This is the only work of fiction by HPL that cannot be dated with precision. The manuscript is written on stationery from the Edwin E.Phillips Refrigeration Company, which was a going concern around 1910 or so, but since the story alludes to the passage of the 18th Amendment it must clearly date to 1919 or later. Since Phillips (HPL’s uncle) died on November 14, 1918, perhaps the stationery came into HPL’s possession shortly thereafter; but it is by no means certain that he wrote the story at that time.
Of possible relevance is a P.S. to HPL’s letter in the Argosyfor March 1914: “I have a design of writing a novel for the entertainment of those readers who complain that they cannot secure enough of Fred Jackson’s work. It is to be entitled: ‘The Primal Passion, or The Heart of ’Rastus Washington.’” It is possible that Jackson is a subsidiary (or even primary) target for attack here. Several of Jackson’s novels have exactly the sort of implausibility of plot and sentimentality of action that is parodied in “Sweet Ermengarde.” With “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” and “Ibid,” it forms a trilogy of HPL’s comic gems.
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Sylvester, Margaret (b. 1918),
correspondent of HPL (1934–37). She had written to HPL in care of WT,asking him to explain the origin and meaning of the term Walpurgisnacht . She later married and became Margaret Ronan, writing the preface to a school edition of HPL’s tales, The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror(Scholastic Books, 1971).
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T
Talman, Wilfred Blanch (1904–1986),
friend and correspondent of HPL (1925–37). Talman, while attending Brown University, subsidized the publication of a volume of his poetry, Cloisonné and Other Verses(1925), which he sent to HPL in July 1925. (No copy of this volume has been located.) The two met in New York a month later, and Talman became an irregular member of the Kalem Club. In the summer of 1926 Talman sent HPL a draft of “Two Black Bottles,” which HPL exhaustively revised (chiefly in regard to the Dutch dialect in the tale); it appeared in WT(August 1927). Talman chafed at the extent of HPL’s revision of the tale, but nonetheless expressed his gratitude by designing HPL’s bookplate in the summer of 1927. He published a few other stories and poems in WT,these not revised by HPL. Talman visited HPL in Providence in September 1927. HPL in return visited Talman’s estate in Spring Valley, N.Y., on May 24, 1928; Talman then drove HPL to Tarrytown, where HPL took a bus to Sleepy Hollow. The two met again when HPL came to New York in April 1929, at which time Talman offered to try to get HPL a job with a New York newspaper. HPL declined, of course. At a gathering at Talman’s apartment in Brooklyn on July 6, 1931, HPL met Seabury Quinn for the first time. For a time Talman was a reporter for the New York Times;later, around 1930, he became editor of the Texaco Star,a trade paper operated by the Texaco oil company. Talman suggested that HPL write a series of travel articles for the paper, but HPL did not feel that the plan was practicable, given the idiosyncratic nature of his travel writing. Talman, a pronounced genealogist, encouraged HPL to research his own genealogy, even as he diligently pursued his own New York Dutch roots. For a time he also edited De Halve Maen (The Half Moon),the magazine of the Holland Society of New York, and commissioned HPL to write “Some Dutch Footprints in New England,” which appeared in the issue of October 18, 1933. In late 1936, on his own initiative, Talman approached William Morrow & Co. about the possibility of a novel by HPL; Morrow seemed inter
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ested, but HPL had nothing to offer, and by that time was too ill to write one afresh. Long after HPL’s death Talman wrote a memoir, included in the booklet The Normal Lovecraft(1973; rpt. LR), as well as a historical treatise, Tappan: 300 Years, 1686–1986(Tappantown Historical Society, 1989). Tchernevsky, Count Feodor.
In “The Ghost-Eater,” a Russian nobleman who comes to visit Vasili Oukranikov in his house in the woods and is killed by Oukranikov (who has transformed himself into a werewolf). “Temple, The.”
Short story (5,430 words); written sometime after “The Cats of Ulthar” (June 15, 1920) but before “Celephaïs” (early November). First published in WT(September 1925); rpt. WT(February 1936); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.
A German submarine commanded by a Prussian nobleman, Karl Heinrich, Graf von AltbergEhrenstein, sinks a British freighter; later a dead seaman from the freighter is found clinging to the railing of the submarine, and in his pocket is found a “very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth’s head crowned with laurel.” The German crew sleep poorly, have bad dreams, and some think that dead bodies are drifting past the portholes. Some crewmen actually go mad, claiming that a curse has fallen upon them; Altberg-Ehrenstein executes them to restore discipline. Some days later an explosion in the engine room cripples the submarine, and still later a general mutiny breaks out, with some sailors further damaging the ship; the commander again executes the culprits. Finally only Altberg-Ehrenstein and Lieutenant Klenze are left alive. The ship sinks lower and lower toward the bottom of the ocean. Klenze then goes mad, shouting: “ Heis calling! Heis calling! I hear him! We must go!” He voluntarily leaves the ship and plunges into the ocean. As the ship finally reaches the ocean floor, the commander sees a remarkable sight: an entire city at the bottom of the ocean, with various buildings, temples, and villas, mostly built of marble. “Confronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth,” Altberg-Ehrenstein notices one especially large temple carved from the solid rock; later he sees that a head sculpted on it is exactly like the figurine taken from the dead British sailor. The commander, finishing his written account of his adventure on August 20, 1917, prepares to explore the temple after he sees an anomalous phosphorescence emerging from far within the temple. “So I will carefully don my diving suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine; that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years.”
This is the first of HPL’s stories not to have been first published in an amateur journal; possibly its length was a factor, as most amateur journals could not accommodate so long a tale. Like “Dagon,” it uses World War I as a vivid backdrop, although HPL mars the story by crude satire on the protagonist’s militarist and chauvinist sentiments. There also seems to be an excess of supernaturalism, with many bizarre occurrences that do not seem to unify into a coherent whole. But the story is significant in postulating (like “Dagon”) an entire civilization antedating humanity and possibly responsible for many of the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of humanity. In a letter HPL remarks that “the flame that the Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein beheld was a witch-fire lit by spirits many mil