Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (3 page)

What Irving had when he was finished was a book with broad popular appeal that could also claim the attention of more serious readers. He had discovered popular culture for American (and perhaps English) literature and brought the two together in the uneasy relationship that has existed between them ever since. That is, he discovered a growing middle-class audience, able to read, curious about art and fashion, eager for information and entertainment, craving novelty and emotional stimulation, prepared to pay good money for an attractive product. What it did not want was an undue taxing of its intellectual faculties or an open challenge to its basic values. It was in this market that American writers would henceforth chiefly support themselves—the alternative, in the absence of patronage, being literature as an avocation. American printers, publishers, and booksellers, including some who doubled as hack writers, had made sizable profits from this trade earlier, but not writers with serious literary pretensions. The larger meaning of Irving's success was that it blurred for good the distinction between the fine art and the business of literature in the United States.

That he was in England when he wrote
The Sketch Book,
that a good deal of it is about England, and that it was highly praised by British critics helped enormously to sell it. For although his American readers increasingly defined their society as new, democratic, liberated from an oppressive past, they were nonetheless curious about the theoretically repudiated old world. As Crayon says, speaking in “The Author's Account of Himself” of his own early desire to go abroad,

Here one touches America's half-secret longing for knowledge of its counterself, of exactly what it professes not to be. Crayon will in due course offer much that is calculated to satisfy that longing. But readers may note a certain irony in the latter part of the passage just quoted. One suspects that in the heightened rhetoric of the long final sentence Crayon is slightly mocking his own interest in the past as a bit lugubrious, a not entirely healthy appetite for an up-to-date American.

As he goes on in the next paragraph to speak of his “earnest desire to see the great men of the earth,” his facetiousness becomes fully obvious:

Crayon's sly wit thus asserts itself at the very beginning; he is not going overboard in adulation of the old world. It is in such irony as this that he keeps his balance, retains his good sense while catering to popular tastes. And as easily as he mocks the affectations of others, Americans or Europeans, he makes fun of excesses to which he himself is prone—antiquarianism, for instance, or (see “The Spectre Bridegroom”) the sentimentalism which, as journals Irving kept while struggling with
The Sketch Book
show, plagued him in periods of depression and self-doubt.

To reduce
The Sketch Book
to the testament of a crypto-aristocratic anglophile and political conservative, as is sometimes done, is to miss its finer points and misunderstand Crayon. His England is admittedly only touristic, the product of “idle humour” and “vagrant imagination,” something he half-laughs at himself for offering the reader. Fighting for his literary life, and fearful of British critics, Irving had no incentive to go far in exhibiting the harsh realities of contemporary English life, the hardships, social dislocations, and class conflicts being generated by the industrial revolution. But both he and Crayon know that their England is somewhat obsolete and idealized. Here and there we are made aware of the increasing restlessness not only of nouveaux riches capitalists but of people in the lower orders as well.

Fundamentally, Irving all his life was a political moderate, variously a Democratic-Republican, Federalist, Democrat, and Whig. He obviously found appealing the sense of order, social harmony, and stability embodied in the trimly laid out English countryside and the survival of old customs and traditions. But Crayon's gentle satire in the much revered Christmas sketches makes it quite clear that Squire Bracebridge—to say nothing of his parson—has somewhat lost himself in the English past and is out of touch with current reality. And Crayon obviously has fears of becoming an anachronism himself.

Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., is not just a fancy name for Washington Irving, even if, as middle-aged, bachelor Americans in England, as writers and avid readers, they have roughly similar temperaments. In Crayon the shy, pensive, slightly melancholy, and sentimental side of Irving exaggerates itself and becomes a fictional character, allowing the author to modify his own experiences or create entirely fictitious ones—as when Crayon's interest in old things leads him through narrow gateways and dark passages to momentarily frightening encounters with personages who seem oddities from a forgotten world.

Crayon's self-characterization begins with the title page epigraph taken from Burton's
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
It encourages us to view him as solitary, a “mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures.” And there is self-mockery in his next epigraph, a few half-comic, half-pathetic lines from another old book,
Euphues,
by John Lyly, which precede “The Author's Account of Himself” and compare the homeless traveler to a “snaile that crept out of her shel” and “was turned eftsoones into a Toad.” While Crayon in his traveling is not “transformed into so monstrous a shape,” fear that he might be is never quite laughed off.

His homesickness is a part of “The Voyage,” which ends with his exclamation upon disembarking at Liverpool, “I alone was solitary and idle. I had no friend to meet, no cheering to receive. I stepped upon the land of my forefathers—but felt I was a stranger in the land.” And what he shows us of Liverpool (in “Roscoe”), a banker-author's struggle for artistic self-realization in “the very market place of trade,” does not altogether cheer him. We do not know whether the next sketch, “The Wife,” takes place in England or the United States, but again, as in “Roscoe,” financial disaster and bankruptcy have to be faced. Temporarily forsaking his spectatorial role, Crayon intervenes directly to keep the newlyweds together, revealing himself a man of feeling and Irving a literary descendant of Sterne, whose
Sentimental Journey
casts a shadow over Crayon's tour.

Subsequently as he takes us through rural landscapes or out-of-the-way London neighborhoods, inspects ancient churches, castles, country houses, and libraries, we are almost always aware of Crayon's presence. Generally he is alone. In the “nooks and corners and bye places” that he sketches, his contacts with human beings are fleeting. In “The Stage Coach,” before he is rescued for Christmas by Frank Bracebridge, he looks on wistfully as three boys, returning from school for the holidays, reach their destination, are reunited with their pet animals, and walk up the road “to a neat country seat, ” where their mother and sisters are waiting: “I leaned out of the coach window, in hopes of witnessing the happy meeting, but a grove of trees shut it from my sight.”

In the immediately preceding sketch, walking by himself among the tombs in Westminster Abbey as the dusk gathers, Crayon has become aware of the interior of the church as a formidable emptiness, from beyond which the sounds of the outside world can scarcely be heard. This image comes too close for comfort to epitomizing his experience in general: not sufficiently anchored in the living world, he finds himself alone contemplating the dead. His sense of the past doubles as a sensitivity to the passing of time. Why else does he so often join passing funeral processions? Mutability is the shadow that walks beside him.

The Sketch Book
persistently hints at a story about Crayon that is never fully told. But we may perceive it in “the fluctuations of his own thoughts and feelings; sometimes treating of scenes before him; sometimes of others purely imaginary, and sometimes wandering back with his recollections to his native country.” These are Crayon's own words about himself in his “Prospectus” for the original American edition of
The Sketch Book
(see Appendix A). In explaining what his “writings partake of,” he warns readers not to expect much coherence in the miscellany. Yet by presenting the apparently random sketches as reflective of the shifting “thoughts and feelings” of a particular personality, the warning ironically suggests underlying connections.

Irving omitted the “Prospectus” from the finished book. But what makes it “finished” is the reader's sense that in the first London edition Irving's seemingly aimless association of ideas and impulses may finally have gotten Crayon somewhere. The story all along has hinted that his “vagrant” wandering in a foreign country is a quest of sorts. Irving has rearranged the book so that after the morbidity of “Westminster Abbey,” the emotional nadir for Crayon, feelings become decidedly more positive. The English sketches on the whole are lighter now, more humorous, giving the impression that Crayon is feeling less a stranger in John Bull's “family mansion.” True, there is pathos in “The Pride of the Village” and tragedy in “Philip of Pokanoket.” But the latter, with “Traits of Indian Character,” helps pull the book back toward America near the end, strengthening the image of the new world, which both contrasts with and complements the old.

If we take “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as instances of Crayon's “wandering back with his recollections to his native country,” then these stories become part of
his
story. And positioning “Sleepy Hollow” at the end of that story (except for “L'Envoy”) adds to its poignancy. Not that “Sleepy Hollow” cannot stand completely on its own, a self-contained fiction, needing no connection with the rest of the book to be perfectly satisfying. It is the book that is enhanced by the connection, not the reverse. The same is true of “Rip Van Winkle.” There are many ways of looking at these two stories besides what is offered in the next few paragraphs.

Narrated by Diedrich Knickerbocker, though encountered in Crayon's book, the stories suggest a kinship between the two personae. Knickerbocker is not the same writer in
The Sketch Book
as in
A History of New York.
His rambunctiousness has been laid aside; he is no longer primarily a parodist. Instead of exploding in words, he tells his stories in an easygoing, unpretentious, oddly humorous way. His diction is that of a well-educated person who feels no compulsion to prove it. Fond of colloquialisms, he tends to use elegant words and phrases ironically. That Crayon should turn to stories that he or someone with whom he is in touch has “found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker” suggests that there is a counterforce working in him, balancing the attractions of England. The Knickerbocker stories give us specifically realized landscapes with figures in them to whom we are brought much closer than we are in the English sketches. Human beings, relate to one another and to the physical environment more informally. The narrator is at home in the land.

The disturbances that mar the idyllic composure of these localities ring familiarly in the context of
The Sketch Book.
Either Rip Van Winkle or Ichabod Crane might be a figure in Crayon's dreams. Both are collectors and tellers of stories. Rip, in conflict with the nose-to-the-grindstone mentality of his wife, has “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour.” Ichabod will work as a schoolmaster if he has to, but he would rather sing, dance, or tell stories for his supper—and his appetite is voracious. Although the aura of mystery and the supernatural in these two texts derives largely from Irving's reading in German folklore and romantic fiction, they seem nonetheless remarkably American, not only in setting and character but in their social or cultural implications as well.

Though sometimes hinting that Dame Van Winkle's shrewishness may be a function of her husband's reluctance to work his land, Rip's story is largely sympathetic to
his
“idle humour” and “vagrant imagination.” Following them away from his marriage and into the mountains, he loses the prime of his life in a dreamless sleep. But when he gets over the shock of waking up, he finds himself, at an age when no one can expect him to work, comfortably provided for. And he has a fantastic story to tell.

If the issue in that story is a tension between imagination or artistic inclination and industry or industriousness, in “Sleepy Hollow” it seems to be between imagination and money. We find Ichabod Crane referred to curiously as a “man of letters.” The remark is of course ironic. His one-room schoolhouse is called “his literary realm.” In the village he passes for a man of “superior taste,” a “kind of idle gentleman like personage.” These phrases resonate ludicrously in the context of
The Sketch Book.
For Ichabod is “in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity,” a superstitious, psalm singing Connecticut Yankee with an eye to the main chance. He uses his music and storytelling as a false front masking his more serious intentions. What his “imagination” truly “expanded with,” we are told, was the prospect of winning Katrina Van Tassel's hand and thereby gaining possession of her father's ample acres. These he would convert into “cash,” to be used in turn for speculating in western real estate.