Sonia Greene and H.P. Lovecraft

I have always been curious about Sonia Greene, the woman who married H.P. Lovecraft. She supported Lovecraft financially for several years, and famously described him as "an adequately excellent lover" who never told her that he loved her. A few years earlier, she had dated Alistair Crowley so she must have had a taste for morose men obsessed with the supernatural. Even more surprising for the Lovecraft fan is that Greene was a Jewish immigrant, a category of person whom Lovecraft often blamed for the downfall of his beloved "chalk-white" civilization. According to Lovecraft's obsessive biographer S.T. Joshi, Greene was herself a writer (she co-authored a story with Lovecraft called "The Invisible Monster" and was president of the Amateur Press Association for a while). She had a daughter, Florence Carol, who became a successful journalist after having a falling-out with Greene -- the two women never spoke again after H.P. Lovecraft came to New York to live with his new bride.

Unlike many women of her era, Greene was independently middle-class. She worked as a milliner -- a hat-designer -- at a posh department store and frequently traveled for her job. Her salary allowed her to rent a nice house for herself and her daughter in the then-fancy area of Brooklyn known as Flatbush. It also allowed her to donate money to several amateur press publications, as well as to travel to amateur press conventions (basically proto-science fiction conventions). She met Lovecraft at one such convention, and got to know him better by traveling up to his beloved Providence to see him. She also helped him visit her in New York by paying his way.

The couple had married in 1924, after a strange two-year courtship in which Lovecraft confessed to Greene that she was the only woman who had ever kissed him in his adult life. Apparently his mother and aunts, with whom he was very close, didn't believe in displays of affection. When Greene and their other amateur press pals walked around New York with Lovecraft, he constantly became enraged by the immigrants he saw (see "The Horror at Red Hook" for a taste of Lovecraftian racism). Sometimes, he would insist that they walk down the center of a street so that he wouldn't have to share a sidewalk with "mongerels." Greene told a biographer later that she kept reminding Lovecraft about her own background, but it didn't seem to dissuade him from his fear of Jews and other immigrants.

What the hell did Greene see in this guy? We'll never truly know because she burned all his letters after divorcing him and moving away from New York in 1926. We do know that she fell in love with him because she enjoyed his mind, and their daily correspondence via post. Some of his letters to her, she said later, were as many as twenty pages long. It sounds a lot like a steampunk version of an online romance. The first few months after they married, they were apparently happy. They spent a lot of time talking philosophy and hanging out with their amateur press geek friends. But then Greene decided to open her own millinery business and it failed. This meant she had to take a job that required a lot of traveling, much like her last job. Also, I suspect, Lovecraft's incessant whininess, anti-Semitism, and general uselessness started driving her nuts.

In the last year or so of their marriage, Greene lived on the road, traveling for her job. She sent Lovecraft a weekly allowance that helped him pay for a tiny flat in the then-working class Brooklyn Heights. Greene slept there one or two days out of the month. During this time, Lovecraft claimed in letters that he was so poor that he lived for three days on one loaf of bread, one can of cold beans, and a hunk of cheese. But he never managed to get a job. He was essentially a house husband who occasionally sold a short story to Weird Tales.

Little is known about Greene's life after she left Lovecraft. Apparently this fascinating woman, a pioneer in both business and the writing world, was deemed so unimportant that the Wikipedians deleted her entry on Wikipedia -- now "Sonia Greene" redirects to "H.P. Lovecraft." Talk about a slap in the face. As if she hadn't taken enough crap from Lovecraft in life, now she's doomed to spend eternity as a footnote in the life of a man who took her money and disparaged her heritage. It almost sounds like a Lovecraft story. Except it's real.

This article appeared in the Table of Malcontents, by John Brownlee, with Eliza Gauger, Lisa Katayama, and Annalee Newitz. For more information about Sonia Greene, read S.T. Joshi's Lovecraft: A Life.