Washington Calling
Hart, Jeffrey
Washington Calling A good introduction to a great American writer. by Jeffrey Hart Four writers, roughly contemporary, can be regarded as founders of an American literature distinctive from...
...And Natty, what sort of a white man is he...
...Of these four early American authors, Cooper and Poe evoked responses signaling their importance...
...That came with the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass, Emerson welcoming the American poet he had called for in his essay “The Poet” (1844...
...His History of New York, a combination of history and light satire written by “Diedrich (“died rich”) Knickerbocker,” also his multiple volumes of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon that outsold Lord Byron with John Murray Ltd., the publisher Irving shared with Byron in England...
...He is a killer, a slayer...
...by Jeffrey Hart Four writers, roughly contemporary, can be regarded as founders of an American literature distinctive from political writing: Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Edgar Allan Poe (18091849), and Washington Irving (1783-1859...
...Burstein, however, has valuably provided us Washington Irving in his time...
...The genteel style had social implications: It was the style of a gentleman, a new social construct that provided a meeting space between aristocrat and wealthy commoner...
...It remained for American writing to make its own Declaration of Independence...
...He died in 1859, the year before Lincoln was elected...
...his biography of Columbus...
...This is the new great thing...
...They are the abiding thing...
...President John Tyler sent him as envoy to Madrid, and he knew Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce...
...the five-volume biography of George Washington that he wrote late in life...
...As Villon asked, “Mais o? sont les neiges d’antan...
...But Andrew Burstein finds that a survey of college-educated men and women born after the 1960s shows that only one-third could identify Rip Van Winkle, and these associated him with a television cartoon...
...He is transported back in time to the days of the old Dutch colonists, finds they resemble figures in an old Flemish painting while bowling on a village green...
...In person, Dickens disappointed Irving, who found him less than genteel...
...Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer...
...At age six, accompanying a family servant to a New York shop, the small boy met the 6’3” George Washington, after whom he had been named...
...Why, he is a man with a gun...
...Self-effacing, self-forgetting, he is a killer...
...St?phane Mallarm...
...I myself think the story “Rip Van Winkle” deserves to live...
...What has happened to all of that...
...He attended the treason trial of Aaron Burr (who was acquitted), and afterwards had an audience with President Thomas Jefferson...
...In fact, Irving remained a practitioner of the genteel style in his writing, popularized in England by Addison and Steele in their Spectator essays (1711-12...
...D.H...
...Lawrence, for example, reads Fenimore Cooper in quasi-mythic terms: Beyond all this heart-beating stand the figures of Natty and Chingachook: two childless, womanless men, of opposite races...
...All the other loves seem frivolous...
...President James Madison and his wife Dolly were hospitable, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren treated him as a confidant...
...I had thought of this story, of all that Irving wrote, and also, possibly, Ichabod Crane and the “headless” horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow...
...Yes, but he had hold of something profound...
...Wearying, he lies down to sleep...
...Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, is the author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times...
...Poe figures prominently in The Shock of Recognition as a critic, poet, and writer of fiction: James Russell Lowell, commenting in 1845, Walt Whitman in 1880...
...Famous in England, France, and Spain, he knew Sir Walter Scott and other prominent writers, and when Charles Dickens visited America, Washington Irving was one of the men he wanted to meet...
...Does that make you think of Hemingway and his guns...
...So, in Wilson’s anthology, both Cooper and Poe make the cut...
...Indeed, I think it has lived...
...A good way to approach that question would be to consult Edmund Wilson’s very useful Shock of Recognition (1943), in which well-known authors respond to the writing of others, as, for example, Emerson on Whitman or Henry James on Hawthorne...
...In The Shock of Recognition, Mark Twain demonstrates that in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895) Cooper couldn’t write...
...Rip Van Winkle with his dog Wolf goes hunting in the woods above the lordly Hudson River...
...But Cooper, to matter, must be seen as a myth-maker...
...Each of them is alone, and final in his race...
...celebrated him in a sonnet, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe...
...The era when anyone could take seriously something written under the name “Geoffrey Crayon” was long gone...
...I read it in grade school...
...And they stand side by side, stark, abstract, beyond emotion, yet eternally together...
...How have they fared in literary estimation...
...Van Winkle awakes and finds that he has slept for 20 years, and missed the American Revolution: “Even to this day they [the current Dutch inhabitants of the village] never hear a thunder storm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of nine pins...
...What remains of interest about Washington Irving, and justifies Burstein’s very competent biography, is Washington Irving as a man in his own time, beginning with the period after the Revolution and extending into the period of growing division...
...But where is Charles Brockden Brown, the preeminent American novelist before Cooper, and author of such gothic novels as Ormond and Wieland ? Where is Washington Irving, with his enormous literary production...
...his Spanish Tales of Alhambra, his mountainous productivity as a man of letters...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 24
