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

What now transpired was a five-month hunt for the cheapest but most tasteful suits Lovecraft could endure to wear; in the process Lovecraft gained a considerable knowledge of discount clothing stores and even the rudiments of haggling. He could not feel comfortable without four suits—two light and two dark, one each for summer and winter. He really did not think it possible— based on conversations with Long, Leeds, and others—to get a good suit for under $35, but in early July, when Sonia was in town, he found a good suit for $25 at Monroe Clothes, a chain store. This was a summer suit, and Lovecraft began wearing it immediately. In October he decided to buy a heavy suit for winter, since the weather was turning colder. This, he knew, would be a considerably more difficult proposition, for really good winter suits can rarely be secured at bargain prices. To his dismay he found, on his weary peregrinations, that ‘In this age of well-heated houses men have stopped wearing the heavy clothing they used to wear … so that the unhappy victim of a menage in which the name Burns applies to the family instead of the fuel is very literally left out in the cold!’

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Finally he seemed to come across just what he wanted, at the Borough Clothiers in Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Lovecraft was very shrewd in dealing with the salesman: he said that he really wanted only a provisional suit until he could get a better one, therefore implying that he might buy another suit from the place later (not mentioning that it might be more than a year before he did so); the salesman, accordingly, consulted with a superior and showed him a more expensive suit but priced it at only $25. Lovecraft bought it, and took to calling it ‘the triumph’.

But he quickly came to the conclusion that he would need to buy a cheap winter suit in order not to wear out the good one, so in late October he undertook yet another long quest for a suit under $15 for everyday wear. The first place Lovecraft went was the row of stores on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan, then (as now) the haven of discount clothing in the city. What he found, after trying ‘a dozen coats of varying degrees of impossibility’, was a coat that was ‘a limp rag; crushed, dusty, twisted, & out-of-press, but I saw that cut, fabric, & fit were just right’. It was part of a $9.95 sale; but the problem was that there was no exactly matching set of trousers. Accompanying it were one trouser that was too long and two that were too short. The salesman was trying to get Lovecraft to accept the short trousers, but Lovecraft wanted the long one; after considerable haggling Lovecraft persuaded the salesman to sell him the coat, the long trousers, and one of the short trousers, all for $11.95. This was all pretty clever on Lovecraft’s part, and a tailor repaired the coat and trousers the next day. This entire adventure, too, is narrated by Lovecraft in a long and piquant letter to Lillian; in the course of which he indulges in a long tirade on the subject:

in general I think I have developed an eye for the difference between the clothing a gentleman wears & that which a gentleman doesn’t. What has sharpened this sense is the constant sight of these accursed filthy rabbles that infest the N.Y. streets, & whose clothing presents such systematic differences from the normal clothing of real people along Angell St. & in Butler Ave. or Elmgrove Ave. cars that he comes to feel a tremendous homesickness & to pounce avidly on any gentleman whose clothes are proper & tasteful & suggestive of Blackstone Boulevard rather than Borough Hall or Hell’s Kitchen … Confound it, I’ll be either in good Providence taste or in a bally bathrobe!! Certain lapel cuts, textures, & fits tell the story. It amuses me to see how some of these flashy young ‘boobs’ & foreigners spend fortunes on various kinds of expensive clothes which they regard as evidences of meritorious taste, but which in reality are their absolute social & aesthetic damnation—being little short of placards shrieking in bold letters: ’I am an ignorant peasant’, ‘I am a mongrel gutter-rat

’, or ’I am a tasteless & unsophisticated yokel.’

To which he adds, with complete ingenuousness, ‘And yet perhaps these creatures are not, after all, seeking to conform to the absolute artistic standard of gentlefolk.’¹⁰ This remarkable passage testifies to Lovecraft’s inability to dissociate himself from the codes of attire and general social behaviour inculcated in him in youth. But now Lovecraft had his four suits, and he need think no more about the matter.