Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place was first published in the United States by J.B. Lippincott in 1961, four years after Lowry’s death. The first British edition appeared the following year from Jonathan Cape. Penguin issued a paperback version in 1969 and reprinted Hear Us O Lord in paperback with Lunar Caustic in 1979. Two of the seven stories were published in literary magazines during Lowry’s lifetime: “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession” in New World Writing in 1953 and “The Bravest Boat” in Partisan Review in 1954. A further three of the stories were published in magazines by Margerie Lowry after the death of her husband: “The Present Estate of Pompeii” appeared in Partisan Review in 1959, “Through the Panama” in The Paris Review in 1960 (see also, in the same issue, Harvey Breit’s essay, “Malcolm Lowry”), and “The Forest Path to the Spring” in New World Writing in 1961. “Elephant and Colosseum” and “Gin and Goldenrod” were published for the first time in the 1961 Hear Us O Lord.
A note from the publisher appeared in the original American and English editions, briefly describing the history of the text: “[Lowry] had made the notes for ‘Through the Panama’ ... on a voyage from Canada through the Canal to Europe in the autumn of 1947, after the publication of Under the Volcano. ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession,’ ‘Elephant and Colosseum,’ and ‘Present Estate of Pompeii’ were planned in Italy in 1948. These and the other stories were not actually written, however, until after Lowry and his wife returned in 1949 to British Columbia.” The publisher’s note indicated that Hear Us O Lord was nearly complete at the time of Lowry’s death—that he was “putting the final touches” on the manuscript. As a result, the note continued to explain, “The Bravest Boat” and “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession” were reprinted in Hear Us O Lord in their original published forms, while the other stories “contain[ed] Lowry’s final revisions, incorporated in the manuscript after his death by his widow, Margerie Bonner Lowry.” In fact, minor changes were made to the previously published stories. Lippincott used the Partisan Review version of “The Bravest Boat” as the copy-text but made various small changes and adopted American spelling instead of Lowry’s British-Canadian spelling. The Paris Review version of “Through the Panama” contained minor typographical errors, such as “Heironymous Bosch,” that were corrected for the Lippincott edition. The printer’s copy of Hear Us O Lord also clearly indicates that the typesetter was forced to go to considerable trouble to align the marginal text in “Through the Panama” with the main text. As a result, the 1961 “Through the Panama” is not identical to the earlier version.
Margerie Lowry’s part in the creation of Hear Us O Lord was more substantial than the publisher’s note indicated. She edited and even wrote parts of all of the stories published after Malcolm Lowry’s death. “I certainly wrote plenty of lines and scenes, when I was editing ‘The Forest Path’ and ‘Through the Panama,’” she wrote in a letter to Douglas Day in 1967.1 Day notes that “Nothing Lowry wrote after 1939 was, strictly speaking, entirely his own,” because of the extensive assistance that Margerie provided.2
The complicated history of Hear Us O Lord—which is typical of Lowry’s posthumous works—means that no definitive edition can be recreated, since a completed manuscript did not exist prior to Margerie’s editing; indeed, without her involvement, the book would not exist at all. An editor of Lowry’s text might, by examining the manuscripts for the stories, Lowry’s notes, and the letters in which he wrote of his plans for the stories, make decisions that differ from Margerie’s, but the resultant text would still not be one that Malcolm Lowry authorized. The present edition therefore follows the Lippincott version of 1961, which has, over the past four decades, acquired historical importance.
The present edition makes relatively few changes to the text—changes have been made to correct obvious errors or to clarify the sense—and preserves Lowry’s idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies, even where the text suggests a state of incompletion. His punctuation is irregular, for instance, and his Spanish is frequently inaccurate. But I have left unchanged these and other textual difficulties in order to reflect the essentially unfinished, even provisional, nature of Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. I believe that Lowry’s writing is unusually rewarding, but the rewards are inseparable from the reality that Lowry left most of his works incomplete. I have therefore tried to balance consideration for the reader with fidelity to the complex history of the book’s original publication.
1 Day 438 n.4.
2 Day 438 n.4.