#123 Washington Irving – Rip van Winkle

Every national literature has to start from somewhere. In the case of America, that somewhere is Washington Irving – a New Yorker writing at the start of the nineteenth century. Generally speaking, he’s thought of as the first American who actually wrote fiction at an international standard.

Irving was very lucky to be born an American, because I would argue that had he been any other nationality at all, he would have been completely forgotten by now. His contemporaries included far better writers who now go completely unread; and even in his day his fame rested on being the novelty of an American who could write. His prose, though competently assembled, is a thin cover for a fundamentally mediocre mind.

Take ‘The Wife’. In this tale, the narrator recounts the tale of a man who has married a society beauty, but is approaching a great business failing. He can’t bring himself to let his wife know what is about to come. The narrator tells him that he should tell his wife, and she will support him through their difficulties. And she does.

“Admirable girl!” exclaimed I. “You call yourself poor, my friend; you never were so rich- you never knew the boundless treasures of excellence you possess in that woman.”

As conclusions go, it makes The Old Curiosity Shop look emotionally complex. The character of the wife is so thin that you could shine a light through her and be able to read a newspaper on the other side. The idea that there might be any shade of doubt or displeasure in her attitude doesn’t even occur to Irving; while a proper author (George Eliot; George Gissing; possibly Curious George the monkey) could get a three-volume novel out of the opposite being the case.

Even the story of Rip van Winkle, the tale of Irving’s with the greatest durability, is a disappointment in the flesh. For those that don’t know it, the idea is that a man falls asleep for twenty years, and wakes up to find the world has changed dramatically while he has been away.

He now hurried forth, and hastened to his old resort, the little village inn—but it too was gone. A large rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken, and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.” Instead of the great tree which used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole, with something on the top that looked like a red nightcap, and from it was fluttering a flag, on which was a singular assemblage of stars and stripes—all this was strange and incomprehensible.

He eventually manages to convince the townspeople that he is indeed the old Rip van Winkle who disappeared all those years ago, and enjoys a comfortable retirement in the town.

Doctor Johnson, when asked to explain why he thought so little of Gulliver’s Travels, said that it was all obvious once you had the basic idea – little people, big people. My copy of that book puts the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag at sixteen chapters. In my edition, Rip van Winkle’s return to the future occupies fourteen pages; and one cannot shake the thought that there was more juice to be squeezed from the orange.

But, like it or not, the history of American literature is stuck with him. Just as in my country students are condemned to follow Piers Plowman, and the French much learn the chanson or Roland, so  American colleges will enforce Irving’s study for centuries to come based on little more than his chronological primacy. Be glad the rest of us don’t have to follow.