Knickerbocker in Spain

THE SPANISH ADVENTURES OF WASHINGTON IRVING--Claude G. Bowers--Houghfon Mifflin ($3).

When Washington Irving, the successful, 42-year-old American author, first visited Madrid in 1826, Spain's empire and glory and even Goya were gone.* All that was left was picturesqueness and a sort of sunset charm, but that was enough to entrance the whimsical New Yorker. Probably the most uncritical foreign observer who ever appeared on the Peninsula, he took to the high life of Spain's capital as happily as his Rip van Winkle had taken to the little Dutchmen's supernatural liquor. One of his dashing hostesses was the Duchess of Benavente, who hated parsimony. On one occasion when the French Ambassador held up one of her card games to look for a coin he had dropped, the Duchess solicitously lit a handful of bank notes to give him light.

Irving had been up to Abbotsford to see Scott; he had gamboled in Paris with Thomas Moore; the fame which he had won by amusing himself (with his Knickerbocker's History of New York, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) was at its height. In Madrid he buckled down to his first job of scholarly writing, a life of Columbus. Young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, passing through, noted that Irving was at his desk every morning at six; that in society he "said very pleasant agreeable things in a husky, weak, peculiar voice." He liked everybody, but he especially liked a handsome, Spanish Mrs. O'Shea, a pretty French girl named Antoinette Bolviller. To the latter, a niece of the Russian Minister, Irving wrote the best letters of his life. All that is known of her history is that 30 years later she was unmarried, living in Rome, spending her days in nun's dress copying paintings in the galleries.

Paid $15,000 for his Columbus, Irving started off in 1828 on his famous journey through Andalusia, Spain's South, gathering material for and writing on The Conquest of Granada and The Alhambra. Traveling through wild mountains with a Russian prince for companion, he met contrabandistas, looked for bandits, was feted by village dancers with red roses in their hair. When an amused Spanish governor told him he could live in the huge old Moorish palace of the Alhambra, Irving was delighted. He moved in and stayed, imagining the heroic past and only slightly disconcerted by the howls of a maniac who was confined beneath the palace.

Thirteen years later, at 59, Irving returned to Madrid as his country's Minister, a man of letters who had perhaps mellowed too young and been boyish too long and whom his fierce contemporary, Fenimore Cooper, then regarded as something of a humbug. Sympathetic Biographer Bowers says his reports on the corrupt and precarious Spanish court made good reading for Secretaries of State Webster and Calhoun. But there is a hint of tragicomedy in the fact that Irving often got no replies, especially to his expense accounts, and that finally his stately letter of resignation was not even acknowledged for eight months.

Still strong for the ladies of Spain, the aging Minister interested himself in a pretty girl named Eugenie de Montijo, granddaughter of a U. S. consul whom Irving had known at Malaga. Eight years later she was Empress of France. But Irving's "favorite" was a fun-loving beauty with brooding eyes named Leocadia Zamora. Author Bowers is the first biographer to discover her portrait and her subsequent history. Like Antoinette Bolviller she had a meditative maturity. After Irving left Madrid she appeared less & less in society, finally founded a convent and entered it as mother superior, requiring that her portrait by Madrazo be painted over with a nun's habit. Years later it was restored.

As uncritical of his distinguished predecessor as the predecessor was of Spain is Historian Claude Gernade Bowers (Jefferson and Hamilton), another writing diplomat, who represented the U. S. in Spain from 1933 to 1939. One of the first public functions Ambassador Bowers attended was a three-day fiesta in Granada in honor of Irving. For his own diversion, Ambassador Bowers later followed the trail of Irving's Spanish travels, dug into embassy archives and the files of the Ministry of State to compose a sedately romantic record of a perennially romantic American.

*Two years before, Goya, at 78, had crossed the Pyrenees alone and gone to Bordeaux. While he did revisit Madrid briefly in 1827, his long life and his work were practically at an end. Goya died at Bordeaux in 1828.

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