“Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” (2017) by Lucy Sussex

Dear How,

I meant to write Howard, but got interrupted, as happens. When I came back ‘How’ looked just fine on the page. it summed us up. Like: How did we ever get married? Blame the words, what we said and wrote to each other, the only thing we had in common. How did we ever think we would work it out? Those words again, mixed with pure blind optimism. How did we part? Without pain, as it should be.

I meant to write you before my news, but time just runs away sometimes. You did file the divorce papers? [crossed through]. I am now Mrs Doctor Nathaniel Davis.

Lucy Sussex, “Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” in Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol. 1 (2017), 51

She was born Sonia Haft Shafirkin to a Jewish couple in 1883 in the Russian Empire, modern-day Ukraine. At the age of 7, she immigrated to the United States of America. At age 16, she married another immigrant, Samuel Seckendorff, who changed his last name to Greene. By 1920 she was divorced, her first husband dead; she had given birth to a daughter and a son, the latter who died in infancy. Skill and hard work brought her success in her business, and amateur journalism had become a hobby and a way to improve her mind. In 1921, Sonia H. Greene met H. P. Lovecraft at an amateur journalist convention in Boston. Contact sparked correspondence, further meetings, collaboration on stories and amateur journals, and then, in 1924, she married again.

The Lovecrafts’ marriage did not last long, and only Sonia gives a full account of their relationship. They separated, and finally filed for divorce…though Howard did not sign the papers in the end, either out of ignorance or some other unguessed reason, so that when Sonia married for a third time, to Dr. Nathaniel Davis in 1936, she thought she was free to do so.

Sonia’s marriage to H. P. Lovecraft has become part of his myth. It was during a brief but incredibly formative and important part of his life, and he spoke so little of her afterward that knowledge of his marriage was scanty among many of his correspondents. Details about their married life, and the mysterious Mrs. Lovecraft, did not begin to emerge into the public consciousness until many years after his death, when journalist Winfield Townley Scott finally made contact with her after publishing a lengthy biographical piece on Lovecraft.

The life story of Sonia H. Davis neither began nor ended with H. P. Lovecraft; and her full life story is given in her own words in her forthcoming autobiography Two Hearts That Beat As One, edited by Monica Wasserman. Yet the relative lack of information on her, the focus on her marriage with Lovecraft, and the way biographers like L. Sprague de Camp have presented Sonia in their works on Lovecraft have strongly skewed the image of who Sonia was as a person.

In Arcade #3 (Fall 1975) for example, George Kuchar’s biographical comic on Sonia drew heavily on L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (19750. Sonia’s portrayal shows her as sexually aggressive compared to the timid Lovecraft, obsessed with money, a brief whirlwind romance in the life a neurotic and impractical horror-writer. While Kuchar is conscientious to reproduce some of Lovecraft’s words and feelings, with Sonia he takes more liberties, putting words and ideas into her mouth she never uttered.

Very few writers think to present matters from Sonia’s point of view.

In this tradition, “Wife of Mr. Lovecraft” by Lucy Essex is a bit different than most. The short story takes the form of a series of postcards Sonia sent to her ex-husband while on a cruise (no dates are given, but we can assume this was meant to be a honeymoon trip to the South Pacific that never happened in real life). Told from Sonia’s perspective, it shows more than a modicum of research, even with the occasional touch of invention and the odd omission or two. The story is more wistful than weird, although it flirts with weirdness.

It had tentacles, or stubs of limbs, and one staring gold eye, with a slot of a pupil, like a goat’s. […] There was something weirdly cute about it, like you get with kittens or pups. When I thought that, I remembered our baby, that story we wrote together, about horror on Martin’s Beach. I said: “Throw it back, it’s a juvenile.”

Lucy Sussex, “Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” in Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol. 1 (2017), 53

Many writers and artists have portrayed Sonia in one form or another. Nearly every biographical comic of Lovecraft includes her at some point, and some biographical stories written after her memoir of their marriage came out, like Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard Lupoff, include her as a character. Yet rarely is Sonia fleshed out. Relateable. There’s something refreshing about the portrayal of Sonia as someone…human.

Not a stereotype of a Jewish emigre or domineering wife, nor a fantastic succubus out to drain Lovecraft dry. Not someone defined by Lovecraft at all. Sonia had her own life, before and after Lovecraft, and she lived that life. The tide of their lives drew them together, and eventually bore them apart. Sussex seeks a kind of closure here which we mere readers never really got. After Sonia returned from Europe, the references in Lovecraft’s letters just peter out…and Sonia’s own account of events after that has long been unpublished. The publication of Sonia’s autobiography will, hopefully, go a long way to rectify that oversight.

“Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” by Lucy Sussex was published in Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol. 1 (2017). It has not yet been reprinted.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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