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?

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