The Neglected Case for Washington Irving’s Storytelling Imagination

‘A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer’By Phillip LopatePrinceton University Press, 288 pagesBest known for his classic American short stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and recognized as the first professional American writer, Washington Irving, as Phillip Lopate acknowledges, has become a sort of relic, relegated at best to historic status and the niche of a minor writer, overtaken by the next generation dominated by Edgar Allan Poe and the writers whom critic F. O. Matthiessen called part of the American Renaissance.Mr. Lopate does not claim to be rehabilitating Irving so much as writing a “belletristic biography” that identifies the work that remains readable and relevant, which in this case includes Irving’s biographies of Columbus and Oliver Goldsmith, and the life of George Washington in its abridged version. Irving, in Mr. Lopate’s book, wrote as he lived in a humane and sometimes satirical, sometimes sober and graceful style.Irving began with the sketch format that exerted a powerful influence on writers like Charles Dickens, treating national character in an amusing and affectionate manner, which Irving outgrew as he turned to serious subjects, including a life of Muhammad, and the impact of European exploration on America. While Mr. Lopate faults Irving for taking a too tolerant view of Columbus’s dealings with America’s indigenous peoples, the devastating impact of European settlement of the so-called New World is evident in the Columbus biography.Much of Irving’s biographical work ought still to be read, Mr. Lopate contends. He has hit on a problem that he could have explored a little more deeply: The tendency to discard biography as having a short shelf life as it is seemingly superseded by later biographies of the same subject. In fact, as Mr. Lopate’s careful examination shows, both in terms of style and command of the most important facts and issues, Irving, a master stylist, remains significant. If Mr. Lopate had juxtaposed certain passages in Irving with the work of contemporary biographers, Irving might well be of surpassing interest.Another superb feature of Mr. Lopate’s approach is his succinct perceptions of other Irving biographers, showing how what is known about Irving is the result of incremental cumulative work over generations. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, our knowledge of Irving may seem superior to what earlier writers have said about him precisely because those earlier writers are that which we know.As to the Irving who lived outside his books, Mr. Lopate has a sensitive and sometimes melancholy and affecting story to tell. Irving fell in love with a young woman who died at the age of eighteen. A lifelong bachelor he never seems to have been able to recover from his loss, but instead devoted himself to his family and friends in many touching ways.Irving lived for several years abroad writing about the Spain he deeply cherished, learning several European languages, and acquitting himself admirably as a diplomat in a time when it was not that unusual for a writer of his renown to be selected for such service by his government. Mr. Lopate suggests there may still be buried in the records of the State Department dispatches from Irving that would show yet another important aspect of his writingAt several vital moments, Mr. Lopate recurs to his own life as a writer, explaining Irving’s motivation to compose not only great literature but also hack work that men of letters, including Mr. Lopate, have sometimes had to take up. In Irving’s case, he was in need of funds to support himself and an extended family. At the same time, he enjoyed, Mr. Lopate suggests, the pleasure of bookmaking even when it was for hire.Irving’s biography, in Mr. Lopate’s treatment, embodies a quiet heroism, a canny understanding of the literary marketplace, and an insatiable desire to measure his own comfortable upbringing in New York against the history of other lands and cultures. At the end of his life, in failing health, he soldiered on, completing the fifth and last volume of his Washington biography virtually on his death bed. At the time, his spirited narrative was a tribute both to Washington and to the cause of biography, neither of which had fared very well in the earlier standard but dull tome produced by the likes of John Marshall.Mr. Rollyson’s “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History” will be published on Presidents’ Day 2027.

The Neglected Case for Washington Irving’s Storytelling Imagination

The Neglected Case for Washington Irving’s Storytelling Imagination

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