Washington Irving: An American Original [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Once I got into Brian Jay Jones' biography of Washington Irving, I couldn't put it down. And I will say that it didn't seem like an automatic winner. I knew less than nothing about Irving, whose name I associated with the Walt Disney version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and with Rip van Winkle; that's about it. But now I feel I have been transported back by the scruff of my neck into the raucous, brawling and yet strangely elegant world of early America. An eager nurse trailed George Washington through the unpaved streets of downtown New York, and obliged him to stroke the tousled head of baby Washington Irving, guilt tripping him I suppose by saying that this baby was named after you, General! And thus it began, young Irving's vicarious association with nearly every president up until Abraham Lincoln (Irving finally died the year before Lincoln took office). Presidents I didn't even remember play in this fascinating story!

Brian Jay Jones speculates that we don't know, but that Irving at least in his youth might have had some sort of gay lifestyle, and I would agree, but after a wild youth his sense of fun seems to have disappeared in general, and the masks he invented early in life, the masks of the graying Diedrich Knickerbocker and the patrician Geoffrey Crayon, sort of froze onto his face right quick. And onto his genitals too? There doesn't seem to be one case of him actually having sex, but maybe people did things different back then? Maybe you could carouse around with your heavy-drinking bachelor friends till you were about thirty, having sex with them too, but that didn't count as a preference? Irving's talents changed over the years from the sly, anti-Jefferson provocations of his (faked) History of New York, to the mellow sounds of The Alhambra and Wolfert's Roost. He seemed fascinated by biography, and wrote lives of such disparate figures as Columbus, Oliver Goldsmith, and the prophet Mohammed (known then as "Mahomet"); even the teenaged "poetess" Margaret Miller Davidson came under his biographical gaze. He was a man of intense, if sometimes scattered curiosity, and many found him loveable. Brian Jay Jones excels at parsing out the strange passion the widow Mary Shelley conceived for Irving; this could have been a whole novel all by itself. He's good with people, the big and the small, the famous and the forgotten. Irving's encounters with his peers are especially well drawn; his infatuation with Walter Scott as a substitute father, a father of art; his rivalry with the firecracker James Fenimore Cooper; his kindness to the ambitious Edgar Allan Poe. When he meets up with Clark (from Lewis and Clark) on his trip to the frontier, it's like worlds smashing together, worlds of reference and power. And Jay Jones can also strip away the Victorian curtains of prudery which in the past have occluded our view of early Federal life; it is somehow reassuring to find Irving travelling through the hideous English pass through a mountain that his contemporaries called the "Devil's @sshole."

But he goes too far, I think, in his vocabulary which is continually anachronistic. The nurse who pestered George Washington is called a "presidential groupie." An entire chapter is called "Workaholic." At times of stress, he gets "burnt out." Then he has "a meltdown." Then he gets "a stalker of sorts." The Quarterly Review's attitude towards all things American? Snotty. Just a handful of dozens and dozens of tacky neologisms, slips into a modern, suburban vocabulary that somehow distort what one feels the real emotional experience must have been for Irving, by re-casting him and his life into sound-bites of pop psychology, while the real thing must have been fuller or at any rate more tentative than Jones gives it credit for. Reduce reductiveness, Jones, for otherwise your life of Irving is first rate.

I agree wholeheartedly with the other reviewers here that Jones's biography of Irving is well written, informative, interesting, and engaging. His style is light and airy and anything but academic, which is a good thing. My only complaint is his total disregard for the books themselves that Irving wrote, other than how hard he worked on them (especially near the end of his life) and a few comments on how they were received by the critics (usually very well except for a few, "Tales of a Traveller" and "Bonneville," for example, that bombed). "I have deliberately left literary criticism and analysis of his oeuvre in the capable hands of others," he writes in the preface. Brief summaries or simple mention of where Irving succeeded or failed in various works would have added to the significance of the biography. It's almost like reading a book about a great general but never getting any specifics about the battles he fought. Jones's biography is very good as far as it goes; if only it had gone a tad further.

This book is refreshing, original and well written. Mr. Jones' prose is vibrant and alive. Most likely, Mr. Irving would have been pleased--although perplexed as to why it has taken so long--that his writing and life are getting such literary care. Good job Mr. Jones.