Washington Irving
Page 7
Drinking to excess, both in private and in public, was not only accepted but encouraged—and Irving was happy to oblige. “It was almost treason against good fellowship not to get tipsy,” Pierre Irving reported forgivingly, “and the senseless custom of compelling guests to drink bumpers, not unfrequently laid many under the table who never would have been led willingly to such excess.”6 However, Irving was never one to drink—or, for that matter, to do much of anything—alone. William's stern rebuke of 1805—“Good company, I find, is the grand desideratum with you”—was as true for Washington Irving in New York as it was in Europe. Within weeks of his return home, Irving fell in with a group of smart, literate, and extremely social young gentlemen he referred to as “the Nine Worthies,” or—since membership often crept above nine—“the Lads of Kilkenny.”
At the core of the Lads were, as one might expect, the always willing Paulding, who was still working as a loan officer and still living with Irving's brother William over on Greenwich Street, Henry Brevoort, who had settled back in the city, and a new addition to their inner circle, twenty-year-old Gouverneur Kemble, the son of a prosperous New York merchant and attorney. Other members included Kemble's younger brother, Peter Jr., Henry Ogden, Richard McCall, David Porter, and Peter Irving, who shared the Lads’ love of literature, politics, and conversation. Also sitting in from time to time were the otherwise staid Ebenezer Irving and William Jr., who, despite his earlier admonition, appreciated intelligent company just as much as his younger brothers.
As the self-proclaimed ringleader of the Lads, Washington, that lover of pseudonyms, took great delight in assigning nicknames to each of his cronies: “the Doctor” for Peter Irving; “Sinbad” for Porter; Brevoort became “Nuncle”; Paulding, “Billy Taylor”; Gouverneur Kemble, “the Patroon”; and Peter Kemble, “Petronius.” Ebenezer was dubbed “Captain Great-heart”; William, “the Membrane”; Richard McCall, the cryptic “Oorombates”; and Henry Ogden, “the Super-cargo.” Secret identities were part of the fun to Irving, who, as the driving force behind the Lads, remained without a nickname. The nicknames not only provided the group with an internal intimacy but also protected the identities of the Lads when they reported their antics in correspondence.
Dining, conversation, and theater were the major engagements, made all the merrier by the copious amounts of alcohol consumed. After an evening at the Park Theater, the Lads would go around the corner to Dyde's Hotel to sing and drink cherry bounce or Madeira. If Dyde's was deemed too expensive by any of the group, they gathered instead at the porter house on the corner of John and Nassau streets to enjoy what they called “blackguard suppers.”7Other times, they staggered home after an evening at Thomas Hodgkinson's Shakespeare Tavern at Nassau and Fulton.
Stories of their drunken exploits were legend among the group. After one evening of heavy drinking, a “half bewildered” Henry Ogden fell through an open grating in the street, landing in a sprawl in the darkened vault below. “The solitude,” he said, “was rather dismal,” until a number of other drunken wanderers fell into the vault with him, and “they had, on the whole, quite a pleasant night of it.” Another evening an inebriated group of Lads spied an intoxicated gentleman sleeping in the gutter in front of Trinity Church. Through fogged eyes and muddled brains, they recognized Henry Brevoort's hat on the fellow's head, and dragged their passed-out friend back to his apartment and put him to bed—only to discover the next morning that the drunk they had lodged in Brevoort's chambers wasn't Henry Brevoort! The Lads laughed, but never learned how Brevoort's hat had ended up on the stranger's head in the first place.8
Best of all were the times at Mount Pleasant, Kemble's family mansion on the Passaic River in New Jersey, just between Newark and Belleville. Kemble had inherited the house and surrounding acreage from an uncle, and the property remained empty much of the time. Once the Lads descended on it, Irving soon provided another, more suggestive name: Cockloft Hall.
Here Irving, Kemble, and the Lads spent their afternoons drinking, playing leapfrog, and engaging in ill-advised activities. Once, while trying to knight Dick McCall with a sword, Peter Irving accidentally stabbed the young man in his posterior. As evening fell, they collapsed in drunken “general naps” on the antique chairs in the drawing room, or simply passed out on the lawn overlooking the river. The drinking, horseplay, group naps, and overall familiarity among so many young men certainly raises eyebrows today, and perhaps with good reason. Writing in 1867 of his uncle and the Lads, Pierre Irving dismissed their activities as “madcap pranks and juvenile orgies,” an interesting choice of words for the discreet Pierre. Even Paulding's son and first biographer, William Irving Paulding, describes the relationship between the Lads somewhat delicately: “There is another noticeable thing. Of this society, four in particular, namely Washington Irving, Henry Brevoort Jr, Gouverneur Kemble, and James K. Paulding, became more closely bound in an unusual friendship. The relations which united this little group were of the most intimate. A confidence even beyond that of brothers existed among them; a confidence which, it was believed, was never violated under any circumstances, on any hand.” Whether the Lads indulged in homosexual behavior at Cockloft Hall is not known. What is clear is that the summer of 1806 cemented the lifelong friendships of Irving, Kemble, Brevoort, and Paulding.9
When not at Cockloft Hall, Irving was in Hoffman's offices, preparing for his bar examination. It was slow going, and at times the sheer tedium drove him into fits of silliness. It was far more entertaining to draw the green blinds on the office windows, loll in an armchair, and smoke cigars over the fire. A good smoke, Irving said, “made my blood circulate with greater vivacity, and to play about my heart with greater activity,” though it didn't make him any more likely to work.10
Kemble didn't make things any easier, writing Irving funny letters from Philadelphia that completely diverted his focus. Dispatched by Hoffman one afternoon on an errand, Irving took one of Kemble's letters with him, reading it as he walked, and laughed so hard he continually stumbled into people. “I had completely forgotten the errand I was sent on,” he told Kemble, “so I had to return, make an awkward apology to boss, and look like a nincompoop.”11
Although the other Lads provided regular distractions, Irving reported that a few of their ranks—himself included—had temporarily peeled away from the group in favor of female companionship. “The Lads of Kilkenny are completely scattered,” he told Kemble playfully, “and, to the riotous, roaring, rattle-brained orgies at Dyde's, succeeds the placid, picnic, picturesque pleasure of the tea table. We have resigned the feverish enjoyments of Madeira and Champagne, and returning with faith and loyalty to the standard of beauty, have quietly set down under petticoat government…. I am a new man, and am hasting with rapid strides towards perfection.” Still, he couldn't resist mocking such domesticated behavior as emasculated or affected: “In a month or two, I shall become as modest, well-behaving, pretty-boy kind of a fellow as ever graced a tea party.” And if the absent Kemble wanted his friends to sing his praises to the ladies at those tea parties, Irving informed him that he should let them know “in what light you wish to be held up, whether as a true Lad of Kilkenny, or a gentle prince prettyman.”12
Irving's obvious confidence in his abilities as a conversational-ist was well founded; one young lady compared him favorably against the rest of the Lads, noting that Irving was “better able to make a pun and has more small talk.” And there were the stories he told about his travels in Europe, “which you know,” the lady continued, “he makes go a great way.”13 The bar exam Irving hoped to take in August was continually postponed in favor of tea with young ladies, discussions on the theater with Thomas Cooper, or work with Peter on a translation of François Depons's Voyage to the Eastern Part of Terra Firma.
But even Irving couldn't keep putting off the inevitable forever. On November 21, 1806, the twenty-three-year-old stood for admittance to the bar, with Hoffman and attorney Martin Wilkins as his examiners. By Irving
's own admittance, his performance was embarrassingly bad. “I… was admitted to the bar, more through courtesy than desert, for I scarcely answered a single question correctly,” he wrote, “but the examiners were prepossessed in my favour.” That was probably true, and for the rest of his life, Irving told a story of how his poor performance had earned him a certain distinction in the eyes of Hoffman and Wilkins. After quizzing Irving on the intricacies of the law, Hoffman appealed to Wilkins on behalf of his young clerk. “I think he knows a little law,” Hoffman said. “Make it stronger, Jo,” Martin replied, “damned little!”14
Fortunately, even damned little knowledge of the law was enough to earn Irving the title of “Esquire,” and he was welcomed into the Wall Street offices of his brother John Treat, who likely knew what he was getting into. For the next decade, “lawyer” would be Washington Irving's formal occupation; not a bad one for a young gentleman with lofty ambitions, provided he had a proclivity for the law—which Irving assuredly did not.
Instead of the law, Irving devoted his attention to a much more attractive project, a literary scheme he and Paulding had cooked up over drinks. As Paulding later recalled, “one day in a frolicsome mood, we broached the idea of a little periodical merely for our own amusement, and that of the town, for neither of us anticipated any further circulation.” The object of this self-published effort, Paulding explained, “was to ridicule the follies and foibles of the fashionable world,” and generally poke fun at just about anything. The project sounded so amusing, in fact, that even William offered to contribute from time to time. (Peter, who seemed the more natural collaborator, declined to participate—his Morning Chronicle had folded in the fall of 1805, but inspired by Washing-ton's stories of Europe, Peter had booked a European tour of his own, and would be leaving in January 1807.)15
Irving and Paulding located one other much-needed accomplice for their project: David Longworth, a local printer with a good sense of humor. Longworth fit in so well with the Lads that Irving almost immediately assigned him the Kilkenny nickname of “Dusky Davey.”
On January 24, 1807, the first issue of their collaboration rolled off the press into the hands of unsuspecting New Yorkers—and exploded like a bombshell.
SALMAGUNDI
announced the all-caps title at the top of the cover page of their small, yellow-backed booklet. It was a word that was familiar to nineteenth-century readers as a cold dish made from chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions, and other ingredients—the equivalent of chef's salad today—but it could also mean a “hotchpotch” or “miscellany.”16 Either definition would do, but if readers were still confused by its meaning, the authors helpfully offered a more direct subtitle:
Or, the
Whim-Whams and Opinions
Of
Launcelot Langstaff, Esq.
and Others.
The opening remarks—mostly by Paulding, but with an assist from Washington—effectively set the tone for the series and directly stated its motives: “Our intention is simply to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town and castigate the age; this is an arduous task, and therefore we undertake it with confidence. We intend for this purpose to present a striking picture of the town; and as every body is anxious to see his own phiz [face] on canvas, however stupid or ugly it may be, we have no doubt but that the whole town will flock to our exhibition.”17
Paulding was right; New York had never seen anything like it. Readers snapped up copies faster than Longworth could print them, sending the first issue back to press seven times. The tone was defiant, yet playful; the authors cocksure of themselves, yet still regarding their readers with a wink: “Like all true and able editors, we consider ourselves infallible…. We are critics, amateurs, dillitanti, and cognoscenti, and as we know ‘by the pricking of our thumbs’ that every opinion which we may advance in either of those characters will be correct, we are determined, though it may be questioned, contradicted, or even controverted, yet it shall never be revoked.”18
While Longworth's name showed up under the “Publisher's Notice,” neither Paulding nor the Irving brothers ever appeared in Salmagundi’s pages under their own names—an anonymity Washington Irving used increasingly, as it allowed him to take on different personas and write in different voices. In the first issue, Paulding played the part of Launcelot Langstaff, dispensing wisdom from his “elbow-chair,” while Washington commented on the theater as “Will Wizard, Esq.,” and wrote about fashion and dancing as “Anthony Evergreen, Gent.” William made appearances in later issues as the poet “Pindar Cockloft” or as “Mustapha Rub-A-Dub Keli Khan,” a Tripolitan ship's captain and New York prisoner initially created by Paulding to provide a foreigner's perspective on America.
Paulding and the Irvings produced Salmagundi at a remarkable pace, releasing the first five issues in a span of forty-six days. Public demand required each to go through multiple printings—no small task in 1806, as each reprinting had to be entirely reset by hand. While Irving and Paulding feigned nonchalance in the pages of Salmagundi—“we write for no other earthly purpose but to please ourselves”—its immediate success surprised them. “The sensation increased with every issue,” Pierre Irving remarked; one issue allegedly sold eight hundred copies in a single day. “Though we had not anticipated anything beyond a local circulation,” Paulding said later, “the work soon took a wide sphere; gradually extended throughout the United States; and acquired great popularity.”19
While there was considerable entertainment to be derived from the pages of Salmagundi, speculation on the real identities of Langstaff, Wizard, Cockloft, and their cronies became something of a parlor game. “The public have already more information concerning us than we intended to impart,”20 Langstaff wrote in the first issue, and New Yorkers were buzzing with curiosity. Irving and Paul-ding couldn't resist acknowledging the discussion in the third issue:
This town has at length allayed the titillations of curiosity, by fixing on two young gentlemen of literary talents—that is to say, they are equal to the composition of a news-paper squib, a hodge-podge criticism, or some such trifle… but pardon us, sweet sirs, if we modestly doubt your capability of supporting the atlean burthen of Salmagundi, or of keeping up a laugh for a whole fortnight…. We have no intention, however, of undervaluing the abilities of these two young men whom we verily believe according to common acceptation, young men of promise.21
Actually, Irving did little to keep up the ruse. If he wanted to make a literary name for himself, he certainly had nothing to gain by keeping secret his part in the biggest literary event in New York.
Over the next thirteen months, from January 1807 to January 1808, Irving, Paulding, and Longworth—with periodic assistance from William Irving—produced twenty issues, comprising sixty-five different articles, commentaries, short essays, poems, and fake advertisements. Irving and Paulding eventually became enmeshed in the universe they had created in Salmagundi, populating it with its own characters—Ichabod Fungus, Diana Wearwell, and Dick Paddle—in an internal soap opera that revolved around the activities of the Cockloft family and Cockloft Hall.
With its tongue-in-cheek commentary on fashion, politics, society, and culture, Salmagundi—“Old Sal,” as Irving sometimes called it—was neither a newspaper nor a pamphlet. More than anything, it was a nineteenth-century version of MAD magazine, and in 1807 no one had seen anything quite like it. Even today, the youthful cockiness and defiance—the sheer attitude—are still entertaining, although the nineteenth-century references are lost on modern readers. For the most part, Old Sal was simply funny gossip and silly stories—but every once in a while, the Lads’ pens stung. Thomas Jefferson, his Republicans, and his red pants bore the brunt of their attacks. Just as Oldstyle had taken his shots at competing newspapers and theater critics, Old Sal skewered anyone the Lads deemed quirky, stuffy, or downright pompous.
Sometimes they got the desired rise—and publicity—out of their targets. When William Irving criticized local
poet and news-paperman Thomas Fessenden, the poet was not amused. “From one end of town to another, all is nonsense and ‘Salmagund,’” Fessenden fumed in his newspaper. “America has never produced great literature—her products have been scrub oaks, at best. We should, then encourage every native sapling; but when, like Salmagundi, it turns out to be a bramble, and pricks and scratches everything with its reach, we naturally ask, why it encumbereth the ground.”22
Other times—as in the case of Port-Folio publisher Joseph Dennie, whose “delicacy of nerves” Irving parodied—the recipient appreciated the joke. Dennie was a fan. Salmagundi, he wrote in a glowing review, “bears the stamp of superior genius, and indicates its unknown authors to be possessed of lively and vigorous imaginations, a happy turn for ridicule, and an extensive knowledge of the world.”23
With such critical and popular accolades—not to mention multiple reprintings and rapid sales—Longworth encouraged Irving and Paulding to secure the copyright to their work. Incredibly, both authors refused, either out of naïveté or perhaps because they were gentlemen who couldn't bothered be with such trivial concerns as money. “We have nothing to do with the pecuniary concerns of the paper,” they had written in the first issue, “its success will yield us neither pride nor profit.”24 When the authors balked, their publisher jumped. On March 6, 1807, Longworth secured the copyright to Salmagundi—an action that earned him the distinction of becoming the first of several publishers Irving would feud with about money over the course of his career.
Throughout 1807 Old Sal was Irving's main project. His duties in the Wall Street law firm largely neglected, the slack was taken up by the understanding John Treat. It cannot be said, however, that Salmagundi was the only activity taking Washington's time and focus away from the law firm. In early 1807, after only four months in his brother's firm, Irving was already job hunting, pleading with the politically connected Hoffman to secure him any appointment that might be available under Governor-elect Daniel Tompkins. “Will you be kind enough to speak a ‘word in season’ for me?” he wrote Hoffman at Albany. “There will, doubtless, be numerous applicants of superior claims to myself, but none to whom a ‘crumb from the table’ would be more acceptable.” Then the groveling began. “I can plead no services that I have rendered,” Irving said truthfully, “for I have rather shunned than sought political notoriety…. I know that there are few offices to which I am eligible… your good word is all I solicit.”25