Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  With the help of his willing family and friends, Irving poached from the best, and his two-year run at the Analectic was far from the embarrassment he worried it would be. He reprinted works by and about Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, and Lord Byron, whose booming poetic voice was quickly becoming a favorite of his. He also included German and Spanish tales and stories of Muhammad, topics that reflected his own blossoming tastes and interests. He provided a monthly column of “literary intelligence”—a gossip column that tracked the comings and goings of New York's artistic and literary young men, who were usually Irving's own friends—and encouraged reviews of other American writers. Paulding and Verplanck were also pressed into contributing regularly.

  As it turned out, writing about naval heroes wasn't the unwelcome chore Irving had groaned about. Such work appealed to his romantic sensibilities, and he spent much of the war writing flag-waving essays about the heroes of the hour, churning out profiles of sailors like Captain James Lawrence or Commodore Oliver Perry. These essays tilted toward the sappy and melodramatic—“The brave Lawrence saw the overwhelming danger,” he wrote in the August 1813 issue, “his last words, as he was borne bleeding from the deck, were, ‘don't surrender the ship!’”—but Irving regarded it as part of his patriotic duty.36

  Naval biographies were one thing; literary criticism was another. Irving was not only a disinterested critic but a bad one, making vague observations of no real value or insight. He loved to gossip and criticize in the privacy of a drawing room or in his correspondence, but doing it publicly was something else altogether. He hated being publicly criticized himself. All his life he took even the most constructive criticism personally, and even the slightest word of disapproval sent him spiraling into a black sulk. He recognized his own weakness at writing such pieces—“I do not profess the art and mystery of reviewing, and am not ambitious of being wise or facetious at the expense of others”37—and abandoned the form altogether after leaving the Analectic.

  He still missed Brevoort badly. “This making of fortunes is the very bane of social life,” he wrote in early 1813, “but I trust when they are made we shall all gather together again and pass the rest of our lives with one another.” He reported to his absent roommate that he was tired of living in the boardinghouse, and proposed that they “get a handsome set of apartments & furnish them” when Brevoort returned later in the year. Brevoort wrote back sympathetically: “You see my dear Wash, how much I long to fill the vacant chair on the opposite side of the well recollected Table in our private sanctuary, but let my remembrance fill all the vacancies in your heart as yours most truly does in mine.”38

  Brevoort traveled widely in Europe throughout 1813. Just as he had on the American western and Canadian frontiers, he continued to act as Irving's agent, putting copies of the revised History of New York and Salmagundi into the hands of literary acquaintances in Paris, London, and Edinburgh—including, Brevoort related in June, Irving's literary idol, Walter Scott. And Scott, Brevoort reported, had enjoyed the book enough to write an appreciative letter, which he enclosed for his stunned friend to read. Scott wrote:

  I beg you to accept my best thanks for the uncommon degree of entertainment which I have received from the most excellently jocose history of New York…. I am sensible that as a stranger to American parties and politics, I must lose much of the concealed satire of the piece, but I must own that looking at the simple and obvious meaning only, I have never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean [Jonathan] Swift, as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker…. I beg you will have the kindness to let me know when Mr. Irvine [sic] takes pen in hand again, for assuredly I shall expect a very great treat which I may chance never to hear of but through your kindness.39

  This was high praise from the writer Irving admired most, but it failed to spark the creative fire. Irving continued his duties at the Analectic, which was earning him a reputation as an editor—and not just in New York. He was approached by Philadelphia bookseller Joseph Delaplaine, who was collecting materials for his Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans, and asked Irving for his portrait. A rather embarrassed Irving refused, and begged Delaplaine not to include him in the Repository at all. “I would rather that ninety nine should ask why I was not there,” Irving explained, “than incur the possibility of one persons asking why I was.”40

  Both Irving and the Analectic were becoming more patriotic as the war continued. In late 1812, at a public dinner honoring the naval heroes Isaac Hull, Jacob Jones, and Stephen Decatur, the fanfare nearly moved Irving to tears. “I never in my life before felt the national feeling so strongly aroused,” he wrote, “for I never before saw in this country so true a cause for national triumph.”41 As the war progressed and news of, first, surprising victories, then crushing defeats filtered into New York, Irving stepped up his rhetoric, and in one remarkable moment, scolded any fence sitters who might oppose the war to at least recognize that the reputation of the country, and every American citizen, was at stake:

  Whatever we may think of the expediency or inexpediency of the present war, we cannot feel indifferent to its operations. Whenever our arms come in competition with those of the enemy, jealousy for our country's honour will swallow up every other consideration. Our feelings will ever accompany the flag of our country to battle, rejoicing in its glory—lamenting over its defeat. For there is no such thing as releasing ourselves from the consequences of the contest. He who fancies he can stand aloof in interest, and by condemning the present war, is woefully mistaken…. If the name of American is to be rendered honorable in the fight, we shall each participate in the honor; if otherwise, we must inevitably support our share of the ignominy.42

  This was hardly Tom Paine, but it was stirring enough. His own oratory, along with the feats of the naval heroes he was reading and writing of, was enough to get the frustrated sailor in him nagging once again. He was anxious to serve in any capacity, but his duties at the Analectic kept him rooted firmly on the sidelines.

  Another Irving was actively serving his country, albeit in a somewhat different capacity. In the election of 1812 William Irving had run for Congress against Egbert Benson, a well-liked politician who had been one of New York's first congressmen and a former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals. The popular he had won that election by only two hundred votes, but when he resigned his seat after only five months, William was easily elected to fill the vacancy. In January 1814 the oldest Irving was off to Washington to begin his term in the U.S. House of Representatives, where William and his Democrat colleagues held an easy majority over the Federalists.

  The same month William left for Washington, Henry Brevoort returned to New York. As Irving had suggested, he and Brevoort changed their living arrangements. Rather than securing an apartment, they simply swapped one boardinghouse for another, moving into Mrs. Bradish's at 124 Broadway. In their common parlor, the two kept up on the latest news and gossip from various fronts, receiving regular visits from Stephen Decatur and his wife, and from Captain David Porter, a former Lad of Kilkenny who had led the naval forces at New Orleans, and whom Irving profiled in the Analectic.

  Listening to Decatur and Porter talk of the war further stoked Irving's inner patriot. He reached his tipping point in late August 1814, when he learned of the British invasion of Washington, D.C., and the burning of the U.S. Capitol and White House. “The pride and honor of the nation are wounded,” Irving declared, “the country is insulted and disgraced by this barbarous success and every loyal citizen would feel the ignominy and be earnest to avenge it.”43

  He was as good as his word. As New Yorkers hunkered down and raised fortifications on the heights of Brooklyn and Harlem, Irving joined the New York State Militia, becoming aide-de-camp to Daniel Tompkins, the governor of New York and a major general of the militia. Brevoort was also inspired to enlist, and received a commission as a first lieutenant in the “Iron Greys” artillery company.

  It wasn't the na
vy, and it wasn't quite the heroic romance Irving likely envisioned when he enlisted—his duties consisted mainly of scribbling Tompkins's dispatches and notifying paymasters of the availability of payroll funds—but he liked it nonetheless. “I feel more pleased than ever with it,” he wrote Brevoort in September. The job held a certain level of respectability, and as a colonel, Irving outranked most of his friends, including the uninterested Brevoort, who took frequent leave from his unit to pursue business opportunities in Vermont. Irving liked Tompkins, describing him as “absolutely one of the worthiest men I ever knew… with a greater stock of practical good sense and ready talent than I had any idea he possessed.”44

  Longing for a taste of military excitement and glory, Irving begged Tompkins for the opportunity to see a little action. That September Tompkins obligingly dispatched him from Albany to Sackets Harbor, a sleepy village on the northeastern shores of Lake Ontario, where only months before stubborn American militia had repulsed an attack by British and Canadian troops. Fearing a renewed attack by land and water, Tompkins asked Irving to visit the front and assess the situation.

  An eager Irving left Albany by stagecoach, then rode three long days on horseback through dense forest to Sackets Harbor. After huddling with officers, he believed that a British invasion was imminent, and called for reinforcements from the surrounding counties. Breastworks were thrown up, pickets were erected… and the anticipated attack never came. Disappointed, Irving plodded back toward Albany, regularly passing the reinforcements he had called into action, now making their way toward Sackets Harbor, where their services were no longer needed. Little suspecting this was the officer responsible for their deployment, the soldiers whooped in jest for Irving to about-face, telling him he was going the wrong way.45

  Back in New York in late October, Irving sent a note to Moses Thomas, apologizing for neglecting his obligations as an editor while he carried out his military duties, then dropped a bombshell on his publisher: he was quitting in December—or, as he elegantly put it, “I shall have to give up all formal agency in the work after the close of the year.”46 He had no confidence in his abilities as an editor, little love for the role of critic, and he was growing increasingly disenchanted with the requirement that he produce original material.

  Despite his deepening weariness of the editor's chair, Irving still had a knack for gauging the popular taste. In December 1814 he reprinted a poem called “Defense of Fort McHenry” by a Baltimore lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who had witnessed the event firsthand. Irving was a fan of such jingoistic sentiments, and enthusiastically endorsed the idea of Americans creating their own patriotic poetry, rather than merely rewriting or adapting British poems. He found Key's lyrics especially inspiring, with their images of star-spangled banners and bombs bursting in air, and, in a prescient introduction to Key's poem, wrote that “their merit entitles them to preservation in some more permanent form than the columns of a daily paper.”47

  In the meantime, William Irving was doing his best in Congress to prop up the defenses of the country by working to ensure that an appropriate number of soldiers was called into service. “I think you were right,” Washington wrote his brother supportively, after passage of a watered-down version of the militia bill, “to support any show of defence, though I regret that you were not able to effect any thing more substantially efficient.” This ineffectiveness would come as little surprise to William's colleagues in the House of Representatives. A patient listener, William Irving is rarely recorded in the Annals of Congress as doing much more than taking his seat during a debate, though his final vote on legislation was almost always solidly with his Democratic colleagues. Indeed, while the eldest Irving brother was thoughtful, meticulous, and patriotic almost to a fault, he—like his brother Washington—shuddered at the thought of public speaking, a critical flaw in a congressman. However, William was a formidable conversationalist—another trait he shared with his youngest brother—and once spoke in a private discussion with such animation that Congressman William Lowndes of South Carolina grabbed him and fairly shouted into his face, “Why, in the name of God, will you not speak this way in the House?”48

  In late December Washington's services as Tompkins's aide-de-camp ended unceremoniously when Tompkins, anxious to return to his gubernatorial obligations, departed for the legislative session at Albany. He entrusted his duties to a new commander, who simply dissolved the staff. It was an anticlimactic conclusion to an otherwise respectable stint, though Irving was disappointed he had never seen any real action. Sackets Harbor aside, he later joked that his most heroic moment in uniform had come when Tompkins—never easy in the saddle—was thrown from his horse into a ditch, where Irving dutifully picked him up and dusted him off.49

  Now that his term of service had expired, Irving considered enlisting in the regular navy. In January 1815 he began a trip down to Washington, D.C., where he planned to discuss his military options with William. He had gotten as far as Philadelphia when he learned that a number of publishers and booksellers had gone bankrupt, including Bradford & Innskeep, which dragged Moses Thomas—and the Analectic—down with it.

  The mass bankruptcies were largely the result of the suspension of specie payments by United States banks. Business had been bad for almost everyone during the past year; on the back of one of his letters to Irving that fall, Brevoort had scribbled the names of fif-teen collapsed businesses, writing at the top of the page in disbelief, “All failed within 2 or 3 weeks.” However, the ruin of Bradford & Innskeep was considered especially shameful in Philadelphia, and both Bradford and Thomas were being maligned publicly for mismanagement. Irving believed Thomas to be largely blameless—he held Bradford responsible for the failure—but the result was the same: the Analectic was as good as finished.50

  Irving was relieved. While he had given Thomas proper notice, the financial collapse of the magazine allowed him a relatively graceful escape. With other creditors knocking at Thomas's door, Irving generously refused to press for any money he was owed. “I promptly signed off whatever was due to me,” he said, “because I thought him unfortunate & the victim of other peoples misconduct.” He offered to provide Thomas with contributions free of charge should he get the magazine running again, but Irving vowed one thing for certain: he would “never again undertake the editor-ship of that or of any other periodical work.”51

  The experience had convinced him once again that living by the pen was not only impossible, but nerve-racking. “These failures,” he told Verplanck, “I am afraid will sensibly affect the interests of literature and deter all those from the exercise of the pen who would take it up as a means of profit.”52 After settling his affairs, Irving might have continued his trip to the capital to join the navy had not the news of the Treaty of Ghent reached the United States on February 11, 1815. The war was over.

  “I suppose this sudden news of peace has taken You all aback,” Irving wrote on February 21 to Commodore Oliver Perry, the subject of one of his biographical sketches, and now a friend. “You however, of all men, have the least cause to regret it; having reaped a rich harvest of Laurels.” If there was one person who regretted the peace, it was Irving. His military service had been “the first thing that roused and stimulated me,” he wrote many years later, “but it did not last long; for peace took place, the forces were disbanded & I had nothing to do.”53

  Only Irving could find peace so depressing. With his military aspirations shelved and any further literary endeavors snuffed by the demise of the Analectic, he was in a funk. Still, his literary standing had risen because of the Analectic, and his fame was enough to secure invitations to the finest parlors and best parties around town. “My literary notoriety had made me an object of attention, I was continually drawn, into society,” he wrote later. Yet the emptiness lingered. “My time & thoughts dissipated and my spirits jaded,” he wrote flatly, “I became weary of every thing and of myself.”54

  At least there was still decent conversation to be
had in the parlor he shared with Brevoort at Mrs. Bradish's, where Stephen Decatur and his wife were Irving's frequent guests. Like Irving, Decatur was suffering from blackened spirits. In January he had been forced to surrender his ship, the frigate USS President, to the British after a fierce firefight off the Atlantic coast—an action that resulted in a brief imprisonment and a loss of reputation. Decatur was looking for an opportunity to regain his good name—and that spring, as the disgraced commodore paced the floors of Irving's parlor on Broadway, he told Irving that such an opportunity had come his way. In March Congress authorized the deployment of naval power against Algiers—known as the Second Barbary War—and asked Decatur to command a fleet to the Mediterranean to suppress Algerian pirates. With Irving's eager encouragement, and against the wishes of his wife, Decatur accepted the post—and asked Irving to consider making the trip with him. After a hurried conversation with his brothers, Irving decided to go with Decatur, but only for as long as it took to shake off his “idle habits and idle associates & fashionable dissipation.” Then, he promised, he would return home “to settle myself down to useful and honourable application.”55

  By May 18 Irving's bags were packed and stowed aboard Decatur's ship, ready for departure, when the news arrived that Napoleon had returned from exile at Elba. The U.S. government held Decatur in port while it sorted out its intelligence, and Irving—who feared that he was becoming a burden to Decatur—suddenly backed out. When Decatur and his fleet sailed for Algiers on May 20, it was without Irving.

  With his bags still packed and his wanderlust raging, Irving was determined to go just about anywhere. He again consulted with his brothers, who generously agreed to bankroll a journey to Italy or Greece.