Swinging the Maelstrom
As is the case with the text of the novella published above, these notes towards Swinging the Maelstrom are based on the unpublished manuscript (UBC 15-7, made in 1942–44; and UBC 15-8, a carbon of a new typescript of the same version, made in 1951) as representing the most substantial version of the text. UBC 15-7 was the text translated into French by Michèle d’Astorg and Clarisse Francillon, and published in Esprit 2, 3 & 4 (1956; the pages in Lowry’s copies at UBC are uncut); 15-8 adds in its final pages a few new elements for a more positive reading (see Introduction above). For Lowry’s far-ranging speculations about these matters and his wider intentions, see his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:498–506 [17 January 1952]), in which he suggests that the various versions might one day be published as an interesting trilogy. This is a later response to much earlier work, but it affirms Swinging the Maelstrom as the text by which the potentialities of the other versions should be judged. In particular, Lowry identifies its rhythm, its exhilaration, its expressionism, as “a sort of jazz record” (505), however cracked it might be.
The approach adopted here is similar to that assumed in A Companion to Under the Volcano, in my [Chris Ackerley’s] Annotations to Kathleen Scherf’s edition of The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, and in my Notes to the screenplay of Tender Is the Night (Ackerley 31–50). The first principle is that “each interpretive problem requires its own distinct context of relevant knowledge” (Hirsh vii). Thus, the notes attempt to define the problems and present the necessary information. The second principle is that of literary tact, of not imputing to the text more significance than it can reasonably bear. Yet there is the problem of the palimpsest in Swinging the Maelstrom, more so than in Lowry’s other works: his revisions led to a “smoothing” of the text, the erasure of the more obvious signs of literary and other influence. Why, for instance, should the various “horrors” be associated with Conrad? Answer: because earlier versions of the text make clear what was later less evident. What about changes of direction and intention? There are difficulties, practical and hermeneutical, in swinging this swirling maelstrom, but references to The Last Address and other versions have been invoked only where obviously pertinent. I have tried to maintain a simple equilibrium, bearing in mind the response of Blondin, tightrope-walking across Niagara, and told that he must be mad: “Oh, no, I have to be particularly well-balanced.”
NOTE: Cross-references to this edition of the manuscript of Swinging the Maelstrom are in bold type, e.g., 21:28 (page 21, line 28); those to other entries in this commentary are of the form #21:28 (my note to page 21, line 28). Double quotation marks are used for quotations. Punctuation that is part of the quoted text is included within the quotation marks; that which is not part of the quoted text is placed outside them. “LA” indicates citations from and references to The Last Address.
Title. Swinging the Maelstrom: invoking jazz rhythm as metaphor, and with reference to the infamous whirlpool off the Norwegian coast, Poe’s vortex, the haunt of Leviathan and entrance to the Abyss (see #20:10). In “Forest Path to the Spring” (Hear Us O Lord 252), the jazz composer narrator suggests this to his friends as a possible title for a number they are recording. The novella remained unpublished save in the French translation until 1963, when Earle Birney and Margerie Lowry published in the Paris Review 8 (1963) an amalgam of the two versions under the title of Lunar Caustic. The reference is to silver nitrate, as used for cauterizing, the removal of warts, or (Lowry believed) in the treatment of syphilis. This version was republished by Cape (1968), Penguin (1979), and included in Psalms and Songs (1975). Lowry’s desire to expand earlier variations is outlined most fully in a letter of 17 January 1952 to Robert Giroux (CL 2:498–507), where the jazz rhythms are analyzed in detail, as a form of expressionism that finds its literary equivalent in the pages to follow. The Last Address had as epigraph the last verse of Kenneth Fearing’s “Dirge” (from Collected Poems), which celebrates (if that is the word) in exuberant terms the downfall (“And wow he died as wow he lived”) of a citizen; Swinging the Maelstrom, somewhat uncharacteristically for Lowry, has no epigraph.
I
3:1. the City Hospital: Bellevue Hospital, New York, at 1st Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan, close to the East River and some three blocks east of the house in which Melville had died (his “Last Address”). Lowry was admitted as a voluntary patient in May 1936 for psychiatric observation (rather than treatment) consequent on delirium tremens; he was there for perhaps ten days. Day (200) describes the shock effect of Lowry’s seeing truly broken lives, brains rotted by alcohol and those dying of syphilis. Given his personal theme of the ordeal of an alcoholic who finds himself drying out in a psychiatric hospital, Lowry was all the more distressed when in 1944 Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend appeared, set in part in the Bellevue Psychiatric Ward, “where Don Birnam spends an interesting afternoon” (CL 1:503). The name “Bellevue” (given Lowry’s impulse to see his life written in symbols) curiously anticipates the Hotel Bella Vista in Quauhnahuac, or Cuernavaca, where Yvonne sees the dishevelled figure of the Consul. In The Last Address (LA 103:13) the protagonist first leaves “a dockside tavern,” before winding his way towards the City Hospital.
3:4. white birds: literally, seagulls; esoterically, Platonic emblems of the soul, as in chapter 8 of Under the Volcano and several Lowry poems.
3:5. a bridge: over the East River, separating Brooklyn and Queens from Manhattan, and regarded by Lowry as dark and sinister (Cinema 155). This is literally the Williamsburg Bridge, some distance away; but in imagination, beyond that, the Brooklyn Bridge—for Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane, a symbol of life and hope, spanning the gulf between estranged souls; but for suicides, a magnet of despair.
3:9–10. the best for less: the slogan of Rudley’s Food Stores, a New York company; as in Under the Volcano (265), a phrase underlining the spiritual bankruptcy of a materialistic society. A similar slurry of slogans is dumped in “The River” from Hart Crane’s The Bridge.
3:10. Romeo and Juliet: the 1936 film version of the play, directed by Georg Cukor, with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in a lavish but lousy MGM production. Adrift in New York, Yvonne Constable sees this promotion and the Rudley slogan in company with a playbill for the 1937 film (or 1935 Broadway show) Dead End (UTV 265). See #40:30b.
3:22. a sound of ticking: a recurrent image in Lowry’s writing for the soul awaiting death, most obviously in the poem eventually entitled “Thirty-five Mescals in Cuautla,” originally “Prelude to Another Drink” (the early version is printed in CL 1:163):
This ticking is the most terrible of all
You hear this sound on ships, you hear it on trains
It is the death-watch beetle at the rotten timber of the world,
And it is death to you too; for well you know
That the heart’s tick is failing all the while …
The Consul hears an identical ticking in the Farolito (UTV 337), as does Sigbjørn in chapter 5 of In Ballast to the White Sea, where the suggestion is equally that of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with its overtones of guilt (his brother Tor has just committed suicide).
3:26. the centre of his circle: the conceit, deriving from John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” is repeated in the final lines of Lowry’s “Poem Influenced by John Davenport and Cervantes” (CP #159:21–22): “Yet for all this I am still at suckle: / The tavern is the centre of my circle.” The phrasing invokes Dante (see #4:28–29), yet a similar passage in Ultramarine (92) associates the image with the familiar Renaissance depiction of the human figure “crucified” within a circle, the navel as its centre.
3:28. afraid of a ship: the image of a ship as an iron Moloch that crushes the lives of men between its jaws is one Lowry derived from Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On (2). Lowry deployed it in his poem “For Nordahl Grieg Ship’s Fireman” (CP #12), in Ultramarine (41), and in Under the Volcano (21).
4:10. a bell was clanging: a hint of Donne’s “For whom the bell tolls.” Compare Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” (5): “And wrecks passed without sound of bells.” Compare, too, the “Frère Jacques” refrain in “Through the Panama” (in Hear Us O Lord) and other works: “Ding, dang, dong.” The terrible old woman dressed in black is similar to the old woman from Tarasco (UTV 50).
4:12. trying to post a letter: behind this incident, at perhaps some remove, lies the ending of Melville’s “Bartleby” and the Dead Letter Office (Rick Asals to Chris Ackerley, personal correspondence). The letter is thus obscurely associated with notions of “correspondence.”
4:13–14. with shaking hands: a sentiment echoed in Under the Volcano, La Mordida, the screenplay of Tender Is the Night, Dark as the Grave and the “Song” (“Pity the blind … ” [CP #133]) of the man whose terrible shakes render him incapable of signing his name. Plantagenet tends to see the external world largely as an extension of his self. In The Last Address regression towards the infantile assumes the dominant note (compare the reference [LA 104:4] to the “mother, who whipped him with bramble sticks,” a recurrent Lowry childhood trauma); but in Swinging the Maelstrom the movement out of this self is more accentuated.
4:16. stages of the cross: correctly, the fourteen Stations of the Cross, the representations in a Catholic church of the different stages of Christ’s Passion.
4:18. the father: Lowry indicates in his Lunar Caustic proposal that both Garry and Plantagenet are looking for a father. This figure is not present in The Last Address, save in the surrogate form of Mr. Horowitz, and the sentiment there is rather that of Ahab stumbling on the careening bridge, “feeling that he encompassed in his stare oceans from which might be revealed that phantom destroyer of himself” (LA 104:18–19). Melville had a son named Malcolm, an identification that underlies this novella and In Ballast to the White Sea. The father is literally a Catholic priest, but for all his friendliness is equally a figure of parental authority and responsibility. See #40:24.
4:25a. Heat Wave: the summer of 1936 in New York was appallingly hot, with a heat wave that lasted for months and temperatures in Central Park reaching as high as 106° F.
4:25b. Roosevelt Raps Warmongers: the Civil War in Spain broke out in fury during the summer of 1936, when army garrisons throughout Spain arose on July 16 in support of Franco’s Nationalists. The attitude of the USA, as expressed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (preparing to run for his second term), was that of broad condemnation but non-intervention. Despite this, hundreds of Americans volunteered for the International Brigades, and the Lincoln-Washington Battalion would take an active part on the Republican side in future hostilities.
4:28–29. This was his objective: in his various outlines of The Voyage That Never Ends Lowry indicated that Lunar Caustic would form his equivalent to Dante’s Purgatorio. As Day argues (201–02), the tower of Bellevue and Plantagenet’s circling motion towards it invite comparison with the Mount of Purgatory (the centre of his circle; see #3:26); and the inhabitants of the ward live in this element, neither saved nor damned. Yet if there is an earthly paradise at the top of Bellevue, Plantagenet never ascends to it: his way is down (however, the revised ending of Swinging the Maelstrom suggests that Lowry, and thus the novella, was equivocal in this respect [see #42:24]). In his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:501), Lowry discusses his attempt to find in the hospital “some image of the eternal underworld, of hell on earth,” a condition of “permanent human suffering and tragedy unredeemable finally by any merely social or humane or material enlightenment.”
4:30. Chords from the night: compare the Consul’s sense of “the dark’s spinets” (UTV 35), or the night’s daemonic orchestras (UTV 342).
4:31. Tilting the bottle: in The Last Address, after the long final draught, Lawhill roars out that he wants to hear the song of the Negroes: “Veut-on que je disparaisse, que je plonge, à la recherche de l’anneau” (“Do you want me to vanish, to dive to find the ring?”) (LA 104:28–29); this derives from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (Oeuvres 211). He adds there that he was sent to save his father, to find his son, “to heal the eternal horror of three, to resolve the immedicable horror of opposites.” This invokes cabbalist traditions of equilibrium and Ouspensky’s principle of the unity of opposites, as in Under the Volcano (130). Swinging the Maelstrom reduced these outbursts, making Plantagenet seem more “normal” but thereby cutting the text from its literary roots.
4:34. dithering crack: described by Conrad Knickerbocker, in his Foreword to the 1968 edition of Lunar Caustic, as the sound of damnation, “as immense and terrible as the City itself.” Lowry took ‘dithering’ from Conrad Aiken, who had used it in this way in Blue Voyage (80). The phrase resounds in chapter XI of In Ballast to the White Sea.
4:35. Plantagenet: the dynastic name of the British royal family of the House of Anjou, the most celebrated of whom was Richard the Lionheart, and the most degenerate (at least in popular tradition) Richard III. The name derives from the planta genesta, or broom, adopted by an early Count of Anjou as the emblem of humility. In The Last Address the name of the protagonist is Sigbjørn Lawhill, after the S.S. Lawhill, a fourmasted barque launched in 1892. In Lowry’s Lunar Caustic proposal, the central figure of the hot musician is called, improbably, the Earl of Thurstaston (a town on the Wirral and a pun on drinking, but complementing “Duke” Ellington or “Count” Basie). Bradbrook (156) suggests that the name reflects Lowry’s own, Clarence, the Plantagenet drowned in a butt of wine; Grace (30) suggests a man at war with himself; this echoes Binns (25), a house divided against itself. In his letter to Robert Giroux of 17 January 1952 (CL 2:503), concerning the change from “Lawhill,” Lowry remarked, not entirely helpfully, that Bill Plantagenet “is still a bit of a pose, but a much sincerer character.”
II
5.4. on a ship: although the preceding Rimbaud allusion has been removed (see #4:31), Plantagenet imagines himself in what follows as a bateau ivre, a drunken boat. The illusion is much more emphatic in The Last Address, where Lawhill is “certain” he is on a ship (LA 106:17). As Day notes (203), Lowry conceived himself in such Rimbaud-like terms, on a voyage into the abyss of self, from which he might emerge “perhaps shattered, but purged and cleansed.” In I Bring Not Peace (200–01), Charlotte Haldane describes the effect Rimbaud’s poem had on Lowry (more precisely, on her character James Dowd), in terms of its jazz rhythms, its wail of despair, and its desire for peace yet struggle to escape obliteration. In chapter III of The Last Address various echoes of Melville (Tashetego, Daggoo) are more explicit.
5:7. Frère Jacques: from “Through the Panama” and beyond, Lowry’s repetitive and insistent rhythm for the sound of a ship, the outcome of “twenty years’ search for an onomatopoeia for a ship’s engine” (Notes 44). In his screenplay of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night Lowry describes the song as an exact refrain of a ship’s engine but also of its polyphony. He justifies its inclusion as a rhythm of the universe, a canon or roundelay capable of infinite variations, relating each of us to humanity and the brotherhood of man (Cinema 173).
5:10a. New Bedford: the whaling port in Massachusetts at the mouth of the Acushnet River, where Ishmael arrives and spends the night with Queequeg before going to Nantucket and joining Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. When Lowry arrived in America in 1934 to rejoin Jan Gabrial, he immediately declared his intention of pursuing his own white whale, and set forth to visit New Bedford by sea. This, however, proved a disappointment: “Instead of the romantic whaling town he imagined, he found a bleak looking run-down modern industrial city” (Bowker, Pursued 186).
5:10b. Ruth: as Bowker notes (Pursued 137–38, 186), Jan’s name is changed to Ruth after the student from New Bedford whom Lowry had met at Conrad Aiken’s house in Rye during the summer of 1932, and to whom he was attracted, though too shy and preoccupied to initiate anything. The wife of Clarel, in Melville’s long poem of that name, is named Ruth, as is the “Jan” character of La Mordida.
5:15. Thrumming: the word used by Conrad Aiken throughout Blue Voyage for the noise of the ship’s engines, “from heartbeat to heartbeat” (139). McCarthy notes (21) that Lowry’s “Frère Jacques” became the replacement for this refrain; this, however, did not happen until the 1951–52 retyping of Swinging the Maelstrom.
5:23. remorse: an affliction suffered by most of Lowry’s heroes, the Consul in chapter 7 of Under the Volcano asking on behalf of them all, “Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions that ought to concern the world.” (For the connection between rats and remorse, see #29:37a.) Philip later calls Bill “Mr. Remorse” (18:23). In his Lunar Caustic proposal, Lowry suggested that the protagonist’s horrors are in excess of the apparent cause and if the real cause could be found everything that seems not quite right would fall into place too. He is using the language of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” to address the difficulty (expressed most famously in Eliot’s essay on Hamlet, but also in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the “horror” is foremost) of finding an object that is the adequate vehicle for the emotion. Lowry wanted the fate of his hero to image that of the world. The clue to the nightmare that follows, he reveals in the proposal, was to be the protagonist’s fear of syphilis; hence the enigmatic “What had he done last night?” Lowry at this time had a strange homoerotic encounter with a syphilitic individual named Tony Valleton. The proposal explores Lowry’s psyche in a way that testifies to some of the traumatic feelings underlying this novella; however, there is too little in the actual text to compel the reader to accept such matters (syphilis “contracted from a homosexual,” the Paul Fitte affair [see #11:20]) as the “real cause” of Plantagenet’s suffering. The DT’s, in Swinging the Maelstrom, are an adequate correlative, whatever Lowry preferred to think, but the later notes offer a curious insight into how he was prepared to reread his own story. Remorse is the central theme of Lowry’s poem that begins “Resurgent sorrow is a sea in the cave / Of the mind” (CP #57) and concludes with an image directly related to the novella:
Remorse, your host, who haunts the whirlpool where
The past’s not washed up dead and black and dry
But whirls in its gulf forever, to no relief.
Remorse would later become the dominant theme of La Mordida.
5:26–27. prosopopeia: a rhetorical device by which figures are represented as persons, inanimate things are made to speak as animate beings, or an absent or deceased personage is depicted as present or alive. Day comments (204) that much of the passage is drawn from images Baudelaire had concocted for Les fleurs du mal. This seems more a metaphor than a literal truth (specific images cannot be identified), but there is little doubt that Lowry is striving for that kind of effect. This is more obvious in chapter II of The Last Address, where Lawhill looks out from the Observation Ward of the hospital over the inferno of the East River.
5:29. shadows: the suggestion is that of Arthur Robison’s 1922 film, Warning Shadows, subtitled “A Nocturnal Hallucination,” which depicts figures in a state of trance watching their shadows act out their passions before they wake from their collective nightmare. The specific allusion is less important than the wider use of expressionist cinematic techniques, here and elsewhere in the novella (notably, in the puppet show), to suggest the world of shadows. Lowry mentions the film in La Mordida (316), and discusses this effect at length in his notes to his later screenplay (Cinema 59).
5:30. A red hand: echoing Milton’s Paradise Lost (II.174), where the “red right hand” of God is raised to smite the fallen angels.
6:1. Richard III: Regent of the Dark, in Shakespeare’s play the most degenerate of the Plantagenet line, a lump of foul deformity (humped, like Moby Dick?). Having eliminated most of his kin, he is the last of his line. Plantagenet imagines himself about to be smothered, like one of the princes in the tower, by his savage namesake (see #6:9). Richard III appears as a barman in the poem “Sestina in a Cantina” (CP #127).
6:3. his American cousin: the kinship of Philip to Bill Plantagenet exists only in Swinging the Maelstrom; in The Last Address the doctor is named Claggart, to invoke the villain of Melville’s Billy Budd. As Day notes (197), the psychiatric resident in charge at Bellevue was Dr. Sylvan Keiser, who had no recollection of Lowry from the hundreds of drunks who passed through his ward each month; Bellevue has no record of the name “Lowry” from this time, which suggests that Malcolm (who was not an American citizen) was probably admitted under another name. Abraham Lincoln was watching Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin when he was assassinated; Mr. Quattrass later sees “Ab’ram Lincoln down under de flo’” (18:15).
6:9. little princes in the tower: Edward and Richard, the two young sons of Edward IV, in Shakespeare’s Richard III and in popular tradition the innocent victims of their uncle Richard; nominally their protector, he arranged for them to be taken to the Tower, and there to be smothered.
6:12. trick bar: a legacy of the recent Prohibition (repealed December 1933), a concealed bar, a shelf or bookcase that might be turned to conceal all evidence.
6:18–19. return to the presexual revives the necessity for nutrition: from Jung (Psychology, Part 2, chapter 7: “The Dual Mother Role”; specifically, from the Table of Contents [liv]): “The regression to the presexual revives the importance of nutrition”; this anticipating such sentiments as: “regression of the libido to the presexual stage … a substitution for … the phantasy of re-entrance into the mother’s womb” (349); and “As soon as the libido regresses to the presexual stage, there we may expect to see the function of nutrition and its symbols put in place of the sexual function” (369). Thanks to Colin Dilnot for this insight. In The Last Address this phrase is introduced much later (LA 140:29), but is more resonant, given the final image of the protagonist curled up in embryonic repose.
6:25. Ed Lang: real name Salvatore Massaro (1902–1933), guitarist and friend of Joe Venuti, with whom he worked for most of his career. Lang died of complications following a tonsillectomy, by which time they had made over seventy recordings together, including many of Lowry’s favourites such as “Little Buttercup” and “Apple Blossoms.” His death is lamented in Lowry’s “Letter from Oaxaca to North Africa” (CP #116.56–59):
Ah, ghouls are nursling to this bosom,
My heart a widowed spider trapping grief,
Its strings are wrung with agony of Ed Lang,
From floribundia to rose of gall and lung.
6:26. limeys: a Yankee put-down of the British sailor, or the British in general, popularly deriving from the drinking of lime-juice on British ships as a means of combatting scurvy, but perhaps arising from the Limehouse area in London’s dockyards.
6:30. Cantabs: an abbreviation of Cantabrigia, the Latin form of the name of Cambridge, with reference to a bridge over the River Cam; in common parlance, a graduate of Cambridge University. See #42:22.
6:32–33. May Balls: at Cambridge University, associated with the revelry of graduation in the merry month of May.
6:33. Footlights Club: the amateur drama society at Cambridge University with which Lowry was on occasion associated, once in “a sort of cabaret scene,” playing the ukulele and singing his own songs (Ronnie Hill, in Bowker, Malcolm Lowry Remembered 26); and once with a production of Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight (see #30:12a).
7:2. bull fiddle: one who plays the bass viol; there may be an implied jest on bull-fighting rather than a specific individual who went to Spain.
7:13–14. barely stretch an octave: Lowry was conscious of his stubby fingers: “an indelible, almost mystical, resentment against his own hands” (Doyen, “Fighting” 210; see also Ultramarine 41); but it was less of a problem with his taropatch, or jazz ukulele, than for a pianist needing a wider span to create the chords. The affliction (as Philip points out) is less physical than psychological; as Lowry noted in his Lunar Caustic proposal, “his frustration here is of an infantile character.”
7:23a. Joe Venuti: “Joe” Guiseppe Venuti (1898–1978), jazz violinist, born in the mid-Atlantic and thus ideally suited to swinging the maelstrom. He was raised in Philadelphia, where he met Eddie Lang (see #6:25) and formed his celebrated “Blue Four,” with whom he made countless recordings and Broadway shows. Lowry believed that Venuti was never quite the same player after the death of Lang in 1933.
7:23b. Bix: Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke (1903–1931), cornet and jazz trumpeter, who died an alcoholic at the age of 28, and by so doing became a cult figure, one of the first white musicians to be accepted in a largely black idiom. His perfect pitch and vibrant pure tone rendered his playing unique, though his unorthodox fingering and intuitive ways (he could not read music) were the despair of trained musicians accompanying him. His other love was the piano. He was one of Lowry’s all-time greats, and his “Singing the Blues” (with Frankie Trumbauer) was for Lowry the expression of pure happiness (see #23:36).
7:24a. “In a Mist”: also known as “Bixology,” a piano solo recorded by Beiderbecke in New York on 9 September 1927. Lowry claimed in his poem “Letter from Oaxaca to North Africa” (CP #16.63–64): “I love the sun yet I would trade the sun / For ‘In a Mist’ by Beiderbecke’s ghost.” The piece has an intricate structure that unwinds upon itself; Lowry therefore used it as refrain and image in his screenplay of Tender Is the Night, which is composed in a similar pattern. It summed up, Lowry suggests (Cinema 57), both the jazz age and “the tragedy of a wasted life.” In his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:499), Lowry discusses the possibility of integrating The Last Address with Swinging the Maelstrom (and Lunar Caustic) in such a manner as to create the effect of “a strange kind of music,” the earlier version modified, reversed and counterpointed by the later to create the kind of art that tries to integrate itself; behind this is the figure of “In a Mist.” Through that mist may be dimly discerned what might have been but never quite came into being.
7:24b. Melville: Herman Melville (1819–1891), American writer best known for Moby Dick (1851), and whose presence infiltrates Lowry’s novella from its early inception as The Last Address (#11:29–30) until the late reference to the Acushnet (#42:12). The area that Melville used to “hang around” in is New Bedford (#5:10a), from whence he sailed in 1841.
7:29. paraldehyde: a volatile colourless fluid (CH3CHO3) formed by the polymerization of formaldehyde, with a suffocating smell. It was used in psychiatric medicine as a hypnotic and a sedative, especially in cases of delirium tremens (Martin Bock to Chris Ackerley, personal correspondence). Jan Gabrial comments on “the pungent odor that enveloped Lowry” after his escapade with Tony Velleton (see #5:23) before he entered Bellevue, associating the smell with the embalming fluid used when her father died (Gabrial 84–85). In The Lost Weekend, at Bellevue, Don Birnam is made to take some, with pronounced if short-lived effects.
7:31. Pantagruel: the gigantic son of Gargantua: “for Panta in Greek is as much to say as all, and Gruel in the Hagarene language doth signify thirsty” (Rabelais II.2:180–81). He was born in the great drought that lasted 36 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 13 hours and a little more. From his birth until the end of his search for the Holy Bottle he was distinguished by the saltiness of his throat, which required continuous slaking.
7:33. freighter to the Orient: this is the experience, based on Lowry’s return from the East (see Ultramarine 142), later given to Kennish Drummgold Cosnahan, the Manxman who went to sea before the mast in 1924, and who in his novel Ark from Singapore (1927) tells of his experience on a sailing ship, “with a deck cargo of lions, tigers, and elephants from the Straits Settlements bound for the Dublin Zoo” (“Elephant and Colosseum,” Hear Us O Lord 119).
7:34. Herman: i.e., Melville. To Derek Pethick (6 March 1950; CL 2:207–08), Lowry identifies with Melville’s life, romanticizing the links (a grandfather lost at sea, a wayward son named Malcolm), but affirming their hold on his imagination and his desire to emulate Melville’s failure “in every way possible.” In each version of the novella, this “hysterical identification” is attributed to the protagonist. Sigbjørn’s identification with Melville is a major motif of In Ballast to the White Sea.
7:35. two arm press: in weight-lifting, where the weight is brought up to shoulder level, then raised in a clean smooth motion above the head (as opposed to the “clean and jerk,” where the final raise is from the waist, or the “snatch,” where there is one continuous movement). There is a likely subliminal pun, to the effect of “getting it up.”
8:3. abortions: a motif recurrent in Lowry’s fiction, apparently based upon an occurrence in April 1934 when Jan became pregnant and had an abortion. As Bowker tells the tale (Pursued 176), Lowry agreed readily to the termination, but later told his psychiatrist that she had had it without his knowledge; his guilt was transferred in fiction onto characters such as Ruth and Yvonne. This detail and the comments it elicits were omitted from the published Lunar Caustic.
8:14. observation ward: in the Psychiatric Unit of Bellevue. As Lowry had been in real life, Plantagenet has been admitted for observation, not treatment. In his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:501), Lowry distinguishes the observation ward from a madhouse, but admits the distinction “doesn’t seem to have been too clear” in his own mind.
8:15. hot licks: jazz music played with complex rhythms and improvisations. “Hot jazz” is jazz taken to its limits, abandoning the established melodic theme for an imaginative variation that later incorporates that theme back into the process; the effect is that of a musical creation as much the work of the performer as of the composer.
III
8:25. the Bay of Bengal: that stretch of the Indian Ocean between the eastern coast of India and the western coast of Thailand. Lowry would later claim (Dark as the Grave 25; “Forest Path,” Hear Us O Lord 260) that his maternal grandfather, John Boden (1839–84), had gone down with his ship, blown up at his request by a British gunboat in the Bay of Bengal, the crew dying from cholera. This enters the revisions of The Last Address (15-4:1), that text originally reading: “Perhaps it is for his father, who ran his ship upon the rocks, and later died in prison, howling French songs.” Day claimed that Boden died in his bed aged 90, in 1934 (59); but Bowker straightens the record, showing that he was simply lost at sea (Pursued 4). For the crated lions, see #7:33.
8:32. Garry: in The Last Address Garry is likened to a portrait of Rimbaud at the age of twelve or thereabouts (LA 107:14), then to Pip of Moby Dick, a simple boy who has become both mad and visionary (LA 158:15). His vulnerability is signalled by his constant use of the word “collapsed”; and his notions of collapse and Plantagenet’s blasting away of the past are directly related to Rimbaud’s policy of debauching himself as part of the process of making himself a visionary, as expressed in his 1871 letters to Isambard and Paul Demeny (Martin Bock to Chris Ackerley, personal correspondence): “by a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” In his Lunar Caustic proposal, Lowry notes that Swinging the Maelstrom was intended to be a tragedy of infantilism, with Garry as Plantagenet “turned inside out”; neither capable of growing up but each possessing (despite everything) an essential innocence and goodness.
9:3. Kalowsky: in The Last Address the old man is Horowitz, presumably after the pianist who could indeed span an octave, or with a hint of the horror in his wits. He is intended as a counterpoint to Garry, a symbol of restlessness and peregrination, and thus a figure of Ahab (15-4:75), yet with a hint of goodness (Gk. kalos, “good”) in his name.
9:22. Mr. Quattrass: in The Last Address he is named “Battle” and given more to sing about. He is there more frenetic, and the cuts made in revising the text have reduced his colourful role. The change of name arose either as a consequence or anticipation of the Consul’s fantasy at the beginning of chapter 10 of Under the Volcano, where he recalls meeting Mr. Quattras, a bookie from Codrington, in Barbados, and saving him from deportation. A different Quattras, a Manxman, features in “Elephant and Colosseum” (Hear Us O Lord 144). Lowry claimed in his Lunar Caustic proposal that the songs were what he had heard in the ward. This is perhaps disingenuous: there is a distinct African-American oral tradition called “Signifying Monkey,” with a variant known as “Poolroom Monkey,” in which one cool dude, the monkey, outwits (or not) the lions, baboons and other beasts in various rhythmic but improbable activities. For examples, see Bruce Jackson’s Get Your Ass in the Water, although this particular song is not recorded there.
9:28. shoot rotation: in the most common form of pool, “eight-ball,” one player breaks, and whoever sinks the first ball elects to sink numbers 1 to 7 (“low”) or 9 to 15 (“high”), before finishing with Black, or #8. Here, a variety of the game, in which each player attempts in turn to sink the balls in ascending order, scoring one point for #1, two for #2, and so forth, until fifteen for #15; the first player to score 61 (for instance, balls one to eleven) wins. In one “Poolroom Monkey” song (Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water 50A, 173), Monkey rejects the Baboon’s offer of pool and counters: “I’ll shoot you a little sixty-one”; 8-ball played for fun, but 61 for serious money.
10:4a. Memel: a former city of East Prussia; now part of Lithuania and known as Klaipéda.
10:4b. Königsberg: the capital of East Prussia until 1945; now known as Kalingrad.
10:5–6. the Wandering Jew: Ahasuerus, “striker of Jesus,” condemned for this outrage to wander the earth without rest, a fugitive and a wanderer, until the Day of Judgement, unable to die. The figure appears implicitly in Under the Volcano (9), “Through the Panama” and throughout October Ferry, chapter 20 of which is entitled “The Wandering Jew.”
10:8. 1870: the year of the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris was besieged and brought to submission. There is a link to Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer, in that the French poet saw his age as demoralized and embittered by that war.
10:10. Zura: i.e., the Jura mountains (as pronounced by Mr. Kalowsky); an extension of the Alps, running NE-SW for some 240 km to a depth of perhaps 50 km, forming the boundary between Switzerland and France.
10:14. put the ace in the corner: that “ole monkey” sank the 1-ball into a corner pocket; then the 2-ball into a side pocket. To “give the ace a ride” means to “let it ride,” for tactical reasons elect not to sink it, to let the other player take a turn.
10:15. Hightop: presumably, a tall player, after a district in New York.
10:16. broke the ball: started off the game, and sank numbers 8, 9 and 10; then put “deep bottom” (considerable backspin) on the cue ball by hitting it below the centre, to sink the final ball, #15. The sequence makes approximate sense (see #9:28).
10:21. Get back to your room: in The Last Address Battle recurrently pokes his head out of his cell, looking for the attendant to say this again; there, it is more like a refrain.
IV
11:11. a broken coal barge: the scene that lies before Plantagenet reflects that within the Hospital, those inside as equally broken wrecks or abandoned hulks. This is in keeping with the bateau ivre imagery, or the principle of correspondence experienced by Ethan Llewelyn in October Ferry (145), “as if this place were suddenly the exact outward representation of his inner state of mind.”
11:14. emerald shoots: in The Last Address more is made of the grass as a symbol of life persisting in this most desolate of surroundings.
11:15. poverty grass: any of several grasses (Donthonia spicata, Aristida dichotoma) that grow in poor or sandy soils.
11:16. the tangled object: a glimpse not unlike the Consul’s “object shaped like a dead man” (UTV 91): a mysterious “other” that corresponds in some way to “some faction of his being.” It is a moment of prescience that Lowry usefully describes in his Tender Is the Night screenplay as “a ghost of a tragic precognition” (Cinema 90).
11:18. a powerhouse: Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend (110) passes by the vast dark-red structure of a Cable and Power Station, which possesses a purpose and energy that he does not.
11:20. hanging by the neck: an image deriving from Melville’s Billy Budd, rather than from Ouspensky or the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack (see LA 143:35). The reaction of Bill Plantagenet suggests a feeling of guilt similar to that which Lowry expressed over the death of Paul Fitte, his Cambridge friend who committed suicide (Fitte gassed himself, but Lowry in October Ferry associated his death with images of hanging). The image of the man who saw truth and was hanged upside down appears in the first and last chapters of In Ballast to the White Sea; Lowry’s source is Ouspensky’s Symbolism of the Tarot (62). In a marginal note to The Last Address (15-4, 4), Lowry comments “Julian & Madrid,” a reference to Julian Bell, another Cambridge contemporary who died in the Spanish Civil War. In The Last Address (LA 105:11) the vision of the hanged man is attributed more vaguely to “one of the patients in a delirium”; this may derive from Cézanne’s painting, “La Maison du pendu,” in the Louvre (see LA 140:14). In October Ferry to Gabriola (112), Ethan has seen the painting (presumably a reproduction) “the day before yesterday in the art gallery at Ixion.” The image echoes the final stanza of Baudelaire’s “Voyage à Cythère”:
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n’ai trouvé debout
Qu’un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image …
– Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégôut!
(“In your island, O Venus, I found standing upright only a symbolic gallows where my image was hanging. Ah, Lord! Give me the strength and courage to contemplate my heart and body without disgust!”)
11:26. Providence: as Bowker records (Pursued 186), this is the name of the ship (auspicious, but later ironic) that Lowry and Jan took to visit New Bedford in August 1934. A “sidewheeler,” as the name implies, is a ship impelled through the water by the rotation of its twin side wheels, like those of the Fall River Line (see #35:36). The “Hudson” is more correctly the East River.
11:29–30. Melville … finished Moby Dick: Melville’s “last address,” where he lived (from October 1863) and died (28 September 1891), at 104 East 26th Street. And yet, in “A Poem of God’s Mercy” (CP #93), Lowry refers to Ishmael lying “stiff in 28th Street” (near that area of Manhattan known as “Gramercy”), in such a way as to suggest this is the address in question; the incongruity is curious. There is further confusion: as Pat McCarthy notes (222), this might be the house in which Melville finished Billy Budd shortly before his death, but Moby Dick had been written in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, forty years earlier. Yet Lowry is not entirely in error: Lewis Mumford (153–54) describes how Melville, with “the tail of Moby-Dick … not cooked yet,” went to New York in the late summer of 1851 to finish the book in a third-story room, and did so “in the humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight, followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier than before.” This is precisely the climate of the novella.
11:30. so he had been told: Lowry added this disclaimer (in pencil, to ms 15-7:15), as a reflex action to cover his debt to Lewis Mumford.
12:1. white and blue: in The Last Address (LA 105:19–20) these are colours of innocence, linked explicitly to the “white and blue girls in summer” (see #32:36). Compare Ultramarine (65), Dana’s moment of peace in his blue and white pyjamas; and chapter 2 of In Ballast to the White Sea, where a similar vision of innocence derives from Rilke’s Cornet Christopher Rilke, a soldier at rest: “And to learn over again what women are. And how the white ones do and how the blue ones are” (25).
12:2. Dunwoiken: the pun is repeated in “Forest Path” (Hear Us O Lord 217) as the name of the shack next to that of the composer narrator. The name dates from Lowry’s Vancouver days, for it does not appear in The Last Address, where the white and blue boats are named Empty Pockets III, Sanugencti and Lovebird (LA 105:17–18).
12:4. a great lidless eye: suggestive of Yeats’s “the lidless eye that loves the sun,” from his poem “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” (l.14); alternatively, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (l.138), “Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.” The image derives from stories of the Bedouins staking out their victims and cutting off the eyelids for relentless exposure to the sun, in the tradition of P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste. See also Lowry’s poems “Prelude to Another Drink” (CP #106.17), “Sunrise” (CP #128.14) and “A Hangover—Reading Rilke, Schnitzler or Someone” (CP #219.10–11), the latter duplicating the situation here:
The grip of sorrow holds you at the lead window
Looking with lidless eyes into the past.
12:6. the red dying sun Antares: a star of the first magnitude in the centre of the constellation of Scorpio. In chapter 11 of Under the Volcano Hugh and Yvonne see among the configurations of the stars the giant Antares raging to its end: “a smouldering ember yet five hundred times greater than the earth’s sun.”
12:7. the Retreat of the Howling Dog: a little-used name of a set of faint stars located above and to the west of Spica to form a Y-shaped pattern. The name probably referred to one of the Hunting Dogs of the constellation Canes Venatici, located farther north.
12:9. the delirium of God: according to Bowker (Pursued 198–99), Lowry’s first working title for the novella was “Delirium on the East River.” For Lowry, “delirium” was a favourite word, as it was for Baudelaire and Rimbaud. A number of poems feature it in their title (“Delirium in Los Angeles … Vera Cruz … Uruapan” [CP #46, #27 & #131, #50]). The imagery of this passage is taken from the 1937 poem, “Prelude to Another Drink” (CP #106.17–19), which concludes:
So God watches us with lids which move not.
But this is the repetition of an ‘idea’
Before the terrible delirium of God.
12:13. toward the Hercules Butterfly: a summer constellation of the northern hemisphere, the pattern of which, as outlined by six of its brightest stars, suggests a butterfly. Compare Under the Volcano (194), and the Consul’s sense of “the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1:20 p.m. toward Hercules’s Butterfly”; which in turn suggests Ouspensky, whose New Model of the Universe (chapter 7) invokes the sensation of worlds hurtling backwards.
12:20. Jack Frost Sugar Works: a New York subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Sugar Co. (subsequently Domino Sugar); a taunting beacon of cold to the inmates sweltering in an infernal summer heat (Day 204). In The Last Address (LA 105:22) the inmates see the ferry, Tenkanas, that goes to “the Ice Palace at Rockaway.”
12:25. prorogation: in parliamentary parlance, the discontinuation of a session of the legislature; also a deferral, postponement (from the late Middle English, prorogare, to prolong).
13:2. homecoming: Bill sustains the nautical comparison, as in Lowry’s poem that begins, “Dead men tell cryptic tales” (CP #197, variant 197.1), with a lonely tramp-ship returning after a long voyage, each man aboard with a personal “dream of homecoming.”
13:9. sanitarium: the suggestion is that of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and hence the illusion of a cure.
13:15. inexplicable thaumaturgy: compare Yvonne’s similar urge for the miracle (the “work of magic”) that will heal her heart (UTV 55).
13:16. the man in the glass tower: Plantagenet is to Garry and Mr. Kalowsky as the psychiatrist looking down from his office on the patients in the Observation Ward is to him; the latter is in turn a forerunner of the man in the control tower in “Through the Panama” (Hear Us O Lord 61), with a model of the locks before him, suddenly aware of yet another man sitting yet higher above him. This is related to J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time and its notion of a serial universe, but it suggests equally Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” a system of surveillance designed for prisons.
13:17. convinced: a complex irony ensues: only when he knows this to be a delusion (see 27:11–15) can Plantagenet truly know that he is sane.
13:34a. honestly: an echo of the nightmare vision of T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”: “I would meet you upon this honestly.”
13:34b. city of dreadful night: combining James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) with the rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to create an apocalyptic vision of urban blight, one threatening to nature; and of the lunatic city of disintegrating consciousness. Lowry’s poem by this title (CP #24), although based upon his agonies in an Oaxaca jail, Christmas 1937, draws in part upon the Bellevue experience.
14:1. tributary: compare the legend of “A Canadian Turned Back at the Border”: “No peace but must pay full toll to hell.” There may be an echo of James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night”: “What thing is this which apes a soul / And would find entrance to our gulf of dole / Without the payment of the settled toll?”
14:5a. that spirit which haunts the abyss: in Under the Volcano (16), that spirit is identified with the Mexican god huracán, the god of storm, and an explicit link is made to Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. That connection would come later, for Lowry had probably not yet read Donnelly; his source is probably Ouspensky, perhaps mingled with Baudelaire’s dark angel of the gulf.
14:5b. abyss: the primeval chasm; the darkness of Genesis upon the face of the deep; that in the heart of man; Milton’s Hell; Dante’s Malebolge; Thomas Burnet’s waters of the deep; Poe’s pit; Henry James’s plunge of civilization; and Julian Green’s horror of the abyss which could open at any moment. To which might be added Conrad Aiken’s dictum in King Coffin (Collected Novels 329): “But remember if thou gazest into the abyss the abyss will also gaze into thee. The abyss will gaze into thee.” See #30:12b.
14:6. brooding like futurity: words used in Lowry’s poem “The Ship is Turning Homeward” (CP #92.10–12): “Perhaps this tramp rolls towards a futurity / That broods on ocean less than on the gall / In seamen’s minds.” The source of the phrase is the sonnet by Thomas Love Beddoes, “A Clock Striking Midnight”: “Futurity / Broods on the ocean, hatching ’neath her wing / Invisible to man, the century ….” This image appears in chapter 6 of In Ballast to the White Sea. The “Western Ocean” is a mildly romantic Eurocentric term for the Atlantic.
14:8. toward the open sea: silence reflects the symbolic significance of such a voyage, in terms of self-discovery and the ordeal to be endured that life might be reaffirmed (see #42:24). In a marginal note to The Last Address (15-4:87) and in his Lunar Caustic proposal, Lowry contemplated a Dantesque parallel: at the moment of his protagonist’s release, the other inmates of the Inferno (who know they can never escape) come up silently and with tears in their eyes to say farewell.
V
14:12. puppet show: taking up the common symbolist image of the marionette, but in accordance with the precepts of an occupational therapy that employs such means to awaken consciousness of Self and Other, or to assist the autistic or speech impaired. In The Last Address (LA 115:9–12; LA 117:15–19; LA 119:8–11), Lowry’s italics indicate clearly that he is quoting from an explicit source. This is Bender and Woltmann’s “The Use of Puppet Shows as a Therapeutic Method for Behavior Problems in Children,” published in 1936 and based on an extensive experiment in psychotherapy that was carried out in the Children’s Observation Ward of the Psychiatric Division of Bellevue Hospital, shortly before Lowry was admitted. Lowry presumably saw at least one of the performances, and read the later report. Puppet shows were found to be the most valuable and effective means of understanding and grading the behaviour of children. Group treatment with puppets (weekly shows performed by adult puppeteers) proved to be a successful solution in allowing aggressive children to work out and verbalize their problems, and to clarify relations with parents and siblings.
Marginal notes in the revisions (15-4:21, 24, 27) reflect Lowry’s decision to render the details more dramatically, by bringing in the doctor and having him voice the words (Dr. Claggart is not physically present in the early chapters). Later, Claggart claims the idea as his own, the show as a socializing influence, an opportunity to sublimate emotional outbursts and share a common experience; it is, he says, “sometimes moderately successful.” In Lowry’s filmscript of Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver sees in a second-hand bookstore a dirty little copy of his book, The Psychological Value of Ventriloquy and Puppets in City Hospitals. The scene then cuts into two Bellevue psychiatrists standing at the very window mentioned here and discussing the value of Diver’s early work, “his stuff about puppets” (Cinema 160). Nothing of this appears in Fitzgerald’s novel.
14:25. the macabre procession: a danse macabre, or dance of death.
15:1. Quelle patrie avez-vous?: Fr. “What country are you from?”; to which the reply, “Je suis Russe” (“I am Russian”). The Frenchman believes that the old man has said, “I am Prussian” (“Prusse”), and hence the challenge to a duel.
15:4. stekel: the German or Yiddish word for “stick”; with a repressed pun on the name of the psychologist, Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940), a member of the Vienna Psychiatric Circle and associate of Freud. In Dark as the Grave (128), Sigbjørn recalls writing this passage and associates the recollection with the “writer” Stekel.
15:10. Lithuania was Russia in those days: Lithuania, one of the Baltic States, was enjoying a brief inter-bellum period of independence, attained as a consequence of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution, before which it had been part of the Russian empire (as soon it would be again). Lowry may have in mind the theme of deracination, as stated by the Lithuanian woman at the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch” (“I’m not Russian, come from Lithuania, pure German”). There is a suggestion of a sort of determinism about the fate of nations (UTV 309; “June the 30th 1934,” Psalms and Songs 43). The point is less the disintegration of nations than that of the human individual. The obscure figure of a drowned Lithuanian is recalled by the Consul in Under the Volcano (353).
15:15. hated the sun: as in Under the Volcano, where the Consul’s wearing of dark glasses and his dislike of the sunflower (179) are indicative of his turning away from the light. As the Consul admits of the sun (205), “Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face.”
15:20. treatment 29: see also 16:8, “treatment 63.” No specific process is known, and the numbers do not appear to have occult significance.
15:24. Voulez-vous me donner une verre d’eau?: Fr. “Will you give me a glass of water, please?”
15:36. the bourn of death: echoing Hamlet (III.i.79–80), “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourne / No traveller returns.” The allusion picks up the echo of “born” at 15:28.
16:28. pictures of ruins: suggesting Macaulay’s vision of the end of civilization, the ruins of London gazed on by a solitary traveler from New Zealand.
16:37. bean parlor: a place where a “bean-feast,” or treat for the workers, might be held.
17:18: Over in India: in The Last Address (LA 112:15–16), Lawhill tries to distract Garry from the memory of his father and mother (“bad people and should be in hell”) by asking him to tell a story “about India”; the tale of the elephants, there given in greater detail, expresses considerable repressed emotion.
17:30. lollipop: a thermometer placed in the mouth.
17:34. locked up in a cage: Garry’s father is in prison.
19:3. Caspar: a figure derived from Kasperle, a stock character in the Altweiner Volkstheater, created circa 1764 by Johann Laroche, appearing in no stock costume but in a variety of disguises. He survived as a puppet in the Kasperletheater, the Austrian equivalent of the Punch and Judy show. Specifically, the hero of all the puppet shows performed for disturbed children in Bellevue Hospital from 1935 (see #14:12). Bender and Woltmann note that Caspar is endowed with all the hopes, wants and philosophy of the common man, that he is “active, curious, sociable and uninhibited,” and that he is immune to any real harm but in the end finds the solution to his problems. The adult figure was changed to a boy for the Bellevue shows, and this enabled the children to identify closely with his different aspects. In Freudian terms, they pointed out, Caspar represents the ego ideal, all that the child would like to be himself, the expression of strong infantile desires that demand satisfaction but must be adapted to the demands of the super-ego, the role of which is played by his parents, whose good and bad sides are variously expressed.
19:26. hand of the giant: in the puppet play (see #14:12 and #19:3), the wicked giant who (like the magician) represents the Bad Father (the Good Father is represented by the character of a Policeman). In The Last Address Lawhill at this point utters the word “Leviathan.”
19:35. shadows on the wall: the “warning shadows” of expressionist film (see #5:29).
20:10. descent into the maelstrom: the maelström is a fierce vortex; in the real world, a swirling tide and whirlpool off the coast of Norway between the islands of Ferros, Mosken and Loffoden in the 68th degree of latitude; in fiction, the haunt of Leviathan, the destroyer of Jules Verne’s Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the entrance to the abyss below. The allusion is specifically to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent into the Maelström,” in which a white-haired fisherman tells of his being trapped in the whirlpool, and finds at the very moment of beginning the descent that he feels “more composed” than ever as he is swirled about in the vortex which claims his ship but which does not, at the critical moment, suck him down.
20:20. his final frontier: compare “the final frontier of consciousness, that’s all” (UTV 135). The Consul’s conclusion, that “Genius will look after itself,” is a consolation that Plantagenet cannot yet find.
20:22. hieroglyphic: for Lowry a favourite word. In the 1940 Under the Volcano Laruelle sees the bloody hands of Orlac as “the hieroglyphic of the times”: this echoes Sir Thomas Browne’s sense of tavern music as “a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world,” or sign of a greater harmony that perfectly orders all things. The word “hieroglyph” is used frequently in Moby Dick; and in Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” it has specific reference to the broken spars and wreckage from the vortex made by a sinking vessel.
21:1–2. collapsed in grey misery: compare Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On (163): “And suddenly the rage was extinguished in the other man’s face, his features collapsed like a heap of ashes, leaving an old man behind.” This derives from an encounter between the central character, Benjamin Hall, and the boatswain, who first tries to provoke the lad, then collapses as stated, and ends up reminiscing what a mess he has made of his life, and how much nicer it would be if only somebody cared for him. The Consul uses the image of Yvonne’s face (UTV 72), attributing the phrase to Hugh (rather than to Grieg).
21:6. to his inner Africa: as Bender and Woltmann note (see #14:12), the cannibals in the puppet show represent the child’s primitive concepts of the parents. The further intimation, however, is that of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the inmates adopting poses like those of the miserable slaves Marlow encounters on first arriving at the Outer Station before his journey to the interior. See also #26:32.
VI
21:7. writing on the wall: “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin,” mysterious words that appear upon the wall at Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5:25–28), which being interpreted doth signify: “Mene: God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it; Tekel: thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting; Peres: Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” The Consul, gazing at his bathroom wall, sees this hieroglyphic (UTV 145), which is also present in chapter CXIX of Moby Dick, “The Candles.” The numbers were presumably recorded by Lowry during his stay in Bellevue; when Jan visited him there he had a black and white exercise book filled with “copious and nearly illegible notes” intended for the novella (Gabrial 91). The Last Address (LA 112:1–4) lists several more numbers: “Pneumatic Tube Station 382: Electro-cardiograph dept. 257: Operating Rooms 217: Physiotherapy 320: Neuro. Path. Laboratory 204: Dial No. 0 for Psychiatric numbers … Dial No. 0 for Psychiatric numbers … Occupational Therapy Dept. 338 ....”
21:12. “Sweet and Low”: a sentimental lullaby, deriving from Tennyson’s “The Princess”; yet one fraught with potential trauma, most obviously in the second verse:
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon.
Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
Father will come to thee soon.
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails from out of the west,
Under the silver moon
Sleep my little one, sleep my pretty one, sleep.
21:13. annealing: the act of tempering or strengthening by sudden heat and slow cooling.
21:23. “These Foolish Things”: a current hit, “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You,” by Jack Strachey, Harry Link and Holt Marvel; recorded by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra in 1936, with Helen Ward as vocalist. The sentimental ballad recounts the various things that remind a sad lover of his lost love. Its intricate arrangement spotlights the sound of the band, with 4-measure solos for clarinet, trombone and vocal, and similar measures (introduction, bridge and coda) for the entire band. Jan Gabrial recalls it as “our song” (Gabrial 92).
22:1. palmettos: any of several species of palm tree typical of the West Indies or the Southern parts of the USA; the kind often potted in hotel lobbies. Here, simply ornamental, though they may possess sedative and diuretic properties.
22:4. the nations: as Hugh reflects, “if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it would die of remorse on the third” (UTV 117).
22:14. caracoled: a caracole is literally a snail or winding stair, but in horsemanship the word describes a succession of wheels and half-turns to left and right. Lowry derived the word from Conrad Aiken.
22:20–21. an alien music: most of the music Plantagenet has played is that of white musicians working in an essentially black idiom. What follows, Perle Epstein points out (149), is in jazz parlance known as a “cutting contest,” where two musicians battle for pride of place. Bill is defeated by the crazy Mr. Quattrass and a mental defective with long blond hair; he is unable to impress even the insane.
22:26–27. “Milneburg Joys”: “Milenberg Joys”: a popular jazz tune composed by Jelly Roll Morton in 1923, and played by various ensembles thereafter.
22:31–32. sthenically: with the psychiatric sense of morbidly active.
23:7. Titanic: the foundering of the “unsinkable” Titanic occurred on the night of April 14–15, 1912, following its collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. In The Last Address Battle sings more of the song, and Lowry in his later Lunar Caustic proposal suggested restoring much of what was removed. The major omission is an obscene ditty that begins, “Why dat de Cap’n’s daughter standin’ on de deck / With her drawers up around her neck.” In his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:503 [17 January 1952]), Lowry insisted that the song about the Titanic was “a bonafide piece of American folk lore” and his own discovery, “taken down right in the mouth of the inferno,” and hence no need to be beholden to a music company or anthology of folklore for the rights (another manifestation of his recurrent nightmare of plagiarism). This is a partial truth, as the song (with many of the variants recorded by Lowry) is a traditional piece of black American folklore, a “toast” centrin’ ’bout de figure o’ Shine, / wit’ glorious obscenity an’ outrageous rhyme. One version is given by Bruce Jackson in Get Your Ass in the Water (52E:189–90):
The eighth a May was a hell of a day.
I don’t know, but my folks say.
The news reached the little seaport town
that the old Titanic was finally goin’ down.
Say now there was a fella on board they called Shine,
he was jet black and he change anybody’s mind.
Shine came up from the bottom deck below,
said, “Captain, water’s runnin’ all in the firebox doors,
and I believe to my soul
this big motherfucker’s fixin’ to overflow.”
Captain says, “Shine,” says, “you go back down,
I got forty horsepower to keep the water pumped down.”
Shine went down and came up with a teacup in his hand,
he said, “Look here, captain, say, I’m a scared man.
I’d rather be out on that iceberg goin’ around and ’round
than to be on this big motherfucker when it’s goin’ down.”
Shine jumped overboard and he began to swim,
with ninety-nine millionaires lookin’ at him.
Shine swimmed on down by the Elbow Bend,
there he met the devil and all a his friends.
Big man from Wall Street came on the second deck.
In his hand he held a book of checks.
He said, “Shine, Shine, if you save poor me,”
say, “I’ll make you as rich as any black man can be.”
Shine said, “You don’t like my color and you down on my race,
get your ass overboard and give these sharks a chase.”
Say, the captain’s daughter came out on the second deck
with her drawers in her hand and brassiere around her neck.
She said, “Shine, Shine, if you save poor me,”
say, “I’ll give you all this ass your eyes can see.”
Shine said, “There’s fish in the ocean, there’s whales in the sea,
get your ass overboard and swim like me.”
Now Shine was swimmin’ and screamin’ and yellin’,
his ass was kickin’ water like a motor boat propeller.
Shine was doin’ ninety, he begin to choke,
fell on his back and he begin to float.
Big motherfucker from Wall Street told the sharks,
“I’m a big motherfucker from Wall Street, you got to let me be.”
Sharks say, “Here in this water, your ass belongs to me.”
Shark told Shine, say, “A bit of your ass be a wonderful taste.”
Shine say, “Man, it sure be a motherfucken race.”
Now when the news finally got around
that the old Titanic had finally gone down,
there was Shine on Main Street damn near drunk
telling everybody how the Titanic sunk.
A bitch said, “Shine,” say, “daddy,” say, “why didn’t you drown?”
He said, “I had a cork in my ass, baby, and I couldn’t go down.”
23:8. take another blow: an instruction to the jazz trumpeter or saxophonist, to “back up” the melody by coming in.
23:17. “In a Mist”: the Beiderbecke piano solo; see #7:24a.
23:36. “Singing the Blues”: the Trumbauer-Beiderbecke composition, “Singing the Blues” (to which the title of the novella makes reference), recorded New York 4 February 1927, with Bix Beiderbecke, cornet; Frankie Trumbauer, C-melody sax; Miff Mole, trombone; Jimmy Dorsey, clarinet; Doc Ryker, alto-sax; Itzy Riskin, piano; Eddie Lang, guitar; and Chauncey Morehouse, drums (Parlophone R 3323; Columbia L.P. CL845). The piece caused a sensation among musicians and is reckoned one of the great jazz recordings of any era. It (one break in particular) became for Lowry the expression of “the most pure spontaneous happiness” (“Forest Path,” Hear Us O Lord 257). That break is recalled in Lowry’s poem “Letter from Oaxaca to North Africa” (CP #16.65).
23:37. Frankie Trumbauer: (1900–1956); raised in St Louis, he played piano, trombone, flute and violin before turning to his favourite instrument, the C-melody saxophone. At seventeen he formed his own band and worked with many leading jazz musicians, notably Bix Beiderbecke. His disciplined dry tone blended surprisingly well with the sweet spontaneity of Bix. After the latter’s death he had a successful career, but was never the same musically. The protagonist of “Through the Panama,” Martin Trumbaugh, is modelled after him.
24:15. a white whale: the object of Ahab’s monomania, and throughout Melville’s novel his whiteness casts “a spectralness over the fancy” (Moby Dick 278). Moby Dick is a Sperm Whale, and in chapter XLI of the novel the challenge set by this variety is contrasted with that of the Right, or Black Whale. When Lowry arrived in America in August 1934 (see #5:10a), he announced that he was in pursuit of his own “white whale,” Herman Melville, whose frustrated and tragic life possessed him to the point of “hysterical identification” (Bowker, Pursued 186). The whiteness of the whale becomes here a metaphor for the right of possession to jazz, a music identified with blacks.
24:17–18. “Fierce Raged the Tempest O’er the Deep”: from Hymns Ancient and Modern, #313, by G. Thring. It begins:
Fierce raged the tempest o’er the deep,
Watch did thine anxious servants keep,
But thou was wrapped in guileless sleep,
Calm and still.
“Save, Lord, we perish,” was their cry,
“O save us in our agony!”
Thy word above the storm rose high,
“Peace, be still.”
Lowry refers to this as “the mariner’s hymn” in the poem “Oh gentle Jesus of the hymnal once” (CP #263). In the screenplay of Tender Is the Night, Dick hears it sung by the Salvation Army on a New York street corner (Cinema 165).
24:24. Liverpool: the repetition of the name aligns Bill Plantagenet with other Lowry protagonists who hail from Liverpool or the Wirral.
24:31. “Death of Ase”: an orchestral composition by Edvard Grieg, part of his “Peer Gynt Suite” #1, with reference to the death of Peer Gynt’s mother in Act III of the play of that name. Having arrived home just in time, her reprobate son Peer takes her in imagination on a sleigh-ride to the heavenly gates and St. Peter, at which point she peacefully dies. Lowry had been reading Peer Gynt in 1936 as background for his long poem “Peter Gaunt and the Canals” (CP #15).
25:1. the Pequod: Ahab’s ill-fated whaler in Moby Dick, the ship named for the Pequots, once a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians. Like the Titanic, it is a doomed ship.
25:2–3. “Clarinet Marmalade”: a jazz tune from the 1920s, written by Nick LaRocca and Larry Shields for the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; celebrated as a virtuoso clarinet piece. It was recorded, in the same session as “Singing the Blues” (New York, 4 February 1927), by Frankie Trumbauer and his Orchestra, with Jimmie Dorsey on the clarinet. In Charlotte Haldane’s I Bring Not Peace (96), it is played by James Dowd (Malcolm Lowry) to Dennis Carling (Paul Fitte).
25:5. truckin’: backing up a soloist on the piano.
25:16. semaphore: there is method in the madness, whatever the shift of key signature from E to F might imply, for “E” in semaphore is signalled by the left hand extended straight (3 o’clock); and “M” requires the left hand dropping (4:30), with the right assuming a similar position (7:30). See also #37:21.
25:26. ah seen de whales: the final victory is to Mr. Quattrass, who usurps even the Moby Dick theme and blends it into his own. This verse may have been suggested by the “whales in the sea” in the Titanic song, line 31 (see #23:7).
VII
26:2a. like his father’s study: a potentially traumatic detail that is not in other versions of the text (see #4:18); whereas much of the trauma (the mother/nurse who beat Lawhill with brambles, images of rebirth) of The Last Address was eliminated on subsequent revision.
26:2b. white robe … phantoms: a ghostly shadow from the end of the first chapter of Moby Dick: “one grand hooded phantom, like a snowhill in the air.” More appropriately, a sentiment from chapter XLII, “The Whiteness of the Whale”: “And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; our ghosts rising in milk-white fog ….” There are similar images in Poe’s “Dreamland” and in the last lines of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (Rick Asals to Chris Ackerley, personal correspondence). Sherrill Grace makes a broad comparison between the ward and Dr. Caligari’s cabinet in the scene that follows, noting that the mad doctor there wears a white coat (31); this, however, is less prominent in Swinging the Maelstrom than in previous versions of the novella.
26:6. Immigration’s on your tail: Bellevue was a public institution, a City Hospital, and visitors were subject to periodic checks upon their entitlement to treatment. Lowry was in the United States on a visitor’s permit and therefore not entitled to free treatment. Moreover, by taking it he was putting himself at risk of being extradited. Eric Estorick recalled Lowry being very angry about this and the thought that he might have to go back to England (in Bowker, Malcolm Lowry Remembered 105). Here, Bill Plantagenet is somewhat evasive about his right to be in the country, but his cousin Philip, having originally overlooked the matter, is at this point well aware of the problem.
26:32. How’re the horrors … : The Last Address (LA 136ff) at this point has an exchange in which Lawhill demonstrates all the symptoms of the condition that should have kept him in the ward; in Swinging the Maelstrom the more dramatic point concerns the reluctant recognition of the difference between himself, playing at being crazy, and the real patients (see #27:15).
26:33. wyvern: in heraldry, a chimerical winged dragon with a barbed serpent-like tail; the private reference is to the poem “We Sit Unhackled Drunk and Mad to Edit” (CP #315.1–4), which begins:
Notions of freedom are tied up with drink
Our ideal life contains a tavern
Where man may sit and talk of or just think
All without fear of the nighted wyvern.
27:4. that poor old man: Lowry’s broader intention in the novella was to depict the inmates as souls with heightened consciousness, and to have the protagonist undergo a transformation of his feelings from self-absorption towards a love for his fellows, in a way not possible when sane. See #37:29–30: “the poor old men.”
27:15. Christ in the Passion Play: the meaning is clarified in “Oberammergau” (CP #226), a poem that refers to the Passion Play performed every ten years (except during the War) in a small Bavarian village that has maintained the tradition since 1634. The poem tells of meeting one who has got drunk with Christ (the actor playing the role in the play), who told him to “trust no man who is not always drunk,” on the grounds that there was no excuse for sobriety, saving war alone. The striking image, repeated in Dark as the Grave (94) and Under the Volcano (181), is that of the actor getting down from his cross, to get drunk on Pilsener and/or to return to his hotel room at night. Here, the detail constitutes a moment of truth as Bill Plantagenet accepts the crucial difference between himself and his friends in the ward, that between genuine suffering and playing at the same.
27:28–29. we’d have to separate you two: in his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:502), Lowry elaborates on what might have become more prominent had the text been revised: that the psychiatrist of The Last Address (“named Claggart, after the homosexual in Billy Budd”) is probably that way inclined, and wrongly suspects “Lawhill” of a quasi-homosexual relationship with a juvenile delinquent. There is no suggestion of this in Swinging the Maelstrom.
28:2. foundered genius: an image subverted by its source in Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (see #5:4). Plantagenet here acts as advocate for Garry, yet to stand trial.
28:19a. the “Tashetego Blues”: in imitation of “The Tishomingo Blues,” a jazz piece from 1917; but here an original composition, referring to the American Indian harpooner in Moby Dick whose final defiant act as the Pequod sinks is to nail a red banner to the top of its mast. In like manner, the “Daggoo Stomp” refers to Daggoo, third among the Pequod’s harpooners, a “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion-like tread.”
28:19b. chants nègres!: from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (l.221): “Veut on des chants nègres, des danses de houris?” This sentiment precedes the wish to vanish, to dive in search of the ring (see #4:31). Rimbaud’s conclusion (l.222) is implied: “Décidement, nous sommes hors du monde” (“Decidedly, we are outside the world”).
28:23. Garry’s stories: in his Lunar Caustic proposal, Lowry notes that in The Last Address “Lawhill is partly talking about himself when trying to present Garry’s case to the psychiatrist.” At this point in Swinging the Maelstrom Bill is arguing himself out of the “coldly shocking” impact of Philip’s analysis (27:7) in such a way as to condition his initial retreat from the world when he leaves the Hospital, before he comes back to an acceptance of his situation.
29:1. degeneration: as Martin Bock has argued persuasively, underlying this word is an entire theory of horror, arising from Lowry’s reading of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895) and informed by his reading of Conrad, particularly Heart of Darkness (see #21:6 & #29:25). This is more obvious in The Last Address than in Swinging the Maelstrom, but the horror of syphilitic and psychological decline is not far from the surface even here. Bock discusses the Victorian notion of “moral insanity” and shows how Plantagenet, like the Consul, has poisoned his genius with alcohol and hastened the degeneration of his mind. The Farolito, he points out, resembles the Ward as a degenerate setting of malformed characters, and like the Consul, Plantagenet exemplifies the characteristics of what Nordau classifies as a “higher degenerate”: impulsiveness, egoism, and “the cardinal vice of the degenerate,” mysticism, a state of mind in which he perceives inexplicable relations among phenomena, which he seeks to unveil by a dark power, but which (in the words of William James) is associated with “delusional insanity” and “paranoia.” In reworking The Last Address Lowry clearly wished to rescue from the horror those characters with “a sort of vision, a vision of rebirth” (see 28:32), but in so doing he excised many of the more “degenerate” passages, and thus rendered the theme (and with it the novella) in some respects less compelling.
29:5. The glass tower: see #13:16.
29:9. the Cunard: there is no ship by this name, but the Liverpool-based Cunard White Star Line was the best-known of the various trans-Atlantic shipping companies. Their passenger liners, excepting the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, were named after Roman provinces ending in “ia” (the Aquitania, the Franconia, the Mauretania, etc).
29:22–23. Goodyear Tires: the Goodyear Tire and Rubber company is one of the largest of its kind, and since 1925 their blimps have been a widely-recognised advertising icon. The Consul, however, suffers “a touch of the goujeers” (UTV 73), which implies either venereal disease or “some undefined malefic agency” (Ackerley & Clipper #73.3).
29:24. Fury: an echo of Fritz Lang’s film, Fury (1936).
29:25. the horrors: the echo of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is present if somewhat muted, but the word is repeated several times in the next few lines. In The Last Address (LA 128:18–19) the comparison is more demanding, Lawhill asking Dr Claggart: “Can’t you see its horror, the horror, of man’s uncomplaining acceptance of his own degeneration … !” As Benham points out (62), a major difference between The Last Address and Swinging the Maelstrom is Philip’s character, as compared with that of Claggart, with respect to his experience of the horror.
29:27. his watch: unlike Plantagenet, Philip cannot hear “the sound of ticking” (see #3:22).
29:29. Christ’s descent into hell: on Easter Saturday, between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, Christ is said to have descended into hell, where He did battle with Satan and rescued the righteous confined there.
29:30. featherless into the abyss: the fall of Icarus as an image of nescience, as in Lowry’s poem “Doctor Usquebaugh” (CP #28.11–14), with its dream of love, and love of the pit:
Whose abyss is a womb shall not deny
A wintry plunge to nescient ecstasy,
Unsheathed entrance to the spirit’s Tarquin,
But featherless and free from overt din ....
29:37a. bushmills: the name of the Irish whiskey used as a punning variant of “the wheels,” i.e., the DT’s or “shakes,” when things go round. In The Last Address (LA 114:6) the list includes “the wheeling bushmills” and “Orange Bitters,” but also “the louse of conscience.” The latter indicates that Lowry had not yet made the connection, as he would later in Under the Volcano (218) and La Mordida, between rats, remorse and the agenbite of inwit (Ackerley & Clipper #218.7).
29:37b. orange bitters: punning on “bitter orange” (a soft drink), with the suggestion of deep retching.
30:5. whispering: the popular song “Whispering,” words by Malvin Schonberger, music by John Schonberger, recorded by Paul Whiteman and his Ambassador Orchestra in Camden, New Jersey, August 1920; coupled with “The Japanese Sandman” it sold more than two million copies. Both songs are used throughout Lowry’s screenplay of Tender Is the Night.
30:6–7. the scarlet snowshoe: referring back to the images of blood in Philip’s previous speech; but in Lowry’s poem “Comfort” (CP #189.1–3) the phrase is used as a synonym of the shakes: “You are not the first man to have the shakes / The wheels, the horrors, to wear the scarlet / snowshoe ….” The tone there is identical to this part of the novella, accentuating the rhyme of “lying” and “dying.” This image does not appear in The Last Address.
30:8. the fury, the anguish, the remorse: an echo of Baudelaire’s “Réversibilité,” to which Lowry alludes in the Consul’s similar nightmare at the beginning of chapter 10 of Under the Volcano:
Ange plein de gaieté, connaissez-vous l’angoisse,
La honte, les remords, les sanglots, les ennuis,
Et les vagues terreurs de ces affreuses nuits …
(“Angel full of gaiety, do you know the anguish? The shame, the remorse, the tears, the desolations, and the vague terrors of these frightful nights?”) The presence of the “angel” in the poem “Comfort” (see #30:6–7) confirms this speculation.
30:9. brownstone: reddish-brown sandstone used for building houses in New York, with overtones of bourgeois respectability, but throughout The Last Address associated with “brimstone.” According to Lewis Mumford (328), while whole new parts of the city were “exulting in the ugliness of brownstone fronts,” Twenty-Sixth Street was largely red-brick. Melville’s house, with its muddy-yellow exterior, had a “brownstone trim” (326).
30:12a. morning … midnight: a hint of Georg Kaiser’s Von Morgen bis Mitternachts (1917), the sombre story of a bank clerk whose break from civilization leads to suicide. In 1920 it was made into a German expressionist film, directed by Carl Heinz Martin (Cinema 249). In a letter to Clemens ten Holder, Lowry claimed to have had a minor hand in the production of this play during his time at Cambridge (CL 2:374).
30:12b. the gulf: beneath everything, the “gouffre” of Baudelaire, which is an image of the abyss in the heart of man (see #14:5). Compare the Consul’s sentiment (UTV 130): “Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the damned thing ….”
30:13. like a woman: an echo of the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Marlow’s sense of the darkening “horror” as he confronts the Intended, her figure blended into that of the old woman Plantagenet saw earlier in the day, trying to post a letter (see #4:12).
30:19a. Death Avenue: the popular name of 11th Avenue, along the waterfront, where regular traffic shared the roadway with the freight trains.
30:19b. Alarçon: Pedro Antonio Alarcón (1833–1891), Spanish novelist and statesman who went to Morocco as a war correspondent in 1859 and published his experiences as Diario de un testigo de la guerra de Africa (1861). He was appreciated as a writer of novelettes and clever short tales, but the story referred to here is his first and most popular success, El Final de Norma (1855), translated by Mrs. F. J. A. Darr (New York: A. Lovell, 1891) as Brunhilde, or The Last Act of Norma. Mrs. Darr had the year before translated another of his tales, El amigo de la muerte (The Friend of Death). In La Mordida (35), and in an unfinished poem beginning “Elsinore was the battlements of Oaxaca” (CP #439), Lowry mentions “Alarcon,” but there the reference is to Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (1581–1639), the Golden Age dramatist who was born in Mexico and spent much time in Taxco.
30:21a. puzzle: Fr. pucelle, “a maid”; an obsolete term for a worn-out drab.
30:21b. a letter to me: in his marginal revisions to The Last Address (15-4:60), Lowry elaborates: “What was in that terrible letter? What was the address on the envelope? Who was it for? Was it for him? But he would fool them all. The world would think that this was his last address, but it would not be so.” The image of the old woman posting the letter has thus for Lowry’s imagination, as in his revisions he worked towards a more positive ending, a deeper resonance than might obviously appear.
30:37. Melville’s house: see #11:29–30. Lewis Mumford calls the house “a refuge from the city outside” (326).
VIII
31:18. The wind!: compare Ultramarine (66): “The wind! The wind!”; and Lowry’s 1936 poem (CP #72) that begins: “Now we have considered these things.” Both passages contemplate a number of simple images, both beautiful and appalling, and the poem concludes with deliberate understatement: “Since all we know is that the wind is good / And at the end the sun is what it is.” The scene that follows could be a meditation upon that sentiment, its tone in Swinging the Maelstrom very different from the tempest-tossed agony of the protagonist in the earlier versions. The suggestion is equally chapter CXIX of Moby Dick, “The Candles,” with its description of the tempestuous heavens opening and the sense of omniscience experienced by Ishmael as he watches, and the image of Melville as described by Lewis Mumford (330), peering from his prison of the Customs House through the pall on the river outside and seeing poignantly into his own position. Lowry wished this scene to be both beautiful and impressive, and the numerous manuscript versions testify to the care that entered into the composition of the cosmic conflict that is yet the internal one. A marginal note instructs (15-4:67): “Get in the simile of the rolling river of the eternal mind.”
31:19. the four corners of the earth: see Revelation 7:1: “And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow.” Perhaps, too, a suggestion of Donne’s “At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow,” with its sense of despair yet impassioned plea: “Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good / As if thou hads’t sealed my pardon with thy blood.” This is in keeping with the prophetic sense of the passage, with retrospective respect to World War II: the deluge is coming, and no one but himself can see it (Binns 26).
31:33–32:1. this park: presumably, Bellevue South Park, just west of the hospital, and in the 1930s part of the wider Bellevue complex; but with a suggestion of Gramercy Park (see #11:29–30), only a few blocks from Bellevue; its name (“God’s Mercy”) echoes the sense of “some green niche of Paradise” (32:12) and Lowry’s desire for a positive ending.
32:3–5. a rainbow … hope: compare Melville’s poem “Immolated,” as cited by Lewis Mumford (347), in the context of the older Melville during the first days of his release from the asylum of the Customs Office (the phrasing is Mumford’s: 329), cheated of outer sustenance, and finding himself equally lacking of inner support:
Children of my happier prime
When one yet lived with me and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
32:35. a lost moment with God: a vision like that of Ahab, in chapter LI of Moby Dick, throughout the tempest standing in a fixed position, gazing dead to windward. Or, perhaps, the spirit of Melville, in his own surrounds. In a marginal note to The Last Address (15-4:68) Lowry commented: “He was the unknown American, awaiting his tryst with disaster, with triumph.”
32:36. a yellow awning: in earlier versions of the novella the awning is blue, and so accentuates the earlier blue and white pattern of innocence (see #12:1) as Plantagenet gazes out at the peaceful scene of blue and white boats moored near the wharf. Compare Dana Hilliot’s moment of peace in Ultramarine (65), in his blue and white pyjamas, and the soft white curtains “bellying” inward.
33:3. out of their bondage: the biblical echo is that of the Children of Israel delivered out of the land of Egypt.
33:6. drunkard’s rigadoon: a rigadoon is a quick happy dance, originating in Provence. In the manuscript of Dark as the Grave, where he would use the phrase as a title of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944), Lowry noted “Zola.” The reference is to the ending of L’Assommoir, which depicts the drunkard Coupeau, in the hospital-asylum of Sainte-Anne, dancing in a delirious convulsion until after four days he collapses, his feet continuing to move in a spastic rhythm terminated only by his death.
33:7. luminously gliding: as Melville’s white shark, from his “Commemorative of Naval Victory”; but cited from Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville (3, 304).
33:21. part of himself: in the words of the Consul (UTV 362), “did not each correspond, in a way he couldn’t understand yet obscurely recognized, to some faction of his being?” Here “obscurely” hints at such correspondence.
33:23. à fuir, là bas: Fr. “to flee (far) away.” The phrase alludes to Mallarmé’s poem “Brise marine” where the poet, weary of the present, dreams of a sea voyage on a tramp steamer, a metaphor for another reality: “Fuir là-bas fuir! Je sens que les oiseaux sont ivres / D’être parmis l’écume inconnue et les cieux!” (“To flee, far off, to flee! I feel that the birds / Are drunk to be amid strange spray and the heavens”).
33:33. degeneration: see #29:1; here, the sense of an inverted mysticism is to the fore.
34:7. Electric numbers: those of the switchboard indicating bells of the various rooms. In Swinging the Maelstrom Lowry dropped “come” from the previous “Come 7: Come 11” (LA 152:5; 153:29). These numbers are taken from Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage (85), with reference to the Pleiades, “mystical seven … Come seven—come eleven; everything all sixes and sevens.” The phrasing derives from craps, where a player making a “come bet” hopes to roll a natural seven or eleven on the first roll and win the game automatically. Compare, too, Hart Crane’s “Virginia,” from The Bridge: “Gone seven—gone eleven, / And I’m still waiting you—.”
34:19. The old man looked at him: as Benham notes (63), in acknowledging the truth of what Philip has said, Bill has failed to live up to the spirit of his promise to Garry and Mr. Kalowsky, and for the first time a false note enters their relationship; this is detected by both the old man and the young boy.
35:6. when the derrick goes: a recurrent image of disaster in Lowry’s poetry: see “the boatmen swing their lanterns” (CP #99); “Outside was the roar of the sea and the darkness” (CP #105); and “Joseph Conrad” (CP #118). It is also used in his Tender Is the Night script (240). The image derives from Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On (120), with an assist from Aiken’s Blue Voyage (240).
35:16. a poor trembling old man: this old man, in The Last Address (LA 152:19–22 & 155:5–8), is said to be in eternal disgrace because he had eaten two dinners and used his bed as a toilet, on account of which he covers his head in a gray blanket and groans.
35:20. Bob Ingersoll: Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), “the great agnostic” (one of the first to use this word with pride). He was a successful lawyer, a well-known Republican orator, and a speaker and writer who wielded considerable influence through his lectures, pamphlets and books, which were mostly directed against Christianity.
35:21. Police Megoff: in The Last Address (LA 156:30 & 159:14) he is named “Macleary,” but in revising this passage (15-4:74) Lowry crossed out that name and wrote “McGoff.” There is a sailor called this on the Oedipus Tyrannus; his name at one point is (mis)spelt “Megoff” (Ultramarine 56). Perhaps he is Melville’s “invisible police officer of the Fates,” as invoked in Moby Dick (chapter I), by Lewis Mumford (41), and throughout In Ballast to the White Sea.
35:32–33. the sanitarium of death: a suggestion of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which forms an analogy to the psychiatric ward; Lowry would use this parallel in his screenplay of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, much of which is set in a Swiss sanitarium.
35:33. tantivy: a flourish of clouds.
35:36. Fall River: an industrial port and city in Massachusetts, on Mount Hope Bay, not far from New Bedford. Both towns are linked to New York by a regular steamboat service. In The Lost Weekend (Jackson 49), written long after Lowry had described his scene, Don Birnam anticipates or recalls a three-week bender, perhaps ending up in a Fall River boat. In the screenplay of Tender Is the Night (157), Dick is seen sitting on the deck of an old sidewheeler of the Fall River Line, “fortuitously” named the Providence, which is passing (“as it does”) Bellevue Hospital (see #11:26).
36:1. How delighted Ruth had been: in his Lunar Caustic proposal for rewriting the novella, Lowry states that through the wakening of parental affection (for Garry), the protagonist will reawaken his love and tenderness for his wife, that sentiment till then overlaid by the “demonic and infantile attractions of the bottle.” Little of this is here present, where Plantagenet’s misery is made worse by the memory of past happiness.
36:22. panthers: mentioned in “Elephant and Colosseum” (see #7:33), but included here with an awareness of Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre: “Mélant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères” (“Mixing flowers with the eyes of panthers”). This line is cited in The Last Address (LA 134:26–27) as an expression (Lawhill claims) of Garry’s craving for freedom. The echoes of Rimbaud in that text are much more sustained.
36:23. none save the carpenter: in “Elephant and Colosseum” (Hear Us O Lord 166), the carpenter claims the elephant deliberately “tweaked” him, and like the rest of the crew refuses to go forward; the job of keeper’s assistant devolves on Cosnahan alone. The agony and anguish of the animals (not mentioned in the short story) epitomize here the fate of the inmates.
36:24. the hurricane: in “Elephant and Colosseum” (Hear Us O Lord 164), the ship is described as going through “the tail end of a typhoon,” and at one point the elephant escapes.
36:34. pandemonium: in Milton’s Paradise Lost (I.756), the “high Capital” of Satan and venue of his council. The word insinuates a link with the end of Under the Volcano, the two visions differing in detail but alike in tone.
37:21. “To make X”: the semaphore is more confused than earlier (see #25:16), yet something is almost discernible: the hand position for “D” (12 o’clock, above the head) is necessary for “X,” and there is a strange symmetry between the various positions for “AX” and “DH”; yet taken as a whole dey makes no sense, no sah.
37:22. heliograph: a device that sends messages by flashing the sun’s rays from a mirror.
37:24. orange and green lights: compare the opening of chapter 11 of Under the Volcano: “Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft ….”
37:29–30. the poor old men: in The Last Address (LA 114:29–37) this astonishing vignette appears much earlier. An intermediate draft (15-3:20) adds an explicit comment: “Lawhill, watching them, gradually understood the meaning of death, not as a sudden dispatch of violence, but as a function of life.” Without the comment, and as a final vision, the image is the more chilling.
38:4. It only looks like spring: Garry’s last words, Lowry insisted in his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:505), were precisely right; he could “play the record,” so to speak, and feel, yes, that’s exactly what Garry and Mr. Kalowsky did say: “They couldn’t have said anything else. That still moves me, just as when I wrote it. That has authority. For all that the record’s got cracked a bit, that’s a good break.” These comments are made in the context of a discussion of the jazz rhythms of the novella, Lowry trying to find the words to say just how these find expression in the text, which in the end has to be considered as “a sort of jazz record.”
IX
38:14. a packet of stamps: designed to create Plantagenet’s “queer canceled feeling.” In The Last Address the word was “eclipsed,” but in revision (15-4:88) Lowry wrote in the more appropriate “cancelled.” Details of the stamps, however, are less precise:
the Straits Settlements: a British Crown Colony, which included parts of the Malay peninsula and islands off its coast; it issued stamps from 1867 but none features a tiger. Lowry is confusing it with the Federated Malay States, which in 1900 issued a series of small stamps featuring a tiger. This was the standard issue throughout the region until 1936, when the individual states issued their own.
elephants from India: another oddity, for no elephant appeared on an Indian stamp (and rarely on stamps from the native states) until 1949. See, however, #17:18.
a Senegalese variety: Senegal was a French colony in West Africa, incorporated into French West Africa in 1944, and becoming an autonomous state in 1958. There is no such issue from Senegal, but an extensive series depicting an African climbing a tree was issued by Dahomey in 1913; Lowry appears to have confused the two countries.
a duck-billed platypus: a slight anachronism, given the 1936 setting, as the only possibility is the 9d brown of the 1937 issue that commemorated the new monarch George VI. In the 1936 version of The Last Address (LA 176:9–10) this stamp was preceded by an impossible “kiwi from the Cook Islands.”
Obangui-Tchari-Tchad: one of three colonies into which the French Congo was divided in 1910 (with Gabon and Middle Congo); later (1937) incorporated into French Equatorial Africa, then (1958) the Central African Republic. The “terrible tiger” is a leopard, a 1907 Middle Congo issue (various denominations) overprinted “Oubangui-Chari-Tchard” (sic) in 1915. The name intrigued Lowry, and is mentioned in his poem “On Reading Edmund Wilson’s Remarks about Rimbaud” (CP #68.21): “And monstrous wives from Obangui-Tchari-Tchad.”
38:27. a new patient: this addition is designed to accentuate a link and a line to a non-imaginary, non-lunar outer world (see 39:6). This is the choice Plantagenet first rejects (he returns to the tavern and the bottle), then accepts in the ending to follow (he accepts the Mar Cantábrico).
39:2. his right address: an echo of the previous title for the novella, The Last Address, and with that the suggestion of Melville’s death.
39:6. a lunar world: one of mutability and madness. The word may confirm Lowry’s later statement that even at this point he had the title Lunar Caustic in mind.
39:7. Firmin: an echo of the Consul of Under the Volcano and of the old prospector and veteran of World War I in Lowry’s short story “June the 30th, 1934” (Psalms and Songs 36–48). The point of connection is the sense of a fulcrum, a moment of “infirmity” in which the world (Plantagenet’s world) could teeter either way. One “John Firmin” is cited as shooting an albatross in “Through the Panama” (30). This and the passage that follows were written at a much later stage; its inclusion represents Lowry’s determination, in his projected revision of the novella, both to affirm a new outwardness in his protagonist’s attitude, and to link the novella by such means to his other works.
39:22a. the Literary Digest: a popular middle-brow digest of the day, founded in New York in 1890 and blending current events with humour. It was absorbed by Time in 1938, consequent to and as a consequence of making itself look foolish in 1936 by predicting Roosevelt’s defeat (he won 46 of the 48 states).
39:22b. Variety: then, as now, a popular “show-biz” magazine.
39:25. the Bellevue Hospital: in a holograph insert written in the winter of 1951–52 Lowry accidentally named the place “Belvedere” (like the Belvedere Castle in New York, north of Central Park). Lowry stayed in the Hotel Belvedere on Capri in July 1948, and sent a note to Albert Erskine in which he related the name to both Bellevue and the Bella Vista (CL 2:131).
39:31. And so it goes: in his Lunar Caustic proposal, Lowry noted: “his leaving is not a release—as the patients think—but a further punishment.” The language and imagery here reverts to something like that of Baudelaire, many of whose poems feature the experience of unreal encounters on haunted streets.
40:9. returned to him: in the 1939 version of The Last Address, along with his little money and his clothes (LA 179:13), Lawhill is given back his copy of Moby Dick, which he takes with him into the tavern, and tries in vain to read.
40:13. Melville’s house: see #11:29:30.
40:14. Zimmerman: the German word means “carpenter,” which may or may not possess any Christian significance to Plantagenet (“humble” may be indicative of faith). The details presumably reflect what Lowry himself saw when he visited the location. In The Last Address (LA 144:11–13), Lawhill comments: “In place of the brownstone houses now there’s only a carpenter’s shop with the legend ‘Zimmermann’ … the name of a philosopher that influenced Melville.”
40:15a. d’Alarçon: an intimation of death (see #30:19b).
40:15b. Strange: a recurrent word throughout Lowry’s writing, most noticeably in Under the Volcano, for moments in which a character notices a correspondence between his life and some other manifestation of the Law of Series; in a word, coincidence or synchronicity.
40:15c. He entered a church: at the end of his Lunar Caustic proposal, Lowry affirms his intention of ending the revised work, and thus paralleling that of Dark as the Grave, in a Catholic church, and with a prayer for guidance and for help for himself and others—but with the poignant agony that his protagonist “is a Protestant whose soul probably cries for confession.” More immediate, however, is the complex agony of Plantagenet’s noticing Christ being offered a drink.
40:24. The father shook his head: as earlier (see #4:18), a figure of parental authority whom Plantagenet defies, elated by the whisky, but whose disapproval registers in the coming moment of choice. This episode is not in The Last Address.
40:26–27. he shunned the lovers: intimating the choice, so common in Lowry’s writing, between love and the bottle. Yet having shunned the lovers (compare “Romeo and Juliet,” 3:10), Plantagenet registers “signs” that question his decision (“Broken Blossoms … Dead End”) and force him to confront the issue (“No cover at any time”). Responsibility cannot be so simply “waved” aside, despite the ironic juxtaposition of “World’s loveliest girls” and “Larger, more modern.”
40:30a. Broken Blossoms: D. W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms (1919), the silent-movie story of a young girl abused by her alcoholic father.
40:30b. Dead End: either William Wyler’s 1937 film, depicting New York’s dead-beat kids of the East Side; or Sidney Kingsley’s 1935 Broadway production by that title, in which the kids had earlier appeared.
40:33. “womb,” then “tomb”: an elementary Freudian rhyme, the train itself related to a Freudian death-dream (UTV 281): the impulse towards embryonic retreat is the movement towards death.
40:35. the El: the “Elevated Railway”; the name given to the New York subway where it appears above the ground.
41:6–7. Whale steaks: probably a whisky-stimulated hallucination (5c was the standard price of a coca-cola, to accompany a burger); but, in conjunction with the white hamburger stand, an intimation that his quest is not yet over. Compare Moby Dick, chapter LXV, where various aspects of “The Whale as a Dish” are considered.
41:10. feeling he was being watched: a common paranoia for the Lowry protagonist. In Under the Volcano (174), the Consul feels “the polygonous proustian stare of imaginary scorpions,” the sudden sense of being watched by somebody nearby. At this point in Swinging the Maelstrom, the text moves to the ending of The Last Address to incorporate the movement to the obscurest corner of the bar, without, however, the striking final image in that version of being “curled up like an embryo,” or, like Bartleby, beyond all human sympathy and no longer to be reached. For a more detailed consideration of the crucial difference in emphasis, see #42:24, the final note.
41:13. world of ghosts: compare “Lines Written on Reading Dostoevski” (CP #96.1–2): “The world of ghosts moves closer every hour / Knowing we belong to no life’s order.” The notion of crime and punishment is thus insinuated, in readiness for the ending. Here, the impulse is towards the sea, and in this respect it resembles two poems following, “The Roar of the Sea and the Darkness” (CP #97) and “The Western Ocean” (CP #117), in which Lowry prays to his ghost for “a vision of the sea.” In the first of these the desire is for oblivion, and the ghost nods to grant that wish “to lose his only grief.” In the revision the ghost shakes his head, and points out gravely that having had such a wish he has “landlocked” his heart and so must continue, claimed by unrest. The writing (1936) and rewriting (1940) of the two poems broadly parallels the transition from The Last Address to Swinging the Maelstrom, with respect to (as in Dostoevski) the awakening of remorse and the need for atonement.
41:16. some heroic sacrifice: Hugh in chapters 6 and 9 of Under the Volcano suffers from the same impulse, and while the impulse is seriously meant, the attendant ironies nevertheless mildly qualify the decision.
41:23. fragments of glass: a return to the infantile. Compare Under the Volcano (292), the Consul’s vision of breaking glass, the smashing of the thousands of bottles and glasses in which he had hidden himself, in one of which, perhaps, lay the solitary clue to his identity. There is a similar sentiment and reaction in the poem “Delirium in Vera Cruz” (CP #27), where the poet, looking in the mirror and asking where has the tenderness gone, is seized by a sudden rage as he sees the obscene vision of himself, the “ghost of love” which he reflected, and smashes all the glass in the room (“Bill: $50”). Plantagenet, more fortunate than the Consul or the poet, has here a sudden glimpse of that “solitary clue.”
41:25–26. an atrocious vision of Garry: atrocious, because seared with agony: that of the pain Garry had caused to the little girl in cutting her throat with such a bottle (“It was only a little scratch”), but also the terrible pain of his love for Garry, and through that vision the possibility of some kind of redemption for himself.
41:35. water: with the blood, a symbol of redemption that yet does not lose its mundane reality; as in the hymn “Rock of Ages”: “Let the water and the blood / From thy riven side that flowed / Rock of ages cleft for me / Let me hide myself in thee.” The hymn is partly quoted in La Mordida (132; 355, n.VI.43).
42:1. Dick: as in Moby. Any anticipation of Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver is speculative, but given Lowry’s later writing of the screenplay of Tender Is the Night, such speculation, misleading or otherwise, is difficult to avoid. For Lowry, the association of Dick Diver with Moby Dick was inevitable.
42:6. like a jewelled dagger: compare the poem “A ship stands drawn like a jewelled dagger” (CP #290), with its final image, unstated here, of crucifixion at the masthead.
42:12. Acushnet: the original of the Pequod, the whaler on which Melville sailed from New Bedford for the South Seas on an 18-month voyage (January 1841 to July 1842), and which formed Ishmael’s blubbery education, his Yale College and his Harvard (Moby Dick, chapter 24). Lowry apparently believed that it was sunk while Melville was writing Moby Dick. The misunderstanding (“Of course not”) nevertheless ratifies the identification with Melville that he has just affirmed and its siren becomes a clarion call.
42:14. Mar Cantábrico: the ship is named for the Bay of Biscay, the sea of the Cantabri, who inhabited the northern coast of Spain in ancient times. She was in real life a Spanish ship that took arms and planes for the Republicans from the United States to Spain, setting sail in January 1938 just one day before a Neutrality Law was passed by Congress, forbidding such shipments. The ship set sail for Vera Cruz to pick up further cargo (here, presumably, Hugh Firmin will join her), then headed for Spain; she was captured by the Nationalists, the Spaniards in her crew executed, and the arms used against the Republicans. In his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:504) Lowry adds, parenthetically, that “the Mar Cantabrico, alas, will be captured by Fascists.” The voyage of the Mar Cantábrico is the model for that of the S.S. Noemijolea in Under the Volcano (103), this being Lowry’s way of intimating that Hugh’s chances of survival are dubious. The prospects of Bill Plantagenet, should he board, are thus equally doubtful.
42:16. trimmers: coal-passers, the least prestigious members of a ship’s crew, workers in the “stokehole”; their duties include hauling coal to the furnaces, dumping ashes and chipping the scale from the boilers. For Lowry, a recurrent Dantesque image, from Ultramarine and In Ballast to the White Sea to his screenplay of Tender Is the Night, of the estranged soul. The word appears in various English translations of Canto III of the Inferno, where Dante encounters a multitude of the wretched chasing after a large banner, those who lived without infamy or praise, neither bad enough to be damned nor worthy of being saved.
42:22. the old alma—or was it stabat?—mater: responding to the “Cantab” of Cantábrico, Plantagenet’s alma mater or university (see #6:30) with the suggestion of stabat mater, a musical composition on the sorrows of Mary at the foot of the Cross. The ritual of washing the blood from his hands (Pontius Pilate meets Lady Macbeth?) intimates that the decision is intended by Lowry as an act of atonement, if not redemption.
42:23. his ship: an echo of B. Traven’s The Death Ship (1926), wherein the anonymous protagonist, stripped of possessions and identity, signs on the Yorikke, a death ship that the owners intend to sink for the insurance money, and enters a world where his name and being are erased forever. The identical image is used in Lowry’s poem “The Roar of the Sea and the Darkness” (CP #97), which in turn invokes Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On. This ending may also echo the opening of Moby Dick, Ishmael’s contention that whenever his hypos get the better of him he quietly takes to the ship.
42:24. his night journey: in Jungian psychology, symbolic of the lonely spiritual pilgrimage towards rebirth and purification, during which the initiate is acquainted with the nature of death but which in the end is a journey of renunciation and atonement, in a spirit of compassion. Lowry noted in his Lunar Caustic proposal that these words (“if one forgets their Jungian connotation”) would make an excellent ending. Such an archetypal voyage was part of Lowry’s steerage from the earliest writing, and as early as 1940 he contemplated writing a novel entitled Night Journey Across the Sea (CL 1:295); but the theme found full expression only in his screenplay of Tender Is the Night, in which the entire ending involves Dick Diver’s “night journey through the unconscious” in such a way as to suggest “a sort of rebirth” (Cinema 174).
A similar hope is kindled here, despite the ironic intimation of a death at sea. The ending to Swinging the Maelstrom differs radically from that of The Last Address, most noticeably in the introduction of the Mar Cantábrico theme. It replaces the image of the protagonist retreating into the intimate darkness of a tavern, moving drink in hand to the “very obscurest corner of the bar, where, curled up like an embryo, he could not be seen at all”; in the words of Ronald Binns (27), “a passive victim of history rather than an active transformer of it.”
In his letter to Robert Giroux (CL 2:503–04), Lowry comments that Lawhill seems merely to return to the womb, “fully identified with Garry,” whereas Plantagenet makes up his mind to fight, “as he thinks,” for humanity “in the shape of the Spanish Loyalists.” Day analyzes this difference (209–11), suggesting that the Swinging the Maelstrom version is more optimistic in that it “resolves to join the world”; and he relates this (as a biographer) to the change in Lowry’s circumstances. Optimism seems the wrong emphasis (see #42:14 and #42:23), for it is likely to be a short voyage.
The revised Swinging the Maelstrom is more tightly written than The Last Address, but it differs in psychological intensity, and its success is of a different order. Two (perhaps three) matters might be considered. First, the regression to the infantile has been set up so well in the earlier parts of the novella that the image of embryonic repose and the necessary drink becomes the emotional (if ironic) fulfillment of the previous comment that return to the presexual revives the need for nutrition. Second, the image of the Mar Cantábrico is anachronistic (the opening of the novella intimates 1936, not 1938), and “romantic” in a way that is at odds with the overall Purgatorial tone (see, however, #41:13 to #41:25–26 for a qualification of this point, in terms of Lowry’s preparation for the revised ending). Third, as a consequence of these two points, the final image of Swinging the Maelstrom, more so than the embryonic posture, demands from the reader an intimate knowledge of Lowry’s private world of symbols. In blending (or mixing) the two texts for Lunar Caustic, Margerie Lowry and Earle Birney opted for the earlier ending as being psychologically and dramatically more compelling, however much this was at odds with Lowry’s changed intentions. Lowry, quite clearly, would have wanted the revised ending, to integrate the novella with the wider theme of the unending Voyage; but he needed still to chip off some of the old rust to make the new machinery work.
ILLUSTRATION 8. Title of the 1939 version of The Last Address (15-3), part of a mock dedication that Lowry wrote on the verso of the revised opening page of chapter IX (Illustration 7, page 44; for the mock dedication to Carey, see the Introduction, page xxiv).
Chapters I to VIII of the 1936 and 1939 drafts of The Last Address are almost identical, with only a very few minor stylistic revisions appearing in the later version.
In Appendix 1 below, we have included chapters I to VIII of the 1936 version, followed by a side-by-side comparison of the 1936 and 1939 versions of the more substantially revised chapters IX and X (see page 148).