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Anonymous Mon Dec 11 22:51:41 2023 No.22818333 [Reply] [Original]

>"How are we to judge Lovecraft’s two-year venture into matrimony? There is, certainly, enough blame to spread to all parties: to the aunts for being cool to the entire matter and for failing to provide either financial or emotional support to the struggling couple; to Sonia for feeling that she could mould Lovecraft to suit her wishes; and, of course, to Lovecraft himself for being generally thoughtless, spineless, emotionally remote, and financially incompetent."

>"It seems hardly profitable at this juncture to blame Lovecraft for his many failings as a husband—nothing can be accomplished now by such a schoolmasterly attitude—but much in his behaviour is inexcusable. The most inexcusable, of course, is the decision to marry at all, a decision he made with very little awareness of the difficulties involved (beyond any of the financial concerns that emerged unexpectedly at a later date) and without any sense of how unsuited he was to be a husband. Here was a man with an unusually low sex drive, with a deep-seated love of his native region, with severe prejudice against racial minorities, suddenly deciding to marry a woman who, although several years older than he, clearly wished both a physical as well as intellectual union, and deciding also to uproot himself from his place of birth to move into a bustling, cosmopolitan, racially heterogeneous megalopolis without a job and, it appears, entirely content to be supported by his wife until such time as he got one."

>"Once actually married, Lovecraft displayed singularly little consideration for his wife. He found it much more entertaining to spend most of his evenings, and even nights, with the boys, and quickly ceased bothering to get home early so that he could go to sleep together with Sonia. He did make a concerted effort to find work in 1924, however bunglingly he set about it, but virtually gave up the attempt in 1925–26. Once he came to the realisation that married life did not suit him, he seems to have become entirely content—when Sonia was forced to move to the Midwest in 1925—to conduct a marriage at long distance by correspondence."

Do you think a man like H.P. Lovecraft could ever have been happily married?

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