Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  He was as good as his word. On July 11 he plunged into his second draft of Columbus. The following morning, he put Pierre in a carriage for France, where he had arranged for him to stay with the Storrows for the next leg of his European tour. With Pierre gone, the reprieve, such as it was, was over.

  Hard at work, he found his insomnia returned. Staggering from his bed at 4:30 or 5:00 A.M., he would go for a walk with Peter, then return to Rich's for breakfast before finally settling in to write all afternoon. On one of their morning walks, Washington spoke of the history of Granada—specifically the events leading up to its conquest in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella and the defeat of the Moorish king Boabdil—as the possible subject of his next book.

  By late August Irving believed he was close enough to finishing his second draft of Columbus to put it aside and begin another project. For several weeks he worked exclusively on a history of Granada, with the same intensity as he had on Columbus. Still, he was determined not to be antisocial; there were bullfights, operas, state dinners, daily walks in the Retiro, visits to court, and even a brief trip to the crumbling remains of the Escurial in mid-October.19

  Money continued to be an issue. Many of the drafts he had drawn on Storrow hadn't been covered yet by either Ebenezer or Van Wart. Irving was mortified, and assured Storrow he would settle his account once he published… well, something. “Unluckily none of my literary matters are in sufficient forwardness to be pressed into present service,” he apologized. “For a few weeks past I have neglected Columbus to run after a new subject.”20

  Irving worked exclusively on Granada for several more weeks before he returned full-time to Columbus in mid-November. He wrote to Murray, asking the Prince of Booksellers whether he thought the project sounded promising.21

  As 1826 wound down, Irving had good reason to be pleased with all that he accomplished. It had been “a year of the hardest application & toil of the pen I have ever passed,” he wrote; however, “I feel more satisfied… with the manner in which I have passed it than I have been with these of many gayer years, & close this year of my life in better humor with myself than I have often done.”22 He was up by six on the morning of January 1, 1827, to work on Columbus.

  If Irving was enthusiastic about his project, there was one person who was not. From the very beginning, Thomas Storrow had expressed serious reservations about the Columbus biography. In Storrow's opinion, the project was cost-prohibitive—Irving was investing more time and effort than Storrow believed Irving would ever recoup financially. Further, Storrow believed Irving was taking a chance with his readers if he expected to pass off the easygoing Geoffrey Crayon as the author of a serious biography.

  Irving was taking a chance, but he had enough confidence in the work to politely dismiss Storrow's concerns. “I am sorry that you do not seem to think highly of my literary undertaking, and that you doubt whether Columbus will repay me for my trouble,” he told him. “It is too late now to demur upon the subject. The work is nearly finished. It has cost me, for the time I have been employed upon it, an excessive deal of labour; if it fails to interest the public I shall be grievously disappointed.” Storrow's doubts cast a momentary pall over the project, and for several days Irving sank into an unproductive rut. “Triste indisposed to work,” he scrawled across the top of three days’ worth of journal entries.23

  Fortunately, Murray wrote to him—for the first time in nearly a year—with good news: he was interested in Columbus, and wanted to see the manuscript. He also apologized for not corresponding regularly, explaining that the Representative had taken up most of his time along with most of his money. Disraeli had proved a skit-tish collaborator, and had backed out of the project, leaving Murray in the lurch. Consequently, the newspaper only lasted until July 1826, at a personal loss to Murray of £26,000, about $3 million today. He managed to stay afloat by sharply reducing the number of titles he published. Irving's track record was enough to keep him interested, but his problematic finances demanded he see anything before agreeing to a deal. Two days after receiving Murray's letter, Irving wrote to Pierre in Paris, asking him to go to London to steer Columbus through production. Time was of the essence, he stressed to his nephew, especially if he was to work with Ebenezer to coordinate the near-simultaneous publication of the book in the United States.24

  Suddenly, things went impossibly wrong. Irving's journals are vague, but in late January, during one of his conversations with Navarette, the senior historian must have said something that made Irving nervous about his project. Irving clearly believed he had missed something important—so important, in fact, that he started rewriting his manuscript from scratch.

  Irving seems to have lost confidence in his narrative tone. He was writing an academic work that nonacademics would find accessible, and he was probably rightly worried about balancing his usual elegant tone with a scholarly one. He began to have bad dreams, “fearful the work was not well enough written.”25 He later admitted to Everett that “Columbus had more slovenliness of style in one stage of its preparation than any work I ever wrote; for I was so anxious about the verity of the narrative and had to patch it together from so many different materials, that I had not time to think of the language.”26 He was a nervous wreck; he barely slept. “Write from early 3 oclock to dinner time,” began one exhausted entry. “Sleep 2 hours. Write from 6 till 8. Pass hour & half at rich's write a little but go to bed at ½ pa 10. wake at 2. write till breakfast time.”27

  Irving abandoned any hope of publishing by spring, and told Pierre to forget about going to London. “It is a kind of work that will not bear hurrying,” he told his nephew, “many questions have been started connected with it which have been perplexed by tedious controversies, and which must all be looked into. I had no idea what a complete labyrinth I had entangled myself in when I took hold of the work.”28

  To the still skeptical Storrow, he wrote:

  I am affraid, after the discouraging speeches you made about Columbus, to say that I am yet labouring at it…. You have no idea what a laborious and entangling job it is. There are so many points in dispute. I have fagged night and day for a great part of the time, and every now and then some further document, throwing a different light on some obscure part of the work has obliged me to rewrite what I had supposed finished…. I want to finish the work on many accounts. I want to produce something that will give satisfaction to the American public, I want to make a little money badly.29

  He was “excessively wearied” and “extremely depressed,” but the work continued.

  Irving's work ethic impressed at least one new arrival in Madrid, a twenty-year-old professor and aspiring poet named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A native of Portland, Maine, Longfellow had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin College in 1825, and had shown such promise that the school offered him a professorship in modern languages, on the condition that he travel in Europe for additional language study. Arriving in Madrid, Longfellow never forgot his first glimpse of Irving laboring over his manuscripts. “He seemed to be always at work,” Longfellow said. “One summer morning, passing his house at the early hour of six, I saw his study window already wide open.” Despite his frantic writing schedule, for the months Longfellow was in Madrid, Irving made an effort to socialize frequently with the young man. Longfellow was delighted with the time and attention. “He is one of those men who put you at ease in a moment,” he said warmly of Irving.30

  To Irving's embarrassment, his money troubles persisted, and he was growing increasingly resentful—and jealous—of successful investors, referring to them derisively as “money-grubbers.” Bitterly, he groused to Ebenezer that Brevoort had managed to avoid bank-ruptcy during the recent financial upheavals precisely because he, too, had become one of the hated money-grubbers.

  Irving had nothing of substance to back up such an accusation—Brevoort had, in fact, suffered financially due to a number of bad investments—but Irving flung the charge at his friend in frustration. To support his allega
tion, he pointed out that he hadn't received a letter from Brevoort in nearly two years, and that the silence confirmed Brevoort had forsaken friendship in the name of profit. Of course, Irving hadn't bothered to write Brevoort to sort things out, but that was beside the point. Washington Irving was mad at Henry Brevoort—and Ebenezer delicately informed Brevoort of the one-sided spat.

  Brevoort was stunned, and more than a little angry. On January 1 he wrote a long letter to Irving to plead his case. He rightly pointed out that he had received few letters from Irving over the same time period, yet “never did I permit any unkind construction of your seeming neglect to cross my mind. Nor was it possible that any neglect of the kind could weaken the deep foundation of my attachment to you—an attachment which as I hope for mercy, I have never felt towards any other man.”31 As for the “money-grubbing,” Brevoort bristled at the charge. “Whoever it was that informed you, that my mind was absorbed & debased by money-making pursuits, was guilty of uttering a base falsehood. The repetition of so gross an aspersion, although disbelieved by you, appears irreconcilable to my conception of the disinterested f[rien]dship that has invariably existed between us.” And yet, Brevoort was willing to give his friend the benefit of the doubt, and extended a generous olive branch: “I trust I have said nothing more than was strictly necessary to my own defence; but if I have said aught to offend your feelings, I hope you will overlook it & remember that this the only instance of discord that has ever arisen between us.—Let us then my dear Irving begin the new year by a renewal of kind and affectionate recollections & by frank and frequent interchange of our sentiments.”32

  Irving received the letter in mid-February, and waited nearly two months to respond. Finally, on April 4, the day after his forty-fourth birthday, he wrote back, composing one of his most revealing letters since the nineteen-page confession he had written to the Fosters. He apologized for the money-grubbing charge, claiming he had spoken “from feelings deeply grieved by your apparent neglect,” and admitted that bad reviews and his mysterious mail stalker were making him hypersensitive even to imaginary slights.33

  He was more wounded, he explained, by the constant assaults on his patriotism from critics who asserted that he had kowtowed to British sensibilities at the expense of his American heritage. “Do not let yourself be persuaded therefore that time or distance has estranged me in thought or feeling from my native country, my native places, or the friends of my youth,” he told Brevoort. “The fact is that the longer I remain from home the greater charm it has in my eyes, and all the colouring that the imagination once gave to distant Europe now gathers about the scenes of my native country.”34

  Finally, he admitted that he feared Storrow might be right—that after all his hard work on his Columbus biography, readers wouldn't give the book a chance. “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,” he wrote sulkily. “How it will please the public I cannot anticipate. I have lost confidence in the favourable disposition of my Countrymen and look forward to cold scrutiny & stern Criticism; and this is a line of writing in which I have not hitherto ascertained my own powers.”35

  The rift between Washington and Brevoort—if there had ever really been one—quietly closed. “I need not assure you that it has removed from my mind every cause of complaint,” Brevoort responded with relief, “& I beg that the warmth with which I expressed myself on the subject may be forgotten.”36 All was forgiven.

  The Columbus manuscript continued to swell, and Irving apologized to Murray that the book he had sworn was “nearly ready for the press” in the winter of 1826 was still unfinished in the spring of 1827. “I make no promise about when it shall be forwarded,” he told Murray, “lest I should disappoint both you and myself.” By July 29 he had enough of Columbus completed, and neatly copied, to forward to London. However, the package wasn't going to John Murray.37

  Eighteen months earlier, Irving had asked Charles Leslie to shop Columbus to Murray or any other interested publisher. Irving preferred Murray, but if the Prince of Booksellers rejected the manuscript, Irving was prepared to take it elsewhere. To properly circulate his book, however, Irving needed an agent. His first choice, Pierre M. Irving, was no longer an option—the young man had returned to America. There was always Leslie, but Irving had already pestered the artist once, and didn't want to put him in the middle of a potentially difficult business transaction, especially given the condition of the British publishing market. He needed a shrewd negotiator with a good head for business—and among Irving's circle of London friends, the person who fit that description best was the American consul, the Harvard-educated attorney Colonel Thomas Aspinwall.

  Irving provided Aspinwall with the first nine of his eighteen “books” on Columbus—about 750 handwritten pages—as well as two letters for his agent's use. One was an official-sounding business letter for Aspinwall to present to interested publishers, with the proposed terms of the agreement Irving was seeking. The other was a confidential document for Aspinwall, detailing just how far Irving was willing to go in his negotiations. Irving rightly believed he had written a book that would earn its publisher profits for years to come, and he wasn't going to part with it on the cheap. “If the work is successful it must remain in regular demand and is not like a work of the imagination, which may be thrown aside on a change of public taste,” he told Aspinwall. “As a literary property, therefore, it would in such case be more valuable than all my other writings.”38

  At Irving's direction, Aspinwall offered Columbus to Murray first, asking the publisher to either purchase the British copyright outright for a relatively hefty 3,000 guineas (about $300,000 today), or to publish the work on shares, in which Irving's cut would be based on the number of copies sold. “In publishing on shares,” Irving admitted privately to Aspinwall, “I take my chance of its ultimate success or failure, and am willing to do so rather than part with the copyright at a lower rate.”39 Murray asked for time to consider his options—and kept silent for the next month.

  The wait was unbearable. Irving set to work on the remaining half of his manuscript, but even as he completed the work on August 19, there was still no word from Albemarle Street. Unknown to Irving, Murray had asked poet Robert Southey, a long-time friend and contributor to the Quarterly Review, for his opinion on Irving's manuscript. Southey took his time reading it—hence the delay—but what he saw didn't impress him. “There is neither much power of mind nor much knowledge indicated in it,” the poet told Murray. Still, Southey conceded that Irving had shown “a great deal of diligence employed upon the subject” and that the book was “likely to succeed.”40

  That was enough for the Prince of Booksellers. In September he informed Aspinwall that he would purchase the British copyright to Columbus for the 3,000 guineas Irving had requested, paying £300 up front, and the rest in regular installments over the next two years.

  Irving was delighted. “I am heartily glad Murray has acceded so handsomely to my terms,” he told Aspinwall. “I should not feel satisfied in dealing with any other publisher. I am accustomed to him. I have a friendship with him, and I like the truly gentlemanlike manner in which he publishes.”41

  He was also highly satisfied with Aspinwall. “He seems to have been very wary,” wrote Newton, who had followed the negotiations closely, “and to have gained great credit with Murray as a sharp bargainer.” Irving was inclined to agree—and when Aspinwall asked for a commission of £78, about 2½ percent of the price he had negotiated, Irving enthusiastically paid him an even hundred. “You have done wonders,” he told Aspinwall gratefully. “I never could have made an arrangement in any degree as good had I been on the Spot.”42

  Securing an English publisher had been Irving's most worri-some task, but he still had quite a bit of work ahead of him. He was also working with Ebenezer and Brevoort to find an American publisher and coordinate a simultaneous American rel
ease. Meanwhile, the book needed a preface, there were revisions to be made, and Irving was working hard on the “illustrations”—what readers today would call an appendix—that would comprise almost an entire volume.

  Unfortunately, he no longer had Rich's library at his disposal—the consul had recently quit Madrid and moved to London to open his own bookstore. Washington and Peter glumly transferred to a house on Plazuela de Santa Cruz, just southeast of the Puerta del Sol in the heart of Madrid. While Irving found countless resources available at the King's Library, the Jesuits’ College, and at Navarette's, he missed Rich's library almost as much as he missed Rich. But he kept working, finishing his preface and jotting down notes on Columbus, as well as the outline of a new idea, a biography of the Prophet Muhammad.43

  Brevoort wrote to announce that he and Ebenezer had printed copies of the completed Columbus manuscript to show to potential American publishers, and anticipated a quick sale, as well as an eager American audience. “Many persons of the highest literary standing among us… have expressed their satisfaction upon hearing that you were engaged on a subject which they think properly belongs to us,” Brevoort wrote, “—so that you have every reason to expect a candid & friendly reception.”44

  Irving was feeling good, even a bit cocky, about his future prospects. “So ends the year 1827 tranquilly,” he confided in his last journal entry for the year. “It has been a year of labor, but much more comfortable than most I have passed in Europe, and leaves me in a state of moderate hope as to the future—.”45Columbus was on its way to the printers, and he was paid well for his efforts, something he couldn't resist crowing about to the patient Thomas Storrow. “You see how Columbus has turned out better than you anticipated as to profit,” Irving boasted.

  On February 8, 1828, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus was published in London in four thin octavo volumes, with a steep price tag of 2 guineas for the set, about $200 today. The critics, and Irving, were shocked by both the presentation and the price. Irving had earlier complained to Murray—in another of his unanswered letters—that there wasn't enough material to fill four volumes, so Murray had simply printed the book with a larger typeface and broader margins to make up the difference. To Irving's embarrassment, the large type made even more obvious the gross number of typographical errors in the work. He had given Aspin-wall no explicit directions regarding proofreading, so the colonel had left such details to Murray's typesetter, who, when unable to decipher Irving's cramped handwriting, had simply guessed—and the book suffered for it.