Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  To no one's surprise but his, quite the opposite was true. An aging Ebenezer, with a houseful of daughters on Bridge Street, wrapped his arms around his brother and welcomed him into his home. James Renwick, now one of the most esteemed civil engineers in the country, paid his respects, as did the steady James K. Paulding, mourning the recent loss of a child, but otherwise his cheerful self. Former mayor Philip Hone spent several days with Irving, guiding him through the booming city which, in 1832, was contained largely below Houston Street. Hone, who hadn't seen Irving since London in 1821, thought he looked “exceedingly well,” if a bit stout, and rightly believed Irving was “delighted in being once more in his native city.”4 As Irving told Peter:

  I have been absolutely overwhelmed with the welcome and felicitations of my friends. It seems as if all the old standers of the city had called on me; and I am continually in the midst of old associates who, thank God, have borne the wear and tear of seventeen years surprisingly…. This, with the increased beauty, and multiplied conveniences and delights of the city, has rendered my return home wonderfully exciting. I have been in a tumult of enjoyment ever since my arrival; am pleased with everything and everybody, and as happy as mortal being can be.5

  It was fitting that he had been brought ashore by a newsboat, for Washington Irving was all that New York could talk about. “His celebrity has been of a nature so unalloyed and universal,” gushed the New-York Mirror, “that the appearance of the man among us is almost like the coming to life of some of those departed poets and authors whose works enrich our libraries, and whose names are cherished as something sacred and apart from those of the living.” While less effusive in his rhetoric, Hone had to agree. “The return of Geoffrey Crayon has made old times and the associations of early life the leading topics of conversation amongst his friends.”6

  New Yorkers were proud that America's best-known writer was a native son. Irving's New York writings, like Salmagundi and A History of New York, were suddenly topics of conversation again. His portrait was printed—suitable for framing!—and biographical essays appeared in newspapers and literary magazines. Invitations to lavish celebratory dinners in his honor came in from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.7 Irving, embarrassed by the fuss, refused all but one.

  “A number of your townsmen,” began this particular invitation, “impatient to evince to you their feelings of gratification at your return among them, to express the interest they have felt in your career in every period of its encreasing brilliancy, and pay a just tribute to your private worth… beg that you will appoint some day when you will honor them with your company at a public dinner.” The first signature at the bottom belonged to his old friend James Renwick, followed by those of more than forty of New York's most distinguished gentlemen, including Judge Hoffman's son, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Philip Hone, several Ogdens and Livingstons, and a Stuyvesant.

  Irving was both flattered and flustered by the invitation. It was one he could hardly refuse—this was, after all, the hometown crowd. “No sooner does a citizen signalize himself in a conspicuous manner in the service of his country,” Irving's Mustapha had mused in Salmagundi twenty-five years before, “than all the gourmandizers assemble and discharge the national debt of gratitude—by giving him a dinner.” That still held true, but even as Irving penned his acceptance, butterflies fluttered in his stomach. Etiquette required him to make a speech. Chatting in a parlor or over newspapers was one thing; standing before a crowd was another. “I look forward to it [the dinner] with awe,” Irving told Peter, “and shall be heartily glad when it is over.”8

  On the evening of May 30, nearly three hundred elegantly dressed gentlemen filed into the fashionable City Hotel, which John Jacob Astor had built on prime Broadway real estate. They chatted casually until 6:00 P.M., when the doors at the end of the hall opened. The room fell into a momentary hush, then erupted into wild applause and whoops as the president for the evening's event, New York chancellor James Kent, strode into the room armin-arm with Washington Irving. Thirty years prior, Kent had listened to the nineteen-year-old Irving hack and wheeze in the rooms next to him at Ballston Springs and had predicted an early demise. Now he escorted that same gentleman to the center table, beside a beaming Paulding.

  Various toasts were made that evening—to Walter Scott, Peter Irving, the first settlers of New Amsterdam, James Fenimore Cooper, George Washington, and others. There were lengthy speeches describing Irving's life and career, lauding his place in literature, and subtly hinting that the evening's honoree should write more about American themes. But it was Irving everyone had come to hear. As Kent concluded his introductory toast, Irving slowly rose to his feet. The audience roared its approval.

  Irving, paralyzed with stage fright, began to speak in a halting, almost inaudible whisper. He apologized to the crowd. The room rang with encouraging applause, and Irving began anew, this time with more poise. “Mr. President and gentlemen,” he said, “I find myself, after a long absence of seventeen years, surrounded by the friends of my youth…. The manner in which I have been received… has rendered this the proudest, the happiest moment of my life.”

  He looked appreciatively around the room. Besides Paulding, there was his brother John Treat Irving, now a successful and well-respected judge; Gilbert Stuart Newton, his constant companion in London; and sixty-six-year-old and still-sturdy Judge Hoffman. The only person missing was Henry Brevoort—yet he was there, in the faces of every mutual friend in the room. “I fancied myself seated at the table,” Brevoort later told Irving warmly, “mingling with our loyal friends & townsmen in cheering & greeting your long expected return.”9

  Irving was among friends. Perhaps emboldened by the supportive atmosphere in the room, he—who normally guarded his public image very closely—let the mask fall, if only for a moment:

  I have been led, at times, to doubt my standing in the affections of my countrymen. Rumors and suggestions had reached me that absence has impaired their kind feelings—that they considered me alienated in heart from my country. Gentlemen, I was too proud to vindicate myself from such a charge; nor should I have alluded to it at this time, if the warm and affectionate reception I have met with on all sides since my landing… had not proved that my misgivings were groundless.

  It was a sensitive subject for Irving, but he had made a clean breast of things. On his part, all doubts about his countrymen's affections were gone. The crowd murmured its approval—but to anyone in the room who still questioned his patriotism, Irving offered a defiant response: “I am asked how long I mean to remain here? They know but little of my heart or my feelings who can ask me this question. I answer, ‘as long as I live.’” At this, “the roof,” reported the Mirror, “now rung with bravos; handkerchiefs were waved on every side, ‘three cheers’ again and again.” Irving raised his glass in a toast. “Our City!” he proclaimed. “May God continue to prosper it!”10

  The applause was thunderous; Irving was relieved. He had made the dreaded speech, and done a good job of it. “Washington was a little nervous at the prospect of a speech,” Newton recalled later; “but the real feeling of the moment burst forth, and he not only got on well, but with real eloquence.” Reading Irving's comments in the newspapers in Paris, a sympathetic Brevoort likely smiled. “I doubted whether your nerves would carry you through a public speech,” Brevoort hooted at him, “but go to, you are an orator, & now may aspire to the dignity of bourgomaster in Gotham!”11

  His friends’ accolades aside, Irving hoped that he had left himself some wiggle room in his jingoistic vow to remain in the country. “It was from my lips before I was aware of its unqualified extent,” he confessed somewhat embarrassed to Peter. “It is absolutely my intention to make our country my home for the residue of my days… but I shall certainly pay my friends in France, and relations in England, a visit.”12

  At the moment, there was more than enough to entertain him in New York. The city had crept northward up the island—Henry Brevoort's eld
erly father at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street was grouchily complaining about the “encroachment of the city on his domains”—with plenty of hotels, taverns, and coffeehouses where Irving could read the papers or chat with friends. The Battery, grown into a lush park, offered shady walks and a scenic vista from which to watch ships entering the city harbors. Gas lamps, introduced in 1823, lit the streets at night. There was a new Masonic Hall on Pearl Street and several recently opened theaters and dance halls. Broadway was more fashionable than ever, still crammed with well-dressed couples, though gentlemen now wore trousers instead of knee breeches. The population had exploded from the 80,000 of 1815 to nearly half a million. It was overwhelming. “If I had anything to deplore,” Irving reflected later, “it was the improvement of my home. It had outgrown my recollection from its very prosperity, and strangers had crowded into it from every clime, to participate in its overflowing abundance.”13

  New York was interesting, but Irving had business to attend to elsewhere. In early June he traveled to Washington, D.C.—the “splendid steamboats” and railroads now shuttled him from New York to the capital city in two quick days14—to pester the U.S. Department of Treasury about the money he believed he was still owed for his expenses as chargé d'affairs.

  For two weeks Irving dallied in the capital, staying in the home of his former boss, Louis McLane, who was serving in Jackson's reorganized Cabinet as secretary of the treasury, and “in better tone of spirits,” Irving thought, “than he was at London.” He called on Senator Henry Clay, who Irving still liked and admired despite Clay's opposition to Martin Van Buren, and had a friendly meeting at the White House with President Jackson, who was more impressive in person than Irving expected. “I suspect he is as knowing, as I believe he is honest,” Irving wrote admiringly. Jackson, who was a full-blown Irving fan from his correspondence and conversations with Van Buren, chatted casually with the writer about his time in London and hinted at future political appointments. Irving diplomatically waved off such suggestions. “I let him know emphatically that I wished for nothing more,” he told Peter, “that my whole desire was to live among my countrymen, and to follow my usual pursuits. In fact, I am persuaded that my true course is to be master of myself and of my time.”15

  In the meantime, his latest book, The Alhambra, was in book-stalls in New York and Philadelphia, only a month after its publication in London. Like Walter Scott, who couldn't seem to give up writing as the pseudonymous “Author of Waverly” even after being identified, Irving could never resist the urge to appear in his Geoffrey Crayon guise. The Alhambra was published in London under Crayon's name, and attributed in the United States to “The Author of The Sketch Book.” At this point, readers no longer cared if Irving wrote as Geoffrey Crayon, Diedrich Knickerbocker, or Fray Antonio Agapida. If it was by Washington Irving, they bought it. This time, it was worth their money. His last two works, Granada and Companions of Columbus, had resonated with critics but had been regarded with indifference by readers. With The Alhambra, Irving returned to what he did best: short, descriptive, elegant essays.

  A colorful fusion of legend and travelogue, The Alhambra was and still is the most accessible of Irving's Spanish-themed books. Irving had initially pitched it as a Spanish Sketch Book, and that description was still apt; most reviews compared The Alhambra favorably with The Sketch Book. Readers who had waded patiently through Irving's history books applauded this return to lighter fare, and with good reason. Unlike the sometimes forced sentimentality of Bracebridge Hall, Irving's affection for the Alhambra, its people, and its history was genuine, and it shone through in his writing. In one of the most perceptive reviews of the work, the New-York Mirror observed, “His people move, look, and walk, with an individuality and a force only to be produced by the hand of a master. We are there actually, while reading the Alhambra. We see the summit of the Sierra Nivada [sic]; we hear the rills and fountains playing through the palace; we see the moon, pouring her floods of light into every court and hall and ruined decorations.”16

  If American critics viewed The Alhambra through the rose-colored glasses of Irving's triumphant return to the United States, as some claimed, then the British must have been equally taken by Irving's prior residence among them, for the reviews were just as good in England. “Were a lecture to be given on the structure of true poetical prose,” declared the Westminster Review, “nowhere would it be possible to find more luculent examples” than in The Alhambra. Irving's friend Thomas Moore declared that Irving had “added clarity” to the English language.17

  Returning to New York from D.C. in late June, Irving spotted an old friend, the actor Tom Cooper, at the upscale Mansion House Hotel in Philadelphia. Cooper invited him to spend the afternoon at his home in Bristol, where he lived with his wife of twenty years, the former Mary Fairlie. To Irving's delight, the Fascinating Fairlie with whom he had flirted twenty-five years before had lost none of her charm. “She was pale, and thinner than I had expected to find her,” Irving told Peter, “yet still retaining much of her former self. I passed a very agreeable and interesting day there.”18 It was well that he did; Mary died eight months later.

  New York's sweltering July humidity convinced Irving it was time to head upriver toward the shadier climes of the Catskills. He didn't travel alone, however. On board the Havre, Irving had made the acquaintance of Charles Latrobe, a thirty-one-year-old English dilettante, and a young Swiss entrusted to Latrobe's care, twenty-year-old Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales. At the time, the two gentlemen had excitedly expressed a desire to tour America, and Irving now invited them to join him and Paulding on a trip to West Point and the Catskills.

  Boarding a steamboat in New York Harbor, the group arrived at West Point “in about four hours!”19 an impressed Washington reported to Peter. Disembarking at West Point, they were met by a gigantic barge belonging to Irving and Paulding's fellow Lad of Kilkenny, Gouverneur Kemble, who could afford such luxuries. Following the War of 1812, Kemble had founded the West Point Foundry Association, chartered by President Madison to produce cannons, rifles, and other artillery for the U.S. government—and had made a fortune. While Kemble was not as wealthy as Henry Brevoort, his still-considerable income was perhaps somewhat more stable, based as it was almost entirely on government defense contracts.

  Kemble's barge ferried the group to his riverside home, hidden among the trees in a deep cove near Cold Spring Harbor. One of Irving's few close friends who remained unmarried, Kemble had a snug retreat that Irving thought the ideal bachelor's paradise. It was Cockloft Hall all over again.

  After several days, the group traveled upriver into the Catskills. This was Irving's setting for “Rip Van Winkle,” only now it was Irving who rubbed his eyes in awe after a twenty-year absence. Where there had been only trees and brush, now stood an enormous luxury hotel on the edge of a precipice. Irving was too excited about the view from his hotel window to complain about this commercial encroachment into the very mountains he had made famous.

  Upon his return to New York two days later, Irving found the city a virtual ghost town. A cholera scare had sent many New Yorkers fleeing for healthier climates. Irving, who was normally inclined toward hypochondria, scoffed at the “exaggerated alarm” of his fellow Gothamites. Still, it was serious; by mid-August 2,565 New Yorkers were dead. Despite his bluster, Irving left for Boston, and spent four days touring the town with Newton, who was preparing to marry a local girl later that month. As Irving bid farewell to Newton that summer, he could hardly have imagined it was the last time he would see the young painter. Newton returned to London in October 1832. Three years later, suffering from severe mental illness, he died in a Chelsea asylum at the age of forty.

  With the cholera epidemic still raging, Washington and Ebenezer retreated up the Hudson. The two settled in a Tarrytown cottage where their sister Catharine had corralled other family members, including her only surviving daughter, Sarah Sanders Paris—a smart and charming girl of nineteen, who soon became Washin
gton's favorite niece.

  During one of his afternoon strolls, Irving wandered down to the home of his nephew Oscar Irving, William's third son, who lived just within eyesight of the Hudson River. A small parcel of land that lay between Oscar's property and the Hudson caught Washington's attention. It was the old Van Tassell property, which had a run-down farmhouse that had originally been used as a tenant house for Philipsburg Manor just up the river.

  Since his visit to Kemble's cottage at Cold Spring Harbor, Irving had considered building a home of his own. After living most of his adult life as a guest in someone else's house, he was determined to have one of his own, worthy of his fame and large enough to accommodate a regular stream of family and visitors. The house on the Van Tassell property was small and poorly maintained, but the entire property was attractive. It was also for sale.

  Mulling it over, Irving set off on what he thought would be just another quick tour of western New York. After a chance encounter with Latrobe and Pourtales, the three traveled together across Lake Erie to Ashtabula, Ohio, on board the steamboat Niagara. Irving struck up a conversation with Henry Ellsworth, the lead member of President Jackson's Indian Commission, appointed to survey the territories set aside for tribal relocation under the terms of the inauspicious Indian Removal Act of 1830. As part of his official duties, Ellsworth was headed to Cincinnati and to Fort Gibson in Arkansas, where he would rendezvous with the rest of his team. Ellsworth invited Irving along. “The offer,” Washington told Peter, “was too tempting to be resisted: I should have an opportunity of seeing the remnants of those great Indian tribes, which are now about to disappear as independent nations, or to be amalgamated under some new form of government. I should see those fine countries of the ‘far west’ while still in a state of pristine wildness, and behold herds of buffaloes scouring their native prairies, before they are driven beyond the reach of a civilized tourist.”20