Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  The Adventures of Captain Bonneville was published in London in early May 1837. Six weeks later, after an irritating delay, Lea, Carey & Blanchard published the book in the United States. Despite Bentley's best promotional efforts, Bonneville bombed in the United Kingdom. English readers were tired of Irving and his American subjects, a grim bit of irony given all he had done to convince critics he had never cultivated a British audience. British critics had a field day, taking their shots at Irving and all things American.

  Irving's latest book, sniffed the Literary Gazette, was “more prolific of extraordinary heroism in females, than we were prepared to expect among these savages.” The Monthly Review, while conceding that Irving still wrote with his typical “ease and grace of style,” lamented that he had sunk to “book-making,” and that the seams were showing. Bonneville had “the appearance of affectation” and “the aspect of feebleness.”32

  Perhaps the most condescending review came in the pages of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which bemoaned that Irving “now occupies himself with simpler tasks than the offspring of his own brains, and acts as accoucheur to the teeming memories of the half-smugglers and half-banditti who supply the Indians with brandy and the Europeans with beaver.”33

  American readers and reviewers were more forgiving. The New York Review hailed Irving as “a man of genius” for his ability to elevate “common subjects” to new heights.34 Further testimony to his genius—or, perhaps, his shrewdness—was that he had convinced Lea, Carey & Blanchard to pay him $3,000. It wasn't Astoria money, but it was enough to recover his investment in Bonneville's materials.

  The cottage continued to siphon away his remaining funds. At the end of March he drew on Aspinwall for £500—the entirety of his English profits on Astoria—to maintain and expand his property. By summer 1837 he had extended the boundaries of his farm from ten acres to fifteen, more than enough room for gardens and walking paths.

  His house was quickly becoming a stopping place for friends and fans who trekked to Tarrytown to see the home of America's most famous writer—and Irving, ever mindful of his image, wanted to ensure his cottage was well-stocked and presentable. Despite the regular expense, he had no complaints; he loved his role as ruler of the Roost, and extended open invitations to friends to stay with him. “There will always be a bed for you, and a most hearty welcome,” he told Gouverneur Kemble. To Van Buren he promised “more comfort and quietude of mind than I fear You will experience in the White House.”35

  Irving was in need of the company. In June an increasingly ill Peter left the cottage for Manhattan to be closer to the hospital, leaving Washington alone in Tarrytown. With Bonneville published, he had no literary projects to occupy his time. He read the papers, strolled the woods near his house, and tried to bolster the sagging spirits of Martin Van Buren, whose presidency was bogged down in the economic disaster that had followed on the heels of the Panic of 1837.

  A weakened Second Bank of the United States and the rise of smaller state banks had sparked the land speculation craze in which Irving, Kemble, Pierre, and countless others had been so caught up. Smaller banks that were printing the money and issuing the credit that made such speculation possible actually had no specie—hard cash—on hand. When President Jackson's Specie Circular required all land purchases to be transacted with hard money, many banks were stuck with paper money they couldn't redeem. The resulting panic and crash was the nation's worst economic catastrophe until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Bank failures in New York alone totaled nearly $100 million. The disaster was due more to the policies of Andrew Jackson than to Van Buren's, yet the soured economy and the blame hung heavily around Van Buren's neck for the span of his presidency.36 “Your situation is an arduous one,” Irving told the president sympathetically, “but a good heart and a clear head will I trust carry you safe through any trial… dare to be unpopular rather than to do wrong and your career will eventually be one which history will perpetuate with applause.”37 Not that Irving would stop speculating. Through the autumn and winter of 1837, he and Kemble—now serving in Congress—persisted in their land investment schemes. As the economy continued its downward slide in early 1838, there were whispers in Democratic circles that Irving had abandoned Van Buren—a charge he strenuously denied. “What—cut a President! Turn my back upon a friend when at the height of power!” he sputtered to Kemble only half in jest. “What the plague does he take me for[?]—I always suspected he had no very high idea of my merit as a politician, but I never imagined he could think me capable of so gross a departure from the ways of the political world.”38

  In truth, Irving harbored doubts about politicians in general. Posturing and demagoguery, he thought, were making it impossible to have any meaningful political discourse or identify real solutions to the depressed economy. Irving was a political pragmatist; he believed extremists, no matter which side of the issues they were on, were bad for politics and for people: “I have no relish for puritans either in religion or politics, who are pushing for principles to an extreme, and overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career…. I always distrust the soundness of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow citizens.”39

  Whether because of his political convictions or in spite of them, some Tammany Hall Democrats thought Irving would be an ideal candidate to run for mayor of New York against incumbent Aaron Vail, a defiantly anti-Jacksonian Whig. In March a “full deputation” of delegates approached Irving in Tarrytown to convince him to accept the mayoral nomination. “Of course I declined,” Irving said. “Nothing could induce me to undertake an office for which I feel myself so little fitted.” Months later, he beat back similar demands to run for Congress. “I must run mad first,” Irving said.40

  There was a more serious offer to consider: in late April President Van Buren offered Irving a post in his Cabinet as secretary of the navy. “I believe you possess in an eminent degree those peculiar qualities which should distinguish the head of that Department,” Van Buren wrote, “and the successful and efficient employment of which is so important to this branch of public services.” The president had spoken with Paulding and Kemble, he said, and both had vigorously supported Irving's nomination.41

  Unfortunately, neither of those gentlemen had checked with Irving first. He was flattered, but refused: “It is not so much the duties of the office that I fear, but I shrink from the harsh cares and turmoils of public and political life at Washington, and feel that I am too sensitive to endure the bitter personal hostility, and the slanders and misrepresentations of the press…. I really believe it would take but a short career of public life at Washington to render me mentally and physically a perfect wreck, and to hurry me prematurely into old age.”42

  His decision was likely influenced by a recent loss. On March 15 John Treat had died in New York at the age of fifty-eight. A long-time judge of the Court of Common Pleas, John had a reputation as a workaholic, and the Irving brothers had been worried about his health for some time. “He will keep on until he gets some stroke of ill health,” Washington had fretted to Ebenezer in 1833.43 The family was convinced overwork and stress had hastened John's demise, and with his brother's death still haunting him, Washington was worried a similarly high-profile, high-pressure job might wear him down. Van Buren was disappointed and slightly hurt by Irving's refusal, and offered the job to Paulding, who accepted.

  Peter's deteriorating condition was also a concern, and while Washington remained in his cottage in Tarrytown—again attended by a bevy of nieces—he kept in close touch with Ebenezer in the city for updates on Peter's health. In late June Washington made the trip to New York to spend several days with Peter in what the family was certain were his last days. On the morning of June 27, Peter died.

  Peter's death devastated Washington. More than anyone else, Peter had understood him best. It was Peter who had encouraged him in his first shaky, boyish excursions
into print in the pages of the Morning Chronicle, and who had trudged through obscure reference books in the early stages of A History of New York. Together, they had suffered the embarrassment of bankruptcy in Liverpool, and celebrated Washington's first international success with The Sketch Book. Neither had married. Peter had been Washington's solace and support, and Washington had loved him without question, generously forgiving his faults and shouldering his significant financial burdens.

  Washington sank into grief. The cottage, while brimming with family, seemed empty, and Irving begged Brevoort and Kemble for company. For months Irving simply sat; his own health worsened. To his frustration, even writing was difficult; everything seemed to remind him of Peter: “My literary pursuits have been so often carried on by his side & under his eye, I have been so accustomed to talk over every plan with him and, as it were, to think aloud when in his presence, that I cannot open a book, or take up a paper, or recall a past vein of thought without having him instantly before me, and finding myself completely overcome.”44

  It wasn't until late November that the clouds began to lift. The company of his niece Sarah helped, as did the pleasant autumn weather. By the beginning of December he had started on a new project, a history of Mexico, and was excited by its prospects. The upkeep of his cottage was becoming increasingly expensive, and with his land investments drying up, he hoped his new project would bring steady sales and income. “If I can only have another course of literary exertion, and the public will but continue to receive my writings favorably,” he wrote, “I may be enabled to render all my pecuniary concerns smooth and easy, and to keep the dear little flock around me in a pleasant and happy home.”45

  Unfortunately, Irving wasn't the only writer at work on a Mexican history. So too was historian William Hickling Prescott. Alerted by Joseph Cogswell of the New York Society Library that Prescott had a similar project in the works, Irving was crushed. Graciously, he informed Prescott that he would relinquish the topic to him, and offered to provide any manuscripts or assistance needed to complete his book. Prescott was floored, but grateful, and wrote Irving a lengthy, deferential letter of thanks. “I cannot sufficiently express to you my sense of your courtesy,” wrote Prescott, “which I can very well appreciate, as I know the mortification it would have occasioned me, if, contrary to my expectation, I had found you on the ground.”46

  Irving's disappointment was palpable in his reply to Prescott, yet his deference to the younger historian was sincere. Prescott's earlier writings, Irving told him, “gave me at once an assurance that you were the man to undertake this subject; your letter shews that I was not wrong in this conviction.” Forfeiting the project had serious financial consequences. “I doubt whether Mr. Prescott was aware of the extent of the sacrifice I made,” Washington later confessed to Pierre. “When I gave it up to him, I in a manner gave him up my bread, for I depended upon the profit of it to recruit my waning finances. I had no other subject at hand to supply its place.”47

  Then, like a serendipitous bolt from the blue, came Knickerbocker.

  In February 1839 editor Lewis Gaylord Clark offered Irving an annual salary of $2,000 to contribute regularly to Knickerbocker Magazine. Irving groaned at the idea of returning to magazine work, with its monthly deadlines and space limitations. But he needed the income, and Knickerbocker offered relatively easy money. Unlike at the Analectic, he would have the luxury of leaving the editing to others. He accepted.

  For his debut in the magazine, Irving slid into the comfort zone provided by his Crayon persona and playfully explained his decision to stand before readers in the pages of a magazine instead of in one of his books: “I am tired… of writing volumes… there is too much preparation, arrangement, and parade, in this set form of coming before the public. I am growing too indolent and unambitious for anything that requires labor or display. I have thought, therefore, of securing to myself a snug corner is some periodical work, where I might, as it were, loll at my ease in my elbow chair.”48

  For the first time, Irving placed his two most famous pseudonyms in the same room, staging an encounter between Geoffrey Crayon and Diedrich Knickerbocker at Wolfert's Roost. It was a clever and subtle way of reminding his readers—many of whom hadn't been born when Irving made his appearance as Knickerbocker—of his first work. Irving was creating new histories and back stories for Knickerbocker, Crayon, and their contemporaries.

  Readers were thrilled to have a regular dose of Irving, and Clark was roundly congratulated in the media for the coup he had scored in securing the celebrity author's services. “The content [in Knickerbocker, is excellent,” the New-York Mirror hailed. “How can they be otherwise, when Geoffrey Crayon is among the contributors?” Not everyone was so effusive. One colleague worried that Irving was running out of gas. “Irving is writing away like fury, in the Knickerbocker,” groaned Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “—he had better not; old remnants—odds and ends,—about Sleepy Hollow, and Granada. What a pity.”49

  Such views, however, were in the minority. Irving's popularity and reputation soared. Readers requested his autograph, and his work appeared nationally in other magazines. Sailors on the Hudson River gaped at Wolfert's Roost as they floated past, and Irving was pleased to welcome a number of eminent fans and guests to the cottage, including President Van Buren, who finally accepted Irving's standing invitation to dinner in July 1839.50

  As the nation's first and most famous author, Irving had aspiring writers seek his advice or approval. In October Edgar Allan Poe, behind flattering cover letters, provided Irving with published copies of two of his latest stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson,” hoping for a good review. Irving's tastes in literature were decidedly old-school; he was unequipped to respond to Poe's dark genius. Perhaps out of deference to his friend, Poe's benefactor John P. Kennedy, Irving read both tales, and wrote Poe with his comments. Of the two stories, Irving preferred “William Wilson.” “It is managed in a highly picturesque Style and the Singular and Mysterious interest is well sustained throughout,” he told Poe. “Usher” he thought might be improved “by relieving the style from some of the epithets.”51

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was enough for the shrewd Poe. “I am sure you will be pleased to hear that Washington Irving has addressed me 2 letters, abounding in high passages of compliment in regard to my Tales—passages which he desires me to make public—if I think benefit may be derived,” Poe wrote to Joseph Snodgrass. “Irving's name will afford me a complete triumph over those little critics who would endeavor to put me down by raising hue and cry of exaggeration in style, of Germanism & such twaddle.”52

  Clearly Poe was not above exploiting Irving's reputation to further his own career. While he admired and envied Irving, he thought Irving's talents had always been undeservedly magnified. Publicly, however, Poe was careful to maintain a respectful attitude. A year earlier, he had turned down an offer from American Museum to write a slashing appraisal of Irving's work, but it had been tempting. “It is a theme upon which I would very much like to write, for there is a vast deal to be said upon it,” Poe admitted privately. “Irving is much overrated, and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and surreptitious and adventitious reputation—between what is due to the pioneer solely, and what to the writer.”53

  Though Poe believed otherwise, Irving was a staunch champion of America's maturing literature. Perhaps better than any other American writer, Irving understood from experience that literature was not only an art but a business. Ensuring that it prospered was a matter not merely of encouraging literary men and women to write but also of guaranteeing that their copyrights were protected. “If the copy right law remains in its present state,” Irving told William Prescott, “our native literature will have to struggle with encreasing difficulties. No copy right to protect it in England and an influx of foreign and cheap literature to drown it at home.” In an open letter in the January 1840 issue of Knickerbocker, he publicly
endorsed legislation pending in the U.S. Congress, arguing for strong protection of American copyrights abroad. “For myself, my literary career, as an author, is drawing to a close, and cannot be much affected by any disposition of this question,” he wrote, “but we have a young literature springing up and daily unfolding itself with wonderful energy and luxuriance, which… deserves all its fostering care.” Unfortunately, the copyright legislation did not pass.54

  In early 1840 Irving wrote an impassioned and highly confidential letter to Van Buren, pleading with the president to find a “respectable and reasonably profitable appointment” for Ebenezer, whose business was on the brink of collapse. The financial obligations of caring for Ebenezer and his five daughters, as well as other family members, were becoming more than Washington could sustain, and he confessed to Van Buren that a placement for Ebenezer would help reduce his own financial burden. “My own means… are hampered and locked up so as to produce me no income,” he admitted to the president, “and I have had to depend upon the exercise of my pen, daily growing more and more precarious, to keep the wolf from the door.” If he was unable to find Ebenezer a post, Washington said, “it will be a humiliation that will grind my spirit for the rest of my days.”55

  Irving's investments with Kemble continued to disappoint, and the updates he received from Kemble's agent in the field only confused him in their detail.56 In April, in dire need of money, he renewed his contract with Clark at Knickerbocker, despite being tired of cranking out the miscellaneous letters, essays, and short stories. To his sister Sarah, he confessed that he was worried he might be writing himself out: “God grant me a little longer health and spirit to work, and good will on the part of the public to receive my poor productions, and I will try hard to get once more ahead. I think, as poor Scott said, I have yet a good deal of work in me, though as years gather on, it seems harder than formerly to bring it out.”57