Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Mary shyly asked for copies of any of Irving's letters—“Irvine” she called him—that Payne might have on hand, and Payne grudgingly obliged, handing over a dog-eared pile, along with a cover note declaring he would end his one-sided pursuit of her. “I have given way to an absurdity,” he huffed, “and have only myself to blame.”76

  Mrs. Shelley made reassuring noises. “Your letter gives me pain,” she told the rejected suitor. However, she admitted, “W.I.’s letter pleases me greatly. I shall be glad to see Irvine's letters, and the handwriting… will become as clear to me as Lord Byron's letterless scrawl. As to friendship with him—it cannot be—though everything I hear and know renders it more desirable. How can Irvine—surrounded by fashion, rank, and splendid friendships—pilot his pleasure bark from the gay press into this sober, sad, enshadowed nook?”77

  Dutifully, Payne continued sending Irving's letters to her even as he prepared to leave for Paris for his meeting with Stephen Price. Mrs. Shelley maintained a friendly correspondence with Payne, and joked that her relationship with—indeed, she teased, her plans to marry—her “favorite I[rving]” was not proceeding as quickly as she had hoped. “Methinks our acquaintance proceeds at the rate of the Antediluvians, who, I have somewhere read, thought nothing of an interval of a year or two between a visit. Alack! I fear that at this rate, if ever the Church should make us one, it would be announced in the consolatory phrase that the Bride and Bridegroom's joint ages amounted to the discreet number of 145 and 3 months.”78

  The following day, a blushing Mrs. Shelley sent a follow-up note to Payne, asking him to speak well of her to Irving. “Tho’ I am a little fool,” she wrote, “do not make me appear so in Rue Richelieu by repeating tales out of school—nor mention the Antediluvians.”79

  Payne gave Irving a parcel containing his correspondence with Mrs. Shelley, along with a note stating his intention to step aside and allow Irving to pursue what the playwright clearly thought was a golden opportunity. “I do not ask you to fall in love,” Payne said, “but I should feel a little proud of myself if you thought the lady worthy of that distinction, and very possibly you would have fallen in love with her, had you met her casually—but she is too much out of society to enable you to do so.”80

  One can only speculate what might have happened had Irving and Mary Shelley created literature's first transatlantic power couple. Irving, however, while likely amused, wasn't interested. “Read Mrs. Shelley's correspondence before going to bed,”81 he noted in his journal that evening—the only words he ever wrote regarding the entire affair. He handed the correspondence back to Payne without comment.

  His summer continued without incident, though he still hadn't found the urge to write much of anything. “I have nothing ready for the press, nor do I know at present when I shall have, my mind having been rather diverted from composition of late,” he told Murray, whose silence had discouraged Irving from any further work on his proposed life of Cervantes. Irving said he was reading about Spanish history and the Moors, and taking in “air and exercise” instead of society—which, of course, wasn't true.82

  He regularly checked with Storrow on the status of his Bolivian mines to see if there was any hope of disposing of them advantageously. There wasn't. “I regret to hear the Bolivars are so low—,” he sighed. “I had hoped to realize something from them to pay current expenses—it seems as if all my attempts to strike a little ahead are defeated.”83

  Irving wasn't the only one suffering financially. A wave of bankruptcies that had started in August was building into a tidal wave in London. On October 31 Irving learned that the banking firm of Welles & Williams had collapsed, taking down a staggering £400,000 in obligations with it, including a guarantee of £2,000 Irving had recently extended on Peter's behalf. Between the Bolivar mines and the collapse of Welles & Williams, Washington teetered on the brink of poverty, as did Ebenezer and the Van Warts. It was Liverpool all over again, and Irving plunged into despair. “Feel a want of confidence in myself in case of misfortune,” he recorded in early November, “—do not feel the same vivacity of thought & feelings as formerly.”84

  Concerned that his copyrights might be dragged into the current business woes, Washington asked Ebenezer to place all his literary property in the hands of John Treat or Brevoort—then had a nightmare the following night in which his house burned down, and all his manuscripts with it. “I am now not worth six pence!” he had screamed in his dream.85 He was a wreck.

  As before, financial need spurred his pen into action, however slowly. He settled into lodgings in Bordeaux's rue Holland for the winter, and revisited his American essays. On December 2 he told Storrow that he was hoping to have something ready for publication soon. “When I once See a little capital of manuscripts growing under my hand,” he said with some optimism, “I shall feel like another being and shall be relieved from a thousand cares and anxieties that have haunted my mind for a long time past.”86

  The American essays, which had helped him vent his frustration following Traveller’s poor reception, now served a similar therapeutic purpose, helping calm his nerves and build his confidence in the wake of economic collapse. By Christmas Day he probably surprised even himself when he wrote that “for some time past, indeed ever since I have resumed my pen, my mind has been tranquil. I sleep better and feel pleasanter.”87

  With his investments failing and future finances uncertain, Irving knew he had to keep writing to sustain himself. “I find there is nothing to be gained in looking beyond the pen,” he told Storrow, “I believe I must content myself with driving my quill in a garret instead of coining the treasures of Mexico & Peru.”88

  Interestingly, it was among the treasures of Spain where Washington Irving sought—and found—his next inspiration and fortune.

  10

  Professional

  1826–1829

  I have principally been employed on my Life of Columbus, in executing which I have studied and laboured with a patience and assiduity for which I shall never get the credit.

  —Washington Irving to Henry Brevoort, April 4, 1827

  THE LETTER FROM THE AMERICAN MINISTER to Spain seemed too good to be true.

  President John Quincy Adams's newly appointed minister, a thirty-five-year-old Bostonian named Alexander Hill Everett, had met Irving during the summer of 1825 in Paris. The two had enjoyed each other's company, and before leaving for Spain, Everett invited Irving to visit Madrid, even offering to formally attach him to the Spanish embassy for protection. Irving had declined, but in early January 1826, on a whim, he wrote Everett from Bordeaux, asking if his invitation was still open.

  Everett's response arrived on January 30. Not only did the offer still stand, but Everett also had a potential literary project for him: the Spanish writer and scholar Martin Fernández de Navarette was preparing to publish the journals of Christopher Columbus, and Everett wanted to know if Irving would be interested in translating the documents into English. Everett suggested that such a translation might be sold to interested publishers.

  Everett had shrewdly appealed to Irving's purse, and the offer was tempting. The investment in the Bolivian copper mine was a disaster, and his personal finances remained tight. As for the proposed project, Irving had undertaken similar work before, translating plays like Richelieu from French into English. It seemed to be easy money. “The very idea of it animates me,” Irving wrote to the minister. “There is something in the job itself that interests and pleases me, and will assist to compensate me for my trouble.” To Storrow, however, he was markedly less reserved. “A job has suddenly presented itself which seems like a godsend. This thing has come upon me so suddenly that it has thrown me quite in a flurry.”1

  In the meantime, Irving wrote to Leslie in London and asked the artist to approach John Murray, to see if he—or any other publisher, for that matter—would be interested in acquiring the Columbus translation, sight unseen, for 1,000 guineas. Irving apologized for the bother; Leslie and his wife
were friendly with the Murrays, and Irving knew that his request could put Leslie in an awkward position. But Murray hadn't responded favorably to his letters lately, so he thought a more personal appeal was necessary. For good measure, he dropped a note to the publisher, assuring him that his project was sure to be “very interesting… I hope it will be a work to tempt you.”2

  And still there was Payne and his long, tiresome letters from London to deal with. A bit of good news had come from the wastrel playwright in early January, when Payne informed him that Riche-lieu would finally be performed at London's Covent Garden Theatre in February. But the play bombed badly, running only six performances. Worse, Payne had given Irving a writing credit, tacking a failed play onto Irving's résumé immediately on the heels of the hated Tales of a Traveller. Fortunately, most readers and critics took scarce notice of Richelieu.3

  On their arrival in Madrid, Washington and Peter were welcomed by Minister Everett into the tight circle of English-speaking diplomats. Everett introduced the brothers to American consul Obadiah Rich, who lived with his family in a large, rambling house in the old section of Madrid near the Prado. Rich also served as archivist of the American legation, and his residence—a fusion of home, library, and museum—was a bibliophile's dream. Rich had one of the finest libraries in Spain, and perhaps the finest private collection when it came to Spanish history. Everett thought Rich's home the ideal place for the Irvings to rent rooms.4

  He was right—“I have never been more pleasantly situated,” Washington told Leslie. Not only did it have a remarkable library, but there was a beautiful courtyard garden where he could stroll for inspiration. The place was quiet, especially compared to his rooms in Paris, where the noise of horse-drawn carriages and loud late-night theatergoers had sometimes made it impossible to sleep or think. Irving thought Rich, a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate, “a most excellent and amiable man.”5

  After settling in at Rich's, Irving visited Navarette for a look at the materials he would be translating. Navarette handed over the first two volumes of his forthcoming Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos, que hicieron por mar los Espanoles desde fines del siglo XV, a massive five-part history of Spain that he was writing at the request of King Ferdinand.

  Irving's heart must have sunk—Everett had misunderstood. The journals of Columbus were only part of the document Irving was to translate. Navarette had another nine hundred pages of rare Columbus-related manuscripts that he had plumbed from the closely guarded archives of the Spanish government over the past thirty years. It was a treasure trove of important, if obscure, papers, but it definitely wasn't what Irving had expected to translate.

  Then news came from Leslie that Murray wouldn't purchase a Columbus translation without seeing it first. “It might be interesting or it might be dry,” Leslie explained on Murray's behalf, “he therefore cannot make any arrangement until it is done.”6 Murray wasn't about to repeat the mistake he had made with his blind purchase of Tales of a Traveller.

  The publisher was having other difficulties. Economic problems in London had been far-reaching, and the recent financial collapse had dragged down a number of publishers, including Murray's friend Constable. “They are all just now in so great a panic, occasioned by the recent failures here,” Leslie told Irving. Murray had survived, but was trying to diversify by establishing a daily newspaper, the Representative, a Tory-leaning publication he had set up mainly as a mouthpiece for his friend Benjamin Disraeli. It occupied so much of Murray's time in 1826 that he neglected his correspondence with Irving for most of the year—and got an earful for it.7

  Back in Madrid, a disappointed Irving spent the next month taking long walks in the overgrown gardens of the Buen Retiro, or strolling in the tree-lined Prado, the most fashionable location in Madrid. He continued to study Spanish, and toured museums and galleries. “Weary and out of order,” he reported.8

  Pope Leo had declared 1826 a Jubilee year, so the theaters were closed (“I never felt more out of humor with popery,” Irving grumbled), and remained so for several months, forcing Irving to seek his diversions elsewhere. He enjoyed the company of Everett and his wife, and befriended the Russian minister, Pierre D'Oubril, and his family. Other days, Irving was content to browse Rich's library, though inspiration continued to evade him. “Exceedingly listless & dispirited part of the day,” he wrote fussily.9

  He was beginning to regret that he had ever seen Navarette's volumes. “I fear there is nothing to be done with it,” he told Storrow. “They… are almost entirely made up of Documents which none but a historiographer would have an appetite to devour or Stomach to digest.” That wasn't true; Irving knew how to sort through dense and esoteric papers—he had done it for A History of New York. Turning Navarette's volumes over in his hands, he knew the information the historian had compiled was useful, even if technical or academic. “Excellent materials for a work, but which in their present form would repel the general class of readers,” he admitted to Leslie. “I am in hopes of making a work that will be acceptable to the public.”10

  Rich later claimed credit for encouraging Irving to write a life of Christopher Columbus. Irving was slow to embrace the idea, but once he did, he worked at a frantic pace. Sitting in Rich's library, he began as early as 5:00 A.M. and wrote steadily into the evening. For the first time, he treated writing like a real job, maintaining a regular schedule and producing a certain number of pages daily. “I had no idea of the Nature of the task when I undertook it,” he later said. “Indeed had I seen it in the light in which I behold it at present, I should have been diffident of undertaking it at all.” Despite his intense work schedule, Irving was no hermit. Writing, when it flowed, energized him, and most evenings he found time for walks and good company. “The people here are greatly pleased with him,” remarked an impressed Everett.11

  In early May he spent three days with Peter and the Everetts at the royal palace in Aranjuez, about thirty miles south of Madrid. It was an exclusive invitation that Irving could hardly refuse, yet he remained remarkably disciplined, spending part of each day taking notes or writing. Returning from Aranjuez on May 6, his rigorous pace resumed immediately. “Rise at ½ past 4,” read one journal entry from this time, “write at Columb all day… write before going to bed. 29 p[ages].”12

  On May 22 he attended his first bullfight—the toros, he called them—an entertainment that became his guilty pleasure. The spectacle, with its blend of formality and managed chaos, resonated with his sense of pageantry; and the bloodshed made it all seem that much more romantic. “I did not know what a bloodthirsty man I was till I saw them at Madrid,” Irving recalled later. “The first was very spirited, the second dull, the third spirited again, and afterward I hardly ever missed. ‘But the poor horses,’ someone interposed. ‘Oh, well, they were very old and worn out, and it was only a question whether they should die a triumphant death or be battered a few years longer.’”13

  In mid-June Irving completed the first draft of his Columbus biography. “I am absolutely fagged and exhausted with hard work,” he told Storrow. Looking through his seven hundred handwritten pages, he was uncertain of its quality. “It is so much in the rough that I have not as yet shewn it even to my brother,” he wrote. “One person I am sure of not pleasing… is myself.”14

  For the next month, he continued reading and researching, poring over any titles in Rich's library that he might have missed, rereading Navaratte's two volumes, and reviewing his own manuscript. “Study all day,” he wrote in his journal,15 though his evenings were reserved for strolls in the Retiro, dining with friends, or attending the theater or bullfights. An even more welcome distraction presented itself on June 24, with the arrival of his twenty-four-year-old nephew, Pierre Munro Irving.

  Pierre, the fourth of William Irving Jr.’s eight children, had recently passed the bar and was making a tour of Europe before setting up a practice in New York. His reunion with Washington owed more to luck than planning. Arriving in Madrid, Pi
erre had approached Minister Alexander Everett about a new passport—and a delighted Everett steered Pierre to his uncle, still huddled in Rich's library. “I found him in the midst of books and manuscripts,” Pierre recalled, “full of the subject on which he was engaged, and in excellent spirits.”16

  Irving was delighted with the young man. Pierre was more than just family; he was surprisingly good company. “He has stuff in him to make a valuable man,” Washington said appreciatively. For the next three weeks, Pierre was his constant companion. Despite the presence of family, Washington soon fell into a funk in which he was “incapable of work.” Pierre thought he knew why: his uncle's mysterious stalker—the one who had barraged him with copies of his bad reviews following Tales of a Traveller—was at it again. “He adverted with deep feeling to the cloud which had been thrown over him by the persevering malignity with which all sorts of disagreeable things had been forwarded to him from America by some secret enemy,” Pierre recalled.17

  Such literary terrorism was certainly part of it, but Washington also fretted about money. To his embarrassment, he was forced to borrow from friends in Madrid and draw regularly on Storrow. Until he published another work, he subsisted only on his prior earnings, most of which were tied up in the failing Bolivian mines. “I must drive my pen hard,” he confessed to Storrow, “to make up for these drawbacks.”18