A History of New York (2 page)

Irving's discovery and the subsequent development of Knickerbocker may be partly laid at the feet of the third and final editor of
Salmagundi,
his friend and future brother-in-law, James Kirke Paulding. It was through Paulding, who had been raised in the Hudson River Valley, that Irving would first learn about the Dutch history of the region, and discover the particular traditions maintained by their nineteenth-century descendants. These traditions, which would form the basis of Irving's New York writings, included Dutch food, architecture, and language; oral histories, such as the ghost story of the headless Hessian, whose insomniac riding kept whole hamlets awake in fear; and glimpses of improbably charming
tableaux vivants:
from Dutch American farmers puffing in stolid silence on their long pipes and apple-cheeked
vrouws
presiding over groaning tea tables to firelit hearths framed by a frieze of Delft tiles of scripture scenes. The romance of this heritage, not his own, inspired Irving to create Diedrich Knickerbocker, the Dutch “insider” who could legitimately present an “authentic” (one of Knickerbocker's favorite compliments) portrait of these overlooked “progenitors,” both in his
History of New York
and in the stories of the Hudson River Valley that he would later write. These include the most famous pair: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which would become part of the fabric of American literature, spun into children's books, poems, paintings, plays, and movies. But the
History
was Knickerbocker's debut, and the beginning of Irving's meteoric rise.

Irving's tongue-in-cheek retelling of the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam and the fortunes of the citizens and governors of that first New York colony—from its settlement to its ultimate surrender to the British in 1674—was a popular success on both sides of the Atlantic. American and European readers likened the
History
to the work of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift, praising Irving's combination of anarchic humor, winning nostalgia, and mock erudition. Like
Tristram Shandy,
the History is sprawling, and more than a little strange; in the course of mapping colonial New Amsterdam, Knickerbocker takes numerous detours to enlighten his reader on a variety of related topics, from the introduction of the doughnut to the birth of Wall Street. Irving lards the historian's narrative with confusing citations and footnotes in multiple voices, all of which seem intended to add nuance and scholarly depth to his humble account of small-scale colonial wars, but have instead (like Sterne's black or blank pages) the surprisingly postmodern effect of knocking his story (and his reader) off course. But the real argument of the History is not to be found in its long-winded accounts of New Amsterdam's military history (which, in Knickerbocker's telling, seems to consist of Dutch generals practicing their swashbuckling moves on garden vegetables, and praying for divine intervention in battle) but through the winningly offhanded way in which Irving fills the lacunae of New York history, satisfying the reader's curiosity with minute and charming details of domestic life in the little colony. Knickerbocker's story is one of origins: he explains the city's familiar-yet-mysterious names (Maiden Lane, Coenties Slip), gives a gloss of romance to its topography (Buttermilk Channel, the Battery), and boldly claims New York's tribal customs (Santa Claus, stoop sitting, an inexplicable fondness for sauerkraut) as inventions of the Dutch who settled the city.

The nostalgic, sometimes bawdy stories of Dutch home life and heroism in Irving's
History
not only identified the formative influence of the Dutch burghers on the physical, economic, and cultural development of New York, but presented these newly rediscovered “founding fathers” as a set of acceptable ancestors for a city looking to divorce itself and its past from the monarchical associations of England. In the wake of the Revolutionary War and seven years of British occupation, Knickerbocker's portrait of New Amsterdam seemed appealingly homely, even middle class. What busy urbanite could deny the charm of the “golden age of Wouter Van Twiller,” when “a sweet and holy calm reigned over the whole province” and the “Burgomaster smoked his pipe in peace”? Like Irving's nineteenth-century city, the Dutch colony, thus portrayed, was equal parts bourgeois ritual, democratic tolerance, and hospitable (if clannish) sophistication. Here, finally, were forebears in which a newly republican New York could take a fond, nostalgic pride. Knickerbocker's epic saga of New Amsterdam, however satirical, was one of the first articulations of American identity, and an early entry into the communal history of a city not yet accustomed to commemorating and celebrating its difference from the rest of the country, as well as from the rest of the world.

Irving's
History
connected readers to New Amsterdam by taking the colony out of the realm of mystery and conjecture. But the book was also a finger in the eye of the New-York Historical Society, which had been founded in 1804 with a mandate to collect and make available to the public “whatever may relate to the natural, civic, or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general, and of this State in particular.” But information about the New Amsterdam settlement was not forthcoming. In an 1807 “Address to the Public” that is equal parts persuasion and polemic, the Society admits the “paucity of materials” pertaining to New York's Dutch past, and reiterates the “extreme difficulty of procuring such as relate to the first settlement and colonial transactions of this State.” In an appeal to their fellow New Yorkers' sense of history and responsibility, the Society solicited documents of just about any kind or quality, including “Manuscripts, Records, Pamphlets and Books relative to the History of this Country ... narratives of Indian Wars, Battles and Exploits; of the Adventures and Sufferings of Captives, Voyagers and Travellers... Statistical Tables, Tables of Diseases, Births and Deaths, and of Population,” and just about anything else that might shed light on New Amsterdam. In an effort to remedy this archivist's nightmare, one of the Society's most revered members, the physician and naturalist Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, compiled and published
The Picture of New-York: Or, The Traveller's Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States
in 1807. The Picture was designed to enrich the meager holdings of the Historical Society while offering readers “ample and genuine information” about the historical, geographical, civic, and social circumstances of the contemporary city. Despite its panoramic title, Mitchill's book is little more than an encyclopedia of dry geographical and municipal facts, curtly expressed. An incomplete encyclopedia, unfortunately: while
The Picture
touches on everything from the city's tidal patterns to its prison system, Mitchill disposes of fifty years of Dutch rule in a few swift sentences, without apology. It was this oversight that inspired Irving (and his brother William, with whom he had originally conceived of the
History)
—he later confessed that their original “serio-comic” intent was just to “burlesque the pedantic lore” of
The Picture
and other books of its kind. In a reversal that its author would not have appreciated, today
The Picture
is an essential artifact of New York only because it gave rise to the creation of its opposite: the voice of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Mitchill's attempt to build an “ample” ontological framework for the nascent city instead created the vacuum into which Irving and his revisionist historian could merrily rush.

On the heels of his
History,
Irving briefly took a position as the editor of the
Analectic Review,
a literary journal based in Philadelphia, but the needs of a family business venture in England was incentive enough to lure him to England in 1815. The venture failed, but Irving stayed on, traveling through England, Germany, and France with a letter of introduction to the celebrated Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (who had reported “sides ... sore from laughing” while reading Irving's “excellent jocose history of New York”) and a fistful of glowing reviews for the
History
(and for
Salmagundi,
which had been published in book form in England in 1810). It would be sixteen years before Irving returned to the United States, and his stay abroad also marked a turning away from the long format of the
History
to the genre of the “sketch,” a picturesque and often sentimental vignette whose gentle humor and brevity made it the ideal format for the observations of a curious and romantic American. Irving would publish three collections of sketches in very quick succession, including
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
(1819-20),
Bracebridge Hall
(1822), and
Tales of a Traveller
(1824), as well as several historical works inspired by an extended stay in Spain:
The Conquest of Granada, Life and Voyages of Columbus, Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus,
and
The Alhambra.
Diedrich Knickerbocker reappears only rarely in Irving's sketch collections, to narrate “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (in
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
) as well as other tales of the Hudson River Valley and New Amsterdam, including “Dolph Heyliger”
(Bracebridge Hall)
and the “Money Diggers” section of
Tales of
a
Traveller,
among whose contents can be found “Wolfert Webber, Or, Golden Dreams,” an evergreen fable of New York real estate. The scarcity of these Knickerbocker tales, the only American elements in collections that are otherwise decidedly Anglophile (or at least Eurocentric) in nature, gives them a precious, endangered quality that mirrors their shared subtext—the disintegration of the Dutch elements of life in and around New York City.

Not all of Irving's American observers toasted his international success. Some perceived his absence as abandonment, and his European subject matter as a canny marketing strategy rather than an artistic choice. The American poet Philip Freneau spoke for Irving's critics with his 1823 poem “To a New England Poet,” in which he urges a nameless colleague not to waste his talents in “such a tasteless land/Where all must on a level stand.” Instead, he recommends, “like Irving, haste away” to England, “and with the glittering nobles mix/Forgetting times of seventy-six.” Once a critical darling overseas, Freneau continues, the subject of his sarcastic ode is sure to triumph in America as well:

Freneau's recipe for success may have been bitter, but it was also prescient: when Irving finally did return to New York in 1832, he was besieged with invitations to valedictory dinners in his honor, requests by artists and sculptors to sit for his portrait, and demands for public appearances and addresses. In one particularly memorable encounter, he served as a kind of American literary ambassador to Charles Dickens, then visiting Baltimore on a national tour. The two authors reportedly shared an enormous mint julep sent by a well-wisher, a confounding image that is made even more so by Dickens's recollection that Irving sipped from the giant cocktail with a straw. Writing after Irving's death, William Makepeace Thackeray noted that the author of “Rip Van Winkle” was shy and awkward in the face of this universal welcome, even when mint juleps were not present: “He stammered in his speeches, hid himself in confusion, and the people loved him all the better.” Affection for Irving, Thackeray concluded, was a “national sentiment.” Irving himself had a lifelong aversion to “having to attempt speeches, or bear compliments in silence,” but his initial bewilderment may have also been due to the transformations he discovered in his native city. Like Wolfert Webber, who sees his cabbage plots transformed into apartment lots, Irving came back to a New York that was changed beyond expectation—and, in some cases, beyond recognition. Manhattan was now the largest city in the United States; the Erie Canal had been opened. Little wonder, then, that Irving marveled, at one of his public welcome dinners, at the “seeming city” that now extended itself over “heights I had left covered with green forests.”

The exigencies of fame and what must have seemed like time travel ultimately spurred Irving's retreat from the city; in 1835 he purchased and remodeled an old cottage in the Westchester County hamlet of Tarrytown, on a hill sloping down to the Hudson River. But the final product, a yellow-brick, gable-fronted cottage that its owner christened Sunnyside, was as much homage to the charms of Dutch New York as to Irving's own writings, and it quickly became a destination for pilgrims seeking an audience with the creator of Knickerbocker. This pilgrimage was later accelerated by the new railroad tracks laid against the banks of the river just below Sunnyside, a development that would be at once the source and the scourge of Irving's quest for privacy: the payment he received for allowing the tracks to be laid on his property helped defray the cost of an addition on the famous house. Sunnyside, which Henry James would later describe as a “shy ... retreat of anchorites,” became, in Irving's lifetime, a metonym for the writer himself, and bore as many “compliments in silence” as the man who lived there. The house was hymned in Andrew Jackson Downing's seminal
Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening
(1849), which suggested that “there is scarcely a building or place in America more replete with interest than the cottage of Washington Irving, near Tarrytown,” and was subsequently a prominent feature of
The Homes of American Authors
(1853) and the subject of a profile in
Harper's
magazine (1856). From that riverside perch Irving wrote
The Crayon Miscellany,
a collection of travel sketches and histories;
Astoria;
and
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his retreat, New York City did not abandon its first literary champion: in 1838 Irving was nominated for mayor of Manhattan by Tammany Hall, an honor he graciously refused.