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

Miss T. thinks a book of my antiquarian & other essays would be quite practicable, & urges me to prepare at least three as samples at once. Also, she thinks she can get me a contract with a chain of magazines to write minor matter to order. And more—as soon as my MSS. arrive, she wants to see all of them, with a view to a weird book … What Miss T. wants in the way of essays is quaint stuff with a flavour of the supernatural.¹⁴

All this sounds promising, and at one point Lovecraft even reports the possibility that The Reading Lamp might be able to secure him a regular position at a publishing house, although this clearly did not happen. Later in the month he reports working on several chapters of a book on American superstitions; the idea evidently was that he would do three chapters and Tucker would then try to get a contract from a book publisher for the project. But since on 1 August he reports the ‘non-materialisation of sundry literary prospects’,¹⁵ the obvious inference is that the Reading Lamp business came to nothing.

But Lovecraft always had Bush to rely on. He met him on 25 May, and reports doing ‘Bush work’ in July. Bush published at least eight books in 1924 and 1925 (all of them psychology manuals—he had evidently given up poetry), and no doubt Lovecraft derived at least a modest income from revising them. Cheques from Weird Tales

were no doubt trickling in also—for ‘The Hound’ (February), ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (March), ‘Arthur Jermyn’ (April), and ‘Hypnos’ (May–June–July) along with JuUnder the Pyramids’, although I have no information on how much any of these stories aside from the Houdini job actually brought in.

The couple, indeed, felt so relatively prosperous that in May they placed a down payment on two pieces of property in Bryn Mawr Park, a development in Yonkers. In her autobiography Sonia declares that a home for Lovecraft, herself, and his two aunts was planned for the larger property and that the other would be used for speculation. Yonkers is the city immediately north of the Bronx in lower Westchester County, and within easy commuting distance of Manhattan by trolley or train. Since the turn of the century it had become a fashionable bedroom community for New Yorkers; but it was still an idyllic small town with plenty of greenery and a sort of New England feel to it, and might have been the ideal place for Lovecraft to have settled so long as he needed to remain in the New York area for purposes of employment. However, by late July Lovecraft wrote to the real estate company that he could no longer afford to pay the monthly fees for the lots. What exactly had happened to the couple’s finances?

Sonia had apparently attempted to start her own hat shop. This strikes me as an extremely risky undertaking. In days when all men and women wore hats in public, the millinery business was an extraordinarily competitive one: the 1924–25 city directory for Manhattan and the Bronx lists at least 1200 milliners. My only thought is that Sonia, as a married woman, did not wish to do the extensive amount of travelling that her position at Ferle Heller’s evidently required her to do, and wished to open a shop of her own so as to remain in the city as much as possible. But if this was the case, the ironic circumstance is that Sonia remained out of work for much of the rest of the year and was then forced to take a series of jobs in the Midwest, separating her far more from her husband than her Ferle Heller’s position would have been likely to do. She says nothing about this whole matter at all in her memoir; but Lovecraft, writing to Lillian on 1 August, makes clear reference to ‘the somewhat disastrous collapse of S. H.’s independent [my emphasis] millinery venture’, with the result that there is now ‘something of a shortage in the exchequer’.¹⁶

The upshot of all this was that Lovecraft was forced to look much more vigorously for a job—any job—than before. Now, and only now, begins the futile and rather pathetic hunting through the classified ads every Sunday in the New York Times for any position that might conceivably be available; but Lovecraft came face to face with a realization as true then as now: ‘Positions of every kind seem virtually unattainable to persons without experience …’¹⁷ What Lovecraft says is the job that ‘came nearest to materialisation’ was a salesman’s position with the Creditors’ National Clearing House, located at 810 Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey. This was a bill collecting agency, and Lovecraft would be responsible not for actually collecting bills but for selling the agency’s services amongst wholesalers and retailers in New York City. He appears to have been hired on a trial basis in late July, but it was painfully evident that Lovecraft simply did not have the brazenness or suavity to be a successful salesman, and he quickly resigned.