Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (2 page)

Thirty-six years old when the book came out, Irving had been a writer on and off since he was nineteen, though he had published nothing in his own name. It was an open secret in New York City, his hometown, that he was the author or coauthor of letters by “Jonathan Oldstyle” (1802-03) in the New York
Morning Chronicle,
of the comic periodical (
Salmagundi
(1807-08), and of Knickerbocker's
History of New York
(1809). Richard H. Dana, Sr., reviewing the still incomplete
Sketch Book
in
The North American Review
in 1819, seemed to take it for granted that the quality and popularity of his earlier writings had made Irving an American literary “success” already. But he had not been able to make a living by writing. Indeed, he had not even made a serious attempt to become a professional writer until he began
The Sketch Book.
Few Americans at this point had. Prejudices in part derived from Puritanism still persisted in some quarters against the seeming frivolity of certain kinds of writing, fiction and drama especially. Those who wrote were expected to do so in their spare time, unless they happened to possess independent means.

Irving's father, a Presbyterian immigrant from Scotland, had subjected his large family to a heavy regimen of church attendance, Bible reading, prayers, and psalm singing. In his five sons he had tried, with mixed success, to instill the Puritan ethic of hard work, frugality, and temperance. All five ultimately became involved in one way or another in the family importing businesses. Two, however, including Washington, went into law first, and a third became a doctor. For Washington, the legal profession was a way of avoiding business, which he hated. But his writing in turn distracted him from the law. Two of his brothers were also partially addicted to the questionable habit of writing. Subject to pangs of guilt over his “idleness,” the young Irving at times threw himself energetically into what bourgeois society considered real work. But he lived for years without a clear sense of purpose, unsettled, unproductive, and often dispirited. Recognizing his talent, his older brothers partially subsidized his literary labors, making him, after the publication of
Knickerbocker,
a business partner with only minimal responsibilities. But this arrangement did not work well. If the jobs he was asked to do—lobbying in Washington for the family enterprises, for instance—were not arduous, he somehow made them time-consuming; perhaps uneasiness at depending on his brothers stifled his muse.

In 1815, embarking on what was supposed to be an extended nonbusiness trip to Europe, he got only as far as Liverpool, where he found his brother Peter ill, and the family importing firm, under his charge in England, going bankrupt. Washington's gentlemanly leisure was abruptly terminated. He worked strenuously in Liverpool for two and a half years in an effort to mitigate the family's financial disgrace. Meanwhile, more appalled than ever at the prospect of a business career, he resolved to give professional authorship a try. The obstacles he faced were formidable, beginning with the low spirits and feelings of loneliness to which he was subject. He had never quite recovered from the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, in 1809. And in the middle of the bankruptcy he had learned of the death of his mother, to whom he was strongly attached. Living in a foreign country, he was cut off from what he knew best, the society he could write about as an insider. There were also the constraints attendant upon the need to produce a money-making work.

As an amateur, Irving had been a freewheeling, irreverent humorist. “Oldstyle,”
Salmagundi
(on which he collaborated with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding), and
Knickerbocker
thrive on caricature, satire, even flagrant self-contradiction. The writing often mocks the literary conventions it uses, the periodical essay, for instance, or the figure of the whimsical gentleman (usually a bachelor) of the old school, emblem of an outmoded, narrow, arbitrary, ultrarespectable gentility, who nonetheless simultaneously provides a viewpoint for mocking contemporary fads and follies. Parody so pervades
Salmagundi and Knickerbocker
(especially the original edition, 1809) that at times they seem to amount to little more than the ludicrously pretentious rhetoric of individuals blinded by illusions. One of the prime targets of such ridicule is the self-aggrandizing vision of itself that the United States was developing.

Seeking to win broad acceptance from a paying public for
The Sketch Book,
Irving substantially transformed himself as a writer, closely watching popular tastes and experimenting with some of the milder, less threatening forms of romanticism—pathos, sentimentality, and fantasies evoking the remote and the supernatural. He began to look into German folklore, which he discussed with Walter Scott on a visit to Abbottsford in 1817. He deliberately chose the format of the miscellany so as to appeal to a diversity of tastes. No longer trying to startle and unsettle, he saw to it that he was less persistently and boisterously humorous than in his early writings. His style grew smoother, more ingratiating. The prose of
The Sketch Book
seems quite consciously crafted, the language at times clearly striving for poetic effects. There is a studied avoidance of vulgarity.

The new manner won over the British critics.
The Quarterly Review,
seeing “the hand of the master” in
The Sketch Book,
called Irving the “best writer of English ... that America has produced since the era of her independence. He seems to have studied our language in all its strength and perfection—in the writings of our old sterling authors....”
The Edinburgh Review
noted with pleasure that Irving had modeled his “diction” on “the most elegant and polished of our native writers.” It hoped that other Americans would follow his example. Dana, however, in his essay in
The North American Review
noted above, voiced reservations about the new style. While he knew that
The Sketch Book
was going to be popular, his assessment of the new work was mixed. On the whole he seemed to prefer Irving's earlier writings. American literature, he believed, had needed the wit and humor of
Salmagundi
and
Knickerbocker
to counteract its excessive earnestness, a quality derived from the nation's “being rather raw in authorship” and thus fearful of being adjudged coarse and undignified. Dana discerned an admirable naturalness and freedom in the youthful Irving but found
The Sketch Book
a bit too
“dressy,”
too “elegant,” slightly artificial or foreign.

Dana's strictures on Irving's new style take on added significance in the context of a debate that had been in progress in the United States for at least two decades, a disagreement related to American sensitivity to British criticism. With the American Revolution had come a conviction that the new nation ought to have a literature commensurate with its lofty political ideals. But the early results, particularly in
belles lettres,
disappointed many. In
A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century
(1803), for instance, the Reverend Samuel Miller of New York asserted that American writings were “in general, less learned, instructive, and elegant than are found in Great-Britain and some of the more enlightened nations on the Eastern continent.” The causes were not hard to find, he maintained: American institutions of higher education were inferior; there was no system of patronage to provide authors with financial support and the leisure to write; the “spirit of our people is
commercial”
; and, “still connected with [Britain] by the ties of language, manners, taste, and commercial intercourse,” Americans were inclined to consider “her literature ... as ours.” All in all, Miller found that Americans had few incentives to encourage the work of native writers.

Many American readers accepted British literary standards and consequently their own cultural inferiority. There were occasional complaints, however, on both sides of the Atlantic that American literature was insuf ficiently distinguishable in subject or style from English literature. In the United States these complaints increased noticeably after the War of 1812, especially in the pages of the
North American Review,
founded in Boston in 1815. Giving voice to a romantically oriented and more sophisticated form of literary nationalism, the new journal criticized American writers for undue subservience to the classics. Edward Tyrell Channing, for instance, declared in 1816 that war inevitably exists between individual genius and “rules for versification, laws of taste, books of practical criticism, and approved standards of language.” He urged writers to keep faith with their own thoughts and feelings instead of imitating approved models. Obviously congruent with the democratic ethos, Channing's doctrine of aesthetic freedom and self-reliance was to begin to exert a strong influence on American literature after 1830, in the era of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.

There is undoubtedly some validity to Dana's complaints about Irving's style. We need look no further than the third paragraph of “The Author's Account of Himself,” where we find Crayon rhythmically extolling America's “mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains with their bright aerial tints; her valleys teeming with wild fertility”—and so on and on. For all their glitter, these hackneyed generalities fail to convey a sense that the writer has had close encounters with the American wilderness. Such overwriting in the earlier Irving would almost certainly have signaled parody.

But “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” give us all the proof we need that Irving was perfectly capable of depicting American landscapes in such a way as to create for the reader an illusion of being there—in the Catskills or on the bank of the Hudson. Or for a quick indication of this scenic talent, one can turn to the first several paragraphs of “The Angler,” in which Crayon recalls boyhood fishing expeditions with his friends and in his quiet playful way demonstrates why the “piscatory tactics” recommended by Izaak Waltbn for “the velvet margins of quiet English rivulets” will not work on a rocky American mountain stream.

Irving's strengths as a writer were in humor and narrative. When he abandoned them, he risked trouble. He was not a very good essayist or moralizer. His thought is liveliest when it questions attitudes, doubts illusions, deflates pretensions—his own among them. At the same time the high authority of English taste in early nineteenth-century American culture obviously made him uneasy. In a prefatory “Advertisement” to the first English edition of
The Sketch Book
(see Appendix B), he claimed that he had originally intended not to publish it in England, giving as a major reason the “austerity” of “British critics” towards American writers. And in a far more remarkable admission in “L'Envoy,” the book's final word (not a part of the original American edition), Crayon exposes his anxiety about “appearing before a public which ... from childhood” he has regarded “with the highest feelings of reverence.” That public of course is the British audience, fear of which, he admits, has heretofore undermined his self-confidence and stifled his creativity.

Clearly the doctrine of America's cultural dependency on England made sense to Irving. He has Crayon speak eloquently and cogently on the subject in the following passage from “English Writers on America,” one of the best known selections from
The Sketch Book:

“English Writers on America” first appeared in the second number of the American
Sketch Book,
before an English edition was contemplated. But Irving clearly knew that the essay would be read in England. By confronting the touchy issue of British condescension toward America and the consequent American resentment, he sought to play the apostle of good feelings—it was that “era”—between the two peoples, balancing criticism and praise for both sides. That he was not entirely comfortable doing so is suggested by the fact that at times his prose again rings slightly false.

Whatever his uneasiness, however, most of the writing of
The Sketch Book
seems clear, uncomplicated, vivid, and relaxed when it is compared with the ponderousness that characterized much American prose in his time—the essays of
The North American Review,
for instance, or the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown or James Fenimore Cooper. It is not difficult to understand why selections from
The Sketch Book
were used as models of style in nineteenth-century American schoolrooms. Irving prided himself on being a stylist. The modem editor of
The Sketch Book,
Haskell Springer, tells us that in revising the text for the first English edition, Irving reworded and rephrased numerous passages in response to criticism, including specifically several passages singled out by Dana as marred by mixed metaphor.

In addition he made several structural changes, the most important perhaps being to move “Westminster Abbey” from near the end to the middle of the book. He added three new selections to the second volume, including reworked versions of “Traits of English Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket,” originally written for
The Analectic Magazine
several years earlier. And he rearranged many of the other sketches and stories in the second volume. Thus, except for the brief “L'Envoy,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” now concludes the book. The first English edition is basically
The Sketch Book
we know today, even though Irving made a final revision in 1848, inserting two more sketches, “A Sunday in London” and “London Antiques,” both apparently at least partially drafted thirty years earlier.