The correspondence naturally focused on the nature of poetry and its philosophical underpinnings. It was just at this time that Lovecraft was beginning a revaluation of poetic style; and the barrage of old-fashioned poetry Toldridge sent to him helped to refine his views. In response to one such poem he wrote:
It would be an excellent thing if you could gradually work out of the idea that this kind of stilted & artificial language is ‘poetical’ in any way; for truly, it is not. It is a drag & hindrance on real poetic feeling & expression, because real poetry means spontaneous expression in the simplest & most poignantly vital living language. The great object of the poet is to get rid of the cumbrous & the emptily quaint, & buckle down to the plain, the direct, & the vital—the pure, precious stuff of actual life & human daily speech.8
Lovecraft knew he was not yet ready to practise what he preached; but the mere fact that he had written very little poetry since about 1922 meant both that prose fiction had become his chief aesthetic outlet and that he had come to be profoundly disappointed in his earlier poetic work.
But if Lovecraft could not yet exemplify his new poetic theories, he could at least help to inculcate them in others. Maurice Moe was preparing a volume entitled Doorways to Poetry, which Lovecraft in late 1928 announces as provisionally accepted (on the basis of an outline) by Macmillan. As the book developed, he came to have more and more regard for it; by the fall of 1929 he is calling it ‘without exception the best & clearest exposition of the inner essence of poetry that I’ve ever seen’.9 Lovecraft refused to accept any payment for the evidently extensive revision he performed on the book. It is, as a result, very unfortunate that the manuscript of the volume does not seem to survive; for, as with so many projects by Lovecraft and his friends, Doorways to Poetry was never published.
Before Lovecraft could undertake the southern tour he was planning for the spring of 1929, he had one small matter to take care of—his divorce from Sonia.
Around the end of 1928 Sonia must have begun pressing for a divorce. Interestingly enough, Lovecraft was opposed to the move: ‘during this period of time he tried every method he could devise to persuade me how much he appreciated me and that divorce would cause him great unhappiness; and that a gentleman does not divorce his wife unless he has a cause, and that he has no cause for doing so’.10 It is not, certainly, that Lovecraft was contemplating any return to cohabitation, either in New York or in Providence; it is simply that the fact of divorce disturbed him, upsetting his notions of what a gentleman ought to do. He was perfectly willing to carry on a marriage by correspondence, and actually put forth the case of someone he knew who was ill and lived apart from his wife, only writing letters. Sonia did not welcome such a plan: ‘My reply was that neither of us was really sick and that I did not wish to be a long-distance wife “enjoying” the company of a long-distance husband by letter-writing only.’
What subsequently happened is not entirely clear. According to Arthur S. Koki,11 who consulted various documents in Providence, on 24 January a subpoena was issued by the Providence Superior Court for Sonia to appear on 1 March. On 6 February Lovecraft, Annie Gamwell, and C. M. Eddy went to the office of a lawyer, Ralph M. Greenlaw, at 76 Westminster Street (the Turk’s Head Building), and presented testimony to the effect that Sonia had deserted Lovecraft. All this was, of course, a charade; but it was necessary because of the reactionary divorce laws prevailing in the State of New York, where until 1933 the only grounds for divorce were adultery or if one of the parties was sentenced to life imprisonment. The only other option in New York was to have a marriage annulled if it had been entered into ‘by reason of force, duress, or fraud’ (the last term being interpreted at a judge’s discretion) or if one party was declared legally insane for five years.12 Obviously these options did not exist for Lovecraft and Sonia; and so the fiction that she ‘deserted’ him was soberly perpetrated, surely with the knowledge of all parties in question.
The overriding question, however, is this: Was the divorce ever finalized? The answer is clearly no. The final decree was never signed. How Sonia could have allowed this to happen is anyone’s guess. One can only believe that Lovecraft’s refusal to sign was deliberate—he simply could not bear the thought of divorcing Sonia, not because he really wanted to be married to her, but because a ‘gentleman does not divorce his wife without cause’. This purely abstract consideration, based upon social values Lovecraft was already increasingly coming to reject, is highly puzzling. But the matter had at least one unfortunate sequel. It is certain that Sonia’s marriage in 1936 to Dr Nathaniel Davis of Los Angeles was legally bigamous—a fact that disturbed her considerably when she was told of it late in life. It was a fittingly botched ending to the whole affair.
Lovecraft’s spring travels commenced on 4 April. On that day Vrest Orton drove him up to a home in Yonkers which he was occupying with his wife, child, and grandmother. The place, built around 1830 and set in an idyllic rural area, charmed Lovecraft. He spent his time visiting the gang in New York, going to various literary gatherings arranged by Orton, and generally enjoying his freedom from responsibility and work.
On 1 May Lovecraft’s travels began in earnest. He went right down to Washington, stayed overnight at a cheap hotel (he got a room for $1.00), then caught the 6.45 a.m. bus the next morning to Richmond, Virginia. He stayed in Virginia for only four days but took in an astonishing number of sites—Richmond, Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Fredericksburg, and Falmouth. All were delightful. Richmond, although it had no one colonial section, nevertheless revealed substantial traces of antiquity to the diligent searcher; of course, it had suffered terrible damage during the Civil War, but was rapidly rebuilt shortly thereafter, and Lovecraft— sympathetic as he always was to the Confederate cause—found the frequent monuments to the Confederate heroes heartwarming. And, of course, he saw a number of sites relating to Poe, including the Poe Shrine (now the Edgar Allan Poe Museum), which had opened only recently. On 3 May Lovecraft saw Williamsburg (then only in the early stages of its restoration as a colonial village), Jamestown, and Yorktown all in a single day.
On 6 May Lovecraft was back in Washington, where he looked up both old and new friends (Edward Lloyd Sechrist and Elizabeth Toldridge) and explored several museums. Returning to New York on the 9th, Lovecraft found that the Longs were planning a fishing trip upstate, so that they could conveniently take him right to the doorstep of Bernard Austin Dwyer, who was at this time occupying a house at 177 Green Street in Kingston. They left the next morning, reaching Kingston in the early afternoon. For the next several evenings Lovecraft and Dwyer sat up discussing literature and philosophy till far into the night. On the 14th Lovecraft visited the neighbouring towns of Hurley and New Paltz, both of them full of Dutch colonial remains.
After a brief stay with Cook in Athol, Lovecraft returned home around the 18th. It had been a great trip, with ten states plus the District of Columbia traversed; and it had given Lovecraft his first fleeting taste of the South, although in later years he would see far more of it. As with his previous year’s travels, he wrote up his 1929 jaunt in a tremendous eighteen-thousand-word travelogue entitled ‘Travels in the Provinces of America’, which, however, was not published until 1995.