Irving maintained an active though apolitical social calendar, dining one night with Federalists, the next with Republicans—a savvy strategy for gleaning information on the pending legislation, had he any interest in doing so. But he was far more concerned with personalities than politics, and made the following observation in a letter to Brevoort in early February:
You would be amused, were you to arrive here just now to see the odd, & heterogeneous circle of acquaintance I have formed. One day I am dining with a knot of honest, furious federalists, who are damning all their opponents as a set of consummate scoundrels, pandars of Bonaparte, &c &c, The next day I dine perhaps with some of the very men I have heard thus anathematized, and find them equally honest, warm & indignant—and if I take their word for it, I had been dining the day before with some of the greatest knaves in the nation—men absolutely paid & suborned by the British government.13
Irving's contacts were a veritable who's who of Washington, D.C. In the course of one week he dined at the Capitol Hill home of architect Benjamin Latrobe, shared a meal with the secretary of the navy, and attended a ball at the residence of Mayor Robert Brent. And there were Mrs. Madison's levees and dances at the Van Ness mansion. “At all these parties you meet with so many intelligent people,” Irving said with satisfaction, “that your mind is continually & delightfully exercised.”
To his surprise and delight, Irving and the First Lady had become friends. Mrs. Madison admired the young man, more for his social and dancing prowess than his writing, and Irving spoke of her fondly for the rest of his life. As for the president, while Mrs. Madison herself once noted that her husband would stand in the middle of the room with no one to talk to, Irving was impressed by the president's skills as an active listener—“a most agreeable man in conversation.” Yet looking back, Irving wondered, “What did he say…. I came to reccollect I had talked entirely myself.” The president, in fact, was also a fan—“the president pronounced me a promising young man,” Irving reported, “but that I talked too much.”14
Another well-placed friend, Secretary of State Robert Smith, had even floated Irving's name with the president as a possible secretary to the American legation to France. “I make no doubt [the president] will express a wish in my favor on the subject,” Irving told William confidently, “more especially as Mrs. Madison is a sworn friend of mine, and indeed all the ladies of the household and myself great cronies.”15
Curiously, the appointment never materialized. While Irving was a relative newcomer to the political scene, he had a significant network in Washington and had obviously made an impression. Further, his reputation as the author of A History of New York certainly indicated he would be an ideal candidate for a secretarial position. Amid the head-scratching, there was some speculation that Irving was rejected outright by minister-designate Joel Barlow because Barlow had allegedly heard Irving criticize his epic poem The Columbiad. Not to worry, Irving told William, he already had a backup plan: “I shall pursue a plan I had some time since contemplated, of studying for a while, and then travelling about the country for the purpose of observing the manners and characters of the various parts of it, with a view to writing a work, which, if I have any acquaintance with my own talents, will be far more profitable and reputable than any thing I have yet written. Of this, however, you will not speak to others.”16 Nothing came of this contingency plan either. At the time, however, William had no reason to doubt his brother's resolve—after all, wasn't this the young man who had written a best seller while recovering from a severe depression?
In the meantime, there was, at last, activity on the bank issue. Senator William Crawford of Georgia introduced legislation on February 5 to renew the charter, and Irving reported its progress dutifully back to William. Things finally came to a head when the Senate deadlocked, and Vice President George Clinton cast the deciding vote to kill the charter bill. A week later the House of Representatives pushed the United States one step closer to war by passing the revised Non-Importation Act, and then adjourned on March 3. The 11th Congress wound to a close, as did Irving's services—such as they were—as a lobbyist.
For Irving, it was just as well. With the adjournment of Congress, Washington, D.C., was a ghost town. The absence of members meant a dearth of dancing, dinners, and social gatherings of any merit, which Irving found dreadful. “You cannot imagine how forlorn this desert City appears to me, now the great tide of casual population has rolled away,” he complained to Brevoort. It was time to go home.17
The demands of the firm of P. & E. Irving and Company kept Irving busy throughout the spring, but whatever free time he had he spent at the theater and at evening tea parties. His old friend Cooper—who was actively courting Mary Fairlie—was performing with George Frederick Cooke in New York, and Irving attended their performances with considerable amusement. Cooke had a tendency to drink too much, and the audience once heckled him so belligerently during a curtain call that he rattled his sword at the crowd, telling them they were lucky it was only a prop. The audience only howled all the louder.18
In early May Irving moved out of his mother's house and in with Brevoort—an arrangement neither had much time to enjoy, as Brevoort had at last secured a full-time position with John Jacob Astor. When Astor struck out for Mackinac, Michigan, he took Brevoort with him. Irving wouldn't lack company for long, however, as June marked the return of Gouverneur Kemble and his younger brother Peter from their tour of Europe. The Lads were back.
At this point, the new literary projects Irving claimed he was pondering were doomed—for the Lads, especially Peter Kemble, were up to no good. “Since his return, we have treated Peter, the late Prince Regent, with great contempt, and take all possible occasions to flout him and piss upon him,” Irving wrote boorishly.
I am convinced that there is nothing on earth so truly despiseable, as a great man shorn of his power. Peter however consoles himself by courting all the little girls in town, who are under Sixteen…. He has likewise become a notable leerer at buxom chamber maids and servant girls, and there is not a little bitch of a house maid that runs proud about the streets, but what peter has had the nosing of her—not that the little villain tups them all, but he is one of your little gluttons whose eyes are greedier than his belly, and where he honestly Rodgers one, he dishonors a dozen with his lascivious looks.19
Clearly, these were young men who needed something to do. Irving acknowledged as much. “I felt a degree of apathy growing upon me,” he later wrote, “which was dismal.”20 And while young Peter Kemble continued to ravish random chambermaids—and consequently underwent treatment for venereal disease in the summer of 1812—Irving's attentions seemed to have fallen on Mrs. Jean Renwick, the mother of his friend James Renwick.
Whether Irving's relationship with Mrs. Renwick was sexual is debatable, but it is clear from the enthusiastic exhortations in his letters—an “excellent lady!” he gushes—that he adored her. A widow, and eleven years his senior, Jean Renwick still had the considerable charm she had shown at age fifteen, when she inspired poet Robert Burns to pen the lyrics to “When First I Saw Fair Jeanie's Face” and “The Blue-Eyed Lassie.” Indeed, Irving maintained the sort of playful, admiring relationship with her that he had with Mrs. Hoffman. While Brevoort, too, was a devotee, Irving's bubbling adulation was without equal. The two chattered playfully about politics, with Mrs. Renwick arguing her points so forcefully, Irving said, that “after three quarter of an hours fighting I was fain to sheer off with a broken heart and absolutely went supperless to bed.” This was the kind of banter Irving excelled at, and the fact that Mrs. Renwick was a worthy adversary likely endeared her to Irving all the more.21
Distracted partly by business, but mostly by personal matters, Irving limited his literary output to revisions of his own work, as he focused on reprints and a second edition of Knickerbocker. In July an edition of Salmagundi appeared in London to good reviews, “much more favorably than I had expected,” he told William. “On the
whole… I think we came off very handsomely, and I can only hope the other critics may be as merciful.”22
It was slow going on any new work. There were just too many interesting distractions, and Irving berated himself for his own inattention. “Pleasure is but a transient stimulus, and leaves the mind more enfeebled than before,” he groaned to Brevoort. “Give me rugged toil, fierce disputation, wrangling controversy, harassing research, give me any thing that calls forth the energies of the mind.”23 Such hand-wringing was typical, especially when his conscience nagged at him to work—although it was hardly ever persuasive.
“Oh! Man, man, what a villainous compound of crudities art thou!” Brevoort wrote from Mackinac in mock sympathy. “One moment the mercury of thy soul sinks ten degrees below despair, and the next moment (from causes inscrutable) rises again, to the highest pitch of hope and enthusiasm.”24
It was at this time that Brevoort began writing Irving of his adventures with Astor on the western frontier—more specifically, his impressions of the Native American tribes that he met along the way. Brevoort was incredibly sympathetic in his portrayal of the Indians, and described their self-government with awe and admiration. He included in his letters copies of Indian orations, which he begged Irving to publish in the newspapers, as “they convey a faithful picture of their present and anticipated distresses.”25
While Brevoort's letters reflect his employer's interest in the affairs of the Indians—the Non-Importation Act had also prevented Indian tribes from importing critical goods—Brevoort found it deplorable that the Native Americans should have grown so dependent on such goods in the first place. He also disapproved of the way tribes were treated by the westward-pushing United States, and told a story of an attempt to purchase a small parcel of Indian land, which was roundly rebuffed by the Indian Council. Under Brevoort's pen, Manifest Destiny took on a decidedly sinister tone: “They refused to sell on any terms for (said they) if we give you a spot the bigness of one of our feet, you will take up a handful of sand and scattering it as far as the winds blow, swear that the whole extent on which it has fallen is yours, therefore you shall not have it.—We caution you not to do as others of your Nation have done—to purchase our lands for a trifle of some drunken worthless individuals of our tribe, and make us all responsible for their acts.”26
Irving, too, was sympathetic to the plight of the Indians, and had already lampooned their treatment by the American government in A History of New York. Brevoort's observations only reinforced Irving's already progressive, though still romantic, views on the Indians.
Brevoort also continued in his role as Irving's de facto literary agent, circulating copies of Knickerbocker among the frontier fur traders. “You contribute more to their merriment & pleasure than you probably would if you were here yourself,” Brevoort told Irving. “One of the Traders swears you must have wintered among the Indians, for you appear to know them so well.”27
The thriving fur industry soon forced Brevoort to make an extended business trip to Europe. The absence weighed heavily on Irving, and for the next twenty months he was practically heart-broken. “I have not been very well since your departure, and am completely out of spirits. I do miss you terribly,” he wrote Brevoort shakily. Life, for the moment, was drained of vibrancy. “I dined yesterday with a small party at Mrs Renwicks and was at a tea party in the evening,” he wrote, “and yet passed one of the heaviest days I have toiled through this long time.”28
With the arrival of spring, however, Irving at last shook off the stupor that had paralyzed his pen throughout 1811. With renewed enthusiasm, he turned to the final polish on a new edition of A History of New York.
He had actually begun to revise the work almost immediately after its publication in late 1809. The first edition contained some careless printing errors, and Irving set to work correcting those errors and tweaking the text. Printing errors aside, the popularity of the first edition had made a second inevitable. For nearly three years the public had been awaiting the revised edition—Port-Folio of July 1812 reported with anticipation that “the ingenious author of Diedrich Knickerbocker, is said to be preparing a new edition for the press”—and Irving didn't disappoint. The new edition sold well, and Irving was paid a relatively generous sum for his work—$1,200, or about $16,000 in today's money, for a print run of five hundred copies.
He needed the money. On June 18 Congress formally declared war on Great Britain, and the War of 1812 hit the New York merchant classes particularly hard. Irving abandoned his apartment for a “snug retreat” in the hills opposite Hell Gate where he could read and perhaps start on a new work.
Perhaps. Instead, he spent two months at Hell Gate visiting friends, gossiping, and dining out. Much was happening in their social circle, and Irving did his best to keep up with the chatter. The Fascinating Fairlie had finally married Cooper on June 11, and Irving, his eyes emerald with jealousy, snorted to Brevoort that their marriage marked “the end of a dismal courtship and the commencement I fear of an unhappy union.” In the same vein, he remarked nastily on the virtue of a mutual female friend who “has been acting very much the part of the Dog in the manger—she cannot enjoy her own chastity but seems unwilling to let anybody else do it.”29
That fall another project landed in his lap. The second edition of A History of New York had caught the eye of a Philadelphia bookseller named Moses Thomas, who had recently purchased a literary magazine called Select Reviews. Thomas asked Irving if he would be interested in serving as its editor starting with the January 1813 edition. The content of Select Reviews consisted mainly of reprints of European works, and Irving's job—or so he thought—would be to choose and edit the works to be reprinted.
It seemed easy enough, and to sweeten the deal, Thomas offered Irving an annual salary of $1,500, the equivalent of about $20,000 today. Irving accepted, likely glad for both the work and the money, though he told Peter casually that he regarded it as “an amusing occupation, without any mental responsibility of consequence.”30 All very well, but they were words he would eat in due time.
Before his work for Thomas could commence, however, the family business beckoned again, and the youngest partner in the firm of P. & E. Irving was dispatched to Washington, D.C., for six weeks as part of yet another effort to lobby Congress on the still-feared Non-Importation Act. “Sick of the business in which I am engaged and Sick of Washington,” Irving wrote irritably in November—yet he was protesting too much, for he continued to show up regularly at Mrs. Madison's levees and countless other parties.31 In fact, he maintained such a rigorous social schedule and was in the company of so many prominent women that friends in New York teased that he must surely be getting ready to marry one of them. Paulding even carried the joke so far as to travel to Washington, D.C., where he demanded Irving allow him to attend his upcoming wedding. Irving took it all in rakish stride: “I have determined… to give as much countenance to this report [of my upcoming wedding] as possible and am resolved to become acquainted with the lady forthwith—that necessary preliminary not having as yet been attended to.”32
He may not have had a prospect in mind when Paulding arrived, but he did miss an opportunity with one particularly eligible lady that set tongues wagging. He was to be set up with Baltimore socialite Elizabeth Patterson—better known as the former Mme. Bonaparte, before her marriage to Jerome Bonaparte was annulled by Napoleon. The two were to attend a social event at Mason's Island, the site of some of the district's most scenic and fashionable gatherings, and, as Irving said in relating the story, a “favourable opportunity… for sentiment & romance.”
Unfortunately, the date never took place. As a rather embarrassed and disappointed Irving later explained, he had eaten dinner at the home of Congressman Henry Clay, drank too much wine, staggered home, and fell asleep in front of the fire, completely forgetting about his date until the next morning. Irving's faux pas was the cause of considerable snickering in D.C.’s social circles, but Irving maintained a sens
e of humor. “Do beg your mother for Gods sake to look out for some other lady for me,” he appealed to Ren-wick in mock desperation, “I am not particular about her being a princess, provided she has plenty of money—a pretty face and no understanding.” No worse for wear, Irving returned to New York in late December, ready to take up the reins of the Select Review, which he and Thomas rechristened the Analectic for its January 1813 launch.33
The Analectic was not the cakewalk he had originally envisioned. While Thomas had rigorously promoted the addition of Irving to his stable of talent, he had also advertised—without his new editor's prior knowledge—that Irving would be producing a series of biographies of naval commanders, a history of the events of America's maritime wars, and—Irving gasped—a British naval chronicle.
Irving was furious. The announcements had not only been made without his consent, but the production of new work was decidedly not what he had signed on for. He fumed to Renwick that he would not be “wickedly made the editor of a vile farrago—a congregation of heterogenious articles, that have no possible affinity to one another.” He added that he had no idea his publisher would “have such a fools cap put on my head—and if they intended to interfere in the conduct of the work I should decline having any thing to do with it.”34
The temper tantrum passed, and Irving got down to business, searching for articles of interest that could be reprinted—free of charge, of course, for there were no copyright laws to speak of—in the pages of the Analectic. Writing to Peter in Liverpool, he asked his brother to send any new works that might be of interest, and urged him to subscribe to any periodicals of importance from which he might pilfer. Meanwhile, Brevoort promised from Edinburgh that he would have any interesting journals and “old odd Books” forwarded to Irving. “All these are intended for the benefit of ‘the Independent Columbian Review,’” Brevoort wrote, punning on the name of the fictional hotel from which Diedrich Knickerbocker had made his escape, “which I am happy to learn is soon to issue from Mulberry Street under the fostering care of Seth Handa-side, Esq.”35
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