It is difficult to convey in capsule form any impression of the vast metropolis, which then as now was as diverse as any place on the globe. The city’s character can change in a single block, and the whole region defies neat generalization. When we speak of Harlem or Hell’s Kitchen or Greenwich Village, we are in danger of letting stereotypes take the place of realities. Lovecraft discovered the city gradually over two years of peregrinations, but his heart was in those surprisingly numerous pockets of antiquity (many of them now sadly obliterated) that still remained even in the heart of Manhattan. Some of the outer boroughs also preserved such pockets, and Lovecraft sought them out with the zeal of desperation. The Flatbush section of Brooklyn where he and Sonia settled was then on the outskirts of the borough, and was then (as it is not now) the residence of choice for the well-to-do in the area. It was not Providence, but neither was it a wholly inferior substitute.
There is no question that, at least for the first few months, the euphoria of his marriage and of his residence in the nation’s centre of publishing, finance, art, and general culture helped to ward off any doubts about the precipitancy of his departure from Providence. With a new wife, many friends, and even reasonably good job prospects Lovecraft had reason to believe that a promising new phase of his life was beginning.
Lovecraft’s marriage seems to have produced, among his friends and associates, reactions ranging from surprise to shock to alarm. Rheinhart Kleiner writes:
I do remember very well that it was while riding in a taxi with Mr. and Mrs. Houtain … that the news of the Lovecraft– Greene marriage was imparted to me. At once, I had a feeling of faintness at the pit of my stomach and became very pale. Houtain laughed uproariously at the effect of his announcement, but agreed that he felt as I did.1
The silence that Lovecraft maintained about his marriage plans up to—and, indeed, beyond—the last minute is attested by one of the most remarkable letters ever written by Lovecraft: the letter to his aunt Lillian announcing his marriage—six days after the fact. It is manifestly obvious that he simply boarded the 11.09 train on Sunday morning, 2 March, married Sonia the next day, began settling in at 259 Parkside, and finally decided to spill the news to his elder aunt. Indeed, Lovecraft sent Lillian several postcards on 4 and 5 March from both New York and Philadelphia (where the couple honeymooned), but without any indication of the true state of affairs.
Some parts of the laborious preamble to the actual announcement in this letter are astounding:
[A] more active life, to one of my temperament, demands many things which I could dispense with when drifting sleepily and inertly along, shunning a world which exhausted and disgusted me, and having no goal but a phial of cyanide when my money should give out. I had formerly meant to follow the latter course, and was fully prepared to seek oblivion whenever cash should fail or sheer ennui grow too much for me; when suddenly, nearly three years ago, our benevolent angel S. H. G. stepped into my circle of consciousness and began to combat that idea with the opposite one of effort and the enjoyment of life through the rewards which effort will bring.
Well, perhaps marriage and a move to the big city is better than suicide from poverty or boredom. But what about the critical issue of the pair’s affection for each other?
meanwhile—egotistical as it sounds to relate it—it began to be apparent that I was not alone in finding psychological solitude more or less of a handicap. A detailed intellectual and aesthetic acquaintance since 1921, and a three-months visit in 1922 wherein congeniality was tested and found perfect in an infinity of ways, furnished abundant proof not only that S. H. G. is the most inspiriting and encouraging influence which could possibly be brought to bear on me, but that she herself had begun to find me more congenial than anyone else, and had come to depend to a great extent on my correspondence and conversation for mental contentment and artistic and philosophical enjoyment.2
This is, certainly, one of the most glaring examples of Lovecraft’s inability to speak of ‘love’ or anything remotely connected to it. His natural reserve in talking of such matters to his aunt should certainly be taken into account; but we will also have to deal later with Sonia’s own admission that Lovecraft never said the word ‘love’ to her.
What were Sonia’s feelings on the whole matter? In speaking of the year or two prior to their marriage, she writes: ‘I well knew that he was not in a position to marry, yet his letters indicated his desire to leave his home town and settle in New York.’3 The first part of the statement presumably refers merely to financial capability; as for the second, although of course we do not have access to Lovecraft’s letters to Sonia, I have to believe that this is somewhat of an exaggeration. Sonia goes on to say that she requested Lovecraft to inform his aunts of the marriage plans before the ceremony, but that he preferred to surprise them. ‘In the matter of securing the marriage license, buying the ring and other details incumbent upon a marriage, he seemed to be so jovial. He said one would think that he was being married for the nth time, he went about it in such a methodical way.’4
What Sonia does not say is that she had written to Lillian a full month before the marriage, and in a manner that should clearly have signalled to Lillian that something was afoot. In a letter dated 9 February 1924, Sonia writes:
I have nothing in life to attract me to Life and if I can help the good and beautiful soul of Howard Lovecraft find itself financially as it has found itself spiritually, morally and mentally, my efforts shall not have been in vain …
Therefore little Lady, fear nothing. I am just as desirous of his success for his own sake as you are, and I am just as anxious, perhaps more so, that you should live to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the honors that will be heaped upon his beautiful and blessed name, as you may be.5
That ‘fear nothing’ must have been in response to some letter by Lillian, perhaps asking Sonia bluntly what her ‘intentions’ toward her nephew actually were.
Lovecraft’s jovality during the ceremony is borne out by several amusing letters to his closest friends. To James Morton he writes, after another long and teasing preamble about the seeming strangeness of his residence at 259 Parkside:
Yes, my boy, you got it the first time. Eager to put Colonial architecture to all of its possible uses, I hit the ties hither last week; and on Monday, March the Third, seized by the hair of the head the President of the United—S. H. G.—and dragged her to Saint Paul’s Chapel, … where after considerable assorted genuflection, and with the aid of the honest curate, Father George Benson Cox, and of two less betitled ecclesiastical hangers-on, I succeeded in affixing to her series of patronymics the not unpretentious one of Lovecraft. Damned quaint of me, is it not? You never can tell what a guy like me is gonna do next!6