Strange Things Went on There

This is one of two gatehouses to Edgewater, Gore Vidal's house right on the bank of the Hudson River at the bottom of the hill. Edgewater has an octagonal library. “Gore Vidal with dogs, Billy and Blanche, on the front lawn of Edgewater. Circa 1965.

“When a writer moves into the house he most wants or needs, the result is often a sudden release of new energy… In my case, there was a burst of energy and imagination of a sort not accessible to me before.  Overnight – the result of the octagonal library?” he later recalled.” *

The library at Edgewater

“I learned that John Jay Chapman, a very good if obscure American essayist, had lived at Edgewater,” Vidal later wrote, “and I could feel his presence in the house.”  

This is the story about the octagon house. Strange things went on there. I believe this had dilated to, strange things happen in all octagon houses.

Saul Bellow lived there. It is where he wrote Henderson the Rain King, modeled on his landlord Chandler Chapman, local aristo/wild man/pig farmer. I lived next door at Rokeby. I always picture the octagonal house if his name comes up and imagine it as the setting if I read him. "When I read, reread, re-encounter “Henderson the Rain King,” I do so in a state of naked amazement and gratitude. It’s one of those books I can’t really consider in any sort of critical or analytical light because I feel about it the way I feel about a beloved person. Perfection? Not at all, not at all. Like its hero, the enormous and spiritually incontinent Eugene Henderson, it bulges with flaws." [James Parker in the New York Times]

The story is that a professor at Bard was working on his doctorate and as he got to the end of writing it, all his papers vanished, the notes everything. They searched for days and finally gave up. Time passed. Then one day while the professor was telling the tale to a friend papers began drifting down out of the air followed by a deluge of pages. It was, of course, the dissertation.

This was told to me by a woman who babysat for the professor.

More on Chandler Chapman from Sports Illustrated:

Given the drabness of the present age, it is heartening to note that the spirit of the eccentric sporting Chanlers lives on in Barrytown, N.Y., 100 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Here, in the decaying but still gracious estate country of Edith Wharton novels, a handful of Chanter descendants carry on in their own fashion. There is Richard (Ricky) Aldrich, grandnephew of Uncle Archie and grandson of Margaret Livingston Chanler Aldrich, who fought for the establishment of the U.S. Army Nursing Corps. Ricky, 36, manages Rokeby, the family seat and farm, where he collects and rebuilds antique iceboats (such as the Jack Frost, a huge craft that won championships in the late 19th century) and ponders the intricacies of Serbian, Croatian and Polish grammar. Ricky studied in Poland for a spell, but left in 1966 after he was caught selling plastic Italian raincoats on the black market. [ fondest memory of Ricky is him showing off his latest “steal” from an auction, a large tractor of some unfamiliar make. It just needed hydraulic fluid. Lots of it. It was poured in the thirsty old beast. Ricky fired up his “steal.” The entire load of fluid shot perilously close to his head and ascended to the heavens becoming a near invisible mist it went so high, giving us ample time to run from the drop zone.] The most obvious fact about Ricky is that he seldom bathes. As one boating friend says, "Ricky would give you the shirt off his back, but who'd want it?"

Then there is Chanler A. Chapman, regarded by his kin as the legitimate inheritor of the family title of "most eccentric man in America." As Ricky's brother, J. Winthrop (Winty) Aldrich, says, "Only members of the Chanler family are fit to sit in judgment on that title." Winty, who is Chanler Chapman's first cousin once removed, says, "Television has done Upstairs, Downstairs, The Forsyte Saga and The Adams Chronicles, but they should do the Chanlers. The whole story is so improbable. And true."

Everyone who has met Chanler Chapman regards him as brilliantly daft. While teaching at Bard College, Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate, rented a house on Chapman's estate, Sylvania ("the home of happy pigs"), and found in him the inspiration for his novel Henderson the Rain King. In the novel, written as an autobiography, Henderson shoots bottles with a slingshot, raises pigs and carries on extravagantly in general. "It's Bellow's best book," Chapman says, "but he is the dullest writer I have ever read."

Now 76 and possessed of piercing brown eyes, a bristling mustache and wiry hair, Chapman nearly always wears blue bib overalls and carries a slingshot. He is fond of slingshots, because "they don't make any noise," and he shoots at what tickles his fancy. Not long ago he fired a ball bearing at a Jeep owned by his cousin, Bronson W. (Bim) Chanler, former captain of the Harvard crew, inflicting what Chapman calls "a nice dimple" in the left front fender. Ball bearings are expensive ammunition, however, so, for $4, Chapman recently bought 600 pounds of gravel. He calculates this supply of ammo should last at least five years.

Before his infatuation with slingshots, Chapman was big on guns. He hunted deer, small game and upland birds and ducks, mostly on his estate. Indeed, at one time he had 115 guns, and his shooting habits were such that friends who came to hunt once never cared, or dared, to return again. Chapman had only to hear the quack of a duck and he would let loose with a blast in the general direction of the sound. On a couple of occasions it turned out that he had fired toward hunters crouched in reeds, using a duck call. "Almost got a few people," he would say matter-of-factly. Sports Illustrated Sports Illustrated: [https://vault.si.com/vault/1977/06/13/step-in-and-enjoy-the-turmoil

*https://classicalamericanhomes.org/discoveries/gore-vidal-at-edgewater/