Washington Irving’s Problems with History and Romance in Astoria

WASHINGTON IRVING'S PROBLEMS WITH HISTORY AND ROMANCE IN ASTORIA I.S. MacLaren 11 ••• The stories of these Sinbads of the wilderness made the life of a trapper perfect romance to me."1 Thus Washington Irving introduced his account of Astoria, the first American attempt at continental commercialism. John Jacob Astor, a Rhenish immigrant who became the United States's first businessman "to attain colossal wealth," launched his dream from New York over a three-and-one-half year period beginning in the summer of 1810,when a ship load of landlubbering fur traders set off round Cape Horn to rendezvous near the mouth of the Columbia River with a boat brigade travelling overland from St. Louis.2 As its scene grew ever more remote, the dream darkened into nightmare: the commercial vision of not only a transcontinental but a pan-Pacific fur trade ran afoul of a series of misfortunes, lamentable misdirection and poor execution. Irving'sAstoria, when considered criticallyat all, is most often judged for its fidelity to the historical record, its accurate depiction of the frontier West, and its testament (or not) to Irving's willingness (or not) to sacrifice literary interest for quick commercial gain. Ample room apparently remains for a brief discussion of the literary difficulties encountered by Irving in this attempt to satisfy the demands of history and romance. The events of the Astorian fur enterprise failed to provide Irving's hoped-for "perfect romance." One of the earliest American visions of the Pacific suffered a literary failure that paralleled the fate of the commercial initiative, the documentation of which Irving,s nephew prepared so "that (Irving was] able to dress it up advantageously,and with little labor, for the press."3 When Astoria appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in October 1836, it wore different subtitles: Anecdotes of an Enterprize Beyond the Rocky Mountains in the United States, and Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains in Britain. The English publisher, Bentley, apparently felt that a greater sale would derive from implying more of a romance than an account of travel literature, and therefore, suggests Richard Dilworth Rust, promoted 2 I.S. MacLaren "enterprise" to the exclusion of mere "anecdotes." However that may be, at least one British critic was not fooled: ''Astoria is not a romance," said The London and Westminster Review of 1837, but a plain, though exquisitely skilful description of a mercantile speculation-a speculation indeed which conducted those who were to cany it into execution amidst the wildest scenes of western America, and which had rather the air of a daring and wild expedition of a hunting tribe than the calculating proceeding of cool and thrifty merchant. 4 This reviewer proceeds, as Edgar Allan Poe would do in the same year, to praise an overall unity in the work, although how such unity would not have been expected out of the subject of a single fur-trade enterprise seems not to have occurred to either of them.5 Romance and history are both unified in the figure of John Jacob Astor, whose dream it was to establish permanent commercial activity on the Pacific Coast and Ocean before anyone else did. A continental strategy in its incipience, Astor's dream blossomed in 1810 into a Pacific quest romance rivalling, if not actually quite echoing, the plans conveyed to the British government by Alexander Henry the Elder in 1781, by Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher in 1784, and by Astor's sometime luncheon guest during the last years of the eighteenth century, Alexander Mackenzie, in 1805.6 Irving strives for unity in his work through deft transition, carefully-suspended chronology, pictorialization of key landscapes, and a pervasive deployment of the ubi sunt theme for the characterization of fur trade barons and Indians alike. But more clearly, he strives for unity by emphasizing the vision of Astor himself; and if Astor's name occurs in fewer than one quarter of the book's chapters, the reader nevertheless is not permitted (nor are Astor's men as Irving characterizes them) to lose sight of the New Yorker's laudable vision.7 "He was," in Irving's view, a view that remained constant from their first...