Dwight, Frederick N.
In “In the Walls of Eryx,” an employee of the Venus Crystal Company whose decaying corpse the narrator, Kenton J.Stanfield, finds in the invisible maze in which he himself becomes entrapped. Dwight, Walter C.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a professional painter in Providence who restores the painting of Joseph Curwen found by Charles Dexter Ward in the house on Olney Court.
Dwyer, Bernard Austin (1897–1943).
Correspondent of HPL, residing in West Shokan and Kingston, N.Y.Dwyer reached HPL through WTin early 1927 and continued to correspond with him to the end of HPL’s life. He published one poem in WT(“Ol’ Black Sarah,” October 1928), but otherwise wrote little; he also devoted himself to pictorial art. HPL visited him in Kingston in May 1929 in the course of examining the colonial antiquities in nearby Hurley and New Paltz; again for a few days in June 1930, at which time Dwyer evidently made several substantial suggestions for the revision of HPL’s work in progress, “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Dwyer was one of the leading protagonists (“Knockout Bernie, the Wild Wolf of West Shokan”) of the spoof, “The Battle That Ended the Century” (1934). After HPL’s death, Dwyer excerpted a letter to him from HPL, written probably in the fall of 1933, and sent it to WT,where it was published as “The Wicked Clergyman” (later “The Evil Clergyman”).
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Dyer, William.
In At the Mountains of Madness,the professor of geology at Miskatonic University who leads the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 and who narrates the novel. Dyer also leads the subexpedition in search of Lake’s party, only to find it wiped out. With the graduate student Danforth, he explores and reports at length on the ancient city and civilization of the Old Ones. Dyer’s last name only is supplied in At the Mountains of Madness;his first name is given in “The Shadow out of Time,” in which is accompanies Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee on his expedition to Australia.
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E
“East and West Harvard Conservatism.”
Essay (1,110 words); probably written in the summer of 1922. First published in Mind Power Plus (date unknown; probably 1922).
The article is on David Van Bush’s New England lecture campaign and the success of his popular psychology in staid Massachusetts. Probably commissioned by Bush, the article appeared in his magazine, Mind Power Plus,which HPL mentions as “newly-founded” in June 1922 (see SL1.186). No copies of the magazine have been located; only a tearsheet of the article from the magazine (where it occupies pp. 55–56) is extant at JHL.
“East India Brick Row, The.”
Poem (48 lines in quatrains); written early to mid-December 1929. First published in the Providence Journal(January 8, 1930).
The poem was written in a futile attempt to prevent the destruction of early nineteenth-century warehouses on South Water Street in Providence, which HPL admired for their humble beauty but which had become so decrepit that it would have been difficult to restore them. HPL notes (letter to August Derleth, [January 1930]; ms., SHSW) that the poem received such a favorable response from readers in the newspaper that he received a cordial letter from the editor about it. See Joseph Payne Brennan, “Lovecraft’s ‘Brick Row,’” MacabreNo. 5 (Summer 1959): 21–22. Eddy, Clifford M[artin], Jr. (1896–1971).
Author and correspondent of HPL. A native of Providence, R I., Eddy was a precocious reader and writer, interested in mythology and the occult. His first published tale, “Sign of the Dragon” ( Mystery Magazine,1919), was a detective story. Various tales of mystery, ghosts, and song-writing (he himself later wrote songs, including “When We Met by the Blue Lagoon” and “In My Wonderful Temple of Love”) continued to
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appear through 1922 in various magazines. He came in touch with HPL in 1923 (see letter to Frank Belknap Long, October 7, 1923 [ SL1.254], where HPL refers to Eddy as “the new Providence amateur”). (His wife Muriel in The Gentleman from Angell Street[1961] claims that they had met HPL and his mother as early as 1918, but this seems to be a fabrication.) HPL frequently visited the Eddys’ home in East Providence. Eddy and HPL took scenic walks, one to the Old Stone Mill in Newport, R.I. (August Derleth later incorporated notes taken by HPL on this occasion into The Lurker at the Threshold[1945]), another to Dark Swamp (see SL1.264–67). Though they never found the swamp, the legendry surrounding the place seems to have influenced the opening of “The Colour out of Space” (1927); in 1967 Eddy began an unfinished fictionalized account of the trip entitled “Black Noon” (published in Exit into Eternity). HPL revised four stories for Eddy: “Ashes” ( WT,March 1924), “The Ghost-Eater” ( WT,April 1924), “The Loved Dead” ( WT,May–June–July 1924), and “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind” ( WT,April 1925). The two collaborated on The Cancer of Superstition,ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, but the escape artist’s death in October 1926 curtailed the project. (Notes and surviving fragments were published in DB.) See Eddy’s collections Exit to Eternity(Oxford Press, 1973), Erased from Exile(Stygian Isle Press, 1976), and The Terror out of Time(Dyer-Eddy, 1976). He wrote a brief memoir, “Walks with H.P.Lovecraft” (in DB).
See George Popkins, “He Wrote of the Supernatural,” Providence Evening Bulletin(November 25, 1963): 37.
Eddy, Muriel E[lizabeth] (Gammons) (1896–1978).
Wife of C.M.Eddy and friend of HPL. In A Gentleman from Angell Street(1961; rpt. LR), Mrs. Eddy maintains that her husband’s mother (Mrs. Grace Eddy) had come to know HPL’s mother at a woman suffrage meeting in 1918 and that at this time the two discovered that their sons were both enthusiasts of the weird. HPL purportedly invited the Eddys to join the UAPA, and Mrs. Eddy also claims that she and her husband contributed to C.W.Smith’s amateur magazine, The Tryout . Then there was a hiatus in relations, but HPL got back in touch shortly after the death of his mother in May 1921. This entire account is, however, missing from Mrs. Eddy’s first memoir, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (in Rhode Island on Lovecraft,ed. Donald M.Grant and Thomas P.Hadley [1945]), and it appears to be a late fabrication intended to magnify the Eddys’ role in HPL’s life. The Eddys do not appear on any membership lists of the UAPA; none of their work appeared in the Tryout;and there is no evidence that Mrs. Lovecraft was interested in woman suffrage. It appears that HPL came to know the Eddys only in the fall of 1923. Mrs. Eddy wrote numerous memoirs of HPL, all saying much the same things as her 1945 account; among them are “Memories of H.P.L.” ( Magazine of Horror, Winter 1965–66), “Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” ( Haunted,June 1968), Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Man and the Image(1969), “H.P.Lovecraft among the Demons” ( The Rhode Islander[ Providence Sunday JournalMagazine], March 8, 1970), H.P.Lovecraft Esquire: Gentleman (n.d.), and The Howard Phillips Lovecraft We Knew(n.d.). She had two daughters, Ruth Eddy and Faye (Eddy) Dyer; the former wrote a brief memoir of HPL, “The Man Who Came at Midnight” ( Fantasy Commentator,Summer–Fall 1949).