Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace

Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America

David Dowling

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807138502
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

In Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace, David Dowling examines an often-overlooked aspect of the history of publishing -- relationships, of both a business and a personal nature. The book focuses on several intriguing duos of the nineteenth century and explores the economics of literary partnerships between author/publisher, student/mentor, husband/wife, and parent/child.
These literary companions range from Emerson's promotion of Thoreau -- a relationship fraught with pitfalls and misjudgments -- to "Davis, Inc., " the seamless joining of the literary and legal minds of Rebecca Harding Davis and her husband, L. Clarke Davis.
Dowling also considers and analyzes the teams of Washington Irving and his publisher, John Murray; Herman Melville and his editor, Evert Duyckinck; E. D. E. N. Southworth and Robert Bonner, the publisher who serialized her sentimental novels; Fanny Fern both with her brother/publisher, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and with Robert Bonner, the latter a more successful pairing; and the famous fraternal relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
Throughout, Dowling demonstrates the intrinsic irony of authors projecting their labors of the mind as autonomous even as they relied heavily on their "literary partners" to aid them in navigating the business side of writing.

Part 1 ~ Author-Publisher Struggles

1

“THE ROMANCE OF TRADE”

Washington Irving, John Murray, and Genteel Capitalism

HOW WASHINGTON IRVING published The Sketch Book in England in 1819—the precise competitive maneuverings that played out his theory of “natural aristocracy”—has taken on a wide variety of significance for almost two centuries. The variance in the record alone is striking: David Pancost has insinuated that Walter Scott may not have even been behind London publisher John Murray’s acceptance of The Sketch Book, while Stanley T. Williams takes it for granted.¹ Such wildly dissonant readings attest to the competition over placing Irving in history as sycophant to the British, or literary pioneer worthy of the canonization he would earn in 1848. The many retellings of that historical narrative, including Irving’s own, reflect its highly contested and unstable status.² Each of those narratives assesses his business practice, which set the precedent for American professionalism in the English book market. Irving’s monetary success has prompted investigation into his business ethic, with results ranging from Williams’s 1935 condemning portrait of financial corruption, to William Cullen Bryant’s 1860 flattering picture of commercial perseverance. Irving’s economic success, indeed, was no secret, but its method was a mystery to many American authors at the time. James Fenimore Cooper, for example, was baffled by the British book market and asked Irving (despite apparent animosity toward him) to help him market The Spy to British publishers. Cooper and others understood that Irving had cracked the code, which they themselves could not decipher, and thus regarded him as a means to advance their own work.³

The precise historical account of the sequence of events that led to the publication of The Sketch Book in England has remained a mystery, even with the emergence of Andrew Burstein’s long overdue 2007 biography. Burstein successfully rescues Irving’s memory from the clutches of Williams’s belittling 1935 two-volume biography that spawned overwhelmingly negative views of him and a lack of appreciation for his innovations for more than seventy years.⁴ In an effort to revive interest in Irving—among the deadest and whitest men from the early national period’s “soft focus” circle of authors that included Bryant—Burstein emphasizes the magnitude of that victory Irving won by landing Murray (“John Murray!” he cheers, faithfully echoing the tone of Irving’s own account).⁵ Murray was the most fashionable and powerful publisher in England at the time; Lord Byron’s works bore his imprint after all. But for the specifics of Irving’s dealings in England that launched The Sketch Book, Burstein draws mainly from Irving’s romanticized rendition that prefaces the 1848 edition of The Sketch Book. He leaves out many crucial and telling details, settling for the brief, conventional explanation historians and readers have accepted—with one exception—since 1848.

In 1986, Pancost established the definitive account of precisely how The Sketch Book’s arrival on London bookshelves differed from the romantic tale Irving sets forth in his 1848 edition, published by the American G. P. Putnam. Pancost’s speculation that “maybe [Irving] felt the truth of his business dealings was at odds with the way his readers perceived him” guides this chapter’s central concern.⁶ I argue that the truth behind those business dealings—particularly with Murray—ran counter to the carefree, dilettantish image of The Sketch Book’s narrative persona, Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Irving embraced mobility and self-interest, but only with tempered restraint from excessive, vulgar ambition, values conveyed through “The Country Church” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in The Sketch Book.⁷ The business ethic of genteel capitalism Irving carefully recorded in his journals and stylized in his letters and fiction articulates precisely why he would have wanted to obscure his real negotiations behind The Sketch Book’s English publication.

IRVING’S PUBLIC IMAGE

The preface to the 1848 “Author’s Revised Edition” of The Sketch Book attempts to reclaim Irving’s public image from his detractors, who often saw him as a conciliatory Anglophile and slick commercial author. Irving cast himself instead as an accidental capitalist of sorts, ill prepared for the commercially driven world of self-promotion and publicity in the British book market. To obscure his aggressive efforts to capitalize on his popularity, Irving dramatized his struggle to put out the correct version of his works to his readers. His tale of racing the reprinters (Pancost calls them pirates, but their work was perfectly legal) to publication showcases Irving’s mastery of strategic and calculated displays of effort. His tactics exude “the promise of play in classical German aesthetics” predicated upon the ways in which “performance is always tied to a strict economy of when and when not to show them that you’re sweating.”⁸ He thus plays the befuddled neophyte in the British book market, acting more out of modest desperation than calculation in his solicitation of Murray without introduction. Upon Murray’s rejection he puts out the work at his own expense with a bookseller who goes bankrupt, leaving the “poor devil author” totally without hope were it not for the generous aid of Scott, who heroically lands Murray for him. Scott thus serves his previously disapproving publisher his just deserts for a satisfying denouement that deftly avoids making Irving appear self-righteous or mercenary.

Misrepresenting Murray—his longtime publisher, friend, and colleague—as an enemy evidently was worth the benefit to Irving of appearing more American before his U.S. audience. In 1848, Irving was in the process of being canonized in America after establishing himself abroad as a celebrated American-born British author of sorts. The placement of his portrait in an honored spot next to Byron’s in Murray’s drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street attests to his exalted status in England.⁹ Irving correctly anticipated the 1848 edition’s key role in the initiation of his American canonization. The edition’s runaway success for the next decade indeed gave Putman cause to mount an easily won campaign to canonize Irving, as Ezra Greenspan documents, first through a commemorative article in the Atlantic Monthly. To immortalize his most famous author who helped build his publishing empire, Putnam then struck a deal with Irving’s nephew Pierre for a complete Irving biography in two volumes.¹⁰

So, with an ideal opportunity in 1848 to reestablish his image with his American audience, and with Murray safely dead since June 1843, Irving could not resist publishing Murray’s first letter of rejection, exacting revenge after apparently harboring resentment all those years, as Ben McClary suggests. But there is no evidence in the letters and journals of even the slightest hint of nascent animosity that might account for his tone of “peevish jocularity” in the preface, as McClary calls it.¹¹ Further, Irving abhorred the “petulant prefaces” that he had seen in other works.¹² What appeared to be a personal attack on Murray was really a veiled jab at England in hopes of being remembered as an American author. Such a nationalistic appeal was pitched toward the American audience with whom he now took up permanent residence after spending much of his career abroad. Residing at his Sunnyside New York estate with Putnam now as his American publisher, Irving projected his image to fit this defining moment. While eluding claims of conciliatory Anglophilia, Irving was also careful not to portray himself as a scheming capitalist either. Hence the preface emerges as an amusing tale of a romantic writer figure totally without commercial instincts tossed about on the sea of the British book market. Irving was hardly so rudderless: reprinters were never such a pressing issue with Irving, “nor was it so difficult to find publishers as he pretended in 1848, for he certainly knew more than a month before publishing at his own expense that Archibald Constable [Scott’s publisher] was willing to publish The Sketch Book and share profits with him,” as Pancost notes.¹³ The slower pace with which Irving really made his decisions speaks to a more calculated plan.

In the English context, Irving’s Federalism projected through Geoffrey Crayon played well. His politics were consonant with British distaste for mounting Jacksonian economic values associated with precisely the kind of speculative laissez-faire capitalism Irving himself used to publish The Sketch Book. The politics of Crayon, rather than those represented in Irving’s business practice, assumed “that it was the personal duty of virtuous republican citizens to maintain [class] order and prevent the disorderly effects of the laissez-faire progressivism favored by democrats,” as Walter Sondey notes.¹⁴ Indeed, Herman Melville blasts such politics in his now well-known excoriation of Irving in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” The piece promotes supposedly wholly original native writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne as much as it eviscerates derivative, British sycophants whom he makes Irving, perhaps unjustly, represent. Melville responds to Irving’s anti-Jacksonianism and his “imitation of a foreign model, and the studied avoidance of all topics but smooth ones.” He laments that there is “no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers” who do nothing more than “furnish an appendix to Goldsmith and other English authors.” Melville’s swaggering bravado takes over, as praise for Hawthorne builds into his famous rant against literary flunkeyism to England. He reaches a fever pitch of nationalism in his cultural call to arms against the British necessitating the expulsion from the home front of all imitative “graceful and fragrant” sissies who pretend to represent the United States: “no American writer should write like an Englishman … let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American.”¹⁵

Melville’s diatribe is instructive because it showcases a garish, exaggerated Jacksonian spirit at odds with Irving’s transformation from social sniper of political phonies in The History of New York into an American-born English gentleman. Geoffrey Crayon, in this sense, constitutes Melville’s real target. Indeed, Irving’s calculated management of the social realities of the market aimed at economic success remained largely hidden from view, as it was isolated mainly to his private correspondence and journals. In fact, Irving privately shared much of Melville’s own sentiment, as an 1825 journal entry shows: literature of the old world, he complains, “checks the aspiring vigor of our own country—Our youthful literature should have no ties & bondages—Should be left to run wild and unchecked like a child—but it is councilled & whipped and flogged into tame decency.”¹⁶ With such views hidden in his journal, and only Geoffrey Crayon as the face of Irving’s successes, other American authors, such as rival Cooper, shared Melville’s resentment. Irving raised Cooper’s own manly ire against what he, like Melville, assumed was a wholly genteel identity generating the profits. Such profits instead derived from an elaborate economic ethos and careful plan for success blending romance and trade. Cooper refused to credit Irving’s rational skill, as he famously groused, “What an instinct that man has for gold!”¹⁷ Cooper’s frontier heroes and Melville’s “Carolina cousin” from “Hawthorne and His Mosses” personify the Jacksonian independent defiant spirit to lead the cultural fray against the English.¹⁸ While appearing completely Federalist and anti-Jacksonian, ironically enough, economic individualism—however unrugged—was always operating from the beginning of what Burstein notes was “Irving’s own long pursuit of financial security and his early comfort with commercial interests in New York.”¹⁹ For Irving, drawing room gentility, however leisurely in appearance, was a matter of business; his self-interest was carefully folded in the mantle of deferential respectability.

Like Richard Dana, one of the first reviewers of The Sketch Book, most have responded to Crayon and not Irving in this regard. The cultural icon appeared to be the complete identity, reflected in a “feminine, dressy, elegant and languid” prose style and selection of subjects that abandoned a more hairy-chested demeanor of “good bone and muscle.” Dana defines his prose style to fit the public image: “his mother English had been sent abroad to be improved,” acquiring a “genteel sort of language, cool, less definite and general.”²⁰ The Irving that relished the hunt—its fast-paced aggression and dangers—would emerge fifteen years after The Sketch Book charmed the British in his full-voiced celebration of enterprise in Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836). This account of the fur trade was tellingly commissioned by the era’s Donald Trump figure, John Jacob Astor. Thus the Irving who wrote The Sketch Book might be best understood not so much as a Jacksonian in Federalist clothes, but as everywhere attempting to intersect the two forces through a “natural aristocracy.” The concept defends class mobility as a natural expression of ambition rather than a destructive undermining of social order and cultural achievement. Attainment of social rank functions as proof of one’s worthiness to speak on behalf of public virtue and justify the social hierarchy. Irving reflected on his upward mobility in a journal entry that championed the self-made gentleman, as opposed to the gentleman of high birth: “We [middle-class Americans] have no hereditary distinctions [in England], but we enter the classes of society by virtue of our talents, manners, wealth &c. this is a natural aristocracy.” Acquiring the title of gentleman through competition “as the trees in the forest” advocates a kind of capitalist, pre-Darwinian struggle for survival.²¹

Peter Antelyes succinctly identifies the central point of contention between Federalists and Jacksonians as “the role that self-interest and mobility should play in the American social order.” Unlike the Jacksonians, “The Federalists favored republican values and saw in the self-interest of the marketplace an abandoning of public virtue.” Federalists “preferred the preservation of the given hierarchical relations of class, land, and lineage, and saw in mobility an undermining of social order and cultural achievement. The Jacksonians, on the other hand, valued self-interest as a republican virtue in itself, and mobility as a means of a new, more equitable, and more successful order.”²² Irving felt pressed to justify his own mobility, yet was averse to advocating any new social order over established ones, a position well suited to his antiquarian tastes and reverence for the trappings of aristocratic privilege.

The question of how Geoffrey Crayon amassed his wealth is never raised in the 1819 edition of The Sketch Book. He possesses capital enough to travel abroad at his leisure but its origins are undisclosed in keeping with the gentleman bachelor’s economic, if not ideological, free agency. Irving’s public profile would similarly obscure his own ascent as an American author into the English book market. Irving’s real professional dealings were overshadowed by Geoffrey Crayon’s publicity until the emergence of Irving’s own account of The Sketch Book’s publication in England in the preface to the 1848 edition. Until then, his public image basked in the spring glow during March and April 1820, when “it became clear that Washington Irving, most often answering to the name of Geoffrey Crayon, was a rising figure in London society.”²³ The preface itself, as I discuss later, nonetheless romanticized that tale to keep Irving the rational businessman from public view.

The economic ideology reflected by Irving’...