Penguins on Parade: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow!

Some Penguin Classics are welcome back in new reprints as often as opportunity allows; indeed, the persistence of their reappearances gives us one of the signature comforts of a canon. These works keep getting reprinted, we’re reassured, because some works deserve to be reprinted regularly.

We can certainly think of the new Penguin Classics edition of Washington Irving that way. The volume – sporting a detail from a terrifically moody painting by the amazingly talented young French fantasy artist Bastien Grivet – is called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, and it’s a reprint of Irving’s 1820 hit The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in which readers will find such foundational American literary myths as the Spectre Bridegroom, Rip Van Winkle, and, of course, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” with its Headless Horseman.

The volume is introduced with a sparkling essay by Irving expert Elizabeth Bradley, who notes that Irving was writing both against the grain and ahead of his time when he concocted the strange and often nostalgic tales of this collection against the better literary judgement of people who considered the young America “not sufficiently sophisticated to have a history, and certainly too green for ghosts.” But as big a pathfinder as Irving undoubtedly was, Bradley wittily cautions against veneration:

To refer to a writer as the Father of American Literature is the quickest way to consign him to anthologies, and to popular oblivion. This is a truism in legend and history alike: Who prefers the dutiful Abraham to his rebellious sons, or Joseph to Jesus? Who – aside from their biographers – remembers the progenitor of Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, or Marie Curie? There is no faster way to doom an author than to slap him with a patriotic paternity suit.

There’s no danger of doom for at least one of Irving’s creations: the aforementioned Headless Horseman, who’ll be chasing poor Ichabod Crane through Sleepy Hollow long after all of us are dead and gone (Bradley wryly notes the ongoing TV series on Fox, complete with “extra monsters, time travel, and skinny jeans”) – this has got to be the only Penguin paperback with back-cover blurbs from both Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Tim Burton. But re-reading the Sketch Book reminds me how good Irving is at everything he writes. If anything, the vignettes here of an old storybook England on the brink (as Irving saw it, anyway) of fading entirely into the past are often more effective than the more famous tales. Take as just one example the moment he encounters a knight’s grave in “Westminster Abbey”:

I paused to contemplate a tomb on which lay the effigy of a knight in complete armour. A large buckler was on one arm; the hands were pressed together in supplication upon the breast; the face was almost covered by the morion; the legs were crossed in token of the warrior’s having been engaged in the holy war. It was the tomb of a crusader; of one of those military enthusiasts, who so strangely mingled religion and romance, and whose exploits form the connecting link between fact and fiction; between the history and the fairy tale. There is something extremely picturesque in the tombs of these adventurers, decorated at they are with rude armorial bearings and gothic sculpture.

Irving goes on that when seeing such things “the imagination is apt to kindle with the legendary associations, the romantic fictions” – and the same holds true for so much of what he wrote himself, both in the Sketch Book and in A History of New York (and especially in Bracebridge Hall). Irving specialized in exactly what he described while remembering that tomb: the connecting link between fact and fiction, between history and fairy tale. So kudos to Penguin Classics for bringing out this pretty new edition of such a quintessential example of that talent. Future Classics volumes reprinting this author’s great Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus and particularly his unforgettable The Alhambra would be much appreciated!