A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Well, perhaps marriage and a move to the big city is better than suicide from poverty or boredom. But what about the critical issue of the pair’s affection for each other?

meanwhile—egotistical as it sounds to relate it—it began to be apparent that I was not alone in finding psychological solitude more or less of a handicap. A detailed intellectual and aesthetic acquaintance since 1921, and a three-months visit in 1922 wherein congeniality was tested and found perfect in an infinity of ways, furnished abundant proof not only that S. H. G. is the most inspiriting and encouraging influence which could possibly be brought to bear on me, but that she herself had begun to find me more congenial than anyone else, and had come to depend to a great extent on my correspondence and conversation for mental contentment and artistic and philosophical enjoyment.²

This is, certainly, one of the most glaring examples of Lovecraft’s inability to speak of ‘love’ or anything remotely connected to it. His natural reserve in talking of such matters to his aunt should certainly be taken into account; but we will also have to deal later with Sonia’s own admission that Lovecraft never said the word ‘love’ to her.

What were Sonia’s feelings on the whole matter? In speaking of the year or two prior to their marriage, she writes: ‘I well knew that he was not in a position to marry, yet his letters indicated his desire to leave his home town and settle in New York.’³ The first part of the statement presumably refers merely to financial capability; as for the second, although of course we do not have access to Lovecraft’s letters to Sonia, I have to believe that this is somewhat of an exaggeration. Sonia goes on to say that she requested Lovecraft to inform his aunts of the marriage plans before the ceremony, but that he preferred to surprise them. ‘In the matter of securing the marriage license, buying the ring and other details incumbent upon a marriage, he seemed to be so jovial. He said one would think that he was being married for the nth time, he went about it in such a methodical way.’⁴

What Sonia does not say is that she had written to Lillian a full month before the marriage, and in a manner that should clearly have signalled to Lillian that something was afoot. In a letter dated 9 February 1924, Sonia writes:

I have nothing in life to attract me to Life and if I can help the good and beautiful soul of Howard Lovecraft find itself financially as it has found itself spiritually, morally and mentally, my efforts shall not have been in vain …

Therefore little Lady, fear nothing. I am just as desirous of his success for his own sake as you are, and I am just as anxious, perhaps more so, that you should live to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the honors that will be heaped upon his beautiful and blessed name, as you may be.⁵

That ‘fear nothing’ must have been in response to some letter by Lillian, perhaps asking Sonia bluntly what her ‘intentions’ toward her nephew actually were.

Lovecraft’s jovality during the ceremony is borne out by several amusing letters to his closest friends. To James Morton he writes, after another long and teasing preamble about the seeming strangeness of his residence at 259 Parkside:

Yes, my boy, you got it the first time. Eager to put Colonial architecture to all of its possible uses, I hit the ties hither last week; and on Monday, March the Third, seized by the hair of the head the President of the United—S. H. G.—and dragged her to Saint Paul’s Chapel, … where after considerable assorted genuflection, and with the aid of the honest curate, Father George Benson Cox, and of two less betitled ecclesiastical hangers-on, I succeeded in affixing to her series of patronymics the not unpretentious one of Lovecraft. Damned quaint of me, is it not? You never can tell what a guy like me is gonna do next!⁶

It is as if Lovecraft is regarding the whole thing as a lark; and, indeed, we will see increasing evidence that he was quite taken with the charm and novelty of being married but was simply not aware of the amount of effort it takes to make a marriage actually work. Lovecraft was, in all honesty, not emotionally mature enough for such an undertaking.

It is worth pausing to ponder the sources for Lovecraft’s attraction for Sonia. It seems facile to say that he was looking for a mother replacement; and yet the emergence of Sonia into his life a mere six weeks after his mother’s death is certainly a coincidence worth noting. Granted that the affection may initially have been more on Sonia’s side than his—she came to Providence far more frequently than he came to New York—Lovecraft may nevertheless have felt the need to confide his thoughts and feelings to someone in a way that he does not seem to have done with his aunts.