The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The non-believer may already understand that what preys upon the unsuspecting plagues the believer even more greatly, but he likely misinterprets the foundation of such fear.  He will claim that the strongly religious see goblins and ghouls because they wish to devolve to these beings responsibility for men's crimes; the Devil's existence being as laughable as that of some Higher Entity, he may add that such believers need to counteract the goodness in their hearts with the evil emotions that sometimes overcome them.  But here is a question of heads and tails.  Responsibility for the evil done unto others lies in our hands – this even the believer knows.  And yet somewhere between the headlines of gore and wickedness one senses another presence, a dark whisper that feels like the wind, a rattling of one's bones that would normally be a shiver.  What this really is has many scientific explanations, and perhaps they are all in a way not untrue.  Yet even as children and without any parental encouragement, those of faith sense something stirring beneath the surface of our plain and pleasing world.  Occasionally it even appears at brief junctures in a shadow, a vision, an eerie, unexplained whistle during an otherwise noiseless night.  And what lurks in the heart of men, good and bad, forms the core of this classic tale.

In the vein of proper horror stories, our exposition of the facts should begin with a warning.  We land in a village in the state of New York, a "spell-bound region" populated by cruller-eating, Mynheer-saying Dutch settlers who have remained isolated from the world abroad and its sweeping turns.  In this case the warning comes in the form of a legend whose stalk has grown well past the landscape's other weeds:

A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere .... 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 .... The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head.  It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.  His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance.  Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

The alleged historical details implicate the entirety of Sleepy Hollow in the plot – not that there really could be a plot from a few hints provided later, but much like the Horseman I am getting ahead of myself.  What is vital is the understanding that the location possesses an eerie power to infect even temporary visitors, including the gangly Puritan schoolmaster Ichabod Crane.  Crane is one of those literary creations who remain with us as we age because we sense that we will eventually espy him in a slightly altered form in our own reality.  He is not so much a caricature as a living characteristic, and that characteristic is Puritanism itself.   Crane is a stern lecturer and a frugal bird who carries all his worldly belongings in a large handkerchief; he favors the meek over the more privileged, guests at the houses of his pupils, shines as a learned singer of psalmody, and spouts the wisdom credulously culled from this book.  He compensates for his feeble appearance with pigheaded courage and blinding optimism that someone more cynical than I could easily mistake for feelings of superiority.  How then can he earn epithets such as "wonderfully gentle and ingratiating" and "a kind and thankful creature"?  Because, at times, he is those as well; at least until he makes the acquaintance of Katrina Van Tassel.

Katrina is young and beautiful with child-bearing hips and a sizeable inheritance.  In a word, she is as nubile as they come.  Crane, like all solitary fools, believes himself fated to meet a lass who could easily do a hundred times better than Crane – and that says little against our schoolteacher.  What she exudes in voluptuousness and luxury Crane omits within his mangy, thrifty shade; they could not be any worse matched.  To make matters even more difficult, there then appears a suitor who is more up to up the task:

A burly, roaring, roistering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood.  He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb he had received the nickname of BROM BONES, by which he was universally known.  He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar ... The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good-will; and, when any madcap prank or rustic brawl occurred in the vicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.

Katrina's choice is complicated – or at least such an appearance is desired.  Between Crane and Van Brunt lies a vast and indefinite canyon of education and culture that brawny attraction and headstrong heroics will not be able to overcome in the course of a healthy human life.  Yet Crane cares little for such antics, and he is drawn to Katrina as he is drawn to the opulent feasts at her father's mansion, feasts that start him re-imagining a future he has never considered in bright color:

As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness.  Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee – or the Lord knows where!

For all his beliefs in the supernatural, in the ghoulish, the grim, and the ghastly, Crane's tragic flaw could be precisely his lack of imagination.  He cannot imagine a world in which he, simple beast, could not meet his needs; nor a world in which the strong spirit within him could fail in its fortress against the materialist barrage.  Is Puritanism nothing more than fear of the wicked, damnation of their accomplices, and the strength derived from prudence and restraint?  That would explain much of Crane and his fantasies.  And those ghost stories on long winter evenings with old Dutch women?  Few things have ever cost a man so dearly. 

The Queen of Spades

Those who know me will attest that I am not a gambling man; in any case, not in the conventional sense.  Games of chance, while thrilling and often very complex, lack the profundity of other topics that have absorbed my hours, and their payoff is far less rich because games can be learned by practically anyone of sufficient volition.  They are ultimately apiary tasks writ large, the calculations of a grandmaster or master hustler made perfect through excessive practice but little thought or consideration.  Stories about gamblers and daredevils have enthralled generations for that same reason: anyone can do it, yet only few wish to risk everything for, in the end, nothing better than fifty-fifty odds.  Should we applaud these achievements or lament their pervasiveness?  In competitive societies which promote success through material acquisition, gambling is an easy way for the underprivileged to get a toe in the door (lotteries are the most egregious of these milkings).  Many win, but we all lose.  We lose because those who have less should not be cajoled into spending a portion of their earnings to buck the system; we lose because once a winner is announced he most often feels liberated from society, or liberated enough to pursue the same hollow activities that he has watched the moneyed perform hitherto; we lose because the only entity that consistently profits from these games is the government itself.  Once upon a time, however, the whole practice of gambling among the wealthy and frivolous exuded a certain gallantry and adventure that thankfully has since been shed.  Which brings us to this masterpiece on the mad chase of destiny, one of the great treasures of Western literature.

Our narrator is a certain Tomskii, a man without scruples or hobbies, but with everything that a simple money-loving mind might desire.  He welcomes us to the St. Petersburg social scene and then directs our attention to one quiet character, Germann.  Germann is the "son of a russified German" and content to watch the usual slew of dares and bankruptcies that this stratum of society thinks of as grand entertainment.  The tables fascinate the young engineer but he cannot bring himself to participate.  When asked about his curious restraint, Germann answers as we expect he might:

The game surely interests me; but I am not in a position to sacrifice the necessary in hope of acquiring the superfluous.

Tomskii’s platitudinous conclusion that Germann is "frugal" owing to his German provenance could be dismissed as a rather unfortunate national stereotype along the lines of Russians' being vodka-swilling bear hunters.  The reader is thus presented with the option of accepting Tomskii's assertion as the omniscient truth or as "idle gossip."  And the repetition of Germann's credo of "not sacrificing the necessary in hope of acquiring the superfluous" is somewhat belied by the narrator's observation that Germann is "in his soul a gambler."  Tomskii's generalization might now be interpreted as a selfish method to divert attention from Germann, who is far more complex and uncategorizable than his shallow mentor.  And here is where, in stories of this ilk, a woman must enter the picture.

The woman in question is Lizaveta Ivanovna, a plain name for a plain girl.  She has no suitors and few perspectives from escaping her dreary existence as the lady-in-waiting to a Countess who also happens to be Tomskii's grandmother.  Tomskii lets it slip that his grandmother, an despotic old bat, possesses a secret that will coax the gambler out of Germann.  From her youth in Paris, she knows of an unbeatable card combination that will ever remain as one of the classic lines in Russian literature.  Germann is hooked, and begins correspondence with Lizaveta, culling sweet nothings from the frothy, overwritten German romances on which he was raised.  He tells her everything a woman of her upbringing and ingenuousness has always dreamed of hearing, and given Germann's innate lack of charm, the effects are both predictable and amusing.  From what we know of him from the first two parts of the tale, we might be surprised that Germann would give in to greed; we are even less inclined to do so taking into consideration the judgment of a worthless cad like Tomskii.  Yet it is often the simpletons among us who see through to our very essence.  So Tomskii needn't be right or wrong when he observes early on:

That Germann is a true Romantic; he has the profile of Napoleon and the soul of Mephistopheles.  He has, I fear, at least three crimes on his conscience.

This old chestnut about how many crimes are committed in thought but not in deed is collated with the first line from the sixth and final part of the story: "two unmoving ideas cannot exist within the same moral nature just like two bodies cannot occupy the same space."  Those ideas are our two concepts of Germann.  He may be an engineer, a calculator, and a stingy bore, or he may have been until now, but is his soul indeed that of a rebel, one that obeys few rules and is devoid of sympathy for those who get in his way?  Or has a great calculator finally found a perfectly calculated risk?  Is it coincidence then that the number of his alleged misdeeds matches the number of cards he was promised by a dying Countess?  We may be moving, I fear, into the superfluous.

The Insanity of Jones

Apart from one unfortunate line, this famous story is absolutely perfect – a miniscule flaw, admittedly, but a telling one.  Nevertheless, The Insanity of Jones still ranks as one of the most spellbinding tales of suspense ever composed, even if its suspense is a matter of when not what.  Its genius resides in its convictions; that is to say, our narrator is utterly convinced that John Enderby Jones can see something we cannot see.   In that particular argument our narrator cannot lose.  What Jones sees, however, and more importantly why, shall remain the subject of unflagging speculation.

Our Jones leads a "strictly impersonal life" in the type of clerical position which, in our modern times renowned for dehumanizing the mediocre with bureaucracy and insignificance, has spawned many a maniac.  We know nothing of his family or his future, in no small part because Jones cares little for what has yet to happen; instead, he is focused on what has already happened.  But if Jones floats in the plainest and most colorless of ponds, what events could possibly have shaped his turning squarely towards the past?  We must answer that question by first understanding what Jones sees as his anteriority:    

Among the things that he knew, and therefore never cared to speak or speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one.  The present John Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries.  He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions.

Why did he never consider that his sentiments might be flawed?  Do we all from time to time not have doubts about our dearest convictions?  A rather simplistic mind will answer that precisely because Jones does not have doubts is why the story is not called 'The Wisdom of Jones' or 'The Clairvoyance of Jones,' or even plainly 'The Knowledge of Jones.'  But Jones does harbor doubts: he wonders throughout our tale as to whether he may be deceived, especially by a man whom our narrator describes as unflatteringly as possible, a being only known as the Manager.

Perhaps it is important to note that Jones and his supervisor are strangers ("Jones had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as noticed ... by the great man"); indeed, in personality they are as opposite as two members of the same species could be.  While Jones remains lean in both physique and conversation, the Manager is fat, myopic, bald, sweaty ("in hot weather a sort of thin slime covered his cheeks") and red-faced, purple-faced "in moments of temper, which were not infrequent."  Lest we think him the epitome of pasty privileges – the description befits a debauched Roman emperor – a sidelight on the Manager reveals him to be "an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will."  What is the truth behind this portraiture?  And why can't the truth be both?  Why can't an oppressive man (our Manager is "coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others, and ... often cruelly unjust") who has never sullied his fingers with daily labor also excel in his particular field?  Because we need an unadulterated villain, a monolith of evil, to be able to side with Jones and his instincts about, well, a prior existence in which he and the Manager were acquainted under very different circumstances.  Such ambiguity would never survive a lesser tale; but The Insanity of Jones is not about ambiguity, it is the exemplary short text that can be read two entirely different ways with equal plausibility.  So when Jones retreats as he does every night to his dinner in a French restaurant in Soho, he senses a "half-remembered appointment."  This turns out to be with a former colleague, "an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company," a man by the name of Thorpe.  He sits down at Thorpe's table and they engage in serious exchanges, although those in their vicinity do not quite see it that way:

There was a wonderful soothing quality in the man’s voice, like the whispering of a great wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once.  They sat a little while longer, but he could not remember that they talked much or ate anything.  He only recalled afterwards that the head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant.

Where this lonesome duo ventures and what the ultimate subject of their dialogues involves shall not be revealed here.  Despite his somewhat cadaverous appearance, Thorpe clearly holds some sway over his erstwhile coworker, who acknowledges Thorpe as a key component to an understanding of his multifaceted reality.  That Thorpe "had been dead at least five years" does not bother Jones, although it may indeed bother us.

Reading Blackwood is invariably a rewarding experience because even his missteps are the errors of genius.  The wayward line in Jones's narrative is less of a line and more of a phrase, but it taints the substance of what we are witnessing with wholly unnecessary psychological mumbo-jumbo (mumbo-jumbo is too massive and unwieldy; perhaps we should say mumbo-mini).  What may be most interesting about Mr. Jones is how he resists reveling in publications that would buttress his world view ("he read no modern books on the subjects that interested him") or in finding acceptance in a group of like-minded individuals ("nor belonged to any society that dabbled with half-told mysteries").  No, no one can quite relate to Jones, because he offers almost nothing to the outside world, firmly ensconced as he is in a realm within.  A realm, I might add, of a thousand screaming souls who all coalesce into the screaming of just one.  

The Ring of Thoth

There is undoubtedly no more romantic vocation than that of the Egyptologist.  Every young soul fascinated with the greatest civilization that ever was will at one time or another have fancied himself a decipherer of ancient riddles and symbols.  After years in splendid scholarly isolation, he will see the fruits of his labor as another gilded tomb is unearthed and another series of mystic rituals uncovered.  Whatever you may think of Ancient Egypt, it owns permanent property in our imagination precisely because so much of it has yet to be explained, the technology of the Pharaohs and their peons being so remarkably advanced (such as the embalming methods, which have never been duplicated) as to make many believe it the achievement of extraterrestrials.  And some elements of the otherworldly surely inform this well-known tale. 

We begin with a brief if cluttered review of the accomplishments of a young British academic by the name of John Vansittart Smith.  Our man may make some claim to lofty provenance, yet the bookends of his nomenclature could not be any more common.  Smith was once an up-and-coming zoologist, a "second Darwin" according to those compulsive labelers we find indigenous to all societies at all times, who eventually turned his attention to chemistry and garnered equal acclaim.  He dabbled in metals – he is very much an alchemist in his relentless self-aggrandizement – before shifting specializations once more and joining the Oriental Society.  Soon thereafter he was deemed a full-fledged expert on Ancient Egypt, as if that job description could ever really apply to the subject matter.  It is in this role, then, that our burgeoning academic finds his way to that most enchanting of European metropolises, the City of Lights:

He set himself to collect materials for a work which should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion.  The preparation of his magnum opus entailed many hurried visits to the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved in a most strange and noteworthy adventure.  The trains had been slow and the Channel had been rough, so that the student arrived in Paris in a somewhat befogged and feverish condition.  On reaching the Hotel de France, in the Rue Laffitte, he had thrown himself upon a sofa for a couple of hours, but finding that he was unable to sleep, he determined, in spite of his fatigue, to make his way to the Louvre, settle the point which he had come to decide, and take the evening train back to Dieppe.  Having come to his conclusion, he donned his greatcoat, for it was a raw rainy day, and made his way across the Boulevard des Italiens and down the Avenue de l'Opera.  Once in the Louvre he was on familiar ground, and he speedily made his way to the collection of papyri which it was his intention to consult.

A rainy Paris in October would be heaven enough for anyone with the faintest romantic streak, but we stand at merely the threshold of our discoveries.  Smith proceeds into the museum where our noticeably ornithic scholar ("His high-beaked nose and prominent chin had something of the same acute and incisive character which distinguished his intellect") overhears a snatch of conversation between two Englishmen punctuated by the observation, "What a queer-looking mortal!"  Further comments imply that they may be talking about Smith, whose birdlike features, odd "pecking motion with which, in conversation he threw out his objections and retorts," and general fineness of feature all suggest a resemblance to our titular god.  He turns to find out, "to his surprise and relief," that he was mistaken: the subject of discussion was "one of the Louvre attendants":

He moved his position slightly in order to catch a glimpse of the man's face.  He started as his eyes fell upon it.  It was indeed the very face with which his studies had made him familiar.  The regular statuesque features, broad brow, well-rounded chin, and dusky complexion were the exact counterpart of the innumerable statues, mummy-cases, and pictures which adorned the walls of the apartment.  The thing was beyond all coincidence.  The man must be an Egyptian.  The national angularity of the shoulders and narrowness of the hips were alone sufficient to identify him.

Who this alleged descendant of the pharaohs may be and what secrets he may possess need no further mention on these pages.  What we can say is Smith is such an exemplary student that he retreats to a dark corner of the world's most famous museum to edit his notes on those papyri and watch the soporific twilight limit his ambitions – and that will do.

Our author is still read with avidity in dozens of languages, but almost exclusively thanks to the immortal glory of perhaps the most recognizable literary figure of all time (elsewhere I bestowed this honor upon this character but may have to retract that comment).  Such is the price of renown: even those of discernible public influence during their lifetimes such as Conan Doyle cannot possibly tame the vicissitudes of taste.  For better or worse Holmes and Conan Doyle will be bound together for all eternity, like Melville and his whale or Nabokov and his mermaid or nymphet or whatever that poor girl was in the end.  The creation outgrows the creator and assumes an uneven proportion of the laurels.  Laurels that (usually posthumously) adorn the brow of the literary genius whom all know by reputation, but not, sadly, by word and deed.  For that reason alone would the judicious reader be wise to explore the other works of Holmes's designer, if only to find passages as soft and menacing as this:

The complete silence was impressive.  Neither outside nor inside was there a creak or a murmur.  He was alone with the dead men of a dead civilisation.  What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century!  In all this chamber there was scarce an article, from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years.  Here was the flotsam and jetsam washed up by the great ocean of time from that far-off empire.  From stately Thebes, from lordly Luxor, from the great temples of Heliopolis, from a hundred rifled tombs, these relics had been brought.  The student glanced around at the long-silent figures who flickered vaguely up through the gloom, at the busy toilers who were now so restful, and he fell into a reverent and thoughtful mood.  An unwonted sense of his own youth and insignificance came over him. 

So great is the power of Egypt that it can render even an insufferable egomaniac like Smith helpless and unripe before its magnificent legacy, but I think that was evident from the very beginning.  Four thousand years ago never felt so palpable, so immediately accessible, as when they leapt from the papyrus to the naked, barely trained eye.  Even to an evolutionary Renaissance man like Smith. 

Borges, "Edgar Allan Poe"

A work by this Argentine man of letters about this American writer.  You can read the original here.

These marble splendors, black anatomy,
Which injure worms upon their sepulchres,
The glacial symbols of death's victory,
He would assemble, by fear undeterred.

It was the other shadow, love's, he feared: 
That common fortune and its common woes. 
Resplendent metal did not blind him sheer,
Nor did sepulchral marble; 'twas the rose. 

He, from the mirror's other side, alone 
Succumbed then to his complex destiny
As the inventor of all nightmares known.

And so perhaps, from well beyond death's shroud,     
Shall he keep building, still alone and proud,
These splendid, wicked wonders endlessly.