Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Four days later, they were bound for Milan, covering 140 miles on dangerous roads marked at intervals by crosses, where travelers had been murdered by bandits. (“One of the crosses appeared quite new,” Irving shivered in his journal.) As the Alps began to rise into view, he and Cabell crossed the bridge at Lodi, where Napoleon had come under heavy artillery fire in his conquest of Lombardy nine years earlier, the divots of cannonballs still visible on the surrounding houses. The next evening, they arrived in Milan, a lively city of 140,000 residents. It was a city he fit into easily, as it was home to the impressive 3,600-seat La Scala opera house.46

  While Irving thought the ballet he attended at La Scala “very pretty,” he reserved most of his praise for the “magnificent” scenery. The Milanese had adopted a novel practice of hoisting their backdrops upward on ropes between scenes, rather than pulling them off sideways, a method, Irving noted, that was “preferable.” As for the Milanese audiences, they were more refined than New York's boisterous Park Theater crowds; when an opera singer stepped forward to sing a well-known aria, audience members shushed one another. “The whole house is silent as a tomb,” an impressed Irving wrote.47

  After three days in Milan, Irving and Cabell engaged a carriage and mules to drive them to Sesto, at the southern end of Lake Maggiore. There they hired a boat to row them roughly thirty miles up to Locarno, just within Swiss territory at the lake's northern end. From there, it was a rougher and chillier ride through Bellinzona and up into the Alps, where the travelers crossed into Switzerland through the pass at St. Goatherd.

  It was a chilly 41 degrees on the morning Irving and Cabell hired a boat to take them across the Lake of the Four Cantons into Lucerne. Irving struggled for the right words to describe the surrounding scenery. In an unusual fit of inspiration, he wrote a few lines of poetry:

  Upon the placid bosom of the Lake

  I lie and sweetly dream the Hours away.

  Anon a Vision of approaching Day

  Strikes on my Lids, and I awake

  To find ’tis but the Glimmering Ray

  Of the false dawn: And I again partake

  Of the Lethean Waters of the Lake,

  And sleep and dream throughout this night of May48

  This was hardly Wordsworth, but it shows Irving beginning to experiment with other forms of writing. If he aspired to be a gentleman of letters, it was necessary to dabble at poetry.

  Irving and Cabell stayed in Lucerne only long enough to hire a carriage to take them to Zurich, making the forty-mile trip in two quick days. So far, they had been traveling for twenty-six days, covering more than 650 miles. At Zurich, they finally took a little time to relax. The town, Irving said, seemed “almost to be built in the waters” of the lake, with little architecture of interest (it was more “designed for comfort than for elegance”). The hills surrounding the lake, however, were perfect for walking and for dabbling in his journals: “At a great distance the stupendous mountains of Glaris & Schwartz reared their fantastic heads above the clouds and sublimely terminated the prospect, offering the contrast of bleak winter to the luxuriant charms of spring. The rays of the declining sun slanting along the hills, gilding their tufted tops lighting up the spires of the village churches—& the white walls of the cottages and resting in bright refulgence on the snowy summits of the alps.”49

  On May 16, after three relatively peaceful days in Zurich, Irving and Cabell set out for Basel, where they took a stagecoach to Paris. Traveling with them were a French merchant and a young woman whom Cabell tried to woo when he believed Irving was asleep. The very much alert Irving heard every word. “At length my disposition to laugh became so strong,” he wrote, “that I had to awake completely and interrupt one of the most amiable conversations that ever took place in a Dilligence. Cabell tried in vain to induce me to sleep again.”50

  The passenger seat was an ever-changing canvas of interesting characters. At Vesoul, they picked up an old musician inclined to drink too much; in Belfort, an anxious young Frenchman who screeched at every bounce of the carriage, convinced he would break his neck in an accident; at Troyes, a woman who constantly talked to her pug. Irving wrote it all down with delight, far more interested in his fellow passengers than in the towns outside his window. The journey, he told William, “was the most interesting and delightful I have made in Europe.”51

  By mid-morning of May 24, Irving caught his first glimpse of Paris. “The distant view of Paris is very fine,” he wrote, “and like mariners after a long voyage, we hailed with joy our haven of repose.”52 After forty days and a thousand miles, they had arrived. Here Irving would stay for four months.

  Paris brought out the very best and the very worst in Washington Irving. His first order of business was to engage a tailor and boot maker “to rig me out,” he said, “a la mode de Paris.” With its abundance of theaters, coffeehouses, parlors, French wines, willing women, and good conversation, Paris presented a gentleman of leisure with more distractions—and opportunities for trouble—than Irving ever thought possible: “There is not a place on the globe where the sensual pleasures appetites &c &c &c are more thoroughly studied and may be more completely gratified…. Every desire, wish, inclination—natural or artificial seems to have been completely investigated—to have been followed up to its source traced thro every turning twisting and ramification—and a thousand means devised both to incite and satisfy it.”53

  This was hardly an atmosphere conducive to self-improvement. Yet he had promised William he would study botany, and technically, he was as good as his word—his journal records his attendance at exactly one lecture. He then wrote William to make sure his brother knew he had lived up to his promise. “I have begun to attend a course of Lectures,” he reported, then immediately offered a disclaimer: “Tho I do not expect to make any important proficiency in these studies, yet they serve to improve me in the language, and it is always well, to be acquiring information. I shall take a French master as soon as I get settled.”54 While Irving did buy a botany dictionary and scribbled some cursory, almost incoherent botany notes in his notebooks—perhaps another show of good faith to William—his interest had waned. The botany journal became a list of plays, and then an expense book. Irving wasn't the only one who had lost interest in the lectures. In early June Cabell, who had proposed the whole scheme in the first place, departed for Geneva.

  Despite Cabell's early exit, Irving didn't lack American company. His old acquaintance Colonel Mercer—with whom he had tromped about on Vesuvius in Naples in March—was residing in Paris, and introduced him to a number of respectable Americans, including Nicholas Biddle, secretary to the French minister, Fulwar Skipworth, the American consul general, and John Vanderlyn, a young painter who was collecting casts for the American Academy of Fine Arts. Vanderlyn was struggling financially—the executor for his letter of credit had died, rendering it useless—so Washington appealed to Peter Irving to make inquiries to the academy on Vanderlyn's behalf, and sat to have his portrait sketched in chalk, for which he paid Vanderlyn in cash.

  Vanderlyn's drawing of Irving at age twenty-two—the first known portrait we have of him—shows an elegant, handsome young man with an aquiline nose, thin, somewhat pursed lips, dark, heavy-lidded eyes, and sideburns curving down his cheeks. His curly hair is brushed forward, falling across his forehead—“A peculiarity,” Pierre Irving points out, “not observable in any later likeness.”55 With his dark coat and a cravat tied neatly at his neck, the relatively average American male that had been described in his passport a year before now looked every inch the nineteenth-century European gentleman.

  William tried to push his youngest brother toward Germany, but Irving wasn't interested. “I have thoughts of remaining in Paris till some time in September, as there is no place in Europe where a man has equal opportunities of improvement and at so little expense.” Irving's idea of improvement likely remained at odds with William's expectations. Washington was having the time of his life—so much so that he c
ouldn't bother to write about it. The journal entries became catalogs of theaters and gardens. Letters home slowed to a trickle, as Irving claimed he had “neither time nor inclination” to write lengthily. “I can only plead as an excuse that I am a young man and in Paris.”56

  As much as he enjoyed Paris, Irving was put off by what he regarded as a lack of earnestness on the part of the French. “A Frenchman can contradict you with the best grace imaginable, and even at the same time make you think he is complimenting you,” he wrote. “Tho this politeness renders France extremely agreeable to the stranger, yet were I to become a resident I would willingly exchange half of it for a little plain sincerity.”57 By mid-September, the novelty was wearing thin; it was time to move on. On September 22, after gathering friends around him for one last celebratory dinner—at William's expense, of course—he left Paris in a diligence bound for the Netherlands.

  Since his trip to Sleepy Hollow with Paulding in 1798, Irving had been infatuated with all things Dutch. Quaint Sleepy Hollow had been right out of a Flemish painting. As he moved along the paved road to Brussels, Irving had his first opportunity to observe the Dutch on their home turf.

  “I look chiefly with an eye to the picturesque,” he wrote, and even under a light rain, the surrounding countryside didn't disappoint. Sitting snugly among the tightly clipped orchards were well-kept cottages of brick and thatch. Peasants worked the fields with pipes clenched between their teeth, and children sang and tumbled over each other as they ran alongside the coach, pleading for money. Even Brussels was clean and well-scrubbed, with no sign of the beggars that so annoyed Irving elsewhere in Europe.58

  He was less enthralled with the physical appearance of the Dutch, noting their “heavy tread and phlegmatic leaden features.” But what they lacked in physical attractiveness, they more than made up for with their amusingly quirky behavior, which seemed to Irving to lean toward laziness and constant smoking. Watching Dutchmen in Delft, he noted with amusement that “Mynheer smoaks his pipe in the afternoon and dozes over his favorite canal whose muddy sluggish waters resemble his own stagnant ideas.” And everyone, “even the porter,” smoked.59

  At Rotterdam, Irving booked passage for London, the last stop on his European journey. “Thank heavens my ramblings are nearly at an end,” he wrote Peter, “and in a little while I shall once more return to my friends and sink again into tranquil domestic life.” The excitement of travel had worn off; it had come to feel like an obligation. “I feel no more that interest that prompted me on first arriving in Europe to be perpetually on the hunt for curiosities and beauties,” he told Peter. “In fact, the duty imposed upon me as a traveler to do so is often irksome.”60

  Upon arriving in London in early October, Irving had trouble finding lodgings. He believed, perhaps rightly, that he was being discriminated against because he was a foreigner, and it convinced him that his initial suspicions of the British were justified: “I thought myself surrounded by rogues and swindlers and felt that I was a foreigner among people who regard all foreigners with contempt and enmity…. I thought everyone eyed me with hostility, and perceived that I was a foreigner—and I expected every moment to experience some rudeness or vulgarity. My hands were half the time in my pockets to guard them from depredations, in short I was completely on the alert.”61

  To his surprise, the British turned out to be gracious hosts. “I have not suffered the slightest impertinence,” he reported to William, “and my pockets, though very frequently exposed, have never been plundered.” He eventually landed a suite on Norfolk Street, close to the coffeehouses and—no surprise—the theater. It was in the theater that Irving learned the news of Admiral Nelson's victory over Napoleon, and Nelson's death at Trafalgar. Only ten months earlier, Irving had seen Nelson's fleet coursing off the coast of Syracuse, in pursuit of the French fleet. Now Nelson was dead, the British victorious, and the war all but over. Still, the shouts of victory in the streets were subdued. “I can scarcely say which is greatest,” Irving mused, “joy at its achievement, or sorrow for Nelson's fall.”62

  On January 18, 1806, Irving boarded the ship Remittance, bound for New York. “I hope to return to you untainted with the vices of Europe,” he had written to one correspondent more than twenty months earlier, “and if neither wiser nor better, at least I hope I shall not be worse than when I set out.”63 He had recovered his health—there was no sign of the hacking cough or the fatigue that had so concerned his brothers two years before. Whether he was wiser—whether he had truly improved himself, as William hoped—was a matter of opinion.

  It was true that Washington hadn't taken in many of the sights William had recommended. He had all but frittered away his time in Rome and had boomeranged off Sicily almost immediately after clearing quarantine. Florence, Venice, Germany, and Scotland he skipped altogether. Apart from a few obligatory strolls through museums and churches, he had forsaken many of the more intellectual pursuits in favor of theater and conversation.

  Yet there was more to his trip than missed opportunities. Washington had traveled over 3,000 miles across Europe, covering five countries by diligence, mule, packet ship, carriage, fruit boat, horse, scow, and, when necessary, on foot. He had been harassed by police, chased by health officials, and attacked by pirates. He had experienced the theater in three of the finest cities in the world—Milan, Paris, and London—and socialized with nobility. He had frolicked in France, strolled Italian palaces, and walked the Alps. It's also possible that, while in Rome with Washington Allston, he had engaged in his first homosexual relationship. These were experiences that transcended the intellectual pursuits William had intended for him; they were life experiences that shaped the man and writer Washington Irving would become.

  At the moment, Irving was going home to resume his legal studies—a “starving profession”—and the journey home was a long one. On March 2, 1806, after fifty-two days at sea, the Remittance landed at Paumanok, on Long Island, in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. Washington Irving was back in New York.

  3

  Salmagundi

  1806–1808

  The antient and venerable city of Gotham, was, peradventure, possessed of mighty treasures, and did, moreover, abound with all manner of fish and flesh, and eatables and drinkables, and such like delightsome and wholesome excellencies withal.

  —Washington Irving, “Chap. CIX. Of the Chronicles of

  the Renowned And Antient City of Gotham,”

  Salmagundi, issue 17, November 11, 1807

  I SHALL ONCE MORE RETURN to my friends and sink again into tranquil domestic life,” Irving had written to his brothers shortly before his return to New York.1 Once back in the city in March 1806, however, tranquillity was the last thing on his mind—and who could blame him? New York was just as changed, just as improved, as he. There were so many things a traveled man and aspiring gentleman could do in New York, especially if it kept him away from the tedious law books.

  With a population creeping up beyond 60,000 residents, New York, like Irving, was growing more literary and sophisticated. New clubs, parlors, and public gardens had sprouted and flourished across the city. It had nineteen newspapers, eight of which were dailies. Painter John Trumbull had returned to New York to take over as director of the floundering American Academy of Fine Arts—the same organization that had left poor Vanderlyn in the lurch in Europe—and had produced portraits of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Peter Stuyvesant that hung in City Hall, alongside his portrait of George Washington.2

  The very face of the city was changing. On Varick Street, work was under way on the chapel of St. John's, under the careful eye of architect John McComb. Eventually, St. John's 214-foot clock tower and steeple would make it one of the city's most recognizable—and audible—landmarks; its chapel bells could be heard as far away as the Battery and Greenwich. On the more fashionable Park Row, just around the corner from the Park Theater, the gigantic Dyde's London Hotel had recently opened, boasting a massive ballroom and adver
tising hospitality “in the true Old English Style.”3

  Money and philanthropy were also shaping the town. Isabella Graham and Joanna Bethune were laying the groundwork for the orphanage for working-class children they would soon open in Greenwich, while Quaker Thomas Eddy—with the help of philanthropist John Pintard and others—was organizing the New York Free School Society to eliminate poverty in children by endowing “habits of cleanliness, subordination, and order.” John Jacob Astor, who came to personify wealth and industry in nineteenth-century America, was investing in New York land and properties, which would benefit both the city and Astor himself. In 1804 Astor had acquired Vauxhall Gardens on north Broadway near the Bowery. A year later he and John Beekman purchased the Park Theater, where a major renovation soon began under the guidance of its new manager, and Irving's friend, the actor Thomas Cooper.4

  Broadway had solidified its place as the heart of the city. It was also its most respectable address—Astor had recently taken up residence there, as had various Livingstons and Roosevelts. From Bowling Green to the Park, Broadway was humming with both business and pleasure, as the wealthy and the fashionable—along with those who aspired to be both—swarmed among “large and commodious shops of every description… book stores, print-shops, music-shops, jewelers, and silversmiths; hatters, linen-drapers, milliners, pastry-cooks, coachmakers, hotels and coffee-houses.”5With such distractions, the “tranquil domestic life” Irving had written of—along with his legal studies—was cast aside for rowdier pursuits. Like drinking.