He Gave the Knicks Their Name. Why Was He Forgotten?

When Irving was alive, everyone read him. “His Crayon, I know it by heart,” the usually acid Lord Byron wrote of Irving’s “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,” a collection stuffed with the shimmering blends of fact and fiction that Irving called “sketches.” Among his fans and friends were the First Lady Dolley Madison, Sir Walter Scott, and John Jacob Astor, New York City’s first multimillionaire. Scott, the preëminent Romantic-era novelist, took the younger Irving under his wing; Edgar Allan Poe, whose gothic tales owed much to Irving’s stories of goblins and will-o’-the-wisps, considered him a writer for whom “there is a vast deal to be said.” Some—including Poe—thought Irving overrated, in the way that best-selling writers are always overrated. Still, the title of Charles Dickens’s 1836 début, “Sketches by Boz,” was a nod to his once inescapable influence.

Today, of course, barely anyone reads Irving. Two decades ago, the essayist and longtime Columbia University writing professor Phillip Lopate was nosing through a cache of books being deaccessioned by the school’s library and found a complete set of Irving’s works, twelve volumes of about a thousand pages each. Not even Lopate, one of America’s foremost essayists and the editor of an anthology called “Writing New York,” had read much of him. He took the musty pile home more from pity than genuine interest, and they “sat on my own bookshelves collecting dust,” Lopate confesses at the start of “A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer.” When Lopate finally brought himself to crack the books open, he was astonished to discover not an entombed literary mummy but a mirror—a writer whom Lopate came to think of as a long-lost literary doppelgänger. The resulting book, comprising some three dozen brisk, sketch-like chapters, is a reappraisal of Irving by an author who has come to see in him “the prototype of a writer’s life, with all its setbacks and triumphs”—particularly of a kind of New York City writer’s life.

The more he read, the more Lopate began to discover traces of Irving’s influence all around New York, and in himself. “I too was a bachelor,” Lopate, who in 1981 published an acclaimed collection titled “Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis,” writes. He came to regard Irving as New York City’s original great bachelor, the Carrie Bradshaw of the city’s early gaslamp era. After an oncology checkup at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center and a lunch of pork fried rice in lower Manhattan, Lopate found himself wondering how a writer who was once the most celebrated American literary figure could wind up so forgotten. As the author of more than two dozen works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Lopate began to consider what chance he has at posterity if someone like Irving can be lost. “I question the whole notion that this or that author no longer ‘speaks’ to us, no longer ‘matters,’ ” Lopate writes, speaking about Irving, and, perhaps, himself.

Irving was born in New York City on April 3, 1783, the son of a stern Scottish immigrant who ran a tidy import business selling wine, sugar, and hardware. The preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris had been signed four months before, but it would be another seven months before the last British troops and warships left New York Harbor, marking the formal end of the War of Independence. The city was a mess. During the seven years that it was occupied by British forces, Manhattan had been ravaged by fires, picked over by looters, covered in fortifications, and swollen with refugees. Many New Yorkers who remained behind British lines during the war were not supporters of the Revolution, but in naming their son after George Washington, the Irvings declared their allegiance. According to family lore, the writer met his namesake in 1789, Washington’s first year as President, when his Scottish nanny, Lizzie, stopped the great man on a street in lower Manhattan. “There’s a bairn named after you,” she said. Washington placed his hand on Irving’s head, “little guessing that the boy would grow up to write his biography,” Lopate writes.

In his early twenties, Irving ran around town with a crew of nine well-to-do “blades” and cutups who called themselves the Lads of Kilkenny; the group included two of Irving’s elder brothers, the future congressman Gouverneur Kemble, and the future novelist James K. Paulding. The young men spent several summers together in an old mansion on the banks of the Passaic River, in New Jersey, “indulging in pranks, drinking orgies, and leapfrogging on the lawn.” Some have wondered whether Irving was gay, a speculation which Lopate dismisses, though he does quote from several suggestive letters to friends. “I am almost ashamed to say. . . . Marriage is the grave of bachelor intimacies,” Irving wrote to his friend, Henry Brevoort, Jr., after the latter got engaged.