More Views of the Hudson River-Part Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Five

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, from page 129:

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

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

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Henry del Campo (1899-1961) of Schodack

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

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

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

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

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

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 * * *

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

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

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

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

 * * *

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

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

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Happy Thanksgiving, 2025!

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

Terence E. Hanley, 2025.