Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Washington

  Irving

  Washington

  Irving

  THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF

  AMERICA'S FIRST BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Copyright © 2008, 2011 by Brian Jay Jones

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-354-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Barb,

  who told me I could,

  and Madison,

  who wants to

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Gotham (1783–1804)

  2 Traveler (1804–1806)

  3 Salmagundi (1806–1808)

  4 Hoax (1808–1810)

  5 Adrift (1810–1815)

  6 Desperation (1815–1817)

  7 Determination (1817–1818)

  8 Sensation (1819–1821)

  9 Rut (1822–1825)

  10 Workaholic (1826–1829)

  11 Politician (1829–1832)

  12 Frontiersman (1832–1834)

  13 Sunnyside (1834–1842)

  14 Minister (1842–1846)

  15 Icon (1846–1859)

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  Washington Irving was an American original. His life story is the kind on which America was built and thrives: a likable, average man does something no one has ever done before and becomes very, very famous. So famous that women swoon over him and adoring fans hang his picture on their walls. Newspapers track his every move. Politicians want to be associated with him. It's a story you might think you've read and heard countless times before, but this one is differ-ent—because it's the first.

  The first American to earn a living by his pen, Washington Irving was America's first bona fide best-selling author. Unlike writers before him, he had no family wealth or personal estate to sustain him if he simply dabbled or wrote for pleasure. Irving had to write for a living. And write he did, churning out books, reviews, and articles for six decades, working with such regularity that he was sometimes accused of “bookmaking.” Like many of today's best-selling authors, who publish books readers love but critics loathe, Irving wrote for the mass-es—and for profit, not for posterity. The fact that his work sold so well and so quickly surprised even him.

  Consequently, Irving was the nation's first international super-star, even in the most modern sense of the word. He had talent, movie-star good looks, and a charm that endeared him to his audience. He was a friend to presidents and kings, artists and poets; admirers begged for his autograph or a piece of his blotting paper, while writers sought an encouraging word. Were he alive today, he would be a staple of gossip magazines and tabloids, as he frequented plays and operas, and danced and drank with the glitterati.

  For all his success, Irving was a man in perpetual crisis—and here, too, he was an American original, frequently engaging in damage control to protect a carefully cultivated reputation. While the public saw a wealthy, eligible bachelor and gentleman, Irving's private life was often in shambles. Money was a constant concern, as irresponsible family members lost his earnings in a variety of poor investments and ill-advised schemes. He fretted over his health, and suffered from a herpetic condition that periodically laid him up for months. He struggled with writer's block, feuded with publishers, and sulked over criticism. Frustrated in matters of the heart, he never married and was, in all likelihood, a homosexual.

  More than anything, Irving wanted to be loved by readers, cherished by friends and family, and successful in his chosen profession. And while his writing is an important part of his life story, it is only a piece of a larger and more complex portrait. Until now, Irving's body of work has always been better known than the man. A few of his stories and characters are so deeply ingrained in our culture that most people can relate the plot of “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” without ever having read the original stories. Yet even those who have read the stories can rarely identify their author.

  This new biography attempts to shift the focus from Irving's writings to Irving the writer. For this reason, I have deliberately left literary criticism and analysis of his oeuvre in the capable hands of others. Instead, this is the story of the man behind those stories. And what a character he is! Far more intriguing than any one of his literary creations. The Washington Irving in these pages is complicated and conflicted. He is the talented, charming, and easygoing man of letters he projected to the public—but he is also the privately petty, jealous, and lazy malcontent. That conflict was part of his considerable charm.

  An elegant writer in print, Irving was a terrible speller. His letters are a mishmash of misspelled words and poor grammar, and his personal journals, which he believed no one else would read, were even worse. For the most part, I have chosen to leave his words and syntax intact, even in the endnotes, stepping in only when grammar or punctuation interfered with clarity. The words and sentiments, the very story, are Irving's own—the story of an American original.

  Washington

  Irving

  1

  Gotham

  1783–1804

  My beloved island of Manna-hata!

  —Washington Irving, A History of New York, 1809

  WASHINGTON IRVING WAS A DUNCE.

  That was the unfortunate assessment of Mrs. Ann Kil-master, his kindergarten teacher, in 1789. Every day six-year-old Washington Irving was marched from his family's home on William Street around the corner to Mrs. Kilmaster's classroom on Ann Street in New York City. William and Sarah Irving hoped their youngest child would learn to read and perhaps begin to write under Kilmaster's watchful eye, but the young charge only exasperated his instructor.

  As disappointed as Mrs. Kilmaster was, her frustration didn't begin to compare with the wrath of Washington's father. Zealous, hardworking, and utterly humorless, William Irving—the Deacon, as he was known—lorded it over his family of five sons and three daughters ranging in age from twenty-three-year-old William Jr. to six-year-old Washington. A strict Presbyterian, the Deacon tolerated neither idleness nor stupidity.

  Born of solid Scotch stock in the Orkney Islands in 1731, the Deacon had initially earned his living at sea, working on an armed packet in the service of Great Britain. While running slants between England and New York, petty officer Irving met Sarah Sanders, the pretty granddaughter of an upright British clergyman. The two were wed in Plymouth, England, and migrated to New York two years later, arriving in Manhattan on July 18, 1763.1

  By the time of the American Revolution, the Irvings had five children and a moderately successful business dealing mainly in wine, sugar, hardware, and auctioneering. The Deacon and his wife were staunch patriots, and British occupation during the war made New York an increasingly dangerous place for the Irvin
g family. Concerned for their safety, the Irvings fled across the Hudson River to Rahway, New Jersey, and were fired on by British troops. As the war wound down, the family returned to a battle-scarred New York to reestablish the family business. By mid-1782, Sarah Irving was pregnant with their eighth child.

  On the evening of April 3, 1783—the same week New Yorkers learned of the British ceasefire that effectively ended the Revolutionary War—Washington Irving was born in Manhattan. There had never been any doubt as to the child's first name. “Washington's work is ended,” Sarah Irving said to her husband, speaking reverently of the hero of the American Revolution, “and the child shall be named after him.”2

  “The house in which I was born,” Washington Irving remembered as an old man, “was No. 131 William-street, about half-way between John and Fulton streets. Within a very few weeks after my birth the family moved into a house nearly opposite, which my father had recently purchased; it was No. 128…. It had been occupied by the British commissary during the war; the broad arrow was on the street door, and the garden was full of choice fruit-trees, apricots, green-gages, nectarines, etc. It is the first home of which I have any recollection, and there I passed my infancy and boyhood.”3

  The house on William Street was large, but Washington never considered it spacious enough to provide an adequate distance from his father. The Deacon had “small sympathy with the amusements of his children,” Washington's nephew and first biographer Pierre Munro Irving wrote forgivingly years later, “and lost no opportunity of giving their thoughts a serious turn.”4

  There was no room for frivolity in the Irving home. Religion was decidedly tedious; church in the mornings and afternoons, followed by lectures in the evenings at which the Deacon sang the closing hymn with pious tears streaming down his face. The Irving children listened to it all dutifully, but the Deacon's passion never persuaded. Recalling his religious upbringing decades later, Wash-ington's bitterness still lingered: “When I was a child, religion was forced upon me before I could understand or appreciate it. I was made to swallow it whether I would or not, and that too in its most ungracious forms. I was tasked with it; thwarted with it; wearied with it in a thousand harsh and disagreeable ways; until I was disgusted with all its forms and observances.”5

  For the rest of his life, Washington recalled the Deacon and his lessons with derision: “When I was young, I was led to think that somehow or other everything that was pleasant was wicked.”6 Fortunately, there was a compassionate, mitigating presence in the house; his mother, Sarah, who taught him that what was pleasant could also be beautiful.

  While Washington remained understandably skeptical of all things religious, he was nevertheless convinced that his mother was a saint. Apart from protecting him from his disapproving father, Sarah Irving understood that gentleness, even in a man, could be a strength, and she tolerated—perhaps even slyly encouraged—her youngest son's dreamy endeavors. Washington never forgot this; his mother remained both his solace and his inspiration for the rest of his life. “The purest and strongest affection that winds itself round the human heart,” he wrote in his journals years later, “is that between the mother and the son.” The Deacon may have hoped to save Wash-ington's soul, but it was Sarah Irving who salvaged his spirit.

  The abundance of brothers and sisters provided another buffer between the Deacon and his youngest son. All the Irving children were unusually close, despite the spread in their ages, and remained so for the rest of their lives. Washington was especially reverential of his brother William, viewing him as not only his oldest brother but a surrogate—and ideal—father figure.

  New York's economy was thriving, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Federalists and Alexander Hamilton, who argued forcefully that loyalist money was just as vital to the economy as that of their patriot neighbors. While never overtly political, the Deacon, along with sons William and Ebenezer, adhered to the Federalist party line, which catered to the interests of the merchant class. The Deacon's business was moderately prosperous, though the Irvings never became part of the powerful Federalist clique of businessmen that evolved into the New York aristocracy. Neither did another New York merchant, a German music shop owner with an interest in fur named John Jacob Astor. Astor ignored politics and went on to amass a fortune, while the Irvings remained solidly and reliably middle class.

  Despite Astor's indifference, politics were becoming increasingly important in New York—so important, in fact, that following ratification of the Constitution in 1787, the Continental Congress designated New York as the temporary seat of the new American government. On April 23, 1789, as cannons boomed and music swelled, President-elect George Washington arrived in New York for his inauguration.7 A week later, at New York's new Federal Hall, Washington stepped onto the second-floor balcony to take the oath of office. As fireworks lit up the skies above Manhattan that night, six-year-old Washington Irving was among the tens of thousands of dazzled bystanders.

  Irving's Scottish nursemaid, Lizzie, was something of a presidential groupie, following the president doggedly over the next few weeks as he strolled among the shops on Broadway or made his way along the narrow streets to his residence on Cherry Street. Holding Irving aloft on her shoulders every time the president rode past, Lizzie was determined to catch the great man's attention.

  Her perseverance paid off, for she finally cornered him in a shop, where she proudly presented Washington Irving to the bemused president. “Please your Honor,” she appealed in her Scottish burr, “here's a bairn was named after you.”8 To her delight, the father of the nation placed his hand upon Washington's head, bestowing his blessing upon his namesake. Irving never forgot the moment. He recounted the story with little variation for the rest of his life, and as an old man had a small watercolor painting of the episode hanging in his bedroom.

  Apart from his brush with the president, Irving had no memories of the political glitterati—Vice President John Adams, Congressman James Madison, the fiery partisans Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, or Chief Justice John Jay—with whom he and his family mingled in their William Street business. That was largely because the political splendor lasted only a little more than a year. In 1790 the compromise brokered by President Washington and his inner circle that allowed the federal government to assume state debts as part of the new national economy also moved the seat of the national government from New York to Philadelphia. New Yorkers shrugged, and went on making money. Manhattan ceased to be a capital city, but was content to be a city of capital.9

  The Deacon had every reason to be confident about the future, yet his youngest son had just been labeled a dunce by his frazzled kindergarten teacher. The Deacon growled, Sarah Irving made reassuring noises, but Washington escaped Mrs. Kilmaster's classes with a mastery of the alphabet and not much else.10

  His new teacher, Revolutionary War veteran Benjamin Romaine, taught a classroom full of boys and girls in a schoolhouse on Partition Street, still scorched by the fires of the American Revolution. Over the next seven years in Romaine's classroom, Irving learned little more than how to read and write—he was such a dismal student that one fellow classmate later remembered him as “a sluggish and inapt scholar of great diffidence—what teachers call stupid.” Yet Irving and Romaine grew to appreciate each other, recognizing in the other a similar good-natured, easygoing attitude. Romaine teasingly referred to Irving as “the General,” alluding not only to his student's famous namesake but also his seeming inability to tell a lie, so frequently and willingly did Irving admit his role in any mischief or scuffle. He went largely unpunished for his part in any trouble not because he was a teacher's pet but because his delicate stomach made it nearly impossible for him to bear the sight of his classmates being disciplined. Romaine's punishments were somewhat severe, and he was not above a practice known as “horsing,” in which ill-behaved male students were rigorously swatted on their bare backsides. When Romaine exposed the rear ends of the other boys in preparation for th
e whipping, it was all the nauseous Irving could do to stagger miserably out of the classroom with the girls.11

  Outside the classroom, he cultivated his reading skills, paging through newspapers to read about battles, which he and brother John Treat, five years his senior, reenacted in their yard, pelting each other with gravel and fallen fruit. In these clashes, it was John Treat, not Washington, who served as the historian and storyteller. John narrated the details with such gusto—and with such an over-bearing bias toward his own side—that Washington eventually quit playing. It was a lesson in storytelling that Irving wouldn't forget: never let your biases offend your audience.

  Newspapers aside, Irving's tastes tilted toward adventure stories—the nineteenth-century equivalent of comic books and pulp novels. At age ten, he became engrossed in a 1783 translation of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a lengthy epic poem featuring swordfights, quests for maidens, ghosts, and lamenting knights. By eleven, he discovered Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, sparking a lasting fascination with sailors and the navy, as well as marking the beginning of a lifelong love affair with travel.

  Just as appealing to his sense of growing wanderlust was a twenty-volume collection of illustrated travel essays entitled The World Displayed, which Irving found among the otherwise solemn tomes in the Deacon's library. Each pocket-sized volume contained pieces by various writers from around the world, with the editorial assistance of a slumming Samuel Johnson. It was within these pages that Irving first encountered stories of ancient Spain and Mexico, two cultures that enthralled him. Sneaking a small volume out of his father's library at night, he read in bed by candlelight until the flame of his smuggled candle finally sputtered out. “I used to take the little volumes to school with me,” Irving recalled sixty years later, “and read them slyly to the great neglect of my lessons.” Romaine recalled stealing up behind his student and snatching the book from him, but the old soldier gave Irving credit for his choice of literature, asking merely that he refrain from reading the books in his classroom. There were other literary gems in the Deacon's study—it was here that the teenage Irving discovered Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spenser—but The World Displayed made a far larger impact on Irving than would any of those masters.12