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“Editorial.”
Published in the Conservative(April 1915, July 1915, October 1915); rpt. The Conservative: Complete (1976; rev. ed. 1977).
These items contain general remarks on the nature and purpose of his amateur journal; later articles contain rebuttals of criticisms he has received in other amateur papers.
“Editorial.”
Published in the United Amateur(July 1917 [as “Editorially”], November 1920, September 1921, January 1922, May 1924, July 1925).
HPL wrote these editorials in his capacity as Official Editor of the UAPA and Editor of the United Amateur(HPL was guest editor of the July 1917 issue, taking over for Official Editor Andrew F.Lockhart, who had resigned). They cover events of importance in the amateur community. The articles of 1920–22 attempt to deflect criticism from some members that HPL was concentrating too much authority upon himself and his close associates; but HPL and his party lost the election of July 1922 over this very issue. HPL’s party (now including Sonia H.Greene as president) was voted back into office in July 1923, but the outgoing official board withheld funds so that no United Amateur could be issued until May 1924. HPL’s last two editorials are, accordingly, both bitter and melancholy in their lament for the decline of the UAPA, which collapsed in 1926.
Edkins, Ernest A[rthur] (1867–1946).
Amateur writer and correspondent of HPL (1932–37). Edkins was one of the leading writers of the “halcyon days” (c. 1885–1895) of amateur journalism. In his account of this period, “Looking Backward” (1920), written long before he knew Edkins, HPL speaks of Edkins’s poem “The Suicide” as “a supremely artistic bit of weird genius…a bit of night-black poetical fancy so arresting in its sombre power that we cannot refrain from reproducing it here in full….” Edkins later left amateurdom and repudiated much of his literary work, becoming instead a businessman in Highland Park, Ill. (later Coral Gables, Fla.). HPL, getting in touch with him in 1932, eventually lured him back into amateur activity. Edkins produced several issues of the amateur journal Causeriein 1936; that for February 1936 contained the first appearance of “Continuity” (from Fungi from Yuggoth). In this same issue Edkins also wrote a brief review of The Cats of Ulthar(1935). HPL preserved all Edkins’s letters to him, but in his eloquent memoir “Idiosyncrasies of HPL” ( Olympian,Autumn 1940; in LR) Edkins notes that he lost most or all of HPL’s letters to him.
See Rheinhart Kleiner, Ernest A.Edkins: A Memoir(Newtonville, Mass.: Oakwood Press, 1947). “Eidolon, The.”
Poem (98 lines); probably written in the fall of 1918. First published in Tryout(October 1918). Using the trimeter line favored by Poe, HPL tells of an eidolon (image) called “Life” that proves to be “laden” with “foul horrors.”
“Electric Executioner, The.”
Short story (8,050 words); ghostwritten for Adolphe de Castro, in July 1929. First published in WT (August 1930); first collected in Cats;corrected text in HM
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Page 86
The unnamed narrator is asked by the president of his company to track down a man named Feldon who has disappeared with some papers in Mexico. Boarding a train, the man later finds he is alone in a car with one other occupant, who seems to be a dangerous maniac. This person apparently has devised a hoodlike instrument for performing executions and wishes the narrator to be the first experimental victim. Realizing he cannot overwhelm the man by force, the narrator seeks to delay the experiment until the train reaches the next station, Mexico City. He first asks to be allowed to write a letter disposing of his effects; then he asserts that he has newspaper friends in Sacramento who would be interested in publicizing the invention; and finally he says that he would like to make a sketch of the thing in operation—why doesn’t the man put it on his own head so that it can be drawn? The madman does so; but then the narrator, having earlier perceived that the lunatic has a taste for Aztec mythology, pretends to be possessed by religious fervor and begins shouting Aztec and other names at random as a further stalling tactic. The madman begins shouting also, and in the process his device pulls taut over his neck and executes him; the narrator faints. When revived, the narrator finds the madman no longer in the car, although a crowd of people is there; he is informed no one was ever in the car. Later Feldon is discovered dead in a remote cave—with certain objects unquestionably belonging to the narrator in his pockets.
The story is a radically revised version of a tale called “The Automatic Executioner,” published in de Castro’s collection, In the Confessional and the Following(1893). Part of the characterization of the madman is drawn from a somewhat more harmless person HPL met on the train ride from New York to Washington on a recent journey—a German who kept repeating “Efferythingk iss luffly!” “I vass shoost leddingk my light shine!” and other random utterances (see “Travels in the Provinces of America” [1929]). The madman in “The Electric Executioner” does in fact say at one point, “I shall let my light shine, as it were.” Later, in the course of uttering the names of various Aztec gods, the narrator cries out: “Ya-R’lyeh! Ya-R’lyeh!… Cthulhutl fhtaghn! Niguratl-Yig! Yog-Sototl—.” The spelling variants are intentional, as HPL wished to give an Aztec cast to the names so as to suggest they were part of that culture’s theology. Otherwise, HPL has followed de Castro’s plot even more faithfully than in “The Last Test”—retaining character names, the basic sequence of incidents, and even the final supernatural twist (although sensibly suggesting that it was Feldon’s astral body, not the narrator’s, that was in the car). HPL was paid only $16 for his work, but de Castro sold the story for $175.
Eliot,———.
The auditor to whom the events of “Pickman’s Model” are addressed.
Eliot, Matt.
In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the first mate on one of Capt. Obed Marsh’s ships. While in the South Seas, he hears reports of an island where the inhabitants can procure all the fish they want and also seem to have unlimited quantities of gold. He later realizes that this bounty is the result of the natives’ mating with loathsome sea-creatures, and he urges Obed to have nothing to do with the place. He later disappears from Innsmouth.