Chronogram - Off the Written Track

Off the Written Track

Four little-known literary landmarks in the Hudson Valley

By Mikhail Horowitz | Photos by Anita Barbour

Ever since Washington Irving romanced the Catskills and the river valley and populated them with bowling homunculi and acephalic equestrians, the region has played host to poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the first rank as well as the merely rank. Thanks in large part to this heritage, the area has, in recent years, become a veritable Mecca for literary pilgrims, those high-minded and low-tipping folks with entirely too much time on their hands. Led by any number of glossy guidebooks, they seek out the Hudson Valley's literary shrines: the three-story, yellow Georgian house in Tivoli that Saul Bellow once shared with Ralph Ellison; the rustic cabin of John Burroughs in West Park; the Woodstock cottage in which Hart Crane spent a slightly-less-dissolute-than-usual two months in 1923; and many other sites that resonate in a special way with serious readers.

But not every locus of literary significance is in the guidebooks. Some of the more esoteric sites have been well guarded for years, known only to secretive scholars and crabby locals. In the interest of increasing the region's already considerable prestige among lovers of literature, we offer the following four locales, hitherto obscure, as ports worthy of call for well-read voyagers. And in the interest of keeping said voyagers from congesting our back roads, tromping through our yards, or stumbling across our pot patches, we have kept the precise coordinates vague enough to put off any but the most persistent of them.

In his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Thomas Gray considered that "some mute inglorious Milton here may rest" among the moss-eaten graves and bird-speckled stones. Ah, but the Milton whose tomb is depicted here, in a country churchyard just north of Saugerties, is the real deal—the audible, glorious author of Paradise Lost. Scholars have long asserted that John Milton died in 1674 and was buried in the Church of St. Giles Cripplegate; but rumor has always had it that his cousin, George Milton, the successful proprietor of a colonial massage parlor in Kingston, paid the blind poet's passage to the New World in 1673. This grave, whose inscription reads "Here Resteth the Author of the Greatyst [sic] Epic Poem in the English Language" (only you can't see it in this photo), would seem to confirm the latter course of events.

Like Milton, Jonathan Swift was no stranger to the American colonies. Prior to the publication of Gulliver's Travels in 1726, he took a year's sabbatical from St. Patrick's to visit several settlements near Esopus. It was at one of these settlements that he heard an elderly sachem of the Leni Lenape relate the legend of the "Lilipuka," the diminutive, deer-pellet-eating people of the forest. Indeed, one of these odious little creatures had allegedly been captured by a Dutch trapper, who had swapped it with one of the townies for a bag of day-old chanterelles. During the course of Swift's visit, the purchaser constructed a tiny house for his picayune acquisition; amazingly, nearly three centuries later, it still stands. This photograph depicts nothing less than Dean Swift's inspiration for the kingdom of Lilliput.

Long given over to foxgrass, cattails, and chicory, this abandoned compound, just south of LaGrangeville, still stands as a mute testament to man's inhumanity to man. Formerly the notorious prison of L'Estorage, it at one time counted among its unfortunate inmates the "sacred monster" of French literature, Jean Genet. As a young vagrant picked up by the flics of Marseilles, he was transported to this Dutchess County hellhole, where each inmate was locked in a windowless cell barely large enough to accommodate a neglected ping-pong table, or a discarded sofa, or an unused Nordic Track. Genet's memoir of his 10 months in this wretched facility, Our Lady of the Locker, is long out of print.

Outside of Stone Ridge, on an inaccessible road in the invious bogs of The Vly, this unassuming mailbox may, some say, betray the presence of one of the giants of postmodern literature. The notoriously reclusive author, whose face has never been photographed, has long been rumored to live in the neighborhood, and the initials on the box would seem to justify the speculation. Skeptics, of course, will be quick to point out that the same initials could just as easily stand for "Toby Pelch" or "Tristram Pandy" or "Tyrone Plothrop." But then how to explain the refrigerator magnet—a cheery facsimile of gravity's rainbow—slyly affixed to the mailbox?

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