| Book Reviews | New York History, 88.3

Book Reviews

The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving.

By Andrew Burstein (New York: Basic Books, 2007. Pp. 348. $26.95.)

Reviewed by Michael L. Black, Associate Professor Emeritus, Bernard M. Baruch College, City University of New York.

Andrew Burstein has written the best introduction to a writer who was once the most highly regarded author of his generation but is now little known. So unread and ignored has Irving (1783–1859) become that, even in Irving country near Tarrytown, New York, a development of apartments named Sleepy Hollow features a sign with Rip Van Winkle on it. And Burstein feels it necessary to retell the two famous stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in some detail (pp. 126–29 and 145–48), suggesting that not even Irving's best-known stories have survived the wreck of his reputation.	1
One reason Irving is now more a name than a cultural force is that he and other "Schoolroom authors" (including Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier) have been shouldered out of the canon and therefore the classroom. Another reason is that some of Irving's works, like the biographies of Columbus and George Washington, are now seen as dated attempts at hero worship. And his Spanish works now seem more exotic than entertaining. Not even his Life of Mahomet (1849) or Mahomet's Successors (1850) have received much attention, in spite of the new interest in Islam.	2
The Original Knickerbocker, therefore, is all the more welcome because it attempts, with much success, to remind us that Irving was a very good writer and a very important influence on the America of his day and later. Burstein, the author of several biographies and studies about the early nineteenth century (America's Jubilee, The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image, and Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello) not only knows the lost world of Washington Irving, but he is careful to explain his subject's role in that world. Irving knew just about everyone of importance (and sometimes benefited from the acquaintance), and, unlike James Fenimore Cooper, he made few if any enemies. As more than a hanger-on in politics, he found himself turning down offers to be in Congress, to be mayor of New York City, or to serve as secretary of the navy.	3
Irving was not at all comfortable—and often said so—with the give-and-take of politics, preferring to work behind the scenes, giving advice and not infrequently asking for jobs for family and friends. Nevertheless, he had two stints as a government employee: as secretary to the legation (1829–1831) in London and as minister to Spain (1842–1846).	4
In this respect, he was not unusual among American writers of his day, many of whom went into government employ (Paulding, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Lowell, and Motley, among others), almost as if working for Uncle Sam was a kind of nineteenth-century WPA. The only writers who did not darken Washington's door were the Transcendentalists (who were more occupied with things of the spirit and not of the office). In Irving's America, politics was a place, usually a temporary stopping-point, for a writer to earn a wherewithal. It also says something about the insecurities of publishing of that era. But it also suggests that writers and government went together easily, unlike today. What well-known writer has served his or her time at a government desk job?	5
Burstein the historian almost always highlights his subject's contacts, always explaining who they were, what they did, and why we readers should pay attention to this important side of Irving's life. Some of Irving's worldly friends and acquaintances are today little known (Louis McLane, Henry Ellsworth, John Pendleton Kennedy). Others are more remembered (Aaron Burr, Martin Van Buren, Henry Clay, John Randolph). Irving moved among them with ease and confidence, and they admired him for his companionship, his occasional advice, and his discretion.	6
The Original Knickerbocker is the first significant biography of Irving since that of Stanley T. Williams, whose two-volume The Life of Washington Irving (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), is the standard—and not always admiring—account. This work supplanted that of Irving's nephew, Pierre Munro, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862–64; four volumes). Having edited several Irving journals and coedited a 1927 edition of A History of New York in preparation for his large biographical study, the Yale scholar produced a text with more than six hundred pages, three appendices of over eighty pages, and almost two hundred pages of notes.	7
Burstein's work is both shorter and more sympathetic to his subject than his predecessor's. There is plenty of evidence in Williams's pages of his distaste for both his subject and his works, and Burstein is admirably restrained in his disagreements with his predecessor. That is, he could have spent much more time and space on his predecessor's biases. Instead, he saves most of his ammunition until late in the work (pp. 335–36), although from time to time he calls attention to some of that writer's unrestrained characterizations of his subject, such as his relationship with his brothers and his inability to cope with setbacks.	8
Not only does Burstein like Irving, but he has produced a biography that treats his entire career in depth. He builds on, but goes beyond, the only other major study of Irving's entire career, Edward Wagenknect's Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).	9
Burstein also handles the unanswerable but often-asked question about Irving's sexuality. Indeed, the docents at Sunnyside, Irving's estate on the Hudson near Tarrytown, say that visitors frequently ask, "Was he gay?" In a better world, an artist's sexuality should not make much of a difference, and Irving is not around to explain or defend or explain himself, but certain aspects of the author's life are unusual, including his celibacy.	10
Irving's nephew and first biographer, Pierre Munro Irving, contended that Irving's only true love was his fiancée Matilda Hoffman, the daughter of his employer, and that the twenty-six-year-old never entirely recovered from her death in 1809 from tuberculosis. Irving himself had something to do with the persistence of this "romantic story," in Irving's phrase (p. 175), in an 1824 personal account to the mother of Emily Foster, a young Englishwoman he had met in Dresden and to whom he may (no one is sure) have proposed marriage. For good measure, Burstein briefly mentions a third marriageable young woman about 1817, Selena Livingston (p. 110).	11
In the 1824 personal account, Irving seemed to open up his heart to Mrs. Foster and explain why he had not married (his first love, Matilda, now fifteen years deceased). A year later, to Emily, he wrote that the presence of several clergymen reminded him of his father's stern religion. Which explanation was the real one?	12
Emily Foster might have remained an unknown English clergyman's wife except for her sister Flora's 1863 memoir, which was tucked into an unauthorized edition of Pierre Munro Irving's biography. Pierre was so angered at the insinuation of Irving's proposal to Emily that he rearranged his biography to add a fourth volume solely to answer the memoir. About sixty years later, Williams uncovered Emily's journal and questioned the Pierre Munro Irving account. Wayne Kime, in his biography of Pierre Munro Irving, Pierre M. Irving and Washington Irving: A Collaboration in Life and Letters (Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977), has a complete account (pp. 281–313).	13
Burstein rightly avoids the "did he or didn't he?" question and concentrates on the similarity between the Matilda-Emily stories, especially on Irving's relationships with the two mothers. This is in keeping with his theme that Irving feared sexual relationships with young women, although he very much wanted to be surrounded with women, especially of the surrogate-mother type with happy families. Burstein also discusses bachelorhood, citing numerous scholarly studies of its attraction in the early nineteenth century, as an important component of Irving's sexuality—or lack of it. The whole discussion of Irving's sexuality, his admiration for unattainable women, his fear of attainable ones, and the culture's attitudes towards men who resisted the siren song of the Victorian home is fascinating.	14
As a historian, Burstein is particularly concerned about Irving's work in that field, remarking that his once-famous biography of Christopher Columbus makes the explorer into a "moderate Federalist" (p. 204), that the biography of George Washington is a model of both nineteenth-century scholarship and a guide for the nation, and that The Conquest of Granada is more romance than history (p. 213). Perhaps to attract a new generation of readers, Burstein always has something interesting to say about the quality of his subject's ventures into history.	15
As a commentator on Irving's fiction, Burstein uses the latest criticism about the two great stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to put both into the context of Irving's life and American literature. He reminds readers of Irving's literary acquaintances, not only James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, but also the lesser-known James Kirke Paulding, Gulian Verplanck, Donald K. Mitchell, and others—all of them part of the New York Knickerbocker literary world that has largely disappeared.	16
The Original Knickerbocker gives us a well-rounded picture of the man who was once the most famous author in America. As something of a corrective to the Williams biography, perhaps it will encourage further research into areas of Irving's life such as his lifelong celibacy, his whereabouts (particularly in the years 1810 to 1812), his life in England from 1815 to 1818, and his business interests. We also need to know more about Ebenezer Irving, who was not only Irving's American literary agent but, with five of his daughters, became a longtime resident of Sunnyside. And then there is Peter Irving, Burrite, steamboat investor, and someone whom Washington tried (and failed) to set up in life.	17
Burstein's well-written biography may not be the final word in Irving studies, but it is a very welcome word indeed.	18

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.