It was with a heavy heart that Irving made the trip back to Manhattan and returned to Masterson's law offices. His time there was unremarkable; the only surviving documents attesting to his abilities as an attorney show his signature as a witness.33 In the summer of 1801 Irving left Masterson for the law offices of the well-connected Henry Brockholst Livingston.
An outspoken attorney of pro-agrarian Jeffersonian politics, Livingston had survived an assassination attempt and had killed in a duel an angry Federalist who had punched him in the nose. Livingston was an amusing mentor, but Irving didn't have the opportunity to study under him for long. In January 1802, in gratitude for Livingston's efforts in the 1800 elections, President Jefferson appointed him to the New York Supreme Court.
Scrambling for a new post, Irving became a clerk to Josiah Ogden Hoffman, who had just resigned as New York's Federalist attorney general. It was a fortunate placement for he, but it wasn't Hoffman's professional guidance to which he responded so well; rather, it was to Hoffman himself, and especially to Hoffman's new young wife, Maria, and their four children.
Hoffman—whom everyone courteously referred to as “the Judge”—was one of New York's most gifted and respected attorneys. He was ambitious, but his success was partly due to marrying well. In 1789 he had married Mary Colden, of one of New York's most prominent political families.34 Mary died in February 1797, leaving the Judge a widower at the age of thirty-one, with three young daughters and a son to care for. In August 1802 Hoffman married Maria Fenno, a vivacious twenty-one-year-old who, like Mary Colden, came from a formidable political family. Her father, journalist John Fenno, was an active and vocal Federalist who had established the anti-Jeffersonian Gazette of the United States with Alexander Hamilton in 1789.
The newlywed Hoffmans settled on Greenwich Street, and the Judge's young clerk immediately became a regular in their household. Irving admired Hoffman's connections and the ease with which he talked politics, and looked to him as a kind of surrogate father, with a smart but not too stern demeanor that—unlike the Deacon's—persuaded rather than intimidated. He also fell in easily with the Judge's four children—Alice Anna, the energetic eldest whom everyone called Ann; quiet Sarah, who went by her middle name of Matilda; Ogden, the only boy; and Mary, who was named after her biological mother. But it was Maria Hoffman who kept him coming back.
In his letters, Irving always called her “my dear friend,” never the overly familiar “Maria.” While their closeness in age and the amount of time Irving spent alone with her in the Judge's house may raise modern eyebrows, there is no indication that their relationship was ever inappropriate—Irving was far too respectful of Mrs. Hoffman, and the Judge likely would have destroyed Irving if anything improper had occurred. “She was like a sister to me,”35 Irving said, and the two regularly enjoyed each other's company and correspondence. It was the first of many close relationships Irving would have with older (albeit in Maria's case, it was only by two years) nurturing, motherly women.
When it came to work, Irving was still a dawdler. In the summer of 1802, overplaying an illness, he convinced his employer and his family that he needed another retreat to Johnstown and the recuperative spas at Ballston Springs.
He reached his sister Catharine in Johnstown, traveling in relative ease by wagon along the turnpike, “but I was so weak,” Irving wrote, “that it was several days before I got over the fatigue.” Like an errant employee who makes certain to cough when he calls in sick, Irving reported, “I have had a little better appetite since I have been up here, though I have been troubled with the pain in my breast almost constantly, and still have a cough at night. I am unable to take any exercise worth mentioning, and doze away my time pretty much as I did in New York…. However,” he wrote with a near-audible sniffle, “I hope soon to get in a better trim.”36
Irving traveled with his brother-in-law Daniel Paris to the spas at Ballston Springs, where his hacking cough was heard through the walls of their hotel. New York Supreme Court justice James Kent asked incredulously if it was really “young Irving who slept in the next room to me, and kept up such an incessant cough during the night?” When told that it was, Kent could only add in disbelief, “He is not long for this world.”37
Suitably recovered, Irving was back in New York by autumn, sorting through the onion-skinned volumes in Hoffman's chambers, gossiping with Peter, and listening to the Judge and his colleagues discuss politics—especially the rise of that Federalist in Democrat-Republican clothing, the crafty New Yorker Aaron Burr.
After losing his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1797, Burr went on to wield considerable power in the New York state legislature, and helped steer all thirteen of New York City's seats to the Democrat-Republicans. “We have beat you by superior Management,”38 Burr told defeated but impressed Federalist colleagues. It came as little surprise when the Democrat-Republicans nominated Burr to their 1800 presidential ticket with Thomas Jefferson.
The messy victory of the Jefferson-Burr ticket in 1801 helped sweep Federalists out of a number of key offices around the nation. As Jefferson's Democrat-Republicans worked to consolidate their power through changes in voting practices, the battered remnants of Hamilton's Federalists were screaming as loudly as they could from the sidelines. The war quickly, and typically, spread to rival newspapers. Political journalist James Cheetham carried the Democrat-Republican banner in his American Citizen, while Hamilton helped William Coleman establish the New York Evening Post as the Feder-alist's journalistic home base. Trying to walk the fine line between the two was the Morning Chronicle, a small daily newspaper established somewhat on the sly by Aaron Burr in October 1802, which was managed and edited by someone Burr considered literary as well as loyal: Peter Irving.
It was possible to be both a Federalist and a Burrite—the Irving brothers certainly were, as was Hoffman, who recognized Burr's Federalist tendencies, even if he didn't necessarily trust him. In one of the Chronicle’s first issues, Peter wrote that he hoped the Chronicle could make its way in “a world of turmoil and vexation” as “a fair and independent newspaper.” With political tensions mounting, however, it didn't take long before the Chronicle’s political cannon fired at both the Citizen and the Post. While Peter claimed to be staking the middle ground, his self-proclaimed “fair and independent” commentary was blistering. Martin Van Buren, who knew a thing or two about smear campaigns, later remembered the Chronicle as “a stinging little sheet.” It was within its pages that editor Peter Irving's nineteen-year-old brother Washington made his literary debut.39
“If the observations of an odd old fellow are not wholly super-fluous,” began a letter in the November 15, 1802, edition of the Morning Chronicle, “I would thank you to shove them into a spare corner of your paper.” With this, Washington Irving, in his first published writing, proceeded to poke fun at the current trends in dress and fashion, training most of his criticism on young men and their “most studied carelessness, and almost slovenliness of dress,” who are more interested in themselves than their unfortunate ladies who “undergo the fatigue of dragging along this sluggish animal.” A second letter followed five days later, this time about the “strange and preposterous… manner in which modern marriages are conducted.” The signature appearing in all capital letters at the end of each piece was not “Washington Irving,” but the first of many pseudonyms Irving adopted throughout his literary life: “Jonathan Oldstyle.”40
Irving wasn't doing anything new by writing under an assumed name. He was working in a tradition—an “old style”—that traced its roots in America as far back as the 1720s, when a young printer's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin had written similar letters to the New-England Courant under the name Silence Dogood. It is revealing that in his first published appearance Irving not only found comfort in a form of writing that was going out of fashion, but also adopted the persona of a wealthy, older gentleman bachelor. While the persona was a lark, it had a whiff of truth about it, for a well-heele
d gentleman was exactly what Irving aspired to be. For this reason, Oldstyle's personality is sometimes difficult to pry away from Irving's own. While he attempted to write in an older, more experienced tone, there is too much whim and too little worldliness in Oldstyle's voice for the act to be entirely convincing.
Why adopt the pseudonym at all? Not privacy, for it was commonly known around New York that Irving was Oldstyle. Some have suggested that Irving, at nineteen, was uncomfortable speaking publicly in his own voice. Others have argued that his decision to combine the uncouth American first name of Jonathan with the more refined last name of Oldstyle was an intentional exercise in irony.41
The real answer is probably nowhere near as complicated or sophisticated. Irving likely had read similar ramblings attributed to “Oliver Oldschool” in Port-Folio, and saw the potential enjoyment one could derive from assuming another name and identity. Adopting a new persona appealed to his love of all things theatrical. He became Oldstyle because it was fun.
By his third letter, Irving discarded discussions of fashion and marriage—he had only a slight interest in the first, and no experience in the second—in favor of a topic he knew well, and which he could write about at length: the theater. In his December 1 letter, Irving dismantled The Battle of Hexam, a play he had likely seen at the Park Theater. One scene was so confusing, Oldstyle complained, that all he could do was scratch his head in bewilderment: “What this scene had to do with the rest of the piece, I could not comprehend. I suspect it was a part of some other play thrust in here by accident.”42
On December 4 Irving turned his attention from the performance onstage to the audience, “who, I assure you, furnish no inconsiderable part of the entertainment.” It was the longest piece he had written so far, and as Oldstyle grumbled about being pelted by fruit and nuts from the rowdy gallery, it was clear Irving wrote from experience:
I can't say but I was a little irritated at being saluted aside of my head with a rotten pippin, and was going to shake my cane at them; but was prevented by a decent looking man behind me, who informed me it was useless to threaten or expostulate. They are only amusing themselves a little at our expense, said he, sit down quietly and bend your back to it. My kind neighbor was interrupted by a hard green apple that hit him between the shoulders.43
Elsewhere, spectators in the pit were spattered with hot wax from chandeliers; ladies in the boxes flirted instead of watching the play; and crowds in the gallery demanded the orchestra play drinking songs rather than the repertoire. Neither were critics spared, as Old-style wondered how they had the nerve to inform the public what to think of a play when they themselves spent the entire time playing cards with their backs to the stage. “They even strive to appear inattentive,” he sputtered. By the fifth letter, all the flustered Old-style could do was offer suggestions for improving the theater, washing his hands of the entire matter in frustration.44
Irving and his Oldstyle letters were getting noticed. The public lapped it up, and Chronicle copublisher Aaron Burr was impressed, sending copies of the first five letters to his daughter Theodosia. Irving also had a fan in Charles Brockden Brown, editor of the Literary Magazine and American Register, who tried unsuccessfully to recruit Oldstyle to write for his publication.45
Good reviews aside, some of Irving's punches were landing hard among the theater crowd. William Dunlap, manager of the Park Theater, thought highly of Oldstyle, calling the letters “pleasant effusions,” but grumbled that Oldstyle was provoking “excessive” irritation among his actors. Irving finally drew blood with his sixth letter on January 17, 1803, in which Quoz—a new character introduced as Oldstyle's friend—trained his fire on theater critics who took all the fun out of going to a play. “The critics, my dear Jonathan,” Quoz said, “are the very pests of society… they reduce our feelings to a state of miserable refinement, and destroy entirely all the enjoyments in which our coarser sensations delighted.” Five days later Oldstyle griped about the play The Wheel of Truth, knowing full well he would get a rise out of Coleman at the Post and Cheetham at the Citizen, who had been bickering publicly about the play's authorship and whether a certain character had been introduced solely to offend them.46
Sure enough, tempers flared, and on February 8, 1803, Irving coyly insisted he was “perfectly at a loss” over all the fuss. “My remarks hitherto have rather been the result of immediate impression than of critical examination,” Oldstyle explained. Knowing that he had rattled both Cheetham and Coleman, Irving couldn't resist one final twist of the knife. “I begin to doubt the motives of our New-York critics,” Oldstyle wrote, concluding that all the dithering over nothing has “awakened doubt in my mind respecting the sincerity and justice of the Critics.”47
Irving's final Oldstyle letter didn't appear for another two months. He was tiring of the ruse, especially since he had exhausted his best material—the theater—and had to rely on current events for inspiration. Still, he could get a laugh. In discussing the practice of dueling, which had just been formally outlawed, Quoz recommended that duelists simply draw lots to see who gets to have a brick dropped on his head from a window. “If he survives, well and good; if he falls, why nobody is to blame, it was purely accidental.”48
While Oldstyle marked Irving's first foray into print, he later looked back on the nine letters as “crude and boyish.”49 For modern readers, the letters offer not only a glimpse of a young Irving playing with convention and finding his voice, but also an accurate and humorous look at the theater of the time, with rowdy galleries, perplexed musicians, disjointed plays, self-important critics, and sensitive actors. Irving never quite stepped into the skin of Oldstyle as comfortably as he would later alter egos, but there were glimmers of his distinct voice, sense of humor, and wry irony. Plus, the exercise had proven that he could write. For much of 1803 Irving basked in the glow of public adoration for his Oldstyle letters. For the twenty-year-old frustrated lawyer, that was enough.
Scribbling as Oldstyle had provided Irving with an interesting distraction, but it was back to the dreaded law books again for the summer. Fortunately for Irving, another diversion soon presented itself—and this one was sanctioned by the Judge and his business partner and cousin, Thomas Ogden. Hoffman and Ogden were preparing a trip to the New York–Canada border to inspect their properties in and around Oswegatchie (now Ogdensburg) in St. Lawrence County, and meet with representatives of the Northwest Fur Company in Montreal. A law clerk, Hoffman thought, even a dabbler like Irving, could always be of some use on such a trip, helping in the witnessing and preparation of legal documents. The trip promised to be difficult, taking them across remotely populated areas with few inns and bad roads, but to Irving it sounded like a paid vacation. Of course he agreed to go.
Rounding out the party were Ogden's wife Martha and his twenty-one-year-old cousin Eliza; Maria and thirteen-year-old Ann Hoffman; the Judge's business partner Stephen Van Rensselaer; English merchant Thomas Brandram; and another gentleman Irving only referred to as “Mr. Reedy.” On July 30 the company set off.
After thirty-nine hours of travel, they arrived in Albany, where the Judge and Ogden had business. Irving spent the next two days touring the surrounding area with the women, making side trips to the spas at Ballston Springs and Sarasota Springs. He was disappointed by both, mainly because they were dull and filled with pretentious guests. Ballston Springs in particular he found “intolerably stupid.”
The company soon left by stagecoach for Utica, tantalizingly close to Johnstown; he dashed off on horseback to visit his sister Catharine. “I had just time to speak a few words to them all and eat something,” he wrote, “when I had to remount and gallop to [rejoin] the party.”50 Several days after reaching Utica, the group set out for Oswegatchie, the final and most brutal leg of their journey. Amenities were scarce, and the road—clogged with burned roots, tree stumps, and downed trees—was so bad they often had to walk behind their wagons. Nonetheless, Irving passed the time reading Romeo and Juliet aloud
with Ann Hoffman, and playing his flute in the evenings as Mrs. Hoffman sang. Next came eight days of pure misery. Soaking rain, lack of food, filthy lodgings, drunken wagoneers, and biting insects so tormented them that their arrival in Oswegatchie on August 16 could not have come sooner. But for Irving, the most entertaining part of the adventure was over. He spent the rest of the tour writing bonds and deeds for Hoffman.
The party returned to Manhattan that autumn. The trip had been a success not only for Hoffman and Ogden—who had laid out towns and surveyed lands that would make fortunes for their families—but also for their grumbling clerk. Irving had brought a journal on the trip in which he began experimenting with his writing. While he was more reporter than diarist, the Irving that emerges is all at once charming, shallow, generous, petty, elated, and depressed. He was also brutally funny, especially when deflating egos, including his own.
He had also proven himself a rugged traveler. He had paddled a scow in a rainstorm, subsisted on crackers and cucumbers, and plunged into a river after deer without a second thought. Irving had experienced the American frontier at its rawest, living close to the ground, and improvising according to each challenge that rolled his way. This unflinching adaptability proved to be one of his most valuable character traits. “I was at an age when imagination lends its coloring to everything,” he later recalled, “and the stories of Sinbads of the wilderness made the life of a trapper and fur trader perfect romance to me.”51 Not every young man embraced the frontier with the same sense of romance as Irving. Some—like twenty-one-year-old Henry Brevoort Jr., who Irving met on the last stop in Montreal—approached it with a keen eye for possible business opportunities.
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