The City at Three PM

THE OTHER LIFE OF ANY BOOK:
THREE COPIES OF
MALCOLM LOWRY’S
UNDER THE VOLCANO

I am wondering if books themselves have a life of their own or, more so, if every individual copy of a book sometimes does have an existence, and possibly a purpose, somehow very separate from the text. I’m not sure how new this idea is, but I suspect it has taken me to an understanding that could be new, or at least worth repeating.

Once in Mexico City I came upon a rather odd copy of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in one of the used bookshops along Calle Donceles.

Calle Donceles is not far from the fine cathedral and regally resplendent maroon-stone administration buildings from the Spanish colonial regime on the huge public square of the Zócalo, blue mountains all around, and it’s in what I like to think of as the “literary” pocket of this the old quarter of the sprawling, modern city. Literary not because of any major publishing houses that I know of being located nearby, but because there are maybe a dozen of those bookshops clustered on narrow Donceles, one after another and with open fronts and shelves so high that wobbly wooden ladders are often needed to access the top tiers. The names of the shops offer wonderful titles on their own, like El Inframundo (The Underworld), El Laberinto (The Labyrinth), Los Hermanos de la Hoja (punningly, Brothers of the Page), and my favorite, overtly invoking the metaphysical, El Callejón de los Milagros (The Alley of Miracles). I love that street.

It was a sunny June afternoon, my last of this particular trip, and I had been thinking a lot about Lowry, author of that one masterpiece in his short life, Under the Volcano. The novel is among the great performances of late modernism indeed, a philosophically probing, full-language symphony telling of the final day in the life of an alcoholic British consul, Geoffrey Firmin, who is called simply “the Consul”; he’s exiled to a meaningless diplomatic post in Cuernavaca, the beautiful mountain resort town south of the capital and once the summer retreat of ill-fated Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota. In fact, being close to obsessed with Lowry’s writing for nearly my whole adult life (more on this obsession later), I had once walked through just about every scene of the novel in Cuernavaca. And this time while in Mexico City I thought I might stay at the Hotel Canadá, seeing as that was where Lowry himself usually put up whenever in the city from Cuernavaca with his first wife. Lowry lived a life of alcoholic dissolution in Mexico during 1936-38, and no need to document how the novel itself is intensely autobiographical, a critical given.

For some reason that afternoon, I was sort of making it a point to see how much Lowry the local used bookstores had. I was heartened to notice that in one shop’s Novelas section, an entire long wall, there were yellow bands with bold black lettering for the major authors on those shelves, and right between one for LONDON and another for MANN, a label surely announced: LOWRY. Not that it or any of the other shops really had much by or about him, perhaps a single translated Under the Volcano issued by a Mexican publisher, or a worn copy or two of the translated Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid; that’s the posthumously released novelized account he wrote about going back to Mexico for several months in 1945-46 with his second wife to show her the actual scenes of episodes in the then unpublished Under the Volcano. The trip ended disastrously, by the way, with more booze-fueled calamities for Lowry and even an attempt at suicide, before he was officially deported by the Mexican authorities; yet it also ended somewhat miraculously, with Lowry getting word while staying in Cuernavaca that Under the Volcano—which had been through laborious revisions and several complete drafts in the last decade and had been submitted to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, turned down by a long list of houses—was finally accepted by good publishers in both New York and London, the two letters of acceptance both arriving in Cuernavaca on the same day. As I said, at least there was some Lowry in those shops, understandable when you consider that Mexicans would respect an author whose most important book is set in their country.

However, when I got to one place, almost the last at the end of the street, there was something very different. High up on a shelf, but within reach, was a copy in Spanish of Bajo el Volcán quite unlike the dog-eared copies of a standard Mexican paper edition with its simple beige cover that I had seen elsewhere; this one was hardbound in maroon pebble-grain, like leatherette, with gold stampings on the spine and front for the title and author. Standing there in the shop open to the street, I pulled it down and—the din of taxi horns blowing and the rich, all-pervasive aroma of traffic exhaust, half pleasant, that is Mexico City stronger than ever at the end of such a hot and windless day—I saw that it was a special reissuing apparently for a matched series of books released in 1979 by the Mexico City publishing house Promexa:

Yes, the Great Works of the Twentieth Century. And a page up front gave the rest of the good company the book kept in the series, the few dozen titles chosen seemingly free of any regional bias, listing just the top Latin Americans, such as Borges and Neruda, and showing a certain critical integrity overall, with not only a shoo-in like Kafka included, but also—attesting to a knowledge of the truly artistically significant—Henry Miller, represented by, naturally, Tropic of Cancer. Leafing through this Lowry edition, I read some of the introduction in Spanish, its talk of Lowry’s passion for Mexico, yet certainly no extensive mention of the Mexican government’s opinion of him. He was all but forced to leave in 1938 after repeated run-ins with the police concerning his public drunkenness, though he later claimed, boastfully, he had been falsely accused of being a foreign spy, as happens to the Consul of his novel; then the formal deportation in 1946 on his only return visit, when the police confronted him with trumped-up unpaid visa fines from 1938. I guess I also stared at the full-page black-and-white photo inside the cover, which seemed to be the shot from the original 1947 American edition. It showed a still relatively young Lowry with a neat mustache and wearing a herringbone-tweed suit coat and a sporty plaid tie, looking decidedly handsome in the shimmering backlighting; below it were biographical facts on his Cambridge University education and the like, but scant indication there either of the practically continual torment of his tumultuous life. It seemed odd to think that right in this quarter, the old colonial sector of Mexico City, transpired some of his worst alcoholic mess-ups while he was first trying to write a draft of this very book I was holding, which had been destined to be rejected by—even ridiculed by— those so many editors it was submitted to for so many years. I was just a couple of streets over from the still-shabby Hotel Canadá built in the 1930s, a place Lowry would himself later describe as “a nasty little hotel...like some jerry-built apartment house in Vienna or Berlin left unfinished from lack of money and then completed on a still cheaper plan while still preserving this illusion of the ‘modern’”—true, it was at the Hotel Canadá and in this area that some of his most disastrous alcoholic misadventures took place. Lowry hopelessly drunk again, Lowry plagued by guilt that he had disappointed his well-to-do parents back in England, Lowry trying to get published and forever having to justify himself to other writers and friends, Lowry hopelessly drunk again.

There’s a beautiful short story by his first wife, the late Jan Gabrial, an American writer and largely the model for the Consul’s wife in Under the Volcano. The story appears to be based on events when she finally decided to leave him after their brief marriage of several years, a piece printed in the old Story magazine in 1946, called “Not with a Bang.” Probably attracting little attention then, it has since become part of the Lowry biographical dossier and is reprinted in at least one critical casebook on his life and work. As the story would have it, a couple are staying in Mexico City. Late one evening the husband shows up in their room at what obviously is the Hotel Canadá, and the wife is already in bed for the night. He, the Lowry character, is thoroughly drunk—perfectamente borracho—from prowling around those saloon-door cantinas that still exist in abundance nearby; it has taken two bellboys to awkwardly maneuver him out of the elevator and into the room. He has bought a little puppy from a beggar on the street and is keeping it tucked under his coat. When he asks her to take care of the puppy, she tries to gently tell him that he has to give it back, there is no place for it in a hotel room. Seized by another alcoholic rage, he turns on her, calls her “a bitch,” and says she doesn’t love him and the puppy is all he has to love. He then heads out, back to the cantinas again. Feeling responsible, she dresses to go and look for him in the cold night. Finally, after some searching on foot and then a taxi ride, she finds him sitting alone on the pavement, and together they go into one of his regular cantinas, where before long he is holding court while standing at the bar, noisily and happily drunk. She sits at a table, watching it all from that distance, then remembers the puppy and sees that the husband is leaning with his arm flat on the coat that he has placed on the bar, the puppy still inside the pile of it and suffocating. She tries to rescue it, but it is too late. Railing loudly, he proceeds to blame the entire thing on her, accusing her of being forever bent on ruining him. She admits to herself then that he is too much for her, he is too far gone for her to save, and she musters the resolve to leave him at last. The Lowry character is named Michael, and this is how the story ends: “And harshly, violently, she began to cry, because she knew that the boat that was Michael had slipped its moorings in her life, and was even now putting out to the darker sea to which she could not follow him.” Jan herself returned from Mexico to the United States on her own in 1937. She asked Lowry to swear off drinking as the sole condition on which she would stick with him, attempt to salvage the marriage, but he couldn’t do it.

The brief notoriety from the enthusiastic initial critical praise that Under the Volcano garnered when it was finally published in 1947 didn’t solve Lowry’s problems, rescue him from that darker sea. And while most reports from friends tell of him usually being extremely likeable, even childlike and often a hell of a lot of fun with his ukulele and his impromptu singing and joking around, his life was also marked by an inability after the one successful book to finish to his satisfaction any other major writing project, more lost than ever in the pain and complications—both physical and psy-chological—of continuing alcoholism, complete with harrowing bouts of the DTs. His father was a very wealthy cotton broker, a stern Methodist who disapproved of Lowry’s behavior and cut him off from all but minimal financial support, and Lowry and his second wife lived poor in western Canada. When they had to abandon a beloved seaside squatter’s cottage they’d painstakingly built from scratch outside of Vancouver, they tried to set themselves up in rural England, Lowry eventually receiving a solid inheritance. During a particularly bad bender in 1957 he gobbled a vial of sleeping pills; the coroner in the Sussex village where it happened attributed what most likely was suicide to “death by misadventure.” He was only forty-seven.

And this is what I am getting at. Something definitely struck me there on Calle Donceles, something in the sheer and all-too-obvious irony of the juxtaposition. To think of the pain of Lowry’s life—especially some of the worst scenes from it played out there in Mexico City only a couple of streets over at the Hotel Canadá and environs, as explained—then to think that I was holding an expensively bound, gold-stamped special edition of the novel that only existed because of, almost could be seen as the direct product of, that torment that haunted him till his too-early death. Which is to say, there were the words of the novel on the slightly yellowing pages, words translated into Spanish, the language of the country that had once officially deported him as an undesirable, with a respected publisher in that country declaring here that the work was an acknowledged masterpiece of its century. But beyond the words, this copy of the book existed on another level, almost waiting for me on this particular shelf on this particular hot afternoon; it somehow had its own inevitability, a life of its own that wasn’t only in the text of Under the Volcano but also in this copy’s ability to whisper to a stranger like me, a writer himself who had reached that stage in his own living where he had started to have occasional doubts about the entire pursuit of writing, asking himself the usual old questions: “What does it all add up to?” And: “Is it, in fact, the living or the writing that matters? Is it worth sacrificing the former for the latter?”

But probably I haven’t made clear just how crazy I’ve always been about Lowry’s novel. Sometimes it feels like I’ve logged as much time recommending the book to somebody as actually working on my own fiction. Well, nearly that much time, the whole process starting with somebody wisely recommending it to me in 1968.

When I was at college at Harvard in those late sixties, I might have held a strange record for the number of creative writing courses taken. It was another era altogether, when Harvard still had glossy emerald ivy on its red brick walls (all of it later pried loose, after it was concluded that the strong, tenacious vines were damaging, slowly wedging apart, the old stone and mortar), and a time when the stuffy Department of English kept creative writing as something you usually had to take without credit toward the set literature curriculum (which included a required full year of soporific line-by-line classroom analysis of Chaucer) or as an extra course completely. One semester a young instructor named Carter Wilson taught a section of English C, a mid-level creative writing course. Wilson was just a few years older than us students under his guidance and had actually published a couple of novels; I remember going down deep into the pulp-fragrant stacks of Widener Library, lit by bare bulbs strung along ancient exposed electric wiring, and seeing Wilson’s books, which made for the kind of undergraduate’s confirmation I needed that Wilson was a legitimate novelist, even if I can’t remember actually checking the books out and reading them. I don’t think booze has ever been any problem whatsoever for me. Nevertheless, there was enough of it in the sloppily typewritten and quite predictable short stories I was turning out at the time; one or two of them involved me and my Wellesley College girlfriend, a painter, polishing off the better part of a bottle of Old Crow bourbon together in the upper bunk in my room in Quincy House on Saturday night, just talking there for hours and doing what undergraduate couples do repeatedly do in a bunk on a Saturday night, while maybe the dreamily slow, psychedelically electric harpsichord of a Donovan album played on the KLH “component” stereo. (Now that I think of it, how lucky does a citizen get?) Yes, I guess there was enough booze in my own fiction that Wilson—a cheerful, mild-mannered guy and good teacher—said that I really should read Under the Volcano, a book all about booze, he assured me. Which is how I came to acquire the Signet paperback that I still have to this day, bought at the Harvard Coop, and that is right here on my desk in Austin, Texas, over thirty-five years later.

Mass-market-sized, its white jacket works on a motif of red, black, and gold for the title and author and then a sketch of a lone, somewhat abstract figure, Giacometti-ish, casting a shadow in front of the crooked outline of a pyramidal mountain rise and a giant spherical sun behind that. The page edges are stained red, something they don’t seem to do on paperbacks anymore, and the August 1966 printing makes the standard promise of the day that it is “Complete and Unabridged,” the price ninety-five cents. There’s a fine, fine introduction by Stephen Spender that I myself reread— slowly, savoringly—every time I reread the novel. I do so not only for its large general ideas and insights concerning symbolism, as well as the whole sticky issue of autobiography as art, but also simply as a reminder, perhaps, of what gracefully written critical prose, with original commentary fully understanding of the magic of words and the complexity of the heart, once looked like; or what it looked like in a time before most critics—the academic ones, anyway—abandoned a love of, and even a humble submission to, the great literature they wrote about and substituted a latching-on to any trendy, usually imported “theory” of the moment, as that unfortunately became what was necessary to bolster and advance a campus career. Picking up the copy from my desk now, I see how I have carefully and repeatedly mended the worn cover with transparent tape over the years to keep it intact, a few of the pages up front having let loose from the glue binding and protruding, frayed to one step short of mummy’s wrappings. The book has had some use. Besides rereading the novel on my own, I’ve probably brought this very copy into my creative writing classes every semester in my thirty years of teaching to read aloud from the masterful opening paragraph. It employs a cinematic panning, to go from the entirety of Mexico, to Cuernavaca, to the grounds of the crumbling Casino de la Selva there, to a specific table on the casino’s terrace, where a French movie director and a local Mexican doctor are having drinks at sunset after tennis on the Day of the Dead in 1939; they begin to discuss the genuine tragedy of their mutual friend, the Consul, who was casually shot by tough, fascistic Mexican police exactly a year earlier in the course of another alcoholic episode. If there are a better few paragraphs to teach students how any setting that truly transports the reader is without doubt a matter of pure and uncut mood, I don’t know about them; here’s a taste:

The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill just outside the town, near the railway station. It is built far back from the main highway and surrounded by gardens and terraces which command a spacious view in every direction. Palatial, a certain air of desolate splendor pervades it. For it is no longer a Casino. You may not even dice for drinks in the bar. The ghosts of ruined gamblers haunt it. No one ever seems to swim in the magnificent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty and mournful. Its jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two tennis courts only are kept up in the season.

And beginning in college, I myself have personally pushed the book on girlfriends, other writers, literate relatives and, of course, many students, having loaned out who knows how often my Signet edition. (On page 91, somebody apparently tore off the top of that page in a crescent, the sentences truncated along the intriguing words, one below the other in successive lines at an angle, “Consul,” “paddled,” “hinges,” and “bougainvillea”—I trust that whoever took the missing passage needed and made good use of it, what’s gone from my copy forever.) I repeatedly and energetically told people they had to read it, realizing now that to say that to somebody is nothing less than to flatly announce to them: “You are put on this earth for only so many years, and I am telling you to take several valuable hours out of that time to experience something that might make that time more valuable, richer indeed...I hope.” The tentative ending suitable for that thought, because there’s probably no rejection greater in life than pushing a book on somebody and having him or her quietly return it to you, with at best an excuse of having been so busy with other things lately, or at worst an outright dismissal bordering on honest enough distaste.

Which is what once happened to me after a public display of my total and unabashed affection.

In my senior year I somehow got admitted to English S, the advanced creative writing class offered every spring semester at Harvard. At the time it was often considered to be a gathering of the dozen or so best budding writers on campus, both in fiction and poetry, who were selected on the basis of manuscript submissions from probably thirty or forty applicants. Embarrassing to think of now, but I had once read something by John Updike saying that on repeated tries every year at Harvard, he had never been admitted to English S, so in my mind I saw the achievement as very major. At the start of the term, late one January afternoon when I trusted nobody else would be there, I snuck over to the yellow clapboard building that was the home of the Department of English, Warren House, to nervously glance up at the bulletin board in the hallway and see my name posted on the typed list of those chosen. It could have been the Nobel Prize announcement, as far as I was concerned.

But once the class started I revised my opinion about the whole idea of English S. Taught that year by a well-known— probably famous—classical translator and sometime poet, the class turned out to be far from what I had expected. Those selected were not the wild hearts who had been keeping low for most of their undergraduate days and simply writing and writing some more—fellow oddballs, diamonds in the old rough like me, I egotistically assured myself. There were mostly just the usual suspects, a predictable cast: some campus literary players from the Harvard Advocate literary magazine (of the ilk who often later went on to become editors in Manhattan rather than writers, a fittingly sad fate for undergraduate literary players, I suppose); and then those I had come to realize populated a lot of the tough-to-get-into creative writing classes at Harvard, which were usually taught by males back then—the most attractive of Radcliffe English majors, who just happened to more than frequently turn up (another early lesson, I suppose, in how the real literary world works); plus the one guy, an obvious and enviable natural talent, who had a contract to write a novel for Doubleday already, and everybody with writing aspirations on campus knew about him (to my subsequent knowledge there was never a published novel). What was strange about this class was that the teacher—smallish, hoary-haired, and competent enough, always speaking low and with good enunciation, as if he was quite used to having an audience take in his every word—did, in fact, have a separate gallery of maybe fans there; a number of what looked like Cambridge matrons sat in straight-backed chairs around the periphery of the rest of us officially enrolled students at the oval oaken table, high-class perennial auditors, apparently, with nothing to do with the university. When the teacher gave us the assignment early on to bring into class a piece of writing we admired, I produced the Signet paperback. I probably read from one of those rolling passages where the Consul—his actress ex-wife, Yvonne, having returned to Mexico to see if she can save him, and his swashbuckling British journalist half-brother, Hugh, traveling to Mexico and wanting to help her try to save him—a passage where the Consul leaps further into his alcoholic visions and transport, at the peak of it communicating with the stars and even the ages, it seems, not in the least interested in being saved, when he’s honest about it: the basic premise of such ushering back into the safe world appears to him at that stage the final failure, the worst sellout. Lowry’s Consul—like Hamlet and Faust and Dante’s pilgrim, the personages he’s compared to in much criticism—will prove to be questing after the biggest of messages as the novel progresses, Secret Knowledge itself.

No, I have no idea now exactly what passage it was, but let me provide one, the sort it might have been. Here the drunken Consul drifts half lost through his lush, sprawling garden after almost stumbling into the deep barranca at the edge of this veritable Eden, as he strains to find a way back to his own house and Yvonne now waiting for him there— which is to say, as he tries to find his way home. In his tequila drunkenness, the world takes on a glowing and revelatory too-clearness of things, and a fleeting image of the airy liberation of the soul materializes right before his wide eyes in an encounter with the cat of his stuffy American neighbor, Mr. Quincey. But there are many stresses indeed in the Consul’s peaceable kingdom.

Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary. The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in the garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another tree, a bottle-green hummingbird exploring a flower, another kind of hummingbird, voraciously at another flower; huge butterflies, whose precise stitched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about with indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multi-colored love letters, tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to drop rings on you; whore’s shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes of glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay the Mexicans! The horticulturists made the occasion, as they made every possible occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for hours, as if the Consul did not exist.) Then the behavior of Mr. Quincey’s cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught an insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured, delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating, for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat’s mouth, he approached his porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvelously flew out, as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees...

Full prose that wears the old heart on the sleeve, all right, a rhythmic, darkly comic, semi-hallucinatory mind flow (note the deft use of the parentheses for triggered stray thoughts) that taps all the complexity of substance-induced envisioning and certainly offers a tip of the hat to the master of that mode, De Quincey himself (note the echoing name of the neighbor whose cat it is).

I’ve never been that good at dramatic performance of anything, but I thought I read it reasonably well that day in class. And finished, the Signet held open before me, I surely expected writing like that to bring down the house. The other students, however, were silent, waiting for the teacher’s response before they gave theirs—it was that kind of class. At the head of the table, he took his time, nodded his head a bit, as if in some consternation while he obviously carefully constructed what to say, and ultimately did offer something along the lines of how when he had been a book reviewer years before on the staff of Time magazine, Under the Volcano came to his desk, though after reading it he decided it was maybe too excessive, too verbally and emotionally indulgent for his taste, so it didn’t merit a Time review from him:

“I chose to pass on it,” he concluded lowly—and imperially, the way I saw it, even if he was being completely honest.

And I might have been a kid, and he might have been the famous translator of classical Greek and Latin and a published, sometime poet, but the dismissal really stung, assaulted everything I believed in then and to this day, as far as literature goes. To ease the awkwardness for me a little, one of the ritzy Cambridge matrons—I can still picture her, an elderly Marianne Moore type with a complicated hat—did pipe in from the gallery in a dramatic warbly voice, “Lowry, Lowry, such a trah-gic life,” providing some support. Though to twist the emotional stiletto yet more, reinforce the unjust absurdity of it—again, as I saw it—the next student at the table to deliver a piece of writing that she admired was a breathtakingly beautiful Radcliffe girl—I can really still picture her, lithe, with pouty lips and wispily long auburn hair, an affection for miniskirts and sort of ballet-slipper shoes with ribbon tie-ups—who read aloud in her melodious sensual voice a poem that I can’t remember (admittedly it could have been something major, eerie Emily Dickinson or Marvell’s little masterpiece “To His Coy Mistress”); the poem had been copied out in meticulous script and mounted on a 9x12 white art-stock slab with a band of soft felt making a framing border, her own very accomplished pen-and-ink sketches of flowers and leaves all around the verses. Honestly.

The hoary teacher’s response, following his lingering, appreciative smile, was most positive, to put it mildly; he pronounced, “A very lovely poem from a very lovely young lady.” Honestly.

And writing this now and seeing the tone I assume when describing a forgotten winter afternoon in cold, gray Cambridge closing in on four decades ago, I know—and it should be obvious—that the hurt lingers. I mean, do I have to call him, the much-honored man who is long deceased, a “sometime poet,” get in a dig like that even today? Still, his failing to recognize Lowry’s achievement, even his possibly running the risk of cutting the readers of Time magazine off from getting the word on it when it appeared in 1947 (though my checking now indicates somebody did review it anonymously for them), he deserves my venting of spleen, I’d say, which, if nothing else, stresses what Under the Volcano means to me.

Anyway, when I pushed the book on another party, a half-dozen years later, I got a response exactly the opposite, the variety of which any of us is obviously longing for when we recommend a book to somebody else.

To my surprise, no doubt, I had started publishing some short stories in literary magazines, had actually been given a chance to teach creative writing myself at a small state college in the sweet Green Mountains of northern Vermont, which spared me from having to return to the bleak routine of the daily-newspaper work that had been my livelihood right after graduation. I couldn’t believe my good luck, granting it was originally just for a summer session and by no means a regular appointment. Living next to me on the faculty floor of a dorm was a playwright up from New York, part of an ensemble theater group, with directors and Equity actors included, in residence for the summer. I hit it off with the playwright, only five years older than me but with solid success already for his startling avant-garde work, plays done by the Lincoln Center Rep and Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theater. In fact, he already had somewhat of a legend about him: linebacker big and a former college athlete, grizzly bearded, prone to wearing head bandannas and bib-front overalls, he had married early and had kids, taught English and Latin at a prep school out on Long Island, before he just left behind the entire package of the square life to write his plays in a cramped one-room apartment in the Village and support himself with a job that amounted to little more than being a resident roadie, lugging speakers and setting up shows at the old Fillmore East rock venue. In other words, he canned most everything for his writing, and living for a while now in a dorm room next door to him, I knew how hard he worked, a single exchange of dialogue labored over and written again and again, the exchange polished maybe for hours...before moving on to the next line of dialogue, and that then written again and again and again. Recently, a play of his had been brought out as a book in the prestigious and hip Grove Press contemporary drama series, putting him alongside Ionesco and Beckett on the shelf. The playwright seemed to have made it, and done so on his own terms without compromising; true, before too long there would be some extremely troubled times for him—big personal issues to wrestle, plus vanishing interest in daring work like his in an increasingly middlebrow, commercialized American theater scene—but that summer his situation was anything other than that. I ate breakfast every morning at a table in the student dining hall with him and the rest of the theater people, and probably right from the start I launched into my preaching about Lowry, one morning carrying the Signet paperback from the dorm, sliding it across the table and positioning it beside his plate of sausage and scrambled eggs to make sure he had it, then the playwright carrying it back to the dorm. The exchange was made.

The teaching schedule was such that most of us wrote in the a.m. and taught in the afternoons. And I suppose I didn’t notice the silence in his room next door as I banged away at my own light green Hermes portable for several hours, didn’t notice the time (this could happen when you were young and giddy about being able to write anything you wanted to, namely prose fiction, delivered from the sometimes sixty hours a week of writing meaningless newspaper copy), and soon it was well past noon. I figured I would see if the playwright wanted to go over to the dining hall for lunch. I knocked, heard nothing, then knocked again.

I opened the door to the dim little cinderblock cubicle. The curtains were drawn against the midday July glare outside, and dressed in his bib-fronts and T-shirt, his Chuck Taylors kicked off, he was sitting stretched out on the bed, a sizable man. A dorm pillow propped his back, and a single desk lamp glowed a yellow cone of light over his shoulder and onto a book, my Signet paperback; in his huge hands he cradled it gently, like a dove, maybe. He looked disoriented by my interruption.

He must have been going at it all morning, for the four hours or so since he’d gotten back from breakfast, reading instead of writing, because when he carefully placed a ballpoint pen to mark his spot, I noticed he was halfway through the near four hundred pages. Still on the bed, he looked at me, the voice not just deep and gravelly and soft but dead serious, too, and very slow, so honest he could have been speaking more to himself than to me. He said:

Which has always struck me, ever since, as the ultimate triumph in that scenario of recommending a book to somebody, the iconic affirmation. And whoever I have tried to tell about the book after that (I just pushed it on a guy in my department last week, a twentieth-century-novel scholar who confessed he was embarrassed for not having read it, promised he would go through it, studiously, as an upcoming summer project) has never been able to give such a response, one that also gets smack at this matter I’ve been wondering about: Again, there is the Signet paperback that contains, “Complete and Unabridged,” that handsome prose and the tale of the last day of the dipsomaniacal Consul’s life in 1938, but there is also this same Signet paperback, an object that I have often used to say what I can’t say myself, that has made for a message in itself that I can physically hand to somebody and beat what becomes more and more as I get older the troubling frustration—or huge pure futility?—that Baudelaire defined well in the second of his two published introductions to Les Fleurs du Mal, “the appalling uselessness of trying to explain anything whatever to anybody whatever.”

And that seems to be very much the other life of that copy, the specific purpose in my own life of the worn-soft, falling-apart Signet paperback.

One night recently, in a bar here where I live and teach here in Austin, Texas, now, I got to talking to a painter I know, a guy whose canvases sell well both in the U.S. and internationally. He is an avid reader, and he spoke to me of a longtime affection for Lowry’s work. As he put down his fresh, syrupy black Guinness pint after a first long sip, he looked up from under the visor of his baseball cap and told me outright:

“I’ve once even held the manuscript. I mean, it was wild, having it right there in my hands.”

The HRC is the rare books and manuscript library at the University of Texas. And I have been on the university’s faculty for almost twenty-five years, admittedly an academic low-profiler in my English department, being a so-called creative writer. My cluttered office with cracked yellow plaster walls on the first floor of Parlin Hall actually looks out to the HRC. Located in a massive reinforced-concrete rise from the 1970s—a blank limestone veneer and somewhat in the style of an imposing Soviet mausoleum—the library was founded by a past university president and systems chancellor, the controversial Harry Ransom; his critics said he called it the Humanities Research Center, or HRC, possibly with the dreams of grandiosity that haunt too many ego-inflated, big-university administrators, knowing that eventually the name of this HRC could deftly be changed to the Harry Ransom Center—which it was. And there I was, a confirmed Under the Volcano addict to match any Under the Volcano addict, I liked to think, and for close to twenty-five years I had been in an office just a few hundred feet away from the original manuscript, but I had no idea of that. For some reason I felt beyond embarrassed, positively ashamed, and I mumbled some face-saving excuses to the painter as I confessed, no, I never had seen it.

In my defense here, I should say that by choice I’ve pretty much avoided that rare books and manuscript library. I head over there only when a reading or talk by a visiting writer is held in one of its quite sumptuous upstairs meeting rooms, with their Oriental rugs and good furniture and cut-glass decanters for sherry at receptions. For me, there’s a certain off-putting, precious atmosphere surrounding the place, not only in the fetishization—as collectible objects—of books and an author’s personal trappings (Arthur Conan Doyle’s eyeglasses, Gertrude Stein’s cape, etc.), but also in the message of how money, and plenty of it, can buy all of that and put it in surroundings possibly posher than most anything else on what often appears a very posh campus, its hefty endowment originally coming from substantial oil-property holdings. The library seems to endlessly host literary “events” and “galas,” some very lavish and with deep-pocketed donors festively abounding; over the years, you might have mistaken—by the mode of attire—more than one of the HRC directors and top curators for a bank executive or corporate lawyer, a mover and shaker rather than an academic. It could be that from the angle of somebody who actually writes, it’s not always that easy to see what a lot of HRC activity has to do with anything in the bigger scheme of genuinely important literary concerns, other than continuing to stoke up money to buy more, well, “things.” Yet I know there’s no denying the inherent value of studying an author’s manuscripts and papers, and I—all grouchy criticism above notwithstanding—certainly wanted to touch the Lowry manuscript, examine it myself, a piece of my literary True Cross, I suppose.

One thunderstorming morning last summer, I went over there to track down the manuscript. I had to get a special buff card issued in my name, then go into a glass-walled cubicle and watch a five-minute instructional video on how to request and subsequently handle manuscripts, narrated in an even-toned voice that sounded like that from one of those schoolyard-safety films or such we were bombarded with as kids in the fifties. I must say the librarians on duty proved most accommodating, totally encouraging. And there in the spacious, well-appointed main reading room, the two boxes of Lowry holdings were delivered on a cart pushed by an undergrad work-study student who had taken a class from me the semester before, a smiling guy wearing a backward rapper’s cap who still seemed gushingly grateful for the B that I had given him. I sat at a table under the gaze of corny bronze busts of everybody from John Steinbeck to George Bernard Shaw, and I began my examination according to the rules.

Security was understandably tight. There were the uniformed campus cops I had passed down in the lobby, monitoring a large panel of state-of-the-art electronic surveillance screens, and there was now the restriction that I was allowed to take notes only with the single brand-new, sharpened yellow Number 2 with a fresh pink eraser issued to me, using the one sheet of note paper that had been stamped, to certify I had brought it in and could take it out again. According to the instructional film, you were supposed to leave all manuscript material except specifically what you were using on the cart in front of the long, low counter the several librarians sat behind, taking only what you needed to a table for examination, item by item. The manuscript was in four cloth-covered, orange-red binders, a small white label on the spine of each bearing the title and binder number; the card catalogue said this was a “composite manuscript,” and the very yellowing pages, often with the ghostly rust imprints of paperclips at the top from where probably notes had once been attached, were each encased in a plastic sleeve.

And there was a rush to just being this close to the artifact, seeing the neat typing (apparently Lowry’s second wife, the detective novelist Margerie Bonner, performed that part of the job when they lived in the squatter’s cottage in Canada) and the profuse pencil notes. The notes sometimes filled the margins or sometimes blanketed the entire back of a page, ideas on cuts and expansion, more revisions still. It all established a sense of utterly hard and utterly long and ceaseless labor; I knew it was tough indeed to imagine how Lowry worked on this book, how he questioned himself at every turn, longed only for perfection. And I might insert here as evidence two quotes I have on hand concerning how he went as far as frankly and repeatedly apologizing to his agent Harold Matson in New York for giving Matson an imperfect, therefore unsalable, manuscript; the quotes are from letters in a volume of Lowry’s selected correspondence, and the first is dated March 1941:

I’m sorry I’ve only given you further disappointments with “Under the Volcano,” so far, and it may be that the adverse conditions under which the book was finally written influenced me to think it was an artistic triumph when it was only sort of a moral one.... So I am rewriting it.

And later, Lowry, still not satisfied when writing to Matson in June 1942, but obviously deep in the near-transcendent throes of work once more:

But I shan’t trouble you again until I have reduced the risk of being a strain on the petty cash department to a minimum. I promise you this: something really good is on the wing this time, sans self deceptions, from this side.

Yes, perfection was the single goal, nothing short of it, as—alcohol problem or not—Lowry always kept writing. And in the HRC, I soon figured out that this “composite manuscript” was exactly that, a pieced-together draft and one of the who knows how many Lowry wrote (scholars usually indicate four basic versions) over the ten years or so he worked on the novel, roughly between 1936 and 1945. As a kind of exercise, or prayer-like invocation, I read and silently mouthed the syllables of the opening sentence, which comes before that descriptive passage I quoted earlier—“Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus”—then I examined closely, several manuscript pages later, how Lowry had penciled in with large letters the old Indian name he uses for his fictionalized Cuernavaca in the novel, drawing a box around it, identical to the way it occurs on page 34 of my Signet, to reproduce the image of the sign on the town’s tiny railway station:

Those wild early summer Texas thunderstorms must have been booming outside, but in this fortress of thick, thick concrete I didn’t hear them. And I must have been in there for a couple of hours, looking at the orange-red binders, one after another, marveling some more at the amount of sheer work that went into the composition, some pages typed, some handwritten, notes and notes and more notes, Lowry pondering, weighing, reconstructing everything everywhere…until I got to the last binder, where after a while none of it was typed whatsoever, simply Lowry’s own holograph pencil writing on the yellowing sheets, with more imprints of rusted paperclips—the novel’s ending was there, but the last fifty or sixty pages were completely in pencil. Which is what was maybe most significant for me, because somehow with this “composite manuscript” going from the typing of the early chapters to the faded gray penciling of the later ones, the diminishing progression seemed to take a stand against all the rather overdone emphasis on the corporeality of books that this swank HRC stood for; it whispered the larger phenomenon of the words themselves nearly moving toward the final step and evanescing away from corporeality altogether, going into some cleaner, clearer, definitely purer realm, back to the limitless and awe-inspiring invisibility of the imagination unshackled, that place where art’s Secret Knowledge does reside.

The other life of this copy of the book, the manuscript itself, was somehow to speak to anybody who carefully looked at it, pored over it, to tell that somebody something very important. And I pictured it speaking to not just a vaguely able writer like me, occasionally uneasy about his own calling at this aforementioned later stage (a bit of age brings telling honesty, if nothing else), but possibly to a rare and hauntingly obsessed younger writer with a gift and potential worthy of Lowry’s inspiration—I saw it speaking specifically to him or her and affirming that all wasn’t lost in the sacrificing of the living for the writing, the conundrum that the edition I came upon in Calle Donceles in Mexico City seemed to pose, a point that might be applied, as well, to my dear longtime friend, the fine playwright who also put himself through so much. I saw it convincing this imagined younger writer to keep at it, no matter what the personal cost; the results might be astounding and the adversity—and pain—might even prove the subject of the art.

Or, to put it another way, this manuscript of Under the Volcano seemingly had most everything of the final version of the novel within the four ever-so-neat, orange-red binders (I’ve since learned in a bibliography that it is the only existing reasonably complete manuscript, the fourth draft and very close to the published novel), it contained more or less the full text, but it also possessed an other life very much its own.

Not an entirely new idea, as I admitted early on, but its implications can become nothing short of staggering, in my opinion, anyway.

I mean, look at it still another way, the real heart of the matter, going well beyond everything I’ve tried to say here.

Because maybe, just maybe, there is an entity in this world thoroughly magnificent and thoroughly indescribable, and it’s called Under the Volcano.