Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize beyond the Rocky Mountains by Washington Irving (review)

202 Western American Literature Billy was no critic, but he knew enough to catch the message of the picture. This seat of honor beneath it was a seat of sorrow, too. Torpid flies marched brazenly across the battlefield, dragging their filth-encrusted legs. And soon only the General himself would be left, daring them all with a dirty face and two pinholes in the cardboard where his bue eyes should have been. Billy’s years of bachelorhood are “mummy years,” impotent years which find him in old age, “cold and moist . . . , fit only to swing a cane against the tissues of the fog.” Yielding to the request of a waitress at Costa’s to shelter a stranger in town, whorish Violet Ives, Billy is thanked with these dispossess­ ing words: “You’re my father, my priest, my black beetle without juice. Sit by me and grow warm. Besides, I’ve paid you in good paper. You have no rights.” It’s a grotesque, pathetic picture of aging, a compelling story of lost and forgotten desires— remembered but unattainable. Regrettably, the Perivale Press edition of The Blue Door & Other Stories is marred by numerous printing mistakes: duplicate pages, misspell­ ings and the like — made worse by contrast to the splendidly printed, hazyblue Brigham Young University Press packaging of Frost in the Orchard. Yet, everyone knows that collections such as these can’t be judged, as it were, by externals. Essences prove that Donald R. Marshall, Lawrence P. Spingam and the short story are new companions to be reckoned with as mutually successful and enjoyable. ROBERT GISH, University of Northern Iowa Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize beyond the Rocky Mountains. By Washington Irving. Edited by Richard Dilworth Rust. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. xxxiv -|- 500 pages, $25.00.) Richard D. Rust’s edition of Astoria is the first volume of Washington Irving’s Complete Works to appear since responsibility for the twenty-seven volume series was assumed by Twayne Publishers from the financially straitened University of Wisconsin Press. Prepared under the auspices of the Center for Editions of American Authors, whose seal it bears, the Rust Astoria is primarily a work of textual scholarship. Based, remarkably, on a printer’s copy manuscript which though widely dispersed is extant for about 90% of the text of this lengthy book, the Twayne edition approximates more closely than any preceding one Irving’s own intentions for the work in its original form. (By contrast, Edgeley W. Todd’s 1964 edition, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, is based on a printed text of 1868 whose types were entirely reset from the 1849 Author’s Revised Edition, itself reset from the first edition of 1836.) The fruit of Rust’s editorship is thus a critical text and accompanying apparatus — the latter including full lists Reviews 203 of emendations and of rejected substantive readings, a thorough yet eco­ nomical textual commentary, transcriptions of notes and memoranda Irving wrote during his preparation of the book and also of passages he rejected from his final version, and other material — which together subsume and supersede earlier texts of Astoria. Edgeley W. Todd’s handsome edition of 1964 had as its primary aim to disprove a notion long associated with Astoria, that whatever the merits of the work as literature it was “unreliable as history” (Todd, p. vii). By tracing in detail the author’s use of his numerous sources, quoting from these in his footnotes and including there a wealth of further pertinent data, Todd pieced together a grand mosaic of interrelated primary and secondary material which stood as proof that Astoria was — and remains — true to ascertainable fact. His edition was a tour de force of historical scholarship which cleared the way for a just recognition of Astoria’s merits as history and, by default as it were, as literature. As befitted his method of providing documentation for Irving’s state­ ments whenever possible, Todd’s editorial approach was expansive, encyclo­ pedic. On the other hand, the keynote of Rust’s textual apparatus and also of his historical information is efficient economy. Because textual discussions and tables properly lay claim to more than one hundred pages of the Twayne...