The Original Knickerbocker
The Life of Washington Irving
by Andrew Burstein
Basic Books, 420 pp., $27.50
Four writers, roughly contemporary, can be regarded as founders of an American literature distinctive from political writing: Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and Washington Irving (1783-1859). How have they fared in literary estimation? A good way to approach that question would be to consult Edmund Wilson's very useful Shock of Recognition (1943), in which well-known authors respond to the writing of others, as, for example, Emerson on Whitman or Henry James on Hawthorne.
Of these four early American authors, Cooper and Poe evoked responses signaling their importance. D.H. Lawrence, for example, reads Fenimore Cooper in quasi-mythic terms:
Beyond all this heart-beating stand the figures of Natty and Ching achook: two childless, womanless men, of opposite races. They are the abiding thing. Each of them is alone, and final in his race. And they stand side by side, stark, abstract, beyond emotion, yet eternally together. All the other loves seem frivolous. This is the new great thing. . . . And Natty, what sort of a white man is he? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, he is a killer.
Does that make you think of Hemingway and his guns? But Cooper, to matter, must be seen as a myth-maker. In The Shock of Recognition, Mark Twain demonstrates that in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895) Cooper couldn't write. Yes, but he had hold of something profound.
Poe figures prominently in The Shock of Recognition as a critic, poet, and writer of fiction: James Russell Lowell, commenting in 1845, Walt Whitman in 1880. Stéphane Mallarmé celebrated him in a sonnet, "The Tomb of Edgar Poe." So, in Wilson's anthology, both Cooper and Poe make the cut. But where is Charles Brockden Brown, the preeminent American novelist before Cooper, and author of such gothic novels as Ormond and Wieland ?
Where is Washington Irving, with his enormous literary production? His History of New York, a combination of history and light satire written by "Diedrich ("died rich") Knickerbocker," also his multiple volumes of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon that outsold Lord Byron with John Murray Ltd., the publisher Irving shared with Byron in England; his biography of Columbus; the five-volume biography of George Washington that he wrote late in life; his Spanish Tales of Alhambra, his mountainous productivity as a man of letters? What has happened to all of that? As Villon asked, "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?"
I myself think the story "Rip Van Winkle" deserves to live. Indeed, I think it has lived; I read it in grade school. Rip Van Winkle with his dog Wolf goes hunting in the woods above the lordly Hudson River. Wearying, he lies down to sleep. He is transported back in time to the days of the old Dutch colonists, finds they resemble figures in an old Flemish painting while bowling on a village green. Van Winkle awakes and finds that he has slept for 20 years, and missed the American Revolution: "Even to this day they [the current Dutch inhabitants of the village] never hear a thunder storm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of nine pins."
I had thought of this story, of all that Irving wrote, and also, possibly, Ichabod Crane and the "headless" horseman in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." But Andrew Burstein finds that a survey of college-educated men and women born after the 1960s shows that only one-third could identify Rip Van Winkle, and these associated him with a television cartoon.
What remains of interest about Washington Irving, and justifies Burstein's very competent biography, is Washington Irving as a man in his own time, beginning with the period after the Revolution and extending into the period of growing division. He died in 1859, the year before Lincoln was elected. At age six, accompanying a family servant to a New York shop, the small boy met the 6'3" George Washington, after whom he had been named. He attended the treason trial of Aaron Burr (who was acquitted), and afterwards had an audience with President Thomas Jefferson. President James Madison and his wife Dolly were hospitable, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren treated him as a confidant. President John Tyler sent him as envoy to Madrid, and he knew Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce.
Famous in England, France, and Spain, he knew Sir Walter Scott and other prominent writers, and when Charles Dickens visited America, Washington Irving was one of the men he wanted to meet. In person, Dickens disappointed Irving, who found him less than genteel.
In fact, Irving remained a practitioner of the genteel style in his writing, popularized in England by Addison and Steele in their Spectator essays (1711-12). The genteel style had social implications: It was the style of a gentleman, a new social construct that provided a meeting space between aristocrat and wealthy commoner. It remained for American writing to make its own Declaration of Independence. That came with the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass, Emerson welcoming the American poet he had called for in his essay "The Poet" (1844). The era when anyone could take seriously something written under the name "Geoffrey Crayon" was long gone. Burstein, however, has valuably provided us Washington Irving in his time.
Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, is the author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times.