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

This whole episode—as well as a later one in which Lovecraft tried to secure a job in the lamp-testing department of an electrical laboratory—shows how difficult it was for Lovecraft to secure the job that most suited him, namely something in the writing or publishing business. There is no reason why, with his experience, he should not have been able to secure some such position; but he was unable to do so. Several of his friends have commented on a notorious letter of application that he sent out around this time, the first paragraph of which reads as follows:

If an unprovoked application for employment seems somewhat unusual i n these days of system, agencies, & advertising, I trust that the circumstances surrounding this one may help to mitigate what would otherwise be obtrusive forwardness. The case is one wherein certain definitely marketable aptitudes must be put forward in an unconventional manner if they are to override the current fetish which demands commercial experience & causes prospective employers to dismiss unheard the application of any situation-seeker unable to boast of specific professional service in a given line.¹⁸

And so on for six more paragraphs, commenting pointedly that he has, in the last two months, answered over a hundred advertisements without a single response.

To be sure, this may not have been the ideal letter, but standards of business writing were different seventy years ago. Nevertheless, Kleiner remarks of this letter, and others like it: ‘I think I am justified in saying that they were the sort of letters a temporarily straitened English gentleman might have written in an effort to make a profitable connection in the business world of the day before yesterday.’¹⁹

Then, in the classified section of the New York Times for Sunday 10 August, appeared the following advertisement in the ‘Situations Wanted—Male’ category:

WRITER AND REVISER, free-lance, desires regular and permanent salared connection with any responsible enterprise requiring literary services; exceptionally thorough experience in preparing correct and fluent text on subjects assigned, and in meeting the most difficult, intricate and extensive problems of rewriting and constructive revision, prose or verse; would also consider situation dealing with such proofreading as demands rapid and discriminating perception, orthographical accuracy, stylistic fastidiousness and a keenly developed sense of the niceties of English usage; good typist; age 34, married; has for seven years handled all the prose and verse of a leading American public speaker and editor. Y 2292 Times Annex.

This advertisement—taking many phrases from his application letter—is rather more open to criticism than the letter itself, for it is far longer than any other one in this section and really does go on at needless length when a more compact notice would have conveyed many of the same points far more cheaply. The expense was, indeed, quite considerable: the rate for ads in the ‘Situations Wanted’ section was 40 cents per word, and this ad—99 words— cost a full $39.60. This would be the equivalent of a month’s rent in the one-room apartment Lovecraft would occupy in 1925–26. I am amazed that Sonia let Lovecraft take out an ad of this length, for surely she paid for it.

Then, in September, an old friend reappeared on the scene—J. C. Henneberger. Lovecraft states that Henneberger had hired him for a ‘new magazine’ at the rate of $40 per week. What kind of magazine was it? College Humor, founded in 1922, was going strong and was not likely to need a new editor; but there was another magazine called the Magazine of Fun

that Henneberger started about this time, and, incredible as it seems, the editorship of this magazine or something like it is what Henneberger appears to have been offering. Lovecraft speaks of Henneberger telephoning him and ‘want[ing] me to turn out some samples of my adapting of jokes for his proposed magazine’.²⁰ It was on the basis of these samples that Henneberger ‘hired’ Lovecraft in mid-September.

Of course, nothing came of the plans. The promised pay for Lovecraft’s editorial work metamorphosed into a $60 credit at the Scribner Book Shop; and although Lovecraft tried to get this credit converted to cash, he was unable to do so and finally, on 9 October, he took Long to the bookstore to purchase a sheaf of books, mostly weird. Frank Long treats the whole episode engagingly in his memoir,²¹ but seems under the impression that the credit was a payment for stories in Weird Tales, when in fact it was for this editorial job that never materialized.