Short-Cut to Greatness
Reading a one-volume abridgment of a multi-volume Washington biography
I recently paid a dollar for a work of blasphemy, which is always refreshing. I was browsing the legendary sale lot of the Brattle Bookshop and found an item I’ve wanted for decades: Charles Neider’s one-volume abridgement of Washington Irving’s five-volume biography of George Washington, which he completed in 1859, with the clouds of the American Civil War gathering on the horizon.
Irving didn’t live to see that war begin. His gigantic efforts to concentrate past his growing health problems and finish his great Washington biography had succeeded in producing the last volume in April of 1859, and Irving didn’t live out the year: he collapsed on his bedroom floor in late November, leaving behind both greater fame than any American writer had ever experienced and … well, this massive multi-volume life of the man after whom he was named.
He’d released the various volumes of the life as they came to bear, and they’d been well-received for the most obvious reason: Irving had by that point trained a very large percentage of the English-speaking reading public to look forward to his wonderful, friendly prose style. No matter what he wrote – a multi-volume biography, historical sketches, scraps of high-concept fiction – that voice of his was always the distinguishing feature, the thing that sold the work.
Not that his felicitous prose style was the only attraction, even here at the end of his writing life – that would have mortified him, considering how much work he put into these volumes. Some of the foremost historians of the day routinely wrote to him upon the release of each volume, of course praising him for his prose style (the sheer readability of which only one of those historians could match) but also noting his canny often revelatory use of his source material. And they were universal in their high regard for the kind of Washington they found in these pages – a more human, more fleshed-out and three-dimensional figure than any previous biographer had dared to create when writing about the revered Father of His Country. By a strange alchemy that might only be comprehensible to other great writers, the sheer amount of reverence Irving had for his hero strictly warned him away from servile hagiography.
And he couldn’t resist himself: once he started telling Washington’s story, he kept expanding his narrative to include the broader issues of the times, to the point where long stretches of his work wander entirely away from his putative subject. Here I should stress the obvious: not one single reader in Irving’s own day would have objected to this in the slightest. They were buying these volumes for the writer, not the subject, and the more of the writer they got, the happier they were. I feel exactly the same way about Washington Irving.
And yet! And yet, I’ve been hoping to find this abridged version – and once again, the story comes down to the writer involved: in this case not so much Irving as Charles Neider, a fine prose stylist in his own right and, more importantly, a first-rate editor whose work on the literary remains of Mark Twain are still seminal. Neider is shrewd, trustworthy judge of how to hack up a body of work to best effect, which is the only reason a passage like this didn’t send me running for the hills:
I have abridged the original text by somewhat more than 50 per cent. As examples, I have eliminated detailed examinations of the operations of Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec, as well as the last stand of the French at Montreal; Benedict Arnold’s military activities in the North, together with those of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys in the same region; and much military activity in the Carolinas and Georgia. I have also abridged sketches of characters whenever it seemed advisable to do so. Inasmuch as my edition is meant for the general reader, not the Irving or Washington scholar, I have not indicated places of omission, reasoning that to do so would be distracting and pedantic. I have tried to keep my presence in the work to a minimum. My own text, strictly of a connective nature, is to be found in brackets. In the original edition Irving provided an often lengthy summary of each chapter not only in the table of contents but at the beginning of each chapter. It was a custom of his day that I have dispensed with as being cumbersome and expensively space-consuming.
As mentioned: blasphemy – and yet, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Neider’s abridged one-volume edition of the travel writings of Mark Twain, for instance, somehow doesn’t feel like a desecration at all. And this abridgement of Irving’s many volumes likewise makes for surprisingly delightful reading, especially since Neider very much allows Irving to breathe in the fullness of his narrative, like in this passage where one of Washington’s foremost young men (and a future star on his own) joins the action:
About this time we have the first appearance in the military ranks of the Revolution of one destined to take an active and distinguished part in public affairs and to leave the impress of his genius on the institutions of the country.
As General Greene one day, on his way to Washington’s headquarters, was passing through a field – then on the outskirts of the city, now in the heart of its busiest quarter and known as “the Park” – he paused to notice a provincial company of artillery and was struck with its able performance and with the tact and talent of its commander. He was a mere youth, apparently about twenty years of age, small in person and stature but remarkable for his alert and manly bearing, It was Alexander Hamilton.
Greene was an able tactician, and quick to appreciate any display of military science. A little conversation sufficed to convince him that the youth before him had a mind of no ordinary grasp and quickness. He invited him to his quarters and from that time cultivated his friendship. Further acquaintance heightened the general’s opinion of his extraordinary merits, and he took an early occasion to introduce him to the commander-in-chief, by whom we shall soon find him properly appreciated.
As I mentioned, if you’re an Irving fan, you’ll happily read him burble like this all day long. You’d think this would make the blasphemy of cutting off chunks make such a book hateful to me, but no – I very much like what Neider’s doing here. He’s made the kind of an Irving Washington biography that would never have occurred to Washington Irving himself to write.
Of course when I finished it, I went immediately to my complete multi-volume edition. Even blasphemy has its limits.