![]() ![]() “By my thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance,” he wrote in A Confession of Unfaith. He loaded his stories with thesaurus words ( ichor, foetor, eldritch, daemon) and engorged sentences: "Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purpled fulgurous sky.” He was fervently absorbed by the theories of human futility and cosmic indifference. He was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and the British writer Lord Dunsany, but he struggled to find his own voice. Lovecraft’s early work was often racist, occasionally brilliant, and frequently bad. When he did write, his stories were mostly overwrought tales about dark happenings among the city’s immigrant populations. Spiraling into depression, he spent most of his time hanging out with friends and little of it writing. But without her around to prepare cheese soufflé for breakfast and take him to Chinese restaurants, Lovecraft, who had ballooned to “porpoise” size in their early days, shriveled to a sardine. “One way his sentiment was to wrap his ‘pinkey’ finger around mine and say ‘Umph!’” Sonia wrote. The relationship had never been that intimate. Eventually, Sonia had to look farther afield to support them both and moved to Cincinnati for another department-store job. He applied for work in the publishing industry, at a bill-collecting firm, and as a lamp-tester in an electrical laboratory, but his efforts proved fruitless. ![]() Lovecraft relocated to New York because Sonia had a lucrative job at a department store, but she lost it right before the wedding. Their first connubial night was spent typing up Lovecraft’s notes for a new story, after which, Sonia wrote in her memoirs, “we were too tired and exhausted for honeymooning or anything else.” Things went downhill from there. The couple married in Manhattan in March 1924. And yet, for some reason, she pursued him for three years. “I admired his personality but, frankly at first, not his person,” Sonia later admitted. “The whole matter was reduced to prosaic mechanism,” he wrote later, “a mechanism which I rather despised.” Not to mention, he was a virulent racial purist, outwardly disgusted by immigrants, tending to become “livid with anger” when he encountered foreign workers. He was also averse to sex, which he blamed on having read a scientific book as a child. He had the frame of a scarecrow, a protruding lower jaw, and a squeaky voice. He had no income besides a dwindling family inheritance and occasional checks from editorial temp work. Lovecraft, still reeling from the death of his mother six weeks prior, was not exactly a catch. It was at a convention for such writers in Boston in 1921 that Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene, an energetic and attractive Eastern European Jewish widow from New York City, seven years his senior. Nervous illnesses kept him isolated at home for long stretches, during which he joined up with “amateur journalist” groups: organizations of unpaid pamphleteers who-with their in-fighting, trolling, and political ranting that no one would ever hear-would likely feel at home in online forums today. (His father had died, probably of syphilis, after a stint in a mental institution.) The family had little of the capital but all the prejudices associated with old New England pedigree, and Lovecraft was never trained for any gainful employment. Lovecraft grew up with a neurotic and stifling mother, Susie, and two aunts. The city suited Lovecraft-a self-taught antiquarian obsessed with the contrasts of New England-in ways that New York could not. Joshi’s authoritative biography, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. “Providence is me-I am Providence,” he wrote his aunt from his New York exile, inspiring the title of S. Born in Providence in 1890, he viewed his hometown-with its scholarly atmosphere and dilapidated 18th-century mansions-as an essential piece of his identity. It was the first time Lovecraft had ever lived alone- and he was spectacularly homesick. To make matters worse, his wife, for whom he’d moved to New York in the first place, had taken a job in another city and left him to fend for himself. He was unemployed, living in a mouse-infested one-room apartment in Brooklyn, and steadily losing weight on a paltry diet of cold canned beans and spaghetti. Like many newcomers to New York City, the aspiring writer from Rhode Island felt overwhelmed and out of place. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was having a bad summer. Lovecraft keeps getting name-checked in pop culture. Subscribe to our print edition here, and our iPad edition here. This story originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of mental_floss magazine. ![]()
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