving himself, who had founded the Corrector in March 1804 as yet another cog in Burr's media machine. The Corrector was the harder-hitting of the two pro-Burr newspapers, not only ripping into his enemies but setting him and his allies up for the coming state elections. As editor of both papers, Peter was in the enviable position of attacking his detractors in one paper, then defending himself from counterattack in the other.

  Washington was not a frothing fan of Burr, but he took the attacks on his brother personally, and Cheetham—whom Irving had poked fun at as Oldstyle the year before—always made him particularly angry. So when Peter approached his brother about helping find “persons of wit and genius” to lend their assistance in responding to Cheetham, Washington jumped at the opportunity to bring his own pen to the rapidly escalating fray.

  While Washington had passion, he didn't have a firm grip on the politics; he relied on Peter and others to feed him the information he needed to score the correct political points. “They'd tell me what to write and I'd dash away,”53 he said. The politics might have belonged to the Burrites, but the sting was all Washington Irving. The headline of Irving's first piece read:

  BEWARE OF IMPOSTORS!!

  TWENTY YEARS PRACTICE!!

  JAMES CHEETHAM—QUACK-DOCTOR

  Irving called Cheetham's writings “powerful promoters of sleep; if however, they are taken in too large quantities, they are apt to excite a nausea of the stomach. The patient will find it difficult to swallow them at first, they generally have to be crammed down the throat by force, and the patient beaten over the head with a club called the Citizen, if he refuses to take them.”54 There was nothing subtle in this satire. Irving and other New York journalists did much during the 1804 election to flog Cheetham and his candidates, but it did Burr no good. After an ugly three-day election, Burr lost the governor's race to Morgan Lewis. His political career flaming out—and careening blindly toward his duel with Hamilton later that year—Burr pulled the plug on the Corrector on April 26 after only ten issues. Irving, at the request of William Coleman, wrote a piece for the Evening Post ridiculing a Democratic parade celebrating the Louisiana Purchase, but the effort was no longer entertaining. He put away the pen.

  It didn't matter. Twenty-one-year-old Irving had a reputation, however modest, as a writer and, perhaps just as important in New York circles, as an eligible bachelor. A female fan in Philadelphia cooed that he was “a gentleman of extraordinary merit and literary acquirements, whose head and heart are equally deserving of admiration and esteem.”55 Paulding and other male friends teased him about his relationship with his “mistress,” Maria Hoff-man—hadn't they disappeared into the Canadian wilderness together?—and what they perceived to be an increasing interest in Eliza Ogden.

  But something else pulled Irving's focus from the pen and politics. Despite his jaunt into Canada with no seeming ill effects, the Irving family, especially William and Ebenezer, continued to worry about their youngest brother's health. Something needed to be done not only to strengthen Washington's body, but also to enrich and stimulate his somewhat idle mind. His brothers studied their company ledgers and determined they had adequate funds to bankroll this effort. Washington Irving was going to Europe.

  2

  Traveler

  1804–1806

  For my part I endeavor to take things as they come, with cheerfulness, and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.

  —Washington Irving to William Irving Jr., September 20, 1804

  IT IS WITH DELIGHT we share the world with you,” William Irving told his youngest brother, “and one of our greatest sources of happiness is that fortune is daily putting it in our power thus to add to the comfort and enjoyment of one so very near to us all.”1

  They were generous words. Neither William nor any of the Irving siblings had been to Europe. In the early 1800s, only diplomats, sailors, and the wealthy traveled to Europe—and William, despite his success, was not a rich man. Washington's trip would be a drain on William's purse, yet he financed the trip willingly, with a genuine concern for his brother's well-being. William, whose knowledge and appreciation of Europe had been cultivated by years of reading, instructed Washington on the places and things he expected a cultured young man to experience, but there was no set agenda for Washington's journey. Improvement, both physical and intellectual, was the primary objective.

  On May 19, 1804, twenty-one-year-old Washington Irving stood on a Manhattan pier before the ship Rising States and bade good-bye to his brothers, nervous yet excited at the thought of an extended absence from family. His knees wobbled as he boarded the ship. It was enough to catch the captain's disapproving eye—“There's a chap who will go overboard before we get across,” he is said to have remarked.2

  Watching the steeples of New York disappear beneath the horizon, Irving said, “It seemed as if I had left the world behind me, and was cast among strangers, without a friend, without a protector, sick, solitary and unregarded.” Those feelings quickly dissolved, and Irving proved to be a robust traveler. The trip was “‘a lady's Voyage,’ gentle and mild,” and by the time Rising States docked in Bordeaux, France, and completed its required quarantine, New York was little more than an afterthought; Irving was ready to begin his European adventure. His first obligation, however, was to write William.3

  Irving said that his letters were “the hasty sketches of the ideas that arise… I take no pains either to polish or correct them,” but that wasn't entirely true. He kept meticulous notes in his travel journals, which he used as the basis for much of his correspondence. This involved copying eye-glazing amounts of minutiae—statistics, major imports and exports—directly from travel guides, then incorporating the information into his letters to give
his family the impression he had learned such details on his own. The ruse was a success, but the effort grew tiring and Irving privately admitted that while he felt “duty bound to give histories of my adventures… I detest the long tedious details into which it continually leads me.” He was also careful to report any improvement in his well-being and omit the opposite.4

  Capitalizing on family business connections, Irving roomed with Jean Ferriere, a local merchant and former mayor who lived in an elegant house with a good library. He and his wife spoke only French, so Irving engaged the services of an instructor to teach him the language (“very good,” the locals told him, “but you must take a French mistress also”5). In time, he was conversing in French with moderate fluency.

  Irving found Bordeaux pleasant enough, with good theaters and elegant gentlemen's clubs where he could read newspapers and converse with sympathetic bachelors. But to his disappointment, locals were most interested in discussing business. In fairness, commerce was a serious concern throughout France; the ongoing war with England was making it difficult to earn a living, and Napoleon's maritime policies were putting a crimp on the economy of shipping towns like Bordeaux.

  Despite Napoleon's heavy-handed politics, Irving admitted a grudging respect for the man, who had proclaimed himself emperor of France on May 18. “You may well suppose I am impatient to see this wonderful man, whose life has been a continued series of actions, any one of which would be sufficient to immortalize him,” he wrote admiringly. He never saw Napoleon, but he witnessed firsthand the impact the little emperor's policies were having on his people, and Irving pitied the French for their politicians. Everything the French had obtained, Irving noted sadly, was “gradually stripped from them by a creature of their own creating.”6

  In early August, after several weeks in Bordeaux, he prepared to head south toward Montpellier on the French Mediterranean coast, “with no pilot,” he told William, “but my own discretion.”7His own discretion, however, left much to be desired. When he tried to leave Bordeaux, he ran into problems with his passport, and was forced to navigate the bureaucratic traps to prove his nationality and get his papers in order.

  In 1804 there was no such thing as a passport photo. Instead of sitting for a photograph, as tourists do today, travelers in the early nineteenth century had their descriptions written into their passports. Once a traveler arrived in a province or country, authorities there would check the description against his appearance. Thanks to passport officials in France and Italy, we have a good idea of what Washington Irving looked like at age twenty-one. He was five foot seven, slim, with chestnut hair brushed forward at the temples. He had an aquiline nose, an oval face, a “middling” mouth and forehead, and smoky blue-gray eyes under dark eyebrows. Irving dutifully copied each passport description into his travel journals—and just as today's travelers complain about terrible passport photos, Irving, too, grumbled that his passport descriptions never did him justice.8

  In a letter home, Irving bragged of his self-reliance: “I am to depend upon my own judgment and often to resort to my own resources for assistance and expedient; it will therefore call forth the powers of my mind, oblige me to rely upon my own exertions and I hope tend to forming that manliness and independence of character which it has ever been my ambition to acquire.” In fact, Irving accepted help whenever he could. For his journey to Mont-pellier, he found it in a short, fat windbag from Pennsylvania known simply as “Dr. Henry,” with whom he shared a carriage for the trip. Standing only five-four, Dr. Henry compensated for a lack of height with an enormous ego and even taller tales. He was more swindler than doctor, but Irving nonetheless thought him an ideal companion, “a most amusing character having much talk and a great deal of whim & eccentricity.” He spoke several languages, and Irving noted that the little man took great pleasure in playing a “variety of characters” of different nationalities and occupations. “With a Farmer, he was a Wine merchant,” Irving wrote in his journal, “with a Shoemaker, a Tanner; with an officer, he was formerly a captain in the American army; with others, a professor in one of the German colleges.”9

  While Dr. Henry was a constant source of comic relief, he also personified the Ugly American, arguing with porters, fighting with landlords, and groping young women. His exploits were cringe-inducing, but Irving relied on the diminutive doctor as an interpreter and protector. “While in travel with him,” Irving said, “he continually saved me from imposition & extortion.” They parted ways just before arriving in Montpellier, but not before Irving learned what he thought was a valuable lesson: “In traveling in France, it is absolutely necessary to be quarrelling all the while to keep from being imposed upon.”10

  After several days in the Montpellier heat, Irving attempted to leave for Marseilles, but his efforts were frustrated by more problems with his passport. “I had been continually mistaken on the road for an Englishman,” he sighed to William. Given that the French were presently at war with the English, being regarded as an Englishman was potentially dangerous—especially since French authorities suspected every British traveler as a potential spy. After an unpleasant interview with a French undercover agent—asked what part of America he was from, Irving retorted dryly, “North America”—Irving was permitted to continue to Marseilles without further aggravation.11

  The hassle was worth it. The town was charming, and the weather perfect. If he had any complaints, it was with the surprising abundance of “beggars, shoe blacks, fiddlers & peddlers.” “The shoe blacks,” an amused Irving noted, “thinking to gain our custom by speaking english, run after us in the street with their brushes & blacking crying ‘Monsieur, monsieur, God dam, God dam, son de bish son de bish!’” He was also disappointed by the theater—he found the attire of their ballerinas “immodest.”12

  Apart from ballerinas, Irving had spent a good deal of time observing French women—and after two months in France, he remained, at best, indifferent to their charms. They lacked “that delicacy, that sentiment, that je ne scai quoi, which is common to our American females,” he reported to Peter. He was equally disappointed by their looks. “I have hardly seen a lady since my arrival that I would call handsome,” he told one male friend. While many were well-shaped and attractive from behind, he said, “She turns her face towards me—the charm is broken… I see a wide mouth, small black eyes, cheeks highly rouged and hair greased with antient oil and twisted from the forehead to the chin till it resembles the head dress of a Medusa!”13

  Irving reluctantly abandoned Marseilles in early autumn, and hired a carriage for the three-day ride to Nice, where he planned to stay a few days before making the sprint across the border into Italy. The 120-mile trip wound along bad roads dotted with small taverns that charged exorbitant prices for terrible beds and even worse food—but Irving took it all in stride. “For my part,” he told William proudly, “I try to take things as they come, with cheerfulness, and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.”14

  Catching sight of Nice shimmering on the Mediterranean among fig and olive trees, with the Alps rising just behind it, Irving thought the city perfectly “fruitful picturesque & romantic”—the ideal way to end his tour of France. “I felicitated myself with the idea that nothing remained but to step into a Felucca,” he told William, “& be gently wafted to the classic shore of Italy!”15

  If it had only been that easy. His passport continued to present problems. Compelled to appear before the mayor of Nice, Irving learned that he had been denounced—by whom, he didn't know—as an English spy! The stunned American pled his case, and the sympathetic mayor promised to call off the police, but still required a revised passport before he would allow Irving to leave.

  Rattled, Irving fired off letters to various American officials, including William Lee, the American consul at Bordeaux, and Hall Storm, a family friend who was American vice consul at Genoa. He begged them to “reclaim” him as an American citizen and thundered away in ri
ghteous indignation at his predicament. “Is this the manner an American Citizen is to be treated by a people who pretend an amity for his country,” he fumed, “to be interrupted in the peaceable pursuit of his lawful affairs, subjected to detention & examination of police officers to have the freedom of going from place to place denied him”?16

  A letter from Storm vouching for his nationality provided a momentary glimmer of hope, but the secretary general at Nice, in a bureaucratic runaround, informed Irving that he also needed formal approval from the commissary general of Marseilles. “This is the infamous manner in which I am trifled with by these scoundrels,” Irving seethed.17

  He had been waiting for his papers in Nice for more than a month—“Little did I think of being persuaded by the police to defer my departure & take time to enjoy the climate & prospects of Nice,”18 he wrote sarcastically—when the necessary documents finally arrived. Glowering but victorious, he was off in a felucca the next morning, bound for Italy. On October 20, after three days on a rough sea, he arrived in Genoa.

  He was immediately greeted by Storm, and the twenty-three-year-old vice consul insisted Irving stay with him in one of the Italian palaces. “You cannot conceive the joy the rapture of meeting with a favourite companion in a distant part of the world,” Irving wrote. For the next eight weeks, he and Hall attended the theater and spent most of their time dancing, singing, chatting, and socializing with Genoa's wealthy families. There was Madame Brignoli, who had a small private theater set up in one wing of her villa, and Mrs. Bird, daughter of the British consul, whose home was regularly filled with music and chatty female company. There was Lord Shaftesbury, a wealthy English prisoner of war suffering from a head injury who railed away at visitors as if still on the floor of Parliament. And there were various members of Genoese royalty, “a stupid set of beings without much talents or information,” Irving thought, but who at least provided decent billiards tables and amusing conversation.19