The biggest milestone for a writer is getting a book published. The statement may seem redundant but it is something that not everyone achieves. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a good example of this. His career as a horror and science fiction author is summed up in a constant accumulation of frustrations and projects that did not come to fruition while he was alive but turned out to be most prolific after his death. Despite the fact that this literary bad luck demotivated him on many occasions, it did not deter him from writing.
Every day he wrote letters. Many. He came to accumulate about 75,000. A surprising figure and at the same time frightening publishers and followers who have ever tried to combine them. Not so Javier Calvo (Barcelona, ??1973), who has spent years on the trail of the writer and more than a decade trying to make this project a reality. His efforts have not been in vain. On February 22, H.P. Lovecraft. Letters I. Writing against men (Aristas Martínez), the first volume of three that compiles letters, many of them unpublished, from the author
To date, letters from the Providence writer had never been published in Spanish before. “Something that is most strange since they make up 99% of his work,” Calvo acknowledges to La Vanguardia, who anticipates that this book has some missives that had not even seen the light of day in English. This undoubtedly turned out to be an incentive for the publisher, says Sara Herculano. “It was something that was needed now and we are especially excited to be the house that hosts this crazy and ambitious project.” The material is so extensive that the publisher proposes a third book dedicated to the writer’s dreams, since many of his epistles address this topic. Antonio Torrubia, bookseller at Gigamesh, the Barcelona bookstore specializing in fantastic and horror literature, applauds these novelties. “I think they come at an ideal time, since more and more television series that drink from Lovecraft.”
The interesting thing about the project, beyond its novelty, is “the opportunity to get to know an author about whom there are many preconceived ideas. It doesn’t take more than ten minutes of searching the Internet to conclude that Lovecraft was a dandy and rather racist freak who occasionally wrote very cool monster stories in some magazines. And all this is true, but reading his letters sheds a lot of light on his person and also on his career. This first book intends precisely that, to know the story of his own literary career told by him. How he reacts to the world of literature and his own emotional and vital trajectory, ”says Calvo.
There are several reasons that led the American to write so many letters. One of them, the lack of conventional work. From time to time he corrected other people’s texts and even came to act as a literary black, although never for well-known authors. But “not having a conventional job made him have a lot of free time, which he dedicated in large part to writing letters, one of his greatest passions. Some to answer fans who contacted him after reading some of his stories in magazines. Others, to maintain debates with authors about the literature of the moment. Very few for friends, since he barely had contact with the outside world, ”explains Calvo.
He also had no family, as his first and only marriage was unsuccessful. The paradox of all this is that, despite being a very unsociable person, today we know Lovecraft thanks to these few friends and followers, who carefully kept writings that they exchanged and, when the author died, ended up setting up a small publishing house in Wisconsin. , Arkham House, to publish their texts.
However, it was not until thirty years after his death that his recognition came. “In the 1960s a new generation of readers began to connect with his writing. They found it interesting, different from what they had read up to then. At that time, and at the beginning of the 70s, some of her works began to be reissued and pocket editions were printed at a very affordable price for the public. That allows more readers to reach it and it starts to catch on. The final explosion came when both cinema and music set their sights on it”, says Calvo”.
Now, both the followers of the writer and the new readers will be able to finish forming a more complete vision of this genius of literature.
