Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving. By Martin Roth. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1976. 205 pp. $12.50.

Washington Irving has fared well in the hands of editors, biographers, and literary historians. Until recently, however, his works have not received extensive critical analysis and evaluation; when they have, attention has focused largely on A History of New York and The Sketch Book, especially on "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," his earlier and later works going unstudied or receiving only occasional general references. A study proposing to trace the progression of the comic modes developed by an originator of a native humor, then, is welcome. In Comedy and America, Martin Roth examines Irving’s American period, which culminated in A History of New York and which was later reiterated in his two most successful tales. Roth takes as his starting point the comic traditions that shaped Irving’s work. He proceeds by attempting to show Irving’s experiments with a range of inherited comic elements that could be shaped into an appropriate medium for an American comedy, which appeared full-formed in Knickerbocker’s History. Finding the subsequent failure of the American experiment to result largely from Irving’s ambiguous attitude toward the imagination, Roth ends with speculations about the beginnings of a truly American literature, the American attitude toward the imagination, and comedy as "the proper mode for American literature" (xiii). His focus on comedy provides a specific approach for considering Irving’s development as a writer. By limiting his scope to Irving’s American period, Roth gives attention to the neglected early writings. His extensive paralleling of Irving with his predecessors supports the generally recognized indebtedness Irving owed to the eighteenth-century essayists and comic novelists. The views taken, however, are largely familiar, the most frequently discussed works are discussed again, and the center remains where it has long been in Irving studies, on origins and influences. For the most part, Roth journeys over well travelled roads, with occasional excursions down interesting byways, to arrive at a new destination, a conclusion about Irving, comedy, and America that mingles fact, fancy, and myth in a manner worthy of the zany Knickerbocker himself.

Arguing that Irving’s American works are not mere adaptations of English and European comedy but expressions of "a coherent, though intuitive, attempt to create an American literature" (ix), Roth examines the comic traditions Irving worked in and his deliberate

use of them in his early writings to create a voice for an American comedy, which, oddly, finally spoke in the Dutch accent of A History of New York. Since he discovers a halting progression toward what he terms burlesque comedy, Roth begins by defining the characteristics of this mode. The next six chapters trace Irving’s progress. "Irving’s Sentimental Journey" finds signs of a perfunctorily completed apprenticeship in "The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle," the comic sketches contributed to The Corrector, and the letters, diaries, and journals from young Irving’s grand tour. These exercises first paid off in the new comic note struck in Salmagundi, to which Roth devotes five chapters. The first discusses Irving’s "Shandean Aesthetics," his absorption of the language and world of Sterne, by paralleling elements from Tristram Shandy and Salmagundi. The next three chapters place Salmagundi within existing comic traditions, those of "Polite Satire," "Political Satire," and "Domestic Humor." Irving’s variations on established patterns, however, reveal his emergence as a writer of the "Burlesque Comedy" for which he was intellectually and temperamentally suited. Through the course of the Salmagundi exercises, Irving’s gradual purging of satire and reliance on the burlesque—its setting as a topsy-turvy world, the characters as various configurations of man with his upside down and vice versa—provide the rehearsal of individual strains later to become a rich burlesque harmony in A History of New York.

A lengthy discussion presents the culmination of Irving’s first period as a comic work in the tradition of Sterne and Rabelais but now with a distinctively American character. To the vocabulary and forms acquired in his preparatory efforts the traditionally humorous Dutch added the subject needed for the creation in America of a comic world, the "mythical land of Cockaigne" (p. 114). Creating in art a "festive and ceremonial America" where history had produced "a solemn and industrious civilization" and telling the tale of the fall of the merry Dutch to the serious English, "where jollity again suffers its inevitable defeat in the face of gloom" (p. 115), Irving was forced to explore the meaning of American civilization. In Knickerbocker’s distracted tracing the origins of the country back to the creation of the world, Roth would have us see "an attempt to annihilate the history of America and the history of the mind, through the disorganized and inverted play of a mind operating through more primitive and childish impulses" (p. 115). By undermining the ordering imposed by civilization and returning to the original void, he empties the world and leaves it clear "to be recreated and resettled

by the comic imagination" (p. 116). Books II and III accomplish this new genesis, creating a comic utopia from various historical and literary paradisal myths, which reveal in America "the recovery of Paradise—if only to reenact again its inevitable loss" (p. 123). Corrupted by alien Yankee values, the Dutch paradise is lost in the third governor’s reign, the degeneration underscored by Irving’s literary devices that corrupt the burlesque world and its biblical and pastoral elements. His emphasis marks "the death of promise in America and the failure of Irving’s American period" (p. 127). For Roth the loss of the mythical Cockaigne-Paradise, or Dutch America that Irving offered as "the proper ground for imaginative activity," is the cultural defeat of the "true America" (p. 143). It results ultimately not from historical causes but from Irving’s own alienation from the present and his ambivalent attitude toward the efficacy of the imagination in creating a more satisfactory world, and it voices "Irving’s deepest and most pervasive literary theme and fear—that whatever cold and thin meanings this new world had come to stand for, it was after all and above all a place in which the imagination could not function" (p. 154).

The effect of this failure on Irving’s later career and his influence on his nineteenth-century successors Roth tries to account for in his last two chapters. "Post Mortem Effects" offers allegorical readings of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as Irving’s last efforts to test the view of America he came to in the History. Since both stories involve invasions of the sacred Dutch community by the Yankee agents of degeneration, Roth sees Irving as questioning whether it had to fail and arriving at the same answer. These tales, then, end Irving’s career as "an American writer and a writer of burlesque comedy" (p. 168) but not his influence. Roth finds "The Sense of a Beginning" for a national literature in Irving’s choice of a "whimsically mad historian" as "the American voice in literature" (p. 169), an "openness to impulse and incoherence" (p. 171) that would be understood by Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. Irving’s beginning A History with the creation of the world anticipates the sense of newness and beginning that characterizes American literature. The conflict between an American literature and the historical nation would be pondered by Hawthorne, Melville, James. Irving’s importance, Roth concludes, is that in his early works Irving developed a vision of the "true America" whose nature was that of burlesque comedy, a land "devoted to festivity and celebration, childishly free to play and, hopefully, to dream," and receptive to the "mysteries of obscenity and scatology." The

hope was naive and failed, and Irving joins the company of major nineteenth-century writers only because he knew "what the American writer would have to do to write American literature" (p. 181).

This summary should suggest that although its parallels of specific passages from Irving with his sources, its examinations of the neglected early works, its discovery of a progressive development in the use of comic modes, and its critical reading of the texts are potentially valuable, Comedy and America offers only a limited contribution to Irving scholarship. More importantly, the whole is marred by printer’s errors, stylistic flaws, extravagant judgments, and a hobby-horsical theorizing. Readers possessed of a Salmagundian desire to castigate the age will rail at the lax proofreading and indulgent style. Moreover, quotations bereft of introduction and conclusion appear throughout and carry the burden in undeveloped paragraphs whose pattern too often is one to three sentences with quotations attached. The objection is more than a Knickerbockerish pedantry, for the method of announcing a theme or technique, quoting from a predecessor, and paralleling passages from Irving leaves potentially interesting ideas undeveloped and gives the impression of reading a list of subjects illustrated by a list of quotations.

Imprecision is not limited to these matters but spills into the larger judgments drawn. Accounting for Irving on the basis of his origins and influences frequently leads Roth into extravagant generalizations. He refers to Irving’s childishness, for example, then extends the trait to all writers of burlesque comedy, and finally asserts that "the American writer generally, with his new eyes and unstable vision of reality, tends to rehearse a perpetual adolescence in his works" (p. 46). Looking for signs of Irving’s influence sometimes mingles his works with strange company. Knickerbocker’s History is linked with Walden, "Song of Myself," and Moby Dick in the same order of imaginative nationalism, which attempts to destroy the history that is in order to create a culture" (p. xi). Ichabod Crane’s terrifying night is compared to the dark world of "Young Goodman Brown." Naturally the historian must discover seeds of a succeeding age in a former. In what he terms the self-consciousness of the narrative voice in "A Tale of a Tub" and Salmagundi, Roth finds a parallel between the eighteenth-century whimsical humorist and the nineteenth-century Romantic hero, and on it he generalizes:

"Eighteenth-century burlesque comedy was preparing the world view that the next century would embrace with such seriousness" (p. 42). Such broad comparisons and generalizations raise their heads throughout and are unsupported, perhaps are insupportable.

These tendencies toward imprecision and lack of discipline lend themselves to the aggrandizing theory this study is designed to substantiate. The notion of Irving’s annihilating the existing America and offering in its stead a mythic account embodying the possibility for a true culture is too heavy a burden for his frame to bear. The book practices the abuse of learning burlesqued in A History. Moreover, to require its allegorical readings of figures like Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane ("To have this tale make sense we must try to see Rip as an artist manqué and his escape into nature as an artistic quest" [p. 159]) is to lose the amiable element in these tales, their sense of joy. One suspects that had Sir Walter Scott known what Irving was really about, his sides would not have been sore with laughter, nor would these stories have become ingrained in the American mind. Roth’s definition of the burlesque comedy he sees Irving creating and then abandoning implies his own sense of the world that he has found reflected in these works. The topsy-turvy world of burlesque Roth sees as a response to the cleavage that occurred "when a psychic line was drawn above man’s waist, and he was dissociated into aspiring spirit above and bestiality below," and it expresses "a triumph of repressed creatural instincts" (p. 9). Accordingly Knickerbocker’s attempts to separate myth from history that are continually interrupted by the act of thinking dramatize "the mind struggling to free itself from the tyranny of thought" (p. 115). Ichabod Crane embodies the result of a devotion to mind at the exclusion of body. In the tale of his adventure Irving longs for the defeat of this epitome of the triumphant Yankee when "The Horseman throws his head at Ichabod as if to say that he does not much need it, that he is quite comfortable in his subsequent untroubled state" (p. 166). In the defeat of the Dutch, Irving supposedly sees the loss of what America could have been, the new Cockaigne, Paradise regained, the world of the Dutch lubbers whose virtues are "those of creatural comfort" and "the ability to live in one’s body, to live in the festive present" (p. 178). This confusion of comedy, innocence, and irrationality, this understanding of burlesque as madness and openness to impulse and incoherence, and the emphasis on inevitable failure as resulting from the separation of mind and body do not reveal an early nineteenth-century writer in his time but betray a mid-twentieth-century squint on the world in which letting it all hang out cures all personal, social, and artistic ills. When Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane embody psychological projections, social criticism, and examinations of the course of America, history, and the de generative

processes of time, then Roth becomes the burlesquer in reverse, turning the world all "arsy-versy" by transforming the laughingly comic into the deadeningly serious.

Unfortunately, at the close of Roth’s promising study, then, one’s response is likely to reiterate the story-teller’s at the end of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow": "Faith, sir . . . as to that matter, I don’t believe one-half of it myself." William L. Hedges has credibly traversed much of this same territory to arrive at more mature judgments. Lewis Leary’s question about what happened to Irving’s comic sense between the writing of A History and The Sketch Book has not been adequately answered, and his fond and comprehensive essays remain better written than both. At the end of his bibliographical essay on Irving in 1971, Henry A. Pochmann optimistically awaited new and insightful critical analyses and appraisals inspired by the proposed Wisconsin edition. We must still wait.

Humor in America. An Anthology. Edited by Enid Veron. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. xvi, 350 pp.

There is a real need for a current paperback anthology of our humor, and Professor Veron creditably attempts to satisfy that need.

But is anyone ever satisfied with someone else’s anthologizing? I am puzzled and concerned about several matters of purpose, organization, and selection.

The editor says that she and her students in humor classes "formulated" the text. As such, it shows the wide range of humor enjoyed by her classes. But it seems to me that the effort to make the anthology also serve as a "change-of-pace" reader for rhetoric and composition classes fails of its purpose. I know full well that freshman writing courses need new material; yet a volume of humor is almost too much of a good thing for a study of rhetoric. True, there is the customary division of articles in a "Rhetorical Table of Contents"—for whatever such tables are worth. The added list of topics for writing and discussion seems to me to include many items that would lead only to a very superficial theme in composition classes not primarily engaged in a study of our humor.

More important, however, than the dual purpose of the editor, is the question of organization in a book devoted to our humor. I would argue that the three main divisions into ‘‘The Wise Fool," "The Storyteller," and "The Little Soul," lead to inaccuracies and overlapping. Of these three categories, the latter seems most appropriate. "The Storyteller" is too vague, implying that narration is not an important element in the other sections. Isn’t this dilemma caused by mixing characters (the wise fool and little soul) with a genre (narrative)? And doesn’t this lead to distinctions we would not wish our students of humor to make? How do we wish to think of Sut Lovingood? What should be emphasized—story skill or the continuing tradition of The Fool in our literature? That is, shouldn’t the Sut selection appear under "Wise Fool"?

Trickster tales, fables, tall stories, frontier shenanigans must be brought together here in an olla podrida called "The Storyteller," surely not a cause for concern in a volume merely aiming to entertain a general audience. But Professor Veron has added many guide lines of her own, indicating that the text is for students of American humor. Such students would be puzzled by some of the choices in "The Storyteller." For example, what is the justification for including in this narrative section two pages of definitions from The Devil’s Dictionary? Is Bierce properly labeled one of our "tricksters"?

54

I do not know how a modest anthology can easily solve this problem of classification, short of dropping the whole idea and using chronological order. But the misplacing of Bierce’s definitions suggests that other classifiers might have helped. For example, the term "antithetical" used by Jesse Bier (although Walter Blair objected to the term as unnecessarily sesquipedalian) would have given us a heading for something not well presented in the anthology—satirical humor. It is here I would place "Bitter" Bierce and others, like H. L. Mencken, who, by the way, is glaringly absent from this collection. And the term "corrective" (or even Norris Yates’ "crackerbarrel survivals") as opposed to antithetical might have given students a more historically provocative approach to our humor.

The book so organized, it seems to me, does not in its selections and prefatory notes, emphasize the lusty delights of Old Southwest story telling even as it fails to reveal the effectiveness of the whole school of platform comedians. It might have been well to stay with Walter Blair’s "Literary Comedians" as a main heading if only to illustrate the changes from frontier subjects and style to the diversity and sophistication of the lecture humorists.

Surely in Professor Veron’s use of this text she must discuss such changes in language and performance. She must deal with understatement, its relation to irony, the kinds of and the reasons for exaggeration in this nation. But the text itself does not expose us to these guidelines; and perhaps that is asking far too much of the brief prefatory remarks by the editor.

A few additional matters of concern and I’ll be through carping. The introduction to "The Wise Fool" section is a hodge podge, trying hard to do too much. The comments must be made on the diversified material that follows—Twain’s criticism of Cooper, Nast’s famous cartoon "Let Us Prey," and Jack Downing. Downing, yes, but why is Twain’s critique (which has to be so drastically abridged) under "The Wise Fool"? And what is Nast’s cartoon doing here? Are they not filling a place better employed for Sut Lovingood or others of his ilk? What about "The Arkansaw Traveler," that paradigm of our wise fools outwitting the city sophisticate, suggesting as it does the country-city theme in so much of our literature?

Is the art of humorous storytelling well illustrated in the first selection under "The Storyteller"—Irving’s "Adventure of the German Student." For humor’s sake would it not have been better to extract a few pages from "The History of New York," or even an abridged version of "The Devil and Tom Walker"?

It is as I have said difficult to accept wholeheartedly another’s anthologizing, and I have tried to point out some regrettable commissions and omissions. Still, there are many old favorites here to cheer the readers. There is Lardner’s "Large Coffee," Melville’s superb drawing of Dr. Cadwallader Cuticle from White Jacket. And to the older selections are added more recent goodies like the excerpt from Faulkner’s "Spotted Horses" and a bit from Peter De Vries.

The introductory notes to each section are a mixed bag but usually comment lucidly on the matter that follows. Brief head notes for each selection are pertinent and informative. The final selections under "Theories and Criticism" are well chosen, including an up-to-date article on T.V. "sitcoms" and a meaty essay by Louis Kronenberger.

Refinements are hardly in order in a two-page listing of critical terms. A student of humor would need a good deal more in the way of definition, for example in making distinctions between travesty and burlesque. Exaggeration as a very special mark of American humor appears here only under its use as a tall tale. The "Brief History of Humor" in just over six pages does what it can in such short compass. The suggestions for reading are excellent—current and well chosen.

Professor Veron attempts too much in one short volume—humorous anthology, springboard for classes in rhetoric, primer for students of humor. This leads me to wonder exactly what kind of classroom the text is designed for. In my own college, it would be excellent, I believe, for our second semester sophomore classes that have elected the subject of "humorous writing."

As an anthology of humor to be enjoyed by a general audience. Humor in America can be highly recommended. It is a welcome addition to humor anthologies—a paperback edition, handy, and up-to-date.