Michael's Bookshelf: Washington Irving and the Test of Time

Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt, Editorial and Managing Director of Carcanet and Editor of PN Review, rounds off the week with a piece on Washington Irving: an extract from a lecture entitled 'ASPICIENS A LONGE: Getting Perspectives on Home', delivered at the University of Glasgow in June 2011.

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Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the last of his parents' eight surviving children. The week he was born the British declared a ceasefire and the American War of Independence was finally over. Mr Irving was a Scot who had emigrated from Orkney to Manhattan. Mrs Irving was English-born but emphatically patriotic. They named their baby after the victorious general.

True to his namesake, Irving helped extend independence into the realms of literature, at least in terms of subject-matter: the essay, history, biography (even a vast life of George Washington, completed a few months before his own death) and narrative. 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle', both first collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819, represent a new strand of Gothic and haunt the American imagination in their original form and in adaptations to other media [...]

Henry James had no very high opinion of Irving, except as a distant relation. When he visited Sunnyside, Irving's house on the Hudson, he felt in it 'the quite indefinable air of the little American literary past'. It was here that Adam, or one Adam, of American literature settled, having begun to clear a space for Henry James himself, among all the rest.

Edgar Allan Poe thought that
Irving had become 'too European'.
His book of poems and essays is
published next month.

Old Mrs Archer in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence valued the polite, humorous Irving - the innocent Irving - over the Gothic writer. She 'was always at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable and cultivated society had been when it included such figures'. What she, and we, relish is not his evocation of the frontier, the native American, the buffalo and bison - not Paul Bunyan, Babe the blue ox or Leatherstocking -- but a tentative world of close detail and response, where the American dream is itself haunted by older dreams, European and primeval.

Dreamers wake into a literal world where everything is changing, including language. In one sketch, falling into conversation with a book in the Abbey library at Westminster, Irving writes,

Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time. 

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Writers who survive such 'mutability' are those like Shakespeare who have 'rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature'. And then there are the writers who register and write out of that very mutability of language. Irving was not one of them.

Some Americans - Fennimore Cooper and [Edgar Allan] Poe among them - felt Irving had become too European. His books about the West, written after his years abroad, went some way towards reassuring them. In 1832, almost penitentially, he travelled out West and had experiences we associate with Cooper's big-boned heroes. He hunted buffalo, saw Indians, ate native dishes including skunk, and was puzzled by the conflict between pioneers and 'the red men', his sympathies going 'strongly with the latter'...

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And what do you think? What kind of writer does it take to survive 'mutability'?