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.
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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
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