What I believe has inspired this long-winded passage is a suggestion by Lillian that Lovecraft simply come home and forget about Sonia, leading Lovecraft to counter that he cannot countenance ‘any design of permanent isolation’ from her given her boundlessly patient and understanding attitude.
But after December, the issue of Lovecraft’s return was evidently dropped, perhaps because all parties concerned were waiting to see about the possibility of his securing employment at Morton’s museum in Paterson. Three more months passed with no prospect of work for Lovecraft except a temporary job as envelopeaddresser; and so, on 27 March, he finally received the invitation to come home.
What, or who, was behind the invitation? Was it merely Lillian’s decision? Did Annie add her vote? Were there others involved? There is conflicting evidence on the point. Frank Long told Winfield Townley Scott that he had written to Annie ‘urging that arrangements be set in motion to restore [Lovecraft] to Providence’;6 but in his 1975 memoir Long noted that his mother wrote a letter to the aunts.7 So who wrote the letter, Long or his mother? The latter theory is not at all improbable: during Lillian’s month or so in New York during December 1924 and January 1925, she and Lovecraft visited the Longs frequently; and it seems that a bond was established between these two elderly women whose son and nephew, respectively, were such close friends. Still, Long’s earlier mentions that he wrote the letter may perhaps be more reliable; or perhaps both Long and his mother did so.
After making the preliminary invitation, Lillian had evidently suggested Boston or Cambridge as a more likely place for Lovecraft to find literary work. Lovecraft grudgingly admitted the apparent good sense of this idea, but then, in words both poignant and a little sad, made a plea for residing in Providence:
To all intents & purposes I am more naturally isolated from mankind than Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, who dwelt alone in the midst of crowds, & whom Salem knew only after he died. Therefore, it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape & scenery … My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical & architectural … I am always an outsider—to all scenes & all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence … Providence is my home, & there I shall end my days if I can do so with any semblance of peace, dignity, or appropriateness … Providence would always be at the back of my head as a goal to be worked toward—an ultimate Paradise to be regain’d at last.8
Lillian shortly afterward decided that her nephew should come back to Providence. She found a place for the two of them at 10 Barnes Street, north of the Brown University campus, and asked Lovecraft whether she should take it. He responded with another near-hysterical letter: ‘Whoopee!! Bang!! ‘Rah!! For God’s sake jump at that room without a second’s delay!! I can’t believe it—too good to be true! … Somebody wake me up before the dream becomes so poignant I can’t bear to be waked up!!!’9
I have quoted these letters at such length—and several of them go on for pages in this vein—to display how close to the end of his tether Lovecraft must have been. He had tried for two years to put the best face on things—had tried to convince Lillian, and perhaps himself, that his coming to New York was not a mistake—but when the prospect of going home was held out, he leaped at it with an alacrity that betrays his desperation.
The big question, of course, was where Sonia fitted in—or, perhaps, whether she fitted in. Although Sonia would return from the Midwest to help Lovecraft pack and accompany him home to get him ensconced in his new quarters, there was certainly no thought at this juncture of her actually living in Providence or working there. And yet, such a course was clearly considered at some point—at least by Sonia, and perhaps by Lovecraft as well. In her memoir she remarks: ‘He wanted more than anything else to go back to Providence but he also wanted me to come along, and this I could not do because there was no situation open there for me; that is, one fitting my ability and my need.’ Perhaps the most dramatic passage in her entire memoir relates to this critical period:
When he no longer could tolerate Brooklyn, I, myself, suggested that he return to Providence. Said he, ‘If we could but both return to live in Providence, the blessed city where I was born and reared, I am sure, there I could be happy.’ I agreed, ‘I’d love nothing better than to live in Providence if I could do my work there but Providence has no particular niche that I could fill.’ He returned to Providence himself. I came much later.
H. P. lived in a large studio room at that time, where the kitchen was shared with two other occupants. His aunt, Mrs. Clark, had a room in the same house while Mrs. Gamwell, the younger aunt, lived elsewhere. Then we had a conference with the aunts. I suggested that I would take a large house, secure a good maid, pay all the expenses and have the two aunts live with us at no expense to them, or at least they would live better at no greater expense. H. P. and I actually negotiated the rental of such a house with the option to buy it if we found we liked it. H. P. was to use one side of it as his study and library, and I would use the other side as a business venture of my own. At this time the aunts gently but firmly informed me that neither they nor Howard could afford to have Howard’s wife work for a living in Providence. That was that. I now knew where we all stood. Pride preferred to suffer in silence; both theirs and mine.10
This account is full of difficulties. First, it is clear that Sonia was not the one who ‘suggested that he return to Providence’, else Lovecraft would not have told Lillian repeatedly that she was merely ‘endorsing’ the move. Second, it is cannot be ascertained exactly when this ‘conference’ in Providence took place. It may have occurred in early summer; then again, Sonia’s mention that she came to Providence ‘much later’ may mean that she came only years later—perhaps as late as 1928, for it was only then that actual divorce proceedings—undertaken at her insistence—were instituted.
The critical issue is the ‘pride’ cited by Sonia. We here see the clash of cultures and generations at its clearest: on the one side the dynamic, perhaps domineering businesswoman striving to salvage her marriage by taking things into her own hands, and on the other side the Victorian shabby-genteel matrons who could not ‘afford’ the social catastrophe of seeing their only nephew’s wife set up a shop and support them in the very town where the name of Phillips still represented something akin to an aristocracy. The exact wording of Sonia’s comment is of note: it carries the implication that the aunts might have countenanced her opening a shop somewhere other than Providence.
Are the aunts to be criticized for their attitude? Certainly, many of those today who believe that the acquisition of money is the highest moral good that human beings can attain will find it absurd, incomprehensible, and offensively class-conscious; but the 1920s in New England was a time when standards of propriety meant more than an income, and the aunts were simply adhering to the codes of behaviour by which they had led their entire lives. If anyone is to be criticized, it is Lovecraft: whether he agreed with his aunts on the issue or not (and, in spite of his Victorian upbringing, my feeling is that at this time he did not), he should have worked a little harder to express his own views and to act as an intermediary so that some compromise could have been worked out. Instead, he seems to have stood idly by and let his aunts make all the decisions for him. In all honesty, it is highly likely that he really wished the marriage to end at this point—or, at the very least, that he was perfectly content to see it continue only by correspondence, as indeed it did for the next several years. All he wanted was to come home; Sonia could shift for herself.