All this sounds promising, and at one point Lovecraft even reports the possibility that The Reading Lamp might be able to secure him a regular position at a publishing house, although this clearly did not happen. Later in the month he reports working on several chapters of a book on American superstitions; the idea evidently was that he would do three chapters and Tucker would then try to get a contract from a book publisher for the project. But since on 1 August he reports the ‘non-materialisation of sundry literary prospects’,15 the obvious inference is that the Reading Lamp business came to nothing.
But Lovecraft always had Bush to rely on. He met him on 25 May, and reports doing ‘Bush work’ in July. Bush published at least eight books in 1924 and 1925 (all of them psychology manuals—he had evidently given up poetry), and no doubt Lovecraft derived at least a modest income from revising them. Cheques from Weird Tales were no doubt trickling in also—for ‘The Hound’ (February), ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (March), ‘Arthur Jermyn’ (April), and ‘Hypnos’ (May–June–July) along with JuUnder the Pyramids’, although I have no information on how much any of these stories aside from the Houdini job actually brought in.
The couple, indeed, felt so relatively prosperous that in May they placed a down payment on two pieces of property in Bryn Mawr Park, a development in Yonkers. In her autobiography Sonia declares that a home for Lovecraft, herself, and his two aunts was planned for the larger property and that the other would be used for speculation. Yonkers is the city immediately north of the Bronx in lower Westchester County, and within easy commuting distance of Manhattan by trolley or train. Since the turn of the century it had become a fashionable bedroom community for New Yorkers; but it was still an idyllic small town with plenty of greenery and a sort of New England feel to it, and might have been the ideal place for Lovecraft to have settled so long as he needed to remain in the New York area for purposes of employment. However, by late July Lovecraft wrote to the real estate company that he could no longer afford to pay the monthly fees for the lots. What exactly had happened to the couple’s finances?
Sonia had apparently attempted to start her own hat shop. This strikes me as an extremely risky undertaking. In days when all men and women wore hats in public, the millinery business was an extraordinarily competitive one: the 1924–25 city directory for Manhattan and the Bronx lists at least 1200 milliners. My only thought is that Sonia, as a married woman, did not wish to do the extensive amount of travelling that her position at Ferle Heller’s evidently required her to do, and wished to open a shop of her own so as to remain in the city as much as possible. But if this was the case, the ironic circumstance is that Sonia remained out of work for much of the rest of the year and was then forced to take a series of jobs in the Midwest, separating her far more from her husband than her Ferle Heller’s position would have been likely to do. She says nothing about this whole matter at all in her memoir; but Lovecraft, writing to Lillian on 1 August, makes clear reference to ‘the somewhat disastrous collapse of S. H.’s independent [my emphasis] millinery venture’, with the result that there is now ‘something of a shortage in the exchequer’.16
The upshot of all this was that Lovecraft was forced to look much more vigorously for a job—any job—than before. Now, and only now, begins the futile and rather pathetic hunting through the classified ads every Sunday in the New York Times for any position that might conceivably be available; but Lovecraft came face to face with a realization as true then as now: ‘Positions of every kind seem virtually unattainable to persons without experience …’17 What Lovecraft says is the job that ‘came nearest to materialisation’ was a salesman’s position with the Creditors’ National Clearing House, located at 810 Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey. This was a bill collecting agency, and Lovecraft would be responsible not for actually collecting bills but for selling the agency’s services amongst wholesalers and retailers in New York City. He appears to have been hired on a trial basis in late July, but it was painfully evident that Lovecraft simply did not have the brazenness or suavity to be a successful salesman, and he quickly resigned.
This whole episode—as well as a later one in which Lovecraft tried to secure a job in the lamp-testing department of an electrical laboratory—shows how difficult it was for Lovecraft to secure the job that most suited him, namely something in the writing or publishing business. There is no reason why, with his experience, he should not have been able to secure some such position; but he was unable to do so. Several of his friends have commented on a notorious letter of application that he sent out around this time, the first paragraph of which reads as follows:
If an unprovoked application for employment seems somewhat unusual i n these days of system, agencies, & advertising, I trust that the circumstances surrounding this one may help to mitigate what would otherwise be obtrusive forwardness. The case is one wherein certain definitely marketable aptitudes must be put forward in an unconventional manner if they are to override the current fetish which demands commercial experience & causes prospective employers to dismiss unheard the application of any situation-seeker unable to boast of specific professional service in a given line.18
And so on for six more paragraphs, commenting pointedly that he has, in the last two months, answered over a hundred advertisements without a single response.
To be sure, this may not have been the ideal letter, but standards of business writing were different seventy years ago. Nevertheless, Kleiner remarks of this letter, and others like it: ‘I think I am justified in saying that they were the sort of letters a temporarily straitened English gentleman might have written in an effort to make a profitable connection in the business world of the day before yesterday.’19
Then, in the classified section of the New York Times for Sunday 10 August, appeared the following advertisement in the ‘Situations Wanted—Male’ category:
WRITER AND REVISER, free-lance, desires regular and permanent salared connection with any responsible enterprise requiring literary services; exceptionally thorough experience in preparing correct and fluent text on subjects assigned, and in meeting the most difficult, intricate and extensive problems of rewriting and constructive revision, prose or verse; would also consider situation dealing with such proofreading as demands rapid and discriminating perception, orthographical accuracy, stylistic fastidiousness and a keenly developed sense of the niceties of English usage; good typist; age 34, married; has for seven years handled all the prose and verse of a leading American public speaker and editor. Y 2292 Times Annex.
This advertisement—taking many phrases from his application letter—is rather more open to criticism than the letter itself, for it is far longer than any other one in this section and really does go on at needless length when a more compact notice would have conveyed many of the same points far more cheaply. The expense was, indeed, quite considerable: the rate for ads in the ‘Situations Wanted’ section was 40 cents per word, and this ad—99 words— cost a full $39.60. This would be the equivalent of a month’s rent in the one-room apartment Lovecraft would occupy in 1925–26. I am amazed that Sonia let Lovecraft take out an ad of this length, for surely she paid for it.