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

Sonia was, of course, nothing like Susie Lovecraft: she was dynamic, emotionally open, contemporary, cosmopolitan, and perhaps a little domineering (this is the exact term Frank Belknap Long once used in describing Sonia to me), whereas Susie, although perhaps domineering in her own way, was subdued, emotionally reserved, even stunted, and a typical product of American Victorianism. But let us recall that at this moment Lovecraft was still in the full flower of his Decadent phase: his scorn of Victorianism and his toying with the intellectual and aesthetic avantgarde may have found a welcome echo in a woman who was very much an inhabitant of the twentieth century.

Sonia has made one further admission that is of some interest. In a manuscript (clearly written after the dissolution of the marriage, as it is signed Sonia H. Davis) entitled ‘The Psychic Phenominon [sic

] of Love’ she has incorporated a part of one of Lovecraft’s letters to her. In a note on the manuscript she has written: ‘It was Lovecraft’s part of this letter that I believe made me fall in love with him; but he did not carry out his own dictum; time and place, and reversion of some of his thoughts and expressions did not bode for happiness.’⁷ The letter was published as ‘Lovecraft on Love’. It is a very strange document. Going on for about 1200 words in the most abstract and pedantic manner, Lovecraft thoroughly downplays the erotic aspect of love as a product of the fire of extreme youth, saying instead that

By forty or perhaps fifty a wholesome replacement process begins to operate, and love attains calm, cool depths based on tender association beside which the erotic infatuation of youth takes on a certain shade of cheapness and degradation. Mature tranquillised love produces an idyllic fidelity which is a testimonial to its sincerity, purity, and intensity.⁸

And so on. There is actually not much substance in this letter, and some parts of it should have made Sonia a little nervous, as when he says that ‘True love thrives equally well in presence or in absence’ or that each party ‘must not be too antipodal in their values, motive-forces, perspectives, and modes of expression and fulfilment’ for compatibility.

But the months preceding and following the marriage were sufficiently hectic that neither had much time for reflection. In the first place, Lovecraft had to finish the ghostwriting job for Weird Tales

. The magazine was not doing well on the newsstands, and in an effort to bolster sales owner J. C. Henneberger enlisted the services of the escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss, 1874–1926), then at the height of his popularity, to write a column and other items. Henneberger also enlisted Lovecraft to write up a strange tale that Houdini was attempting to pass off as an actual occurrence that purportedly took place in Egypt. Lovecraft quickly discovered that the account was entirely fictitious, so he persuaded Henneberger to let him have as much imaginative leeway as he could in writing up the story, which as it stands seems to be entirely Lovecraft’s in its prose and largely in its conception. By 25 February he had not yet begun to write it, even though it was due on 1 March. Somehow he managed to finish it just shortly before he boarded the train to New York on 2 March; but in his rush he left the typescript behind somewhere in Union Station in Providence. Although he took out an advertisement that appeared the next day in the lost and found column of the Providence Journal (in which the story is titled ‘Under the Pyramids’), the typescript was never recovered. It appeared as ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ in the first anniversary issue (May–June–July 1924) of Weird Tales

.

Lovecraft’s concern at the moment, however, was to get a newly typed version to Henneberger as quickly as possible. Fortunately, he had brought along the autograph manuscript, so the morning of the 3rd found him at the office of ‘The Reading Lamp’ (on which more later) frantically retyping the long story; but he was only half done when it was time to go to St Paul’s Chapel for the service. They completed the typing job one or two evenings later in Philadelphia. The story was sent to Weird Tales immediately, and Lovecraft received payment of $100—the largest sum he had hitherto earned as a fiction-writer—on 21 March. It was the only occasion on which he was paid by Weird Tales in advance of publication.

‘Under the Pyramids’ is quite an able piece of work, and it remains a much undervalued tale, even if some of the earlier parts read like a travelogue or encyclopedia. Some of the imagery of the story probably derives from Théophile Gautier’s superb nonsupernatural tale of Egyptian horror, ‘One of Cleopatra’s Nights’. Lovecraft owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882).