THE CRASS HUMOR OF IRVING’S DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER

Every writer, if he becomes good enough and famous enough, must contend eventually with various simplistic stereotypes that grow up around him and his works. Such stereotypes are too often spread unwittingly by high school and college English instructors and through the "introduction to the author" sections in various anthologies and literary survey books. Once implanted, these stereotypes die hard, if at all. Poe as the mad dope-fiend. Whitman as the Good Gray Poet. Dickinson as the eccentric, pathetic recluse. There are others too numerous to mention.

Obviously, bringing such preconceived stereotypes of authors to their works as we read them can lead to simplistic and unbalanced notions about what they have written. The widespread stereotype that concerns me in this particular paper is that of Washington Irving only as the "sunny," "genial," gentlemanly, sexually neuter man of letters. We have almost completely forgotten that Washington Irving (as displayed in those works almost invariably left out of the survey books and anthologies) had strong tendencies toward the risqué, the raunchy, and the burlesque. We need to remember.

Because in many ways "Rip Van Winkle" is least representative stylistically of Irving’s Knickerbocker works,¹ readers who have read little more of Washington Irving than this one story are probably unaware that the devices and preferences that best define the Diedrich Knickerbocker style are used by Irving mainly for purposes of crass humor. Specifically and typically, Diedrich delivers up much bawdy humor, puns, sarcasm, burlesque visual comedy, and heady portions of descriptive hyperbole, especially in terms of characters he does not like and in terms of the golden past which he sentimentally prefers to the present.

True, the types of humor that I have just mentioned are not found much in those stories Irving wrote under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, who made the gentlemanly and "genial" statement in The Sketch Book that "Wit, after all, is a mighty tart, pungent ingredient, and much too acid for some stomachs; but honest good humor is the oil and wine of meery meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small, and the laughter abundant."² Geoffrey Crayon, you see, was Irving’s gentleman persona. Irving, in his own eyes, was essentially a ₈entleman. But Diedrich Knickerbocker, if his tastes in humor are any indication, was not. Yet, Diedrich Knickerbocker appears to be the persona through which "gentle" and sophisticated Washington Irving liberated some of his more crass and bawdy inclinations.

Let’s begin our brief survey with a look at some of Knickerbocker’s typically bawdy humor. One could almost make a case for the "anal vision" of Diedrich Knickerbocker, if one were so inclined (I am not so inclined), because so much of his bawdy humor involves the human posterior. For example, in the History of New York³ there is the constant harping on the fact that Columbus’s real name was "Christoval Colon (vulgarly called Columbus)," and at one point Knickerbocker suggests that America should have "been called Colonia, after his name" (p. 55). There is also the Dutch boat that "like the beauteous model . . . who was declared to be the grestest belle in Amsterdam . . . was full in the bows, with a pair of enormous cat-heads, a copper bottom, and withal a most prodigious poop!" (p.99). The History contains much bawdy humor, however, that is not of an anal nature. For example, Antony Van Corlear bundled with the Yankee lasses and "rejoiced [them] exceedingly with his soul-stirring instrument" (p. 328). And there are Negroes who have such "risable" (p. 103) powers.

Anal humor is evident in many of the Knickerbocker short stories. For example, in "Dolph Heyliger" (Bracebridge Hall, 1822) there is the scene in which "Antony Vander Heyden, who had fairly talked himself silent, sat nodding alone in his chair by the door, when he was suddenly aroused by a hearty salute with which Dolph Heyliger had unguardedly rounded off one of his periods, and which echoes through the still chamber like the report of a pistol" (p. 524). In "Wolfert Webber; or, Golden Dreams" (Tales of a Traveller, 1824), Wolfert has a nightmare: "He babbled about incalculable sums; fancied himself engaged in money-digging; threw the bedclothes right and left, in the idea that he was shoveling among the dirt, groped under the bed in quest of treasure, and lugged forth, as he supposed, an inestimable pot of gold" (pp. 526-27).

However, like the History, the stories contain bawdy humor not of the anal variety. For example, in "Dolph Heyliger" there is a coy suggestion that Dr. Knipperhausen and Frau Ilsy, his housekeeper, have been having a long sexual encounter ("How she had acquired such ascendancy I do not pretend to say. People, it is true, did talk—but have not people been prone to talk every since the world began?" [p. 460]) and that Dolph has had a sexual education or sorts while at Knipperhausen’s house. Dr. Knipperhausen, it was whispered, "was possessed of the art of preparing love-powders" (p. 462), and when he had secret consultations with "love-sick patients of both sexes" (p. 463), Dolph, "it is said . . . learnt more of the secrets of the art at the key-hole, than by all the rest of his studies put together" (p. 463). And is it only coincidence that Dolph learns of sex through the key hole, while at the same time Frau Ilsy is running around the house with "a huge bunch of keys jingling at the girdle

of an exceedingly long waist"? (p. 460). And is it only coincidence that Dolph stops pounding his pestle after his learning experience at the keyhole? Before his key-hole experiences Dolph was usually to be found "diligently pounding a pestle" (p. 458). The "regular thumping of Dolph’s pestle" (p. 460) was to be heard for he often was "pounding the pestle . . . in one corner of the laboratory" (p. 460). Truly, "the boy had parts, and could pound a pestle" (p. 455). There is just too much made of the pestle here for us not to realize that Irving is working with the double-entendre.

Some of the bawdy humor in the Knickerbocker stories comes from the names given to certain characters. In "Rip Van Winkle," for example, there is the sexual redundancy apparent in the name Peter Vanderdonck. In "Dolph Heyliger" there appears the name "Ouselsticker," which when pronounced leaves small room for missing the humorous, sexual point. This sexual reading of the name Ouselsticker seems even more probable when in the line following the introduction of this character we are told how he saw a sloop go "full butt against Antony’s nose" (p. 513). Also, in "Dolph Heyliger" there is a character named Peter de Groodt, sometimes called "Long Peter," who is especially chummy with Dolph’s widowed mother. And in the story "Wolfert Webber" we are told that Wolfert’s ancestor was named Cobus Webber. Perhaps it is only coincidence that the word cobs can mean testes.

However, there is more than sex to the Knickerbocker humor. For example, a fondness for puns seems to be a part of the Knickerbocker persona, even though Irving claimed to abhor them and used them little in his non-Knickerbocker writings. In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" the puns are blatant and purposefully obvious. Ichabod "tarried" in Tarry Town, and Brom Bones beat the "goblin horse all hollow" down in the Hollow. In "Dolph Heyhiger," when the supposed ghost figure of Killian Vander Spiegel stops tramping around, all is "dead silence" (p. 476). In "Wolfert Webber" one character is "precipitated" (p. S37) from a precipice, Wolfert tells his lawyer to be "brief" (p. 543), and there are many "floating traditions" (p. 499) about Captain Kidd.

Then there is the sarcasm, too tart a dish for Geoffrey Crayon perhaps, but not for Diedrich. Irving often uses the persona of Diedrich Knickerbocker to attack sarcastically a lack of benevolence and charity so often found in the general population. For example, in "Wolfert Webber," Diedrich writes of Wolfert, "For a long time he was suspected of being crazy, and then everybody pitied him; at length it began to be suspected that he was poor, and then everybody avoided him" (p. 490). And in the beginning of "Dolph Heyliger" we are told how nicely stingy the public was with its charity when Dame Heyliger was in desperate need of material assistance: "It was universally agreed that ‘something ought to be done for

the widow’; and on the hopes of this ‘something’ she lived tolerably for some years; in the meantime every body pitied and spoke well of her, and that helped along" (p. 45l ). At the end of the story, when Dame Heyliger’s house burns down, the sarcasm is heavier still:

As it was, she had been overcome with fright and affliction, and lay ill in body and sick at heart. The public, however, had showed her its wonted kindness. The furniture of her rich neighbors being, as. far as possible, rescued from the flames; themselves duly and ceremoniously visited and condoled with on the injury of their property, and their ladies commiserated on the agitation of their nerves; the public, at length, began to recollect something about poor Dame Heyliger. She forthwith became again a subject of universal sympathy; everybody pitied her more than ever; and if pity could but have been coined into cash—good Lord! how rich she would have been! (p. 532)

Without letting up, Knickerbocker continues the attack:

It was now determined, in good earnest, that something ought to be done for her without delay. The Dominie, therefore, put up prayers for her on Sunday, in which all the congregation joined most heartily. Even Cobus Groesbeek, the alderman, and Mynheer Milledollar, the great Dutch merchant, stood up in their pews, and did not spare their voices on the occasion; and it was thought the prayers of such great men could not but have their due weight. Doctor Knipperhausen, too, visited her professionally, and gave her abundance of advice gratis, and was universally lauded for his charity. As to to her old friend, Peter de Groodt, he was a poor man, whose pity, and prayers, and advice, could be of but little avail, so he gave her all that was in his power—he gave her shelter. (pp. 532-33)

Such censure of a selfish public in regard to Christian charity is reminiscent of the sarcastic stance often taken in the History of New York toward both Dutch and Yankees.

Although Irving uses visual comedy in some non-Knickerbocker stories, visually comic burlesque is used most heavily in the Knickerbocker materials. In the History of New York we have scenes such as the descent of Peter Stuyvesant onto a cowpie in the midst of a mock-epic battle scene and the nose-thumbing bathos emanating from Antony Van Corlear’s diplomatic mission to Fort Christina. In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" there is Ichabod’s dance at Van Tassel’s: "Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle; and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion, and clattering about the room, you would have thought Saint Vitus himself, that blessed patron of the dance, was figuring before you in person" (p. 504).

And there is the even more humorous picture of Ichabod riding off to the dance:

He rode with short stirrups, which brought his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle; his sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers’; he carried his whip perpendicularly in his hand, like a sceptre, and, as his horse jogged on, the motion of his arms was not unlike the flapping of a pair of wings. A small wool hat rested on the top of his nose, for so his scanty strip of forehead might be called; and the skirts of his black coat fluttered out almost to the horse’s tail. (p. 498)

In certain stories the visual humor is used to undercut the potentially serious scene. In "Wolfert Webber," for example, as Wolfert prepares to die, and "poor Amy buried her face and her grief in the bed-curtain" (p. 543), we have the potential seriousness undercut by a "pellucid tear that trickled silently down and hung at the end of her [Dame Webber’s] peaked nose" (p. 543). Some of the visual comedy in "The Devil and Tom Walker" also is used to undercut the potentially serious scenes. For example, it is immediately before the Devil comes to collect Tom’s soul that we get the picture of "crack-brained" Tom having buried his horse upside down. Undercutting of potentially serious passages is quite common in the History of New York.

Closely related to this visual humor is the hyperbole so often used by Knickerbocker in describing characters and the past. Diedrich uses hyperbole to make laughable and distasteful characters he does not like, but he also uses hyperbole to make likeable the "golden" days of the past. For example, in the History Knickerbocker describes "one tall, lank fellow . . . in a little man’s coat, with the buttons between his shoulders; the skirts scarce covering his bottom; his hands hanging like spades out of his sleeves" (p. 364). In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Ichabod is described as having hands that "dangled a mile out of his sleeves" (p. 478). Ichabod also is said to have the "dilating powers of an anaconda" (p. 480). In "Dolph Heyliger" Dr. Knipperhausen’s glasses seem like "two full moons" (p. 457), and in "Wolfert Webber" the "corpulent frame" of Ramm Rapelye "gave all the symptoms of a volcanic mountain on the point of eruption" as he "emitted a cloud of tobacco smoke from that crater, his mouth" (p. 481). And in the History Diedrich says:

now I am going to tell a fact, which I doubt much my readers will hesitate to believe; but if they do, they are welcome not to believe a word in this whole history, for nothing which it contains is more true. It must be known then that the nose of Antony the trumpeter was of a very lusty size, strutting boldly from his countenance like a mountain of Golconda; being sumptuously bedecked with rubies and other precious

stones,—the true regalia of a king of good fellows, which jolly Bacchus grants to all who bouse it heartily at the flagon. (p. 386)

In the stories, though, Knickerbocker does not risk his "reputation" on whether or not we accept the hyperbole as fact, perhaps because he makes no pretense that his stories are solemn history.

In terms of the past, Knickerbocker is most likely to describe the "good old times" (p. 21) with a hyperbole that is more sentimental than humorous. For example, in "Dolph Heyliger" we are told that in Albany "everything was quiet. and orderly; everything was conducted calmly and leisurely; no hurry, no bustle, no struggling and scrambling for existence" (p. 520). In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Knickerbocker describes a "uniform tranquillity" in the Hollow which was "one of the quietest places in the whole world" (p. 475). And the following is just one of many examples of Knickerbocker’s exaggerated view of the past as found in the history of New York: the past is a "blissful and never to be forgotten age . . . when everything was better than it has ever been since" (p. 194).

Of course there is much more to the Knickerbocker style than just the humor. Also, there is much more to the humor than simply that which is blatant and crass. There is much irony, for example, and subtle wit. Still, too many of us have forgotten the more common, the more human aspects of Irving’s Knickerbocker style, as well as the more human, common aspects of Irving himself. Taken alone, the Crayon persona presents us with half a man and half a writer, though too many have come to see it as the whole man and whole writer. But the Crayon and Knickerbocker personas together come much closer to presenting us with the truth about Washington Irving and his works.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, OSHKOSH

NOTES

   ¹Included in Irving’s Knickerbocker works are six short stories ("Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Dolph Heyliger," "The Devil and Tom Walker," "Wolfert Webber; or, Golden Dreams," and "Guests from Gibbet Island"), many sketches (e.g. "Hell-Gate," and "Kidd the Pirate" In Tales of a Traveller), and the History of New York.
    ²AII the quotations from the Knickerbocker materials under discussion are taken from The Works of Washington Irving, Author’s Revised Edition (Kinderhook Edition: New York, 1857-1880), 14 volumes. Page numbers are cited in the text. This edition contains the same text as the Author’s Uniform Revised (Standard) Edition which is titled The Works of Washington Irving, (New York, 1860-1 861), 21 volumes. All quotations from The Sketch Book (this includes the stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow") and Knickerbocker’s History of New York are taken from volume 11(1880) or the Kinderhook Edition. All quotations from Tales of a Traveller (this includes "The Devil and Tom Walker" and "Wolfert

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Webber; or, Golden Dreams") and Bracebridge Hall are taken from volume 1(1857) of the Kinderhook Edition. See page 319 of The Sketch Book for the source of the Geoffrey Crayon quotation.
   ³It is well known that Irving toned down the second edition of the History of New York. The first edition had been criticized in many quarters for being too bawdy.