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

This simple incident may go far in suggesting what went wrong with the marriage. Although in later years Lovecraft charitably claimed that the marriage’s failure was ‘98% financial’,³² in reality both Sonia and Lovecraft had deceived themselves into thinking that they shared a ‘congeniality’ (as Lovecraft stated in his marriageannouncement letter to Lillian) that went beyond intellectual and aesthetic matters and covered actual modes of behaviour and basic values. Granting that financial considerations were indeed of considerable—even paramount—importance, these differences in values would have emerged in time and doomed the marriage sooner or later. In some senses it was better—at least for Lovecraft—that it occurred sooner than later.

But in those first few months the euphoria of being married, the excitement of the big city (and of fairly promising job prospects), the fortuitous arrival of Annie Gamwell at the end of March, and of course his many friends in the area kept Lovecraft in a buoyant mood. Amateur work was still taking up some time: Sonia, as President, and Lovecraft, as Official Editor of the UAPA, managed to issue a United Amateur

for May 1924, although it must have been a month or so late, as Sonia’s ‘President’s Message’ is dated 1 May.

Social activity with amateurs still remained on the agenda. Sonia took Lovecraft frequently to the monthly meetings of the Blue Pencil Club (a NAPA group) in Brooklyn; Lovecraft did not much care for this group but would go to please his wife, and in 1925–26, when he was alone, he would skip meetings except when Sonia happened to be in town and made him go. There was some group called The Writers’ Club whose meetings Lovecraft attended in March, although this does not seem to have been an amateur organization. When asked by Morton if he would attend a meeting in May, he writes: ‘It all depends on the ball-and-chain.’ However we are to take the ‘ball-and-chain’ remark (one hopes it is meant in genial flippancy), Lovecraft adds rather touchingly: ‘She generally has to hit the hay early, and I have to get home in proportionate time, since she can’t get to sleep till I do.’³³ The couple did share a double bed, and no doubt Sonia had already become accustomed to having her husband beside her and felt uncomfortable when he was not there.

Lovecraft found the support of his friends indispensable for maintaining emotional equilibrium during this entire period, when the many changes in his social and professional life and, later, the successive disappointments and hardships threatened to disrupt his own mental stability. The most heart-warming portions of his letters to his aunts of 1924 are not those involving Sonia (she is mentioned with remarkable infrequency) but those dealing with his surpisingly numerous outings with friends old and new. This was, of course, the heyday of the Kalem Club, although that term was not coined until early the next year.

Some of these men (and they were all men) we have met already—Kleiner (then a bookkeeper at the Fairbanks Scales Co. and living somewhere in Brooklyn), Morton (living in Harlem; I am not sure of his occupation at this time), and Long (living at 823 West End Avenue in the upper West Side of Manhattan with his parents and studying journalism at New York University). Now others joined ‘the gang’.

There was Arthur Leeds (1882–1952?), a kind of rolling stone who had been with a travelling circus as a boy and now, at the age of roughly forty, eked out a bare living as a columnist for Writer’s Digest

and occasional pulp writer for Adventure and other magazines; he had two stories in Weird Tales

. He was perhaps the most indigent of this entire group of largely indigent aesthetes. At this time he was living at a hotel in West 49th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.

There was Everett McNeil (1862–1929), who like Morton earned an entry in Who’s Who in America, on the strength of sixteen novels for boys published between 1903 and 1929, mostly for E. P. Dutton. The majority of these were historical novels in which McNeil would sugarcoat the history with stirring tales of action on the part of explorers or adventurers battling Indians or colonizing the American frontier. The most popular was perhaps In Texas with Davy Crockett (1908), which was reprinted as late as 1937. George Kirk describes him in a letter to his fiancée as ‘an oldster—lovely purely white hair, writes books for boys and does not need to write down to them, he is quite equal mentally’.³⁴ Kirk did not mean that last remark at all derogatorily. Lovecraft—who had already met McNeil on one of his New York trips of 1922—felt the same way and cherished McNeil’s naive simplicity, even though gradually McNeil fell out of favour with the rest of the gang for being tiresome and intellectually unstimulating. He was living, as in 1922, in Hell’s Kitchen, not far from Leeds.