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 

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 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

W.H. Holmes (?-?)-An Unusual Ghost Story

It seems that for decades a lot of men and even many women used only their initials in everything they did. That habit confounds the people who in later years might look for them, especially when they had common surnames. W.H. Holmes is a case in point. I know nothing about him and have found nothing about him, although there were: a well-known American paleontologist named William H. Holmes (1846-1933) (he was a member of the Hayden Survey of the Rocky Mountains in the 1870s); a school superintendent, Dr. William H. Holmes, of Mount Vernon, New York, who died in 1934; and a newspaper editor and publisher by those initials and that name in Kansas during the early 1900s. I'm not sure any of these men makes a good candidate for our W.H. Holmes. Another possibility is that "W.H. Holmes" was a pseudonym, "Holmes" being the operative word.

W.H. Holmes was the author of six stories published in The Black Mask and Weird Tales in 1922-1923. The following credits are from The FictionMags Index:

• "A Deep Sea Dog" in The Black Cat (Jan. 25, 1922)
• "The Matrimonial Reef" in The Black Cat (Oct. 1922)
• "Creeping Death" in The Black Mask (Feb. 1923)
• "The Weaving Shadows" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923)
• "Scrambled Motives" in The Black Mask (June 15, 1923)
• "The House in Boney Hollow" in The Black Mask (Sept. 15, 1923)

Who can say why he or she stopped writing after 1923? Or maybe he or she started writing under a different name. In any case, W.H. Holmes appears lost to us.

W.H. Holmes' Story:

"The Weaving Shadows" is a short story of about eight pages. It is set in New York State, with an opening and a closing in New York City and the main action taking place above the city, in the Highlands of the Hudson, more specifically at Sunken Mine. Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. I'll have more on that in a while.

Chet Burke and his unnamed sister live in an apartment in New York City. Burke is a Sherlock Holmes-type character. The story itself is constructed like a classic Holmes story. Burke is sitting in his favorite easy chair, "absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic," when his cipher of a sister lets in two visitors. (She's the Mrs. Hudson character I guess.) Burke knows Chief Rhyne of the Rhyne Detective Agency. Evidently he's the Inspector Lestrade character. With him is a Mr. Hayden, a carpenter late of New Orleans and now living with his sister and her daughter in a backwoods house at Sunken Mine. The troubled Mr. Hayden tells his story, just as Sherlock Holmes' clients do. Burke agrees to take the case and goes afield with Hayden. Chief Rhyne is left behind. It would have been better if he had gone with them. Maybe a lot of death could have been avoided.

"The Weaving Shadows" is an unusual story. It has many of the conventions of the ghost story or a story of a haunting. It also has Spiritualism, that hoary holdover from the nineteenth century, as well as suggestions of vampirism. The setting is an old and decaying house in a place long-since abandoned of most human habitation. The ghosts first appear as the ectoplasm-like "weaving shadows" of the title. Hayden is lying in bed at night when he first sees them. He feels constricted in his chest, then paralyzed. The shadows coalesce and Hayden is confronted with two terrible visages. Then blood drips from the air above him. Slowly, then, "The Weaving Shadows" becomes a different kind of story, and though Burke finds some background to the haunting at Sunken Mine, he is not able to explain what happened there. The gist of what I write is that "The Weaving Shadows" appears to be a story at the beginning of a transition from the conventional ghost story of a previous era towards real weird fiction of the twentieth century. That makes me think that Weird Tales was necessary for the evolution of weird fiction into its truest form. How would it have gone otherwise without the advent of "The Unique Magazine"? 

W.H. Holmes wrote five stories published in The Black Mask. I wonder if  Rhyne or Burke were characters in those stories. Rhyne seems to be a conventional kind of detective. Maybe he turns to Burke when he has more outré cases, for Burke is obviously an occult detective, the most fully developed character of that type so far in the first issue. I wonder if W.H. Holmes planned to write more stories featuring Chet Burke.

One difference between Chet Burke and many of the other protagonists in the first issue of Weird Tales is that he fails. He is defeated in his quest to explain the events at Sunken Mine. What is implicit in the story is that the deaths--at least one of the deaths--there may be attributable to his failure. Failure, defeat, humiliation, insanity, and even death are the lot of the weird-fictional protagonist. Contrast that with the triumphant or victorious science-fictional hero.

Although there is Spiritualism in "The Weaving Shadows," there are also more sophisticated concepts, some of which may resonate with us more now than they would have in 1923. One is night paralysis, a phenomenon that is sometimes related to visions, apparitions, or hallucinations of dark forms standing at a person's bed at night. There are also hints of psychopathology in the Hayden family, of schizophrenia, terrible depression, or other psychological and emotional disorders. Long before the Haydens lived in their backwoods saltbox house, it was inhabited by another tragic family with its own unique problems. All of this leads to disaster for the Haydens.

Now we come to H.P. Lovecraft.

There are echoes of Lovecraft in "The Weaving Shadows." Or maybe I should call them pre-echoes. First is its setting in a remote and depopulated place, one obviously in decay. This is the standard setting for a Gothic story. So no Lovecraft in that alone. There is also a theme of decadence and degeneration in families and whole cultures or societies. That's also a theme in Gothic fiction. Still not necessarily Lovecraftian. And then you read about the five-mile journey Burke and Hayden make on foot from the train station to the lonely house--a description that reads like a descent--and you start to be reminded of Lovecraft's version of these places and things.

In "The Weaving Shadows," blood drips from the air above the bed onto the floor. Again, not from the ceiling but from the air. In other words, it seemingly materializes, as if it were coming through what we might call a wormhole into the room. Could it be drawn from Hayden's sister and niece, who are sleeping downstairs and who are showing signs every day of a further wasting away? I remember a similar occurrence in "The Picture in the House" by H.P. Lovecraft (written in 1920; printed in 1921, 1923, and 1937), except that the blood drips from the ceiling and is issuing from the room above, where a ghastly tableau is sure to be taking place, even as the protagonist sits unawares below, at least until that moment.

If you want to read "The Weaving Shadows" but don't yet want to know about its climactic events, you should stop reading this entry right now.

As it turns out, there are two ancient skeletons in the attic of the house. Burke and the local sheriff discover them after the tragedy of the Hayden family has played out. The skeletons show signs of violence. They have been encased in a crypt-like space, lined with plaster, for generations. Skeletons inside of a secret and enclosed space in an old house make me think of Lovecraft's later story "The Dreams in the Witch House" (written in 1932; printed in 1933). In "The Dunwich Horror" (written in 1928; printed in 1929), there is a terrible creature kept in an enclosed space in an isolated farmhouse. 

Burke fails to solve the mystery of the events at Sunken Mine. He confesses as much to Chief Rhyne. The stepbrother of the two women whose skeletons were found in the attic presumably killed them and hid their bodies in a specially prepared place. So was he a murderer and a fiend? Or did he do what he believed was necessary under the circumstances? In other words, were the two women helpless victims, or were they in some way evil, an evil recognized and headed off by the stepbrother when he killed them? And why did Hayden's sister find and choose that remote house for her new home? Was she called there somehow? To liberate the spirits of the two dead women? Hayden's sister and her daughter are Spiritualists. Did they call up the spirits of the dead women? Were those spirits unable to escape until summoned by acts of Spiritualism? These questions are only suggested by the events of the story and never addressed or answered.

I have one note on Holmes' prose, which is mostly okay but includes this horrible clause: "the chairs squatted grimly."

Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. You can still go there, for it is located on public land at Clarence Fahnestock State Park in New York. The Appalachian Trail passes through the area, but you might want to go the way Burke and Hayden presumably went. The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad presumably delivered them to Cold Spring, on the east bank of the Hudson River. There they got off the train and began their trek. If you walk east from Cold Spring, in the direction of Dennytown, you will probably be walking in their footsteps.

A little northeast of Dennytown is Sunk Mine, named, no doubt, after Sunk Brook. There is still a Sunken Mine Road east of Dennytown. At one time, it was the main street of a nineteenth-century mining town called Odletown or Odeltown, formerly Odelltown. Men began mining iron ore there before or around the time of the American Revolution. During the Civil War, the ore they mined was used to feed the forges across the river at West Point. Most of the mines in the area were shut down by about 1876. The Sunk Mine was in operation until the mid 1880s. There are still ruins and remnants of mining and habitation in that part of the state. Be careful all around, but be especially careful if you come upon an ancient saltbox house lost in the backwoods. Whatever you do, don't spend the night there.

Finally, in thinking, writing, and researching all of this, I wonder if the author of "The Weaving Shadows" was a New Yorker (maybe Dr. William H. Holmes, the school superintendent at nearby Mount Vernon, is a good candidate after all), alternatively, whether he was in the U.S. Army at West Point and explored the local area during his tenure there.

Putnam County, New York, 1854. The details are too small to see here, but you can view a larger version of this image on the website of the Library of Congress by clicking here. Look for the bridge over Sunk Brook along Eastern Turnpike, which separates two political divisions called Phillipstown (in yellow) and Putnamville (in pink), in the western part of the county. (Coming from the Midwest, I don't know whether these divisions are called towns, districts, townships, or what.) It's a very thorough and beautifully made map and gives you a real sense of the place as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft made much of the geography, history, and culture of his native New England. Another writer could easily have done the same kind of thing for this part of New York. In fact, it's not too late. Someone should give it a go.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Four

Utopia Into Lost Worlds

One of the problems with stories of Utopia and Dystopia is that their authors often spend so much time describing their imaginary societies that they forget to tell a story. When I was in high school, I read Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. I don't remember very much about it except that I didn't think it was very interesting--a lot of description and no action. Nearly six years ago, I read the yin to Bellamy's yang in the form of The Republic of the Future by Anna Bowman Dodd. I found her book more interesting but only in an intellectual or political-historical way. Like Looking Backward, it doesn't really tell a story. Even George Orwell's 1984, which is a more conventional kind of novel, includes long passages describing the nightmarish society of the future, long quotes from a fictitious book by the equally fictitious Emmanuel Goldstein, and even a closing essay by Orwell on Newspeak, the language of the future (which unfortunately approaches our present). It's almost like the very dark flip side of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, a kind of anthropological or ethnological examination of a carefully constructed society, complete with a discussion of linguistics.

For readers of genre fiction, part of the problem with stories of Utopia and Dystopia is that they often serve as vehicles for satire or philosophical speculation rather than for purposes of storytelling. That's one argument against classifying utopian and dystopian stories as science fiction and fantasy. I don't know about you, but I don't think 1984 or Brave New World or Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, sits very easily in either of these categories. Even We, with its rocketship and its glassed-in towers and its curative surgical operation, is more satirical than it is science-fictional. In other words, it's not meant merely to entertain. On the other hand, if a writer of science fiction or fantasy can fit Utopia/Dystopia into a larger bit of storytelling, it can work and genre readers might not really object. For example, screenwriter and producer Dave Filoni recently set an episode of The Mandalorian on a brilliantly imagined dystopian planet. Outside the city walls on Corvus is a burned-out hellscape, like a smoking battlefield from the Great War. Inside is a dim, gray, concrete nightmare, the place where the proles and the peasants live and are oppressed and tortured by their overlords. At the core of the city, behind yet more walls, is the pleasant, green garden of its tyrant, who is eventually, thankfully, brought down. This is one of my favorite episodes of the series, not only for its visuals and overall aesthetic but also because it resonates in the real world in which we today find ourselves, one in which our rulers live in comfort and splendor while we are punished simply for wanting to live our lives in peace and freedom. I don't think Mr. Filoni intended it, but "The Jedi," otherwise a bit of entertainment, also acts as a kind of commentary on our current situation--as a bitter satire and well within the dystopian tradition.

* * *

It seems to me that Utopia and Dystopia each has its own related and more popular subgenre. It probably had to be that way if Utopia and Dystopia, which are at their hearts philosophical and high-literary forms, were going to make their way into popular fiction. For Utopia, the chief subgenre is the Lost Worlds story. I'll let The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (update, 1995) , describe it:

This rubric covers lost races, lost cities, lost lands: all the enclaves of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This subgenre was obviously a successor to the fantastic voyages [q.v.] of the 18th century and earlier, but there are important distinctions to be drawn. The earlier tales had belonged to a world which was geographically "open" [. . . .]. The lost-world story, however, belonged to a cartographically "closed" world [. . .]. (pp. 734-735)

(The Internet Speculative Fiction Database uses the tag "lost race.")

Not all Lost Worlds stories are utopian. I would guess that most aren't. King Solomon's Mines by H. Ride Haggard (1885), another novel I read--and loved--as a teenager, is a perfect example of that. (Unlike Looking Backward, a novel of about the same vintage, it actually tells a story, and an exciting one at that.) But if the Garden of Eden is Utopia, then it is surely lost. Like the tyrant's garden in "The Jedi," it is closed to us, secreted forever behind unbreachable walls (but only because we wanted it that way). Plato's ideal city-state is also lost, and his opposing Atlantis has disappeared forever under the waves. Subsequently unreachable, both have proved fertile ground in which to set stories of Utopia and Lost Worlds. (What else is Looking Backward but a description of an ideal republic?) Thomas More's Utopia, which could exist as a real place only in a "geographically 'open'" world, disappeared in a puff of smoke once the whole surface of the earth was mapped. It was only as the geographic world--and possibility--was closing that the Lost Worlds story reached its heyday. Maybe we realized what was really being lost and wanted to snatch some of the romance and adventure and pleasure from it before it was gone forever. In any case, the world closed. Yes, there were twentieth-century stories of this kind set in Africa (Thun'da by Gardner Fox and Frank Frazetta), the Amazon (The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle), Antarctica (Dian of the Lost Land by Edison Marshall), the South Seas (King Kong), the North Polar region (Island at the Top of the World by Ian Cameron), and even inside of a Hollow Earth (The Warlord by Mike Grell). But as the nineteenth century slid into the twentieth, stories of Utopia and Lost Worlds--if they were to be more plausible--would have to be set either in Time, as in Looking Backward (published at about the same time that the American frontier closed), or in Space . . .

And that's where Edgar Rice Burroughs came in.

To be continued . . . 

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1828) by Thomas Cole (1801-1848), an American artist of the Hudson River School. In his painting, Cole emphasized landscape; the figures here are diminished, dwarfed by Creation, disgraced and humiliated by their actions. On the right is Paradise--the only Utopia possible on Earth, possible precisely because it was created by God. Note that it is surrounded by a high wall of seemingly impassable mountains: the lost valley ringed by impassable mountains became a theme in the Lost Worlds subgenre of fantasy and science fiction. Two quick examples: the comic-book version of Cave Girl by Gardner F. Fox and Bob Powell, and The Last Valley, a not-quite-fantasy film from 1971. And on the left? What we might call a dystopian landscape for a still rural or agrarian America. Mass living--urban, industrialized living--which makes Dystopia plausible, had not yet set in when Cole executed his painting. But replace the dead trees and craggy cliffs with a gray and decrepit cityscape and the smoke and fire of the erupting volcano with the spew and furnace of some great manufactory--like the orc-plant in the Lord of the Rings--and you would have a scene surely familiar to readers of twenty-first century dystopian fiction.*

*And the image of the erupting volcano should be familiar to some because of its use by one of the more totalitarian and dystopian of the religions of science fiction.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley