Irving's true solace lay within the pages of esta obra. Over the past year, even as he had groaned over the law books in Hoffman's offices, he had continued to revise his manuscript extensively. As he read through his pages in Kinderhook, he realized that he had changed the tone of the work. Esta obra was no longer a mere burlesque on someone else's work; he had written it in a more humorous, satiric voice. It still needed work, but Irving believed he had found his way. Sequestering himself in Van Ness's farmhouse, he sat down to write.
“I now altered the plan of the work,” Irving explained later. “Discarding all idea of a parody on the Picture of New York, I determined that what had been originally intended as an introductory sketch, should comprise the whole work, and form a comic history of the city.”27 Specifically, he decided to focus on the Dutch dynasty that had ruled the city in the seventeenth century. Throwing out everything that didn't pertain to the Dutch settlers, he began compressing the sheaves of notes, references, draft chapters, and false starts into a coherent narrative.
While writing distracted him from his grief, it didn't come easily. In a letter written to Brevoort ten days after Matilda's death, he complained that his mind was so languid that writing was nearly impossible. A week later, he reported that he was able to resume writing. While a “nervous fever” was causing his hair to fall out, he was beginning to feel more himself.
“My time here, though I pass most of it by myself,” he wrote, “slips off very pleasantly—and I find so little want of amusement to while it away, that for two days I have scarcely been out of the house.” He wasn't a complete hermit—he had befriended the local schoolmaster, Jesse Merwin, “a pleasant good natured fellow, with much native, unimproved shrewdness and considerable humour.” Merwin dropped in on Irving for an hour each day, and Irving, always up for a good chat, “found much entertainment in his conversation.”28
Between drafts of his mock history, he traded letters with Mrs. Hoffman, the one person he felt truly shared his grief. He was becoming increasingly comfortable, he told her in mid-May, with the “half Monastic” life he was leading at Kinderhook, and while he could not bear the thought of returning to the city, the act of writing was improving his spirits. “By constantly exercising my mind, never suffering it to prey upon itself, and resolutely determining to be cheerful,” he wrote, “I have in a manner worked myself into a very enviable state of serenity & self possession, which is promoted by the tranquility of every thing around me.”29
Things were indeed looking brighter at Kinderhook. The trees were in full bloom, and he had discovered a brook in a nearby meadow and a lake where he and Merwin passed countless hours fishing, usually unsuccessfully. He promised his mother he would return to New York to visit as soon as he could, but warned her that “if I return there immediately, I shall only get out of spirits and unable to do any thing.”30
By the end of May, only a little more than a month after Matilda's death, he believed he was close to finishing his book. Both Brevoort and Paulding read through Irving's drafts, offering advice and encouragement. As he closed in on the end, Irving's nerves began to fray, and his anxiety was clearly visible to his friends. When one packet of materials went temporarily astray in the mail, he dashed off a panicky letter to Brevoort, berating him for addressing the package too cavalierly. “Why did you not drop me a line in the post office at the same time to let me know a pacquet was coming,” he wailed. “As to directing it to be left at Hudson,” he lectured, “you might as well say the bank of the river—I know not where to look for it, or whether it has been put ashore at Hudson or carried to Albany—Do write me immediately on the receipt of this.” Meanwhile, he appealed to Paulding to read through the pages he had sent him as quickly as possible, then grumbled to Brevoort that Paulding would “be too minute & either be very long about it or tire himself out before he has got it half ways.”31
Leaving Kinderhook for New York City in June proved to be as difficult as he had feared. “I must soon leave,” he told Mrs. Hoffman, “but it will be necessity not inclination that will lead me. Life seems to flow on so smoothly in the country—without even a ripple to disturb the current, that I could almost float with the stream and glide insensibly through existence.” Once back in the city, he contented himself with doing “nothing,” except saying good-bye to his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry Van Wart, who were leaving to settle permanently in Birmingham, England, for Van Wart's business.32
By late summer he was putting the final touches on his book up at Ravenswood, the Hoffmans’ family farm near Hell Gate. “My health has been feeble and my spirits depressed,” he moaned to Peter, “so that I have found company very irksome, and have shunned it almost entirely.”33 Despite his dampened mood, his pen scratched on.
By late October the book was finished—or so he thought—and Irving trekked down to Philadelphia to secretly prepare it for printing. But he didn't stop revising—a habit that would annoy printers for the rest of his career—and, in a midnight marathon writing session, he wrote out an entirely new section, which he was determined to insert in the manuscript already at the printers. “Tomorrow I begin—by god,” he told Brevoort on October 23, resolving to let the book go to press at last. He instructed Brevoort to “get Jim [Paulding] as well as yourself to prepare some squibs &c to attract attention to the work when it comes out.”34
There was a good reason for the squibs, as well as the decision to print in Philadelphia, rather than in New York. The name on the title page of Irving's book, now called A History of New York, was not his own but that of Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old, wry, petulant Dutch historian created by Irving to serve not only as the narrator of his mock history, but also as its conscience and commentator. Knickerbocker was more than a pen name; for the first time, Irving had given one of his pseudonyms its own distinct personality and unique voice. Knickerbocker breathed with a life that was lacking in the old bachelor Jonathan Oldstyle or any of the various personalities Irving had assumed in the pages of Salmagundi, and Irving was determined—through a shrewd bit of advanced marketing—to make Knickerbocker just as real to his fellow New Yorkers. If he played it right, by the time his book was released in December, New Yorkers would have a vested interest in the old historian.
His plan depended a great deal on the “squibs” he had asked Brevoort and Paulding to prepare, a series of notices in the newspapers designed to catch the public's attention and whet its appetite for Knickerbocker's book. While the notices were Irving's idea, he left the details to Paulding and Brevoort. What the two young men delivered, and the buzz it created, was more than Irving could have hoped for.
“DISTRESSING,” headlined a notice in the October 26, 1809, edition of the New York Evening Post. The single word was eloquent in its panic, and readers pored over the rest of the text, equally alarmed and intrigued:
Left his lodgings some time since and has not been heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry-street, or at the office of this paper, will be thankfully received.
P.S. Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity in giving an insertion to the above.35
The notice ran in several newspapers over the next few days, and concerned New Yorkers were on the lookout for the little man in black, certain that such a distinct-looking figure—for the cocked hat was already passing out of style by 1809—would be easy to spot. Yet no one reported seeing the gentleman until November 6, when a reader signing himself simply as “A Traveller” provided the following bit of information:
Sir,—Having read in your paper of the 26th October last, a paragraph respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was missing from his lodging; if it would be any relief to his friends, or furnish them with any clue to discover where
he is, you may inform them that a person answering the description given, was seen by the passengers of the Albany stage, early in the morning, about four or five weeks since, resting himself by the side of the road, a little above King's Bridge. He had in his hand a small bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief; he appeared to be traveling northward and was very much fatigued and exhausted.36
Irving's ploy was working. According to Pierre Irving, one New York City authority was so troubled by the thought of the old man wandering around the countryside that he contacted Wall Street attorney John Treat Irving to discuss the possibility of offering a reward for the safe return of Mr. Knickerbocker to the Columbian Hotel.37 The notices had generated the kind of response a modern marketing firm could only dream of—but Irving and his collaborators weren't done yet.
The first two notices had effectively introduced the eccentric Mr. Knickerbocker to the public, and teased them with the mention of his small package wrapped in a red handkerchief. On November 16 it was time to give readers another taste:
To the Editor of the Evening Post
Sir,—You have been good enough to publish in your paper a paragraph about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard of the old gentleman since; but a very curious kind of written book has been found in his room, in his own handwriting. Now I wish you to notice him, if he is still alive, that if he does not return soon and pay off his bill for boarding and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his book to satisfy me for the same.
I am sir, your humble servant,
SETH HANDASIDE
Landlord of the Independent Columbian Hotel,
Mulberry-street38
New York was buzzing with anticipation. Would Knickerbocker return to the hotel in time to claim his book, readers wondered, or would Seth Handaside publish it to recoup the costs of Knickerbocker's room and board? What kind of book was it? Even those New Yorkers who suspected some sort of ruse—astute residents knew there was no Independent Columbian Hotel—wondered what the punch line of this rather elaborate joke would be.
Irving and his collaborators had brilliantly pushed the public to the edge of its seat, and it was in this atmosphere of anticipation that A History of New York—its official title was the somewhat wordy A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Diedrich Knickerbocker—was finally published on December 6. But not before a final notice in the November 29 issue of the Evening Post:
LITERARY NOTICE.
Innskeep & Bradford have in the press and will shortly publish,
A History of New York,
In two volumes, duodecimo. Price three dollars.
Containing an account of its discovery and settlement, with its internal policy, manners, customs, wars, &c. &c., under the Dutch government, furnishing many curious and interesting particulars never before published, and which are gathered from various manuscript and other authenticated sources, the whole being interspersed with philosophical speculations and moral precepts.
This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind.39
Irving held his breath, waiting for the reaction. He needn't have worried; the public devoured it. Irving's masterful media gimmick had done the trick. But curiosity alone wasn't what kept the volumes moving off the stands in Broadway. As the prickly Knickerbocker, Irving wove a daring, magnificent story in his two-volume work. It was a performance unlike anything readers had seen from an American writer.
Irving opened his tale ambitiously, with a brief history of the world, an account of how the American continent had originally been populated, and a discussion of the ethics of the “right of Discovery,” which entitled the discovering party to eject the native population from its own land. With this necessary justification out of the way, Irving followed the intrepid explorer Henry Hudson as he promptly, albeit accidentally, discovered the island of Manhattan, which the Dutch immediately colonized and dubbed “New Amsterdam.”
In the next five sections, Irving explained how, in less than a century, the bumbling Dutch government, led by one colorfully inept governor after another, managed to lose their new colony. Irving played fair; his history was accurate as far as names and events were concerned. Even the obscure sources he cited—residue of the idea that had inspired the whole project in the first place—were, for the most part, genuine. The real tale was in the telling. His sense of humor as sharp as it would ever be, Irving led his readers on a romp through the administrations of three of New Amsterdam's seventeenth-century governors, and proceeded to lampoon nineteenth-century politicians.
Under Irving's pen, New Amsterdam's first governor, Wouter Van Twiller, became a sleeping, smoking, do-nothing administrator who presided successfully over his colony in spite of—perhaps because of—his laissez-faire approach to governing. Later his polar opposite, the busybody Peter Stuyvesant—the hero of Knickerbocker's narrative—fights not only with invading armies but also with his own people, and loses the colony not from inaction but because they want him to hand over the colony peacefully to the English. Stuyvesant complies, and retires in style.
Readers may have hooted at the antics of Van Twiller and Stuyvesant, but they roared the loudest at the exploits of William “The Testy” Kieft, a thinly disguised parody of President Thomas Jefferson. Just as modern readers would recognize references to Bill Clinton's libido or George W. Bush's garbled syntax, so 1809 readers picked up on the distinctly Jeffersonian traits displayed by Kieft: his red stockings, his penchant for waging war by proclamation, and his unusual scientific experiments, such as carts that went before the horse, or Dutch ovens that required no fire.40
For the Federalist Irving, the send-up was sincere, and he unloaded like a Dutch blunderbuss, spraying his shot at nearly everything. Irving's Kieft is a scolder who loves to listen to himself talk, lecturing his enemies and his people in declarations “written in thundering long sentences, not one word of which was under five syllables.” His policies, which “entangled the government… in more knots during his administration, than half a dozen successors could have untied,” were justified by the bogeyman of “economy—a talismanic term, which by constant use and frequent mention, has ceased to be formidable in our eyes, but which has as terrible a potency as any in the arcane of necromancy.” The humor could be subtle—such as when Kieft's policies inspired the birth of two new political parties—or heavy-handed: “How William the Testy enriched the Province by a multitude of good-for-nothing laws, and came to be the Patron of Lawyers and Bum-Bailiffs,” the title of one chapter glibly states.41
While the timely political satire was part of the appeal to his audience, knowledge of 1809 politics isn't required for today's readers to enjoy A History of New York. Indeed, much of Irving's take on politics, politicians, and the political process has aged remarkably well. In his History Irving raged against politicians who talk but don't act, political parties that disagree with each other for the sake of disagreeing, wars fought through proclamation while generals strut, and governments that approve useless policies in the name of economy.
The book is hilarious—remarkable, considering Irving's state of mind when he completed it. There are moments of pure slapstick: fat messengers split their pants as they climb down from their horses; portly Dutch generals hurl vegetables at each other in battle and wrestle on the ground with the contents of their pockets spilling out; and battling governors fall elegantly into piles of cow manure.42 At other times, the humor is impish, even crass, and Irving cackles from its pages like a schoolboy, such as when he robustly describes the Dutch ship Good Vrouw: “Like the beauteous model, who was declared the greatest belle in Amsterdam, it was full in the bows, with a pair of enormous cat-heads, a copper bottom, and withal, a most prestigious poop!”43 And then there are moments of biting irreveren
ce, as when Knickerbocker explains the origin of the name “Manhattan”:
The name which is most current among the vulgar (such as members of assembly and bank directors) is Manhattan—which is said to have originated from a custom among the squaws, in the early settlement, of wearing men's wool hats, as is still done among many tribes. “Hence,” we are told by an old governor, somewhat of a wag, who flourished almost a century since, and had paid a visit to the wits of Philadelphia—“Hence arose the appellation of Man-hat-on, first given to the Indians, and afterwards to the island”—a stupid joke!—but well enough for a governor.44
This is some of Irving's most confident writing—and many readers and critics have rightly argued that A History of New York is the standard against which all of his subsequent works should be judged. It is Irving at his most irreverent, disrespectful, and rebel-lious—and for now, the twenty-six-year-old New Yorker was gleefully shouting from the roofttops.
His readers loved it. “It took with the public & gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable & uncommon in America,” Irving wrote years later, still surprised by its reception. “I was noticed caressed & for a time elated by the popularity I gained.” Indeed, Irving's identity as Knickerbocker became one of the worst-kept secrets. As the History made its way across New England, down the Atlantic seaboard, and toward the expanding West, Irving was greeted as “Diedrich.” “Wherever I went I was overwhelmed with attention,” he wrote. “I was full of youth and animation… and I was quite flushed with this early taste of public favour.” With his uniquely American book and his uniquely American voice, Irving became something else that hadn't been seen before: a true American celebrity.45
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