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

It would be an excellent thing if you could gradually work out of the idea that this kind of stilted & artificial language is ‘poetical’ in any way; for truly, it is not. It is a drag & hindrance on real poetic feeling & expression, because real poetry means spontaneous expression in the simplest & most poignantly vital

living language. The great object of the poet is to get rid of the cumbrous & the emptily quaint, & buckle down to the plain, the direct, & the vital—the pure, precious stuff of actual life & human daily speech.⁸

Lovecraft knew he was not yet ready to practise what he preached; but the mere fact that he had written very little poetry since about 1922 meant both that prose fiction had become his chief aesthetic outlet and that he had come to be profoundly disappointed in his earlier poetic work.

But if Lovecraft could not yet exemplify his new poetic theories, he could at least help to inculcate them in others. Maurice Moe was preparing a volume entitled Doorways to Poetry, which Lovecraft in late 1928 announces as provisionally accepted (on the basis of an outline) by Macmillan. As the book developed, he came to have more and more regard for it; by the fall of 1929 he is calling it ‘without exception the best & clearest exposition of the inner essence of poetry that I’ve ever seen’.⁹ Lovecraft refused to accept any payment for the evidently extensive revision he performed on the book. It is, as a result, very unfortunate that the manuscript of the volume does not seem to survive; for, as with so many projects by Lovecraft and his friends, Doorways to Poetry was never published.

Before Lovecraft could undertake the southern tour he was planning for the spring of 1929, he had one small matter to take care of—his divorce from Sonia.

Around the end of 1928 Sonia must have begun pressing for a divorce. Interestingly enough, Lovecraft was opposed to the move: ‘during this period of time he tried every method he could devise to persuade me how much he appreciated me and that divorce would cause him great unhappiness; and that a gentleman does not divorce his wife unless he has a cause, and that he has no cause for doing so’.¹⁰ It is not, certainly, that Lovecraft was contemplating any return to cohabitation, either in New York or in Providence; it is simply that the fact of divorce disturbed him, upsetting his notions of what a gentleman ought to do. He was perfectly willing to carry on a marriage by correspondence, and actually put forth the case of someone he knew who was ill and lived apart from his wife, only writing letters. Sonia did not welcome such a plan: ‘My reply was that neither of us was really sick and that I did not wish to be a long-distance wife “enjoying” the company of a long-distance husband by letter-writing only.’

What subsequently happened is not entirely clear. According to Arthur S. Koki,¹¹

who consulted various documents in Providence, on 24 January a subpoena was issued by the Providence Superior Court for Sonia to appear on 1 March. On 6 February Lovecraft, Annie Gamwell, and C. M. Eddy went to the office of a lawyer, Ralph M. Greenlaw, at 76 Westminster Street (the Turk’s Head Building), and presented testimony to the effect that Sonia had deserted Lovecraft. All this was, of course, a charade; but it was necessary because of the reactionary divorce laws prevailing in the State of New York, where until 1933 the only grounds for divorce were adultery or if one of the parties was sentenced to life imprisonment. The only other option in New York was to have a marriage annulled if it had been entered into ‘by reason of force, duress, or fraud’ (the last term being interpreted at a judge’s discretion) or if one party was declared legally insane for five years.¹² Obviously these options did not exist for Lovecraft and Sonia; and so the fiction that she ‘deserted’ him was soberly perpetrated, surely with the knowledge of all parties in question.

The overriding question, however, is this: Was the divorce ever finalized? The answer is clearly no. The final decree was never signed. How Sonia could have allowed this to happen is anyone’s guess. One can only believe that Lovecraft’s refusal to sign was deliberate—he simply could not bear the thought of divorcing Sonia, not because he really wanted to be married to her, but because a ‘gentleman does not divorce his wife without cause’. This purely abstract consideration, based upon social values Lovecraft was already increasingly coming to reject, is highly puzzling. But the matter had at least one unfortunate sequel. It is certain that Sonia’s marriage in 1936 to Dr Nathaniel Davis of Los Angeles was legally bigamous—a fact that disturbed her considerably when she was told of it late in life. It was a fittingly botched ending to the whole affair.