<\/p>\n
From a tower in Kent to a country retreat in upstate New York: today\u2019s destination is Washington Irving\u2019s \u2018Sunnyside\u2019, founding site of American literature.<\/p>\n
In his two-volume compilation of periodical essays, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. <\/em>(1819-1820), Irving presented \u2018sketches\u2019 of English life, contrasted with American scenes. Appropriately enough for a collection dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, the essays are preoccupied with a sense of heritage and its rootedness in physical place and physical object. In mapping English culture through literary tourism — the seeking-out and re-description of sites associated variously with authors\u2019 lives or with particular books \u2013 Irving helped develop a sense of the literary landscape of Britain. \u00a0Fundamentally, he helped define an American national literature at once dependent upon and antagonistic to the country that Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s 1863 book of travel essays would call rather patronisingly \u2018Our Old Home.\u2019 Especially alive to the implications, sentimental or ironic, of the act of trying to combine familiar texts with the ambiguously homely and yet intractably foreign landscape to which they were related, Irving sought to condense a usable version of Britain into a repository of, and pre-history to, an American cultural heritage and literary future.<\/p>\n \u2018Sunnyside\u2019 can be seen to actualise the argument of Irving\u2019s Sketchbook<\/em> superimposed onto his long-standing interest in Scott and Abbotsford. Although described by American architectural historians as a \u2018cottage\u2019, Sunnyside clearly quotes Abbotsford in its steeply-pitched roofs, its clustering together of chimneys in a consciously picturesque fashion, its romantic irregularity and its high-stepped gables. Most explicitly, it is still clothed in British ivy, grown from a cutting brought from Melrose Abbey for the purpose. The house also reiterates Abbotsford in its sense of performing the author\u2019s identity: it too is consciously fantastical and autobiographical as, for example, in its later addition of a \u2018Moorish\u2019 turret in allusion to Irving\u2019s time spent as a diplomat in Spain.<\/p>\n It is in the matter of location, however, that Irving most interestingly imitates Scott. Whereas Scott intended to build a house that would match the charms of storied and poetical association that he found in the local landscape of the Borders (Abbotsford lies beneath the Eildon Hills, by tradition cleft by the wizard Michael Scott, and was extended to encompass land in the vicinity of Huntley Bank, where Thomas the Rhymer met the Queen of the Fairies), Irving had to build the storied and poetical association to go with the house. He did so by fabricating a largely fictional and highly romantic history for the house and landscape, which, by extension, laid the foundation for the \u2018home\u2019 of a new national literature.<\/p>\n One of the most celebrated tales in Irving\u2019s Sketchbook<\/em>, \u2018The Legend of Sleepy Hollow\u2019, \u2018found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker\u2019, concerns a country schoolmaster from Connecticut, much possessed with the old tales of witchcraft and hauntings set down by New England author Cotton Mather. He courts one Katrina van Tassel and is eventually routed by his rival, a local Dutchman, who impersonates the local Headless Horseman one night in order to terrify him into fleeing the area. The story identifies Sleepy Hollow, where Irving spent time as a boy, as a place bewitched, which channels the past into the present by enriching the real with the visionary and impalpable:<\/p>\n Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor during the early days of settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson\u2026 [T]he place still \u2026 holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. \u2026The whole neighbourhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions\u2026<\/p>\n While he was building Sunnyside, Irving returned to this early piece of myth-making in a series of essays published in the Knickerbocker Magazine <\/em>of March 1839-1841. In one, the dilettante traveller Crayon boasts of his acquisition of \u2018one of the most ancient and historical mansions in the country\u2019, supposedly containing Diedrich Knickerbocker\u2019s possessions. In another, \u2018Crayon\u2019 edits, extracts, and annotates a supposed history written by Knickerbocker of his house, detailing three main epochs: the occupation of the land by a native American \u2018wizard chieftain\u2019; the original build by Jacob van Tassel (a relative of Katrina in the earlier story) sacked by the British and rebuilt after the War of Independence; and its final occupation by Knickerbocker himself as historian of the early settlers. The house is thus fashioned as a testimonial to the cultural and architectural heritage that preceded the birth of the nation, while Crayon is positioned as inheriting, occupying, and renovating a building now conceived as a microcosm of American identity, which is legendary and haunted.<\/p>\n While Sunnyside would subsequently become celebrated as an influential model of American architecture, it should be more greatly celebrated for having invented the American writer\u2019s house. In his later years, Irving constructed an experience for his guests not unlike that provided by Scott. As N.P. Willis\u2019 account in Evert Augustus Duycksinck\u2019s Irvingiana: a memorial of Washington Irving <\/em>(1860) reveals, visitors were typically admitted to the \u2018workshop of genius\u2019 to chat about Irving\u2019s working practices, before driving with Irving around the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. Willis tells of looking around whimsically for the figure of Katrina van Tassel and other characters from Irving\u2019s story, and of taking especial pleasure in hearing Irving\u2019s childhood memory of shooting squirrels in the wood, a memory that also features in \u2018The Legend\u2019. Both men are caught here in the act of laying down Scott-like \u2018associations\u2019 within the landscape, a potent compound of authorial memory, fiction, and topography.<\/p>\n Of all the parallels that Sunnyside and Abbotsford present nowadays, the most striking is a slightly mournful air of being left high and dry by the receding waters of nineteenth-century enthusiasm. Put more bluntly, both houses have become monuments to forgotten national treasures, to the extent that, when I visited Sunnyside with my family on a long hot July day, we were undisturbed by anyone except the volunteer guides.<\/p>\n