Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

The extent of the public’s reliance on British critical opinion is captured succinctly in Philip Freneau’s satirical advice “To a New England Poet.”

Cultural subservience to England was further compounded by the British disdain for all things American in the decade following the War of 1812. In the January 1820 issue of the
Edinburgh Review,
Sydney Smith famously posed the rhetorical question: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?” Washington Irving responded directly to such criticisms in
The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
Published in England in the same year as Smith’s notorious taunt,
The Sketch-Book
established Irving’s reputation, according to John Gibson Lockhart in the February 1820 issue of
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
as an author whose writings “should be classed with the best English writings of our day.” It was hailed as evidence that America possessed the raw materials necessary to produce a culture of its own. In his review, Lockhart wrote, “[
The Sketch-Book]
proves to us distinctly that there is
mind
working in America, and that there are materials, too, for it to work upon, of a very singular and romantic kind.”

While helping American literature gain legitimacy in England and Europe, Irving’s
Sketch-Book
also introduced British and European romanticism into American culture. In post- Revolutionary America, literature was considered part of public discourse rather than the unique expression of an individual artist. Poetry and fiction had a well-defined civic purpose: to educate readers in the virtues of citizenship. This was especially important in the newly formed republic, where common law practices were being implemented across regions with widely divergent social customs, from puritan New England to the plantation-based South. Writers were expected to produce stories and poems that were morally instructive, domestic and national allegories that illustrated how and why individuals should subordinate their personal interests and inclinations to the public good. Purely imaginative literature, and especially the novel, was suspect, because it elicited from readers emotional and psychological responses that were unregulated by principles of community. However, the public conception of literature began to change as British and European romanticism made its way across the Atlantic. The works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and other prominent romantic writers were printed and reprinted by American booksellers and magazine editors. Gradually, fiction came to represent a space of imaginative freedom, a setting suitable for the self-reliant individualism championed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. What appeared as a dangerous and seductive wilderness to the citizen of the early republic came to be perceived as a symbolic space of unlimited possibility.

Washington Irving’s writings were an integral part of this transformation. He was among the first American writers to separate literary fiction from public discourse. Although his early writings contain elements of social and political satire, he refused to put his writing in the service of a single party or cause. Evidence of this can be found in his 1848 “Preface to the Revised Edition of
The Sketch-Book,”
in which Irving relates his struggle to find a publisher. He appealed to Sir Walter Scott for help; Scott, after reading some parts of the manuscript, offered Irving the editorship of a weekly periodical but warned him that it would have “somewhat of a political bearing.” Irving’s reply makes clear that he preferred to write when and what he pleased.

What is remarkable about this retrospective account of his correspondence with Scott is the extent to which Irving identified as his own character traits he attributed to Geoffrey Crayon, the narrative persona he constructed for
The Sketch-Book.
In “The Author’s Account of Himself,” Irving describes how he spent the “holiday afternoons” of his youth “in rambles about the surrounding country [making himself] familiar with all its places famous in history or fable [and] neglect[ing] the regular exercises of the school” (pp. 49-50). These idle, romantic habits informed his peculiar narrative perspective, that of an outside observer of “the shifting scenes of life.”

In describing this point of view, Irving presents writing as an activity that affords an aesthetic pleasure akin to travel or to shopping for prints.

More than a simple pun on the title of his book, this description exemplifies a significant shift in the public conception of reading. The subjects of his sketches are not meant to illustrate ethical norms for citizenship. They are meant to provide some distraction and relief from the pressures and anxieties of modern, professional life. Literature had become a leisure activity rather than a moral exercise in character formation.

If Geoffrey Crayon is a self-portrait, then Irving clearly thought of himself as a romantic writer recording his unique impressions with little regard for instructing readers in the political or moral truths of the moment. In so doing, he assumed a narrative persona that Nathaniel Hawthorne later imitated when he wrote in his introduction to
The Scarlet Letter,
“I am a citizen of somewhere else” (Hawthorne, vol. 1, p. 44). Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon inaugurated a literary tradition of interiority and introspection that led subsequent writers such as Henry David Thoreau to declare that the true American frontier was to be found within each individual’s experience. “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,” Thoreau wrote in
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,
“[they are] wherever a man
fronts
a fact, though that fact be his neighbor.... Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is,
fronting
IT” (Thoreau,
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau,
vol. 1, pp. 323-324). Irving’s insistence that literature was a species of imaginative entertainment rather than a means of moral or political instruction helped usher in a new conception of artistry that contributed to the formation of an American literary culture conducive to democratic individualism.

Irving grew up in a post-Revolutionary America torn between its democratic aspirations for the future and its memories of the colonial era. During his boyhood, British sympathizers lived next door to veterans of the Continental army. Memories of the hardships endured while quartering British troops during the occupation of New York were mixed with frustration over financial losses incurred from the severing of ties with Great Britain. The War of 1812, often referred to as the Second War of American Independence, rekindled and put to rest some of these memories, but the early republic continued to be haunted by its British colonial past. The story “Rip Van Winkle” wonderfully illustrates Irving’s strategy for putting these ghosts to rest. Set in Sleepy Hollow, “a little village of great antiquity ... founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province,” this story conjures up the ghosts of New York’s Dutch colonial past in a way designed to erase the memory of America’s subservience to British rule. Rip wanders from the village and out into the Kaatskill Mountains at a time when “the country was yet a province of Great Britain” (p. 74). When he returns after a twenty-year nap in the wilderness, the Revolutionary War is over and the signs of British colonial rule have been replaced by symbols of American independence. The village inn, which used to be “designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George the Third” (p. 77), has been renamed the Union Hotel, and the sign bearing the portrait of King George has been repainted to look like George Washington. “The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON” (p. 84).

Irving’s story exemplifies the shift in public discourse that coincided with this transformation of the signs of colonial rule into the symbols of American nationalism. When he returns to the village Rip walks into the midst of a political debate led by “a lean, bilious-looking fellow . . . haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens—elections—members of congress—liberty—Bunker’s Hill—heroes of seventy-six—and other words, which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle” (p. 84). When asked ” ‘Whether he was a Federal or Democrat,’” Rip is equally bewildered (p. 84). Irving’s story, at this point, becomes a satire on the American public’s preoccupation with political matters. The explanation for Rip’s mysterious twenty-year absence turns out to be a legend derived from New York’s Dutch colonial past. It is given by “old Peter Vanderdonk,” whom we are told was “a descendant of the historian of that name, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the province” (p. 87). He assures the villagers of “a fact, handed down from his ancestor,” namely, that the Dutch explorer “Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country,” returned to Sleepy Hollow every twenty years to “keep a guardian eye upon the river, and the great city called by his name” (p. 87).

Oddly, Hudson’s protective intervention takes the form of playing nine-pins and drinking from “a stout keg” of Hollands gin. Rip, being “naturally a thirsty soul” joins in the carousing, and after repeated draughts from the flagon, “his senses were overpowered” (p. 81) and he passed out for the duration of the Revolutionary War and its political aftermath. Rip’s long nap leads him to forget—or better, to never know—the traumatic separation from the land of their fathers that marks the memories of his fellow citizens. Moreover, in the story’s conclusion, Irving cast Rip in the role of a storyteller so that his fellow citizens could share the bliss of forgetting. Loafing on the bench outside the Union Hotel, Rip tells his story to every stranger who arrives in the village and, in so doing, becomes a kind of living history that provides the younger generation with an alternative to the political turmoil of the post-Revolutionary period. He prefers “making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor,” and soon becomes “reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war’ ” (p. 88). Those old times constitute a pre-history for the new republic free of the emotional scars of its having severed ties with England. By having Rip take up the task of the historian, Irving turns his story into an allegory of how to construct a “legendary” past, one that presents the origins of the nation as idyllic and therefore free of the political conflict that is inherently part of democracy (Horwitz, “‘Rip Van Winkle’ and Legendary National Memory;’ p. 37).

 

Irving grew up in a time without a history. The youngest of eight surviving children, he was born on April 3, 1783, the same year British troops formally withdrew from New York. His father, William Irving, was a merchant of moderate means, whose business fluctuated with the political climate of the newly formed nation. His mother, Sarah Sanders Irving, was a devoted wife and mother, whom Irving remembered dearly throughout his life. He was the pampered favorite of his sisters, Ann, Catherine, and Sarah, and throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, his four brothers, William, Peter, Ebenezer, and John Treat, also watched over him. He was not spoiled, but latitude was allowed him conducive to his development as an artist. With four brothers already set to work in the family business, there was no need for him to be pressured into a practical education for a career. Irving showed quick intelligence in his schooling but little discipline. Instead of applying himself to Dillworth’s
Arithmetic
or translations of Virgil, he was more apt to bury himself in books culled from his father’s library. He found popular travel narratives especially appealing. He absorbed
The World Displayed,
a collection of travel narratives, along with fictional works such as
The Arabian Nights
and
Robinson Crusoe.
His religious upbringing also left him lukewarm. His father, a deacon in the Presbyterian Church, imposed rigorous theological training on his children. Irving later recalled that “religion was forced upon me before I could understand or appreciate it. I was forced to swallow it whether I would or not ... until I was disgusted with all its forms and observances” (Williams, vol. 1, p. 7). He never attended Columbia College (now Columbia University), as did his brothers Peter and John, and eventually decided to study law less from ambition than to escape “the risks and harassing cares of commerce” (Irving,
The Complete Works of Washington Irving,
vol. 25, p. 1,008).