It was taking him longer than he had hoped to complete the new volume; his mind was scattered, and he was having problems keeping track of his own narrative. Yet he never stopped writing, driven onward, he joked grimly, by “my mock admonition to Diedrich Knickerbocker not to idle in his historic wayfaring”: “Is not Time—relentless Time! shaking, with palsied hand, his almost exhausted hour-glass before thee?—hasten then to pursue thy weary task, lest the sands be run ere thou hast finished thy history.” The finger-wagging had its effect; part four of Life of George Washington was published in May 1857. “It has been the most wearing and engrossing task that I have had in the whole course of my literary career,” wrote a spent Irving, “and, had I been aware how it would have enlarged under my hand, I should hardly have ventured at my time of life, to undertake it.”57
The work was nearly finished, but Irving could no longer keep up the pace he had maintained for the past two years. He spent the remaining months of 1857 shuffling through the backlog of mail, fulfilling requests for his autograph, and squashing a rumor that he was planning to write a biography of Kit Carson. Among the pile of letters was one from Sarah Storrow, informing him that she would not be able to visit the United States any time soon. “I now give up the hope of seeing much more of you in this world,” he responded sadly.58
Concerned for his uncle's health, Pierre moved to Sunnyside in early 1858, sleeping in the narrow room upstairs, just off of Washington's bedroom. That winter Washington was suffering from catarrh, a swelling of the mucous membranes that made it difficult for him to breathe, and some nights Pierre lay in the dark listening to his uncle cough in the next room for what seemed like hours at a time. Writing came slowly and only with tremendous effort, and Washington often joked to Pierre that his “harp of a thousand strings” was no longer in tune. “But I cannot complain now if some of the chords should be breaking,” he conceded.59
Irving spent much of the spring in his Voltaire chair on Sunny-side's western piazza, dozing fitfully and rambling on wistfully about old friends, most now long gone: Allston, Burr, Leslie, Newton. Even Matilda Hoffman and Emily Foster did not escape his thoughts. Buried among his most private belongings were Matilda's Bible and her miniature portrait, and the surviving pages of the anguished letter he had written to Emily's mother thirty years earlier.
To Irving's annoyance, Putnam announced the final volume of Life of George Washington for the coming fall without checking with his author first. Putnam was destined for disappointment. Pierre had watched his uncle write for the last few months, and knew his current habits were not conducive to speed. “When in the mood,” Pierre noted, “everything came easy; when not, the devil himself could not make him write.”60
Indeed, by fall—about the time Putnam was hoping to have the book at the printer—Irving confessed to Pierre that he had not been writing much, and he wasn't sure that the little he had written was very good. “I have been spell bound,” he said, “have taken things to pieces, and could not put them together again.”61 He was still bothered by catarrh and by asthma attacks that kept him awake at night gasping for breath. It was no wonder he could scarcely find motivation to “mount his horse,” as he called it, to complete his Washington biography.
His health took a turn for the worse in the middle of October—so much so that newspapers reported Irving had become “dangerously ill.” That wasn't quite true, but for several days he had a fever and his head throbbed incessantly. He admitted that in his eagerness to complete his Life of George Washington, he had over-tasked himself—“the pitcher might have gone once too often to the well,” he said. At this point, it was no longer George Washington or Diedrich Knickerbocker driving him onward; it was Washington Irving's own mortality. “I do not fear death,” Irving said stoically, “but I would like to go down with all sail set.”62 He was determined to finish—and in November, after several weeks of intense work, he passed several completed chapters to Pierre for review.
As Irving worked, his health worsened. After visiting Sunny-side in late December, a concerned Oliver Wendell Holmes sent him a bottle of Whitcomb's Remedy for Asthma along with some medicated cigarettes to help with his cough. Many nights, Irving refused to retire to bed, worried he would be unable to breathe, and asked Pierre to spend the night talking with him in his bedroom. Pierre was worried. “The fluctuation of feeling from one day to another seems incredible,” he wrote.63
There were good days—that Christmas, Irving was “full of fun, humor and anecdote.” Such days were becoming rarer. Irving was growing increasingly terrified of being left alone in his bedroom at night—the “haunted chamber,” he called it—and would either sleep on the sofa in the parlor downstairs, or knock on Pierre's bedroom door in the middle of the night and beg to come in and talk. Despite Washington's deteriorating condition, Pierre thought his uncle was as mentally alert as ever. “He was never more delightful in conversation than during those long evenings,” recalled Pierre.64
In early March, with his face swollen and his nerves shot, Irving completed the final page of the final volume of his Life of George Washington. Pierre took it from there; his uncle let the book go to print without ever seeing the final proofs. “In better health, I could have given more effect to parts,” he said, “but I was afraid to look at the proofs, lest I should get muddling.”65 The work was finished.
On April 3, 1859—a gray, rainy Sunday—Washington Irving turned seventy-six years old. As greetings and bouquets arrived at Sunnyside—“beautiful flowers to a withered old man!” he said—Washington and Pierre sorted through a number of unpublished manuscripts, mostly Spanish tales, still lying at the bottom of a desk drawer. Washington let them be; he was done writing. “Hence-forth,” he vowed, “I give up all further tasking of the pen.” As family gathered around him that afternoon for his birthday dinner, Washington had a violent coughing fit and staggered, gagging, out of the room and up to bed. His nieces sat at the table in stunned silence, tears in their eyes.66
The final volume of Irving's Life of George Washington appeared on May 10, nearly nine months later than Putnam's announced publication date. The wait was worth it. “You have charmingly shown Washington's dislike of state; and you have hit off John Adams's character in perfection at a single touch,” said a letter from historian George Bancroft, who requested an autographed copy.67
Such accolades were routine; Irving had become practically untouchable. As William Preston explained to Irving that May, in the last letter he would write to his friend of more than forty years, “I have often had an enhanced consideration, when it was known that I had been an acquaintance of Washington Irving; for I don't believe that any man, in any country, has ever had a more affectionate admiration for him than that given to you in America. I believe that we have had but one man who is so much in the popular heart.”68 Like the subject of his last book, Washington Irving had achieved the status of icon.
Rumors of Irving's decline continued to circulate in the newspapers. In June a concerned Gouverneur Kemble made the trip from Cold Spring Harbor to check on Irving at Sunnyside. As Irving entered the parlor to greet him, Kemble fumbled for words. “Why, you are looking…” Kemble started.
“Very badly!” Irving laughed.
“But better than I expected to see you!” replied Kemble. The two old friends spent the day together, had dinner, and talked until dark. As Kemble prepared to leave, Irving was choked with emotion. “Good bye and God bless you,” he said to his friend for what he knew would be the last time. As Kemble walked away from Sunny-side, Irving burst into tears.69
His nights were mostly restless. Pierre sat up with his uncle into the early morning hours, talking, reading aloud, or sitting by watchfully as Washington tossed and turned in bed. In the mornings, he was often confused, sometimes uncertain who he was. Yet there was still some of the old spark of Diedrich Knickerbocker behind the tired eyes. One evening Irving sat in the parlor to read, complaining that he couldn't find anything decent in his
library and was thus reduced to reading his favorite author. “What is it?” an intrigued Pierre asked, and Irving held up the book for Pierre to see. It was his own Life of George Washington.70
In early autumn Irving began playing backgammon and whist, a card game similar to bridge, to keep himself awake as long as possible to avoid the horrors of his bedroom. He slept fitfully, coughing through the night, fighting for breath. In the mornings, he awakened groggily, in a nervous sweat, believing he still had a manuscript to finish. His doctor, John C. Peters, was summoned to administer opium in light doses to try to calm him. His nieces tended to his needs lovingly, but were always on the verge of tears. Irving smiled at them reassuringly. “I am getting ready to go,” he said. “I am shutting up my doors and windows.”71
On November 7 Irving was visited by Theodore Tilton, editor of the New York Independent, for what was his final interview with any newspaper or magazine. “He was suffering from asthma, and was muffled against the damp air with a Scotch shawl, wrapped like a great loose scarf around his neck,” Tilton reported, “but as he took his seat in the old armchair, and, despite his hoarseness and troubled chest, began an unexpectedly vivacious conversation, he almost made me forget that I was the guest of an old man long past his ‘threescore years and ten.’” As Tilton stood to leave that afternoon, he caught sight of a painting of Sir Walter Scott surrounded by literary colleagues. “You should write one more book,” Tilton said, motioning toward the canvas, “your reminiscences of those literary friends.” Irving shook his head with a grim smile. “Ah, it is too late now! I shall never take the pen again,” he replied. “I have so entirely given up writing, that even my best friends’ letters lie unanswered. I must have rest. No more books now!”72
Monday, November 28, 1859, dawned clear and unseasonably warm, and Irving awoke in such a good mood that Pierre spent several hours in New York City, leaving his uncle in the care of several nieces. That morning Washington walked slowly out to the little brook on his property—his “Little Mediterranean,” he called it—but returned home glum, suffering from a shortness of breath. Pierre was back at Sunnyside that afternoon to find Washington chatting in the parlor with family, breathing normally, though in somewhat low spirits. As the family sat down to dinner, the last rays of the winter sunset flooded the dining room at Sunnyside, and Irving bubbled with almost childlike excitement about the beauty of the sunset as it twinkled, then faded, on the Hudson.
Irving napped after dinner, and awoke in time for tea and conversation. He was quiet that evening, almost distant, but gamely participated in several hands of whist in the parlor. Pierre watched his uncle warily; he seemed “heavy, and a good deal depressed.” At 10:30 P.M. Washington kissed everyone good night and retired to his upstairs bedroom accompanied by his niece Sarah Irving—Ebenezer's seventh daughter, whom Washington had come to adore as much as the absent Sarah Storrow—who carried the veritable apothecary of medicines Irving needed to take each evening.
Irving stood quietly at the foot of his bed for a moment, as if lost in thought. “Well, I must arrange my pillows for another weary night,” he sighed—and then, so quietly that Sarah could barely hear it, whispered, “You cannot tell how I have suffered. When will this end?” With a sob of pain, he clutched at his left side. Gasping for breath, he clawed for the footboard of his bed as he collapsed heavily on the floor. The sound and Sarah's hysterical screams brought the family scrambling up the stairs to the bedroom. Pierre cradled his uncle's head in his lap, but there was no miraculous revival. At seventy-six years old, Washington Irving had suffered a massive heart attack. He was gone.
News of Irving's death traveled rapidly down the Hudson River. The newly installed telegraph sent the ominous message “Washington Irving is dead!” down the wire to newspapers across the country. “Who is there that the tidings did not touch with profound sorrow?” lamented the Milwaukee Sentinel.73 Flags were lowered to half-staff in New York City, and the mayor and common council approved a formal resolution marking his passing and honoring his life and work.
On December 1 Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow were swathed in black. Mourners stepped off the train platform at Irvington under a black-draped sign, while businesses in Tarrytown shuttered their windows for the day. The courts in New York City closed deferentially, allowing government officials to attend Irving's funeral. At 12:30 P.M., as church bells rang solemnly in New York City, a line of carriages pulled away from Sunnyside, carrying Washington Irving's family, the pallbearers, Dr. Peters, and attending clergymen. Among the eight pallbearers were James Renwick and an emotional Gouverneur Kemble, ready to lay his fellow Lad of Kilkenny to rest.74
The service at the Old Dutch Church in Tarrytown was Episcopal—Irving defied his Presbyterian father to the very end—and at the conclusion of the services, Irving lay, as he had requested, in an open casket. More than a thousand mourners filed past to pay their respects. Irving's casket was then placed in a coach at the head of a procession of 150 carriages, which slowly made its way up the hill toward the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. “It is a thing that lies near my heart,” Irving had once said of the cemetery. “I hope, some day or other, to sleep my last sleep in that favorite resort of my boyhood.”75
A late spell of Indian summer warmed the air that afternoon—an “exquisite” day, Pierre remarked—as hundreds of mourners thronged against the iron fence surrounding Irving's gravesite. As Washington Irving was lowered into the ground, in the spot he had so carefully chosen next to his mother, the sun began to sink in the sky, bathing the Sleepy Hollow hillside in warm, red shadow.
Irving was buried beneath a simple headstone, engraved only with his name and dates of birth and death. There is no epitaph. The shy, private Irving had once again declined to make a public statement. He would leave his legacy for others to discuss and decide.
His friend Longfellow, commemorating Irving in a December 15 speech before the Massachusetts Historical Society, urged his audience to “rejoice in the completeness of his life and labors, which, closing together, have left behind them so sweet a fame, and a memory so precious…. We feel a just pride,” continued Longfellow, “in his renown as an author, not forgetting that, to his other claims upon our gratitude, he adds also that of having been the first to win for our country an honourable name and position in the History of Letters.”76
Irving likely would have been embarrassed by such a statement. He hadn't planned to win recognition and acceptance for American writers, and he certainly hadn't intended to become his country's first man of letters. He had only been trying to earn a living. Fifty years earlier, mourning the death of his seventeen-year-old fiancée and facing certain unemployment, he had rocketed out of seemingly nowhere with a book that had given American readers their first real literature, and provided New Yorkers in particular with the first sense of their own history and a character that embodied their very identity. A decade later, with little money and few prospects, he had tantalized American and British readers with elegant tales of English customs, Christmas traditions, and old New York. His most memorable creations—Diedrich Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman—owed their existence in no small part to financial hardship and need. Washington Irving and his characters became icons. Almost in spite of himself, the middle-class son of a New York merchant became one of the most famous men in the world.
His literary reputation was hard-earned, carefully cultivated, and intensely protected. As he produced elegantly written tales of the American West, Spanish histories, or Dutch legends, Irving had made it all look easy. In truth, it had always been hard work. Writing, while it flowed from his pen gracefully, rarely flowed easily. Inspiration was a struggle, and he had sometimes suffered long, depressing periods of writer's block. Criticism hurt him terribly. He constantly questioned his abilities, and craved the appreciation and affection of his readers. Yet while Irving had often catered to public tastes, he was also intrepid in exposing readers to his own quirky interests in Spa
nish history, Moorish castles, and Islamic prophets.
To Irving's surprise, colleagues, readers, and fans were just as eager for his approval. Politicians, writers, actors, artists, and wannabes of every type clamored to be associated with him. A friend to six presidents, he had danced with Dolley Madison in the White House, consoled Martin Van Buren in London, and flattered a young Queen Isabella in Madrid as John Tyler's minister to Spain. John Jacob Astor tapped him to be his personal biographer. Mary Shelley had a crush on him. Edgar Allan Poe flattered him. Sir Walter Scott loved him. Dickens, Longfellow, and Hawthorne adored him. Even those like James Fenimore Cooper who loathed him gave his work their grudging respect.
Irving was also lucky. He had risen to prominence as an American writer at a time when there were few other writers with whom to compete. While skeptics like Poe argued that critics were inclined to be too forgiving of Irving's limitations simply because he was the country's first bona fide writer, what Poe didn't seem to appreciate was that going first meant going it alone. Unlike Poe, Irving had no preeminent American man of letters to flatter and ask for letters of recommendation; he had to fend for himself. Where he lacked guidance, he had improvised, sometimes spectacularly, pulling off a wondrous literary hoax to launch Knickerbocker, intuitively mastering the complex whims of international copyright to protect Geoffrey Crayon on both sides of the Atlantic, and projecting a confident public image that differed from his shy, uncertain, private self—a feat even Poe couldn't pull off.
Yet to Irving, such things were secondary. Ultimately, he had simply been trying to find his way in the world, making the most of his limited talent, moderate ambition, and enormous personal charm. That he had succeeded beyond his expectations—and those of others—delighted him. But Washington Irving had never set out to write for posterity, as Longfellow might argue. Irving, like Shakespeare, wrote for the masses.
Perhaps the most appropriate epitaph, then, was from his own pen, some forty years earlier, as he was on the cusp of international fame with The Sketch Book:
Washington Irving Page 45
