Expecting a formal agreement—and down payment—in his hands shortly, Washington left for Sheffield, about ninety miles north of Birmingham, to stay with his nephew Irving Van Wart for a week. Within a few days, however, Washington fired off another missive to Aspinwall: “I am anxious to have the arrangement made and the works sent to press immediately, and printed rapidly so as to have them in type by the end of the next month, that I may be free.”43 Murray's response to these presumptuous overtures was typical: complete silence. He didn't respond until he was ready. Until he finished reading Mahomet, he had nothing to say.
Murray's silence sorely tested Irving's patience. “I would wish to have the works published by some other person or in some other manner, if he cannot accommodate me by prompt attention to them,” he griped to Aspinwall on October 18.44 Murray's continued silence sorely tested Irving's patience. He ranted to Aspinwall:
I am excessively annoyed by these delays concerning the publication of my works. I want to have them bolted through the press immediately, that I may not be tied down in England…. The fact is Mr. Murray's irregular mode of conducting business has always been an annoyance to me, and of late he has been wanting in consideration and punctuality in money matters…. I am not in a very favorable mood therefore to put up with any more of his delays and negligences, and would be quite willing to deal with some other bookseller who is a mere man of business.45
Irving enclosed a letter for his agent to deliver to Murray. “I think [it] will rouse him,” he wrote, “if he is really desirous of having the works.”46
The letter was all bluff and swagger, a performance intended to intimidate rather than persuade. Irving reminded Murray that he had two works “ready for the press”—an overstatement if not outright lie—and scolded his publisher for the delays in finalizing their prior agreement. If Murray wasn't interested, Irving would go elsewhere:
As this delay is excessively annoying to me and impedes all my plans and movements, and as it is very probable that you may not be desirous of publishing at this moment, I am perfectly willing that what has passed between us on the subject should be considered as null and void, and in such case will thank you to return to Col Aspinwall the MS: already left with you…. As to the other work [Alhambra], I do not think there is any likelihood of your being able to get it out as early as I wish—I trust, therefore, you will not take it amiss if I seek some other person or mode to publish it.47
Irving had overplayed his hand. Murray would be neither lectured nor intimidated. On October 25 the publisher fired back:
My reply was “Yes, I'll write to you,” and the cause of my not having done so earlier, is one for which I am sure you will make allowances. You told me upon our former negociations, and you repeated it recently, that you would not suffer me to be a loser by any of your Works; and the state of matters in this respect, I am exceedingly unwilling because it is contrary to my nature to submit to you, and in doing so at length, you will I am sure do me the justice to believe that I have no other expectation than those which are founded upon your own good feelings. The publication of Columbus cost me. Paper—Print—Advertising—Author £5,700 and it has produced but £4,700—Grenada cost £3,073 and its sale has produced but £1,830, making my gross loss of £2,250.—I have thought it better to communicate with yourself direct, than through the medium of Mr. Aspin-wall.—
Let me have time to read the two new MSS—and then we shall not differ I think about terms.48
As his coup de grâce, Murray enclosed a copy of Irving's May 9, 1829, letter, throwing back in his face words Irving had written in anger more than two years before: “At any rate [Irving had written], I should like hereafter to make our arrangements in such a manner that you may be relieved from these apprehensions of loss, and for the necessity of recurring to any management of the press to aid the publication of a work of mine.”49 With the stroke of a pen, Murray had downgraded Irving from the House of Murray's most valuable author to an economic liability.
On October 29 a fuming Irving wrote Murray a lengthy response. In Irving's view, Murray was trying to renege on a verbal agreement. “Nothing apparently remained to be settled but the dates of payment,” he explained. “By your letter of the 25th, however I find you do not consider any arrangement existing between us. You now say, ‘Let me have time to read the new MS & then we shall not differ I think about the terms.’ No stipulation of this kind was even hinted at when we made our bargain.”50
As for Murray's argument that Irving was a financial drain, Irving had none of it: “I do not know whether you intend the Statement you give of loss on two of my works as your reason for departing from the present arrangement—but on that point I will observe that Columbus and the conquest of Granada are copy right works, the sales of which cannot be considered as at an end; especially as they are on historical subjects, which, though they may not have the immediate sale of works of fiction, are more permanent in their circulation.” Irving was confident Murray would recoup his investment. “If you would give me and my works a fair chance,” he scolded his publisher, “I have no doubt you would find both of us to work well in the long run, but you must not always expect to clear the price of a farm by the first years crop.” He would take Mahomet elsewhere, he told Murray. But if he wanted The Alhambra, it was still available.51
If the two had cared to sit down and discuss rather than fight, they might have come to the mutual conclusion that the root of their problems lay with the shaky state of the current publishing market (Irving privately admitted as much to Peter). Irving was hardly the financial albatross that Murray said he was, but, given both Irving's recent track record and the condition of the market, Murray was justified in asking to see a complete manuscript before making an offer, rather than relying on first drafts and vapor trail promises. Neither publisher nor author was in a reasonable frame of mind. Irving pulled Mahomet off the table, and Murray rejected The Alhambra. Stalemate.
Irving was in a foul mood. Despite a side trip to Byron's home at Newstead Abbey in late October, during which time the home's curator, Colonel Wildman, invited him to return for a prolonged stay, Irving returned to London in early November under a storm cloud. At his desk on Stratford Place, he took out his Alhambra manuscript, intending to work, but merely stared at the pages. He was too angry. “The restlessness and uncertainty in which I have been kept,” he growled to Peter, “have disordered my mind and feelings too much for imaginative writing.”52 He wanted to go home.
There was still Van Buren for company, now joined by his son John, a witty, personable, and good-looking twenty-two-year-old. Van Buren's formal nomination as minister had been forwarded to the U.S. Senate on December 7, but as of mid-December there was no indication of when he might be confirmed. With London quiet, Irving and the Van Burens set out on a rambling winter tour of central England, winding their way first through Oxford, then spending several days at Stratford-upon-Avon, where the three travelers stayed in the same Red Horse Inn Irving had visited more than a decade before, and written of in The Sketch Book. In this little corner of Stratford, at least, Washington Irving—rather, Geoffrey Crayon—was nearly as popular as William Shakespeare. His portrait hung in the room he had occupied in the inn, and the landlady delighted in showing him a poker she had locked away in her archives on which she had engraved “Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre.”53 Irving was amused, and the Van Burens were impressed.
In January 1832 Irving made an extended trip to Nottingham for a stay at Lord Byron's estate, Newstead Abbey. Byron's home was a mixture of convent and mansion—an “irregular grey pile, of motley architecture,” Irving called it.54 He stayed in Byron's own bedroom, adjacent to the ruins of the abbey's old chapel and called “The Rook Cell” because of the enormous number of crows that lived in the nearby chapel grove. Here Irving slept in Byron's bed, lounged on Byron's sofa… and sulked about John Murray.
“I wish you to execute a commission of me, with Mr. Murray,” Irving wrote to Leslie on January 9
, 1832. This assignment, however, had nothing to do with any of his projects. It involved a manuscript Irving had forwarded to Murray from his old friend James Renwick, who was looking for an English publisher for his book The Elements of Mechanics. Not surprisingly, Irving had yet to hear back from Murray. “This conduct is so contrary to all laws of courtesy as well as rules of business,” Irving spluttered to Leslie, “that it is diffi-cult to treat it with proper temper.” Running vertically down the left margin, Irving had written, as an angry afterthought, “In case he [Murray] should refer to the past—I do not wish you to say anything on the subject to him: neither am I desirous of renewing my literary connexion with him—I am tired of him.”55
He was so upset, he found it difficult to work. He cobbled together some rough notes, stories, and sketches about the abbey and its surroundings—enough “for a very popular little volume,” he thought—and poked halfheartedly at The Alhambra. “It has only been within a very few days that I have been able to touch my papers, and that very unsatisfactorily,” he wrote to Peter in late January. “I am annoyed & provoked with myself but it is of no use—these moods will have their way.”56
Worse, he received a letter from the American poet William Cullen Bryant, asking if he would approach Murray about publishing an English edition of Bryant's latest book of poetry. Bryant wasn't picky about payment—“I had rather that he should take it for nothing,” he wrote, “than that it should not be published by a respectable bookseller.”57 Given Irving's strained relationship with Murray, it was an unfortunate bit of bad timing.
Irving promised Bryant to do what he could, but warned the poet, “The book trade is at a present in a miserably depressed state in England and the publishers have become shy and parsimonious.” As for Murray, “[he] has disappointed me grievously in respect to other American works entrusted to him and… has acted so irregularly, in recent transactions with myself, as to impede my own literary arrangement and oblige me to look round for some other publisher.”58
Irving wrote to Renwick with a response from Murray—relayed through his son, John Murray III—regarding the fate of The Elements of Mechanics. “All business & especially that of bookselling is suffering such stagnation at this moment,” John Murray III wrote, “that my father has been compelled to decline almost every new undertaking which has been proposed to him.” That was typical, Irving told Renwick. “He [Murray] was never a good man of business and of late seems to have become completely irregular.” As if on cue, several days later, the younger Murray sent another note to Irving, this time rejecting Bryant's book of poetry. It was the final straw. “I have broke with Murray,” Irving said on February 6.59
Irving took Bryant's book to John Andrews, “a fashionable bookseller,” who agreed to publish it, provided Irving edit it and write an introduction. Irving groaned; such arrangements were becoming more and more typical. He agreed, writing a laudatory “dedicatory letter” for the volume's opening pages, and editing the book so quickly that a printed volume was delivered to Bryant on March 6. It had been relatively easy work, but one editorial emendation came back to haunt Irving years later. In the first stanza of Bryant's poem “Song of Marion's Men,” commemorating the Revolutionary War hero Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Bryant had written the opening lines:
Our band is few but true and tried,
Our leader frank and bold;
And the British soldier trembles
When Marion's name is told—
Publisher Andrews, however, was uncomfortable with Bryant's portrayal of the British as trembling. Such a sentiment, Irving explained to Bryant, “might startle the pride of John Bull on your first introduction to him,”60 and Andrews therefore asked Irving to modify the stanza to remove the offensive verb. Given the context of the poem, it was a silly change—the entire poem is a celebration of the kind of American pluck that won the American Revolution—but Irving, without checking with Bryant first, agreed to rewrite the offending lines as
And the foeman trembles in his camp
When Marion's name is told.—
Luckily Bryant approved the change—indeed, was pleased with his British literary debut—but the edit caused headaches for Irving in 1837, when critics accused him of mutilating Bryant's work in order to ingratiate himself with the British.
Returning to his own literary efforts, Irving sent a packet to Ebenezer in late winter containing the first part of The Alhambra. While it was assumed Lea & Carey would publish the book in the United States, Irving still hadn't lined up a British publisher. Without Murray, Irving confessed to one correspondent, “I hardly know whom to turn to—Some [publishers] are disabled and all are disheartened.”61 He asked Aspinwall to find a suitable British home for the work.
In late February, as Irving and Van Buren sat over breakfast on Stratford Place, Van Buren finally received news regarding his official confirmation as minister. In a partisan squabble, the Senate had rejected his nomination. “It will kill him,” several of his opponents snickered, “kill him dead.”62
Counseling a dejected Van Buren in London, however, Washington Irving thought otherwise. While Van Buren's rejection had taken them both by surprise, Irving rightly believed Van Buren had become a political martyr. “I cannot but think the sympathy awakened by this most vindictive and unmerited outrage offered to him, will be sufficiently strong and permanent to ensure him a signal triumph,” he told McLane.63 Now in diplomatic limbo, Van Buren asked Irving whether he should continue to attend official events. Irving was emphatic—and remarkably prescient—in his counsel:
I advised him to take the field and show himself superior to the blow leveled at him. He accordingly appeared at all the court ceremonials, and to the credit of John Bull, was universally received with the most marked attention. Every one seemed to understand and sympathize in his case; and he has ever since been treated with more respect and attention than before…. This I consider an earnest of the effect that will be produced by the same cause in the United States. I should not be surprised if this vote of the Senate goes far towards ultimately elevating him to the presidential chair.64
Sympathetic letters poured into Stratford Place, some insisting that Van Buren return “sword in hand” to fight for his nomination in the Senate, while others counseled him to stay away. “We had long talks on the subject,” Irving confided to Peter. “The result was, that he determined to remain here a few weeks… by which time the public sentiment will have had time to express itself fully and sincerely, without any personal agitation on his part.”65 Van Buren returned to America, but not before a tour of Europe.
Irving was ready to go home, too. The Alhambra was scheduled for publication in America by early May, and Aspinwall had found him an English publisher. Henry Colburn, who had been courting Irving as far back as Bracebridge Hall, at last landed the coveted author. He offered Irving the 1,000 guineas he wanted, provided he finish the book by the beginning of April. That was all Irving needed to hear; his completed manuscript was delivered to Colburn on March 28.
Irving was exhausted. Completing Alhambra had been exceedingly difficult. He was burned out on politics, sick of John Murray and his depressed publishing market, and tired of England. It was time to say good-bye.
On April 1 Irving bid farewell to Van Buren. “The more I see of Mr. V.B., the more I feel confirmed in a strong personal regard for him,” he told Peter. “He is one of the gentlest and most amiable men I have ever met with; with an affectionate disposition that attaches itself to those around him, and wins their kindness in return.”66 Following his tour of Europe, Van Buren returned home on July 5. In his absence, he won the Democratic nomination for vice president for the 1832 election.
On April 11, 1832, after bidding Peter a heartfelt and painful farewell in France, Washington Irving boarded the ship Havre, bound for New York. After seventeen years away, the most famous man in America was finally coming home.
12
Frontiersman
1832–1834
The period that has passed since my arrival in this country has been one of the greatest and mostly delightful excitement I have ever experienced…. Wherever I go, too, I am received with a cordiality, I may say an affection, that keeps my heart full and running over.
—Washington Irving to Peter Irving, April 1, 1833
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of May 21, 1832, James Webb, editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, received word from one of his numerous “news collectors”—the nineteenth-century equivalent of paparazzi—that there was a ship anchored just off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, unable to enter New York Harbor because of an unforgiving headwind. The ship was the Havre, and among its passengers was Washington Irving.
The wily Webb immediately dispatched one of his “news-boats,” the schooner Eclipse, to sail out to the Havre to fetch America's best-known writer and celebrity.1 While Irving was slightly embarrassed at being singled out for such star treatment, he nevertheless boarded Webb's schooner. He was eager to get home.
As the Eclipse sailed back to port, Irving saw that the city he had left in 1815 had changed markedly in his absence.
I was astonished to see its once wild features brightening with populous villages and noble piles, and a seeming city, extending itself over heights I had left covered with green forests…. I beheld a glorious sunshine lighting up the spires and domes, some familiar to memory, others new and unknown…. I have gazed with admiration upon many a fair city and stately harbor, but my admiration was cold and ineffectual, for I was a stranger…. Here, however, my heart throbbed with pride and joy as I admired—I had a birthright in the brilliant scene before me.2
Irving was thrilled to be back, but the feelings of dread that had plagued him for nearly as long as he had been famous—the fear that his countrymen, convinced he had forsaken them for all things English, would give him the cold shoulder—gripped him. The negative, wailing reviews—smugly clipped and mailed to him by his anonymous stalker—still swam before him. He had made “dextrous compliments to English prejudices,” critics said, or had written too much “of and for England, rather than his own country.” “By degrees I was led to doubt the entire sentiment of my countrymen towards me,” Irving fretted. He was all but convinced that he would be booed or egged in the streets.3
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