Pierre apologized, and Washington knew he had overreacted; Pierre, after all, was only looking out for his uncle's financial independence. “Tell him not to be uneasy,” he told Pierre's wife reassuringly, and extended an invitation to Pierre to visit him at Sunnyside. “Tell him I promise not to bore him about literary matters when he comes up,” Washington said, “but I want to have a little talk with him about stocks, and rail roads.”9
For all of Washington's gruffness, he knew Pierre was right; money was an issue. The renovations at Sunnyside were nearly complete. He was delighted with the result—“the additions and alterations have turned out beyond my hopes,” he told Sarah—but everything had cost more than he had anticipated. “I am now living at the rate of twice my income,” he admitted, “and until I can get my literary property into productive operations I must continue from day to day to grow gradually poorer.”10
With financial pressure mounting, he still suffered from writer's block. Instead, he tramped around his new farmyard that summer, giving directions to his laborers, and standing for so long that he eventually collapsed with inflamed legs. He retired to Sunny-side's western piazza and sat in his comfortable Voltaire chair, waving at the yachts on the Hudson, dozing over books, and receiving countless guests. “I am a complete rustic,” Irving said of himself in the autumn of 1847. “Live almost entirely at home; have not slept but twice from under my own roof for eight months past…. I am surrounded, however, by my family of nieces, who are like daughters and most affectionate daughters to me.”11
Gradually his motivation returned, and he went back to work on his life of George Washington, immersing himself so completely in the project that even offers to discuss his revised editions with interested publishers were ignored. “I have not time to turn these matters over in my mind,” he told Pierre, and headed for New York City to bury himself in Astor's library.
His week of research and writing at Astor's stretched to two weeks, then a month, then three. The careful balance of work and New York society, he told his niece, “has had a good effect on me in every way. It has rejuvenated me, and given such a healthful tone to my mind and spirits that I have worked with greater alacrity and success.” While his own health was good, Astor's wasn't. “He is very much bowed down and almost helpless,” Irving said. “He speaks so low that it is difficult to hear him.” On the morning of March 29, 1848, John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America, died at the age of eighty-four.12
Irving served as one of Astor's pallbearers, helping lay him to rest in the Trinity Churchyard Cemetery on the west side of Manhattan. Irving was also asked to serve as one of six executors of Astor's will, overseeing the legalities of a fortune that exceeded $20 million. Irving's choice as an executor was based on friendship more than legal ability; out of deference to his late friend, Irving accepted the responsibility—and its generous pay. Up to this point, he had refused any money from Astor; his only profits from Astoria came from sales of the book, not from Astor's wallet. That, however, was literature; this was business—and Irving allowed himself to be paid a professional fee for his legal services, receiving $10,592.66 from Astor's estate, more than a quarter of a million dollars today. Irving kept that figure private, but tongues flapped with rumors—and the loudest voice of all was James Fenimore Cooper's. “To-day, J. J. Astor goes to the tomb,” Cooper snarled. “Irving is an executor, and report says with a legacy of $50,000. What an instinct that man has for gold!”13
Cooper was mistaken, but Irving let him grumble; his affection for Astor was genuine. “I never came under a pecuniary obligation to [Astor] of any kind,” he later wrote. “My intimacy with Mr. A was perfectly independent and disinterested…. He was altogether one of the most remarkable men I have ever known.”14
Irving lost another friend later that spring, this one the dearest of all. On May 17 Henry Brevoort died in New York City at age sixty-six. He was only a year older than Irving.
We can only imagine how Brevoort's death affected Irving. There is not a single letter regarding Brevoort's death, or any correspondence in which Irving recalls his friendship with the man he had adored the most throughout his life. In fact, no correspondence at all exists between the dates of May 5, 1848—perhaps the time Irving learned of Brevoort's failing health—and May 30, a week after Brevoort's funeral at which, we know from Philip Hone's diary, Irving served as a pallbearer. Indeed, the only direct reference we have to Brevoort following Irving's return from Spain in 1846 is an 1848 letter seeking to fill Brevoort's vacant seat on the board of trustees for the Astor Library.15 Given that the 1838 death of his brother Peter had resonated in Washington's letters for years, as had the marriage and subsequent absence of his niece Sarah Storrow, Irving's silence regarding Henry Brevoort is deafening. It is as if any mention of Brevoort had been purged deliberately from Irving's voluminous correspondence—an undeserved fate for an intimacy that spanned five decades.
By the time of Brevoort's death, Irving had been in New York City for nearly five months. His nieces provided regular updates on work at Sunnyside, and to his disappointment, another problem surfaced that he simply couldn't build around or clear away. The Hudson River Railroad had made its way up the east bank of the Hudson, giving New Yorkers a convenient mode of travel from the city to the upper Hudson valley—and it ran right through Irving's riverfront property, less than one hundred yards from his front door. The scenic vista between his house and the river was ruined, as were the silence and solitude. “If the Garden of Eden were now on Earth, they would not hesitate to run a railroad through it,”16
Irving groaned. A portion of his precious riverfront property was filled, tracks were laid, and Irving received a settlement of $3,500. Irving and the railroad had an uneasy relationship. He regularly complained about engineers blowing their train whistles as they pointed out Sunnyside to their passengers, but he had to admit that it made commuting to New York City or to Kemble's place in Cold Spring Harbor much more convenient, especially as the station was only a ten-minute walk from Sunnyside.
Irving was involved in another negotiation that summer, with happier results. On July 26, after four months of intense discussions, he and Putnam signed a contract granting Putnam exclusive rights to all of his works, to be published in a uniform author's revised edition. The agreement was an unusual one for its day, in that Irving received regular royalty payments of 12.5 percent of the retail price of every book sold, with a guarantee of $1,000 the first year, $1,500 the second year, and $2,000 annually in years three through five. That gave Irving at least $8,500 over the next five years, an agreement the financially skittish writer found especially attractive. “I trust,” he wrote with relief, “through my arrangements with my bookseller and further exercise of my pen in completing works now nearly finished, I shall make my income adequate to my support.”17 That was an understatement; over the first few years of his agreement with Putnam, Irving earned about $9,000 annually, roughly a quarter of a million dollars today.
With contract in hand, Irving had to revise his books—a process he didn't relish. Fortunately, he had made significant headway on A History of New York, and was working regularly on several others. On September 1, only six weeks after signing the agreement, Putnam released A History of New York as the first volume of Irving's Author's Revised Editions.
Knickerbocker hadn't been revised since 1829. Irving had mellowed over the intervening two decades, and for the 1848 edition, he thought Diedrich Knickerbocker should do so as well. Out went the anti-Jeffersonian sentiment that had given Knickerbocker his bite and some of his biggest laughs, but which Irving found both dated and out of step with the more gentlemanly reputation he had cultivated in the forty years since Diedrich's first appearance. He had “softened a good deal that was overcharged,” he told Pierre, “had chastened the exaggerated humor of some portions… and tempered the rawness of other parts without losing any of the raciness.” It wasn't quite the same book, but it didn't matter. After six years of being out
of print, a new edition of Diedrich Knickerbocker was available again, and the public devoured it. Critics in particular were delighted with the elegant format. “If any works of our language are worthy of such choice embalming, and such an honored place in all libraries as these volumes are destined to fill,” said one critic, “it is those of Washington Irving.”18
He was a hit all over again; demand sent Knickerbocker back for a second printing in less than six weeks. In the meantime, Putnam had issued the revised edition of The Sketch Book to equal acclaim. If Irving hoped the revised editions would help secure his literary reputation, he needed look no further than the reviews for his most popular work. “Washington Irving's name is uppermost in our thoughts when speaking the claims or recounting the successes of American authorship,” hailed the Evening Post. Another review was more direct: “Few single works have attained a wider influence, or a more enduring fame.” Sales of The Sketch Book exceeded even Putnam's expectations, with 7,000 copies sold within three months.19
From the autumn of 1848 through the spring of 1849, Irving labored at Columbus, Bracebridge Hall, and Astoria almost as fast as Putnam could publish them. Meanwhile, he continued work on his life of George Washington and the Muhammad biography he had shelved in 1831. Making things even more frantic, Astor's will had not only made him an executor of the estate—a task Irving still struggled with—it had also appointed him one of the lead members of the committee overseeing the establishment of the Astor Library. It was all enormously hard work, and Irving was sagging. “I have had more toil of head and fagging of the pen for the last eighteen months than in any other period of my life,” he said, “and have been once or twice fearful my health might become deranged.”20
He put everything aside to devote the summer months almost exclusively to writing a new volume for the Putnam collection, Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography, which Putnam published in August. It wasn't quite a new Irving book—he had expanded a biographical sketch he had written for Galignani in 1825 and revised in 1840—but it was eagerly anticipated and enormously well received. “If there is anybody of whom it could be said that it was his duty to write a Life of Goldsmith, it is Washington Irving,” observed the Christian Review. “None but a man of genial nature should ever attempt to write the Life of Goldsmith: one who knows how much wisdom can be extracted from folly; how much better for the heart it is to trust than to doubt.”21 Geoffrey Crayon, the critics bubbled, had not lost his touch.
Goldsmith’s success, however, came at a price. Irving was exhausted. Putnam, dazzled by the potential profits from another new Irving work within the year, pushed him to complete Mahomet as quickly as possible. Irving had none of it. “I… am not yet in a mood to take up my pen,” he griped to Pierre, “so Mr. Putnam must stay his stomach with Goldsmith a little longer.” Despite his grumbling, he managed to complete the first volume in time for Christmas 1849 sales, and Putnam's instincts proved correct; readers were positively giddy with anticipation for Irving's newest book. “The life of Mohammed by Washington Irving!” exclaimed the United States Magazine. “What visions of delight flood the mind at the thought!”22
The first major biography of the Prophet to be written by an American, Mahomet straddles a fine line between fiction and biography—and some critics were uncertain what to make of it. “As a chapter of history it falls below the dignity and weight of the subject,” wrote the reviewer in the Literary World. “It is painted in water colors, while it should be cast in bronze…. But that Washington Irving should have made it interesting as a Fairy Tale… is a fault of his genius only, and, our readers will agree, a pardonable one.” Irving followed this volume four months later with Mahomet and His Successors, another popular success that met with similar head-scratching from critics. “Mr. Washington Irving is a pleasant writer,” said the Christian Observer, trying its best to remain positive, “but not, we think, a very deep or acute thinker…. We do not think that Islamism is a subject altogether adapted to Mr. Irving's cast of mind.”23
The healthy sales of Mahomet and other volumes of Irving's revised editions did not go unnoticed by John Murray III, who already owned the English rights to most of Irving's work and now expressed an interest in publishing the revised editions in London. There was only one problem: Irving's revised editions were already being published in England, albeit illegally, by Henry Bohn, in cheap, briskly selling volumes. Bohn's shady justification for poaching on Murray's English rights was that Irving was an American citizen, and therefore not entitled to the protection of British copyright law. Murray sued Bohn and, in a unique defense, argued that since Irving was of Scottish heritage, he was therefore an Englishman and entitled to British copyright protection. Murray even offered to pay Irving's way to London to testify in court, an offer the writer gruffly declined, though he provided Murray with a detailed Irving family genealogy to help the publisher make his case. Murray and Bohn eventually settled, with Bohn purchasing a number of Irving's British rights from Murray for 2,000 guineas. That was fine by Irving; he had no financial stake in the squabble. Further, had the story been picked up by the American press, he did not want it to appear that he had claimed to be an Englishman. “I have no idea of compromising my character as a native born and thoroughly loyal American citizen in Seeking to promote my pecuniary interests,” he warned Murray.24
By 1850 Putnam had published most of Irving's literary catalog. The Alhambra and Granada were the only remaining titles to be released, but after the rapid pace of 1849—when Putnam was releasing the revised editions as quickly as one book a month—Irving was exhausted. “I don't think in the whole course of my literary career I have been such a slave to the pen as for the last eighteen months,” he wrote in February. As he feared, his health weakened, and he spent the spring and early summer months trying to shake a fever that left him racked with chills and unable to sleep. For a moment, he feared he might not recover and made out his will. Then, slowly, he regained his strength. “I find I do not rally from any attack of the kind so Speedily as I used to do,” he told Sarah apologetically. The revised editions were put aside, and Irving devoted the rest of the year to catching up with loved ones.25
Still, finding the time to write letters was difficult. There were lengthy communications from family, friends, and colleagues, but Irving's fame also brought a new kind of correspondence that required his attention: fan mail. As the nation's most famous author, he received bundles of mail from admiring readers, as well as countless manuscripts from published and unpublished writers, each begging for a word of encouragement—or, at the very least, an autograph. “Every letter to be answered is a trifle,” he explained wearily “but your life in this way is exhausted in trifles.”26
For all his complaints, Irving was serious about his correspondence. Many of his letters of 1851 open with an apology for the delay in his response, but he made a point of answering them all as quickly as he could, scrawling thank-you notes, short comments, or words of encouragement to almost every aspiring poet, playwright, and novelist who sent their work. It was then only fitting that Harper's New Monthly dubbed Irving, “The patriarch of American Letters” in its April 1851 issue.
Irving eased back into writing that spring, and the revised editions of The Alhambra and Granada finally made their way into print in the summer of 1851. Putnam's volumes were continuing to earn a small fortune for both publisher and author, but Irving was coming to regard them as a distraction. What he really wanted to do was focus on his George Washington biography. For much of the summer, he remained at Sunnyside, poring over copies of Washing-ton's letters and papers, writing steadily and almost merrily. “I am always happiest when I have a considerable part of my time thus employed,” he told Sarah, “and feel reason to be thankful that my intellectual powers continue capable of being so tasked.”27
His solace was interrupted in mid-September by the death of James Fenimore Cooper. “A shock,” Irving said, “for it seems but the other day that I saw him at our common literary
resort at Putnam's… apparently destined to outlive me, who am several years his senior.” Despite their strained relations—which Irving always insisted was all on Cooper's side—Irving remained a fan of Cooper's writing. “His works form an invaluable part of our literature,” he told Lewis Gaylord Clark. “When an author is living, he is apt to be judged by his last works…. When an author is dead, he is judged by his best works, and those of Cooper excited enthusiasm at home and applause throughout the world.” Irving, whom Cooper had labeled a “double dealer” and “below the ordinary level, in moral qualities,” graciously agreed to serve as the head of the committee that prepared a memorial and dinner in Cooper's honor.28
Delays postponed the Cooper dinner until February 1852, when the event finally took place at Metropolitan Hall in New York, with Irving serving as cochairman alongside William Cullen Bryant and Daniel Webster. Irving was the first to speak and, typically, stumbled through his remarks—“the pangs of delivery were awful,” he admitted.29 He finally turned over the floor to Bryant, who spoke at length on Cooper's life and works, raising eyebrows only when he mentioned “an unhappy coolness that had existed” between Irving and Cooper. That was a story Irving hoped to keep out of the newspapers.
There was no such animosity, either real or imagined, between Irving and another popular American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Irving knew Hawthorne largely through his work—the two had never met—and admired both the man and his books enormously. After receiving an advance copy of The Wonder Book from Hawthorne in early 1852, Irving sent his colleague a genuinely appreciative note. “I prize it as the right hand of fellowship extended to me by one whose friendship I am proud and happy to make,” he wrote, “and whose writings I have regarded with admiration as among the very best that have ever issued from the American press.”30
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