Strictly speaking, Washington Irving wasn’t the original Knickerbocker. That would seem to have been Herman, or perhaps Diedrich. But more about that later.
Andrew Burstein’s “The Original Knickerbocker” is the first full biography in 70 years of Irving. Along with his contemporary, James Fenimore Cooper, Irving was one of the first two Americans to become internationally famous – and earn a living – by the pen.
Burstein, a professor of history at the University of Tulsa and author of several works in 18th- and 19th-
century American history, has written a lively and discursive biography, not only capturing its subject but also evoking the tenor of the times, including “the highly charged political world” of Irving’s young adulthood. It is also a useful overview of the state of American literature and culture at a time when Europeans thought there could be no such thing as a good American book.
Irving was born in New York City on April 3, 1783, the youngest of 11 children (eight of whom survived) in a not overly prosperous family headed by a small-business owner. Trained as a lawyer, a profession he never practiced, Irving first gained notice with “Salamagundi, or, the Whim-Whams and aps of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others,” an irregular humorous publication (1807-08), produced in conjunction with friends.
Greater renown came in 1809 with “A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty,” often known as “Knickerbocker’s History” for the pseudonym it was published under, Diedrich Knickerbocker – one of several (easily penetrated) pen names Irving adopted.
“History” is a burlesque, a satire that mocks, beginning with its absurd title, the pretensions of earlier historians. Burstein calls it “Irving’s opening salvo in his war against accepted wisdom and moral authority.”
Knickerbocker is a dreamy skeptic, a devout escapist, and, as such, a forerunner of Irving’s quintessential antihero, Rip Van Winkle. Irving believed “that there is a better place to live than the present,” and beginning with “History” he decided to have fun with time, he displaced time, to take readers to that livelier place. He did that over and over in his career, his biographer says, often, as in “History,” employing “dream-inducing puffs of smoke” from a tobacco pipe to signal the shift in time.
As for “Knickerbocker,” Irving borrowed the euphonious name from a man he had not met, though they later became friends: Herman Knickerbocker, a lawyer and U.S. congressman from Albany, N.Y. As the book’s popularity grew, the name tended to attach itself to New York City.
In 1815, Irving went abroad and did not return for 17 years. He began writing stories that came out first in installments, under the name Geoffrey Crayon, and then in book form in 1824 as “The Sketch Book.” The two most famous and enduring are “Rip Van Winkle” (based on a German folk tale) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Here, as elsewhere, Burstein gives good exegeses of the main stories.
After “Sketch Book,” Irving’s transatlantic renown grew with each new work. While serving a minor embassy appointment in Madrid he researched his biography of Columbus, which was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic and went into 175 editions between 1828 and 1900.
He received a hero’s welcome upon his return to the United States in 1832 and ever afterward drew attention, to his displeasure, wherever he went. He bought a home, his first, along the Hudson River, called “Sunnyside,” but did not retire there until after returning to Spain to serve as ambassador. When he did retire, his literary productivity was stunning, the most notable work his five-volume biography of George Washington.
Burstein takes up the sexuality issue that invariably arises when a man is a lifelong bachelor (an honorable state in Irving’s time). Irving most likely was not gay, he concludes – indeed, the death of an early love left him devastated – but he always showed a preference “for women who showed him maternal, or older-sisterly, concern.” And it was in the company of his caring nieces that he died at Sunnyside on Nov. 28, 1859.
Burstein restores luster to Irving’s “somewhat diminished reputation,” a diminishment begun by his previous biographer, Stanley Williams, whose two-volume life (1935) rarely had anything positive to say about any Irving literary work. Irving led a highly public life, certainly far more than most writers do, and so it is good to have this fresh assessment of an important literary and cultural figure.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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The Original Knickerbocker
The Life of Washington Irving
By Andrew Burstein
Basic Books, 420 pages, $27.50
