Washington Irving: History, Tales, and Sketches,
Anant, Victor
is that the squalor which was the reality of Wilde's last days is transfigured into art. We see Wilde convert his degradation into a symbol of the theological Fall. He also views himself as a...
...For anyor~e busier than, say, a death row inmate I do not recommend it...
...Irving's Mahomet was meant to be a general reader, he says...
...and the journey is being expedited every step of the way by smiling young people freshly turned out in colorful McDonald's livery...
...Nonetheless he was not unanimously honored in his lifetime...
...Irving, a spoilt child, hated school and refused to go to college...
...Yet he remains unloved and generally unlovable...
...Wilson has scooped the literary awards...
...but my guess is that to the very end this notable entrepreneur was without a clue as to the nature of the assault upon him...
...His early notebooks are full of moody passages, comic or picaresque folk tales, and the sudden, deadly, throwaway insight...
...When he tries he usually falls for the crackpot...
...I became extremely curious about the world which had suddenly been revealed to me, for it seemed to be formed upon principles quite different from those I had imagined...
...Emerson deplored its shallow Dutch wit, and Walt Whitman called it feeble burlesque...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984...
...It was this least known of his works, however, which Gandhi (who probably read not more than a dozen books in his life) was attracted by during his early days of political organization in South Africa...
...The family business, it must be remembered, was in wine, sugar, hardware and in auctioneering...
...The laughing philosopher who had earlier satirized even Thomas Jefferson for "impaling butterflies and pickling tadpoles" had New York in uproar...
...He completed it after the death of Matilda, daughter of a New York attorney, Josiah Hoffman, whom he had hoped to marry...
...damn them...
...We do, however, generally loathe squalor...
...The crux of the novel is Giles's coming to terms with his own bitterness...
...Of course today in the halcyon days of the Reagan Renaissance these complaints stand exposed for the sour fanaticisms t h a t they are, and the aforementioned senator has been sentenced to three years in the hoosegow for unrelated low deeds...
...If he fancies himself progressive he merely opens his pocketbook to the ritualistic liberal...
...his style was sweetened and polished...
...ing his nag Rosinante to set off on mythic crusades, Irving ruffled the feathers of contemporary prophets and upset their followers without mocking their faiths...
...Later, he kept revising to remove the bee-stings and coarseness--for a had to offer then was the idea that life " very worldly, and pragmatic, reason, was a package deal...
...Salmagundi was closed a year later, after twenty issues...
...The answer is to be found in politics...
...Irving lived and wrote in concentric circles...
...From the age of sixteen, he says, he wandered around the nooks and crannies of little New York...
...Back in the cozy nest of New York he and brother Peter launched Salmagundi...
...For those who still do not, it is a devilishly spicy appetizer of chopped red meat, herring pickled, olives, onion, vinegar, and red pepper...
...And as he tasted the adventures of the road, he also consumed vast quantities of travel writing...
...Then, his sensual appetites sated, he says he yearned for "the tranquil domestic life...
...had started lampooning pretensions of the New World in New York's Morning Chronicle, a paper edited by Irving's brothSr Peter...
...We do not have a proper hatred of illusion...
...He refused to play god: He played "the holy fool...
...his wickedness never malicious...
...Why can we not deal as rigorously with narcotics as we did with cyclamates and such other allegedly insalubrious items...
...extravagant and massively irreverent, Irving knew what he had done...
...Irving However, it was Irving's A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, published in 1809, which really carved out a place both for him and American literature in the market that mattered: the Old World...
...Parallels, such as they are, are parodic...
...He grew up learning to play the flute at a time when the American Revolution had drawn to a close: George Washington had entered New York to the blare of trumpets and drums, brass and plumery...
...he, too, was deeply aware that it is our humanity, our mortality, that consecrates our faith...
...But the reader knows there will be another turn of the screw, for dotard Louise has inserted silently into Giles's Tretis howlers all of her own...
...There were grumbles, always from those ideological opportunists who claim to speak for the consumer and the common man even as they advance a dozen other of their left-wing panaceas...
...He devotes his life to improving and sellisg the widget...
...We see Wilde erecting about himself verbal paradoxes and conundrums through which he intends to be redeemed...
...The American business prodigy is often a sad case...
...Edited with meticulous notes by James W. Tuttleton, this commemorative edition of Irving's Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., Salmagundi, A History of New York, ~ ' ~" Sketch Book resurrects Irving ces him in perspective, as a truty orlgi ' American pioneer...
...had been pirated from pamphlets in New York and had appeared in English periodicals...
...Giles's cantankerousness is not that of unregarded age in corners thrown but the grumpiness of Timon of Athens...
...The blind scholar acknowledges he has been like a man who "casteth forth his ice like morsels: who is able to abide his frost...
...He also views himself as a martyr, a stumbled messiah...
...Swift, Cer- Wars...
...The umbilical cord is severed...
...With prodding from Scott, the leading publishing house of John Murray then issued it in two lush volumes, and edition after edition raked a profit of more than s in one year...
...Wilde deflected the world's blows with epigrams...
...He survived wild escapades, acquired a smattering of French, Italian, and also Spanish, the only language he seriously studied...
...I knew every spot where a murder or a robbery had been committed or a ghost seen...
...Yet his range is very narrow...
...Even in Paris his McDonald's hamburgers are on duty to serve hurried gastronomes, who gobble them up as gratefully as do the hamburger lovers of Bull Snort, Georgia or historic Des Plaines, Illinois, where the first of his McDonald's hamburger production lines was established in 1955...
...He is always hard working and resourceful...
...CHEF KROC Ray Kroc is gone...
...And, in his awakening, Irving celebrates the return of the practical man...
...A dirty old man named Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent...
...Chef Kroc entitled his autobiography Grinding It Out...
...Even academics treated his mammoth work, which went into forty editions, with a bemused spooky disdain...
...The Sketch Book still offers refreshing discoveries...
...He was rising from his own ashes like an exquisite phoenix...
...b u t when, like Salmagundi, it turns out to be a bramble, and pricks and scratches everything within its reach, we naturally ask, why it encumbereth the ground...
...The indian, says Irving, "is formed for the wilderness as the Arab is for the desert...
...Knickerbocker mixed legend with local color...
...The more beleaguered he was, the wittier he became...
...With rather heavy symbolic aptness, Wilson has Tibba read King Lear...
...Dowdy, plump, and plain, she wins the scorn of Giles's daughter, Tibba, whose life has been lived through the heroes and heroines of books...
...Back in London, making literary pilgrimages and going up to Scotland to meet Sir Walter Scott, in 1818, this dandy came to the rescue of the Irvings...
...Rip Van Winkle is the American male seen from abroad, an overgrown child, jolly, comic, likable, essentially immature, through the tragedy of a life slept away, ignorant of wife and the adult world...
...Perhaps God giggles at prophets, Washington Irving seems to say, because their followers will always...
...Two of the four American themes are from German folklore, and two indulge in sepulchral ancestor worship of the Mana-hatta...
...It was completed in 1849, before he devoted himself solely to the five-volume Life o f Washington, finished in 1859...
...He hid himself in words for in sentences his personality could unftirl as in a sanctuary...
...being fool'd, by fool'ry thrive...
...For 200 years what seems to have clung to his memory is the smell of success...
...The fam'ily had prospered through two decades of turmoil, and had been a safety net of silken ropes...
...He died eight months afterwards, on November 28...
...But he is mortally ill...
...Occasionally he is farseeing, and more often than not he is decent...
...This affected carapace hardened into a firm characteristic when he failed to win a Fellowship at Cambridge...
...As a student he was arch and bitter...
...Curiouser and curiouser, it was a family of Muslim Cutchi Memons who gave Gandhi employment in South Africa after he had qualified for the bar in England but could find no work on his return to india...
...At this very moment hundreds of thousands of his toothsome brown patties are hygienically en route from the griddle to the open mouths of expectant customers...
...So many of our public values are based on it...
...Sleepy Hollow Restorations, Inc., and the Tarrytown Hilton hosted a Bicentennial conference on "Washington Irving, Sunnyside and American Romanticism," including " t h e romantic g a r d e n , " " t h e decorated interior," "romantic villas and cottages"--all heralded by a warning poster that the Headless Horseman Rides Again...
...Tibba loses the humility and wisdom of Cordelia to be wooed by the bounder Peverill...
...he hammered the gavel and sold...
...Coleridge stayed up all night to finish it...
...Philippics were written about Chef Kroc in the left-wing gazettes, and two of the most singleminded critics even ambushed him with a book, Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story o f McDonaM's...
...Dickens wore his copy threadbare...
...In 1820, the Reverend Sydney Smith was sneering, "Who the wide world over reads an American book...
...Giles Fox, the hero in Wilson's novel, a librarian and medieval philologist, propagates, on the contrary, an unhealthy sourness...
...Gandhi had also read another Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle, on the "Hero as Prophet...
...And a startlingly revelatory account of both the author and the Art of Bookmaking: Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a good progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them--and from whom they have stolen...
...Recognizing the blindness motifs, we are informed "there was surely much of Giles in Lear...
...Or so it seemed to this literary pilgrim returning, on a windy and appropriately spooky November 28 morning, to the village which bears his name, after having performed a solitary ritual of ancestorworship at his grave tn the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in neighboring Tarrytown...
...He wrote it for the ages...
...cool, blushes...
...He was the Henry Ford of the hamburger and he saw to it that his meticulously chosen franchise -operators were all drilled in their art at his "Hamburger University" in Elk Grove, Illinois where diligence was rewarded with a "Bachelor of Hamburgerology" degree and " a minor in french fries...
...Americans are blessed to have been given, in the infancy of their nationhood, a writer with a romantic and comic piety...
...But the London Atheneum called this comic epic "an honest and manly attempt to found an American literature...
...All around the world discriminating individuals of reasonable disposition extol it...
...If we are far from considering Mahomet the gross and impious imposter that some have represented him, so also are we indisposed to give him credit for vast forecast, and for that deeply concerted scheme of universal conquest which has been ascribed him . . . . Had he, indeed, conceived from the very outset the idea of binding up the scattered and conflicting tribes of Arabia into one nation by a brotherhood o f faith, for the purpose of carrying out a scheme of external conquest, he would have been one of the first military projectors...
...Everyone should know what a Salmagundi is, the first issue said...
...By nineteen, he had already cultivated his "sense of the ridiculous...
...Few writers have successfully stretched a small talent farther than Washington Irving," a 65-cent pamphlet from the 1970s by a professor of English at Columbia (the university which bestowed on him its first Honorary Master of Arts) states in its opening sentence...
...Gandhi, for all his charismatic qualities, remained (at least as l knew him in our early Congress apprenticeship in India) " a chuckling saint...
...Wise Virgin cannot hope to compete with this, yet A.N...
...He remained a bachelor...
...He, too, believed in only one god...
...As the century turns it is not moral law which hounds him but diseases within his own body...
...America has never produced great literature--her products have been scrub oaks, at best...
...It made an unprecedented profit, about three thousand dollars, and went into a secTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 43 decided to publish The Sketch Book at his own risk...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 7) tain route to illusion and squalor...
...He highlighted the disguise with real costumes for "dress is the most complete repr~entation of modern civilization...
...The package never burst at the seams...
...fin hoc est hoax, cum quiz et jokesez, et smokem, toastem, roastem folkesez, fee, faw, fum...
...Bits of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent...
...He vigilantly patrolled what became a string of 7,500 outlets, claiming annual sales of over eight billion dollars and employing well over 130,000 people by the early 1980s...
...He collapses into a delirious slumber ahd his last words are recorded by a friend: " I knew I should create a great sensat i o n . . . " Wilde hid himself in words...
...He saw Sarah Siddons and carefully studied the calculated rudeness of The Spectator...
...He used language as Pope used a couplet: a machine to hide in which was simultaneously a weapon to wield...
...Where others, like the poet Philip Freneau, the moralist Emerson, the devoutly tormented Nathaniel Hawthorne, the naturalist philosopher Thoreau, all took Some kind of passionate stand or other, Irving accepted a commission from the self-made millionaire furrier John Jacob Astor, moved to an old Dutch farmhouse "as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat" in a bend on the Hudson River, and went on writing biographies, travelogues, and constantly revising, devulgarizing, in edition after edition, his biting early work...
...To the native American there must have been something subversively alien in the work of a humorist who anticipates Chaplin, Nathanael West, Damon Runyon, and others who have not plodded the beaten paths of country humorists...
...Yet Chef Kroc was the most innovative of all fast food tycoons, and he demanded quality at reasonable prices...
...lndeed, until the end of his bicentenary year, the New World's first man of letters was remembered more for his literary "real estate...
...If you tell him that Aristotle or the Founding Fathers had a sounder grasp on matters he impatiently turns away and builds a million dollar institute to refine and popularize his personal monomania...
...Like Kafka'his early legal education, along with bronchial attacks, perhaps shaped the playful melancholy in all his writings, as if he is always arguing a flawed case...
...ond edition in 1812, a third in 1819...
...May they Rest in Peace...
...There is nothing of the kind...
...Chef Kroc saw to this...
...The disintegration of his marriages was merely par for the course...
...From one end of town to another," a rival journalist from New England wrote, "all is nonsense and Salmagund...
...In light of our experience, it was as though Marx were to appear on television live from the Gulag sanguinely prophesying the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...In A History of New York, Irving spared no one, as the earlier version now available again in the Library of America series shows...
...He excited the curiosity of women, from novices in a convent to barmaids in inns to the formidably literate Baroness de Stall...
...Oswald in King Lear is sneered at because "a tailor made thee" and ParoUes in Ali's Well that Ends Well is dismissed for "the soul of this man is his clothes...
...Food fanatics denounced the Big Mac in terms more vituperative than they could ever summon against narcotics, and a United States Senator even linked him to the perfidies of the Watergate era...
...Louise Agar, the recruited helper, had written a failed doctorate "on a subject of staggeringly peripheral importance...
...In artsy craftsy communitieshis golden arches were deemed as abhorrent as nuclear power plants, though the white walls, the plate glass, and the pipe railings of Richard Meier raise few mutters...
...His controversial golden arches, however, endure from sea to shining sea and in nearly a dozen foreign countries...
...However, his most recent disaster is the affliction of blindness, and so he is forced to hire an assistant who will transcribe his notes and take down his ideas...
...His sources were always secondary...
...But Wilde's dressing up--both linguistic and sartorial--reflected the brilliance of his Vital intellect...
...Soon his reputation as a scandalous wit had reached Philadelphia where he was hailed as the voice of young America pricking the jingoism of fashionable playwrights and their brave American sailors in love and war...
...WASHINGTON IRVING: HISTORY, TALES, AND SKETCHES Edited by James W. Tuttleton/Library of America Series, distributed by Viking Press/S27.50 Victor Anant J u s t as it appears as if posterity is counterparodying a writer who parodied his times and as if observances for the bicentenary of his birth last April 3 had completely petered out with the dismantling of the exhibits in the New York Public Library third floor hallway, the sanguine spirit of the "New World's first man of letters" is reincarnated again...
...Because he worked close to the grain he raised the hackles of republicans, and while his precocious wit and dandyism won the ladies, his family decided to pack him off on a long discovery of Europe on the grounds of his weak health...
...And with a magical touch of necromancy the Library of America Series, honoring America's foremost writers, now pays tribute in a handsome volume to four works of Washington Irving in their original, outspoken, robust versions...
...Sir Walter Scott said his sides were sore with laughter...
...The phrase italicized by Irving is the only one thus highlighted in this work of a historian as a Haft, or pilgrim...
...She is also personally unprepossessing...
...with all its ribbons namely, that the family business faced and trimmings everything in the New bankruptcy because of the economic World represented a multiple choice, instability created by the Napoleonic Myth, fable, and legend...
...his feel of the pulse, his timing, impeccable...
...The gamble paid...
...Wilson gives him the intriguing realization that the failures in his life stem from a subconscious self-destruct mechanism which "wanted things to go wrong from the first...
...In his Autobiography, Gandhi says that Irving's Mahomet raised "Muhammed in my estimation...
...and Parolles live Safest in shame...
...The medieval Tretis begins to speak for the first time as literature and not as a bundle of grammatical idiosyncrasies...
...Troubled Americans will have to find a less facile route to ruin, and rogues like the doddering Timothy Leafy will no longer be appearing on national television as he did on the "Today Show" some months ago, laboriously pontificating about his narcoticized utopia...
...The business prodigy usually confuses mastery of the what for mastery of the why...
...If he fancies himself a patriot he goes off on his own, writing doggerel to free enterprise or confecting some simple-minded theory for explaining the pathway to the American Dream...
...These hamburgers have no soybean additives, nor oatmeal, nor any of the other fillers that might tempt less scrupulous hamburger tycoons...
...Like Don Quixote mountVictor Anant has written for the London Spectator and other publications...
...American fast food is one of the marvels of our culture...
...Rust, sword...
...On re-reading the unexpurgated versions it is remarkable how Irving sensed that what America vantes, Homer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Aesop, the King James Bible, Tom Paine...
...his style playfully imitative of the old world...
...Usually he has no sense of the larger forces shaping his life and little inclination to affect them...
...I t might yet, in retrospect, be one of Irving's later biographies, Mahomet and his Successors, a two-volume narrative of "the life and founder of the Islam faith," which will remain his most intriguing work...
...If ever one of the elite interest groups of the Republic makes the elimination of drugs an issue on its national agenda, drugs and all ambivalent references to them will be gone...
...Irving's facts were adulterated...
...Perhaps deliberately, Washington Irving pioneered an American concept: the package deal...
...Working solo or in alliance with scientists he has done more to improve American life than the politician, the professor, or practically any other species of working American...
...America is indeed independent," the Atheneum said...
...Decorousness betrays the sham within...
...In London he was seduced by the theater...
...I personally have observed sophisticated British journalists dining in the most venerable of London's gentlemen's clubs and reminiscing wistfully about esurient encounters with Kroc's masterpieces, with Colonel Sanders' poulets, and with other such incomparable viands...
...We should, then, encourage every native sapling...
...One wonders, what did this visionary make of the hostility that fizzled and popped against him...
...Certainly, it is his most polemical work, unusual for a writer given l o elegant ambiguities, and totally devoid of humor...
...He even affects a disinterested inquisitiveness about his own fate...
...He died January 14...
...The idea is an old one...
...This youngest son of a dour Scottish Presbyterian commercial family had been whimsically named after the great hero...
...He seems to have been haunted for over a quarter of a century by "the little cloud which rose out of the deserts of Arabia...
...he represented the abiding virtues of "limitations...
...but the idea of extended conquest seems to have been an afterthought...
...his instincts reverential...
...There's place and means for every man alive...
...Ackroyd's Wilde is as fluent as the genuine article and in addition achieves wisdom from his humiliations...
...Wise Virgin finds Giles middle-aged and lonely, tinkering with a medieval religious tract called the Tretis of Loue I-feuenliche which he is meant to be editing...
...Hints come that Giles might even be serene, like Milton who On His Blindness understands he will at least no longer have to regard "the world's vain mask...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
