More Views of the Hudson River-Part Six

Frederick Exley was born in Watertown, New York, in 1929. His birthplace isn't anywhere near the Hudson River. Instead, Exley had views of the river and its valley and towns while being institutionalized for alcoholism and mental illness during the 1950s. His struggles and experiences gave him much of the material for A Fan's Notes, his "fictional memoir" published in 1968.

Exley was the fan of his title, for he was obsessed with the New York Giants, especially with Frank Gifford, who had been a student and star athlete at the University of Southern California during Exley's attendance there in 1950-1952. The Giants aren't having much of a season this year, but Gifford gave fans a lot to cheer about in the 1950s. Both men left USC in 1952. Gifford soared. Exley on the other hand crashed. It was only with the writing (and success) of his novel that Exley began coming back. Kurt Vonnegut and James Dickey praised A Fan's Notes. Newsday called it "the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." Maybe Newsday was primed to make the comparison by references and allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel in Exley's own. These include the following passage:

     In the afternoons I lay face up on a water mattress and watched the compact white clouds run down the sky, or face down looking into the blue-green water--chlorinated and temulent to the smell--of the mail-order, children's swimming pool on which I floated. (Vintage Books, 1988, p. 368)

One difference is that Gatsby died afloat in his swimming pool, whereas Exley lived.

Exley mentioned other authors and books in A Fan's Notes. These include Washington Irving, George Orwell and 1984, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter. He didn't mention H.P. Lovecraft, but there are comparisons there, too. Like Lovecraft, Exley suffered from self-imposed malnutrition, his due to alcoholism. In describing his institutionalization, Exley wrote: "We had failed our families by our inability to function properly in society (as good a definition of insanity as any)." (p. 75; italics in the original) Although Lovecraft was never institutionalized, I think he also suffered from the same inability. And now I find in rereading page 75 of my Vintage edition that Exley used a phrase also used in Lovecraft: "they told us terrifying stories of the indignities that would be heaped upon us down there." Compare that to two uses of the same phrase in "The Call of Cthulhu":

When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith.

And

The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. 

Depths and descent are themes in both works. In A Fan's Notes, the descent is more psychological than physical, even if the quote from above refers to a descent into a lower part of the hospital.

There are horrors in Exley's fictionalized memoir. Many of these have to do with how psychiatric patients were treated in the 1950s and early '60s, including by insulin shock treatment. There is another type of horror, too . . .

Joseph Conrad isn't in A Fan's Notes, either. Earlier this year, I wrote about Conrad and his novella Heart of Darkness (1899). The most famous line from that story is of course Marlow's last words: "The horror! The horror!" In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. One bit of that person's marginalia reads:

". . . is horror, horror out there or in here?"

And this is where my insight, if it is one, arrives.

In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the horror or terror is external to the person. Ichabod Crane is normal and stable. Although Irving's narrator leaves open the possibility that Ichabod was finally terrified by a supernatural occurrence, the more likely explanation is that Brom Bones is the one to have put a scare into him by masquerading, Scooby-Doo style, as the Headless Horseman.

In "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928), the horror is also external in the form of Cthulhu himself, and to a lesser extent in his worshippers and acolytes. But the horror is also internal for some people, including the artist Henry Anthony Wilcox of Providence, Rhode Island. In late March and early April, coinciding with the worldwide Cthulhu crisis, Wilcox is possessed as if he were overcome by a terrible hallucinatory fever. He isn't himself. Others in the story suffer from psychological torments and fears as well. They have in a sense internalized an external horror. It occurs to me now that maybe their author in his own life externalized internal horrors.

Thirty years or more after that, Exley, while in the hospital, encounters another psychiatric patient, who tells him "that there was a man within him, pestering him, allowing him no peace." The man asks him to listen at his diaphragm, "the exact location of the man." Exley listens, hearing nothing. Nonetheless, he asks his interlocutor what the man is saying. "'He say he the debbil,'" is the reply, "'an' he gwoan kill me.'" (p. 73)

There is more on the man with the devil inside him (on pages following page 73--these show Exley's far different view of race in America than what Lovecraft expressed) and a further explication of the black man's--and Exley's--problem. The point is that, in a novel of a No-Longer-Romantic America, one of the postwar period and the 1960s, "the horror, the horror," was already internalized. There were external horrors to be sure--insulin shock treatment was one--but in the time between 1819-1820 when Irving's story was published and 1968 when Exley's first saw print, horror became internalized. The human heart--a heart often of darkness--became the source of the world's horrors instead of some externality. Joseph Conrad must have recognized that (during Freud's first decade as a published author), and so the migration of horror from external to internal sources had already commenced by then. Lovecraft recognized it in his own writings of the 1910s to the 1930s. And in an episode of his own first novel, Frederick Exley seems to have confirmed it.

I have mentioned Freud here because Exley did, too. He writes: "In the modern and enlightened sunshine of Freud, in this Anacreontic milieu where we were all going to be absolved of guilt and its ensuing remorse, Hawthorne had seemed to me irrelevant and spurious." (p. 367) But Exley returned to Hawthorne, learned a new appreciation of him, and even "developed a crush" on him. Conrad may or may not have been a romantic author (or "Romantic Realist" as Ruth M. Stauffer put it in a study from 1922; he was certainly conservative), but maybe he followed an older example, disregarding science and "progress" in favor of a traditional understanding of the human heart. That confuses things a little, and maybe mine is no insight after all. Maybe a discovery that horrors are internal rather than external is simply a return to tradition. If that's true, then maybe external horrors are left as artifacts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our monsters and ghosts were and are from within.

* * *

Another of the authors mentioned in A Fan's Notes was Harlan Hatcher (1898-1998), with whom Exley had taken a course at USC. Exley mentioned him in relation to Ernest Hemingway and the days both men spent in Paris during the 1920s. (According to Exley, Hatcher did not know Hemingway. He only knew of him. See pp. 128-129.) I recognized Hatcher's name, for in late summer I had read from The Ohio Guide, compiled by Harlan Hatcher and published in 1940. Hatcher was born in Ironton, Ohio, and taught at Ohio State University but became president of football rival University of Michigan. I'm always fascinated by these nexi and coincidences, even when they don't signify anything greater than themselves or have any occult meaning. Anyway, this is the first of these final notes on my series on Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Hudson River, all of which are personal rather than external. They are in here rather than out there.

A Fan's Notes is not the kind of book you should read when you have slipped through the cracks of the world. I didn't know that when I began reading it during my five-weeks-and-a-day. I read it anyway. Sometimes it dragged and sometimes not. I got through it and I'm glad I read it, even if I don't have as high opinion of it as the writers of the cover blurbs. Chapter 6 is entitled "Who? Who? Who is Mr. Blue?" I was reading that chapter in my tent, by flashlight, when I heard a barred owl call, "Who? Who? Who?" Then it flew away, and I heard two owls exchanging their more recognizable call, "Who cooks for you?" Another thing you should know about barred owls: they sometimes begin their calling with the most terrible and ghastly of screams.

Finally, Frederick Exley married on October 31, 1959, exactly sixty-six years before my drive on Halloween night, 2025, which ended my five-weeks-and-a-day. I drove under a half moon that night, the same fraction that inspired the name of Henry Hudson's ship, Halve Maen, or Half Moon, on which he and his crew sailed up the Hudson River in 1609.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Five

Like I said, I did not set out on a reading program about the Hudson River as it appears in literature. Instead, I began thinking about the subjects of this series simply by reading the stories in a small volume called Ghosts, edited by Grant Overton and published in 1927. I found Ghosts at a garage sale this summer, along with a booklet about George Rogers Clark's victory at Vincennes in 1779, also published in the 1920s. That's a story every fourth-grader in Indiana learns in history class--and remembers thereafter if only because of the account of Clark and his men wading through miles of the flooded Wabash River bottom in the winter of 1779. Next year will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of our country. I hope to write about that at the same time that I write about Weird Tales in 1926, which was, of course, the American sesquicentennial year. I'm not sure that I will find very much to write about in regards to Weird Tales in the year of our sesquicentennial, but I'll at least give it a try.

* * *

I enjoyed many of the stories in Ghosts, even if not all are actually ghost stories. The first is "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells (1896). It's a somewhat weak story, but then Wells was a materialist, I think, and not very convincing as a believer in ghosts, which is what would have been required of him if he was going to write successfully a story like this one. The last story is "Quality" by John Galsworthy (1912). If there is a ghost in Galsworthy's story, he is only a human ghost. "Quality," as well as "The Man Without a Country" by Edward Everett Hale (1863), would seem out of place in a volume like this one, the difference being that I enjoyed Hale's story but didn't think very much of Galsworthy's.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1819, 1820) is the second story in Ghosts. Right away, as I was reading it, I was struck by the similarity of stories by H.P. Lovecraft to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." More specifically, I noticed a similar kind of setting and the establishment of a sense of place. I quoted earlier in this series from "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929). Although I wrote a note to myself about "The Colour Out of Space" (Amazing Stories, Sept. 1927), I didn't mention it or quote from it in this space. I'll make up for that now:

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

     The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.

     There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

Compare that to similar passages in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "The Dunwich Horror."

I went in one direction in my series comparing Lovecraft to Irving's hero Ichabod Crane. All the while, I was preparing to write in another direction, for not long after reading Ghosts, I came upon a book, entirely by accident, that includes other views of the Hudson River. That book is A Fan's Notes: A Fictional Memoir by Frederick Exley (1929-1992). A Fan's Notes was published in 1968. I read it in the Vintage Books edition of twenty years after.

Now, at last, I have arrived at the last two views of the Hudson River about which I will write in this series. First, from page 81 of A Fan's Notes:

     That hospital (the word is frightfully harsh) was lovely. Its buildings--château-like houses--commanded a high, green hill, and its shrubbed, carpet-like lawns ran sweepingly down between ancient, verdant trees. It was spring then, the spring just preceding my autumn commitment to Avalon Valley; and the azure sky seemed always mottled with sailing, billowing clouds, which, when we turned our eyes heavenward, seemed to caress and cool our faces. Beneath us in the valley, deep blue and turgid and heart-stopping, was the Hudson River.

Second, from page 129:

With the top down on the Mercedes and the chillness of the season cutting our faces a fierce pink, we shot through the autumn-lemon hills of Putnam County, and across the snakelike mountain roads into that valley. Beyond the river, its waters flat blue and cold now, rose the mountains, rose just as Irving had said they did, now purple, now russet, now shrouded in mist. I especially liked the antiquated towns where the the old limestone houses sat flush with the streets beneath the fall trees. Looking at them, one thought of cavernous hearths opening onto great, smoldering logs, of huge copper kettles, of the odor of things baking, of family reunions, of rooted people with a sense of the past, warm, loyal, dignified people who endured in a kind of unending autumn--I could not, and cannot, imagine that valley save in autumn.

Like Ichabod Crane, Frederick Exley was a teacher. He seems to have been well read, and he made references and allusions to other authors and books, mostly American, including, as in the second passage above, Washington Irving. A Fan's Notes is something of a horror story. I'll have more on that next time. (The hospital mentioned in the first passage was a mental hospital.) But Exley's approach in describing settings is similar to Irving's and not at all like Lovecraft's, for Lovecraft wanted to let us know that he was writing of terrible places and terrible events. Irving and Exley actually liked the places and people of which they wrote.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Four

North of the Bronx is the Tappan Zee, a wide place in the Hudson River with a combination American Indian-Dutch name. Tarrytown is on the east side of the Tappan Zee. Washington Irving wrote about the Tappan Zee and Tarry Town, as he called it, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." His description below could be the caption to a painting by an artist of the Hudson River School:

The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.

According to Wikipedia, Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) lived in the area of the Tappan Zee while he was writing his novel Gateway (1997). He mentioned that body of water in his book, calling it the Tappan Sea and letting us know that his protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, has an apartment overlooking it.

C.L. Moore (1911-1987) and Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) lived at Hastings-on-Hudson, which is also on the Tappan Zee, in the 1940s. Both wrote for Weird Tales in the 1930s. Others who were born in or lived in the Hudson River valley included:

• Edith de Garis (ca. 1874-1950) of Waterford and Albany

• Louis B. Capron (1891-1971) of Menands, Colonie

• Henry del Campo (1899-1961) of Schodack

• P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974) of Troy

In addition, the unknown author W.H. Holmes, who wrote "The Weaving Shadows" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), was almost certainly from from the Hudson River valley.

Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015) and Jean Milligan Buchanan (1919-2004) lived in Manhattan, though closer to the East River than to the Hudson. He was the associate editor of Weird Tales from November 1942 until September 1949. Jean Milligan, his wife after 1952, is supposed to have been the pseudonymous author Allison V. Harding. I have my doubts about that idea, but that's something for other days, some of which are in the past. In any case, Jean Milligan Buchanan lived at the end of her life at a nursing home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in fact just three blocks north of Edgar Allan Poe Street and within view of the Hudson River.

Finally, I wrote about my uncle, who studied English at the State University of New York at Albany in the 1960s. One of the subjects of his studies was Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), who was not an author of the Hudson River valley but instead of a valley to the south, that of the Delaware River.

Next: A View of the Hudson River from the 1960s.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Three

In this centennial year of The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby, I have been writing about New York, its islands, its rivers, its cities, and its towns. Washington Irving (1783-1859) famously wrote about those places, too. (I'm not claiming the fame, only the writing.) And for the past three weeks I have been writing about the Hudson River and places along its banks and in its valley. Other authors of American literature have lived in and written about the Hudson River and its valley. They include some early authors and some late:

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote about the wilds of New York in his novel The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna; a Descriptive Tale (1823). There is a long passage about scenery along the Hudson River in Chapter XXVI well worth reading.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1830-1831. He lived on Manhattan Island, at the Brennan farmhouse in 1844-1845 and in the Bronx in 1846-1847. There is an Edgar Allan Poe Street in Manhattan, close to the Hudson River, and Poe is known to have taken in views of the river on his writer's walks and rambles. I found an article about Poe and New York. Click on the following title, author's name, and date to read it: "Edgar Allan Poe Won’t be Forgotten on West 84th Street--Nevermore" by Allison Moon on the website West Side Rag, July 19, 2022; updated on July 20, 2022. I also learned that Poe's story "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) was based on the case of Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose body was found in the Hudson River off Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1841.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a New Englander, but he understood the spell of the Hudson. In an article "Gorgeous Hudson River Valley" (The Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 17, 2014), author Edward Readicker-Henderson wrote: "When Nathaniel Hawthorne went up the Hudson on his way to Niagara in 1835, he said he'd been putting it off because he didn't want 'to exchange the pleasures of hope for those of memory.'" Mr. Readicker-Henderson's article is about the Hudson River School of artists, about whom I have written nothing at all. But if you would like a view of the Hudson River of two centuries past, then you should have a look at their work.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York City and lived in his childhood in Albany. The Hudson River is mentioned twice in his epic novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851). There is more about Melville in "Melville Ashore" by Edward Tick in the New York Times, August 17, 1986. Again, click to find and read it.

Like Melville, Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York and spent part of his childhood in Albany. Charles Fort (1874-1932) was born in Albany of Dutch ancestry. He lived with his wife in the Bronx, and that's where he died. Stories by Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne were in Weird Tales magazine. Stories and ideas inspired by Charles Fort were also in its pages.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Two

I have a book here next to me called The Hudson: A History, written by Tom Lewis and published in 2005. I had it offered for sale but took it back once I started reading and thinking about the Hudson River. I confess that this was not a pre-planned program of reading. I simply started by reading "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1819, 1820), immediately making a connection, at least in my own imagination, to stories by H.P. Lovecraft, thence, more tenuously, to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). A recent commenter, Baron Greystone, called this an experiment. That's as good a description as any. I liken what I have been doing in this series to the compare-and-contrast-type paper we all wrote in English composition class all those years ago.

Not all of what I have written here works very well, but enough of it does, I think, to make my point or points. The first is that H.P. Lovecraft followed in Washington Irving's example in effectively and concretely establishing a setting and a sense of place in his fiction. More particularly, his approach and some of his imagery in "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929) are very close to Irving's in his story of a century before. Second is the effect that encountering the Hudson River has had on the writer's and artist's imagination. I soon found another writer's view of the Hudson quite by accident. That writer also referred to other writers and other books, including The Great Gatsby. Reading his book led me to what I think might be an insight--for myself if for no one else--regarding the literature of terror and horror in America. I'll soon write about him and his book, as well as this insight, but first are some other views of the Hudson.

Reading through The Hudson: A History by Tom Lewis has led me to thinking and reading about other authors. First is this quote from the works of Washington Irving, describing his first trip upriver:

Of all the scenery of the Hudson, the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. Never shall I forget the effect upon me of my first view of them, predominating over a wide extent of country--part wild, woody and rugged; part softened away into all the graces of cultivation. As we slowly floated along, I lay on the deck and watched them through a long summer's day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to approach; at other times to recede; now almost melting into hazy distance, now burnished by the setting sun, until in the evening they printed themselves against the glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian landscape.

Irving's reference to "an Italian landscape" is unnecessary, I think. It even works against the author's purpose in that he was an American author setting out, though he may not have known it very well, as a pioneer in an individual and independent American literature. Besides that, scenes in nature and the real world don't look like landscapes. It's actually the other way around.

In his book, Mr. Lewis left out "the Kaatskill Mountains." I found the full quote in a book called The Hudson: Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention by Wallace Bruce, a "Centennial Edition" published by Bryant Union Company of New York in 1907. The "centennial" part of that was of the first voyage of the world's first commercial steam-powered vessel, the North River Steamboat, later called the Clermont. Invented by Robert Fulton (1765-1815), the ship began steaming along the Hudson River between New York City and Albany in 1807.

Fulton was well connected to all kinds of people, including Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Barlow is connected to the place where I had my 2005 book The Hudson available for purchase, namely, Gallipolis, Ohio. The French City of Gallipolis has its connections to Ohio author Jack Matthews (1925-2013), who also had a strong sense of place. The late Mr. Matthews was born a century ago and died twelve years ago last month. Although I saw him several times, I never met him or spoke to him, and I greatly regret that.

Just so you know, Jack Matthews also wrote about H.P. Lovecraft. Just so you know, among his novels was Beyond the Bridge (1970), which has as its background the collapse of the Silver Bridge over another of our great rivers, the Ohio. That tragic event took place fifty-eight years ago this month, on December 15, 1967, when the cars and trucks of workers, commuters, and Christmas shoppers fell into the river from the bridge connecting--until it didn't anymore--Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Kanauga, Ohio, just north of Gallipolis. Finally, just so you know, some people connect the Silver Bridge disaster to the supposed curse of Cornstalk and the supposed creature known as Mothman.

Washington Irving is of course quoted again and again in the 1907 book The Hudson. So is another author named Irving. She was Minna Irving (1864-1940), who was born Minnie Odell and who contributed a poem to Weird Tales magazine, "Sea-Wind," published in August 1937. She was born in Tarrytown, New York, and her mother's maiden name was Van Tassel, so her connections to Washington Irving and Irving's work would seem strong, even if she lived by a borrowed name.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part One

The Hudson River was named after English explorer Henry Hudson (ca. 1565-1611 or after), who sailed upriver in 1609 while in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He was the first European to make that journey. Hudson made it as far as a place later called Stuyvesant Landing. East of there and away from the river is Kinderhook, birthplace of our eighth president and our first Dutch president, Martin Van Buren (1782-1862). Van Buren was friends with Washington Irving (1783-1859), as well as with a schoolmaster named Jesse Merwin (1783-1852). Van Buren asserted that Merwin was the pattern or original of Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," although there is one other candidate for Ichabod's original, Samuel Youngs (1760-1839). Youngs was of Tarrytown, New York, and lies buried at Sleepy Hollow.

There is a historical site called the Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse in Kinderhook. It's located about a mile north of Martin Van Buren's home of Lindenwald. It was at that house, then owned by William Peter Van Ness (1778-1826), that Irving wrote most of A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819, 1820). Among the contents of The Sketch Book is "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Lindenwald was named for its trees, what we in America call basswood. The word trees in relation to a house will come up again before the end of this entry. Consider the context and possible meaning.

Now for some trivia, because we here like trivia, including about our presidents.

• Martin Van Burn had a nickname, "Old Kinderhook." Some people believe that his nickname is the source of our expression OK or okay. (Raymond Chandler spelled it okeh.) I think it more likely of African origin, but that's okay. OK or okay is supposed to be the most commonly spoken word the world over. I don't know about you, but I picture Baltus Van Tassel as looking like Martin Van Buren in late portraits and photographs of the president.

• I wrote some time ago that the Baltimore Ravens are the only professional sports team that I know of named after a literary work. However, I overlooked the New York Knicks, or Knickerbockers, named after Washington Irving's pseudonym, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who is also a fictional character and something of a literary hoax in Irving's writing and publication of The History of New York. Like Henry Hudson, Diedrich Knickerbocker disappeared without a trace.

• William Peter Van Ness was Aaron Burr's second in Burr's duel with Alexander Hamilton. Burr was infamous for his alleged plot against the United States. One of his co-conspirators was Harman Blennerhassett, who owned a large house on an island in the Ohio River, a little downriver of what is now Parkersburg, West Virginia. Author P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974), of New York Dutch descent, died on Blennerhassett Island while attending a meeting of the West Virginia State Archaeological Society. He was stricken with a heart attack while viewing excavations on the island. 

• Aaron Burr served during the Revolutionary War, including at West Point along the Hudson River. After his acquittals and after having lived in Europe, Burr returned to New York City, where, like Ichabod Crane might have done, he practiced law. By the way, Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia Burr Alston (1783-1813), was, like Henry Hudson, lost at sea.

• Finally, I'm writing this in a place named after Martin Van Buren and settled in part by Dutch immigrants from New York.

 * * *

Washington Irving mentioned Henry Hudson in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," giving him instead a Dutch Christian name:

     From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. 

There is an oblique reference to Hudson and his men, or men like them, in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925):

     Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

 * * *

The first quote above brings up another bit of trivia. This one relates to an episode of Seinfeld in which the characters encounter a gang called "the Van Buren Boys." I wonder: who would win if the Sleepy Hollow Boys were to go up against the Van Buren Boys?

The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson by British Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier (1881), with a caption from a later reproduction, probably in book form.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Happy Thanksgiving, 2025!

Art by Albert Dodd Blashfield (1860-1920). The Internet seems not to have noticed yet that Blashfield was the younger brother of painter and muralist Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936).

Terence E. Hanley, 2025.

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Six

The fictional Dunwich lies in the valley of the fictional Miskatonic River, but that river has a different and more ominous appearance than does the larger Hudson River in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow":

The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As with Dunwich, maybe you don't want to go there.

In contrast, here's an example of how the narrator feels about the Hudson in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow":

     Thus feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and "sugared suppositions," he journeyed along the sides of a range of hills which look out upon some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson. The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down in the west. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.

A few years ago, I drove to Maine for a funeral. Along the way, I crossed the Hudson River by way of Bear Mountain Bridge, northwest of Peekskill. I stopped at a scenic overlook above Iona Island and read about the history of the area. This is above Tarrytown, above Washington Irving country, but I could see for myself the charm, mystery, and great beauty of the place, and I understand why people would have been drawn to it in his time and still are today. Not far to the northeast is Sunken Mine, about which I wrote on May 11, 2023. I wrote then that someone should give Putnam County, New York, the Lovecraft treatment, but the Irving treatment might do just as well.

* * *

H.P. Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn in 1924-1926. I have been to New York City only once, on a train, in the dark of night. I'm not qualified at all to write about the city. But in looking at a map, I believe it correct to say that Brooklyn is near or across from the outlet of the Hudson River. That river is not mentioned in "The Horror at Red Hook," but here are a couple of passages referring to water:

Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. 

And:

Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background.

(Another warning to writers: "leeringly" and words, or non-words, like it are bad. Don't use them. Think better, write better, use a dictionary.)

Although Lovecraft was from a harbor town--Providence, Rhode Island--he seems to have been a landlubber, and I believe he found the smell of fish intolerable. Jay Gatsby, on the other hand, hails from the interior of a continent, and yet he wears or wore a yachting costume, earned in service on board a wealthy man's yacht. "To the young Gatz," writes Nick Carraway, "resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamor in the world." Lovecraft lived in poverty, in Brooklyn, next to New York Harbor, a place of commerce. Gatsby lived in great wealth, at the fictional West Egg, next to Long Island Sound, a place for yachting and sailboating. In 1925, these two men were an island and worlds apart.

* * *

There is an unfortunate racial aspect in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Here is an example:

He was the admiration of all the negroes; who, having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm and the neighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black faces at every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene, rolling their white eyeballs, and showing grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear.

Someone should have told Washington Irving that white people have white eyeballs, too.

There is almost the same image in The Great Gatsby:

As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

One hundred and five years separated the publication of those two narratives. How little some things change.

"The Horror at Red Hook" is about race. There's no getting around that. Others have written about the racial aspect of that story in particular and Lovecraft's oeuvre in general. I'll leave that alone for now. But I'm not done with the Hudson River; or Irving, Lovecraft, Fitzgerald, or Nathaniel Hawthorne; or American literature, including weird fiction and horror fiction.

The first-day of issue of the U.S. postage stamp "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," from 1974. The artists are of course unidentified.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Five

Whip-poor-wills call in weird fiction. They call in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," too:

     Then, as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,--the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path [. . .].

They are all through "The Dunwich Horror." Here is a similar passage from that story by H.P. Lovecraft:

     Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

A weird and supernatural atmosphere prevails in several parts of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." After all, it was first in print during the Romantic period in America when logic and reason were placed on the back burner in favor of mystery and emotion.

We think of Nathaniel Hawthorne as having been influenced by Puritanism and one of its exemplars, Cotton Mather (1663-1728). As it turns out, Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather was Judge John Hathorne (1641-1717), who, like Mather, was involved in the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693. But Cotton Mather is mentioned in Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," too. Ichabod Crane is described as "a perfect master of Cotton Mather's 'History of New England Witchcraft.'" Mather is also mentioned in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, including in "The Unnamable," published in Weird Tales in July 1925 while its author was living near Red Hook and about to write about his perceived horrors of that place. If the works of Cotton Mather are a kind of early-American grimoire, then there are grimoires in the form of his books in both Irving and Lovecraft.

To be concluded . . .

"Just then he heard the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kick in the ribs, and old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; he thundered over the resounding planks; he gained the opposite side; and now Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him."

A painterly illustration of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by American artist William J. Wilgus (1819-1853).

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Four

H.P. Lovecraft moved to Brooklyn, New York, on March 3, 1924. Early the following year, he moved again, this time to a place near Red Hook, a waterfront neighborhood of Brooklyn. He set his short story "The Horror of Red Hook" (Weird Tales, Jan. 1927) in Red Hook and Rhode Island. Like his police detective, Thomas F. Malone (uncharacteristically Irish for a Lovecraftian hero), Lovecraft repaired to Rhode Island after his own personally horrific experiences in New York City.

Not long after Lovecraft moved to his apartment near Red Hook, Charles Scribner's Sons published a short novel that has proved an American classic. Some think of it as the Great American Novel. That book was of course The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published on April 10, 1925, now more than one hundred years in the past.

H.P. Lovecraft and Jay Gatsby lived opposite of each other. Lovecraft, struggling and living in obscurity and poverty in or near a run-down and squalid neighborhood in Brooklyn, resided at one end of Long Island. Jay Gatsby, bearing the posthumous epithet "The Great," lived at the other in immense wealth and among some very rich people. Like H.P. Lovecraft and Ichabod Crane, Gatsby journeys into an alien culture. Lovecraft didn't want to be there. He didn't want to break in as much as out and return to his New England home. Ichabod Crane has other ideas, though. Like Gatsby, he wants to gain entry into a society and culture in which he is an outsider, there to win the heart of a beautiful and wealthy (by proxy) woman. Both characters fail. Gatsby's failure is in fact an utter and fatal disaster.

Unlike Ichabod and Lovecraft, Gatsby is not Anglo-Saxon at all, but German and Midwestern in origin. His journey to New York is eastward rather than westward and from a young society and culture into an older one, even if his New York is the bustling place of the 1920s. The tragedy of Jay Gatsby is that, try as he might, he would always have been an outsider, and he never knew it. His dream of breaking into what he must have imagined was a higher society and winning Daisy Buchanan was never possible. As for Ichabod Crane, well, he faced a more physical man than himself--a man of action rather than of words--in Brom Bones. Like Tom Buchanan is to Jay Gatsby, Brom Bones is a rival to Ichabod Crane. Like H.P. Lovecraft, who did not have a romantic rival, Tom has questionable ideas about race.

* * *

There is cult activity in "The Horror at Red Hook." There is cult activity, too, in the 1943 film The Seventh Victim. Both are set in New York City, the former among low-class people, the latter among the middle class. I wrote a not long ago about the alien-invasion movie The Faculty (1998) and its references to other stories and movies. Bebe Neuwirth's long, black hair with bangs cut straight across and curled under reminded me of the woman with the same kind of hair, played by Jean Brooks, in The Seventh Victim. There is also a swimming pool scene in The Faculty. That one reminded me of a like scene in Cat People (1942). Both films were produced by Val Lewton, who also had a story in Weird Tales, "The Bagheeta," from July 1930.

* * *

Lovecraft created cults among peasants and poor people. What he didn't realize is that cults and other fringe belief systems are far more likely to form and spread among the upper and middle classes, maybe especially in the middle class. The middle class radical should be a cliché or stereotype by now. Supposedly intelligent and well-educated people should recognize him when they see him. Instead they fall for his spiel and vote for him in droves, as they did in New York City earlier this month.

Poor people and peasants tend to be more conservative or traditional in their outlook. They have too much to lose when change and upheaval, or what people call "progress," comes along. When the shooting, murdering, burning, and destruction begin, they know that they will disproportionately pay the price. One dead Trotsky, millions of dead peasants and proles. The makers of The Seventh Victim had it right. Lovecraft--and Marx--had it wrong.

* * *

I'll refer again to other things I wrote about earlier this year: if you take away the place names and prepositions from the titles "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Horror at Red Hook," you have "the horror, the horror."

To be continued . . .

An etching of an illustration by F.O.C. Darley for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." This image is reversed from the previous color version. I don't think it reads as well. 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Three

Both Ichabod Crane and H.P. Lovecraft are or were New Englanders of Anglo-Saxon origin. Both journey or journeyed from New England into alien cultures in New York, the former in the old Dutch country around Tarry Town, the latter to Brooklyn, which has, by the way, a name of Dutch origin. Both are or were more or less forced out, although Lovecraft left New York voluntarily, and I would guess with great relief, happiness, and excitement. Ichabod leaves after being scared and perhaps humiliated. What he fails to understand is that alien cultures resist outsiders, though not always with malice. Maybe outsiders can never make it inside.

Washington Irving, author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," was not Anglo-Saxon as far as I can tell. He was actually the son of a Scotsman and a woman of Cornwell, both presumably of Celtic origin. Irving was born to immigrant parents in Manhattan, situated between Brooklyn to the south and Tarry Town well to the north. Like his creation Ichabod Crane, he was or seems to have been a positive and cheerful person. He seems to have fit in wherever he went. Maybe that's a talent among Celtic peoples, who originated somewhere in the east as migrants.

* * *

The name Ichabod is biblical. It means "without glory", or "where is the glory?" and is supposed to refer to the birth of the person Ichabod after the death of his father and grandfather and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines. (Will they ever cease?) Ichabod's mother died at his birth. Like the biblical Ichabod, H.P. Lovecraft lost his father and grandfather, later his mother. If we can call literary success a kind of glory, then Lovecraft was unlike Ichabod in that he was "with glory," although mostly after his premature death. The name Ichabod in regards to Irving's hero is perhaps ironic, for he is in the end humiliated and all of his ambitions smashed like a Halloween pumpkin.

* * *

Ichabod's surname undoubtedly refers to his physical appearance. The storyteller writes:

     He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

H.P. Lovecraft also had an unusual appearance, though not so extreme. I don't know of a comprehensive physical description of him. I'll just write about what I see in photographs. I don't know how tall he was, but he doesn't appear to have been especially tall. His gauntness may have lent him the appearance of greater than average height. In photographs, he looks to have had longish arms and perhaps disproportionately shorter legs. His head and torso appear large. His most striking features, I think, are his large, intense, dark eyes and his prognathous jaw and chin. The jaw and chin might also have lent an impression of great height, for it suggests acromegaly or gigantism. In looking at him, I can't help but be reminded of the actor Rondo Hatton. Although Lovecraft sometimes smiled in photographs, he never showed his teeth, and his smile was kind of upside down. Maybe he felt self-conscious about his teeth. On the other hand, maybe his lack of a toothy smile was just another indication of his shy, retentive, or withdrawn personality.

Despite being so thin, Ichabod Crane has a vast appetite. He also likes to drink. Lovecraft on the other hand was abstemious and died, essentially, from malnutrition. During his early marriage to Sonia Greene, though, Lovecraft gained weight, reaching two hundred pounds. If he was overweight at two hundred pounds, then that also suggests that he was not much more than average height, perhaps five feet, ten or eleven inches tall.

Ichabod Crane is self-confident, including and especially in regards to women. (More accurately, he is not lacking in confidence. His is not the presence of a positive trait so much as the absence of a negative one. This is one way in which we have gotten ourselves into so much trouble, for in our anxious, depressed, and insecure age, we have cultivated and nurtured negative traits and allowed them to drag us down.) His goal is to marry Katrina Van Tassel, and beyond that, to take over one day the estate of her father, Balt Van Tassel. One of his means to win her heart (he hopes) is through his psalmody, or the singing of songs, in other words, through the music of words.

Unlike Ichabod, Lovecraft married, although he might have been the pursued rather than pursuer. He was not a great success with women. In fact he seems to have shrunk from them. He seems to have been a man's man instead. Nonetheless, Lovecraft easily corresponded and collaborated with women, many of them fellow writers. These relationships were also based upon the music and magic of words, I think, and so maybe Lovecraft was, in his way, more successful than we think.

To be continued . . .

Illustration for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by American artist F.O.C. Darley (1822-1888), an associate of Edgar Allan Poe and an illustrator also of  "The Gold-Bug."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Two

On March 3, 1924, Howard Phillips Lovecraft married Sonia Greene and moved in with her in her apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Early the following year, she moved to Cleveland for her work. Lovecraft moved into a smaller apartment a mile or two from Red Hook, a neighborhood to the south facing New York Harbor.

Lovecraft was not happy in his new home. In July-August 1925, he wrote a short story called "The Horror at Red Hook." The title alone might tell us something about Lovecraft's state of mind. The contents of "The Horror at Red Hook," perhaps Lovecraft's most notorious short story (there are even more notorious poems), tell us still more.

Lovecraft also wrote "He" in August 1925. That story begins:

     I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me. [Emphasis added.]

(I would like to pause here to point out once again that "blackly" and abominations like it are not words. Writers beware! Stay way from these non-words!)

My coming to New York had been a mistake . . .

H.P. Lovecraft emanated from an old New England family that had come on both sides from old, old England. They were from what used to be called the Anglo-Saxon race. Bloodlines, families, family curses, breeding (and inbreeding), race, racial geography, immigration, sense of place--these are recurring themes in his work. So is the sense of being an outsider, "The Outsider," I think, being one of his most personal and diagnostic works. Coming from Providence, Rhode Island, and a very old part of New England, Lovecraft was an outsider in New York.

And so was Ichabod Crane.

Like Lovecraft, Ichabod Crane, subject of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820), is a New Englander who has journeyed to New York, thus into a foreign culture. Ichabod is a schoolmaster from Connecticut. Like Lovecraft, he is a man of words, or as the storyteller in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" calls him, "our man of letters." Both are or were Anglo-Saxons attempting to fit into non-Anglo-Saxon cultures. In Ichabod's case, that culture is Dutch. Both encounter troubles in New York. Both are out of place in these cultures alien to them, and there is no way they can ever fit in. In other words, each is ultimately incapable of going native. Ichabod Crane tries to fit in and envisions himself, as the future husband of comely Katrina Van Tassel, as heir to the estate of her father, Mynheer Baltus Van Tassel. Like Lovecraft, he is of modest means. Unlike Lovecraft, he is ambitious--and un-self-defeating.

Ichabod wants to break into the culture and society in old Dutch New York. In the end, it is rumored that he has gone to New York City after having had a scare put into him at Sleepy Hollow. Lovecraft, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get out of the alien culture and society in which he found himself. On April 17, 1926, Lovecraft very suddenly abandoned his life in New York City and returned to his home in Providence. I can imagine that he felt the way the recent visitor to Dunwich feels: "It is always a relief to get clear of the place."

To be continued . . .

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858) by American artist John Quidor (1801-1881). Quidor was born in Tappan, New York, southwest of and across the Hudson River from Tarrytown. This is the first of a small online art gallery illustrating "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part One

In late September, near the beginning of my five-weeks-and-a-day, I re-read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820) for the first time in a very long time. Irving's story begins with a long passage meant to introduce setting and to establish a sense of place, more specifically, the sense of a marvelous place where strange, magical, and supernatural events might occur:

     In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

     I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.

     From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

Readers of weird fiction might be struck by the similarity of that passage to the following later one:

     When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

     Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

     As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Those are of course the opening paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft, first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

The mood evoked and the atmosphere described in these two passages are very different from each other, essentially the opposite of each other. A person might like to tarry in Sleepy Hollow, near Tarry Town. That same person probably can't wait to get away from Dunwich. As the author's voice says, "It is always a relief to get clear of the place."

Irving's introduction speaks of "marvellous beliefs," "trances and visions," "strange sights," and "music and voices in the air." Indeed, "[t]he whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions." There are also references to "a High German doctor" and "an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe." These things seem to be about local flavor and the charm of the place. The country in and around Dunwich is entirely different. There isn't any charm there. No decent person would want to sample its flavors.

Like his predecessor, Lovecraft wrote about the marvelous and perhaps supernatural atmosphere of his setting, as well as of things of the past: "Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality." More recently, there are horrors in Dunwich, these drawn out of the historic and even remoter past. Call this the Nathaniel Hawthorne version of the tale of place. Washington Irving seems to have been a happier person and his a happier story. It is, at least, a somewhat lighthearted story. "The Dunwich Horror" is something else entirely.

To be continued . . .

Hugh Rankin's interior illustration for "The Dunwich Horror" in Weird Tales, April 1929. By the way, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was in Weird Tales, too, in November 1928, or ninety-seven years ago this month.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley