WI: Lovecraft Gets a Job

[asnys]

I've been reading L. Sprague de Camp's biography of H. P. Lovecraft, and I've reached his marriage to Sonia Greene and stay in New York City. During this time, he made enormous, but mostly fruitless, efforts to find more regular employment than his ghost-writing and short stories, but was badly hampered by the fact he was thirty-four years old and had never held a job or finished high school. Still, with a little more luck - or a better-written resume - he might well have been able to find some kind of employment. For example:

His friends tried to help. Loveman, who arrived in New York on another job hunt in August, thought he could get Lovecraft the editorship of catalogues at the Anderson Galleries, but somebody else got the job.

What if somebody sits Lovecraft down, forces him to write a better cover letter and resume - the surviving example of his letters is just embarrassing - and he gets the position?

I wonder if this might save not just his relationship with Sonia - which fell apart in no small measure due to financial difficulties - but also his attitude towards New York, if he didn't feel himself such a failure. Though the city later came to symbolize everything wrong with society to him, his initial attitudes were much more ambivalent. I doubt he'd ever like the multi-ethnic nature of the place, but succeeding at something in the modern world might lift him a little bit out of his depression and misanthropy, even if he remained philosophically futilitarian.

 

[MerryPrankster]

I remember hearing somewhere of an AH scenario in which Lovecraft gets Sonia pregnant and that saves their marriage--the idea was that Lovecraft was too much a gentleman to leave her in the lurch, so he'd try harder to get a job. He ends up getting a job in advertising.

I can't remember where I'd heard it. Lovecraft's different situation might be a "butterfly" of a greater POD in a published AH work.

 

[asnys]

I remember hearing somewhere of an AH scenario in which Lovecraft gets Sonia pregnant and that saves their marriage--the idea was that Lovecraft was too much a gentleman to leave her in the lurch, so he'd try harder to get a job. He ends up getting a job in advertising.

At least judging by de Camp - and it's been long enough since I read Joshi's book that I don't remember if he disagreed - I don't think lack of effort was Lovecraft's problem. He just had no idea how to find a job, and was too proud to admit it. But I can see a pregnancy disrupting the situation enough to get him to get real help with that.

 

[John Dusk]

he was thirty-four years old and had never held a job or finished high school.

Did he make his living solely from writing up until that point?

 

[asnys]

Did he make his living solely from writing up until that point?

He came from a well-to-do family - his writing never made much money. Unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the family fortune when he was a teenager, when his grandfather died shortly after losing a lot of money in a failed dam project in Ohio. The death of his grandfather left HPL as the sole male of the household - his father had died in a madhouse already, probably of syphilis - and the Phillipses were too "old American" conservative for the women to go to work. They still had enough money that they were able to eek things out for a long time, but without a breadwinner their finances got slowly worse and worse, and by the time he married Sonia HPL was essentially impoverished.

It's positively Gothic, isn't it? His mother ended up dying in a madhouse too. No wonder he became a horror writer.

 

[Miss Teri]

What exactly does "the editorship of catalogues at the Anderson Galleries" entail as a job?

 

[asnys]

What exactly does "the editorship of catalogues at the Anderson Galleries" entail as a job?

The book doesn't say, but I believe the Anderson Galleries were an art gallery. That's not the only possible position, though - he apparently also came close to getting an assistant editorship at The Haberdasher, which was a trade magazine, and a few other posts.

 

[Miss Teri]

The book doesn't say, but I believe the Anderson Galleries were an art gallery. That's not the only possible position, though - he apparently also came close to getting an assistant editorship at The Haberdasher, which was a trade magazine, and a few other posts.

I remember a scenario (it might have been an entry of Uchronia"), where he becomes editor of Weird Tales.

 

[asnys]

I remember a scenario (it might have been an entry of Uchronia"), where he becomes editor of Weird Tales.

He may have been offered the job - the historical record isn't entirely clear - but it would have entailed moving to Chicago, which he wasn't willing to do, and I kind of think he would have been terrible at that position.

 

[Miss Teri]

He may have been offered the job - the historical record isn't entirely clear - but it would have entailed moving to Chicago, which he wasn't willing to do, and I kind of think he would have been terrible at that position.

I suppose the former would be a major hurddle.

Though, maybe he'd make an okay editor. He made some decent collaborations.

 

[asnys]

I suppose the former would be a major hurddle.

Though, maybe he'd make an okay editor. He made some decent collaborations.

I don't think he could handle the business side of things. Something like an art gallery magazine or a trade journal, he wouldn't care much about that and would probably be more willing to do stuff for the sake of commerce, especially if he's only an assistant editor and not handling business stuff. But Weird Tales... I can just see him running entire issues of Poe reprints because nothing that was submitted that month met his standards, or refusing to dun advertisers who don't pay their bills because it would be ungentlemanly. The guy was perpetually taken advantage of by his ghost-writing and revision clients because he felt it uncouth to, e.g., demand to be paid what he was owed.

 

[Webster1893]

If he did get a job, his personal-life my have suffered; during work he would think a lot about his story-ideas and when he arrives home, would write about this, neglecting his wife? Perhaps his work would be more defined as not having to the time to instantly write them down, but wait after work.

 

[Kerguelen]

He avoids the nervous breakdown that he suffered in OTL. As a result, he becomes an accomplished astronomer who becomes obsessed with new discoveries. He then gains a degree in astrophysics and mets Albert Einstein along the way. He becomes Eintein's protege and continues his work on black holes. During the 1940's, he publishes a paper theorizing how radiation could escape from black holes. Later, his theory is discovered to be true giving it the name Lovecraft Radiation.