Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  As the end of March approached, Irving believed Emily was responding positively to his efforts. On March 24, following a morning of rehearsals for their latest amateur play, he walked along the Elbe with Emily and her mother, then attended a party at their home that, he noted in his journal, “ends pleasantly.” Four days later, on Good Friday, he spent the evening with the Fosters, and before turning in for the evening, made an entry in his journal that was later almost forcefully rubbed out. “Early part of day triste,” Irving wrote, which he frequently used to describe gloomy weather, but “Emily delightful.”23

  His confidence was up, as was his nerve. On March 31 he recorded in his journal—in yet another entry that has been almost completely obliterated—that he had gone to the Fosters for a party that evening, but had gone home “very much…”24 Here the erasure makes the rest of the entry completely unreadable. It is likely that the deleted word is “depressed,” or something of a similar sentiment—for it is likely that on this date he proposed marriage to Emily Foster, and found his proposal did not meet with the desired reaction.

  Emily probably did not refuse him outright. She likely asked for time to consider his offer, for Irving remained close by for the next month, waltzing with her on his fortieth birthday, and watching her warily. Publicly, he and Emily remained warm to each other, but the strain of keeping up appearances was obvious in an April entry in Emily's journal: “Irving is amiable & amusing. I must not yield to capricious coldness fits.” For much of the month, she was conveniently unwell or nursing a headache when Irving called on her.25

  Irving could only wait and brood. Despite his “amiable & amusing” facade, his spirits were sinking. “Endeavor to write poetry but in vain—,” he recorded on April 14, in another rubbed-out entry, “determining not to dine today at Mrs F Think of leavg Dresden.” The tension must have been palpable, yet in late April, as Irving put the finishing touches on Der Freischütz, Emily seemed to warm to him again. “E in good spirits & listens delightfully,” reads a scrubbed April 18 journal entry. By April 20 she was “in good spirits… and very agreeable” (erased), on the twenty-first, “much better” (also effaced), and on the twenty-seventh he was writing a poem in preparation for her nineteenth birthday on May 4.26

  Then, in late April there was an angry confrontation. Rumors of Irving's marriage proposal had been whispered around Dresden drawing rooms, but when it was mentioned at a party she and Irving were attending, Emily exploded. “That report that I am to marry ‘certo signore autore’—begins to annoy me,” she wrote testily in her journal. When Irving entered the room, other guests discreetly filed out, “to leave me,” Emily continued, “a tete-a-tete with him[.] I was quite angry.”27

  What was said remains unknown, but the confrontation wrecked Irving. His journal entry for that day was brief, but curious. No mention was made of the argument, yet its absence screamed from five terse etceteras and twelve angry, decreasing horizontal lines:

  Study at home all morning—[c]all at Livius—Take Italian lesson at Mrs F—Dine there—with Livius—read French in the Evg.—call at Lowensterns—then at Livius—&c &c &c &c &c28

  For the next two days, Irving avoided the Fosters. At the end of his self-imposed separation, he acknowledged in his journal that the time away had done him good: “Returnd home in very good spirits determind to see society and gather myself up.”29 But he had also unburdened himself by writing, perhaps at Mrs. Foster's request, a lengthy, cathartic letter, which he now presented to Mrs. Foster and Emily.

  It was a letter unlike any Irving ever wrote. Composing it during an emotional and nervous crisis, he exposed his soul for perhaps the only time in his life. “It was left with us under a sacred promise that it should be returned to him,” Flora Foster remembered later, “that no copy should be taken; and that no other eyes but ours should ever rest upon it.”30 The letter was so dear to Irving, in fact, that he kept the surviving pages in a locked box for the rest of his life, in a package marked simply, “Private Mems.”

  Over the course of nineteen rambling pages—three of which are missing—Irving described his childhood, his love and grief for Matilda Hoffman, his struggles at a career, and the still smarting humiliation of bankruptcy, as he tried desperately to address concerns Mrs. Foster may have expressed about his lifelong bachelor-hood, his moodiness and mental condition, and his plans for the future:

  You wonder why I am not married… I became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the world to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances, and I was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by matrimony. My time has now gone by…. You want to know some of the fancies that distress me…. While at Dresden I had repeated feelings since I entered upon the world, which like severe wounds and maims in the body, leave forever after a morbid sensitiveness, and a quick susceptibility to any new injury.

  Despite this “morbid sensitiveness,” Irving asserted—after a long explanation of personal, financial, and artistic difficulties—that his outlook on life was generally positive, sometimes to a fault: “Indeed I often reproach myself with my cheerfulness and even gaiety at times when I have real cause to grieve. Whatever you may think of me, the natural inclination of my mind is to be cheerful; but I have had so many shadows thrown across my path; I see so much doubt before & sorrow behind me; I see every enjoyment hanging on so transient and precarious a tenure, that I cannot help sometimes falling into dejection.”31

  The letter ends on a down beat, breaking off in mid-sentence just as Irving began to discuss his family obligations. It is impossible to know what sentiments and confessions may have been on the three missing pages, but it is clear that he had informed Mrs. Foster—either in the missing pages or in person—that he would no longer pursue Emily's hand. As Flora Foster later recalled: “He has confessed to my mother, as to a true and dear friend, his love for Emily, and his conviction of its utter hopelessness. He feels himself unable to combat it. He thinks he must try, by absence, to bring more peace to his mind. Yet he cannot bear to give up our friend-ship—an intercourse become so dear to him, and so necessary to his daily happiness. Poor Irving!”32

  Heartbroken, Irving resolved to leave Dresden. “He sometimes thinks he had better never return,” Flora wrote. “That would be too sad.” Irving lingered in town long enough to attend Emily's nineteenth birthday party, delivering to her mother the verses he had composed the day before the altercation. “If… they would give her any pleasure—Slip them into her scrap book,” he wrote politely, “if not slip them into the stove that convenient altar.”33

  On May 19, as Irving bid the Fosters good-bye for a tour of Silesia and Bohemia, it wasn't clear if he would come back. “Mama suspects he meant not to return,” Emily recorded in her journal, “he said he had thought of it—but that he would, he could not help it—We stood on the balcony by moonlight and talked of heaven.” Irving's journal entry was more tight-lipped: “Evg. Pass at Mrs. F—take tea in open air—moonlight evg.—talk of stars &c.”34

  Irving's tour started well enough, as he drove through neat country villages and traipsed through the Giant Mountains. But he was an emotional mess, and the letters he wrote regularly to Mrs. Foster were rambling and confused: “When I consider how I have trifled with my time, suffered painful vicissitudes of feeling, which for a time damaged both mind and body—when I consider all this, I reproach myself that I did not listen to the first impulse of my mind, and abandon Dresden long since. And yet I think of returning! Why should I come back to Dresden? The very inclination that draws me thither should furnish reasons for my staying away.” With time on his hands, Irving conducted some image-related business, fussing about a portrait he was having engraved for mass production in America. “I wished it to supplant the likeness already engraved for my country,” he wrote, “in which I am made to look like such a noodle, that if I really thought I looked so I would kick myself out of doors.” He still couldn't bring himself to write. “I think if I c
ould get my mind fully employed upon some work it would be a wonderful relief to me,” he sighed. By mid-June he was ready to return to Dresden, against his better judgment. “I ought to be off like your bird,” he told Mrs. Foster, “but I feel I shall not be able to keep clear of the cage. I wish I liked you all only half as much as I do.” He was back by June 26, sporting a new, albeit temporary, mustache and a determination to leave Dresden for good.35

  The decision had actually been made for him, for the Fosters had decided to return to England at the end of July. Irving was determined to winter in Paris, but agreed to accompany the family as far as Rotterdam. On July 30 he rode down the Oube River with the Fosters until their steamboat entered open water, then boarded another boat to take him to Brielle. “As he looked up to us, so pale & melancholy,” Emily wrote of their good-bye, “I thought I never felt a more painful moment, such starts of regret, a little self-reproach and feelings too quick to analyze.” Irving tried manfully not to betray his emotions, but leaving the Fosters and Dresden rattled him. “Oh, Dresden, Dresden!” he said. “With what a mixture of pain, pleasure, fondness, and impatience I look back upon it.”36

  Irving slunk to Paris. Almost immediately, he dispatched a number of letters to Peter—still struggling with his steamboats at Le Havre—to assure him that he was preparing to work on a new book that would earn them both plenty of money. “We shall then be independent of the world and its chances,” he told Peter.37

  Preparing to write was one thing; actually writing was another. Irving still suffered from the massive case of writer's block that had kept his pen still for nearly a year. He began to have nightmares that depressed him and drained his energy. “I am aware that this is all an affair of the nerves,” he told Peter, “a kind of reaction in consequence of coming to a state of repose after so long moving about, and produced also by the anxious feeling on resuming literary pursuits.”38 The unfinished Buckthorne novel, removed from Brace-bridge Hall at Leslie's urging, was still in his trunk; yet the inspiration to finish didn't come.

  He found some solace in the home of Thomas Storrow on rue Thevenot. Storrow, the son of a British army officer, had settled in Paris in 1815 with his wife and four children, and the family welcomed Irving into their home as one of their own. To his delight, he also had real family in France; his nephews Henry and Irving Van Wart, aged seventeen and sixteen respectively, were studying in Paris. Irving took them under his wing, bringing them along to dinner parties and going for walks on the Champs Elysées.

  And there was John Howard Payne, who persisted in adapting French plays for the London stage, despite appeals from Irving to pursue a different line of work. Payne was living in rooms above the Salon Littéraire of the Palais Royal, basking in the success of an opera he had premiered in London in May, Clari, the Maid of Milan, with its still-famous song “Home, Sweet, Home.” This time it was Payne who had a business proposition for Irving: if Irving helped him adapt A. V. P. Duval's play La Jeunesse de duc Richelieu, Payne would split any profits with him down the middle. Irving agreed to help, but on the condition that his name would not appear on the final product.

  It wasn't Buckthorne, but it spurred his pen anew. In October Irving sublet rooms in a spacious apartment Payne maintained at 89 rue Richelieu, which the latter had crammed with furniture from a cottage he rented in Versailles. Here Irving could work on Richelieu, as well as Azendai and Married and Single, two more collaborations Payne had talked him into. It was hack work, but it was still work. If it was done right, Irving thought he might make a living at it. With Payne's encouragement, he was now determined to become a play-wright—and suddenly, inspiration struck. “While dressing think of subject for play,” he wrote in his journal on October 23, “Shakespeare as a young man.” His pen scratched an outline for three acts. He was on his way, or so he thought.

  Later that month Payne left for London, taking with him copies of Richelieu, Azendai, and Married and Single, which he hoped to peddle to Charles Kemble, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre. Irving remained behind to manage their mutual business affairs, which, to his annoyance, amounted mostly to holding Payne's French creditors at bay.

  In early November Irving began adapting La Jeunesse de Henry V. He changed its setting from France to England to better suit British tastes, and renamed it Charles II; or, The Merry Monarch. Peter visited to provide some much-needed company and assistance—he could translate from the French—and moved into a spare room in the rue Richelieu apartments. Within days, Peter was deep in conversation with the ironically named Mr. Goodsell, who was trying to convince the Irvings to speculate in an experimental flax machine. Money was an issue again.

  Washington's mood soured. Payne sent news that Kemble might purchase Richelieu, but complained so much about money and future prospects that Irving came unglued. “When there is the necessity for whining and croaking—,” he snapped, “wait until the plays are damnd, and then you may whine and be damned too.” He sent Payne a draft of Charles II, reminding his coauthor to keep his name off it. As his own money grew tighter and Payne's debtors continued to call, Irving urged his friend to simply dispose of the remaining plays “precisely as your own interests & emergencies may dictate.”39

  Irving was out of money, and out of patience. In December he forced himself to work on his German Sketch Book, but to no avail. “Try this morning to write on German work,” he noted in his journal on December 11, “but find it impossible.” It was the same the next day. “Full of doubts as to literary prospects,” he wrote.40 The nightmares began anew.

  It had been eighteen months since the publication of Brace-bridge Hall, and Murray was understandably anxious. “I am perfectly ready for you,” Murray wrote his absent author, “and the sooner you take the field, the better.” Irving swallowed hard; he had nothing to show Murray. So he did the only thing he could do to keep the publisher off his back: he lied. “I do not like to make promises,” he responded on December 22, “but I think I shall be able to furnish you with a brace more volumes of the Sketch Book in the course of the spring. I am already far advanced in them.” As a contingency plan, he proposed adapting Arabian Nights. “I can be working at them in the intervals of more original writing,” he told Murray.41

  In early 1824 a pirated copy of Salmagundi appeared in London, and the French publisher Galignani offered Irving the opportunity to publish an authorized edition of Old Sal. “It is full of crudities and Puerilities and I had hoped would have remained unnoticed & forgotten,”42 Irving told Murray. Yet, ever mindful of his reputation, he realized that if the public were to see Geoffrey Crayon in his younger, less refined days, it was better to publish a version he had sanitized himself. He agreed to revise not only Salmagundi but also A History of New York for Galignani.

  Payne sent word that Charles Kemble had agreed to purchase both Richelieu and Charles II for two hundred guineas—he also purchased Der Freischütz from Livius—but the novelty of being a playwright had worn off. Irving told Payne to keep the money and to withdraw their unsold manuscripts from consideration; he was quitting the playwriting business altogether. “The experiment has satisfied me that I should never in any wise be compensated for my time & trouble,”43 he told Payne.

  Murray refused to acknowledge Irving's Arabian Nights suggestion; his readers wanted Crayon, not rehashed Persian tales. Irving quickly finished his revisions to Salmagundi for Galignani, but creating new Geoffrey Crayon stories for Murray proved far more challenging. The clock was ticking; his self-imposed spring deadline, he told Leslie in February, “obliges me to make the most of what I have in hand & can soonest turn to account.” He strained to finish the Buckthorne piece, breaking it into a series of shorter stories about writers, booksellers, agents, and actors. “It had grown stale with me,” he explained to Leslie.44

  Irving was “very much out of spirits,” frequently waking in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep. Then, on February 15 Thomas Medwin, Percy Shelley's cousin, read to him the
journal of a painter who had been abducted by robbers near Rome. “He relates an anecdote or two which excite me,” Irving recorded in his journal, “return home and & commence.”45 The pen was back in action.

  Rising at five, sometimes four in the morning, Irving wrote at a speedy clip, at one point completing seventy-five handwritten manuscript pages in five days. The restless John Murray gently, but firmly, leaned on him to finish, and even provided financial incentive to spur his pen, offering 1,200 guineas for the manuscript sight unseen. By March 25 Irving was comfortable enough with the pieces he'd finished to promise Murray a complete manuscript by mid-May. “I think the title will be Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,” he told his publisher.46

  As for Murray's 1,200-guinea incentive, Irving acknowledged that such an offer was “a liberal one and made in your own gentle-manlike manner.” However, “I would rather you would see the Mss: and make it fifteen hundred.” He assured Murray that those who had read his pages so far “think the work will be the best thing I have written.”47

  Satisfied, Murray backed off—and Irving's pen suddenly went dry. “Out of spirits—distrustful of my work,” he wrote.48 Instead he sat for a portrait—his image remained in demand—and looked for new apartments. He sent letters of encouragement to Payne in London, read James Fenimore Cooper's new novel The Pilot, and learned of Byron's April 19 death.

  The fog lifted in early May, which proved fortuitous: Murray was advertising Tales of a Traveller for publication that summer. After some hectic writing, Washington sent the manuscript of the first volume to Peter for copying on May 17. A week later he traveled to London, where he planned to oversee production of Traveller and edit his proofs, even as he worked on material for a second volume.