‘Twas His Poem--or ‘Twasn’t It?

This much holds as true as the red in a sprig of holly: the 19th century poem known as “The Night Before Christmas” is where America’s notions of Santa Claus spring--the jolly old man, his chimney dive with a bundle of toys, his sleigh aloft with Dasher and Dancer and company. So beloved are the verses that the poem, “Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas,” is wrapped up in family memories worldwide, twined with a snug bow, and who but a Grinch would tug it loose?

This December, not even a simmering scandal about the poem could stop its traditional commemorations.

As usual, fans are celebrating Bible professor Clement Clarke Moore, who is famous for writing the poem after a brush with an unlikely muse.

On a snowy morning in December 1822, the story goes (with a variation or two), Moore rode a one-horse sleigh to Greenwich Village in search of a Christmas turkey. He composed the lines in his head at the urging of a plump neighbor who suggested a poem about St. Nicholas. At home, with a quill pen, Moore wrote down the words and read them to his six children in front of a roaring fire.

Enchanting back story, agrees English professor and literary sleuth Don Foster. But Moore made it up, and what’s even more outrageous, says Foster, he didn’t even write the verses that secured his reputation as author of one of the world’s most beloved poems. In his new book, “Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous” (Henry Holt, 2000), Foster, 50, who teaches literature at Vassar College, identifies the author as Maj. Henry Livingston Jr., an obscure New York bon vivant, poet and Revolutionary War veteran.

Foster’s headline-making revelation is exactly the sort of thing for which he’s become famous. “Author Unknown” details Foster’s literary detective work, which began when he was a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara in the mid-1980s and he identified the author of a lame 1612 funeral elegy as none other than William Shakespeare. In 1996, he outed Joe Klein as the anonymous author of the bestselling novel “Primary Colors.”

In his book, Foster claims to have invented “a science of literary forensics,” a method by which authors can be unmasked by their word choices, their source materials and other clues. He took “The Night Before Christmas” case, without pay, at the request of a persistent Livingston descendant. Coincidentally, Foster, his wife and two teenage sons live in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Livingston once lived and is now buried.

“There’s perhaps a lot more popular interest in this [case],” acknowledges Foster, who read the poem growing up and still makes it part of his family’s holiday celebration. “If the purpose of poetry is to speak to people’s hearts, this is one we’ve all taken to hearts since childhood.”

Spirit of Poem Doesn’t Change

There are four known signed copies of the poem in Moore’s handwriting. Three are owned by institutions--the Huntington Library in San Marino, the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan and the Strong Museum in Rochester, N.Y. So far, none plans to stop describing him as the author of “The Night Before Christmas.”

The fourth manuscript is in private hands. It is being auctioned at https://www.amazon.com/auctions, and can be bid on until Christmas Eve. The manuscript was featured recently on FOX-TV’s “The Ultimate Auction” special, and Fox is orchestrating the auction. Suggested opening bid for the three-page poem: $1 million to $1.25 million.

The item, says Doug Binzak, the show’s co-executive producer, is drawing “a high level of interest” from corporate representatives, none of whom have asked about Foster’s theory.

The piece’s private owner is New York antiquarian dealer Seth Kaller. He purchased it at auction with a partner in 1997 for $211,000, and says he took great pains to research the authorship controversy. Those involved in the auction aren’t worried that potential bidders will shy away. “It was not a major concern at all,” Binzak says.

The Huntington Library will continue to assert that Moore wrote the poem, says Sue Hodson, its curator of literary manuscripts. But we may never know the truth, which could suit the public fine. “None of us likes our icons threatened or tumbled or taken down,” Hodson says. “We have things so important to us that we can’t bear the thought that there’s anything false about it or different from what we’ve always known. People grow up up reading [the poem] aloud on Christmas Eve with the fireplace roaring.”

What’s important, others say, is that the poem is still a jewel. Every December, including this one, the General Theological Seminary in New York City honors Moore with a reading of the classic in front of a crackling fire. The seminary opened in 1822 on the site of a Chelsea apple orchard donated by Moore, who later worked there as a Bible professor. “It’s the spirit of the verse and not the author that’s important at this point,” says the seminary’s dean and president, the Very Rev. Ward B. Ewing, in a statement distributed to the media. “Although, as a scholarly community, we’ll be interested to see if an expert consensus develops, more important is the spirit of giving, of fantasy and wonder which the poem celebrates.”

On Dec. 17, in the Bronx, the Church of the Intercession held its annual pilgrimage to Moore’s grave. In a downpour, a “St. Nicholas” in a gold miter and white gown led 130 people by lamplight down a slope toward the Hudson River. The crowd prayed at the site, left a wreath and listened to a reading of the poem.

Which is just as it should be, Foster says. “I think that’s a good thing. It’s very much in the spirit of Christmas after all. I should add that Clement Clarke Moore was a benefactor to the General Theological Seminary and his church, and the New-York Historical Society, and his memory is rightly revered on those counts.”

Earlier this week, President Clinton threw a Christmas party for elementary school children at the White House and read to his guests. “ ‘Twas the night before . . . “ began the president. “Christmas!” the children shouted.

No Smoking Gun, Just Circumstances

“The Night Before Christmas” first was published anonymously in the Troy, N.Y., Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823. By the time Moore died in 1863 at 84, he was revered as the “father” of Santa Claus. A Bible professor such as Moore would not have lived a lie, his defenders say. Among them is Kaller, the New York antiquarian dealer. Kaller has drafted a point-by-point 10-page rebuttal to Foster’s research. “[Moore] did help create Christmas as we know it,” Kaller says, and accuses Foster of making inflammatory charges to sell books. “Well, what would happen if someone came to you with arguments that Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the moon? One could argue . . . but if someone came up with that argument, he would get attention.”

Critics point out that despite access to Livingston’s papers, Foster produced no smoking gun--no working manuscript, say, of the poem in Livingston’s hand that could be credibly dated before the Troy Sentinel published the verses. Instead, Foster’s evidence, while voluminous, is circumstantial. For instance, Foster argues, Moore did not take credit for the poem until 21 years after its original publication. By then, Moore’s name had been floated as the potential anonymous author. Moore first wrote to the former owner of the Sentinel, which had folded, asking how the paper had received its original copy of the poem. He was told that the wife of a local merchant, who had since died, submitted the poem. The coast was clear, Foster writes, for Moore to include “The Night Before Christmas” in his 1844 book, “Poems.” (Livingston died in 1828 at age 80).

But Moore apparently did not know the name of his own reindeer, Foster asserts. In the Sentinel’s version, St. Nick calls out to “Dunder and Blixem,” a Dutch exclamation meaning, “Thunder and Lightning!” In Moore’s “Poems” collection, he refers to “Donder and Blitzen.” Later, when Moore hand-copied the poem, he repeated the error. Moore, Foster contends, did not know Dutch. Livingston, who was of Dutch ancestry, did.

Foster also found no evidence that Moore had ever used the phrase, “Happy Christmas,” which appears in the poem’s last line. Livingston, on the other hand, was found to have used the greeting, though the phrase was not in vogue at the time.

Moore was a fine man, a pious philanthropist, but a sourpuss, Foster writes. A stilted writer who didn’t have the range to swing from his “Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language” in 1809 to the Christmas poem. Also, Moore was not shy about slapping his name on the work of others, Foster charges. Moore had given a book, “A Complete Treatise on Merinos and Other Sheep,” to the New-York Historical Society Library. He had autographed the 1811 book, taking credit in his inscription for translating the work from its original French. But way in the back of the book, the appendix lists the sole translator as Francis Durand, a fact, says Foster, that Moore apparently overlooked in his haste to take credit. (Kaller counters that handwriting experts have concluded that Moore did not write the inscription.)

Livingston, on the other hand, was a jolly bankruptcy court commissioner who wrote comical and children’s verses. His prose, Foster concludes, is peppered with the same offbeat exclamation marks that appear in the original Sentinel text. (“Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now!”) Also, other pre-1823 Livingston poems have the same meter as “The Night Before Christmas.” (“To my dear brother Beekman I sit down to write/Ten minutes past eight and a very cold night . . . “).

On and off, since the mid-1800s, starting with his children and grandchildren, Livingston’s descendants have tried to make the case that he was the real author. Two of his children, reports Foster, said Livingston wrote and recited “The Night Before Christmas,” in December 1807 or 1808. (Foster writes that none of Moore’s six children was able to recall the day he claimed to have introduced them to his poem.) But his heirs had nothing other than anecdotal evidence to sway scholars.

A few years ago, Mary Van Deusen, Livingston’s great-great-great-great-great granddaughter, picked up the cause after an early retirement from IBM Research, where she worked on computer language design. “I have fallen totally in love with Henry,” 56-year-old Van Deusen writes in an e-mail, “and [would] love to help him live again for other people to get to know.” In August 1999, she approached Foster. What he assumed was probably just a Livingston family myth turned out, in his estimation, to be true.

Foster does not suggest that institutions footnote their Moore holdings or take any action at all. He only wants to lay out the evidence, he says, and let people judge for themselves. Foster says he has not heard from anyone claiming to be a Moore descendant.

Lovers of letters and light verse might find a gold mine in Livingston’s work, which has been ignored until now.

Whoever wrote the poem managed to spin the skinny, grim European version of St. Nicholas into a plump grandfatherly figure who dashed through the heavens to deliver presents to children. “The invention of this figure we call Santa Claus owes so much to this poem,” Foster says, “that we can’t really understand or appreciate the poem fully without knowing something about how the poem came about, and the culture from which it was generated.”