In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H. P. Lovecraft by Poole W. Scott

Author:Poole, W. Scott [Poole, W. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781619028562
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2016-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Lovecraft believed, or claimed to believe, that Sonia would come to live in Providence, joining his aunts in caring for him. She did, in fact, make a suggestion, once, along these lines. It was never to be.

Number 10 Barnes Street on College Hill became Lovecraft’s new home, his Aunt Lillian taking the second floor. He sent a note to Long, meant for all the Kalems to read, praising his new neighborhood, “all old Yankee homes with a good percentage colonial.” He wrote to James Morton in May of his pleasure in escaping “the nightmare of Brooklyn’s mongrel slums” and still referred to Sonia jokingly as “the missus.” A steady flow of letters continued between him and his wife, a marriage by correspondence that perfectly suited Lovecraft but that Sonia found intolerable, at least after a three-year wait.

Wilfred B. Talman, a Brooklyn journalist who joined in with the Kalem (although missing the requisite KLM at the beginning of his surname), remembered that “When Lovecraft returned to Providence the gatherings sloped off promptly summoned now and again by Balknap [sic] Long into hasty conclave when HPL touched New York on one of his historical jaunts or to visit the Longs.” Talman never mentions that these trips included visits with Sonia.39

Lovecraft and his friends from the Brooklyn years seemed to collaborate in an effort to erase her existence. August Derleth first wrote to Lovecraft—the man whose literary legacy he would devote his life’s work to preserve, defend, and profit from—at his Brooklyn address. Lovecraft wrote back simply that the Brooklyn address “was temporary & is obsolete. I am 100 percent Rhode Islander by birth & upbringing.” In a letter to Derleth in May 1928, he writes of being on “the alien soil” of New York—a place, he added, that “[I] hate like a poison.” He notes visits to Long and that he’ll be “damned glad to get back to colonial Providence.” He goes so far as to report that he’s staying in Brooklyn but not that he has an estranged wife he’s visiting. Derleth did not learn of Sonia Greene’s existence until 1931.40

Sonia, for her part, at first had an idea that would allow him his beloved Providence and keep his marriage to her at the same time. Specifically, Sonia suggested to Lovecraft and his aunts that she, using her own money, “take a large house, hire a maid, pay the expenses and we all live together; our family to use one side of the house; I to use the other for a business venture. . . .” This generous proposal, one that actually greatly benefitted Lovecraft’s aging aunts Lillian and Annie, caused them to react with horror. The wife of a man from the Phillips line could not be a “businesswoman” or some such modern nonsense in Providence. Such things might go on, against their wishes, in a place like New York. But they’d not have it in their own town.

In Sonia’s description of this incident, the only description we have, Lovecraft himself offered no opinion.

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