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.
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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.
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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 . . .
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| 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
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