This is surely one of the most remarkable passages in all Lovecraft’s correspondence. It suggests many things at once—the crippling poverty under which he was at this time living (and, although under somewhat less straitened circumstances, he would continue to live for the rest of his life, even back in Providence); the fact that he had largely abandoned restaurant meals in the interest of economy; and the rather schoolboyish tone of the entire passage, as if he were a teenager attempting to justify his behaviour to his parents.
There is a still more depressing note in all this. In October Lovecraft was forced to buy an oil heater for the winter, since the heat provided by his landlandy, Mrs Burns—especially in the wake of a nationwide coal strike organized by the United Mine Workers and lasting from September 1925 to February 1926—was insufficient. The heater came with a stove-top attachment, so that Lovecraft could now indulge in the luxury of ‘the preparation of hot dinners. No more cold beans & spaghetti for me …’6 Does this mean that, for the first nine and a half months of the year, Lovecraft was eating cold meals, mostly out of cans? In spite of an earlier remark about heating beans on a ‘sterno’ (a tin of a waxlike flammable substance), this seems to be a dismal probability—else why would he boast about the prospect of hot dinners?
The room at 169 Clinton Street really was rather dismal—in a run-down neighbourhood, with a dubious clientele, and infested with mice. For this last problem Lovecraft purchased 5-cent mousetraps, as recommended by Kirk, ‘since I can throw them away without removing the corpus delicti, a thing I should hate to do with a costlier bit of mechanism’.7 (Later he found even cheaper traps at two for 5 cents.) Lovecraft has been ridiculed for this squeamishness, but I think unjustly. Not many of us would wish to handle the corpses of mice.
The final insult came on the morning of Sunday 24 May. While Lovecraft was sleeping on the couch after an all-night writing session, his dressing alcove was broken into from the connecting apartment and he was robbed of nearly all his suits, along with sundry other abstractions. The thieves removed three of his suits (dating from 1914, 1921, and 1923), one overcoat (the fashionable 1924 coat that Sonia had purchased for him), a wicker suitcase of Sonia’s (although the contents were later found in the thieves’ apartment), and an expensive $100 radio set that Loveman had been storing in the alcove. All that Lovecraft was left with, in terms of suits, was a thin 1918 blue suit hanging on a chair in the main room, which the thieves did not enter. Lovecraft did not discover the robbery until 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday the 26th, since he had had no previous occasion to enter the alcove.
The property was of course never recovered, although a police detective came over and promised to do his best. And yet, after an initial outburst of anger and frustration, Lovecraft managed to respond to the whole situation with surprising good humour, for only two days later he wrote a long letter to Lillian on the matter and in the process made light of the situation:
Alas for the robes of my infancy, perennial in their bloom, & now cut off—or snatched off—in the finest flowering of their first few decades! They knew the slender youth of old, & expanded to accomodate [sic] the portly citizen of middle life—aye, & condensed again to shroud the wizened shanks of old age! And now they are gone—gone—& the grey, bent wearer still lives to bemoan his nudity; gathering around his lean sides as best he may the strands of his long white beard to serve him in the office of a garment!8
What now transpired was a five-month hunt for the cheapest but most tasteful suits Lovecraft could endure to wear; in the process Lovecraft gained a considerable knowledge of discount clothing stores and even the rudiments of haggling. He could not feel comfortable without four suits—two light and two dark, one each for summer and winter. He really did not think it possible— based on conversations with Long, Leeds, and others—to get a good suit for under $35, but in early July, when Sonia was in town, he found a good suit for $25 at Monroe Clothes, a chain store. This was a summer suit, and Lovecraft began wearing it immediately. In October he decided to buy a heavy suit for winter, since the weather was turning colder. This, he knew, would be a considerably more difficult proposition, for really good winter suits can rarely be secured at bargain prices. To his dismay he found, on his weary peregrinations, that ‘In this age of well-heated houses men have stopped wearing the heavy clothing they used to wear … so that the unhappy victim of a menage in which the name Burns applies to the family instead of the fuel is very literally left out in the cold!’9
Finally he seemed to come across just what he wanted, at the Borough Clothiers in Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Lovecraft was very shrewd in dealing with the salesman: he said that he really wanted only a provisional suit until he could get a better one, therefore implying that he might buy another suit from the place later (not mentioning that it might be more than a year before he did so); the salesman, accordingly, consulted with a superior and showed him a more expensive suit but priced it at only $25. Lovecraft bought it, and took to calling it ‘the triumph’.
But he quickly came to the conclusion that he would need to buy a cheap winter suit in order not to wear out the good one, so in late October he undertook yet another long quest for a suit under $15 for everyday wear. The first place Lovecraft went was the row of stores on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan, then (as now) the haven of discount clothing in the city. What he found, after trying ‘a dozen coats of varying degrees of impossibility’, was a coat that was ‘a limp rag; crushed, dusty, twisted, & out-of-press, but I saw that cut, fabric, & fit were just right’. It was part of a $9.95 sale; but the problem was that there was no exactly matching set of trousers. Accompanying it were one trouser that was too long and two that were too short. The salesman was trying to get Lovecraft to accept the short trousers, but Lovecraft wanted the long one; after considerable haggling Lovecraft persuaded the salesman to sell him the coat, the long trousers, and one of the short trousers, all for $11.95. This was all pretty clever on Lovecraft’s part, and a tailor repaired the coat and trousers the next day. This entire adventure, too, is narrated by Lovecraft in a long and piquant letter to Lillian; in the course of which he indulges in a long tirade on the subject:
in general I think I have developed an eye for the difference between the clothing a gentleman wears & that which a gentleman doesn’t. What has sharpened this sense is the constant sight of these accursed filthy rabbles that infest the N.Y. streets, & whose clothing presents such systematic differences from the normal clothing of real people along Angell St. & in Butler Ave. or Elmgrove Ave. cars that he comes to feel a tremendous homesickness & to pounce avidly on any gentleman whose clothes are proper & tasteful & suggestive of Blackstone Boulevard rather than Borough Hall or Hell’s Kitchen … Confound it, I’ll be either in good Providence taste or in a bally bathrobe!! Certain lapel cuts, textures, & fits tell the story. It amuses me to see how some of these flashy young ‘boobs’ & foreigners spend fortunes on various kinds of expensive clothes which they regard as evidences of meritorious taste, but which in reality are their absolute social & aesthetic damnation—being little short of placards shrieking in bold letters: ’I am an ignorant peasant’, ‘I am a mongrel gutter-rat’, or ’I am a tasteless & unsophisticated yokel.’
To which he adds, with complete ingenuousness, ‘And yet perhaps these creatures are not, after all, seeking to conform to the absolute artistic standard of gentlefolk.’10 This remarkable passage testifies to Lovecraft’s inability to dissociate himself from the codes of attire and general social behaviour inculcated in him in youth. But now Lovecraft had his four suits, and he need think no more about the matter.