Volume 36
Spring-Summer
2010 |
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Patron saint of the Catskills, Rip Van
Winkle has belonged to all America,
coast to coast, almost from the moment he
was born, by passage through Washington
Irving’s pen, in 1819. Only seven years later
there was a Rip Van Winkle House along
the road from Palenville to the nation’s first
resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House;
in 1850 there was another Rip Van Winkle
House on the corner of Pacific Wharf and
Battery Street in San Francisco. Rip’s real-life
presence was attested by nonagenarians who
claimed to have known him and his hectoring
dame. Other Hudson Valley denizens claimed
to have heard as children, whenever thunder
rumbled in the mountains, the tale of Henrik
Hudson and his gnomish bowlers, as if it were
a folktale eons old rather than Irving’s invention.
Today Rip is more prevalent and perhaps
more real than ever, the figure for whom every
writer grasps when trying to convey our era’s
dizzying rate of change.
Joseph Jefferson (1829–1905) as Rip in an 1869 photograph by Napoleon Sarony. Photo:
Library of Congress
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In 1872 William Cullen Bryant wrote
in Picturesque America: “As you climb up this
steep road [to the Catskill Mountain House]
... here, by the side of a little stream, which
trickles down the broad, flat surface of a large
rock, is the shanty called “Rip Van Winkle’s
House.” In a June 1906 issue of 4 Track News,
an overwrought Charles B. Wells wrote: “Rip’s
‘Village of Falling Water,’ Palenville, lies at the
base and from the summit, looking far out
over a field of fleecy cloud-tipped peaks, the
gilded dome of the capitol at Albany tosses
back the sparkling sunlight which glistens in
the silvery Hudson below as though seeking
to detain it in its mad onward rush to the
pathless sea.” Rufus Rockwell Wilson wrote
in the 1947 book New York in Literature:
“Most of the dwellers in present-day Leeds
are prompt in their denials that such a man
as Rip Van Winkle ever lived in the town,
but there is one wrinkled veteran, far spent
in years who, if discreetly questioned, will
tell you in confidence that were he again a
lad he would lead you to the rock, a little
way this side of Palenville, where Rip used
to camp and sleep on his hunting trips.”
The real Rip is more interesting. Let’s
hurtle back to the eighteenth century.
Washington Irving was born in New York in
1783, the year in which the American Revolution
was won. In 1800 he made his first voyage
up the Hudson. Writing of it many years later,
he said: “The Kaaterskill Mountains had the
most witching effect on my boyish imagination.
As we slowly floated along I lay on deck
and watched them, through a long summer
day, undergoing a thousand mutations under
the magical effects of atmosphere.” Presumably
he gathered up stories on his travels in
the valley, as he did on subsequent journeys
to Canada and, in 1804–6, Europe. Upon his
return he elected not to go into the law, even
though he had been admitted to the bar. Instead
he published, with his literary cohorts,
the Salmagundi papers (1807) and, in 1809 as
“Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a comic History of
New-York that is fresh and funny today.
Jefferson created a dramatic version of Irving’s story in 1859, and for the next four decades acted the part of Rip. He even played the
part in a film from 1896, the year of this photograph by B. J. Falk. Photo: Library of Congress
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Flush from success on both sides of the
Atlantic, he suffered a blow with the death of
his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman; he was never to
marry. A morose Irving entered the literary
business, where his celebrity could not keep
his Analectic Magazine from failing. In May
1815 he went to Europe and took charge of
the family business in Liverpool, but in 1818
it failed, too. He now had nothing on which
he might capitalize but his fame: he had to
write for a living. Irving visited his admirer
Walter Scott at Abbotsford and learned from
him of the wealth of unused literary material
in Scottish and especially German folk tales.
Irving feverishly taught himself rudimentary
German so that he might read—and borrow
from—these tales.
Rip met the light of day in May 1819 as
the last sketch in the first installment of The
Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, published
in New York by, oddly enough, C. S. Van
Winkle. Six installments followed, until in
1820, the publisher issued them all in one
volume. Today we might say that with The
Sketch-Book, which also included “The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving invented not
only the American short story, but also the
Catskills, as a source of legend and enchantment.
Yet even in his own day, Irving’s critics
pointed out that some passages in “Rip Van
Winkle” were not mere borrowings, but in
fact direct translations from the German of
Otmar’s Volksagen, published in Bremen in
1800.
This “oldest frame house standing in the Catskills,” dating from 1787, was one of several
structures in Greene County, New York, promoted as the “Rip Van Winkle House.” Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey
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In a note appended to the legend, Diedrich
Knickerbocker—among whose posthumous
writings the tale was supposedly located by
editor Geoffrey Crayon (also Irving’s creation,
of course)—informs us that he himself has
talked with Rip Van Winkle and that “the
story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of
doubt.” Crayon introduces this note by saying
that, without it, one would suspect that the
tale had been “suggested by a little German
superstition about the Emperor Frederick der
Rothbart and the Kyffhauser Mountain.” This
false clue led a generation of scholars off on
a Barbarossan snipe hunt, as Rip Van Winkle
is not based on the legend of the Mountain
King who would rise with his entombed army
to defend his nation (Folk motif D1960.2,
Kyffhaueser, King asleep in mountain, will
awake one day to succor his people; Bolte and
Polivka 3:460; Feilberg, Danske Studier, 1920:
97ff; and other motif citations too plentiful
for a general readership).
Irving’s location was indeed the Kyffhauser
Mountain, but his model was plainly Otmar’s
Peter Klaus, described by Bayard Taylor in Byways
of Europe (1869):
Peter Klaus, a shepherd of Sittendorf,
pastured his herd on the Kyffhauser,
and was in the habit of collecting the
animals at the foot of an old ruined wall.
He noticed that one of his goats regularly
disappeared for some hours every
day; and, finding that she went into an
opening between two of the stones, he
followed her. She led him into a vault,
where she began eating grains of oats
which fell from the ceiling. Over his
head he heard the stamping and neighing
of horses. Presently a squire in ancient
armor appeared, and beckoned to him
without speaking. He was led up stairs,
across a court-yard, and into an open
space in the mountain, sunken deep
between rocky walls, where a company
of knights, stern and silent were playing
at bowls. Peter Klaus was directed by
gestures to set up the pins, which he did
in mortal fear, until the quality of a can
of wine, placed at his elbow, stimulated
his courage.
Finally, after long service and many
deep potations, he slept. When he awoke,
he found himself lying among tall weeds,
at the foot of the ruined wall. Herd and dog had disappeared; his clothes were in
tatters, and a long beard hung upon his
breast. He wandered back to the village,
seeking his goats, and marveling that he
saw none but strange faces. The people
gathered around him, and answered his
questions, but each name he named was
that upon a stone in the church-yard. Finally,
a woman who seemed to be his wife
pressed through the crowd, leading a wildlooking
boy, and with a baby in her arms.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Maria.”
“And your father?”
“He was Peter Klaus, God rest his soul! who
went up the Kyffhauser with his herd, twenty
years ago, and has never been seen since.”
Sound familiar? I won’t burden you with side-by-side German and English, but trust me, the
congruency is shocking. When confronted by
his critics, Irving seemed confused, responding
that legends were for all to use, as writers of
the past had done. Eventually he issued a sort
of apology:
In a note which follows that tale [“Rip Van
Winkle”], I alluded to the superstition on
which it is founded, and I thought a mere allusion
was sufficient, as the tradition was so
notorious as to be inserted in almost every
collection of German legends. I had seen it
myself in three. I could hardly have hoped,
therefore, in the present age, when every
ghost and goblin story is ransacked, that the
origin of the tale would escape discovery.
In fact I had considered popular traditions
of the kind as fair foundations for authors
of fiction to build upon, and made use of
the one in question accordingly.
Washington Irving in a daguerreotype by John Plumbe, ca. 1856, produced by Mathew
Brady Studio. Photo: Library of Congress
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Irving lived long enough to see his own
invented and adapted legends become in
turn the legends which others used for their
tales and stories. And to be fair, surely unbeknownst
to Irving, sleeper tales went back
far earlier and wider than that of Peter Klaus,
to Scandinavia’s “Girl at the Troll Dance,”
to Ireland’s “Clough na Cuddy,” to Japan’s
“Urashima Taro,” and more (Folk motifs
D1364, Magic sleep; F564.3.1, Long sleep,
long waking). In an ancient Greek tale, Epimenides,
a shepherd, went to the mountains
in search of stray sheep, fell asleep in a cave,
and woke up fifty-seven years later to find
himself unrecognized by all, until his youngest
brother, now an old man, finally knew
him. And there is Ulysses, of course, who
returned home after twenty years to be
recognized only by his faithful dog Argus.
And Woody Allen’s Sleeper. All, no matter
how dimly, echo the greatest Resurrection
story, which itself is the product of legend
and fable from prior millennia.
A Blanche McManus poster executed for Dodd Mead, publishers of Jefferson’s book
(1895–6). Photo: New York Public Library
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But the mother lode for the Christian
era appears to be the Seven Sleepers of
Ephesus, saints whose feast day is July 27.
During the persecutions of the Roman
emperor Decius, circa 250 C.E., seven
Ephesian Christians were given a chance to
recant their faith. They instead gave their possessions
to the poor and retired to a mountain
cave to pray, and there, as they slept the night,
Rome’s soldiers walled the mouth of the cave
with stones. More than a century later, during
the reign of Christian emperor Theodosius
I (379–95 C.E.) or II (408–21 C.E.)—one
ought not press too hard for the factual base
of this tale, especially as Aristotle had written
of the “Sleepers of Sardes” some seven
centuries earlier—the cave was unsealed, and
the masons found seven Ephesians awakening from what they believed to be a single night’s
slumber (Folk motifs D2011, Years thought
days; D1960.1, Seven sleepers, or Rip Van
Winkle. Magic sleep extending over many
years. Huber Die Wanderlegende von den
Siebenschlaefern; and more, from Ireland to
Sweden to Native America).
“Rip Van Winkle House in Sleepy Hollow,” reads the identification on this stereoscopic
photograph by E. & H. T. Anthony of New York, ca. 1880. Photo: New York Public Library
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One of these seven sleepers, Malchus,
walked into town and was startled by the
crosses atop several buildings. Like Rip, he
had slept through a revolution. The Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus—Malchus, along with
Maximian, Martinian, Dionysius, John,
Serapion, and Constantine—were honored
as saints for centuries. During the Crusades,
their remains were removed to the Church
of Sainte Victoire in Marseilles, where pilgrims
flocked. In 1927–8 an excavation at
Ephesus, underneath the ruins of a church,
revealed several hundred graves from the fifth
and sixth centuries, some with inscriptions
referring to the Seven Sleepers. This grotto
remains a tourist destination today, even
though the sleepers’ feast day of July 27 was
suppressed as mythical (of pagan origin, that is) with the reform of the Roman Catholic
liturgy in 1969.
Luckily, that was the year of the Woodstock
Music Festival, the height (or should
we say Haight) of all hippiedom. And our
beset and bedraggled Catskillian hero was
ready to become its patron saint, even if this
ripeness is evident only in retrospect. Rip was
the quintessential hippie, the one who made
a success of failure by tuning in, turning on,
and dropping out.
Irving’s genius had lain not in his stealthy
adoption of the nondescript Peter Klaus as
his archetype, but in creating Rip with a twist,
as an apolitical antihero, a henpecked laggard,
at the very moment in history when America
was most insufferably vainglorious. By making
Rip literally a good-for-nothing, Irving created
a role model not only for a distant counterculture,
but also for art—which, like play,
must have no purpose but itself, or it becomes
no longer itself. In the years after Irving’s
death, America became ever more practical,
pragmatic, and utilitarian, reinventing itself
with every generation, relentlessly conflating
change with progress. The seeming idler—the
writer, the painter, the philosopher—prized in
past times for performing his work far from
the madding crowd, increasingly was termed
the useless man. For the artist, the man outside,
Rip provided the perfect symbol.
The Catskill Mountain House was the nation’s first resort hotel, founded in Haines Falls in 1823. This view by Thomas Nast is from “Sketches among the Catskill Mountains” in Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1866. Author’s private collection.
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Mind you, Irving did not intend his hero
this way. It was for the next generation of writers
like Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville to
see in their own commercial struggles, their
own ineffectuality, the specter of Rip. For
Melville in particular, Rip possessed untapped
allegorical, even spiritual possibilities. His star had fallen from the firmament of American authors after Typee (more than 16,320 copies
sold in his lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic)
and Omoo (13,335 copies). His masterwork,
Moby-Dick, published in 1851, sold only
3,715 copies. His last attempt at fiction, The
Confidence Man, sold even more poorly, and his
1866 volume of poetry, Battle-Pieces and Aspects
of the War, sold a pathetic 471 copies, compelling
the author to reimburse the publisher
for its production costs. In that same year he
gave over all hope of making a living from
his writing and accepted a job as a customs
inspector, a post he held for nineteen years.
Melville’s death in 1891 passed almost unnoticed.
But in 1919 it emerged that he had never
truly stopped writing. He had left behind work
that future generations would cherish: the novella
Billy Budd, today perhaps his most widely
read book, and a volume of poems titled Weeds
and Wildings with a Rose or Two. One of the sections
in this astounding volume is called “Rip
Van Winkle’s Lilac,” an experimental combination
of prose and poetry that transforms and
elevates Rip to nothing short of sainthood.
Melville introduces a new character, a “certain
meditative vagabondo” who comes upon
Rip’s vacant but picturesque abode some years
before the hero’s awakening. “And the gray
weather-stain not only gave the house the
aspect of age,” Melville wrote, “but worse; for
in association with palpable evidences of its
recentness as an erection, it imparted a look
forlornly human, even the look of one grown
old before his time.” Yet the vagabondo is
drawn to the ramshackle ruin of fallen willow,
roof-shingle mosses, and Lilac (Melville always
capitalizes the word) gaily sprouting from
Rip’s planting on the day he last saw home.
Exhorted by a passing stranger—“gaunt,
hatchet-faced, stony-eyed”—to paint a trim
white church in the distance rather than the
shambles before him, he demurs, only to have
the stranger press on:
“You will stick to this wretched old
ruin, then, will you?”
“Yes, and the Lilac.”
“The Lilac? And black what-do-ye-call-
it—lichen, on the trunk, so old is it.
It is half-rotten, and its flowers spring
from the rottenness under it, just as the moss on those eaves does from the rotting
shingles.”
“Yes, decay is often a gardener.”
When Rip returns to his broken-down home
some years hence, he recalls having set a Lilac
on the day of his departure for the hills:
That Lilac was a little slip,
And yonder Lilac is a tree!
Many years after Rip was “remanded into
night,” the Lilac continued to bloom:
Each June the owner joyance found
In one prized tree that held its ground,
One tenant old where all was new,—
Rip’s Lilac to its youth still true.
To the end of his life, Melville had kept
on his desk this motto: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” And the poem concludes:
See, where man finds in man no use,
Boon Nature finds one—Heaven be
blest!
R.I.P., Rip.
Author’s note on references: All references to folk
motifs are cited using the Aarne-Thompson classification
system, with volume and page numbers
for the motifs listed parenthetically. See Stith
Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–8).
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John Thorn is the author and editor of
many books, including New York 400
(Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009). He
lives in Saugerties, New York. With each
passing year he identifies more with ol’
Rip. Copyright © John Thorn.
Irving lived long enough to see his own invented and adapted legends become in turn the legends which others used for their tales and stories.
This article appeared in Voices Vol. 36, Spring-Summer 2010. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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