ULTRAMARINE WAS WRITTEN FOLLOWING a sea voyage Malcolm Lowry made at eighteen, as a deck hand, cabin boy and ultimately a fireman’s helper on a tramp steamer. The voyage provided him with the background for the novel, but its real theme is the necessity of the boy, Dana Hilliot, to prove himself as a man among other men.
Malcolm was graduated from The Leys, a public school in Cambridge, England, in 1927 and had been entered for Christ’s College, Cambridge. But the sea was in his blood; he had read O’Neill and Joseph Conrad, and his home in Caldy, Cheshire, was near the great seaport of Liverpool. He finally persuaded his father to allow him to go to sea for a year before going to the University. His father, in what proved to be nearly a disastrous excess of good will, not only procured him the job on a freighter out of Liverpool, bound for the Far East, but even had him driven to the dock in the family limousine. This obviously did nothing to help Malcolm’s standing among the crew, to whom he was already a green Outsider.
When he returned from this voyage, which had taken him through the Suez Canal to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Singapore and Vladivostock, he went up to St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1929. He had kept notes during the voyage (as he always did: I have his notes made on our walking tour of the Lake District in 1957, just prior to his death); from these notes he wrote first two short stories which were printed in the Cambridge magazine Experiment, edited by Gerald Noxon. This was Malcolm’s first published work. One of the stories, “Seductio Ad Absurdum,” was chosen by E. J. O’Brien for the Best British Short Stories of 1931, and the second was given honorable mention for 1933. These stories were later incorporated in part into Ultramarine.
While he was working on the novel, he read Blue Voyage, by Conrad Aiken, and The Ship Sails On, by Nordahl Grieg. Both of these made a deep impression on him and their influence can be seen plainly in Ultramarine. Malcolm was very young; but while there are certainly traces of imitativeness in the novel, it is also highly original and, for its time, experimental. Malcolm had sought out Aiken in Boston, in 1929, working his way over on a freighter; they returned to England and, at Malcolm’s request, Aiken took him for a time as a pupil. They became fast friends and after Malcolm went up to Cambridge, he spent nearly all of his vacations with Aiken at Jeake’s House, Rye, Sussex. In the long vacation of 1930, however, he made another sea voyage, working his way as a coal trimmer on a Norwegian freighter to Norway, to meet Nordahl Grieg, with whom he also established a friendship that lasted until Grieg’s death.
Ultramarine was finished, I believe, during Malcolm’s last term at Cambridge, and was accepted by a London publisher. Then followed the first of a long series of calamities which pursued his work relentlessly. (In Ballast to the White Sea, a novel, was completely destroyed when our house burned down in 1944; the manuscript of Under the Volcano was lost, and recovered.) One of the directors of the publishing firm had his briefcase stolen from his car: he was apparently away only a few moments, but when he returned, the briefcase was gone and with it the only typescript of Ultramarine.
There seem to be conflicting versions of what followed, and I can only report what has been said. Malcolm had written much of Ultramarine at Aiken’s home, but he had completed the final draft at the home of a friend, Martin Case. Malcolm later told me he had thought the novel completely lost, since he had destroyed or thrown away all previous drafts and had not kept a copy of the final version, or even his notes taken on the voyage. But Martin Case, he said, had retrieved the cast-aside material and now came forward with it. When I met Case in London many years later, almost his first words to me were, “Did you know I was the man who saved Ultramarine from my waste-basket?” Conrad Aiken, however, says that he had a version of the novel in his house in Rye, and that Malcolm knew it. But who can sort out what actually happened, after thirty years?
In any case, the novel was rewritten and first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1933. To the best of my knowledge it has been out of print since 1934 or 1935, and is now published for the first time in America. Readers of Under the Volcano and Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place will find in Ultramarine many of the themes which were developed and deepened in the later books. The most important thing about this book, to me, is not its partially autobiographical content, but the fact that at this early period Malcolm was already so completely the self-conscious artist, in control of his material and his style.
This new edition of Ultramarine reproduces the changes Malcolm had made, over the years since 1933, in his own copy of the original edition. During the years we spent together he was always working on two or three projects simultaneously, and there was, too, a spasmodic running commentary on Ultramarine. I would come upon him with the battered copy in his hands staring at it angrily and making notes on the pages, or sometimes just holding it and gazing out of the window; he would turn to me and say, “You know I must rewrite this someday.” I cannot remember exactly when he decided it was to be, in its rewritten form, the first volume in a group of six or seven novels, to be called collectively The Voyage That Never Ends. But it was at this time that he changed the name of the ship from Nawab to Oedipus Tyrannus, to conform with Hugh’s ship in Under the Volcano. He had also intended changing the viewpoint in Chapter III from first person to third person, and had projected a much more extensive revision than that contained in the marginal notations I later transcribed.
One of his additions, the recurrent joke about Pat Murphy’s goat, came about in this way: while we were living on the beach at Dollarton, British Columbia, we had as a neighbor and very dear friend an old man from the Isle of Man, Jimmy, a boat-builder. One stormy late afternoon in autumn, when Malcolm had stopped work and was having his tea, Jimmy dropped in. I have no recollection of what brought this to his mind, but at some point he began to chuckle and in his lilting Celtic voice came forth with this expression. Malcolm was simply delighted by it, he had the old man repeat it and he wrote it down. Then he jumped up from the table, took Ultramarine from the bookcase, and immediately made notations as to where he would use it, laughing all the while.
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Margerie Lowry Los Angeles, California June 1962 |