The lees of fire

An American year: Irving, Melville, McCarthy and Wolfe

One thing I was never told growing up about Washington Irving’s famous 1819 story “Rip van Winkle” is how much the story centers on the “henpecked” protagonist’s aversion to his wife. Her torment of her husband for his less than exemplary performance as farmer, head of household, et cetera, is what motivates him to take to the hills with dog and gun for a nice day on his own, at which point (as is well known) he is set upon by elves offering a flagon of ale that makes him sleep for twenty years.

On his return, a now aged Van Winkle is bemused by how the political culture—transformed by the American Revolution—has become violent, partisan and crude under the republic, instead of respectful and sleepy as before under the monarchy. But contemporary retellings rarely note that he is most overjoyed to find his wife dead and his son old enough to become his drinking partner. The story ends by noting that many men similarly oppressed by their wives long for “a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon.”

Irving is a funny figure to have ended up dubbed, by my Penguin Classics edition at least, the “grandfather of American literature,” since at one level he is simply a replacement-level Romantic scribbler who adapted the repertoire to American conditions. (A generation later Poe did something similar with much better results.) But such adaptation was not easy. In the preamble to the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Irving notes that the unsettled nature of American society—a “restless country”—makes it difficult to tell ghost stories, except in “our long-established Dutch communities”:

Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered, long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon.

Though few would accuse him of being the greatest American writer, I find it laudable that Irving seems to have imagined his ghost stories as a gesture against the American grain—and impressive that he obtained such durable acclaim by telling them. It seems fitting for American literature to have reached, already at such an early point in its development, the recognition that it stood somehow opposed to the society from which it emerged.

Not irrelevant here is another of Irving’s writings, on King Philip (or Metacomet), the Pokanoket chief who led native tribes in rebellion against New England colonists in the late seventeenth century. Irving offers an early revisionist account of American history, vindicating Metacomet (albeit along “noble savage” lines) and condemning the brutality of the colonists, as well as the narrow and warped perspective of their chroniclers.

Americans have occupied much of my attention this year, or so I realize in retrospect. The New Statesman recently published an essay I wrote on Tom Wolfe—or rather, on what made him who he was and why he has few imitators today. I have also written this past year on Norman Mailer, Cormac McCarthy and Edward Hopper, as well as what some non-Americans, namely Tocqueville and Freud, thought and wrote about this country.

Along with some Old World writers (Bernhard, Turgenev, Flaubert), this year I’ve been catching up on the American literary tradition: Hawthorne and Melville as well as Irving. Just now on a customary New Year’s Eve camping trip in the Southern California backcountry I read more of Melville’s sketches from the Galapagos (which he calls the “Encantadas”). These were published in the mid-1850s, after Darwin’s visit aboard the Beagle but before the fame of On the Origin of Species (1859) widely associated the islands with modern natural science. Perhaps unexpectedly given the island chain’s iconic status in the contemporary imagination as an untouched natural wonder and hub for biodiversity (or what have you), Melville, looking at them from a Romantic perspective, finds them to be the most depressing and forlorn places on earth:

Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea, and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles, looking much as the world at large might after a penal conflagration.

The islands, as Melville puts it, are fashioned from the “lees of fire.” Reading these pages on what was a cold and damp night in the California wilderness at the end of another year, this phrase caught in my head and bounced around as I put down the book and watched the flames of the campfire recede to red embers.