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

But Lovecraft had the last laugh. The new official board did manage to produce six issues of the United Amateur, but at the convention in late July 1923 Lovecraft’s literary party was almost entirely voted back into office; incredibly, Sonia H. Greene was elected President even though she had not knowingly placed herself on the ballot. This whole turn of events appeared to rile Fritter and his colleagues, and they acted in an obstructionist manner toward the new official board; the Secretary-Treasurer, Alma B. Sanger, withheld funds and failed to answer letters, so that no United Amateur

could be printed until May 1924. No convention was held in 1924, and evidently the official board for that year was re-elected by a mail vote; but that administration produced only one more issue (July 1925)—an issue remarkable for its complete dominance by members of Lovecraft’s literary circle (Frank Belknap Long, Samuel Loveman, Clark Ashton Smith, and of course Lovecraft himself). This ended Lovecraft’s official involvement with the UAPA. Although he strove valiantly to establish the next official board (Edgar J. Davis as President, Victor E. Bacon as Official Editor), it never really took off and, after one or two skimpy issues of the United Amateur, it died some time in 1926.

Lovecraft was by no means aloof from the affairs of the NAPA. It is somewhat ironic that the only two national conventions he ever attended, in 1921 and 1930, were those of the NAPA, not the UAPA. The NAPA convention of 1921 was held on 2–4 July in Boston. At the banquet on 4 July Lovecraft himself gave a speech; it survives under the title ‘Within the Gates: By “One Sent by Providence”’. Next to some of his humorous short stories, it is the wittiest of Lovecraft’s prose performances. The speech is full of genial barbs directed at Houtain, Edith Miniter, and other amateurs, and concludes by apologizing for the ‘long and sonorous intellectual silence’ of the speech (it is less than a thousand words).

One of the individuals who must have been in the audience was Sonia Haft Greene (1883–1972). Sonia had been introduced to amateur journalism by James F. Morton, whom she had known since 1917. She was one of a contingent of NAPA members from the New York area (among them Morton, Rheinhart Kleiner, and others) to go to the convention, and Kleiner later testified that he introduced her to Lovecraft at the event.⁶ Very shortly thereafter Sonia became an ardent supporter of the amateur cause, and not only joined the UAPA but contributed the unheard-of sum of $50.00 to the Official Organ Fund.

It is a pity that we know so relatively little about the woman whom Lovecraft would marry less than three years later. She was born Sonia Haft Shafirkin on 16 March 1883, in Ichnya (near Kiev) in the Ukraine. Her father, Simyon Shafirkin, apparently died when she was a child. Her mother, Racille Haft, left Sonia with her brother in Liverpool—where Sonia received her first schooling— and herself came to America, where she married Solomon H—— (full name unknown) in 1892. Sonia joined her mother later that year. She married Samuel Seckendorff in 1899—she was not quite sixteen, her husband twenty-six. A son, born in 1900, died after three months, and a daughter, Florence, was born on 19 March 1902. Seckendorff, a Russian, later adopted the name Greene from a friend in Boston, John Greene. The marriage was apparently very turbulent, and Samuel Greene died in 1916, apparently by his own hand.

Sonia had taken some extension courses at Columbia University, and had secured an executive position (with a salary of $10,000 a year) at Ferle Heller’s, a clothing store. (The store had two outlets, one at 36 West 57th Street and the other at 9 East 46th Street; Sonia, whose specialty was hats, worked at the former shop.) She resided at 259 Parkside Avenue in the then fashionable Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Kleiner describes her physically as ‘a very attractive woman of Junoesque proportions’; Galpin, while using exactly the same classical adjective, paints a more piquant portrait:

When she dropped in on my reserved and bookish student life at Madison [in 1921 or 1922], I felt like an English sparrow transfixed by a cobra. Junoesque and commanding, with superb dark eyes and hair, she was too regal to be a Dostoievski character and seemed rather a heroine from some of the most martial pages of War and Peace. Proclaiming the glory of the free and enlightened human personality, she declared herself a person unique in depth and intensity of passion and urged me to Write, to Do, to Create.⁷