LOVECRAFT, H.P.

MYSTERIES OF TIME AND SPIRIT: THE LETTERS OF H.P. LOVECRAFT AND DONALD WANDREI [along with] LETTERS FROM NEW YORK. Edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Two Volumes. Hardcover Issues.

San Francisco & Portland: Night Shade Books, 2002 & 2005. First Editions (& 1st printings). Two volumes, orignal black cloth lettered in metallic blue and silver. 437 + 332 pp., Indexes. Comprises Volume One and Volume Two of the Night Shade Books 'Lovecraft Letters' series. Only these two volumes were published. A fine set in fine dust jackets. Item #314513

From the Introduction to MYSTERIES OF TIME AND SPACE:

We are fortunate to have the Lovecraft-Wandrei correspondence in as nearly complete a condition as it is. It appears that Wandrei preserved virtually every letter or postcard he received from Lovecraft. For Lovecraft’s part, he preserved nearly all Wandrei’s letters (aside from his first) for the first several years of their relationship, but as their letters became relatively infrequent in the 1930s, did not keep Wandrei’s missives consistently. (It is a bit harrowing to see that Wandrei’s final letter is dated two days after Lovecraft’s death on March 15, 1937—apparently the first letter Wandrei had written to Lovecraft in three months.) What is revealed in these letters—beyond the multitude of details about each author’s life and work, discussions of classic and contemporary weird fiction, accounts of travels and of meeting mutual colleagues, and the progress of each author’s literary work—is the parallel maturation of both Lovecraft and Wandrei over more than a decade of living and writing, and the close intellectual and imaginative bonds forged by common philosophical outlooks, common ties to their native regions, and, for a time, common literary aspirations. Although Wandrei visited Lovecraft twice in Providence—in 1927 and 1932—and met him briefly in New York on several occasions in the 1930s, their relationship was largely confined to paper; but despite its occasionally sporadic nature, it remained strong to the end. Lovecraft and Wandrei knew that they were members of a very small circle of cosmic visionaries, and that each required the encouragement of the other to maintain his unique perspective on literature and life.

From the Introduction to LETTERS FROM NEW YORK:

There are few more poignant statements in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction than the opening passage of “He” (1925):

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rose blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.
. . . Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.
This passage could stand as a virtual abstract of the present volume, whose letters provide masses of documentary evidence to support the despairing reflections of Lovecraft’s narrator. And yet, by a bitter irony, it seems that Lovecraft required the anguish of two years in the hated metropolis to make possible the final decade of his life—indeed, of his literary career. Some of the truest words uttered about Lovecraft come from his lifelong friend W. Paul Cook, who knew him both before and after his “New York exile” of 1924–1926: “He came back to Providence a human being—and what a human being! He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.”.

Price (CAD): $275.00