In “A Washington Irving Sketch Book,” the essayist Phillip Lopate tries to rescue New York City’s original mythmaker from literary oblivion.
Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein,” once developed a terrific little crush on Washington Irving, the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” This was in 1824, in London, and Shelley, twenty-seven, and two years the widow of Percy Bysshe Shelley, spent a season begging a mutual friend, the playwright and actor John Howard Payne, to set them up. Irving, just past forty, was a bona-fide influencer of the Romantic era—fêted on two continents, living in the highest style, surrounded “by fashion rank & splendid friendships,” as Shelley wrote to Payne in a letter. Shelley wrote Irving a series of notes, and gave them to Payne to deliver. Payne, who was apparently in love with Shelley himself, sat on them for a little while, but eventually relented. Irving swiped through the flirtations without a second glance. “Read Mrs. Shelley’s correspondence before going to bed,” the lifelong bachelor wrote in his diary.
Shelley gave up the pursuit soon after. “As to friendship with him—It cannot be,” she wrote to Payne. “Though every thing I hear & know renders it more desirable.” How could such a man, she sighed, “pilot his pleasure bark . . . into this sober, sad, enshadowed nook?”
Poor Payne. Irving was the first acknowledged master of American letters, the first man in the young Republic, it was said, to make a “profession” out of writing. Born in the closing days of the American Revolution, he helped define the years of America’s adolescence, pioneering forms such as the American essay, short story, and travelogue, as well as emergent genres like horror and the Western. By the end of his life, Irving had established himself as a respected biographer and a sometime international diplomat. (He served as Ambassador to Spain during the reign of Isabella II, and helped negotiate America’s remarkably sensible northern boundary with Canada.) In 1859, the year Irving died, the publication Home Journal declared him “by far the most honored man in our country”—and “curiously enough, even less honored than loved.”
When Irving was alive, everyone read him. “His Crayon, I know it by heart,” the usually acid Lord Byron wrote of Irving’s “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,” a collection stuffed with the shimmering blends of fact and fiction that Irving called “sketches.” Among his fans and friends were the First Lady Dolley Madison, Sir Walter Scott, and John Jacob Astor, New York City’s first multimillionaire. Scott, the preëminent Romantic-era novelist, took the younger Irving under his wing; Edgar Allan Poe, whose gothic tales owed much to Irving’s stories of goblins and will-o’-the-wisps, considered him a writer for whom “there is a vast deal to be said.” Some—including Poe—thought Irving overrated, in the way that best-selling writers are always overrated. Still, the title of Charles Dickens’s 1836 début, “Sketches by Boz,” was a nod to his once inescapable influence.
Today, of course, barely anyone reads Irving. Two decades ago, the essayist and longtime Columbia University writing professor Phillip Lopate was nosing through a cache of books being deaccessioned by the school’s library and found a complete set of Irving’s works, twelve volumes of about a thousand pages each. Not even Lopate, one of America’s foremost essayists and the editor of an anthology called “Writing New York,” had read much of him. He took the musty pile home more from pity than genuine interest, and they “sat on my own bookshelves collecting dust,” Lopate confesses at the start of “A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer.” When Lopate finally brought himself to crack the books open, he was astonished to discover not an entombed literary mummy but a mirror—a writer whom Lopate came to think of as a long-lost literary doppelgänger. The resulting book, comprising some three dozen brisk, sketch-like chapters, is a reappraisal of Irving by an author who has come to see in him “the prototype of a writer’s life, with all its setbacks and triumphs”—particularly of a kind of New York City writer’s life.
The more he read, the more Lopate began to discover traces of Irving’s influence all around New York, and in himself. “I too was a bachelor,” Lopate, who in 1981 published an acclaimed collection titled “Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis,” writes. He came to regard Irving as New York City’s original great bachelor, the Carrie Bradshaw of the city’s early gaslamp era. After an oncology checkup at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center and a lunch of pork fried rice in lower Manhattan, Lopate found himself wondering how a writer who was once the most celebrated American literary figure could wind up so forgotten. As the author of more than two dozen works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Lopate began to consider what chance he has at posterity if someone like Irving can be lost. “I question the whole notion that this or that author no longer ‘speaks’ to us, no longer ‘matters,’ ” Lopate writes, speaking about Irving, and, perhaps, himself.
Irving was born in New York City on April 3, 1783, the son of a stern Scottish immigrant who ran a tidy import business selling wine, sugar, and hardware. The preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris had been signed four months before, but it would be another seven months before the last British troops and warships left New York Harbor, marking the formal end of the War of Independence. The city was a mess. During the seven years that it was occupied by British forces, Manhattan had been ravaged by fires, picked over by looters, covered in fortifications, and swollen with refugees. Many New Yorkers who remained behind British lines during the war were not supporters of the Revolution, but in naming their son after George Washington, the Irvings declared their allegiance. According to family lore, the writer met his namesake in 1789, Washington’s first year as President, when his Scottish nanny, Lizzie, stopped the great man on a street in lower Manhattan. “There’s a bairn named after you,” she said. Washington placed his hand on Irving’s head, “little guessing that the boy would grow up to write his biography,” Lopate writes.
In his early twenties, Irving ran around town with a crew of nine well-to-do “blades” and cutups who called themselves the Lads of Kilkenny; the group included two of Irving’s elder brothers, the future congressman Gouverneur Kemble, and the future novelist James K. Paulding. The young men spent several summers together in an old mansion on the banks of the Passaic River, in New Jersey, “indulging in pranks, drinking orgies, and leapfrogging on the lawn.” Some have wondered whether Irving was gay, a speculation which Lopate dismisses, though he does quote from several suggestive letters to friends. “I am almost ashamed to say. . . . Marriage is the grave of bachelor intimacies,” Irving wrote to his friend, Henry Brevoort, Jr., after the latter got engaged.
Starting in 1807, the Lads collaborated on a short-lived magazine called Salmagundi, named after a sailor’s stew. “We invite all editors of newspapers and literary journals to praise us heartily in advance,” they declared in the first of what would be twenty issues, published sporadically. Salmagundi gently skewered New York City life and society, and specialized, Lopate says, “in the sort of worked-up nonsense that proved quite popular with audiences of the day, being neither solemn nor mean-spirited.” The wry, winking tone still legible in its pages was an early iteration of the urbane magazine voice that powered nineteenth-century publications such as Judge and Puck, as well as later ones like The New Yorker, New York, Spy, and Gawker. Salmagundi spoke to a desire to mythologize New York as it became a metropolis, an impulse shared by the authors of the portentous histories and guides being released by the city’s nascent publishing industry, which Irving decided to ridicule in a “bulging comic tome” inspired by Swift and Cervantes. Consulting the sparse records of the then nascent New-York Historical Society, Irving invented the narrator Knickerbocker, and stretched the bit for four hundred pages “with the garrulous energy of a young writer just discovering his full powers,” Lopate writes.
“A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty,” published when Irving was twenty-six, was a sensation, the first best-seller in New York’s history. Mixing social and political satire with the scraps of information then known about Dutch New York, Irving created a set of founding myths for his home town, consciously modelled on the founding myths of the world’s great ancient cities, with a crooked real-estate deal in place of the trials of Theseus, or fratricidal twins raised by a wolf. In his telling, the Lenape agreed to sell Dutch colonists only as much land on Manhattan as could be covered by a man’s breeches. After the deal was struck, the Dutch produced a man, Winant Ten Broeck, whose prodigious undies unfolded and unfolded until they draped over the entire island. “The simple savages, whose ideas of a man’s nether garments had never expanded beyond the dimensions of a breech clout, stared with astonishment and dismay as they beheld this bulbous-bottomed burgher peeled like an onion,” Irving wrote.
Some historians have seethed at Irving for forever “muddying” the city’s sense of its own history; others have recognized that Irving was trying to transcend what Plutarch (another historian who loved to embellish) derided as the “so-called rules of chronology.” “Virgil he wasn’t, but New York could have done worse,” the late Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows wrote of Irving in their totemic social history “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.” Lopate comes down on the side of the defenders, arguing that Irving on the page was giving New York City “a mythological dimension beyond what the historical record warrants, like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo.”
Even when everyone read him, Irving had his critics. By 1819, when he published the first section of “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,” a collection of tales of English and American country life written under yet another pseudonym, he had been living in England for four years, which would turn into a nearly two-decade hiatus from the U.S. Though “The Sketch Book” contained both “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving’s most beloved and enduring works, Lopate suggests that it was the beginning of his downfall. Some American readers, still smarting from the War of 1812, wondered whether Irving had gone soft on the English, and if maybe he was too precious, too genteel, to speak for America. It’s a critique that his biographer, Stanley T. Williams, would reproduce in a scathing 1935 volume—“Irving himself wearies us, mild-mannered, urbane, indecisive . . . and, at times, timid and dependent”—and that Lopate, a self-described belletrist, seems to take personally. “It was generally acknowledged by [reviewers] that he had an ability to infuse his prose with a beguiling tone, regardless of subject matter,” he writes.
Irving, Lopate tells us, was an “abolitionist at heart,” but throughout his long career he spoke out little against slavery. Even his best works contain grotesque depictions of Black people and Native Americans; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” describes Black New Yorkers with “grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear,” watching their rich white neighbors enjoy a country-house party. As Irving got older, he dedicated himself to a series of surprisingly well-researched and open-minded biographies of Christopher Columbus, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Anglo-Irish “hack” writer Oliver Goldsmith. Lopate spends ten pages considering Irving’s most curious work, “The Alhambra,” a loving account of the old Moorish castle in Granada, Spain, where he had been invited to live for several months by a local governor, who was a fan of his work. Living in the castle was the event of Irving’s life. “Often have I trod in fancy the romantic halls of the Alhambra,” he wrote. “As I inhale the odor of the rose, and feel the influence of the balmy climate, I am almost tempted to fancy myself in the paradise of Mahomet.” For many American readers, Irving’s writing—laden as it is with Orientalist clichés—provided a rare encounter with Islam.
When Irving returned to New York City in 1832, he was “stunned” by the steamships in the harbor, the enormous new hotels, the striking fashions on the streets. He had become his own creation, Rip Van Winkle. A large formal dinner was held in his honor, where he was proclaimed “the Father of American Literature,” and he stammered through an awkward speech. From then on, he thought of himself as a real writer, collecting steady book profits and taking on tepid magazine assignments to help sustain his glamorous life style, which made even more readers sour on him. On this, Lopate is magnanimous: “What writer since then has not been inveigled into doing a bit of hack writing when the wolf was at the door?”
Irving did manage to cobble together enough of a pile to buy a small estate on the Hudson River, north of the city, not far from the climatic scene in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He called the property Sunnyside, and he departed from it for an extended period only once, in 1842, when President John Tyler appointed him Ambassador to Spain. When he returned, he sat down to his final work, a five-part biography of Washington, and completed it just a few months before he died. Lopate, one of the few people in the past century to make his way through all three volumes, admits that it’s a snoozer. “1,272 pages, my God!” he writes. Still, he praises Irving’s instinctual dislike of hagiography, and his ability to find the “warm, complicated human being under the Houdon marble statue.”
There’s a nice bronze bust of Irving in the southeast corner of Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, right next to the central loop. Thousands of walkers, joggers, and bikers pass him by every day. As Lopate looked for other interpretations of Irving, he came across a book called “Sojourners,” by Philip J. McFarland, published in 1979, a trippy attempt not so much to chronicle Irving as to reconstruct him and his social milieu of friends, fans, and patrons in America and Europe. By re-creating “the worlds through which the wanderer Irving moved,” McFarland wrote, “I have undertaken to reveal, more fully perhaps than would the writer of a conventional biography.” Lopate adopts some of McFarland’s conclusions about Irving’s work, including his idea that Rip Van Winkle remains the exemplar of the American Everyman “who is no longer able to find anyone who remembers him or can tell him who he is.” Lopate writes that throughout his entire life, Irving was preparing for his own oblivion; he would have been surprised to hear how his creations have endured. Knicks in six, for example? Couldn’t have done it without him. ♦
