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next day at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Manhattan. They left for a honeymoon in Philadelphia on March 4, but they spent much of the time retyping “Under the Pyramids,” a story ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, the typescript of which HPL had left in the Providence train station. They settled in Sonia’s apartment in Flatbush. (Her daughter Florence moved out around this time; evidence suggests that Florence did not approve of Sonia’s marriage to HPL.) Shortly thereafter Sonia either lost her position at Ferle Heller’s or resigned in order to begin her own independent hat shop; this venture was a failure, and by July HPL himself had to consider finding employment; his efforts were notably unsuccessful. From May 1924 to July 1925 Sonia was President of the UAPA and HPL Official Editor; they managed to publish a few issues of the United Amateur,largely containing contributions by themselves and their colleagues.
In October 1924 Sonia was stricken with a gastric attack and had to spend several days in a hospital. By the end of December she managed to secure employment at Mabley & Carew’s, a department store in Cincinnati; she left on December 31. Sonia’s health continued to be poor. She twice spent time in a private hospital in Cincinnati, and by late February 1925 had lost her position and returned to Brooklyn. She spent most of the period from late March to early June in the home of a woman physician in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. After staying in Brooklyn for most of June and July, she secured a job at Halle’s, the leading department store in Cleveland, and worked there for just under a year. The result was that, during the period 1925–26 (when HPL moved into a single-room apartment at 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn), she was with HPL for a total of only three months, mostly for a few days at a time at widely scattered intervals.
By the spring of 1926 Sonia acquiesced in the wishes of HPL’s aunts that HPL return to Providence. She came with him to assist him in the relocation on April 17, spending about a week with him before returning to Brooklyn (she had by this time left Halle’s). At some point, either at this time or some months later, Sonia proposed opening a hat shop in Providence; but HPL’s aunts refused the offer, feeling it shameful for their nephew to have a wife working as a tradeswoman in their native city, where they were still part of the informal social aristocracy. For the next two years their relationship was conducted almost solely by correspondence, although HPL did return to New York on September 13–19, 1926, presumably because Sonia (who now had a position in Chicago) was on a purchasing trip to New York and asked HPL to come. In the spring of 1928 Sonia asked HPL to come to Brooklyn again, as she was setting up another hat shop. HPL stayed at her apartment (395 East 16th Street) from April 24 to June 7 while helping her set up the shop.
By the end of 1928 Sonia must have begun to press for divorce, since she was no longer satisfied with a marriage by correspondence. HPL repeatedly refused to grant the divorce, claiming that a “gentleman did not divorce his wife without cause,” but he finally relented. Because of the restrictive divorce laws in New York State, the divorce was initiated in Rhode Island, under the charade that Sonia had deserted HPL. The final decree must have been issued in March or April 1929, but HPL did not sign it; therefore, he was never technically divorced from Sonia, and Sonia’s subsequent marriage was legally bigamous.
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The last time Sonia saw HPL was in mid-March 1933, when she had come to Hartford, Conn., for a visit and asked HPL to join her. (In correspondence HPL mentions the trip but not that he was meeting Sonia.) Later that year Sonia left for California; prior to her departure she destroyed HPL’s letters to her (only a few postcards survive). In 1936 she married Dr. Nathaniel Davis. She did not hear of HPL’s death until 1945. Three years later her memoir “Howard Phillips Lovecraft as His Wife Remembers Him” appeared in the Providence Sunday Journal(August 22, 1948), heavily edited by Winfield Townley Scott, the Journal’sliterary editor. Further edited by August Derleth, it appeared in Catsas “Lovecraft as I Knew Him” (rpt. LR). The original version, which survives at JHL, was published uncut bearing her original title: The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1985, 1992). Additional recollections were published as “Memories of Lovecraft: I” ( Arkham Collector, Winter 1969; rpt. LR). Some letters by her to August Derleth in the 1940s were published in Gerry de la Ree’s article, “When Sonia Sizzled” (in Wilfred B.Talman, et al., The Normal Lovecraft[Gerry de la Ree, 1973]).
See R.Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” Nyctalops2, No. 1 (April 1973): 45. Davis, Walker and Audrey.
In “The Curse of Yig,” they are settlers in the Oklahoma Territory in 1889. Walker, who has a tremendous fear of snakes, is inadvertantly killed by Audrey when she mistakes him for Yig, the legendary snake god. She herself gives birth to three half-human, half-snake offspring, of which only one survives.
“Deaf, Dumb, and Blind.”
Short story (4,720 words); written in collaboration with C.M.Eddy, c. February 1924. First published in WT(April 1925); first collected in DB;corrected text in HM.
A deaf, dumb, and blind man, Richard Blake, “the author-poet from Boston,” rents a lonely cottage— the Tanner place, on the outskirts of Fenton—because he thinks its “weird traditions and shuddering hints” might be an imaginative stimulus. The hermit Simeon Tanner had been found dead in the house in 1819, and something about the expression on his face led the townspeople to burn the body and the books and papers in the house. Blake moves into the place with his manservant, Dobbs. But after some anomalous incident Dobbs flees, babbling incoherently. Blake is left to himself, and he records his impressions in a diary he is preparing on his typewriter. This diary shows that Blake had become aware of some nameless presence in the house, and presently he somehow hearsbizarre sounds, then a blast of cold air, and finally icy fingers “that draw me down into a cesspool of eternal iniquity.” Blake is found dead, and Dr. Arlo Morehouse, who comes to investigate, becomes certain that the final bit of writing found in the machine was not typed by Blake. In a letter to August Derleth (in DB), Eddy reports: “[HPL] was unhappy with my handling of the note found in the typewriter at the very end of the protagonist’s account of his eerie experiences, the final paragraph that seemed to have been typed by one of his persecutors. After several conferences over it, and an equal number of attempts on my part to do it justice, he finally agreed to re
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write the last paragraph.” This seems to suggest—although perhaps not by design—that HPL revised only the last paragraph; in truth, the entire tale was probably revised, although Eddy presumably wrote the first draft.
The tale’s conclusion bears some analogy with “The Statement of Randolph Carter”: in that story, the monstrous entity makes its presence known by speech (through a telephone); here, the entity reveals itself by writing. There is also a foreshadowing of “The Dunwich Horror,” in that Simeon Tanner is said to have “bricked up the windows of the southeast room, whose east wall gave on the swamp,” suggesting that he had kept some creature imprisoned within the room, just as Old Man Whateley attempted to contain Wilbur Whateley’s twin.