In the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving could number Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Lord Byron among his ardent fans. The widowed Mary Shelley fell in love with him from afar and pursued him by letter. President John Tyler appointed him Minister to Spain. His door-stopper biographies of Christopher Columbus and George Washington were bestsellers. Despite the wide range—and uneven quality—of his subjects, his prose was universally admired. His name alone could sell books. How times have changed! These days, Irving is known for the bare fact that he was the United States’ first author to make a living wholly from his pen, and for just two small stories from the first half of his career: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” His biographies and histories are superseded, his hackwork is justly forgotten, and so (less justly) is his travel writing. Few would classify him as a peer of the authors who adored him.
None of this would have surprised Irving himself. He expected his star to sink below the horizon. As Phillip Lopate puts it: “Irving was always preparing himself to be forgotten.”
Lopate’s A Washington Irving Sketch Book is the tribute of one minor writer to another. It’s a collection of essays examining individual facets of Irving’s life and work in roughly chronological order. Each of Irving’s major works is given a chapter, but so are disparate topics like his bachelorhood, his affinity for painters, his melancholy temperament, his forays into paraliterature, and the house he built in the Hudson Valley. I don’t call Phillip Lopate a “minor writer” in order to demean him. It’s a phrase he applies to Irving in this book: “I am not trying to promote Irving to the top levels of the American pantheon. I agree, Irving is a minor writer.” And it’s a phrase Lopate has applied to himself, for instance in an interview in Tablet Magazine in 2023: “I didn’t imagine [as a young person] being a successful ‘minor writer.’ I have my place in the culture, not a huge place, but it’s respectable.” He is known as a personal essayist and anthologist of personal essays. He considers Irving a model. So what makes them both minor writers?
First, a minor writer requires a minor genre. Lopate’s is the essay, and Irving’s was the sketch. Lopate defines the sketch as “a highly flexible, casual, almost promiscuously diaristic form of writing that would allow him excursions into memoir, vignette, rumination, fable, criticism, travel piece, and even, on occasion, fiction.”
Second, a minor writer is retiring and modest. “A part of [Irving] craved invisibility,” suggests Lopate. He made a habit of attributing his books to pseudonymous personae: Diedrich Knickerbocker in A History of New York, Geoffrey Crayon in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Fray Antonio Agapida in A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada. This was a normal literary strategy for a familiar essayist, but Irving could carry it to a pathological extreme. Even after he was famous, he became cross with his English publisher for insisting on putting his own name (and not Agapida) on the cover of Granada. One way Irving used these personae was to let them express strong opinions of a kind he personally avoided out of tact and gallantry. Agapida’s narration of the reconquista was ethnically and religiously bigoted in a way that Irving himself was not. In person (and under his own name) Irving was kind and diplomatic.
This was not a shallow gallantry; his kindness could take remarkable forms. In 1839, for example, he stepped aside from writing a history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico so as not to overshadow the less-well-known William H. Prescott. At this time Irving was the most popular and successful author in the country, and he’d been preparing for years to write his book. It would undoubtedly have made him a lot of money. Instead, he donated his notes to the younger author. Lopate suggests this was not simply generosity. Irving nursed a persistent regret that, unlike his brothers, he had never attended college. He read widely to educate himself, but he never quite escaped the autodidact’s feeling of inferiority. Even after Sir Walter Scott virtually named him a successor, he wrote to the famous older author, “I have no command of my talents.” He made a habit of writing self-deprecating prefaces to his books, apologizing for the inadequacy of efforts for which he had every expectation of an eager audience. When he learned Prescott planned to write a book about the same subject as himself, he wrote to the younger man, “I at once felt how much more justice the subject would receive at your hands.” In short, despite his success, Irving seems to have believed his own genius was small.
Lopate professes to “enjoy,” “esteem,” and “admire” Irving, and in his own career he has sometimes imitated Irving’s tendencies to public modesty. For instance, his career retrospective essay collection, Getting Personal (2003), includes a preface that seems to borrow several tactics from Irving: self-deprecation and a persona. It’s introduced by a fictional editor, a “Dr. Horst Shovel,” who claims to have found scattered notes after Lopate died (from a fictional aneurysm) and organized them into the preface. It’s full of jokes at his own expense. For example:
When I was younger it seemed to me that the luckiest stroke would be if, after I died, some discerning editor or critic were to put out an anthology, choosing the best of my essays, and pointing out that, while the books as a whole do not stand up, because “he never learned to shape his material into an overarching structure, or to cut,” nevertheless a belletristic sensibility is at work here that is “interesting,” or at least characteristic of its time.
Is there something false in this tone? It seems ironic and uses one of Lopate’s favorite conceits—the claim that he doesn’t like to edit, immediately belied by a highly wrought and self-conscious context. Lopate’s self-deprecation differs from Irving’s in that I don’t believe him. For him, it’s a style, a tactic, a choice, not a courtesy, and certainly not the expression of a genuine self-doubt. Sometimes I think Lopate is pretending to be less than he is.
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This hunch sent me back to an earlier book by Lopate. Notes on Sontag (2009), the clear template for A Washington Irving Sketch Book. These are his only two books about other writers. The titles of both are a play on the career-launching publications of their respective subjects, “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving. Lopate mentions the older publication in the newer one: “in my one previous biographical work, on Susan Sontag, I was ambivalent and sometimes rather skeptical.”
This understates the case. He was fundamentally critical of Sontag. She crusaded against the values of realism, naturalism, humanism, and the personal, all of which Lopate supports. She also acted as if she disdained the essay form (which Lopate loves and champions), always pivoting when asked about her own mastery of essays to discuss her novels instead. In many ways, Sontag and Lopate were philosophical enemies. They also knew each other personally. She taught at Columbia University when he studied there, and they later met in New York City as fellow writers and cinephiles. His anecdotes about their interactions are amusing at his own expense. For instance, he recounts how Sontag kept catching him leaving in the middle of movies, which gave quite the wrong impression of his seriousness. Sontag didn’t admit him to her coterie of acolytes, didn’t seem to respect him very much, and failed to pursue the friendship he sometimes desired.
Notes on Sontag is an excellent book because of this antipathy. She spurred him to defend the values she attacked, and he became his cranky best when writing about her. The friction gave him traction. The antagonism between author and subject tore away his veil of self-deprecation. Roused by Sontag, Lopate didn’t speak of the essay as a minor genre: He made the case for its standing as major literature. He didn’t fall back on the personal because of an implicit inferiority before the objective: He championed it as a source of truth. In short, Lopate’s book about a writer he dislikes is far more electric and revealing than his book about a writer he admires.
This is clear in form as well. In Notes on Sontag, Lopate quotes Sontag liberally, working short bits of her writing into the flow of his own argument, but in A Washington Irving Sketch Book, he studs his chapters with block quotes. Some go on for more than a page. The stated function of these lengthy excerpts is to expose the reader to Irving’s lovely prose. Unfortunately, to my ear, the quoted prose is often remarkably boring. I couldn’t help but feel that Irving’s star has faded for a reason. There’s something soporific about the smoothness of this style:
The stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character, must not confine his observations to the metropolis. He must go forth into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their conditions, and all their habits and humors.
It’s like an unobjectionable watercolor, or dinner jazz on low volume in a fancy restaurant—pretty, but almost too restful and balanced and alliterative to hold the attention, especially as it burbles on, paragraph after paragraph, in an unbroken rhythm, exploiting every last sonic symmetry. No style could be more removed from the desiderata of our age, when eyeball kicks, syntactic startlements, and aphoristic punch are all in vogue. “We have moved past these Victorian expectations and require spicier seasonings,” allows Lopate. Mere smoothness and prettiness won’t cut it. We need lumps in our oatmeal. “Can we even detect what these respondents were appreciating, or have his felicities of prose become absorbed too completely to bear noticing?” Lopate’s own style is more engaging to a contemporary reader than that of the man he is adulating. It is informal, colloquial, and clear, varied in rhythm and emphasis, so the book presents the odd spectacle of a more interesting writer admiring the work of a less interesting writer. It’s the complete reverse of the Sontag book.
The more I weigh Lopate’s Sontag against Lopate’s Irving, the more striking the contrast becomes, and the more perplexing. Consider, for example, the role of his favorite subject—himself—across these two books. Sontag’s essays (with a few lovely exceptions) resisted autobiographical impulses, so Lopate strewed Notes on Sontag with personal autobiographical stories, rehearsing every last encounter the two had, as if to underscore their differences and assert the ultimate triumph of his own perspective. He also made a point to argue that the unique form of literary celebrity Sontag attained was ironically based on a personality created in the public mind by the severity and straining seriousness of her essays. She tried to be impersonal, but premised her fame on an image of herself as an imperious intellectual.
Washington Irving is supposedly a model for Lopate’s own work, a happy indulger of the personal. Yet in Lopate’s book on Irving, there is remarkably little of Lopate. Only one early chapter, entitled “An Aside,” as if it’s the garrulous indulgence of an old man, is a personal essay, and he uses it to recall a walk he took around the same parts of New York City that Irving would have known. After that, Lopate rarely shows up again, except for some brief passages at the end of the book describing his visit to Irving’s house, now a museum. The book is close to a straightforward literary biography in structure, describing Irving’s life in basically chronological sequence, and summarizing his books one by one.
What’s going on here? Why is Lopate so personal in his book about the enemy of the personal, and so impersonal in his book about the most personable of writers? Why is he so involved and invigorated when responding to the work of an enemy, and so bland and uninspired when recounting the work of a model? I confess that I wondered, contemplating this question, if Lopate is simply losing his edge at this late stage of his career. But it gets weirder. Just as Lopate’s study of Sontag reveals how the intensity of her persona defeated her pretensions to impersonality, his study of Irving reveals how the man was curiously inaccessible behind his ethos of openness.
Professionalism guarded Irving’s reserve. He was thrown on the resources of his pen early in life. He had to support various family members, so he never wanted to turn down a project, especially if it paid well. He overcame an early tendency to writer’s block by acquiring a steely work ethic that made him a mood-indifferent workhorse. In a chapter entitled “The Hack Writer,” Lopate explains that Irving “learned to work without stint and to write consistently, regardless of any blues he might be feeling.” He took on strange projects if they paid enough, for instance writing Astoria, a corporate hagiography for John Jacob Astor tracing the fortunes of a fur company in the Pacific Northwest, and, on another occasion, composing a sentimental biography of a religious child poet who died young, Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson. Of this second book, Lopate writes: “I see it rather as a job he undertook, like a stonemason carving a tomb: Irving was attempting to perform in yet another genre whose rules he followed consistently, for better or worse.” Even Irving’s private journals are curiously distant, rapidly cataloging what he saw and what the people around him did, with little commentary on his own reactions or emotional life. Even in his most intimate notations he was a writer storing up material for the marketplace.
Lopate’s admiration for this man, given the whole drift of pretty much everything else he’s ever written (a gigantic orgy of appreciation for the personal), is rather odd. He even mounts a defense of impersonal hackwork: “The exigent life of a writer often requires being a hack as well as an original thinker. There is even pride in knowing one’s craft so well that doing hackwork adequately can seem an achievement.” Mulling these uncharacteristic remarks, I couldn’t help reflecting that no matter how much Lopate claims to admire the hack, his own artistic temperament would never permit him to become one. In his extensive apologia for the personal essay, he has made a cult of self-expression, holding up authenticity of reaction as a primary moral and aesthetic canon. In fact, early in this very book Lopate describes his own inability to perform hackwork.
In the early chapter “An Aside”—the only true personal essay in the collection—Lopate’s walk takes him past the New York Stock Exchange. There his writing veers off course to indulge a memory. Once, he tells us, he received an invitation to write “an essay for the annual report of the Stock Exchange.” The invitation surprised him, a known leftist with no great fondness for capitalism, but he decided to give it a shot anyway, to take a swing at some good old-fashioned hackwork. It didn’t go well. After wandering around the building, he found himself taking a characteristic interest in the side characters of finance, the young “runners” (junior employees who transmitted paper orders from phone clerks to floor brokers). He wrote his essay “about ‘the Little People,’ the workers behind the scenes at the Exchange.” It was rejected. He attributed this to his inability to “become an all-purpose hack writer, a vocation that takes a special brazenness.” Then the rest of the book is about Irving, his consummate professionalism, his life as a brazen hack, which Lopate professes to admire.
I left Lopate’s attack on Sontag feeling subtly better-disposed toward both of them, but I left this paean to Irving with a sneaking disappointment. Given that Phillip Lopate is eighty-two years old, this might be his final book. His effort to memorialize a writer prepared to be forgotten will not be his own best claim to be remembered. “There was something sad yet heroic,” he writes, “about the way Irving kept pressing on, trying to maximize his slender vein of genius in new ways.” What is he actually saying here? What does this book truly add up to? I have come to see it as a careful line drawn between Lopate and his idol. Their careers have been spent in the service of different ideals. Irving achieved his popularity at the price of “a special brazenness” that Lopate has always refused. If they are both minor writers, that label means something different for each. Lopate has spent a career insisting that the personal is where truth lives, but here at the end of that career he has written his most impersonal book, as if unwilling to claim for himself the kind of durable relevance time has refused Irving.
Robert Minto
Robert Minto is an essayist, critic, and storyteller. He lives in Minneapolis and maintains a monthly public reading diary.