Reply #61: I Loved This! On a Great, Now-Generally-Forgotten Author

[Hidden Stillness]

This program was on a few weeks ago, and was so fab that I waited for it to come back again, and here it is. I am going to buy this book; this was great.

Washington Irving was probably the first great, famous American author, as famous a wit and philosopher as Ben Franklin at one time, at a time when America was still almost all wilderness, and there was considered to be no real culture here at all (I still remember the title of an essay I read years ago, from the early 1800s--by Charles Lamb?--called "Who Reads an American Book?" meant seriously). Irving is the author of a story I still love to read, because the descriptions of the countryside and farming, birds, the lake, food, the haunted night, the small town, are so fabulous, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." This program was about re-intoducing people to the great, now-forgotten writer, and a possble explanation of why Irving is no longer among the famous early American greats. As someone who loves the 19th century, (pre-corporate) style of writing--Walt Whitman and Emerson are two favorites--Washington Irving's strangely simple-yet-densely-imaginative style, is the ideal to me.

The author referred several times to the hallmarks of Irving's writing style, and the descriptions were all good: imaginative, dream-world, political satire, whimsy, "comic exaggeration combined with a sentimental picture of halcyon days," an attacker and puncturer of pretenses and arrogance, a lover of history, yet with a "timeline...(that) was mostly abstract and dreamlike," like many popular cultural historians. Irving's whole style was of nostalgia, preservation of culture, the loss of time, the haunting by the departed of places, and an opinion that "memory is both fragile and powerful, and that we can lose time without losing the past," that it is a delusion that we can ever really lose the past, but that we can commune with it anytime, by thinking and reading, and dreaming. The complete descriptions of Irving, of place and work and countryside, keep the past vividly alive as an almost lived thing for readers. The story of Ichabod Crane and "Sleepy Hollow" is a brilliant example of it. The premise of "Rip Van Winkle," that of somebody who goes to sleep before the American Revolution, sleeps 20 years, and wakes up after it has happened, unaware of it, is another.

Washington Irving was a very shy person, life long, who actually studied the law for a while, and really took up writing by being bored at work as a law clerk. Because most of Irving's stories involve non-social males, shyness and social ineptness, a overactive, haunted dream-life, sympathy for those who are misunderstood and abandoned (as Irving's acqauntance Aaron Burr, left to die in jail), the author addressed the question as to whether Irving was actually gay, and not a life-long bachelor because of losing the "one true love" early on, (once the accepted explanation). There is not enough evidence for that or anything else, such as general social phobias, etc., and so it was referred to but not much further, as there is not enough proof going any which way. Irving's political opinions are also hard to pin down, sometimes very left-wing (a friendship with Martin Van Buren, etc.), sometimes conservative, especially as regards a total lack, until the very end, of any references against slavery, and a gradual change of opinion going against Indians, a loss of earlier sympathy, as Irving became more enthralled with the "hardy males" of the Westward expansion, wagon trains, etc. Irving satirized Puritans and their claim of being "original" Amercians, yet also came to dislike New York City because it was "too modern," eventually moving to Tarrytown, to be near a nephew, and to own a house for the first time, over the age of 50. The move from the big city also suited Irving's very shy personality and style of life.

Washington Irving's writing style, described as a descendant of Dutch thinking and writing, built up a huge cultural/nostalgic love for holidays, especially Christmas and Halloween, and a storybook "haunted, magical" countryside, with vivid descriptions, that were an escape from the modern, increasingly built-up industrial world. "If the Garden of Eden were now on Earth, they would not hesitate to run a railroad through it"--mystical, yet observational, optimistic yet awkward and often defeated, these things were Washington Irving's wrtings. A popular historian who feared the forgetting and oversimplifying of the past, Irving wrote a brilliant, poetic essay called, "The Mutability of Literature," that the author quoted from, but that is so wonderful that people should just print up the whole thing (six pages) and read it: http://www.bartleby.com/109/6.html . This essay is on the great books being forgotten for the new, is hauntingly written, and the new author points out that the same thing would then happen to Irving. Even the greatest get set aside; it reminds me of an episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," where Mary and Lou Grant are talking, and Lou Grant quotes Winston Churchill, referring to Churchill as one of the towering giants of the 20th century, then asks, after all of Churchill's achievements, "When was the last time you heard someone mention Winston Churchill during a conversation?" like that. Of course--never.

The author attributes the forgetting of Irving, to the "lazy" lack of historical reference of America itself, and a vituperative, "scholarly" book by an "expert," during the 1930s I think it was, a Professor regarded as an authority, who with this one book destroyed Irving's reputation and esteem by readers. This is apparently the first large biography since then, on a writer once considered one of the most famous in the world, adored by Charles Dickens. This was a great talk, the author is Professor of American History at the University of Tulsa, and this book, I think, restores the rightful place of one of the great storytellers of early America, and today. I don't know how well it will sell, I hope it does well, and I think a writer like this, kind of cut off from the world even while moving around successfully in it, fits the modern tenor of thought better than almost any other type from the era.