The escape artist.(The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving)(Book review)

Andrew Burstein The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. Basic Books, 348 pages, $27.50

It is the sad irony of Washington Irving's career that he was forgotten by the very literary tradition he engendered. Once read by heads of state and ordinary men alike, the genteel New Yorker now rarely elicits interest outside the academy. Louis Napoleon, the future emperor, paid a personal visit to his Tarrytown cottage; Charles Dickens gushed over his single-handed effort to bring American literature out of its infancy. For today's readers, though, Irving often seems a quaint but ineffectual ancestor whose work is too light to merit much attention.

In his new book, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving, Andrew Burstein skillfully argues that Irving should be credited with initiating "a national literature where there was thought to be none." The whimsical stories that brought him fame--"Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"--are centerpieces in an American mythology that did not exist when Irving began writing. As Cervantes had done earlier with Don Quixote, he forged a literary tradition through picaresque tales whose humor points to deeper notions of national identity.

Born into a comfortable family in 1783, just as Manhattan was shedding its bucolic Dutch past, Irving received a sound education but, unlike his older brothers, did not attend Columbia College. He began working in a law office at the age of sixteen, but--as was the case for his entire life--tempered professional obligations with a literary life that nurtured a profound imagination.

He started by publishing theater reviews in his brother's Morning Chronicle as Jonathan Oldstyle, the first of many pseudonyms he used in his career. Written as dispatches from the fashionable Park Theater, the Oldstyle letters show Irving's ability to mock popular culture without offending his readership. He soon joined with other budding New York wits to found Salmagundi, a playful journal that had its precursors in the humor rags of England. Setting their sights on Jeffersonian populists, New York's growing nouveau riche, and the general turmoil of the American scene, Irving and his friends poked gentle fun at their subjects in a tone that borrowed from the masters of British satire, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift.

Irving's first major work came in 1809 with A History of New York, penned under the memorable nom de plume Diedrich Knickerbocker. Knickerbocker's "Gotham" (the term is yet another Irving invention) is unpredictable and not beholden to the laws of reason, a "sweet vision of fancy, or some fair creation of industrious magic." An unabashed parody of self-important historians, the History brims with caricatures of Lenape natives, Dutch settlers, and Englishmen agitating for control of New Amsterdam. Astute readers recognized an undercurrent of social commentary--the ineffectual governor William the Testy, for one, as Thomas Jefferson--but the History was a success because, like Gulliver's Travels or Don Quixote, it could be enjoyed on multiple levels. A "devout escapist," in Burstein's words, Irving was commencing the project that would consume his lifetime: reclaiming history from the past, and carving out a space for his country free of lingering European condescension towards America.

The History earned a readership abroad, boosting Irving's reputation while signaling that Americans could produce literature worth reading. Irving soon embarked on his first European voyage and, just as with the Lost Generation of the 1920s, the trip polished his sensibilities while honing his sense of what it meant to be an American. As he traveled Europe, befriending Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, Irving collected sketches of the ...