Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  There was another important, albeit fleeting, influence in his life at this time: John Anderson, a thoughtful, artistic young man who was in active pursuit of Irving's sister Catharine throughout 1794 and 1795. Eleven-year-old Washington worshipped the elegant Anderson, who could sketch, paint, play the violin, and talk about literature, philosophy, and the theater. Anderson frequently escorted Catharine—“Kitty,” he called her—on trips to visit her newly married brother William. Washington seemed to always show up just in time to take tea with them, and listened to their conversation late into the evening.

  The young suitor seemed to have a genuine affection for Irving. “Washington Irving spent the afternoon with me,” Anderson wrote in his journal in January 1794. “Gave him some of my drawing books to look over, and presented him with a small one; play on the violin for him. He stayed to tea. Shew'd him the copy of my old journals and let him read a part.”13 It is easy to see why Irving responded so strongly to Anderson—here was someone who encouraged his interests in art, music, and writing.

  Anderson was an unsuccessful suitor—Catharine later spurned his advances and turned her attention to future husband Daniel Paris. But Anderson's influence on Irving was both permanent and prominent. The young man nurtured Irving's love and appreciation for drawing and painting, and encouraged a more active interest in music, though Irving's instrument of choice was the flute, not the violin. Listening to Anderson discuss literature, theater, or current events, Irving absorbed the basics of good conversation. And there were Anderson's journals, in which he laid out his thoughts, dreams, and plans—a habit Irving adopted and maintained for the rest of his life.

  With school growing increasingly tedious, Irving began to wander around and beyond Manhattan. Broadway dead-ended on open fields beyond Reade Street, but new buildings were rapidly being erected around the city, ripe for exploration. When small outbreaks of yellow fever made some areas of the city inaccessible, Irving headed north, picking his way up the Hudson shoreline to hunt, swim, read, and investigate the villages and scenery beyond the city limits.

  Irving was strongly affected by these sojourns into the countryside, remembering them warmly twenty years later:

  As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been committed or a ghost seen. I visited the neighboring villages and added greatly to my stock of knowledge by noting their habits and customs, and conversing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summer's day to the summit of the most distant hill, when I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I inhabited.14

  Watching his youngest son returning alone from his excursions upriver, reading books out on the piers, or listening intently to adult conversation, the Deacon could only shake his head in bafflement. “My father dubbed me the Philosopher,” Irving later recalled, “from my lonely & abstractd habits.” If this nickname was given with affection, Irving scowled that it was completely inappropriate—“I was the least of a philosopher as a boy.”15 Philosopher or not, the solitary existence that so puzzled the Deacon came to an end one afternoon in 1797 in the parlor of William and Julia Irving, where fourteen-year-old Washington was reacquainted with William's brother-in-law, nineteen-year-old Tarrytown native James Kirke Paulding.

  James Paulding and Washington Irving had met years earlier, shortly after the 1793 marriage of Paulding's sister to Washington's oldest brother. That had been, Paulding recalled, merely a “boyish acquaintance.” Four years later, with a job at the United States Loan Office, Paulding had come to the city to stay. While he lived with his brother on Vesey Street, he spent a great deal of time visiting with his sister, where he again encountered Washington Irving. This time, Paulding wrote, the relationship “ripened into a solid friendship.” It was one that would span seven decades.16

  Despite their five-year age difference, the two young men were much alike. Paulding, like Irving, was the eighth and youngest child in an intensely patriotic family. Like the Irvings, the Paulding family had fled their home during the war and had been fired on by British occupiers. And like Irving, Paulding was an introspective boy who turned to books for solace. Poverty limited his access to very few volumes, but he managed to find in his uncle's library Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, which, Paulding said, “possibly gave a direction to my whole life.”17

  A strapping boy and largely self-taught, Paulding was regarded by neighbors as a slouch. “I lived pretty much in a world of my own creating,” he admitted later. “My life at Tarrytown was weary and irksome. The present was a blank and the future almost a void.” Fortunately, his brother stepped in and helped him land both a job and a place to stay in Manhattan.18

  Something of a country bumpkin when he first arrived in the city, Paulding remembered being laughed at for walking down the middle of the street. Nonetheless, he and the urbane Washington Irving were quickly inseparable, and just as quickly discovered they had something else in common: a passion for the theater.

  While attending the theater was easy for nineteen-year-old Paulding, for fourteen-year-old Irving it was no small matter. Unlike the employed Paulding, Irving was still in school; with no source of income, he had to scrape up the cost of admission however he could. When he could finally buy a ticket, he had to leave the performance early, to his annoyance, so he could be home by 9:00 P.M. for the Deacon's evening prayers. Once in bed, however, Irving would sneak out his bedroom window, leap onto the roof of the woodshed, and scramble down to the street to return to the theater in time to catch the afterpiece.19 If caught, he was certain to raise his father's ire to new, awe-inspiring levels, for this was willful defiance of the Deacon, who not only expected his children to remain at home in bed after curfew but also intensely disliked the theater.

  While it is easy to dismiss the Deacon's opposition as pious rhetoric, he did have reason to be concerned—the theater was a rowdy, bawdy, somewhat shady place. The action on stage was frequently drowned out by the audience, as the working class in the pits drank and smoked and talked back to the actors. The more active attendees in the tier of boxes often expressed their dislike for a performance or actor by pelting the stage with rancid fruit or nuts. Meanwhile, in the top balcony, prostitutes openly carried out their business, with the tacit approval of both management and the police.

  For all this, Irving was willing to risk the Deacon's fury. While the offstage activities were entertaining enough, Irving was more absorbed by what took place onstage. He attempted writing a play at this time—nothing of it survives—but more importantly, he quickly became a keen and intelligent critic. For Irving, theater was always a topic he could discuss knowledgeably and tastefully.

  While his evenings were occupied with the excitement of sneaking off to the theater, his days were still spent in the increasing dullness of Romaine's classroom. “Thot of running away & going to sea,” Irving wrote flatly in one of his journals. Such a life, he surmised, offered not only adventure and romance, but also an attractive alternative to being under the Deacon's roof. For weeks, the teenage Irving prepared for life at sea by strictly adhering to what he called a “regimen,” gagging down pieces of salt pork and sleeping on the hardwood floor of his bedroom. Suffice it to say, the call of the sea couldn't compete with such discomforts. “Hated pork,” he recalled matter-of-factly, “and gave it up.”20

  To his surprise, he suddenly had to give up Romaine as well, as the schoolmaster decided to go into business in spring 1797, and closed the doors of his classroom for good. Irving was immediately placed in a “male seminary,” under the baton of Josiah A. Henderson, where Irving sat with college-bound older students, but continually frustrated the efforts of Henderson to teach him Latin, or anything else. Six months later, he was enrolled in Jonathan Fiske's school, where he stayed onl
y until March 1798, at which point the frustrated Fiske began tutoring him privately. On the sly, Irving took lessons in music, dance, drawing, and painting—all activities certain to inspire the Deacon's rage.

  In the summer of 1798, there was a different and more serious kind of wrath to be avoided. Cases of yellow fever had been reported on the docks along the East River, close to the Irving home. Unlike the 1795 outbreak, which had been limited to a few isolated parts of town, this time the fever swept through New York like wildfire. The Irvings made the quick decision to abandon the city altogether, scattering the family among friends and relations upstate.

  That decision likely saved Irving's life. While 1,600 residents were treated at the Quaker estate of Bellevue, some 2,000 New Yorkers—including twenty doctors and poor John Anderson—succumbed to the fever.21 Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Irving was safe with Paulding in Tarrytown, where they explored the eastern shores of the Hudson and hunted squirrels in the woods surrounding a nearby Dutch village called Sleepy Hollow.

  Gable-end stone mansions squatted among gardens full of hollyhocks. Wrens nested in unraveling hats nailed to walnut trees lining the roads. In the afternoons Paulding's grandfather read aloud from his enormous Dutch Bible with gigantic silver clasps. It all appealed strongly to Irving, this throwback to quaint traditions and old styles, a place where “population, manners, and customs, remain fixed.”22

  And there were the old Dutch legends and local ghost stories. Villagers spoke in hushed whispers of the strange cries heard in the woods where the captured British spy John André had been hanged. There was the Woman of the Cliffs, who was seen near the river when a storm was blowing in. Most terrifying was the unnerving “apparition of a figure on horseback without a head.” Irving listened to it all with shuddering relish.23

  When the yellow fever burned itself out in Manhattan, it was time to return to the city—and to regular study sessions at home with Fiske, who was determined to prepare him for admittance to college, despite Irving's best efforts. Unfortunately, like Kilmaster, Romaine, and Henderson before him, Fiske was doomed to frustration and disappointment.

  Irving's last formal teacher, Fiske finally threw up his hands and abandoned his charge in 1799. It was clear Irving was not destined to follow his brothers Peter and John Treat to Columbia University. At the age of sixteen, with his formal schooling completed, he had, by today's standards, little more than an elementary school education. He had learned little science, a smattering of history and geography, and no logic, theology, foreign languages, algebra, or higher math.24 Even in an area of real interest to him—writing—he lacked discipline, with an erratic sense of spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

  Although he was a scribbler as a student, a career as a writer likely never occurred to him. At that time, it was unheard of for anyone to make a living as a full-time, professional author. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine—these gentlemen were lawyers, printers, politicians first, writers second. There was Charles Brockden Brown, a recent New York transplant who dabbled at novel writing, but he was considered more of a magazine writer and editor.

  Considering his options for a career, Irving sought what he believed to be the path of least resistance. The law, he thought, appeared to have both the greatest promise of wealth and security and the least amount of labor-intensive work. Lawyers talked, argued, discussed, and socialized, all habits in line with his natural proclivities. And they weren't slaves to the countinghouse, trade winds, or political embargoes, three masters Irving had watched his father and brothers struggle with as merchants.

  “As I had some quickness of parts I was intended for the Law,” Irving said years later in a somewhat embellished version of events, “which with us in America is the path to honour and preferment—to every thing that is distinguished in public life.”25 This was likely only part of the story. The American Revolution had been fought as much in the courtroom as it had on the battlefield, and Irving had seen civic-minded lawyers like Burr and Hamilton amass fortunes as practicing attorneys. It was also the path his brother John Treat was taking with relative ease, though Irving hardly appreciated that the overachieving John made everything look simple.

  To the bar it was, then. At age sixteen, Irving entered the offices of Henry Masterson to begin his study of the law. Although one son had already taken to the law, it remained a profession that did not meet with the Deacon's approval. Peter had also considered the legal field, but the Deacon's glare had sent him scrambling into medicine instead. In the Deacon's limited worldview, industrious young men in the new economy made money, not arguments. Washington dismissed his father's disapproval; the youngest Irving had long grown used to disappointing the Deacon.

  Better, in the Deacon's eyes, were William Jr. and Ebenezer, who had chosen lives of business and commerce—and the late nineteenth century was certainly a good time for merchants in New York. American neutrality throughout the Napoleonic Wars benefited the economy; between 1795 and 1800, the value of American exports tripled.26 The more well-to-do merchants set up homes on the west side of Manhattan, independent from their businesses, making it one of the most fashionable parts of town. With the influx of new money, lower Broadway became one of the city's wealthiest and most sociable areas.

  Watching the upwardly mobile strolling on Broadway, Irving dreamed of making it big. “My anticipations of success at the Bar,” he wrote, “how I would overwhelm the guilty—uphold the innocent—I would scarcely have changed my anticipation for the fame of Cicero.”27 He may have meant it, but he wasn't willing to do the necessary work to become a Cicero—his study habits hadn't changed a bit. It didn't help that Peter frequently dropped by in the early afternoon to gossip.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Peter Irving was considered the most sociable and literary of the Irvings. He frequented the best drawing rooms and belonged to all the right clubs. He was vice president of the Calliopean Society, one of New York's early literary clubs. William Dunlap, the manager of the Park Theater, spoke highly of him and valued his opinions on acting, costumes, and sets.28

  But Peter's star declined as he succumbed to the indolent habits he now encouraged in his youngest brother. Failing to live up to the promise of his potential—Peter was a doctor in title only; he never practiced—he was likely concerned that his younger brothers might outshine him. While the Irving children were all exceptionally close, brotherly competition always brought out the worst in Peter.

  Peter was not threatened by William Jr. or Ebenezer, who had followed their father into a life of commerce. Younger brothers John Treat and Washington, however, were another matter. When John Treat flirted briefly with the ministry, a move Peter considered a deliberate attempt to curry favor with the Deacon, Peter's contemptuous fury was blistering. “Mind Jack,” he mocked, “you must preach dashing sermons!”29 Such brotherly sarcasm was more than John Treat could bear.

  Washington, who resembled Peter both in looks and temperament, was easier to keep in check. He revered his older brother and sought his approval, so he was easily influenced to adopt Peter's indolent routines. While both had literary ambitions, each struggled, with varying degrees of success, against what Washington called “gentlemanly habits.” The two spent their time together smoking cigars, discussing the theater, and avoiding work.

  It didn't take long for Washington to decide he needed a break from his studies. In 1800, pleading ill health, he convinced his family to send him on a recuperative vacation up the Hudson to Johnstown, where he would stay with his sisters Ann and Catharine and their families. Given its proximity to Albany, Johnstown was considered a cultivated place.30 Irving could barely contain his excitement. Once on the Hudson River, he never looked back.

  As his sloop coursed up the river and into the Highlands, Irving was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the scenery. Nothing ever spoke as loudly to his senses as the grandeur of the Hudson, the Catskills, and the Highlands.

  What a time of intense delight was that first sa
il through the Highlands. I sat on the deck as we slowly tided along at the foot of those stern mountains, and gazed with wonder and admiration at cliffs impending far above me, crowned with forests and eagles sailing and screaming around them; or listened to the unseen stream dashing down precipices; or beheld rock, and tree, and loud, and sky reflected in the glassy stream of the river….

  But of all the scenery of the Hudson, the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. Never shall I forget the effect upon me of the first view of them predominating over a wide extent of country, part wild, woody, and rugged; part softened away into all the graces of cultivation. As we slowly floated along, I lay on the deck and watched them through a long summer's day; undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to approach; at other times to recede; now almost melting into hazy distance, now burnished by the setting sun, until, in the evening, they printed themselves against the glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian landscape.31

  For Irving, there was no God in these regions, but there were plenty of goblins, ogres, witches, and pirates—and at every turn in the river, crew members and passengers traded local legends and ghost stories that sent shivers up his spine.

  Whether this first trip to Johnstown had the desired effect on his physical health, Irving couldn't say—he was far more interested in its energizing effect on his spirit. Just as Walden stirred Henry David Thoreau or the Mississippi moved Mark Twain, the Hudson River would forever be Washington Irving's solace and stimulus: “To me the Hudson is full of storied associations, connected as it is with some of the happiest portions of my life. Each striking feature brings to mind some early adventure or enjoyment; some favorite companion who shared it with me; some fair object, perchance, of youthful admiration.”32