In his controversial 1975 book, Lovecraft: A Biography, author L. Sprague De Camp came to a different conclusion: ‘He was a man who, as a result of congenital tendencies (his schizoid personality), compounded by an abnormal upbringing, was long delayed in maturation. He showed adolescent bumptiousness, prejudices, dogmatism and affectations, and adolescent timidity towards new human contacts and relationships, in his thirties, more than a decade after he had ceased to be an adolescent. In some respects, such as the sexual and the monetary, he never did mature.’
With his mother’s death, Lovecraft found himself being coddled by his two indulgent aunts, Lillian Phillips Clark and Annie Emeline Phillips Gamwell. They all lived together under the same roof for three years.
Lovecraft had always had women around to care for him. Although he was comfortable living with his aunts, it was only a matter of time before he began looking around for a bride. He didn’t actually bother to look very far.
After first meeting her at a gathering of the National Amateur Press Association in Boston in 1921, Lovecraft married the Ukrainian-born Sonia Haft Greene, a woman seven years his senior, in St. Paul’s Church, New York, on 3 March 1924. ‘He said nothing could please him better,’ she noted some years later.
The newlyweds lived together in south Brooklyn, while Sonia worked for a fashionable woman’s wear establishment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. However, within less than two years the marriage was in trouble, with Lovecraft moving back to Rhode Island and the couple basically living separate lives.
‘I believe he loved me as much as it was possible for a temperament like his to love,’ wrote Sonia. ‘I had hoped . . . that my embrace would make of him not only a great genius but also a lover and husband. While the genius developed and broke through the chrysalis, the lover and husband receded into the background until they were apparitions that finally vanished.’
‘There was a general feeling that the marriage was not destined to last, nor did it,’ observed the author’s friend, critic Rheinhart Kleiner.
Sonia (who had married once before, when she was sixteen) eventually urged Lovecraft to divorce her and, on 25 March 1929, he signed a preliminary decree on the grounds of her ‘wilful desertion’.
‘I told him I had done everything I could think of to make our marriage a success,’ Sonia wrote, ‘but that no marriage could be such in letter-writing only.’
The couple continued to correspond sporadically, and Sonia last saw her former husband in 1932. She eventually moved to California where, after three years, she married a former university professor. The marriage lasted until his death, a decade later.
A month after Lovecraft’s death, the poet Samuel Loveman put a classified advert in The New York Times in an attempt to contact his friend’s former wife, who had already heard the news from another source. ‘Even though I am not his widow,’ she wrote later, ‘I mourn in sorrow and reverence his untimely passing.’
Sonia herself died on 26 December 1972 at the age of 89. Towards the end of her life, it was alleged that Lovecraft had apparently never executed the document required to make their divorce final. As a result, Sonia’s third and final marriage was quite possibly bigamous.
‘Despite all one may think of the bizarre affair of Lovecraft’s marriage,’ recalled Kleiner some years later, ‘I am inclined to believe that the former Sonia Greene, however misguided or ill-advised, was sincere in her own way.’
For the remainder of his life, Lovecraft made his home in his beloved Providence, where he remained a studious antiquarian. However, he was no hermit, and he managed to travel extensively as he eked out a precarious living.
‘I have never had much inclination to depend on people for amusement,’ Lovecraft explained. ‘To me all mankind seems too local and transitory an incident in the cosmos to take at all seriously. I am more interested in scenes - landscapes and architecture - I have a very real affection for the old town with its ancient steeples and belfries, hills and corners, courts and lanes, all reminding me of that eighteenth century and that Old England which I love so well.’
For a writer so influential, it is perhaps surprising to realise that Lovecraft’s major fiction output barely spanned two decades.
Having founded the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1923, publisher J.C. Henneberger had read Lovecraft’s serials ‘Grewsome Tales’ (written 1921-22, and later retitled ‘Herbert West -Reanimator’) and ‘The Lurking Fear’ (written in November 1922) in G.J. Houtain’s professional magazine Home Brew. Impressed by Lovecraft’s work, Henneberger eventually convinced the reluctant author, who still considered writing to be no more than a gentlemanly hobby, to send five manuscripts to editor Edwin F. Baird in May 1923.
‘I have no idea that these things will be found suitable,’ explained the author in his covering letter, ‘for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself.’
Lovecraft compounded his negativity by insisting that, should ‘any miracle’ lead to Baird publishing any of the stories, the editor must agree that ‘If the tale cannot be printed as written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection.’
Despite Lovecraft’s pessimistic tone, Baird bought all five of the tales after asking the author to re-type them, and urged him to submit more. In the eleven issues of Weird Tales published from October 1923 to February 1925, Lovecraft appeared in eight of them with nine stories and a poem.
Lovecraft’s initial run of fiction in ‘The Unique Magazine’ comprised ‘Dagon’ (in the October 1923 issue), ‘The Picture in the House’ (December 1923-January 1924), ‘The Hound’ (February 1924), ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (March 1924), ‘The White Ape’ (a retitling of ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’) and the poem ‘Nemesis’ (both April 1924), ‘Hypnos’ and the pseudonymous ‘Imprisoned With the Pharaohs’ (both May-July 1924), ‘The Festival’ (January 1925) and ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ (February 1925). However, the writer balked at retyping some of his older tales.
According to author Frank Belknap Long, Baird’s admiration for Lovecraft’s fiction ‘verged upon idolatory [sic], and he clearly felt that if Weird Tales failed to contain three or four Lovecraft stories in the course of a year, there would ensue a reader disappointment of a very serious nature.’
However, that did not stop Lovecraft writing to Baird in February 1924 to complain: ‘I was delighted to receive your two communications, and to hear that you like “Nemesis”. This delight atones fairly well for the sensation of gastric depression caused by the implication that “Arthur Jermyn” is going to press as “The White Ape”! I wish I could convert you to my point of view regarding the annoying literalness and flaccidity of that later title.’
That same year, the magazine found itself in serious financial problems. Baird was acrimoniously fired and, with the help of writer and literary agent Otis Adelbert Kline, Henneberger took over the editorial reins to produce a bumper anniversary issue.
For this special edition, Henneberger commissioned Lovecraft to ghost-write a story to be published under the byline of world-renowned escapologist Harry Houdini. Houdini had previously been represented in the magazine with the two-part serial ‘The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt’ (March 1924) and ‘The Hoax of the Spirit Lover’ (April, 1924), both of which may have actually been written by Walter Gibson, creator of pulp hero The Shadow.
Written in February of that year under the title ‘Under the Pyramids’, Lovecraft’s first-person narrative involved Houdini battling subterranean monstrosities beneath the Egyptian pyramids.
Giving himself the credit ‘Translated by H.P. Lovecraft’, the author completed the manuscript shortly before he boarded a train at Union Station, Providence, on 2 March 1924 to travel to Manhattan to marry Sonia Greene. However, an understandably preoccupied Lovecraft lost the o
riginal typescript somewhere in the station, and he spent the following morning - his wedding day - retyping the manuscript from his notes. With the work only half-finished before he had to attend the ceremony, he used the following day and night of his honeymoon in Philadelphia to complete the job.
‘I alone was able to read those crossed out notes,’ recalled Sonia. ‘I read them slowly to him while he pounded at a typewriter borrowed from the hotel . . . and when the manuscript was finished we were too tired and exhausted for honeymooning or anything else. But I wouldn’t let Howard down, and the manuscript reached the publisher on time.’
Henneberger retitled the story ‘Imprisoned With the Pharaohs’ and gave it the cover of his oversized ‘Anniversary Number’ (May-June, 1924), which he hoped would revive the magazine’s flagging fortunes.
Houdini reportedly liked the story very much and, not only did he apparently invest money in the struggling publication, but over the next couple of years he met with Lovecraft on a number of occasions to discuss future projects. Unfortunately, these came to nothing with the fifty-two-year-old escape artist’s death in Detroit on Halloween, 1926.
When Henneberger’s subsequent attempts to convince Lovecraft to become the new editor of Weird Tales or a similar periodical devoted to ghost stories were reputedly rejected because it would involve a move to Chicago, Farnsworth Wright was appointed the new editor of Weird Tales.
In a 1928 letter to Derleth, Lovecraft described Wright, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, as ‘an admirably amiable, conscientious & honourable person despite his limitations in critical judgment’.
According to pulp writer E. Hoffman Price, Wright once told him: ‘Often I buy a story because I like it. But always, I am obliged first to consider whether my readers would like that yarn. Many a time, I’ve accepted things which I did not care for, but which I felt would please many of the readers’.
Wright rejected Lovecraft’s new story ‘The Shunned House’ in 1924 because, at over 10,000 words, he thought it was too long and slow. He did, however, continue to buy such tales as ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ (for the February 1925 issue), ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ (May 1925), ‘The Unnamable’ (July 1925), ‘The Temple’ (September 1925), ‘The Tomb’ (January 1926), ‘The Cats of Ulthar’ (February 1926), ‘The Outsider’ (April 1926), ‘The Moon Bog’ (June 1926), ‘The Terrible Old Man’ (August 1926), ‘He’ (September 1926), ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (January 1927), ‘The White Ship’ (March 1927), Pickman’s Model’ (October 1927), ‘The Lurking Fear’ (January 1928), ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (February 1928) and ‘The Silver Key’ (January 1929). However, several of these stories had appeared previously in amateur publications.
‘With Weird Tales as perhaps the only exemplar of this type of fiction,’ explained Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, ‘Lovecraft’s work exerted a very strong influence. The things he talked about were strange, were novel, were mysterious. The whole concept of a cosmology in which evil forces controlled the universe was very fresh, and some of his characters and characterizations were quite shocking.
‘Today, when one reads Lovecraft, one reads him with echoes of countless science-fiction, television, and motion picture images in his or her mind. But at the time, I can assure you, most of the people I knew that had met the word of Lovecraft for the first time were quite frightened by it.’
Following the appearance of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ in the April 1929 Weird Tales (for which the magazine paid $240.00 - the most Lovecraft had received for a story up until that time), negative reaction to the tale’s gruesomeness resulted in Wright not publishing any new fiction by the author again until ‘The Very Old Folk’ in the February-March 1931 issue.
Wright had already rejected ‘Cool Air’ (written in March 1926), even though Lovecraft considered it ‘not nearly so bad as many he has taken’. The story ultimately appeared in the penultimate March 1928 issue of Tales of Magic and Mystery, a classy-looking but short-lived pulp that ran for just five issues. Wright eventually purchased the story after Lovecraft’s death, and he used it in the September 1939 edition of Weird Tales.
Although he also initially turned down ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ (written in November 1926), Wright subsequently changed his mind and published it in the October 1931 issue for $55.00. He had also rejected ‘In the Vault’ (written in September 1925) for being too gruesome, yet he finally bought it six years later for the magazine (after August Derleth persuaded Lovecraft to let him re-type the ‘all but unreadable’ manuscript) without any comment.
After selling another tale rejected by Wright, ‘The Colour Out of Space’, to Hugo Gernsback’s archetypal science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1927 - and receiving a paltry fifth of a cent of a word for it after having to write several letters demanding payment - Lovecraft refused to offer his fiction to any magazine except Weird Tales. However, he also resisted selling those stories turned down by Wright to other markets, even though many of them paid better rates: ‘I have a sort of dislike of sending in anything which has been once rejected,’ Lovecraft admitted.
This reluctance to re-submit his work even applied to the 42,000-word novelette ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, which Wright had rejected in June 1931. About an Antarctic expedition that stumbles upon an ancient city whose alien inhabitants are still alive, Lovecraft wrote in 1931: ‘ “At the Mountains of Madness” has a certain kind of cumulative horror, but is altogether too slow for the cheap artificial markets.’
Despite the author’s doubts as to its suitability, the story was eventually agented by young Brooklyn fan (and later literary agent and renowned comic book editor) Julius Schwartz to Astounding Stories, where editors F. Orlin Tremaine and Desmond Hall paid $350.00 for it. It was serialised in somewhat abridged form over three issues in February-April 1936. Unfortunately, Schwartz’s plans to sell a collection of Lovecraft’s work to a British book publisher came to nothing.
Around the same time, Donald Wandrei also sold ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ (1934) for Lovecraft to Astounding for $280.00. (Wandrei later claimed to have also sold ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ to the magazine as well.) ‘The checks, amounting to many hundreds of dollars, rescued Lovecraft from a serious financial plight,’ he explained. However, despite earning more for his fiction than ever before, Lovecraft complained about Tremaine’s editing of his manuscripts and considered them still unpublished.
Although he thought of himself as essentially a prose writer, Lovecraft also dabbled extensively in poetry. In the early 1930s he wrote a series of thirty-six weird sonnets in little more than a week. He sold ten to Weird Tales for $35.00 and others appeared in such fan publications as The Fantasy Fan, Science-Fantasy Correspondent, The Phantagraph and The Acolyte. The cycle was eventually collected under the title Fungi from Yuggoth in an amateur booklet published in an edition of less than 100 copies by William H. Evans of Eugene, Oregon, in 1943. It was later included, along with the ambitious werewolf poem ‘Psychopompos’ (written 1917-18) and other verse, in the 1963 Arkham House volume Collected Poems.
‘Much of the poetry falls into two main categories,’ observed author and poet Joseph Payne Brennan, ‘deliberately archaic work imitative of eighteenth-century verse, and a group of weird sonnets known as “Fungi from Yuggoth”. The imitative verse is interesting and often competent, but I think the “Fungi” sonnets are far more arresting and effective.’
Written over six months in late 1925 or early 1926, Lovecraft’s influential 30,000-word essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ appeared in the only edition of W. Paul Cook’s amateur journal The Recluse, in the middle of 1927.
Following its initial printing, Lovecraft almost immediately began making notes to update his study, and a slightly revised version was serialised over seventeen instalments in Charles D. Hornig’s fanzine The Fantasy Fan between October 1933 and February 1935. However, the essay remained incomplete when the periodical ceased publication.
According t
o British horror writer Ramsey Campbell: ‘Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is not only an appreciation of all that he found best in the genre and a critique of the flaws he saw, but also a statement of his own artistic ambitions.’
‘I think it is probably the finest piece of non-fiction which Lovecraft ever wrote,’ agreed Brennan.
Lovecraft also kept up a voluminous correspondence with numerous people, including many of his fellow contributors to Weird Tales. He had been regularly writing to Californian poet Clark Ashton Smith since 1922, along with such young protégés as August W. Derleth and Frank Belknap Long, Jr. Lovecraft later added Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the barbarian, Episcopal minister Henry S. Whitehead, Catherine L. Moore and her future husband Henry Kuttner, the youthful J. Vernon Shea, Fritz Leiber, Jr, the son of a famous Shakespearean actor, and numerous others to his circle of letter-writers.
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