Brian Jay Jones has served as a speechwriter, ghostwriter and policy analyst for two U.S. senators. He now works as a writer and policy analyst and lives in Damascus, Md.
“Washington Irving: An American Original” (Arcade Publishing, 2008) is his first biography.
How did you get interested in Irving?
I once read Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas” about America’s misty-eyed view of Christmas. The book points out that none of that romantic business was actually real. For a long time, Christmas was actually outlawed in the colonies because people got drunk and rowdy. So where did that dewy-eyed view of Christmas come from? Washington Irving made it up.
I tracked down Irving’s “Sketch Book” where he writes about an “old style” English Christmas celebration with a Yule log, wassail and the Squire of Bracebridge Hall saying, ‘This is how we’ve always celebrated Christmas.’ But Irving was making it all up. I realized it wasn’t stiff 19th-century prose, though. It was lively and funny. Then I wanted to know more about Irving, but there wasn’t much in print, no good, modern biography.
Was it hard to integrate the many different aspects of Irving’s personality?
No, because he was so interesting. My objective was to show that this man with a very public reputation was making sure you saw only what he wanted you to see, while behind the scenes he was a total mess. He was bankrupt much of the time, he often had no inspiration, many times he broke out in a nervous rash. But people always thought he was a dignified, proper gentleman.
The political aspect surprised me. I was surprised to learn that Irving was the minister to Spain and secretary of legation in London. He also figured out how to skirt around loopholes in the law regarding copyrights.
People should give Irving credit for trying to figure out how to protect American writers from piracy.
Is Irving’s love of theater reflected in his writing?
Absolutely. He had a real sense of the dramatic. He was into the ‘show, don’t tell’ aspect of writing.
What part of Irving’s life interests you most?
I like the way he took chances. He could have kept on writing potboilers, but he didn’t. The Columbus biography made him tons of money. The biography of Muhammad, “The Conquest of Granada,” “The Alhambra” — they were very esoteric subjects. People said no one would buy them, but Irving wrote them because he enjoyed the material — and they worked.
I’m also fascinated that whenever anything important happened, Irving was there. Writing the book never got boring because here would come Martin Van Buren or Mary Shelley, who had a crush on Irving. At times I felt I was writing fiction. I’d think, “I can’t wait to write about Charles Dickens.” There’s the time Irving runs into Thackeray on the train or the time he’s in Madrid — and here comes Longfellow. There was always something going on around Irving.
