Chapter 2: Washington Irving and the Bachelor’s Domestic: How a Bachelor of Arts Came to Be Hailed as the Father of American Literature
Huck lighting out for the territories... Leatherstocking blazing his own trail through the wilderness... Ishmael throwing down his schoolmaster’s ruler and heading out to sea as a common seaman. Pointing to images like these, critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Richard Chase have contended that “classic” American literature focuses on a hero who flees from civilization by exploring the wild interior, both of his identity and country. According to this school of thought, European realist novels examine social relations and typically end in marriage—the ultimate act of integration and assimilation—while American romances reject such a narrative trajectory and instead offer fractured, symbolic narratives of men in flight. For romances, home represents the quotidian and the deadening, while the wilderness promises adventure and self-discovery. As Leslie Fiedler argues in Love and Death in the American Novel,The figure of Rip Van Winkle presides over the birth of the American imagination; and it is fitting that our first successful homegrown legend should memorialize, however playfully, the flight of the dreamer from the drab duties of home and town toward the good companions and the magic keg of Holland’s gin. Ever since, the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility. (25-26)
Hence the central character of the masculine American romance is a bachelor—or a would-be bachelor—who throws off commitment and tradition to chase dreams. As Richard Chase argues of Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels and the American romance more generally, “the myth requires celibacy,” since its hero must be free to roam (55).
Although Fiedler and Chase rightly point out the frequent presence of celibates—or, in my terminology, bachelors—in antebellum American literature, the phenomenon often has less to do with romantic individualism than with male sentimentalism, which uses the bachelor to explore anxieties about men’s relation to vocation, domesticity, and the imagination. As Nina Baym contends in “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” Fiedler and company oversimplify American literature, overlook the significance of alternative traditions, and exclude women in their reductive formulations of the myth of male individualism and authorship. They also overlook male sentimentalism, in which men more commonly recline by their firesides in reverie than embark on adventure. As Lora Romero, Vincent Bertolini, Cathy Davidson, and Dana Nelson have shown, antebellum sentimentality was not just a feminine phenomenon, but also a “multivalent political discourse that can have simultaneously radical and conservative impulses—and complicated consequences” (Nelson 29). In the literature of male sentimentalism, including writers such as Irving, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Henry Tuckerman as well as Hawthorne, Cooper, and Melville, men flee only through their imaginations, not so much attempting to escape home as to appropriate its emphasis on privacy and feeling. In claiming the limited authority to write, male sentimentalists conceived of themselves not as patriarchs who sired and governed future generations, but as bachelor uncles who observed and sympathized with the broader human family yet maintained a distance. By posing as bachelors, American authors could stake out a position that reflected their own status as outsiders who preferred leisurely reflection to the ambitious pursuit of economic success—yet this was itself a pose belying the anxious striving for literary and economic accomplishment.
Writers in early nineteenth-century America confronted the problem of defining a relationship with the European (predominantly British) tradition while still creating a vital American one.[1] Often this problem was couched in terms of patriarchy, a hierarchical structure in which power is passed down from father to son. By speaking as fathers, the American Founders asserted their concern for the future and their power to determine what was best for the republic. To define what American men should not be, the Founders pointed to the bachelor, who seemed to deviate from the fundamental mission of establishing a republic grounded in the home and supported by patriarchal virtue. As Mark Kann explains, the Founders “portrayed the Bachelor and other disorderly men as immature, childish minors who disregarded or denied consensual norms of manhood…. they were itinerants in time and space, who fit in nowhere and deserved to be distrusted everywhere” (77-78). Whereas bachelors were depicted as caring only about their own pleasure, married men were invested in the destinies of their children and thus more likely to discipline their own impulses (Kann 34-35).
If patriarchal language was essential to republican political discourse, why do we find bachelors appearing so often in literature produced by the succeeding generation? Consider, for instance, the use of bachelor narrators in Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819-20), James Fenimore Cooper’s Notions of the Americans Picked Up by A Travelling Bachelor (1828), and William Wirt’s The Old Bachelor (1814). Whereas the Founders of the United States employed patriarchal language to legitimize the war against England and claim the political authority to govern, early nineteenth-century critics acknowledged that the language of patriarchy failed to describe American culture, since the US lacked literary fathers such as Milton and Shakespeare and was still in its cultural adolescence.[2] In part, the popularity of the bachelor pose resulted from the avuncular authority that he embodied. Because he lacks the intimidating authority of a patriarch, Wirt’s Old Bachelor can guide the transition between the revolutionary generation and their children, aiming “to excite the emulation of the rising race, and see whether a group of statesmen, scholars, orators, and patriots, as enlightened and illustrious as their fathers, cannot be produced without the aid of such another bloody and fatal stimulant” (69). With this declaration, the Old Bachelor asserts both his lack of bias (he is neither father nor son) and his devotion to America’s future. The bachelor provided an alternative to patriarchal tradition, since he did not have direct heirs and spoke without the authority of a father. At the same time, this figure could also represent nostalgia for the patriarchal order, since he attempted to transmit traditional values to future generations through his writing.
Perhaps no American author better illustrates the dynamics of bachelorhood than Washington Irving, himself a lifelong bachelor whose idiosyncratic narrators represent the vagaries of single life. As Michael Warner astutely notes, “bachelorhood was something [Irving] consistently regarded as anomalous, problematic, and probably immoral,” yet he identified himself as a bachelor and made most of his narrators bachelors (773). According to Warner, Irving struggled to find a relevant position in a society that was making a transition from the hierarchical structure of patriarchy to modern ideas of heterosexuality, which is based upon mutuality and self-making (776). Warner offers a persuasive analysis of Irving’s troubled relation with bachelorhood, arguing that he used the bachelor to explore, somewhat guiltily, a literary rather than biological approach to reproduction, in which the author could create a public, social inheritance linking generations. But Warner provides only a partial explanation, overlooking how Irving’s use of the bachelor mask changed over the course of his career. Irving viewed bachelorhood almost as a requirement for authorship, since he asserted that the writer needed to be free from social and familial commitments to engage his imagination. In Irving’s work, we see the bachelor figure through many guises, as a member of a group of chummy bachelors, or as a sentimental journeyer, or even as a surrogate father. Through these masks, Irving worked out his own struggles with authorship, as he worried how to claim literary authority in a culture where the authorial role was undefined, how to be a professional yet avoid the taint of the marketplace, and how to find the space for artistic endeavors despite American culture’s emphasis on male enterprise.
Irving suggested that the bachelor, like the artist, exists outside the bounds of family, simultaneously longing for its comforts and asserting his own independent imagination. From his twenties, as a young law student and bon vivant strutting around New York, to his seventies, as a beloved author settled into a quaint house near the Tappan Zee River, Irving imagined himself as a bachelor. Likewise, his major narrators—Launcelot Langstaff of Salmagundi, Diedrich Knickerbocker of A History of New York, and Geoffrey Crayon of The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, and other sketches—exemplified the range of the bachelor life, from merry prankster to curmudgeon to sentimental spectator. Irving’s career, both as he lived it and as he represented it in fiction, demonstrates the intimate and evolving relationship between bachelorhood and authorship in American culture, a relationship shot through with anxieties about vocation, gender, family, and the practice of art. We can divide Irving’s use of the bachelor persona into different phases reflecting his attitudes toward authorship. During his twenties, Irving associated bachelorhood with merrymaking and satiric rebellion against patriarchal authority, reflecting his personal position as a member of a group of unattached young men known as the Lads of Kilkenny. In this period of bachelor homosociality, Irving treated authorship almost as a game, collaborating with his brother William and friend James Kirke Paulding to produce the satiric periodical Salmagundi (1807-1808). After personal tragedy upset his plans to become a lawyer and marry his mentor’s daughter, Irving created the curmudgeonly bachelor scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker. In 1819, Irving crafted The Sketch Book’s Geoffrey Crayon, a narrator whose bachelorhood seemed to make him perceptive and sympathetic, while remaining restless in his search for a home. When he published The Sketch Book, Irving finally committed himself to being an author, but he still avoided a public declaration of this decision by casting Geoffrey Crayon as a gentleman amateur, a sentimental journeyer in the tradition of Sterne. Finally, Irving settled into the identity of bachelor father, inviting the reader into the comfortable space of his essays like a favorite uncle dispensing advice. Although the mode associated with Irving’s bachelor persona shifted from conviviality and mock authority to sentimental detachment, his motive in employing these characters as authorial stand-ins remained the same: to claim the limited authority to write.
Through the bachelor, Irving worked out his desire for and alienation from patriarchal power, initially lampooning it in Salmagundi, then analyzing the relationship between patriarchy and storytelling in The Sketch Book, and finally settling into a role as bachelor patriarch during the later part of his career. Irving feared that remaining unmarried would make him an alien in a culture oriented around the bourgeois family, and he longed for the comfort and stability associated with home. What Irving seemed to be after, with increasing intensity as his career progressed, was to be a father—to nurture a tradition, oversee a home, and be loved—without facing the responsibilities of being a husband. At the same time, American literary critics were looking for a father figure, someone who proved the vitality of American literature without being an overpowering presence. They found such a figure in Irving, who was hailed both as the “Father of American Literature” and as an exemplary sentimental bachelor. Rather than seeing Irving as exemplifying the American male’s flight from adult responsibility, then, I propose that we understand him as attempting to fuse flexibility and stability, work and home, masculinity and femininity, and detachment and feeling by imagining the bachelor in a dynamic relationship with patriarchy. Irving works not so much to challenge these categories as to borrow elements from them in constructing his own position as a bachelor observer. This chapter examines Irving’s biography, his fictions, and his influence on antebellum American culture to show how one bachelor of arts became regarded as the father of American literature.
As a young man, Irving reveled in his bachelorhood, frolicking with his friends and mocking the pretensions of authority figures. The indulged youngest son in a large middle-class family, Irving enjoyed a sort of prolonged adolescence, counting on the financial support of his family to shield him from the need to choose a profession. At the age of twenty-one, his brothers sent him on a tour of Europe because they were worried about his health. Upon returning two years later, in 1806, Irving joined a group of roistering young men who called themselves “The Lads of Kilkenny” or “The Nine Worthies of Cockloft Hall.”[3] The Lads, whose ages ranged from early twenties to mid-thirties, faced America’s awkward transition from a traditional, rural economy to a capitalist, urban one, as well as the personal transition from adolescence to manhood. They had left their parents’ homes but had not yet married or established their own homes; they were beginning to search for vocations but had not yet committed to them; and they felt pressured to conform to bourgeois standards of moderation and productivity but were not yet ready to surrender their autonomy or leisure. Through their actions and their writings, the Lads revealed a persistent fear of and fascination with wifely and paternal authority, which seemed allied in pushing young men toward adult responsibilities.
While rejecting the bourgeois values and patriarchal structure of the normative family, the Lads embraced fun rather than responsibility, excess rather than restraint. Yet they also turned to their peers to form an “all-male family” in which they could enjoy comfort and emotional bonds.[4] Defying adult responsibilities with their whimsical behavior, the Lads performed pranks, strutted about town, got drunk at their favorite taverns, and engaged in rambling, gossipy conversations about literature, politics, and fashion (Stanley Williams I: 76). They frequently enjoyed what they called “blackguard suppers,” comparing themselves to vagabonds as they indulged their appetites (Pierre Irving I:168). To craft new identities and signal their membership in the group, they adopted nicknames such as “Nuncle,” “Captain Greatheart,” and “the Patroon.”[5] Such names spoofed male authority, since Nuncle suggests avuncular knowledge, Captain Greatheart military prestige, and Patroon the patronage powers of an old Dutch governor (OED). Even if as individuals they felt impotent, the Lads could form a group identity in which each claimed (mock) authority. Young and without an established place in the economic and social structures of New York, the Lads resisted pressures to marry and find a vocation by satirizing patriarchal identities. Still, these nicknames provided clear hints at who the Lads wanted to become.
A parody of a family made up entirely of brothers, the Lads established a home of sorts at a country estate along the banks of the Passaic River that they dubbed Cockloft Hall. Here they established what we might think of as bachelor domesticity, a masculine variation on domesticity that is centered on the home but emphasizes playfulness and excess rather than discipline and nurture. By retreating from the city to the “old” home in rural New York, the Lads geographically and imaginatively returned to a more traditional, leisurely way of life, playing at being both boys and genteel patriarchs. As the name “Cockloft” suggests, here young men crowed like roosters and held “juvenile orgies,” living out a fantasy of what would happen if boys ran the home (Pierre Irving I:166). (Of course, the moniker also suggests a ribald sense of humor, an obsession with phallic power, and, well, a certain cockiness.) While feminized domesticity values restraint and politeness, the Lads acted with extravagance and wildness, enjoying sumptuous feasts, draining many bottles of wine, playing leapfrog on the lawn, and scampering up trees. After an exhausting day of feasting and frolicking, the Lads “sometimes fell sociably into a general nap in the drawing room,” preferring the open congeniality of bachelorhood to the exclusive partnership of marriage (Peter Irving, cited by PMI, I:167). For the Lads, Cockloft Hall provided the foundations of a familial identity based not on kinship ties, discipline, or genteel taste, but on boyish camaraderie, flexibility, and imagination.
The bachelor values of Cockloft Hall were reflected in Salmagundi (1807-8), an urbane periodical that continued the Lads’ tradition of mocking, yet flirting with, both domesticity and patriarchy. Adopting the masks of three bachelors—Launcelot Langstaff, the general editor, Anthony Evergreen, the fashion critic, and William Wizard, the drama critic—Irving, his brother William, and friend James Kirke Paulding celebrated the eccentricities and satirized the hypocrisies of New York.[6] In this miscellany, many aspects of bourgeois society, from politics to fashion, from the theater to home life, come under the narrators’ scrutiny, yet the narrators themselves are also treated ironically. The authors published Salmagundi anonymously and at irregular intervals (twenty issues were ultimately printed), playing with the public’s curiosity. In Salmagundi, Irving and company stake out a special status for the bachelor, claiming that he is more incisive and creative than husbands and wives governed by the norms of domesticity. Inverting domestic ideology, Launcelot Langstaff insists that the obligations brought on by marriage and family render a man dull and docile, while bachelors can go on dreaming and scrutinizing their surroundings:
Like true and independent bachelors, having no domestic cares to interfere with our general benevolence, we consider it incumbent upon us to watch over the welfare of society; and although we are indebted to the world for little else than left-handed favors, yet we feel a proud satisfaction in requiting evil with good, and the sneer of illiberality with the unfeigned smile of good-humor. (251)
As a bachelor author, Launcelot assumes a defensive position, since he is conscious that society “sneer[s]” at those outside its system. By using the term “left-handed,” which can refer to “fictitious or illegal marriages” (OED), Irving subverts the language of matrimony to insist that the world has failed to honor the bachelor. Yet he claims that because the bachelor is eccentric, outside the family circle, he is a keen reader and corrector of society.
Rather than undergoing socialization through marriage, each of Salmagundi’s bachelor narrators remains faithful to his own ideal, whether it be writing poetry, seeking the perfect woman, or devoting himself to scholarship. Free to indulge his own whims, the bachelor stands out as a romantic individual prone to fantasizing:
I hold that next to a fine lady, the ne plus ultra, an old bachelor to be the most charming being upon earth; inasmuch as by living in ‘single blessedness,’ he of course does just as he pleases; and if he has any genius, must acquire a plentiful stock of whims, and oddities, and whalebone habits. (135)
By comparing the bachelor to a “fine lady,” Irving suggests that he is a figure of gentility and romance, perhaps “feminine” in his charm, eccentricity, and devotion to beauty. Just as a lady wears a whalebone corset to give herself shape and grace, the bachelor’s “whalebone habits” frame his personality. But the comparison to a fine lady also suggests that the bachelor does not have real power in society. Like his namesake, the Arthurian knight whose purity is tarnished by his passion for Guinevere, Launcelot Langstaff is ardent about the ideal: in his case, repose, literature, and tradition. Whereas the Arthurian hero is a tragic romantic who commits the sin of adultery, Salmagundi’s Launcelot is an absurd figure who fails in his attempts to woo women because he bursts from the romantic mode into comedy. While trying to win the love of a lady, Launcelot begins to write a poem celebrating her “substantial house-keeping virtues,” but then he breaks into fun, so that “never was poor lady so most ludicrously lampooned, since lampooning came into fashion” (159), since housekeeping seems inconsequential to him. Launcelot Langstaff (or “long-staff,” “lang” being the Scottish word for “long”) may wield his staff, but he inevitably breaks it. Often the sentimental gentleman suffers from an excess of tears, but with Langstaff (and later with Geoffrey Crayon), an explosion of jollity destroys his romantic fantasies and returns him to his elbow chair, from which he mocks society’s pretensions.
Although no poet, perhaps the greatest frustrated romantic among the Cocklofts is Launcelot’s Uncle John, who is so committed to finding the ideal woman that he never marries. In a nostalgic remembrance, Launcelot describes a warm-hearted traditionalist who shies from committing to future plans, a man whose greatest pleasure is to fish. Preferring the subjunctive to the present tense, the eternal might-have-been to the actual, Uncle John shrugs when his delays cost him the hand of a prospective bride, saying, “Tut, boys! I might have had her” (215). Uncle John’s “might haves” characterize the temperament of the bachelor-author, who prefers the romance of possibility to the narrative of actuality. According to this paradigm, romance fails when it is consummated, when it is no longer an act of the imagination. The pathos—and yet also the irony—of the tale comes when Uncle John, after announcing his hope that he will “leave behind me more substantial proofs of virtue than will be found in my epitaph,” suddenly “die[s] a bachelor, at the age of sixty-three, though he had been all his life trying to get married” (213). It seems that Uncle John’s bachelorhood both heightens the emptiness of his legacy—despite his hopes, he leaves behind no children and no home—and is his legacy, for as a bachelor Uncle John offers himself as a model of both imaginative freedom and unfulfilled possibility.
To the extent that the bachelor leaves a legacy, he does so by writing and by advising the next generation. The Salmagundi authors present themselves as wise patriarchs writing for their own pleasure and for social betterment: “we advise every body… to purchase this paper:―not that we write for money; for, in common with all philosophical wiseacres, from Solomon downwards, we hold it in supreme contempt” (51). Through the bachelor pose, Irving and company avoid the taint of professional authorship and jocularly take on the power of a seemingly objective lawmaker and philosopher like Solomon. As he plays with the rhetoric of patriarchy, Irving re-presents the patriarch not as the head of a household or a progenitor, but as one who sustains a link to the past and is self-contained. Although nineteenth-century masculinity typically centers on labor and profit, bachelor literature offers a counter narrative in which single men uphold a leisured, imaginative lifestyle.[7] As Launcelot says of the fashion critic Anthony Evergreen, “He is a kind of patriarch in the fashionable world, and has seen generation after generation pass away into the silent tomb of matrimony, while he remains unchangeably the same” (53). By painting marriage as a “tomb” into which the individual is subsumed, Irving subverts the ideology of bourgeois progress and presents the bachelor as a wise counselor who maintains core values and integral selfhood.
If marriage brings about the death of independence and traditional values, then according to Irving the housewife is the murderer. The bachelors of Cockloft Hall are in an awkward position—they want to preserve the traditions so important in the “happy days of Governor Rip and the patriarchs,” but they must contend with what Irving somewhat misogynistically characterizes as the feminine zeal for “domestic innovations” (348). Because the “termagant wife” insists that the man be productive in concrete ways, Launcelot considers her “a pestilent being, who... is the bane of good-fellowship, and has a heavy charge to answer for the many offenses committed against the ease, comforts, and social enjoyments of sovereign man” (161). Although traditional domestic ideology casts the home as the space where men could nurture their feelings and relax, Irving suggests the opposite: the woman-centered home is a place of work, where men are forced to stop dreaming, surrender their power, and produce consumable goods. In his frequent attacks on the “termagant wife,” Irving accuses her of promoting the values of capitalistic progress—work, individualism, and profit—against those of a more genteel, leisured, imaginative society. Irving depicts the conversion of the home into a scene of productive labor as a threat to artistic creation, which has always depended on leisure and fancy.
Through his dreaming bachelors, Irving attempts to reclaim the domestic sphere as the space for male retirement and creativity. Pindar Cockloft, formerly a fashionable blade in love with being in love, decides to write poetry rather than chase women. By naming him “Pindar,” after the Greek poet renowned for his odes, Irving satirizes American poets’ nationalist ambitions. Pindar retreats from the city to the serenity of Cockloft Hall, bringing his “old-fashioned writing-desk” and “Chinese inkstand” (71). Pindar’s move reverses the trend in the nineteenth-century economy for workers to shift away from household industries and into public workspaces, since he both works and plays at home—indeed, his work is play. Rather than filling the house with children, Pindar writes reams of poems, stuffing them around the house in “old chests, drawers, and chair-bottoms” (70). The home becomes the site of creative, but not procreative, production, and also the repository of Pindar’s labors. In the final pages of Salmagundi, Irving suggests an integral connection between where and how the bachelors live: “there is a knot of merry old bachelors seated snugly in the old-fashioned parlor of an old-fashioned Dutch house, with a weathercock on the top that came from Holland who amuse themselves of an evening by laughing at their neighbors, in an honest way, and who manage to jog on through the streets of our ancient and venerable city without elbowing or being elbowed by a living soul” (350-51). With this vision of bachelor domesticity, Irving connects the narrators’ commentary and conviviality to the comfortable, tradition-bound retreat that they occupy. Although they make forays into society to observe its foibles, they retire to their old-fashioned home to snicker, tell stories, and bond through their comic resistance to contemporary American life.
Despite its comic swaggering, Salmagundi worries that the bachelor’s separation can lead to exclusion and irrelevance rather than to wisdom or genteel superiority. In “The Little Man in Black,” Irving tells of a bachelor so lost in learning that he is isolated from his community. When the “Little Man in Black,” a quiet, solitary man who dresses in antique clothes and carries a sheepskin folio, first arrives in a small American village, his neighbors view him as a mystery, interpreting his blackness according to their own predilections and superstitions. Some see him as a witch who casts evil spells on his neighbors, others as a “gloomy misanthrope” or a lazy good-for-nothing (314). All agree that he is an alien, and the Little Man is so engrossed in his studies that he does nothing to dispel their hostility. When Lemuel Cockloft, a respected member of the village, hears moaning coming from the Little Man’s shack, he enters and discovers the truth: he is no evil wizard, but a scholar committed to studying the work and continuing the legacy of his ancestor, the “sage” Linkum Fidelius (319). The Little Man is the last in a line of scholars. In dying he leaves behind only the book of his ancestor, replacing the biological line of inheritance with a text and its succeeding commentaries. Sadly, the text that the Little Man preserves is absurd, since Linkum Fidelius is spoofed earlier in Salmagundi as an incoherent, inconsequential scholar. Because a sympathetic passerby hears the Little Man’s cries, the scholar does not die alone, though he comes close. His status as a scholarly bachelor separates him from his community and leaves him impoverished, with only his books as “treasures” (122).
Although the ostensible moral of the story is to act with love towards all, even those who seem alien, the terror in the story seems to be one of impotence—the fear that bachelor-scholars will die leaving books as their only tangible legacy. Because the Little Man is always reading, he is misread by his neighbors, who must invent stories to interpret the blackness that cloaks him. In this sketch, Irving crystallizes the anxieties surrounding authorship in antebellum America: ignored or feared by his neighbors, the bachelor author works and dies alone, his vaunted independence leading ultimately to loneliness, his legacy limited to a pile of musty papers. All of the phallic jokes about Cocklofts and Langstaffs seem to be cover for a deeper fear of impotence. Indeed, if the bachelor patriarch’s only legacy is words and ideas, then he may be leaving behind nothing at all. Yet the Little Man in Black is distinguished from the Salmagundi gang --he deliberately lives alone and he concentrates on studying rather than creating texts.
Despite the pessimistic and cautionary tone of “The Little Man in Black,” most of Salmagundi celebrates the creativity and acuity of bachelors. According to R. Jackson Wilson, the Salmagundi authors posed as retired bachelors so that they could avoid the taint of writing for money (77-78). In correctly pointing to authorship as an underlying concern of Salmagundi (and indeed most of Irving’s works), Wilson fails to account for the subtle complexities of the bachelor pose. Not only did bachelorhood reinforce the amateurism of the authors, but it also provided a position from which Irving and his collaborators could both tweak authority and speak as experts. By posing as bachelors, Irving and company adopted an outsider’s stance, developed a vision of communal authorship, and laid claim to a male-dominated domesticity centered around leisure, imagination, and fun.
Salmagundi seemed to stimulate a fad in New York City, as young men began to cultivate what Irving called “a royal Bachelor style” and looked to him as a model (Letters 1: 289). Irving’s biographer Stanley Williams attributes some of his popularity to his bachelorhood, arguing that New York boasted “an odd romantic interest in bachelors” from 1809 to 1835 (2:335). Repudiating the demands of the bourgeois economy that they be productive, diligent workers, young men held Bachelor Balls in which the goals were “amusement” and “mirth.”[8] Yet Irving’s vision of bachelor homosociality also prompted criticism and mockery, reflecting the “inferior status” that bachelors held (Chudacoff 44). In 1815, for instance, The Intellectual Regale, or Ladies’ Tea Tray published “Bachelors’ Hall,” a parody of Salmagundi in which a band of hard-headed bachelors bumble in trying to remain independent from women.[9] Even though the idea of being a self-possessed bachelor appealed to many young men, critics charged that this model of manhood encouraged irresponsibility and alienation.
Although Salmagundi helped to promote the “royal Bachelor style,” by 1806 Irving realized that his own bachelor family, the Lads, was beginning to split apart. According to Irving, two forces threatened their “riotous, roaring, rattle-brained orgies at Dryde’s” [a New York tavern]: work and women (Letters I: 219). These forces were allied, since in committing himself to a wife a man committed himself also to work in order to support her. As Irving joked in a letter to his friend Gouverneur Kemble, women, with their “petticoat government” and “picturesque” tea parties, could turn a bold bachelor into a “well-behaving, pretty boy kind of a fellow” (Letters I:219). Through his extravagant rhetoric, Irving stages his own revolt against the authority of women and their genteel codes of behavior. Reject marriage, Irving contends, and retain wild boyhood.
But Irving himself could not resist the pull of marriage and profession, even though he mocked those who seemed to be controlling his life. Soon after Salmagundi was completed, Irving became engaged to Matilda Hoffman, the daughter of the judge who guided his legal studies and who, Irving said, “had an affectionate regard for me—a paternal one I may say” (Letters 1:739). As a pre-condition for the marriage, Judge Hoffman insisted that Irving commit to becoming a lawyer, even though the young man “had an insuperable repugnance to the study” and “a fatal propensity to Belles Lettres” (Letters I: 740, 739). Yet Irving tried to resist this propensity because of his increasing personal and professional obligations, even ending his work on the satire that was to become Knickerbocker’s History of New York. Still, Irving yearned for a more carefree and creative life. Ever the reader, Irving used a bookish metaphor to record his resentment toward the law, complaining to his friend Kemble that as he and a comrade lazed about the law office their “inveterate enemies, the ponderous fathers of the law... frowned upon us from their shelves in all the awful majesty of Folio grandeur” (Letters I:217). By personifying legal tomes as severe, intimidating fathers, Irving revealed his distaste for what the legal profession represented: a literal approach to reading, attention to mundane details, and, implicitly, Judge Hoffman’s power over his life. As he mocked this looming patriarchal authority, Irving registered his continuing preference for the bachelor values of leisure, dreaming, and whimsy. Indeed, he contrasted his sad serfdom in the legal profession to his friend Kemble’s bachelor freedom, imagining “how differently you were employed, perhaps sipping in inspiration and champagne; listening to the light joke; enjoying the union of mirth, melody, and sentiment, in a song, or basking in the sunshine of some fair Hunkamunka’s eyes” (Letters I:218). Whereas Irving felt oppressed by the never-ending dullness of the law, he joked that Kemble could cultivate a range of sentimental experiences, seeking laughter, love, and poetic inspiration.
Even though he lampooned the patriarchal power represented by his law books, Irving dutifully gained entry to the bar and worked for Judge Hoffman so he could qualify for marriage. However, Matilda died before the marriage took place. Critics have debated what effect her death had on Irving; some claimed that he never really loved her, others that he was so distraught by her death that a warm, sentimental spirit infused his writing.[10] What is verifiable is that after her death Irving gave up his legal career, retreated to the country, and, eight months later, completed Knickerbocker’s History of New York. Despondent though he may have been, Irving found the time and energy to complete this stalled manuscript. Irving himself claimed that writing Knickerbocker’s History was a form of therapy: “but the despondency I had suffered for a long time in the course of this attachment, and the anguish that attended to its catastrophe seemed to give a turn to my whole character, and threw some clouds into my disposition which have ever since hung about it. When I became more calm and collected I applied myself, by way of occupation, to the finishing my work.”[11] According to R. Jackson Wilson, Irving described his writing as therapy in order to present himself as an accidental writer rather than a professional one. Yet there is an additional explanation: Irving believed that he needed to be relieved of obligation to others in order to write.
Although Knickerbocker’s History captivated New Yorkers and brought praise from such luminaries as Sir Walter Scott, Irving resisted declaring himself a professional author. Not only did he continue to subscribe to the ideal of the author as genteel amateur, but he also remained confused about what vocation to choose (Williams I: 118-20). Between 1810 and 1815, he pinballed between different prospects, traveling, lobbying in Washington for his family’s business, editing a literary magazine, and embarking on a brief career as a military officer. For a short time in 1815, it looked as if he would join Commodore Stephen Decatur on a mission to capture pirates (living out, it would seem, the ultimate boyhood fantasy), but when this plan fell through he instead journeyed to Liverpool to assist with the family import-export firm. There he discovered that the business was on the brink of bankruptcy and that his brother Peter was very ill. When the family business finally failed in 1818, Irving, now in his thirties, could no longer fall back on his brothers for economic support.[12] As dreary responsibilities fell upon him, Irving sunk into a depression, compounded by the news that his mother had died and that his fellow Lads were jumping ship and abandoning bachelor conviviality for marriage. Irving dealt with his loneliness and vocational confusion by reworking his identity. Defending against the expectation that he settle down in America as a married bureaucrat, Irving insisted that his personality and talents best suited him for the rambling, open-ended lifestyle of the bachelor author.
Initially, though, Irving adopted the bachelor mask to express his sense of exclusion and self pity. When he received a letter announcing that his best friend Henry Brevoort would soon marry, Irving presented himself as an exile denied the nurturing and security of marriage (McFarland 149). While his friends “launch[ed] away into the married state,” Irving imagined himself abandoned “to tread this desolate & sterile shore” (Letters I: 463). Like a drowning victim treading water to stay afloat, the bachelor occupies an unstable, marginal zone between land and sea, childhood and adulthood, home and wandering, while the married man is propelled forward into the future. In a later letter, written after Brevoort had married, Irving contrasted the sterility of the bachelor with the fertility of the husband. Whereas Brevoort was “transplanted into the garden of matrimony, to flourish & fructify and be caressed into prosperity,” Irving, “poor me,” was “left lonely & forlorn, and blasted by every wind of heaven” (Letters I: 508). Echoing bourgeois culture’s idealization of matrimony as a crucial determinant of success, Irving describes Brevoort entering a sort of paradise, where he would be carefully nurtured to produce both children and money. Unlike the patriarch, the bachelor must endure isolation, uncertainty, and abuse, since he lacks the support of the bourgeois home. Yet in his letters and short fiction Irving asserted that creatively marriage represents sterility while bachelorhood bears fruit.
Irving saw an alternative to the dismal fate of the “lonely and forlorn” bachelor in the bachelor domesticity represented by the Lads of Kilkenny. If the bachelor was particularly susceptible to life’s storms, then he might establish a sanctuary with his unmarried companions. As Irving explained to Brevoort, he had hoped that he would “be able to return home, nestle comfortably down beside you, and have wherewithal to shelter me from the storms and buffeting of this uncertain world” (Letters I: 463). Using language resembling a marriage proposal, Irving adapted domestic ideology to imagine a home in which men would enjoy the liberty of boyhood as well as the seemingly feminine satisfactions of “nestling” and nurturing.[13] To another recently married friend, James Kirke Paulding, Irving revealed his fantasies about joining with his friends and forming a “knot of queer, rum old bachelors” who would “meet at the corner of Wall street and walk the sunny side of Broadway and kill time together” (Letters I: 585). Although to modern ears such a fantasy has clear homosexual overtones, it is also a dream of eternal boyhood, in which men could ramble the streets without the encumbrances of wife and family, yet still enjoy affectionate bonds. But Brevoort’s plans to marry “seemed in a manner to divorce us forever,” destroying their “bachelor intimacy” and his fantasy of an alternative domesticity (Letters I: 509.) If his friends were trading the prospect of “bachelor intimacy” for orthodox marriages, then Irving would have to construct his own shelter.
For Irving, that shelter was art. As he grappled with his family’s economic troubles and his own depression, Irving began to view writing as way to recover his dignity and salve his pain.[14] In a memorandum in which he explained his past to the mother of a prospective fiancée, Irving claimed that he wrote The Sketch Book to overcome the depression brought on by his failing fortunes:
I felt cast down—abased—I shut myself up from society—and would See no one [….] The idea suddenly came to return to return to my pen. Not so much for support, for bread & water had no terror for me, but to reinstate myself in the worlds thoughts—To raise myself from the degradation into which I considered myself fallen. (Letters 1:742-43)
According to critics such as R. Jackson Wilson and Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Irving dodged being identified as a professional author by claiming that he wrote not for profit, but to overcome sadness. As Wilson argues, “Writing for the market was extremely risky, not just economically but emotionally. And so he found it easier to say that he had been driven to the market by sorrow or necessity than that he had chosen it” (103). Although Wilson rightly points out that Irving regarded authorship anxiously, he minimizes the writer’s actual pain and overlooks the significance of his declaration that he would “raise myself” through his writing. With The Sketch Book, Irving finally embraced the role of author and began to see writing as a possible way to serve society and earn its praise. As Irving recalled in a memorandum for his publisher, John Murray III, “The sudden and great reverses in business which took place on the return of peace overwhelmed the house in which my brothers had so kindly given me an interest, and involved me in its ruin. I then determined to try my pen as a means of support and began the papers of the Sketch Book” (Letters IV 223). According to this retrospective account of how he came to authorship, Irving began writing The Sketch Book to reclaim his manhood and establish himself as a professional.
Despite this new belief that authorship was productive labor, Irving continued to insist that the lifestyle it required was at odds with marriage. Because of his “wandering disposition” and bad luck, Washington Irving thought—correctly, as it turned out—that he was “doomed to live an old Bachelor” (Letters I: 585, 463). In remaining so long a bachelor, Irving knew that he was violating conventional social mores, which instructed, as he put it in “Mine Uncle John,” “that a man could not possibly be happy except in a married state.”[15] Even though Irving attributed his bachelorhood to “circumstances,” he also indicated that he remained single because he found marriage to be incompatible with authorship (Letters I: 585). Irving doubted that authorship would pay well enough for him to support a family; perhaps more importantly, he believed that to write he needed “complete abstraction and devotion of the mind,” as the mental habits of bachelorhood clashed with the daily demands of marriage (Letters I: 737).
Still, Irving idealized domesticity, which he associated with feeling, comfort, and creative inspiration. In particular, he enjoyed visiting his sister Sarah Van Wart and her family. As he reported to his friend Brevoort:
I cannot tell you how happy I feel at finding myself embosomed in my Sisters charming little family. I am like another being from what I was in that listless period of existence that preceded my departure from America. It seems as if my whole nature had changed—a thousand kind feelings and affections that had lain torpid, are aroused within me—my very blood seems to flow more warm and sprightly.... The House, the grounds, the Household establishment, the mode of living: never before did I find myself more completely at home. (Letters I: 399)
Irving describes himself almost as a child in the home, “embosomed” by familial affection. Throughout his writings, Irving seeks for this feeling of being at home, where his emotions were charged and responsive, and where alienation was replaced by a deep sense of belonging. Yet Irving recognized his essential homelessness, viewing the Van Wart’s residence as only a temporary harbor. As he wrote to his sister after she sent him a packet of letters, “[The letters] brought me at once into your dear little family circle, and me forget for awhile that I was so far adrift from any home. These little tidings of the fireside, to a man that is wandering, are like the breezes that now and then bring to the sea-beaten sailor the fragrance of the land” (Letters I: 719). Once again, Irving describes himself as being adrift at sea, longing for the stability offered by home but unable to secure it. His idealization of home depended on his absence from it.
While Irving believed marriage might save a man from a wandering lifestyle, he also feared that such stability would destroy his own creative abilities. As he told his friend Brevoort, by marrying “[a]ll those vagabond, roving propensities will cease. They are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the feelings. You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze, or trifling eddy—get a wife & she’ll anchor you” (Letters I: 433-34). Even as he disparaged the idle mind, Irving also insisted that he needed to indulge his own “vagabond, roving propensities” in order to write, even though such habits shamed him. As he told Sir Walter Scott in turning down an editorial job, “I have no command over my talents such as they are; am apt to be deserted by them when I most want their assistance & have to watch the veerings of my mind as I would those of a weather cock.... I shall occasionally shift my residence, and trust to the excitement of various scenes & objects to furnish me with materials” (Letters I: 570). Frustrated that he could not control his productivity as a writer, Irving inverts the once proud metaphor of the cock, symbol of masculine pride and Dutch tradition, making it a sign of his imagination blown about by forces beyond his control. In asserting that fancy controlled him, and not vice versa, Irving suggests that authorship depends on rootlessness and solitude. When his brother Ebenezer suggested that he return to America, Irving somewhat defensively asserted that "I am living here in a retired and solitary way, and partaking in little of the gaiety of life, but I am determined not to return home until I have sent some writings before me that shall, if they have merit, make me return to the smiles, rather skulk back to the pity of my friends” (Letters I: 541). As Michael Davitt Bell observes, this passage reflects at once Irving’s sense of being a necessary orphan from his country and his hopes that through his literary work he could find “the means of reclaiming a lost patrimony” (67).
Irving’s determination to become an author produced The Sketch Book, a miscellany that nevertheless finds coherence in the detached perspective of Geoffrey Crayon, its bachelor narrator. By dubbing his narrator “Geoffrey Crayon,” Irving makes him a doubly literary figure, alluding both to Chaucer and a tool for writing and sketching. On his pilgrimage to England, Crayon hopes to recover the link to the “parent country” and establish a cultural identity that grows out of the English inheritance (SB 58, 59). Although Crayon believes that Americans are “a young people” who lack a mature culture of their own (SB 49), he suggests that England is alienating America with its snide criticisms: “But it is hard to give up the kindred tie! and there are feelings dearer than interest—closer to the heart than pride—that will make us cast back a look of regret, as we wander farther and farther from the paternal roof, and lament the waywardness of the parent that would repel the affections of the child” (47). The metaphor here is oddly mixed—the child is wandering, but the parent is wayward, driving away America by failing to provide an affectionate home. Such a metaphor echoes the rhetoric of the American Revolution, which called upon Lockean philosophy to argue that Britain was a bad parent that needed to be overthrown (Rogin, Father 21). Forty years after the Revolution, America was in a restless transition to establish a culture of its own, and the bachelor—neither father nor child— embodied this transition.
For the epigraph to The Sketch Book Irving chose a passage from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy that captures Crayon’s narrative stance as a bachelor: “I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they place their parts, which, methinks, are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene” (1). Through this epigraph, Irving implies that the bachelor floats through life, passively watching what unfolds as if he were a spectator at a play. In The Sketch Book, Irving considers the conventional ways that a man claims authority: head a household, perform labor, or create a work of enduring value. Even though Crayon admits the attractions of these options, he finds authority and relevance only through observing others. Despite Crayon’s insistence that he is merely a spectator following his “idle humor” wherever it leads him (SB 9), the sketches come together in showing a representative American attempting to reconcile the conflicts between America and England, creativity and tradition, and wandering and domesticity. Such conflicts go to the heart of Irving’s own struggle over authorship, particularly his efforts to establish a creative identity shielded from the demands of the marketplace and family life. Three kinds of sketches best express these tensions: reunion sketches, in which Crayon watches scenes of homecoming; literary sketches, in which Crayon questions the notion that literary production allows an author to create a timeless legacy; and American myths like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” which insist upon the importance of storytelling.
Throughout the volume, Crayon observes scenes of homecoming between men and women that both feed his sentimental speculations and reinforce his solitude. For example, when Crayon first steps off the boat in England, he witnesses an impoverished woman waiting expectantly for her sailor husband, who turns out to be on the brink of death. Even though Crayon sympathizes with the couple, he focuses on his own feelings of alienation, since he has no one to greet him: “I stepped upon the land of my forefathers—but felt that I was a stranger in the land” (SB 15). As much as Crayon may feel a kinship with English culture, the reunion of the sailor and his wife and the bustle on the dock remind him that he is alone and without power in this unfamiliar place. In “The Wife,” Crayon spectates at a happier reunion, which only reinforces his sense of homelessness and longing. Irving based this sketch on advice given him by Sir Walter Scott and on the experiences of his friend C. R. Leslie, a painter who struggled with bankruptcy (Williams 1:180). Quoting Scott’s recommendation that he marry so that he can share his success and trouble with a family, Irving details how Leslie’s wife comforted the artist through economic difficulty. As a bachelor, Crayon seems to possess special insights into the operations of home, since he can see it from a sympathetic distance. When Leslie resists telling his wife of their financial difficulties, Crayon advises him to let her share the burden. Yet Crayon cannot reap the rewards of this wisdom; as the couple reunites joyfully at their humble rural cottage, he can only stand and watch. This sketch serves both to verify that “a single man is apt to run to waste and self neglect” and to suggest that separation leads to insight (23).
Whereas the sketches about home and homecoming resonate with emotion, Crayon takes on a tone of mock romance in recounting his fascination with scholars, who he assumes are bachelors like him. Yet both types of sketches grapple with the same problem: how the bachelor can enter into a community and claim power. “London Antiquities” satirizes the assumption that the scholar is a monk laboring “in the ample solitude of the cloister” (SB 193). When Crayon stumbles across the Gothic church of the Knight Templars in the midst of busy London, he thinks that he has found a retreat “from the high way of busy money seeking life” (SB 193). Crayon romanticizes the black-cloaked figures who pass through the hall, thinking them to be members of a “magical fraternity” of scholar-necromancers whose solitude and celibacy lead them to secret knowledge. But Crayon’s fancies crumble when he realizes that the monastery is really “an ancient asylum for superannuated tradesmen and decayed householders” (SB 194-95). Crayon finds that the market has transformed even the monastery, as the active quest for knowledge has been replaced by the need to care for impotent old men made dependent by economic failure. Although Irving had hoped that scholarship would provide a retreat for the bachelor, he finds that there is no cloister safe from economic change, a message that likely reflected his own humiliation at the downfall of the family business.
While “London Antiquities” mocks the assumption that scholars are powerful genii secluded from the world, “The Art of Book-making” ridicules men-of-letters as imitators whose imaginations are so infertile that they steal the words of their “fathers.” Crayon recounts his visit to a “suite of apartments” set off from the public area of the British Museum, where he finds “pale, studious personages” “clothed in black” who are “poring intently over dusty volumes,” insensible to their surroundings and closed to conversation (SB 62, 61). Like “London Antiquities,” this sketch follows a pattern: initially Crayon assumes that these solitary men are magi, but soon he realizes that their power is limited and that their seclusion only indicates their irrelevance. Irving couples the production of literature to sexual reproduction, opening up the question of how bachelors “give birth” to literature: “I have often wondered at the extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads on which nature seemed to have inflicted the curse of barrenness, should teem with voluminous productions” (SB 61). Although ostensibly “barrenness” refers to lack of creativity, the metaphor is made literal when Crayon finds that these scholars are reproducing the works of the past by plagiarizing from their predecessors, working in a “book manufactory” rather than creating original works (SB 62). At first, Crayon explains this “copying” as a process of re-generation, as if borrowing is merely a means of continuation and preservation: “Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them—and from whom they had stolen” (SB 63). According to Michael Warner, Irving here presents the idea of literary parthenogenesis, whereby authors can create new objects apart from the structures of biological reproduction: “Literary reproduction is, for Irving, the ultimate form of surrogacy: a mode of cultural reproduction in which bachelors are, at last, fully at home” (792). Although Warner rightly argues that Irving looks to literature as an alternative to biological reproduction, he overemphasizes the author’s enchantment with the past and misses the comic horror of the scene. In this twisted vision of literary heredity, authors produce themselves through incestuous acts with their fathers, then become fathers themselves as succeeding generations steal from them. Such acts produce wan and imitative works.
By reproducing the works of their fathers (mothers are notably absent from the whole process), the younger writers attempt to take on paternal authority, but they instead demonstrate their own irrelevance and inability to create a compelling whole. Crayon’s metaphor of literary fathers unintentionally begetting their successors comically explodes when he imagines the dead authors rioting against the plagiarists. Reversing the Bloomian scene of sons revolting against fathers, the patriarchs attack their thieving descendents to protect their work from replication. Through Crayon’s comic fantasy, Irving shows how the imagination can expose pretension and open up a view of society that is at once absurd and insightful. Crayon sets himself apart from the scene, so his vivid imaginings contrast with the mechanistic laboring of the scholars. When he laughs, releasing an uncontrolled burst of energy, he is ejected from the room. As an intruder in the factory of letters, Crayon finds that authorship has become as mechanized as other industries, so that originality and fertility have given way to imitation for profit. With this sketch, Irving returns to a question that troubled him in Salmagundi: how to claim the authority to write, and how to enter into a line of literary patriarchs. As we laugh at the thievery of hack writers and the powerlessness of their predecessors to stop them, literary production is exposed as a fraud. However, by acting as a spectator, Irving suggests that an author can survey the cultural milieu (or, in this sketch, melee) without being damaged by it; detachment and imagination produce understanding.
While “The Art of Bookmaking” focuses on the sterility of contemporary authors, past authors are portrayed as similarly impotent in “The Mutability of Literature.” The sketch replaces an author-centered aesthetics of patriarchal inheritance with a reader-centered aesthetics of sentimental response. Seeking a quiet retreat from the noise of schoolchildren at play, Crayon enters the library at Westminster Abbey, “a kind of literary catacomb, where authors, like mummies, are piously entombed, and left to blacken and moulder in dusty oblivion” (SB 101). Despite the authors’ hopes of achieving “boasted immortality,” their books instead embody their own fate as they deteriorate in wooden cases. Crayon points out a bitter irony: in attempting to produce literary works that would endure, authors “buried themselves in the solitude of cells and cloisters,” making themselves dead to the world (SB 101). Once again, the only active force in this literary tomb is Crayon’s playful inventiveness, as he imagines an old tome coming to life and chastising him for letting books collect dust. Crayon retorts that literature should comprise not dead thoughts, but living ideas.
As with “The Art of Bookmaking,” Irving compares literary production to biological cycles of reproduction and death, implying that fathers should have no sway over sons beyond providing a space for their creativity (SB 105). Only works that touch the heart and “have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature” (SB 106)—works like Shakespeare’s—are valued in the future, passed like “family jewels” from one generation to the next (SB 107). By describing lasting works as “family jewels,” Irving rethinks the idea of literary inheritance along sentimental rather than patriarchal lines. Whereas literary influence is often imagined as an oppressive burden handed down by literary fathers, Irving suggests that literature can both inspire with its beauty and be recast for new purposes. In the three sketches that focus on Crayon’s encounters with old books and authors, Irving works through the central problem of literary legacy by showing the derivativeness of modern literature and the enduring value of works keyed to the emotions. Even as Irving acknowledges that authors are no longer cloistered monks or aristocrats supported by patrons, he works towards a model of authorship that is set away from the marketplace and driven by fancy and feeling.
In The Sketch Book, Irving describes several men who possess the creative, independent, and sentimental masculinity that he seeks. In paying tribute to these men—a scholar, a fisherman, and a king—Irving tackles The Sketch Book’s core questions, questions that likewise help to define the careers of Mitchell, Melville, and James: What kind of lifestyle promotes creativity and contentment? Can the author escape the pressures of the marketplace? What should the author’s relationship be with domesticity and history? In “Roscoe,” for example, Irving focuses on a banker and scholar who demonstrates that intellectual pursuits and commerce can coexist, but who ultimately suffers economic collapse.[16] At the opening of the sketch, Irving proposes that Roscoe’s ability to devote his leisure time to art furnishes an instructive example for America, “where literature and the elegant arts must grow up side by side with the coarser plants of daily necessity” (SB 17). Nevertheless, Irving insists that artistic production springs from “the solitude of the mind” and yearns for a domesticity oriented around creativity rather than family (SB 18). Even though Roscoe lived with his wife and ten children, Irving ignores their presence and instead describes the author closeted with his books, “these silent, yet eloquent, companions of thought” (SB 19). Yet economic concerns invade Roscoe’s resort, as bankruptcy forces him to sell his house and his books. Irving sneers at the “knot of speculators debating with calculating brow over the quaint binding and illuminated margin of an obsolete author,” insinuating that they reduce literature to commodity and rob Roscoe of his sentimental companions (SB 19). Although Irving ostensibly is describing the dissolution of a library, in a larger sense he is mourning the invasion of literature by market-based values. Irving ends the sketch by insisting upon the supremacy of art over commerce: “[Roscoe] is like Pompey’s column at Alexandria, towering alone in classic dignity” (SB 20). As he memorializes his friend Roscoe, Irving insists that the artist remains separate from and significant to society no matter what befalls him.
Whereas “Roscoe” documents the destruction of a private creative space, in “The Angler” Irving extols the pleasures of bachelor domesticity through his portrait of a contented fisherman. Alluding to Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, or The Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Irving suggests that the Angler of this tale resolves the tensions between the bachelor’s needs and society’s demands: he lives a solitary life, but is valued by his community; he is retired from work but still fanciful and active; and he is independent, but shapes a legacy through the young men he instructs in the art of fishing and life. Authors as well as fishermen can learn from the Angler, since his patience and knowledge exemplify the creative process. To suggest the connection between writing and fishing, Irving includes an epigraph from Walton’s friend Sir Henry Wotton: “The jealous trout that low did lie,/ Rose at a well-dissembled flie./ There stood my friend, with patient skill,/ Attending of his trembling quill” (SB 264). The quill is both the rod that reels in the fish and the writing implement that records the catch. Rather than adopting the industrious work ethic driving the capitalist economy, the Angler practices a leisured productivity, waiting for the fish (or inspiration) to strike. The Angler seems to represent a solution to the dilemmas facing Crayon. Rather than being restricted by domesticity, he rules his own space; rather than worrying about making money, he enjoys the creative and contemplative act of fishing.
Yet Irving cannot directly embrace the Angler as model for sentimental, creative manhood, since he comes from a lower social class and fishes rather than writes. Thus he turns to a poet who incarnates the values that Irving connects to both bachelorhood and art: distance, sympathy, and self-sufficiency. In “A Royal Poet,” a sketch about the imprisoned King James I of Scotland, Irving suggests that wisdom, poetry, and deep humanity can result from seclusion and deprivation. While a captive at Windsor Castle, James I composed beautiful love poetry to a lady wandering through the garden below, leading Irving to hypothesize that “it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement” (SB 69). Just as James was inspired to create because he was separated from what he desired, so Crayon advances a spectator’s aesthetics in which distance drives artistic production. For Irving, reunion leads to death, while separation stimulates creativity.
In his most famous tales, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving invents myths of male creativity’s place in the community. He departs from the Crayon formula, setting both sketches in America and narrating them from the perspective of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a curmudgeonly bachelor historian. Whereas “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” mocks Ichabod Crane for trying to satisfy his greedy desires through marriage, “Rip Van Winkle” tells how a father became a bachelor and thus was freed to be an idle storyteller. In creating what became American myths, Irving endorses storytelling and tradition over industry and progress, simultaneously advancing a fanciful approach to literary invention and satirizing the tenuous position of the man of letters in American culture.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” revolves around the comic conflict between a sleepy traditional community and an active promoter of progress. A “drowsy, dreamy” place, Sleepy Hollow cleaves to a traditional lifestyle of work, storytelling, and shared recreation (SB 273). When the Connecticut Yankee Ichabod Crane comes to Sleepy Hollow, he threatens these values by casting himself as a “pioneer” who will teach children the modern technology of reading (SB 274). To most of the men, Ichabod’s “head-work” seems to be no work at all, but many of the women embrace him as a “man of letters,” since “he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed” (SB 276). The satire operates on several levels: Irving demonstrates that Ichabod is not really a man of letters; his knowledge of literature is actually quite limited and he places too much unthinking faith in the printed word. However, Irving also shows the association in antebellum America of reading with gentility, both in a negative sense (the man of letters doesn’t really work) and a positive (the man of letters can bring prestige into a home).
Ichabod does qualify in one way as man of letters. According to Irving’s implicit definition, his life as a bachelor leaves him free to indulge his extravagant, idiosyncratic imagination. His freedom, however, is not total. He is vulnerable because he has no family or home, lodging in a different place each week. While Irving defines the residents of Sleepy Hollow according to their membership in one sort of group or another, from Brom Bones’ set of young blades to Van Tassel’s family, he often shows Ichabod alone and afraid. Craving the stability and plenty that he associates with marriage, Ichabod fantasizes about marrying Katrina Van Tassel and assuming control of her lush, well-stocked “paternal mansion” (278). Trying to bring marketplace values into this traditional community, Ichabod assumes that marriage will allow him to convert the “domains” of the Van Tassels into cash and take over “wild lands” (280). Rather than planning to maintain the paternal estate, Ichabod dreams of expanding the empire, hoping to replace the ease and nonchalance of the village’s traditional patriarchy with a more capitalist, acquisitive model.
In describing Ichabod’s calculations to advance himself through marriage (something that Irving pledged he would never do himself), Irving launches into a mock romance in which the “lank” schoolmaster competes with the brawny Brom Bones “to win his way to the heart of a country coquette” (274, 281). While Ichabod attempts to assume the role of a courtier in the courtly love tradition, covering a sheet of paper with failed attempts at poetry, Bones uses more cunning means to defeat his rival. Taking advantage of Ichabod’s artistic sensibility and credulity, Brom Bones acts out a frightening tale, confronting his victim with what he fears most: the headless horseman, a story embodied. Ichabod becomes an exile, fleeing the community because his nightmares have come true.
By chasing a scheming Yankee out of Sleepy Hollow, Brom Bones reasserts patriarchal tradition against modernization, production against consumption, and masculinity against effeminacy. Even Ichabod’s name suggests his unsuitability to assume a fatherly role in the community. Ichabod, which means “Where is the glory?,” was the name given to the unwanted son of Phineas after the defeat of Israel by the Philistines (Samuel 4:1). “Abraham Bones,” on the other hand, calls to mind both the patriarch of Israel and strength. Even though Brom is presented as a youth who engages in pranks, Irving implies that he will grow into his name and become a father, while Ichabod will remain forever the unwanted son, the desiring bachelor. In a larger sense, Brom’s triumph suggests that practical masculinity will defeat the man of letters, at least in a place bound by tradition. Yet this defeat is welcomed precisely because Ichabod’s penchant for change is so threatening to Sleepy Hollow’s tradition of leisure, community, and storytelling. As Joel Porte argues, Ichabod represents the failed “pioneer of the mind” who is at once too gullible and too scheming, too wed to book-learning and too keen on serving his appetites (51). By mocking Ichabod’s gullibility, Irving joins in the criticism of the bachelor for his “overindulgence” in imagination, bookishness, and detachment from reality (Traister 126). Rather than producing, Ichabod consumes, yet he also serves as a modernizing force, upsetting the folkways with literacy and plans for capitalistic expansion.
Because Ichabod is a bachelor without a traditional productive role in the community, the residents care little when he disappears. Hans Van Ripper even celebrates the pedagogue’s disappearance by burning his “magic books and poetic scrawl,” reasserting the community’s sense that literacy produces nothing worthwhile and that the man of letters threatens tradition (295). Ichabod embodies the practical anxieties of authorship that pained Irving: he is cowardly, impotent, and alienated from the community, despite (or because of) his striving. However, in the postscript to “Sleepy Hollow,” Knickerbocker pays tribute to the “pleasant, shabby gentlemanly old fellow” who related the tale (SB 296). Even though Irving mocks the would-be man of letters, he celebrates the actual storyteller for his creative power, just as Brom Bones earns the respect of his community for his inventive tricks. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” represents Irving’s attempt to value tradition and playfulness over the uxorious, expansionist impulses of the Yankee reformer.
In contrast to Ichabod Crane, a bachelor who looks to marriage to establish himself as a wealthy patriarch, Rip Van Winkle is a husband who longs for the freedom of bachelorhood. According to the conventional reading of the story put forward by Leslie Fiedler, Judith Fetterley, David Pugh, and others, “Rip Van Winkle” tells of a man’s escape from domesticity into nature and male fraternity. Such a reading overlooks Rip’s fear of the wild as well as his desire to convert the home into a place where he can daydream. It’s not home that Rip wants to escape, but the tyranny of his “termagant” wife, who berates her “hen-pecked husband” for failing to maintain the family’s land and husband its resources (35). In a larger sense, Irving implicitly criticizes female domesticity for forcing men to work and denying them autonomy. To find a place where he is free to dawdle and engage in reverie, Rip must retreat into the wild forest, away from his wife’s tart tongue and improving impulses.
By venturing into the wilderness, Rip walks away from the urgencies of the present into an “unknown” fantasy zone where Hendrick Hudson and his crew of archaic Dutch explorers rule. “[D]ressed in a quaint outlandish fashion” that reveals them to be from out of time, the explorers form a bachelor fraternity as they play nine-pins and drink spirits (SB 34). These men seem to be living out Rip’s fantasies, since they can indulge in pleasure without censure from shrewish wives. But Rip realizes that he is not part of this gang—their play is silent and somber, and they treat him like a servant rather than a fellow escapee from domestic tyranny. Indeed, they frighten him even more than Dame Van Winkle, since he cannot decipher their “strange, uncouth, lack-luster countenances” (SB 34). As he stands in the natural “amphitheater” watching the performances of the gloomy crew, Rip becomes like a bachelor narrator, spectating rather than participating. An exile both from domesticity and fraternity, from the drive of the present and the fantasies of the past, Rip sleeps twenty years away in the forest until he can be sent forward into a time where he can fuse the independence of bachelorhood with the comfort of domesticity.
Although initially Rip returns to the village a stranger, doubting his own identity because no one recognizes him, ultimately he realizes his fantasy of being a father without having to submit to the responsibilities of being a husband. Rip re-enters the village on Election Day, which turns out to be his liberation day, since he has been freed from “petticoat government” by the death of his wife (SB 49). “[R]everenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war,’” Rip assumes an honored position at the head of the village, telling stories that connect the “rising generation” with the past (SB 40). Irving envisions an alternative to both the bourgeois manhood that Rip’s wife presses him toward and the old-style patriarchy of biological succession, as the henpecked husband becomes a bachelor father. Like Irving, Rip assumes a position of importance through his skills as a chronicler of the town’s past, as storytelling benefits the larger community (Warner 784). But he is only able to become town patriarch after his daughter Judith Gardenier recognizes and “adopts” him, suggesting that he needs to be welcomed by family before he can be received by the community. Since Judith cares for two Rips, her son and her father, R. Jackson Wilson argues that this sketch shows the infantalization and emasculation of the male storyteller and the impossibility of reconciling authorship and manhood (SB 109-110). I would argue more optimistically, however, that it describes the storyteller’s ability to have it all: to be at once father and youth, to escape responsibility to home and market yet still enjoy their comforts, to create works of the imagination that matter to the larger community, to preserve the past but also to guide the future generation as represented by Rip’s grandson Rip. In this core American myth, Irving reconciles the tensions between domesticity and imagination by suggesting that the storyteller needs both the freedom and leisure to create and the authority to be heard.