Washington Irving
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The feelings were mutual. Several months later, Hawthorne sent to Sunnyside a copy of The Blithedale Romance with what could only be called a fan letter:
I beg you to believe, my dear Sir, that your friendly and approving word was one of the highest gratifications that I could possibly have received, from any literary source…. Pray do not think it necessary to praise my “Blithedale Romance.”… From my own little experience, I can partly judge how dearly purchased are books that come to you on such terms. It affords me—and I ask no more—an opportunity of expressing the affectionate admiration which I have felt so long; a feeling, by the way, common to all our countrymen, in reference to Washington Irving, and which, I think, you can hardly appreciate, because there is no writer with the qualities to awaken in yourself precisely the same intellectual and heart-felt recognition.31
In early 1852 Irving continued work on the Washington biography with a new intensity, but his health was suffering, especially after a fall from a horse. That kind of abuse was hard on a man nearing seventy years, but Irving pressed on. He told Sarah Storrow, “I never fagged more steadily with my pen than I do at present. I have a long task in hand, which I am anxious to finish, that I may have a little leisure in the brief remnant of life that is left to me. However, I have a strong presentiment that I shall die in harness; and I am content to do so, provided I have the cheerful exercise of intellect to the last.” He couldn't keep it up for long. “My Life of Washington lags and drags latterly,” he complained in May. So, too, was he. Irving's position on the board of trustees for the Astor Library required him to spend much of his time that autumn shuttling between Sunny-side and New York City, and constant travel wore him out. He was ill again with the old “bilous attacks,” and his mind was unfocused. “I no longer dare task it as I used to do,” he told Sarah Storrow. “When a man is in his seventieth year, it is time to be cautious.”32
In January 1853 John P. Kennedy, newly installed as President Fillmore's secretary of the navy, invited Irving to Washington, D.C.—a useful diversion, as he planned to plumb the State Department archives for materials for his book. On January 16, after waiting out a heavy snowstorm, Irving was on a train to D.C. “Whom should I see,” he wrote, “but Thackery.” The English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, still basking in the success of Henry Esmond, was en route to Philadelphia on a speaking tour of the United States. The two writers “took seats beside each other in the cars,” Irving wrote, “and the morning passed off delightfully.”33
Irving's trip to D.C. was less productive than he had hoped. His first visit to Mount Vernon, in the company of some of President Fillmore's family, was more pleasure than business. That same evening he attended a White House reception for the president, where his presence created a sensation. “I had to shake hands with man woman and child who beset me on all sides,” Irving groaned, “until I felt as if it was becoming rather absurd.” The local press reported Irving's embarrassment with a smile. “[Irving] certainly is the best read man in our country, and deservedly the most esteemed,” said a Baltimore newspaper. “The happiness of having pressed his hand will be among the cherished recollections of the hundreds who clustered around him at the President's reception.”34
Newspapers hailed Irving as “the lion of the literary world,” but he found the responsibilities associated with the moniker exhausting. “My good sir, theres not a roar left in me,” he wrote to one correspondent in February. “I am the tamest most broken down lion that ever was shewn in a menagerie—not even to be stirred up with a long pole.” Any opportunities for research were crammed between social obligations that, even at the White House, were “tedious.”35
Irving remained in Washington long enough to see Franklin Pierce sworn in as the fourteenth president. As Irving stood on the marble terrace of the Capitol, shivering in the snow beside Mrs. Fillmore, he was struck by the symbolic elegance of the ceremony. “It was admirable to see the quiet and courtesy with which this great transition of power and rule from one party to another took place,” Irving wrote. “I… have seen the two Presidents arm in arm, as if the sway of an immense empire was not passing from one to the other.” He had only chatted casually with Pierce, but he liked what he saw. “He is a quiet, gentleman like man in appearance and manner,” he said, “and I have conceived a goodwill for him, from finding, in the course of our conversation, that he has it at heart to take care of Hawthorne, who was his early fellow student.” A classmate of Pierce's at Bowdoin College and a close friend since, Hawthorne's active support for Pierce earned him an appointment as consul to Liverpool—“a lucrative post,” Irving noted.36
Irving bid good-bye to the Kennedys, signed an autograph for Fillmore's starstruck daughter, then headed back to New York. Stepping off the train at the Dearman station, he walked toward Sunny-side, where his nieces were clustered on the piazza, watching for him through a spyglass. “Uncle Wash” was ushered into his parlor and gently lowered into his Voltaire chair. The Squire of Sunnyside was home.
On April 3, 1853, Washington Irving turned seventy years old. His health was satisfactory, but he considered his age pragmatically:
I have reached the allotted limit of existence—all beyond is especial indulgence. So long as I can retain my present health and spirits, I am happy to live, for I think my life is important to the happiness of others; but as soon as my life becomes useless to others, and joyless to myself, I hope I may be relieved from the burden; and I shall lay it down with heartfelt thanks to that Almighty Power which has guided my incautious steps through so many uncertain and dangerous ways, and enabled me to close my career in serenity and peace… in the little home I have formed for myself, among the scenes of my boyhood.37
By late May, however, he was ill again, which forced him to abandon work on his biography. “In sober sadness I believe it is high time I should throw by the pen altogether,” he said sadly, “but writing has become a kind of habitude with me…. It is pretty hard for an old huntsman to give up the chase.”38 But he worried that his abilities might be deteriorating with age. Nervously, he bundled his manuscript pages, handed them to Pierre, and paid Kennedy a visit in Maryland.
For weeks, as Irving and Kennedy lounged in the sun at the latter's country home in Ellicott's Mills, or dallied at tenpins at Berkeley Springs, Pierre patiently read the manuscript at Sunnyside. “Familiar as I am with the story, I have been equally surprised and gratified to perceive what new interest it gains in your hands,” he wrote his uncle enthusiastically. “I doubt not the work will be equally entertaining to young and old.” Washington was enormously pleased. “I now feel my mind prodigiously relieved,” he replied, “and begin to think I have not labored in vain.”39
Irving had concluded his manuscript with George Washing-ton's inauguration as president, and was convinced the work was finished. He soon decided that it wasn't. On his return to Sunnyside in July, however, he felt that the intensive writing of the past several months had given him a “weariness of the brain.” What he really needed, he said, was “a good spell of literary abstinence.”40
Off he went to Lake Champlain and Ogdensburg—the very place he had visited with Judge Hoffman fifty years before on his first real excursion into the wilderness. Where there had been only forest, there were now villages and small towns. “All was changed,”41 Irving observed wistfully.
Stopping by the riverbank where he had launched a canoe fifty years earlier, old faces and adventures swam before him: “I sat for a long time on the rocks summoning Reccollections of byegone days and of the happy beings by whom I was then surrounded—All had passed away—all were dead and gone; of that young and joyous party I was the sole survivor—they had all lived quietly at home out of the reach of mischance—yet had gone down to their graves—while I, who had been wandering about the world, exposed to all hazards by sea and land—was yet alive. It seemed almost marvelous.” There was no sadness in the observation, only quiet acceptance. At seventy, Irving had a healthy respect for h
is own mortality, and in September 1853 he had chosen a burial site on the southern slope of a hill in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, overlooking the Old Dutch Church. His interest in the cemetery went beyond the literary; when Tarrytown planners had proposed naming the burial ground “Tarrytown Cemetery” in 1849, Irving had immediately informed them of their error and suggested “Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” instead. It was his cemetery, among the very places he had made famous. He had the remains of other family members moved to his chosen site, built an iron railing around it, and marked his burial space next to his mother. He was ready.42
Irving settled back into Sunnyside for the winter, overseeing the final touches on a cottage he was building for his gardener, as well as other “unprofitable improvements” to his property. “A pretty country retreat is like a pretty wife—one is always throwing away money in decorating it,” he said with a twinkle. “Fortunately, I have but one of those two drains to the purse, and so do not repine.” All invitations that winter were refused in favor of the company of his nieces. “How can I tear myself from them?” Irving asked. “Domestic affection forbids it!”43
His main diversion in the spring of 1854 was “dipping into town occasionally to pass a few hours at the Astor library, but returning home in the evening.” With the speed and convenience of train travel making such trips easy, Irving had become America's first literary commuter.44 Only now the sign at the train station near Sunnyside no longer read “Dearman.” That April the citizens of Dearman had chosen to rename their town in honor of their famous neighbor. From then on, Irving—and today's commuters—would step onto the platform under a station sign reading “Irvington.”
By August Irving had begun the process of “toning up” his George Washington manuscript, hiring Pierre to assist him on the project and to steer the book through publication. It had been nearly four years since Putnam had released anything by Irving. The publisher was eager for a new volume, and Irving certainly wanted the money. He collected the stories and essays he had written years earlier for Knickerbocker and other magazines. Titled Wolfert's Roost as a wink to the former owner of his beloved Sunnyside, the book was published in February 1855. To those readers who hadn't read the stories in their original Knickerbocker format, Wolfert's Roost was the most coveted of prizes: a new Washington Irving book, full of surprises—including “The Creole Village,” in which Irving had coined the timeless phrase “the almighty dollar.”45
There was little doubt that it would sell well, and positive reviews appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. It was Washington Irving who was being appraised more than the work itself, and reviewers were almost universal in their tributes. “It would not be easy to overpraise this American miscellany,” effused the London Athenaeum. “There is as much elegance of diction… as when Geoffrey Crayon first came before the English world, nearly forty years ago.” The Boston Telegraph declared unabashedly that the book was “superior to any of his previous works in one respect—that of wide range and variety…. It is, in fact, a volume which contains ‘representative’ papers of all his former works.” Some declared it his best work since The Sketch Book. It was a better reception than its author had anticipated, and Irving wept as he pored over the overwhelmingly complimentary reviews and warm accolades at Sunnyside.46
Shortly after the publication of Wolfert's Roost, Putnam issued part one of Irving's Life of George Washington, which detailed Wash-ington's career prior to the American Revolution. Irving had little time to read the glowing reviews and letters; Putnam had already advertised part two as available in August, and part three in October. “I have authorized no such statement,” Irving snapped to his publisher. “I wish you would make no promises on my behalf but such as I distinctly warrant.”47
Irving's skittish horse, Gentleman Dick, was partly to blame for his missing Putnam's deadlines. On April 19, as Irving rode Gentleman Dick at Sunnyside, the horse spooked and ran into a tree at a full gallop, throwing the seventy-two-year-old hard to the ground. “My head was pretty well battered,” Irving said, “and came nigh being forced down into my chest, like the end of a telescope.” Miraculously, he escaped with no broken bones, but the experience laid him up for several days and made breathing painful. It was Gentleman Dick's second offense—months earlier, the horse had run out of control for several miles, with Irving barely clinging to its neck—and Irving finally caved in to the demands of his nervous nieces that he sell his unpredictable steed. “Poor Dick!” Irving wrote sympathetically. “His character was very much misunderstood by all but myself.” The event was reported in the newspapers with typical overstatement, and for several weeks Irving wrote letters to panicked friends, assuring them the reports were “as usual, exaggerated.”48
In September Irving was back at work on volume two of George Washington. This installment focused on Washington's service during the American Revolution, and Irving worried he would be unable to do the topic justice. “It is very difficult to give a clear account of a battle,” he fretted to Pierre.49 Reviews for the first volume continued to be positive, and his desk was papered with congratulatory letters from friends and fellow writers encouraging him to complete the first American president's biography.
Irving hadn't planned to write Washington's life story beyond his inauguration. His presidency alone was enough to fill several volumes. It promised to be hard work, but, Irving had to admit, he relished the accolades as well as the idea of ending his career on such a distinguished topic. Why shouldn't the nation's most famous Founding Father be memorialized by the nation's most famous author? He wouldn't just write part of Washington's life; he would write all of it.50
There was another former president who also required his attention. That autumn Irving received a dinner invitation from Martin Van Buren, from whom he had been estranged for more than a decade. But times—and politics—had changed, and Van Buren generously extended an olive branch to his old friend. “It gives me great pleasure to accept your kind invitation,” replied Irving, and he and Kemble joined Van Buren for dinner at Linden-wald, his estate in Kinderhook. Dining with Van Buren brought back a flood of memories for Irving, and not just of their days together in London. They were in the very house in which Irving had written A History of New York forty-six years before. His life seemed to be coming full circle.
Irving worked quickly on the second volume of Washington; it was ready in time for a Christmas 1855 release. He had scored again; friends and critics rushed to offer praise. “You have done with Washington just as I thought you would,” wrote Prescott admiringly, “and, instead of a cold marble statue of a demigod, you have made him a being of flesh and blood, like ourselves—one with whom we can have sympathy.”51
Irving accepted the praise gladly; he was already deep into volume three, working so relentlessly that he gave himself throbbing headaches. He worried that he might not finish the task at hand. “I am constantly afraid that something will happen to me,” he confided to Pierre. Something larger than his own legacy was compelling him to finish. In a way, Washington Irving was fulfilling an obligation to George Washington, the man who had blessed him as a child. “I have reason to believe he has attended me through life,” Irving said of his namesake. “I was but five years old, yet I can feel that hand upon my head even now.”52
Irving did his best to keep up with the books, manuscripts, and samples of poetry that poured into Sunnyside with alarming regularity, but the task was overwhelming, and the effort was a distraction. “Oh these letters—these letters!” he groaned to Pierre. “They tear my mind from me in slips and ribbons.”53
One correspondence, however, sparked his interest. It was from his past, a letter from Emily Foster, now fifty-two years old, long married, with five children, asking Irving if he would receive her oldest son at Sunnyside. She and her family, she added, had recently been rereading his books aloud, and “I could see you, your own self, as we read, and your very smile,” she wrote. “Do tell me about yourself, dear Mr. Irving. You do not kno
w how much and how often I think of you.”54
“You can scarcely imagine my surprise and delight on opening your letter,” Irving replied. “A thousand recollections broke at once upon my mind of Emily Foster, as I had known her at Dresden, young and fair and bright and beautiful, and I could hardly realize that so many years had elapsed since then.” He told her of Sunny-side, of his neighbors, and of his “house full of nieces,” who, he wrote, in perhaps an intended dig, “almost make me as happy as if I were a married man.” But that slight flare-up was all; the old regrets and hurt feelings were gone. He wished her well, and signed off as “Your affectionate friend.”55
The third installment of Life of George Washington appeared in July 1856. Beginning with Wolfert's Roost in February 1855, Irving had published four books in eighteen months—and he was already starting another! He confined himself to Sunnyside through the autumn and winter to work on the fourth part of George Washington. Unanswered mail littered the tables and floors of his study; he had no time to plow through the endless requests for scraps of his blotting paper, pieces of wood from his trees, or kind words for just-published novels. “When I remind you that I am approaching my seventy-fourth birth day,” he said to one friend in March 1857, “that I am laboring to launch the fourth volume of my life of Washington, and that my table is loaded with a continually increasing multitude of unanswered letters which I vainly endeavor to cope with, I am sure you will excuse the tardiness of my correspondence.”56