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
Sonia was taken with Lovecraft from the start. She bluntly confesses that, when first meeting Lovecraft, ‘I admired his personality but frankly, at first, not his person’8—a clear reference to Lovecraft’s very plain looks (tall, gaunt frame, lantern jaw, possible problems with facial hair and skin) and perhaps also his stiff, formal conduct and (particularly annoying to one in the fashion industry) the archaic cut of his clothes.
But a correspondence promptly ensued. Lovecraft heard from Sonia as early as mid- to late July of 1921, by which time she had already read some of Lovecraft’s stories that had appeared in the amateur press. Lovecraft professed to be taken with her, at least as an intellect.
It was Sonia who took things into her own hands. She visited Lovecraft in Providence on 4–5 September, staying at the Crown Hotel. Lovecraft, as had already become customary with his out-oftown visitors, showed her the antiquarian treasures of Providence, took her back to 598 and introduced her to aunt Lillian. The next day Sonia invited Lovecraft and his aunt to come to the Crown for a noon meal.
In the meantime Sonia contributed to the amateur cause in other than monetary ways. In October 1921 the first of two issues of her Rainbow appeared; both would be forums for the poetic, fictional, essayistic, and polemical outpourings of Lovecraft and his inner circle of amateur colleagues. Lovecraft contributed a piece entitled ‘Nietzscheism and Realism’, which he declares was a series of extracts made from two letters to Sonia.9 This compendium of philosophical bon mots comprises, sadly enough, almost the sole remnant (aside from a handful of postcards and one other item to be discussed later) of what must have been an extensive and exceptionally fascinating correspondence—one which we would, from a biographical perspective, wish to have perhaps more than any other of Lovecraft’s. But Sonia is clear on its fate: ‘I had a trunkful of his letters which he had written me throughout the years but before leaving New York for California [around 1935] I took them to a field and set a match to them.’10 No doubt Sonia, after all she had been through, was within her rights to do this, but all students of Lovecraft must groan when reading this terse utterance.
Being a professional amateur was perfectly suited to Lovecraft’s aristocratic temperament, but, as time went on and the family inheritance increasingly dwindled, some thought had to be paid to making money. Lovecraft was surely aware of the principal reason for his mother’s nervous collapse—her worries about the financial future of herself and her son. Perhaps it was this that finally led him to make some effort at earning an income; for it is at this time that David Van Bush appears on the scene.
Bush had joined the UAPA in 1916. Lovecraft first mentions him, to my knowledge, in the summer of 1918. From 1915 into the late 1920s Bush wrote an appalling number of poetry volumes and pop psychology manuals, most of them self-published. It is a dreary possibility that Lovecraft revised the bulk of these books, both prose and verse.
The fact is that Bush did become quite popular as a writer and lecturer on popular psychology. Lovecraft did not begin working in earnest for Bush until around 1920, and it is no accident that Bush’s titles begin appearing at a rapid rate thereafter. Lovecraft regarded Bush with a mixture of annoyance and lofty condescension. He met Bush in the summer of 1922, when the latter was lecturing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and paints a vivid portrait of him: