Lakhasly

Myths of an emerging nation One of the first writers to take advantage of the greater opportunities for publica- tion that were opening up, in the process becoming one of the first American writers to achieve international fame, was Washington Irving (1783–1859). Irving was born into a prosperous merchant family in New York City, the youngest of eleven children. He studied law and contributed to two newspapers edited by one of his brothers, the Morning Chronicle and The Corrector. For the Chronicle he wrote ‘The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.’, a series of youthful satires on New York society. Published in 1802–3, they won him instant recognition. To restore his failing health, he then made the first of many trips to Europe; later, in fact, he was to live for protracted periods in England, to travel in France and Germany extensively, and to have spells of government service in Spain. But in 1806 he returned to New York City. There, a year later, he began to publish Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff Esq., and Others (1807–8), a series of satirical miscellanies concerned with New York society that ran to twenty numbers. The leading essays were written by Irving, his brothers and James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860), all members of a group known as the ‘Nine Worthies’ or ‘Lads of Kilkenny’ of ‘Cockloft Hall’. Federalist in politics, conservative in social principles and comic in tone, they included one piece by Irving, ‘Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient City of Gotham’, that supplied New York City with its enduring nickname of Gotham. Characteristically, Irving had borrowed here from a European source: he transferred both the name and a reputation for folly from the original Gotham village in Nottinghamshire, England. Irving was now famous as an author, wit and man of society, and to consolidate his reputation he published A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) under the pen name of Diedrich Knicker- bocker. Often regarded as the first important work of comic literature written by an American, it initiated the term ‘Knickerbocker School’ for authors like Irving himself, Paulding, Fitz-Greene Hallek (1790–1867) and Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), who wrote about ‘little old New York’ in the years before the Civil War. Ostensibly concerned with the Dutch occupation, the book in fact burlesques contemporary historical narratives, satirizes pedantry and literary classics, and offers a comic critique of Jeffersonian democracy. Jefferson himself is satirized as Governor Kieft under whom greedy Yankees attempt ‘to get possession of the city of Man- hattoes’. And there is an ironic apologia for white dispossession and destruction of Native Americans. The original inhabitants of America, Knickerbocker assures the reader, were ‘mere cannibals, detestable monsters, and many of them giants’; ‘animals’ rather than humans, they ‘deserved to be exterminated’. ‘The host of zealous and enlightened fathers’, in any event, brought many blessings with them for ‘these infidel savages’, such as ‘gin, rum, brandy, and the smallpox’. They also brought them ‘the light of religion’ and then ‘hurried them out of the world, to enjoy its reward!’ Irving’s style here, and in his earlier essays, is derived from the gently satirical fluencies of English writers like Oliver Goldsmith and Joseph Addison. Five years after the publication of his History he went to England to work in the family business there. He remained in Europe for seventeen years. He became friends with Sir Walter Scott, visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in 1820 pub- lished The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of essays and sketches that was enormously successful in both England and the United States. The Sketch Book contains two small masterpieces that initiated the great tradition of the American short story, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Four other sketches are also set in America, but most of the other pieces are descriptive and thoughtful essays on England, where Irving was still living. Both ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’ have origins in German folklore. Irving admits as much in a ‘Note’ to the first tale where the reader is told that ‘the foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr Knickerbocker by a little German superstition’. Both also owe a debt, in terms of stylistic influence, to Sir Walter Scott. Nevertheless, both exploit their specifically American settings and create American myths: they explore the social and cultural transformations occurring in America at the time in terms that are at once gently whimsical and perfectly serious. In ‘Rip Van Winkle’, the lazy, hen-pecked hero of the story ventures into the Catskill Mountains of New York State to discover there some little men in Dutch costume bowling at ninepins. Taking many draughts of some strange beverage they have brewed, he falls into a deep sleep. When he returns to his village, after waking up, he eventually realizes that twenty years have passed, the Revolution has been and gone, and that, ‘instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States’. The news naturally takes a long time to sink in; and, at first, when he is surrounded in his homeplace by people whom he does not recognize and who do not recognize him, he begins to doubt his own identity. ‘I’m not myself – I’m somebody else,’ he complains; ‘I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!’ His dilemma is a gently comic response to traumatic change; and it offers a genial reflection in miniature of the sudden, disconcerting process of alteration – and possible reactions to it – experienced by the nation as a whole. A similar transposi- tion of American history into American legend occurs in ‘Sleepy Hollow’. This story of how the superstitious hero, Ichabod Crane, was bested by the headless horseman of Brom Bones, an extrovert Dutchman and Crane’s rival in love, allows Irving to parody several forms of narrative, among them tall tales, ghost stories and the epic. But it also permits him, once again, to reflect on change and to present a vanishing America, which is the setting for this story, as an endangered pastoral ideal. ‘It is in such little retired Dutch valleys,’ we are told, as the one where American types like Crane and Bones live, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweep by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream; where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbour, undisturbed by the passing current. The tendency towards a more lyrical, romantic strain suggested by Irving’s evocation of the sleepy hollow where Ichabod Crane lived became a characteristic of the later work. His next collection, Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists (1822), was well received, but it mostly consists of sentimental portraits of the England of landed gentry. Tales of a Traveller (1824) met with a poor reception; and, dis- couraged, Irving turned increasingly towards historical subjects. His History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) were both based on careful historical research; so was Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831). What was described as a ‘Spanish Sketch Book’, The Alhambra, recounting Spanish legends, appeared in 1832. Irving then returned from Europe to America, where he was enthusiastically welcomed, and began travelling in the far West in search of picturesque literary backgrounds. The results of these Western travels were A Tour of the Prairie, one of three volumes in The Crayon Miscellany (1835), andAstoria (1836), an account of the fur-trading empire of John Jacob Astor. Both books evoke the romance of the West but none of its rigours; and the later book idealizes the business tycoon Astor, at whose suggestion it was written. Other books followed: among them, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A. (1837), Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of Irving’s literary masters, A Book of the Hudson (1849) and a monumental Life of Washington (1855–9) in five volumes. Irving’s literary career was erratic, and he never recovered the wit and fluency of his early style; he also tended, especially in his later work, to bathe the European past in an aura of romance. Nevertheless, in his best work, he was a creator of significant American myths: narratives that gave dramatic substance and shape to the radical changes of the time, and the nervous- ness and nostalgia those changes often engendered. Perhaps he was so effective in fashioning those myths in particular because the nervousness about the new America, and nostalgia for the old – and, beyond that, for Europe – were some- thing that he himself felt intensely. He was writing himself, and the feelings he typified, into legend.

Myths of an emerging nation One of the first writers to take advantage of the greater opportunities for
publica- tion that were opening up, in the process becoming one of the first American writers to achieve
international fame, was Washington Irving (1783–1859). Irving was born into a prosperous merchant
family in New York City, the youngest of eleven children. He studied law and contributed to two
newspapers edited by one of his brothers, the Morning Chronicle and The Corrector. For the Chronicle
he wrote ‘The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.’, a series of youthful satires on New York society.
Published in 1802–3, they won him instant recognition. To restore his failing health, he then made the
first of many trips to Europe; later, in fact, he was to live for protracted periods in England, to travel in
France and Germany extensively, and to have spells of government service in Spain. But in 1806 he
returned to New York City. There, a year later, he began to publish Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams
and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff Esq., and Others (1807–8), a series of satirical miscellanies
concerned with New York society that ran to twenty numbers. The leading essays were written by Irving,
his brothers and James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860), all members of a group known as the ‘Nine
Worthies’ or ‘Lads of Kilkenny’ of ‘Cockloft Hall’. Federalist in politics, conservative in social principles
and comic in tone, they included one piece by Irving, ‘Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient
City of Gotham’, that supplied New York City with its enduring nickname of Gotham. Characteristically,
Irving had borrowed here from a European source: he transferred both the name and a reputation for
folly from the original Gotham village in Nottinghamshire, England. Irving was now famous as an author,
wit and man of society, and to consolidate his reputation he published A History of New York from the
Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) under the pen name of Diedrich Knicker-
bocker. Often regarded as the first important work of comic literature written by an American, it initiated
the term ‘Knickerbocker School’ for authors like Irving himself, Paulding, Fitz-Greene Hallek
(1790–1867) and Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), who wrote about ‘little old New York’ in the years
before the Civil War. Ostensibly concerned with the Dutch occupation, the book in fact burlesques
contemporary historical narratives, satirizes pedantry and literary classics, and offers a comic critique of
Jeffersonian democracy. Jefferson himself is satirized as Governor Kieft under whom greedy Yankees
attempt ‘to get possession of the city of Man- hattoes’. And there is an ironic apologia for white
dispossession and destruction of Native Americans. The original inhabitants of America, Knickerbocker
assures the reader, were ‘mere cannibals, detestable monsters, and many of them giants’; ‘animals’
rather than humans, they ‘deserved to be exterminated’. ‘The host of zealous and enlightened fathers’,
in any event, brought many blessings with them for ‘these infidel savages’, such as ‘gin, rum, brandy,
and the smallpox’. They also brought them ‘the light of religion’ and then ‘hurried them out of the world,
to enjoy its reward!’ Irving’s style here, and in his earlier essays, is derived from the gently satirical
fluencies of English writers like Oliver Goldsmith and Joseph Addison. Five years after the publication of
his History he went to England to work in the family business there. He remained in Europe for
seventeen years. He became friends with Sir Walter Scott, visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in 1820
pub- lished The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of essays and sketches that was
enormously successful in both England and the United States. The Sketch Book contains two small
masterpieces that initiated the great tradition of the American short story, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Four other sketches are also set in America, but most of the other pieces are
descriptive and thoughtful essays on England, where Irving was still living. Both ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and
‘Sleepy Hollow’ have origins in German folklore. Irving admits as much in a ‘Note’ to the first tale where
the reader is told that ‘the foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr Knickerbocker
by a little German superstition’. Both also owe a debt, in terms of stylistic influence, to Sir Walter Scott.
Nevertheless, both exploit their specifically American settings and create American myths: they explore
the social and cultural transformations occurring in America at the time in terms that are at once gently
whimsical and perfectly serious. In ‘Rip Van Winkle’, the lazy, hen-pecked hero of the story ventures into
the Catskill Mountains of New York State to discover there some little men in Dutch costume bowling at
ninepins. Taking many draughts of some strange beverage they have brewed, he falls into a deep sleep.
When he returns to his village, after waking up, he eventually realizes that twenty years have passed,
the Revolution has been and gone, and that, ‘instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third,
he was now a free citizen of the United States’. The news naturally takes a long time to sink in; and, at
first, when he is surrounded in his homeplace by people whom he does not recognize and who do not
recognize him, he begins to doubt his own identity. ‘I’m not myself – I’m somebody else,’ he complains;
‘I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!’ His dilemma is a gently comic response to
traumatic change; and it offers a genial reflection in miniature of the sudden, disconcerting process of
alteration – and possible reactions to it – experienced by the nation as a whole. A similar transposi- tion
of American history into American legend occurs in ‘Sleepy Hollow’. This story of how the superstitious
hero, Ichabod Crane, was bested by the headless horseman of Brom Bones, an extrovert Dutchman and
Crane’s rival in love, allows Irving to parody several forms of narrative, among them tall tales, ghost
stories and the epic. But it also permits him, once again, to reflect on change and to present a vanishing
America, which is the setting for this story, as an endangered pastoral ideal. ‘It is in such little retired
Dutch valleys,’ we are told, as the one where American types like Crane and Bones live, that population,
manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is
making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweep by them unobserved. They
are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream; where we may see the straw and
bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbour, undisturbed by the passing
current. The tendency towards a more lyrical, romantic strain suggested by Irving’s evocation of the
sleepy hollow where Ichabod Crane lived became a characteristic of the later work. His next collection,
Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists (1822), was well received, but it mostly consists of sentimental
portraits of the England of landed gentry. Tales of a Traveller (1824) met with a poor reception; and, dis-
couraged, Irving turned increasingly towards historical subjects. His History of the Life and Voyages of
Christopher Columbus (1828) and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) were both based on
careful historical research; so was Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831).
What was described as a ‘Spanish Sketch Book’, The Alhambra, recounting Spanish legends, appeared
in 1832. Irving then returned from Europe to America, where he was enthusiastically welcomed, and
began travelling in the far West in search of picturesque literary backgrounds. The results of these
Western travels were A Tour of the Prairie, one of three volumes in The Crayon Miscellany (1835), andAstoria (1836), an account of the fur-trading empire of John Jacob Astor. Both books evoke the romance
of the West but none of its rigours; and the later book idealizes the business tycoon Astor, at whose
suggestion it was written. Other books followed: among them, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville
U.S.A. (1837), Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of Irving’s literary masters, A Book of the
Hudson (1849) and a monumental Life of Washington (1855–9) in five volumes. Irving’s literary career
was erratic, and he never recovered the wit and fluency of his early style; he also tended, especially in
his later work, to bathe the European past in an aura of romance. Nevertheless, in his best work, he was
a creator of significant American myths: narratives that gave dramatic substance and shape to the
radical changes of the time, and the nervous- ness and nostalgia those changes often engendered.
Perhaps he was so effective in fashioning those myths in particular because the nervousness about the
new America, and nostalgia for the old – and, beyond that, for Europe – were some- thing that he
himself felt intensely. He was writing himself, and the feelings he typified, into legend.