Volcano … [is] a strange book and I think it makes an odd but splendid din…. [W]hat I can and could do was to write a book which put down my own reflection of the moon in my own real broken bottle. And I think I have done.
MALCOLM LOWRY TO CONRAD AIKEN, 9 APRIL 1940
The “splendid din” of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, published in 1947, was well established across numerous countries and in multiple translations by 1965, when the Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry appeared. Readers of the Selected Letters were enchanted by their moving and entertaining energy, or as Harvey Breit asserts in his introduction, by the “powerful and substantial gifts” of their “irony, erudition, manners, generosity, independence, humanity and literary taste” (419). The letters, laden with charm, wit, and good cheer, widened the “aura of genius that clung to [Lowry] during his lifetime” (Selected Letters xii, xiv). But readers were astonished too by the darkness of those letters, by the seemingly endless parade of frustrations and failures that kept on plaguing Lowry throughout his life. In particular, for the first time readers were confronted in 1965 by a setback that reverberates through the volume that we are presenting here: the astonishing list of twelve publishers that made its appearance in appendix I of the Selected Letters. Those publishers were lined up in their expression of a chilling consensus about a major text by Lowry, speaking in one voice of their rejection of this work, what we are calling The 1940 Under the Volcano.1 In 1965 readers were right to imagine too that this same list must have had devastating consequences for Lowry when he read it in a letter mailed to him from New York on 5 September 1941 by his literary agent Harold (Hal) Matson. Lowry had, after all, been developing and refining that manuscript for over three years and in June 1940 had submitted what was already his third draft.2 What readers did not learn from the 1965 volume was that, for Lowry, yet grimmer news had preceded that September 1941 notice by nearly a year: a 7 October 1940 letter from Matson that deeply altered the course of Lowry’s view of himself, of his work on his Under the Volcano project, and of the publishing world.3
For the 1965 readers of the Selected Letters, that list was but one part of a repeating pattern of troubles and defeats in Lowry’s life that included the loss by fire in 1944 of the massive draft of In Ballast to the White Sea then in his possession and concluded with Lowry’s “death by misadventure” in 1957, the latter darkly announced as the final entry in the volume.4 In 1947 Lowry had won international acclaim for his masterpiece, what might be deemed the final version of Under the Volcano, inspiring enormous admiration as a major achievement renewing the tradition established by Joyce’s Ulysses twenty-five years earlier. It is hardly surprising then that the long list of rejections by a number of New York’s finest literary presses inevitably contributed to a general disregard by readers for the version that we are publishing here. Yet a small handful of scholars did dig more deeply, recognizing important relationships between the 1940 and 1947 manuscripts. Vik Doyen, focusing during the early 1970s on the textual histories of Lowry’s main fictional texts, came to understand the development of Under the Volcano in terms of six identifiable phases, each suggesting at least the possibility of an integral manuscript. During the mid-1990s Frederick Asals, “apply[ing] the word ‘version’ to passages and chapters only, and not [except for the 1940 and 1947 texts] to the work as a whole” (Ackerley, “The Making” 75–76), came to understand Lowry’s working method in terms of blocks of text rather than entire manuscripts. Asals, of course, was indebted to Doyen’s work nearly a quarter century before but had the benefit of looking more closely at the vast amount of archival material available to him. For both Doyen and Asals there are only two “genuine ‘versions’” of the novel (Asals, The Making 395): the 1947 edition and the 1940 circulated fair copy that we are publishing here.
The few people who did examine the 1940 version of Under the Volcano inevitably read it in light of its failure in New York and the later success of the 1947 text. It is significant, too, that until very recently scholars could pay little attention to the relationship between the 1940 Under the Volcano and the major works that Lowry had underway alongside it: Swinging the Maelstrom and the long-thought-lost In Ballast to the White Sea. When we consider the 1940 text in relation to these texts—both recently published in scholarly/critical editions—we gain a new sense of the remarkable experimentation and variety of exploration that Lowry was undertaking throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. The publication of a critical edition of the 1940 Under the Volcano invites a careful examination of that work simply in its own right, just as the circumstances around Lowry’s carefully nurtured efforts to place it with a publisher encourage a closer look at that list of firms that in 1940 and 1941 so summarily rejected it. Lowry’s approach to the New York publishing world reveals a paradigm of what typified the highs and lows of his publishing efforts throughout his life. That is, much can be discerned about Lowry’s real and imagined life that for him enveloped the very act of creation.
The two-year period from the summer of 1934 (when Lowry turned twenty-five) to the summer of 1936 figured with extraordinary prominence in the fate of all of Lowry’s writing from the mid-1930s onward. These were his New York years, when he relished the role of the young Englishman abroad, eager to consummate his “love affair” with America (Bowker, Pursued 180). As part of this desire for consummation, Lowry went to considerable effort during this time to familiarize himself with the New York publishing world, investing enormous time and energy in a personal and social framework that he hoped would be stable enough to provide for him the kind of setting within which he could write as he chose, one that had the potential, in terms he in effect demanded, to offer him a close-knit and supportive community. He filled his letters with entertaining hyperbole and theatrics that conveyed his sometimes grim situation in order to secure and manage his place in the world. Projecting images of both himself and his correspondents, Lowry sought to nurture into existence a community where if others would only follow his prescription, they could come to fully understand and respect each other, in personal as well as professional terms. Always seeking to draw deeply on the close and supportive companionship of a mentor, editor, or other literary friend, Lowry hoped in the New York of 1934–1936 to ally himself with like-minded and sympathetic individuals whom he could trust and in whom he could confide in complex and complicated ways.
Along with his first wife, Jan Gabrial, Lowry attempted to piece together this social/professional community by making the rounds of New York literary parties and lunches as well as by approaching publishers directly. Such contacts, he hoped, would lay the framework for future possibilities. And indeed, it would be in part a handful of people from that world who would later sustain him during his adventures in Mexico, where he lived from the fall of 1936 to the summer of 1938, and where, shortly after his arrival, he not only found the material for his Under the Volcano project but also began to see that the latter might become “the first leaf of the triptych of a kind of drunken Divine Comedy” (Lowry, in Bowker, Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano, 32). Though he originally had planned to do so, Lowry did not return to New York. Instead he spent one year in Los Angeles (1938–1939), where Jan had taken up work after leaving Malcolm in Mexico in December 1937. He then began what was at first an enforced sojourn in Vancouver, arriving on 30 July 1939, less than three years after he had left New York. His arrival on unhappy terms in an unfriendly environment in Canada left him feeling incredibly remote from the New York world that he had tried to construct for future use.
In Canada he was cut off from direct regular communion with literary people. But his sense of strong and active associations in New York let him imagine a connection with an empathetic collaborative presence there: a kind of participant editorial voice, however remote. Lowry’s situation improved when Margerie Bonner, whom he had met in Los Angeles, came up to join him in Vancouver on 31 September 1939. She too was a writer, and a year later, after Lowry’s divorce from Jan, she would become his second wife. She was also, as Lowry’s friend Gerald Noxon later observed, “an expert typist, because if it weren’t for that fact, I don’t think Malc could ever get round to putting [his manuscript] into legible shape” (On Malcolm Lowry 29). In the fall of 1939 she immediately typed out a new copy of, first, the manuscript collection of poems, “The Lighthouse Invites the Storm,” that Lowry had underway, and, secondly, his novella, “The Last Address” (which later became Swinging the Maelstrom).5 With each successive stage of the Under the Volcano project, her contribution would become more substantive, as Noxon recalled: “Margie has helped a lot to give [the manuscript] coherence and to steer Malc off the rocks of sheer introspective ramblings to which he is naturally inclined” (On Malcolm Lowry 28). In domestic terms, as things turned out and much to their own surprise, Malcolm and Margerie were to make Vancouver and its environs their home for the next fifteen years.
Lowry’s submission of his 1940 manuscript occurred seven years after the publication of his first novel, Ultramarine (1933), and seven years before the publication of the version of Under the Volcano that the world has come to know. That its submission stands at the historical midpoint between the only two novels that he published during his lifetime signals its affiliation with the two other major works that he had underway at the time, and which he felt confident would shortly appear as part of his planned trilogy: the novella Swinging the Maelstrom and the novel In Ballast to the White Sea. The thought of these manuscripts filled Lowry with boyish glee when he discovered that his old and dear pal from his University of Cambridge days, Gerald Noxon, had returned to his native Canada in 1940. Given to “dramatizing himself” in his letters, to “narrating his life,” often histrionically so (see Grace in CL 1:xxii), Lowry flung his epistolary arms around Noxon in August 1940. He spiritedly proclaimed, if brimming with a little too much joy, that he had high hopes that what he called Lippincott and Story Press would take all his books, “5 tomes” he said with more than a little exaggeration, although he did include among those hoped-for successes a volume of poetry and one, perhaps, of short stories: “So that you see, or if you don’t see, I should point out, that with me […] it is going well” (CL 1:347). His rejoicing was undoubtedly affected by the sense of well-being that came from his revelling in the “fine wet ruin of a forest” in Dollarton where he and Margerie had just taken refuge from the city, at first in a rented cabin: “We dive from our front porch into a wild sea troughing with whales and seals. We have a boat, now diving at anchor. Everywhere there is a good smell of sea and timber and life and death and crabs” (CL 1:346). He was enjoying life with Margerie, ecstatically describing her to Noxon as a one-time “child film star […] now of age” (CL 1:347). “The baked oysters are calling!” (CL 1:348) he hooted in closing, cheerily inviting Noxon and his wife, Betty, to visit. Lowry’s jubilation was immense, for in August 1940 he had not yet considered the possibility that the New York publisher of his choice, one he imagined as an integral part of his essential and carefully cultivated literary community, might in fact utterly reject his work.
* * *
The publication of The 1940 Under the Volcano asks that we consider anew what readers since 1965 have known only as a failed manuscript, rejected by publishers for being “too cerebral, too depressing, too uncoordinated, too confusing” (Day 286). It asks us too to take account of Lowry’s own sense of what he was attempting to achieve with his 1940 text—his negotiations with both the publishing industry and with himself as an author. We begin below examining his claims, both realistic and exaggerated, that he made about his manuscript-in-progress to the American poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, who had served as his mentor a decade earlier, and who had read the first—and now lost—version of the novel when he visited Lowry in Mexico in 1937. And we take note also of Lowry’s doubts. Not least, we try to gauge the meanings he attached to his very purposefully choosing to submit his manuscript first to Story Press, a small publisher with high literary ambitions that had emerged on the literary scene when Lowry was still in New York in 1936.
In what follows, the particularities of Lowry’s 1940 vision of his Mexico material become evident. Because there is another—and particularly astounding—text, a fulfillment in a way of this one, to follow seven years later, we might take pleasure in reading this book not as a failed text, but as a uniquely restless one. The 1940 Under the Volcano is a work simultaneously fixed and fluid, closed and open, curiously subject to, and indeed in many ways desperately hoping for, its own future iterations. Of course responses to it are contingent for most readers on knowledge of that later work. Yet any who may not have read the 1947 version and have only the knowledge that that celebrated work exists now have the opportunity to read both works in the order in which Lowry wrote and submitted them. The 1940 Under the Volcano is admittedly a text written in some degree of haste, produced on the run as it were, in conditions (with drafts and fragments written from 1936 to 1940) extraordinarily bad even for Lowry. But there is much to admire in the 1940 text, including ingredients that continue to exist (though in sometimes radically new iterations) all the way through to 1947.
By 9 April 1940 Lowry was calling it “a strange book,” one that made “an odd but splendid din” (CL 1:309). Strange, odd, splendid: these are indeed apt words for describing this often unpredictable work, one that in many ways haunts the later 1947 text. It contains many pleasures and surprises, including key passages and expressions that persist to the end, which here exercise their own unique effects. Indeed, this 1940 work might be seen as an “adjustable blueprint” (an expression that Lowry would later use to describe his 1950 film script [Lowry, Notes on a Screenplay]), awaiting its adaptation by someone—a literary friend, a spiritual collaborator—who understood the still-incipient intentions of its original creator. As a blueprint it provides a good deal of the narrative base and general structure that subsequently helped Lowry over a period of more than four years (from the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1945) to move freely, deliberately, and painstakingly in the direction of the grand orchestral performance of 1947. But even as a blueprint this edition has its own sturdy features and, as the annotations by Chris Ackerley and David Large at the back of this volume so generously reveal, it contains surprising layers and depths embedded in its many symbolic and allusive gestures. Readers will find for themselves that it is a work full of many small and some large revelations. In the end, not least, its presence makes all the more visible the brilliance and mystery of the 1947 work.
Finally the appearance here of The 1940 Under the Volcano, published by University of Ottawa Press in the company of the two related volumes, Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, reconsiders Lowry’s life and career during the 1930s and early 1940s in ways readers and even most scholars are only now beginning to discern and assess. Marked as Lowry’s life was by failures, setbacks, and defeats—the grim effects of his drinking throughout the 1930s and again after 1944; the disastrous experiences in Mexico especially in 1937–1938; the divorce from his first wife, Jan Gabrial, who could not live with his alcoholism; the failed attempts in 1939 and the early 1940s at re-entry into the United States; the June 1944 fire in Dollarton that took his cabin and thousands of pages of his work; his miserable death in Ripe, Sussex, in June 1957—the publication of these three volumes reveals a creative and productive mind astonishingly active and far reaching during the period that would otherwise appear to have been submerged in an alcoholic haze. This and the other two editions invite a reconsideration of the magnitude and achievement of his ambitiousness and productivity during these years. Lowry’s regard for these three quite different texts as belonging to a single project is reinforced by the annotations in this volume and in the other two volumes in this series; they provide a sense of the extent to which these three works draw from a single sensibility: the European in the New World, eagerly trying to establish himself as a writer between the mid-1930s and early 1940s.
For Lowry work in progress ideally spawned relationships. It created sustained dialogue. And, though undoubtedly frustrating for any editor, it resisted fixity. No major text was ever finished. He was ever wary of the supposition that any of his longer written or for that matter published texts stood as his final statement. Even as late as 1951, while laying out a detailed map of his seemingly never-ending work-in-progress for his literary agent and his editor, both in New York, Lowry was suggesting that the 1947 Under the Volcano was only a “more or less finished novel, that has already been published, but which is a cub that can still stand a little further licking” (Lowry, “Work in Progress” 77; see also McCarthy 117). Hence when working on what he considered major work, he remained always expectant that it might compel or entice enough interest to lead to a committed conversation. Because Lowry fit such conversation into the contours of a kind of intimate domestic discourse, it inevitably included rituals of confession, forgiveness, and redemption. This was true especially where, as at times was his wont, he felt he had been in some way recalcitrant, even when he had been filled with “lugubriousness” among kindly hosts extending to him their succour (CL 1:474).
Matthew Corrigan sensed early on Lowry’s need of sophisticated editorial friendship. In 1970, focusing on the later 1940s and 1950s, he recognized a pattern of Lowry’s desperate searches for an empathetic publisher, a friendly literary voice. Corrigan saw that Lowry’s success as a writer ran parallel with this ability to maintain a productive dialogue with an editorial companion. Lamenting that “New York Publishing” had not bothered to develop an adequate editorial relationship with Lowry, he insisted that this failure accounted for Lowry’s persistent trouble in finding his way out of his piles of manuscripts. Corrigan’s approach, brought into focus by the quality of the manuscripts published in the ten or twelve years after Lowry’s death, provides insight into the Lowry we encounter from the New York days of 1934–1936 to the Vancouver of 1940.6
Except for complicated and awkward moments much later, in 1947 and 1954, Lowry moved in a geographic orbit very much outside New York after the 1934–1936 years: Mexico, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and, from 1954 until his death, his native Europe. Yet after 1939, amidst the “desperate solitude of British Columbia” (87), New York became the imagined home that for him lent substance and sustenance to the survival and hoped-for publication of his manuscripts. But the New York establishment did not have the means to extend itself enough to a writer who was unable to perform according to contractual timetables or other imposed arrangements. With only rare exceptions there were no New York publishers able to come to grips with Lowry’s approach to his art, and no one “who then, on the basis of that terrifying knowledge, knew how to deal with him” (88). Lacking the means to cope with the “writing habits” fostered by his instincts as a visionary seeking a voice capable of expressing agony, hope, and suffering—the terrors of both damnation and salvation—these publishers were unable to offer Lowry the kind of nurturing, encouragement, and, above all, “understanding” that would lend him the time, space, and sense of purpose to pursue the kinds of writing that he was exploring. Eventually, argues Corrigan, in the later 1940s and into the 1950s, hidden in their “brusque criticism” (88) was their “prefer[ence] to chalk up his recalcitrance and delay to alcohol” (84). Even Albert Erskine, the editor who oversaw the publication of Under the Volcano at Reynal & Hitchcock, had his hands tied in the end, Corrigan insists, by the judgments of his later colleagues at Random House (88). Erskine was a man dear to Lowry, the editor whom in his seventy or so published letters to him Lowry embraces as “Dear Brother,” “Dear Brother Albert,” “Dear old Albert,” “My god, you old rapscallion,” or “Dear bro. Albert.” Yet none of this prevented Random House from cutting off their contract with him in 1954. Sherrill Grace rightly asserts that it was in the personal terms of the friendship, terms that involved his loyalty to Erskine, that Lowry felt most shattered: “Lowry was bereft, as much by the realization that he had ‘let Albert down’ as by the loss of the publisher’s support” (Grace in CL 1:578). The personal could—and often did—transcend the professional in Lowry’s making of books.
For his part, Lowry in turn did not understand “[t]he world of New York publishing and those great judgment-day board meetings which threatened his survival as a writer” (Corrigan 85). His “painstaking letters” from “the backwash of British Columbia” to his New York agent and publishers, Corrigan points out,
bridged for him, or so he thought, the carefully measured distance between himself and that concrete thermos (significantly, almost the furthest distance by straight line from New York he could manage in North America). The letters helped until he was left with the silence of expectation, awaiting a reply which seldom came in kind, a note suggesting he could survive as a writer cut off from society, that his instincts [as a writer] were right. (85)
Corrigan’s insights were spurred by the posthumous publication in 1968 of Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Though focusing on Lowry’s situation during the years after he submitted his 1940 manuscript, Corrigan in effect captures the years just before. Even without benefit of the biographical minutiae involving Lowry’s literary relationships of the period between 1934 (when Lowry arrived in New York) and 1940 (when from Vancouver Lowry felt he could close the deal on his relationship with his preferred New York contacts), Corrigan sensed in 1970 something of the symptoms of Lowry’s 1940 experience: “[Lowry’s] frustration with publishers can be seen as central to [his many] fears. For some reason he was unable not to be affected by their judgment on his work. The third version [actually the third draft] of Volcano had been sent to his New York agent in 1940, and subsequently rejected by twelve publishers” (87). Corrigan’s frightening vision of Lowry’s professional life helps illuminate details of the cultural politics and personal dynamics underlying Lowry’s submission of the text of the 1940 Volcano to what was for him his ideal and idealized publisher.
Corrigan would have seen news of the rejection of the manuscript of the 1940 Under the Volcano for the first time in 1965. There, making up the whole of appendix I, are the sobering words from September 1941, name stacked upon name, a roll call of twelve publishing houses. Harold Matson’s few words to “Dear Malcolm,” starting with “I have regretfully come to the conclusion that I am not going to find a publisher” and ending with “am holding the script here for your instructions,” (Lowry, Selected Letters 419) frame that list. Starting weightily from the top, it begins with these eleven: Farrar & Rinehart; Harcourt, Brace; Houghton Mifflin; Alfred Knopf; J. B. Lippincott; Little, Brown; Random House; Scribner’s; Simon & Schuster; Duell, Sloan & Pearce; and Dial Press.7
At the bottom of the list the name of the small publisher Story Press, relatively inconsequential among the rest, might have passed unnoticed by readers. Yet for Lowry it was the one that mattered most—not simply because Story Press was the first to reject his manuscript, but because that rejection, for reasons that exceeded the mere formal act itself, had a particularly searing effect on him. Story’s rejection was galling because for Lowry it held a uniquely emotional—almost, in his personal sphere, mythic—significance. Its disorienting effect was intense because it was for him not just professional but personal, so rooted in the face of the New York publishing world that he had been holding closest in his thinking and in his heart. Of course Story’s rejection of the manuscript had a practical impact on Lowry, but it was the small publisher’s apparently careless closing of the door on any future professional and personal relationship—without seemingly any acknowledgment of the connection that Lowry had been carefully nurturing and which he had mistakenly assumed as reciprocal—that produced the greater shock.
Extending Corrigan’s argument, and examining correspondence available only with the publication of Sherrill Grace’s Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry (CL), it becomes clear that the manuscript Lowry submitted to Story Press was in fact not at all one that he regarded as finished. It was, rather, a demonstration, a progress report, an earnest of what he could do and was doing. It was his plea for more time, for the continuation of a more engaged, fuller conversation. Lowry coveted the certainty of some kind of ongoing exchange—what for him incorporated the rituals of family. The manuscript, typed in enormous haste during the first half of 1940 in Vancouver, was put together as an early mirror of what Lowry was contemplating, an attempt to engage in fruitful dialogue with agents, publishers, and editors in New York whom he imagined as waiting for him to show up, as it were, and whom he preferred to embrace in terms of the protocols and codes of loyalty, confession, and yearning.
It was Whit Burnett (who with his wife, Martha Foley, owned Story Press) whom Lowry had selected as his most important partner. The intricate choreography of Lowry’s relationship with Burnett came to light only with the publication of Gordon Bowker’s 1993 biography, Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry; Sherrill Grace’s 1995–1996 Collected Letters; and Frederick Asals’s detailed 1997 study, The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.8 Drawing on those volumes, we can now examine in some detail the extent to which Lowry’s approach to use familial or familiar protocols generated the nuances of his professional relationships, for he insisted that agents, editors, and publishers first learn something about his life in order to fully understand his work. He was not drawing equations of theme or character, necessarily—though this did happen often enough—but rather calling attention to parallels between the physical and spiritual conditions that surrounded him when he wrote and the success, real or imagined, of that writing.
The long catalogue of publishers in that September 1941 letter from Matson might have sent Lowry into a state of shock, but it did not unsettle him as deeply as the rejection from Story. Still that list had embedded in it the names of others who had told him that they were holding out great hope for his new work. His knowledge of their hovering presence would have amplified for him the sense of those he had let down or betrayed. The list echoes names conveyed to him in Mexico in January 1938 by the New York literary agent Ann Watkins, after he had sent her parts of his early work on Under the Volcano (Grace in CL 1:344, note 3). Watkins had conveyed to him the interest in his project of “‘the Little Brown crowd,’ Bob Haas at Random House and Max Schuster [of Simon and Schuster]” (Bowker, Pursued 237). Indeed in 1938 Watkins had explored the possibility of acting as his agent. Arthur Calder-Marshall, informing her that Lowry “‘had it in mind to send [his manuscript] direct to Whit Burnett’” (Asals, The Making 412, note 1), nevertheless urged her to pursue Lowry’s novel, which was then a forty-thousand-word draft that he had seen while visiting Lowry in Mexico in October 1937, and which he said “sounded like ‘one of the most exciting books that has come down the line in a long time’” (Bowker, Pursued 237; see also CL 1:503). Watkins—who had lent money to Lowry towards expenses when he and Jan left New York for Mexico, “and as a sort of retainer” (Bowker, Pursued 202)—urged Lowry “to offer it to her rather than to Whit Burnett,” claiming that “she was better placed to sell it” (237). But Lowry was not prepared to submit the novel as it stood. He wrote much later to Jonathan Cape that the 1937 Mexico version was for him just not “thorough or honest enough” (CL 1:503). With Watkins’s urging ringing in his ears, Burnett became more and more entrenched in Lowry’s imagination, performing significant roles that in real terms went back to 1933 and continued to 1940–1941, and even to 1947–1948.9
* * *
During those two years in New York Lowry came to know at close range both Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, the husband-and-wife owners of Story magazine as well as Story Press (which they founded in 1936). In 1934, during his first fall season “when things began to ferment literarily,” Malcolm, along with his young wife, Jan, also a writer and equally keen to meet literary editors, “got very active in the current literary movement in New York” (Gabrial, “The First Wife’s Story” 98). Burnett and Foley in turn introduced the Lowrys around to others.
Through sheer grit and determination, Burnett and Foley had founded Story magazine in 1931 while living in Vienna, where they had moved after some time in Paris, and swiftly established it as an ambitious and exciting “little magazine.” Published as more or less a monthly (Neugeboren 245), it became a significant force in literary circles and moved from Europe to New York in 1933, with offices in the Random House quarters. The Lowrys, while committing themselves to writing but also caught up in the “many, many literary cocktail parties” (Gabrial, “Marriage” 126), kept their eye on developments at Story magazine and, in 1936, on Burnett and Foley’s expansion of their activities with their establishment of Story Press. Unfortunately, the social allures of New York also played on Malcolm’s self-damning side. He simply “wasn’t good at” the kind of socializing that went on there, as Jan pointed out, “except with a glass in his hand,” and then he became too often belligerent: “so often he would wind up getting drunk and insulting somebody or yelling at somebody there.” Jan hated seeing Malcolm “stumbling and falling over his words and reeling, and seeing this marvellously versatile, wonderful gift that he had with words somehow being so bastardised the minute he got into heavy drinking” (“Marriage” 126). The literary establishment in New York, as Corrigan points out, took note of Lowry’s tendencies.
One of Lowry’s first meetings with Burnett seems to have been in response to Lowry’s note to him at the end of August 1934 suggesting that they “might have a word together” (CL 1:154). Soon after, in September, he and Jan were guests of honour at a party hosted at Burnett and Foley’s home on the occasion of Story’s publication of Lowry’s “Hotel Room in Chartres” (Bowker, Pursued 187). In the course of trying to find a publisher in the United States for Ultramarine, Jan had successfully placed the story with Burnett just before Malcolm arrived in New York in August 1934 (Gabrial, “The First Wife’s Story” 97–98). This was precisely the kind of personal and professional connection that Lowry craved, the kind of burgeoning friendship that would allow him soon after to give his friend, the writer Alfred Mendes, the casual impression that he and Burnett would be “lunching” together later that day until late in the afternoon (CL 1:156). Lowry clearly felt relaxed in his interactions with Burnett, and he vigorously and optimistically worked on carefully cultivating the relationship. Flattering him in a note, he said that he felt “very proud” of his 1934 appearance in Story, that it “put a bloom” on his arrival in New York (CL 1:154). In fact, Story had already given Lowry’s career an auspicious boost the year before, with its inclusion of “On Board the West Hardaway” in the October 1933 issue. The front cover blurbs promised “[n]ew stories of distinction” within, and spoke of Story as “[t]he magazine of the short story as literature” (see Dilnot n.p.) In 1933 Lowry was still living in Europe, including Paris (where he and Jan had married in January 1934). Until that first appearance in Story, and aside from the notable achievement of publishing his first novel, Ultramarine, in London in June of that same year, he had published only in school periodicals and, later, in the literarily lively journals at Cambridge University, including Experiment and Venture. Story’s championing of Lowry provided him with an impressive introduction to readers of serious literary magazines—and with his literary debut in North America.
In recalling Lowry’s New York days, Martha Foley remembers his frequent visits to Story’s quarters—described as a welcoming literary place of “utter happy confusion” (Irwin Shaw in Foley 204, note 1). Jay Neugeboren, who published Foley’s memoir about the magazine, remarks with admiration on the broader world held together by the Story office: “How intimate it all was!—as if Story’s editors and readers and writers were part of an extended family, a family in which the new and young writers were the admired favorites [….] It was as if Martha and Whit were running a kind of general store in which the prime merchandise was good fiction—[…] a store in which one could always find good literary shop talk” (Neugeboren 12). In mid-1935, even after moving to a larger space, Story still happily broadcast the “homey air” of its new quarters. Lowry must have deeply appreciated its welcoming, intimate atmosphere. Like other writers—Tennessee Williams, Cornell Woolrich, Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell—who sometimes lacked the necessary funds to submit their manuscripts to Story by regular post, Lowry brought his manuscripts round by hand, submitting them personally for Story’s consideration. Story was able to provide for Lowry a place where he could simply, and without invitation, drop in: “For weeks he visited my office everyday,” writes Foley, “sat around for a while, looked at books and magazines I had lying about” (206–07). She remembers him as the “most heartbreaking writer” to visit her office, notably when, as sometimes happened, he was “separated from his wife and dismally lonely in the United States.” What struck her most was his frustration with the lack of progress he was making on his stories and the one novel he then had underway, In Ballast to the White Sea. “Except at Story, his work, including a novel, was being perpetually rejected,” she recalls (206–07). For the next fifteen years he would publish no short stories at all, concentrating after 1934—on Ann Watkins’s firm advice (Bowker, Pursued 189)—on novels (and, additionally, on poems). During those visits to the place of refuge provided by Story, Lowry often appeared morose, “disconsolately” taking his leave after hanging around for a while. At one point, Foley says, “he disappeared. When he returned he told me he had been placed for observation in Bellevue” (Foley 206, 207).
Lowry’s self-imposed stay in the psychiatric ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, during May or June 1936, was, of course, the event that led to the composition of Swinging the Maelstrom, “a novelette of about 100 pages about an alcoholic” (CL 1:503). It was that subject that he would begin to explore much more expansively later that year in his Under the Volcano project. Eventually, he would develop images of New York as a place of desolation, in a flashback describing a forlorn Yvonne in Chapter IX of the 1947 Under the Volcano and in his account of the alcohol-riddled Dick Diver in the New York section (147–69) that Lowry introduced into his 1950 film script, an adaptation of sorts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. For Burnett, the theme of alcoholism was one that he perhaps found too much in evidence in Lowry’s own life.
Lowry’s amicable working relationship with Burnett in New York included the latter’s willingness to function as a critic of Lowry’s work. He rejected some—“too many,” as Lowry later admitted (CL 1:377)—of the stories Lowry showed him, mostly pieces he had written before arriving in New York. In light of Lowry’s later efforts with the 1940 Under the Volcano, these stories may have triggered a certain wariness in Burnett, for they carried some of the qualities that would become visible in the 1940 manuscript, especially in its sometimes extended passages of laboured dialogue. As Gordon Bowker argues, not only were these stories “uncommercial,” but “often they didn’t quite come off—too much talk and too little action” (Pursued 189). When Story magazine announced in 1936 that it was expanding its reach to the publication of novellas (Neugeboren 260–61), Watkins, then serving as Lowry’s agent, submitted to Burnett Lowry’s “The Last Address” manuscript, which Lowry had written that year (Grace in CL 2:506, note 4). Burnett considered it and declined to publish it, though Lowry would long protest that Burnett had in fact accepted it and later even claimed to Matson that “for two and a half years [that is, through the Mexico and into the Los Angeles period] I looked at every number of Story expecting to see it” (CL 1:387). As late as 1946 he explained to Jonathan Cape that Story had accepted his novella and paid for it but had not published it only because they had “changed their policy,” reverting to once more publishing only shorter pieces (CL 1:503). And in 1952 he would tell Robert Giroux that “the magazine changed its mind or its policy” (CL 2:501).10
In contrast to Lowry’s claims, however, Burnett denied ever having accepted the work for publication, in 1942 confiding to Matson (who had become Lowry’s agent in 1940) that “Lowry had not yet got the story into good enough shape for them” (Bowker, Pursued 202). Nonetheless Lowry valued what he perceived as Burnett’s personal attentiveness and lively critical interest, which continued while Lowry worked on his Under the Volcano project in Mexico and Los Angeles, where he showed his typist, Carol Phillips, a letter from Burnett (Bowker, Pursued 259; see also 237). Indeed in Los Angeles Lowry wrote to ask Burnett for his manuscript of “The Last Address,” which he wished to rework for a book competition, and which Burnett promptly returned (Bowker, Pursued 247, 249; CL 1:387). In 1941 Lowry sent Burnett the revised “The Last Address” manuscript, and Burnett reconsidered but again rejected it (CL 1:377, 387). A few months later Burnett refused yet another of Lowry’s short stories, “Enter One in Sumptuous Armour.” This time, the rejected manuscript was returned without any accompanying reply (CL 1:387; see also CL 1:377).
* * *
If Lowry’s relationship with Whit Burnett was already cooling while they were both in New York, the greater distance between them once Lowry found himself stranded in Vancouver must have only exacerbated the situation (at least for Burnett, if not for Lowry). Of course Burnett was hardly the only surrogate family member to whom Lowry felt he could turn, and perhaps first and foremost amongst those was the figure of his old friend and mentor Conrad Aiken, whom Lowry had first met in Cape Cod in 1929 (when Lowry was twenty, Aiken forty). Aiken had visited Lowry in New York briefly in August 1936 and for an extended period in Mexico less than a year later, during June and July 1937, while undergoing a divorce and a third marriage. After that Aiken returned to his English base in Rye, where seven summers earlier he had acted in loco parentis to Lowry, who was then still a student at Cambridge. With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Aiken returned to Cape Cod. In October 1939 Aiken took up renewed correspondence with Lowry, just over two months after Lowry had been “hustled” to Vancouver from Los Angeles (Sugars in A/L Letters 53). During 1939–1940, dispiritedly trying to find his way in what was for him an intensely depressing city, Lowry entered into extensive conversation with Aiken about the work that he had underway since his two years in New York and about devising ways he himself might get back into the United States.
Lowry had been delivered to Canada in late July 1939 by Benjamin Parks, a Los Angeles lawyer taking direction from Lowry’s father in Liverpool. In Vancouver he waited until January 1940 without his Under the Volcano manuscript and notes, which had remained with Carol Phillips in Los Angeles. Lowry’s letters to Aiken were at first frantic and desperate. He was preoccupied with seeking a way to convince his father that he needed to gain refuge closer to Aiken, preferably in the eastern United States or—with that becoming impossible for Lowry, a British citizen, with the war underway—in eastern Canada, possibly Montreal. He pleaded with Aiken to keep it a secret from his father that Margerie Bonner, whom he had met in Los Angeles after his marriage to Jan Gabrial had broken down, had arrived in September 1940 to live with him in Vancouver and who had become, he insisted repeatedly, “essential” for his work (CL 1:281). For his part, Aiken participated in the correspondence with extraordinary solicitousness, generosity, and thoughtfulness, even offering to ask Parks to send the Under the Volcano manuscript to him.
Almost immediately, Aiken became party to Lowry’s hopes and concerns about his 1940 manuscript. Lowry first sought fresh guidance from “the old maestro” mainly for his poetry, asking Burnett to forward to Aiken his manuscript collection of poems, “The Lighthouse Invites the Storm” (CL 1:249, 256, 294). Aiken agreed to read it (A/L Letters 83). Liking it, and urging Lowry to get rid of some “audenesques” in the work, he looked forward to talking over the poems with Lowry, expecting to see him soon on Cape Cod (A/L Letters 106), as he had ten years before. In July 1940, praising the poetry of Aiken, Stevens, and Rilke, Lowry reiterated his great eagerness to see Aiken so that he might learn better to move forward as a poet: “I feel I could be a good poet if I knew what sort of discipline to subject myself to [….] If I were more, or less, of a poet I suppose this desire for a design governing posture of some sort wouldn’t worry me [….] But give me some advice, I generally follow yours as one hypnotized” (CL 1:340). Though the longed-for visit to Cape Cod was never to materialize, of significance in these exchanges is Lowry’s sustained fixation on his poetry, even while his main task had become the Under the Volcano project. Chris Ackerley, the annotator of The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, points out that “so much of what was to grow in the novel first quickened in the poetry, and so many of the poems are in turn microcosmic images of the later prose. Lowry’s imagination conceived itself as essentially poetic.” Ackerley suggests Lowry built up his manuscript in mosaic fashion, and once certain “images, phrases, sentences, but often entire prose-poems” were “there in the sense of being tonally apposite and poetically right, they would remain fixed, while the surrounding text would change from one revision to the next” (Ackerley, “The Making” 82). Amidst much discussion of his and others’ poetry, Lowry also discussed with Aiken the prose works that were then foremost in his mind: In Ballast to the White Sea, Swinging the Maelstrom (“The Last Address”), and, most of all, the 1940 version of Under the Volcano. Though Lowry’s poetry-in-prose would only arrive at its fuller expression in 1947, strong hints of the products of his exchanges with Aiken are already present in the 1940 text, Lowry’s preoccupation with verse signalling something of the extent to which that “prose” project was finding its richest expression as a work of “poetry.”
By the end of January both Malcolm and Margerie were in fact working hard on the manuscript of Under the Volcano. With their rapid progress toward a clean typescript during the winter and spring of 1940, Lowry sought from Aiken advice on where he might submit it for publication. Aiken suggested his close friend Robert Linscott at Houghton Mifflin in Boston. Linscott, influenced by his own conversations with Aiken, took a strong interest in what Lowry was said to be doing. In a letter passed along by Aiken, he wrote directly to Lowry in February 1940, wanting, as Aiken put it, “to have a looksee at the new novel! Hot diggity” (A/L Letters 107). In his late February letter to Aiken, Lowry replied enthusiastically: “a thousand thanks for interesting Linscott: the Volcano might do for him” (CL 1:295; see also CL 1:294). However, though Lowry actively entertained Linscott as a second and appealing possibility for publication (see Asals, The Making 71–72), he was assuredly not Lowry’s first. Whit Burnett at Story Press remained the adopted family member at whom he was aiming his great book, for whom he was imagining it, and he felt himself being pushed by Aiken to take a difficult stand on the choice of first reader for his manuscript. Lowry’s deeply felt conflict was driven by his ideas of commitment and friendship, and by his compulsion—in step with his artistic enterprises—to tease into existence various bonds invoking the performance of a kind of family romance.11 It was a conflict driven by Lowry’s need to lessen uncertainty and expand empathy concerning the fate of his work, to assuage the anxieties that were so integral a part of his at best tortuous, at worst torturous relationship with the creative process. Now ambition and doubt were at war within him, both profoundly affected by the sustained faith—reflecting his exaggerated sense of loyalty—that he felt Burnett had over a long period shown to him.
To some extent, Lowry was keen to follow Aiken’s urging in order to place into collaborative ownership questions of authority, guardianship, and power in relation to his work, for it was within such a relationship that he found the security he needed to produce his writing. In this case he felt obligated also to his surrogate father, Aiken, who sturdily supported Lowry during his travails with what was for him the unpleasantness of life in Vancouver during 1939–1940, and who kept reminding him of the importance of Linscott’s interest. Pointedly Aiken wrote in March: “it will be a help all round if you get the Mss to me for Linscott while he is still freshly interested” (A/L Letters 121). On 9 April Lowry tried to dampen Aiken’s expectation concerning Linscott: “some time ago before you interested Lindscott [sic] in it, I promised Whit Burnett, who now has the Story Press amalgamated with Lippincott, to submit the Volcano to him.” And he added, more or less rhetorically: “What would you advise me to do?” (CL 1:311).12 In closing he promised to send Aiken a copy of the manuscript before taking any further action—a promise that he would not fulfill.
In his exchanges with Aiken, Lowry was complexly mindful of his long-running New York–based entanglement with Burnett, with whom he had long tried to nurture a brotherly (or sometimes filial) relationship. To Matson he explained that the forces of “loyalty and obligation” drew him to Burnett (CL 1:341). To Aiken he kept up a blur of reportage, stating in mid-May that “The Volcano is on its last typing” (CL 1:327), though by early June confessing it had “protruded some unexpected peaks” (CL 1:331). Or, as he put it over a week later to Burnett, “it protruded a few unsuspecting peaks which is why I couldn’t send it earlier” (CL 1:337). These peaks, he informed Aiken, had forced him and Margerie into “slaving away madly at the end of the Volcano” (CL 1:331). In his mid-May update, he added that Burnett had sent him an “enthusiastic letter” about it (CL 1:327; Bowker, Pursued 295). Aiken, declaring that he was “so glad [that] Burnett is keen on Volc,” was curious to learn whether he had seen the new (Vancouver) version or whether he was speaking of the old (Mexican) version. Aiken added, querying, that he “thought you meant to send it to Linscott?” But he concluded by deferring to Lowry’s best judgment: “of course as you think best” (A/L Letters 136–37). Although Lowry remained flattered by and grateful for Linscott’s vigorous direct and relayed expressions of interest in seeing the manuscript, he finally felt compelled in June 1940 to tell Aiken that even before Linscott’s letter had arrived, he had “already more or less promised to send it to Whit [….] I feel that I owe a certain loyalty to Whit since he trusted me for a long time.” He added: “if I sent it to Linscott first I am sort of breaking my promise to Whit” (CL 1:332). He felt “duty bound,” Lowry announced, to send the manuscript to Burnett (CL 1:362).
Aiken, in the meantime, suggested that he was prepared to keep a “duplicate” copy for Lowry, holding it for possible future forwarding to Linscott (A/L Letters 140). But Lowry, as noted above, did not send a copy to Aiken, perhaps because he was anxious about details of the book which took up in ways too obvious the influence of his interactions with Aiken in Mexico. Or, in terms of the dynamic and drama of the family romance, he might have felt acutely that “the time had come for the child to break away from the ‘Benevolent Eye’ of the father” (Sugars in A/L Letters xxv; see also A/L Letters 70, 79). If so, the child had certainly already benefited from the father’s generosity. Aiken had by this time carried Lowry through the 1939–1940 crisis with his real father, the crisis of feeling abandoned in a country that kept him isolated and alienated from the centre of New York, and the crisis of sensing almost desperately the need to submit a manuscript version of his most advanced work-in-progress before circumstances driven by the war swept his career away. Lowry, happily, felt himself “on the way up” (CL 1:332), as he wrote to Aiken in June, shortly before doing what he told Aiken he would do: mail the manuscript to Burnett.
Squirming perhaps as he did so, Lowry later claimed he had not sent Aiken the duplicate copy of the manuscript because the book’s political discussions might provoke “unsympathetic people” engaged in postal censorship to tie it up in red tape (CL 1:339). He even proposed including Aiken as one to whom he might dedicate the novel, but quickly veered away from that too, awkwardly citing his concern that Aiken might find “the Mexican scene […] too mutually affective or whatever [….] Anyhow, for better or worse, it’s written to you, or at you” (CL 1:340). At the same time he continued to loosen the links of their relationship, in November 1940 expressing gratitude (with more than a hint of something now passed) for “the colossal advantage of having known” Aiken (CL 1:361), and in May 1941 giving thanks that “the hope engendered” (CL 1:375) with Aiken’s help during the difficult 1939–1940 months had carried him and Margerie through that challenging period—though it brought them neither to New York nor even to eastern Canada. In fact by mid-August 1940 things were running in Malcolm and Margerie’s favour, with their having moved away from Vancouver first to a rented apartment and then to their own “supershack by the sea—all paid for, no rent, no tax, but lovely, surrounded with dogwood and cherry and pines, isolated, and a swell place for work” (CL 1:375). By August 1940 Aiken had introduced one of Lowry’s truest and most thoughtful surrogate brothers back into his life: Gerald Noxon, who was able in many ways to take Aiken’s place within the complicated dynamics of Lowry’s imagined family,13 and who from 1940 to 1945 would also, as things turned out, come to replace Whit Burnett.
* * *
The submission of his manuscript to Whit Burnett (and Martha Foley) at Story Press led Lowry on an emotional roller coaster ride, high hopes mixed with self-doubt, replaced eventually by bitter disappointment that Burnett had not levelled with him directly after Lowry had for so long embraced him as his trusted interlocutor. Lowry had completed a rough first draft of his Under the Volcano project in Mexico. In Los Angeles, working with the typist Carol Phillips, he finished a second draft that, after leaving Los Angeles in July 1939, he did not see again until January 1940, despite repeated requests that it be sent to him in British Columbia. With absolute support from Margerie, he then wrote the entire third draft in less than six months in crowded quarters in Vancouver. He and Margerie began working together in an unpleasant space they were forced to occupy on West 19th Avenue, then completed the task more happily after moving to rented quarters on West 11th. They worked with enormous rapidity, wartime conditions leading Lowry to believe he should act promptly with what he tried to convince himself should be his final version, though one that might still need a little work, as he sent it off with a mixture of bravado and trepidation, hope and doubt. Bringing sustained focus and intensity to his writing, he was able merrily to report to Conrad Aiken in early March: “The Volcano is rapidly reaching its last belch” (CL 1:298). Their concentrated effort at finalizing the text occurred during what were for Malcolm and Margerie those bleak months before they made their mid-August 1940 discovery of their fabled wilderness idyll at Dollarton, what Lowry called “the backwoods,” some fifteen kilometres northeast of downtown Vancouver, where in a series of waterfront cabins they would make their home for the next fourteen years.14
Lowry mailed his manuscript to Burnett on 22 June 1940. “Dear Whit,” he wrote casually in a long covering letter, nonchalantly assuming the easy intimacy of old lunch companions: “My novel is now on its way to you” (CL 1:335). Typically, his letter was long, entertaining, and erratic, a manifestation of Lowry’s star performance as letter writer and explicator of his own work. In this case he was explicating especially his intentions, for his work had not yet arrived at what were in effect his goals and aspirations as outlined in his letter. To Burnett he expressed a qualified satisfaction with the manuscript, at the same time as, in good and perhaps naïve faith, he provided some harsh criticism of his own work. Lowry’s letter more closely resembled a progress report than any conclusive statement of accomplishment. “I have made this book as good as I possibly could,” he bravely declared at the outset, before proceeding to undermine any sense of artistic satisfaction on his part (CL 1:335). Mindful perhaps of Burnett’s rejection of some of his earlier work, Lowry claimed to have “eliminated much of the longwindedness and vapourousness” that he confessed had tended to plague his previous writing (CL 1:337). He was both terrified that Burnett might find those very qualities embedded in the work and simultaneously inviting him to share in the recognition and correction of those problems. Certainly, many of the more evident weaknesses in the manuscript—the awkward execution of Laruelle’s dream in Chapter I, the childishly unguarded list of Hugh and Yvonne’s favoured characters and people in Chapter XI—would have been easy enough for Lowry (or Margerie) to recognize, no matter how close the material.
Lowry admitted that the book’s style “could certainly stand being more stripped, harder, and more winnowed”—though this was but “a minor defect” (CL 1:336). The manuscript had fallen prey, he wrote, to his own habits of retelling, for during the preceding years he had worked on “repeated rewritings, as many in places as 19 or 20” (CL 1:336). As an example, he said that he had, without catching it on time, used the phrase “another spiral had wound its way upward” (which he drew from Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On) more than necessary, attaching it to “several differing sensibilities,” but he boldly stated that such were simply “errors” that he had detected “too late perhaps” (CL 1:337). Blithely, he informed the busy Burnett that he trusted him to “glow upon them with a glittering eye […] and pluck them out” (CL 1:337). Thus he objectified his manuscript and distanced himself from it, in the process intimating to Burnett that he looked forward to a fluid working relationship. Burnett, he was implying, was an editor he was keen to work with, one he could trust.
To literary agent Harold Matson—who, he told Burnett, he wished would handle the “revised Under the Volcano” (CL 1:313)—Lowry made clear on 27 July, roughly one month after he had submitted the manuscript, that he would be “tickled to death if [Burnett] would publish it” (CL 1:342). He imagined that Burnett personally favoured him in special ways and anxiously expressed to Matson his worry that at Story Press, Burnett alone might “personally” like the work, but that “others in the firm” might not (CL 1:342). Introducing the charming notion that Burnett might have wanted to let Matson in on his having accepted the book as “a sort of surprise, pleasant, I hoped,” he in the same paragraph delicately confided that Burnett might not be showing his hand immediately in order to “save my feelings” concerning the book’s “saleability” (CL 1:343). Lowry luxuriated in the rituals of a gentlemanly literary friendship, and about two weeks later he ventured to ask Matson to find out “what [Whit] is thinking of doing” (CL 1:345).
At Story, Burnett was faced not only with Lowry’s own recitation of the “errors” in his manuscript but also with his own direct experience of Lowry’s personal weaknesses. He would have remembered Lowry’s melancholy loitering in the Story offices. He would have recalled Lowry’s alcohol-driven belligerence at social gatherings in New York. Indeed in July 1941 when Lowry was confessing to “Whit and Martha” that the 1940 novel was not “spherical and whole as a work of art should be,” he explained that his “mind and life” had been in a “sad mess” while he was working on that manuscript, as it had been in New York “when I met you” (CL 1:376–77). News must also have trickled through to the editors at Story Press, as to others in the New York establishment, of Lowry’s horrible behaviour when he was drinking in Mexico. These impressions—and what Lowry later told Matson had been his “complete psychic disintegration” (CL 1:388)—must have informed Burnett’s view of what taking Lowry on might come to mean for him and his firm. Indeed, such impressions deeply informed Aiken’s own experience of Lowry. When in 1939–1940 Lowry sought fatherly and mentor-like protection under Aiken, the latter was forced to remind him of his drinking habits back in 1929–1930, when Aiken had taken up the three-year experiment of acting in loco parentis to Lowry, and again in 1937, when he had visited Lowry in Mexico (A/L Letters 76; Sugars in A/L Letters xxiv–xxv). Burnett, reacting more coolly to Lowry than Aiken ever did, seemed unprepared or unwilling to extend a long-suffering hand of forgiveness to the prodigal son.
Burnett, after all, already had a full range of complex commitments to an impressive list of productive writers. To take on a novelist so unsure about his work and one who, Burnett must have readily recalled, in 1934 had wanted to undo his 1933 novel, Ultramarine, the only major work he had already published, must have seemed too daunting.15 In 1940 whether merely championing or in fact querying and undermining his submitted manuscript, Lowry undoubtedly, and likely deliberately, was himself raising red flags by calling attention to the novel he wished he could have written and which he hoped, indeed assumed, he would still write. He protested a little too fiercely about what he called its strengths and confessed his own inadequacies as a writer (though not as a reader or critic) in exposing its weaknesses, even as he bravely waded through its themes and techniques. The flamboyant language of his 22 June letter to Burnett in fact obscured his deeper dismay at the compromises he had had to make in his desperate pursuit of publication. Lowry framed his letter with a sense of personal urgency, alluding to the need “to finish another” book, hoping Burnett would convey his decision by telegram (CL 1:337). Anxious with concerns of what wartime measures, possibly conscription, might demand of him, he yearned for a quick response. As he put it (in a mirroring of the novel itself), “life is full of venoms and uncertainties and scorpion moves, and one does not know, from day to day, what one must do, or whether a continent will stand between Wednesday and Friday? I grant you it is a strange time to embark upon a career” (CL 1:337–38). Laden with flourishes of intimacy, attempts at conveying what might be understood as post-Aiken filial connections, the letter ended on an oddly portentous note: “if you take it it may be that will enable me to live a little longer in this world where everybody cheats, and to produce more […]” (CL 1:337–38). Signing off the letter to Whit, he sent best wishes also to Martha. Story Press’s only immediate response was merely to inform Lowry that the manuscript had been received on 27 June (CL 1:345).
* * *
Once the manuscript and letter had left his hands, Lowry immediately grew impatient for a response, all the while trying to keep his imagined discussion and debate alive. He reported a month later to Aiken that he had sent the work to Burnett, even as he was turning to work on other projects: his poems and Margerie’s novel The Last Twist of the Knife (CL 1:339). He wrote to Matson, too, always placing him with Burnett as a kind of co-recipient of the work:
I have written a book that I really feel might be important, Under the Volcano, and the honestest thing I could think to do with it was to send it to Whit and ask him to let you, if you wished or would, (for I am somewhat of a prodigal son) arrange the details of it, that is, either in case he took it, or really considered, if he didn’t, that it stood a good chance elsewhere and would not so much waste—drain on a petty cash department as in the past. (CL 1:341)
Lowry reiterated throughout this 27 July letter his eagerness that his manuscript should act as an acknowledgment of his “great feelings of obligation” to both Burnett and Matson (each about ten years older than Lowry).
In many ways, Lowry relished playing the role of the prodigal, even as late as 1945 approaching Jonathan Cape as the contrite child hoping that his Under the Volcano manuscript might “fulfill […] to some extent the promise you saw in me when, with that promise in mind, you published, many years ago, Ultramarine. I realise I am still in some debt to your firm […] and I am hoping that this book, should you find it publishable, may make amends” (CL 1:479). In 1940 he wrote to Matson, mixing prodigality with moral triumph, that he felt he had written “a good book which justified the trust you and Whit had put in me” (CL 1:343). Lowry was presenting himself as the prodigal son who had been so full of promise in the New York of Burnett and Matson only four years earlier, who had projected such a strong sense of his credentials through the two published pieces in Story, and who had built up what he felt was considerable credit. Now he felt that he was at risk of letting them down, betraying himself and them with his 1940 offering. He recognized, he said, that he had subjected them to some “oddnesses & unratified irreliabilities,” inevitably causing them to look on him “rebukingly,” forcing them to take up a “great and strained patience” (CL 1:399). More pragmatically, with his July 1940 letter Lowry was asking Matson to serve as his literary agent, petitioning him in that capacity to take the manuscript, should Burnett not want it, to Linscott at Houghton Mifflin, who “through Conrad Aiken,” he explained to Matson, “professed an enthusiastic desire to see it” (CL 1:342).
As Burnett’s silence grew, Lowry began increasingly to second-guess himself, as he was quick to do with other completed projects, at times to the point of self-flagellation. He began to express worries that Burnett, spotting weaknesses in the manuscript, might decide against it after all. “I am beginning to feel perhaps that I have over-estimated it,” he wrote to Matson, hoping that he might have a “friendly look” into it and take charge of it (CL 1:342): “Some parts of it the war has undone. There are a few abstractions and meaninglessnesses which a state of peace would have written out of the thing, and which, even, now, a friendly eye would freeze out, and its worth be enhanced” (CL 1:342). On 9 August 1940 he repeated to Matson: “No reply as yet, simply an acknowledgement” from Burnett at Story Press. Again, in his effort to hold Burnett and Matson together, expressions of faith mingled with doubt: “It may really be that the book is unsaleable and not worth your time: I honestly don’t think that, but you and Whit ought to know, if anybody” (CL 1:345). In any case he repeated what he had already told him: “If Whit doesn’t take it, Linscott of Houghton Mifflin is interested” (CL 1:345). In early September 1940 he said a little wistfully to Aiken, mixing dread and bravado: “I still have not heard from Whit about Volcano, but if he doesn’t take it, it is going to Linscott, and it may be even now on its way. Don’t know how to send you a copy yet” (CL 1:350). By early October while “struggling in a kind of void,” he decided to push Matson for “some news” in the face of “the anonymity […] of silence from the U.S,” for his 1940 manuscript was starting to feel to him like a “posthumous” work, and he jested sourly that “[i]f Whit still has the Volcano by now, it must be growing somewhat extinct” (CL 1:356).
Matson’s reply came on 7 October, and it stung, for it brought Story Press’s outright rejection of the novel. Even worse, it left Lowry with the impression that Burnett himself had done nothing on behalf of the manuscript. Indeed it was Foley’s, not Burnett’s, words that Matson forwarded. Foley said that Story Press had had several readings on the novel, and she offered some faint praise of this “very unusual book,” speaking of its author as one they had been following for some time (in fact she and Burnett had been following him since 1933): “We have been so interested in what Malcolm has been trying to do that we hate to give this as our decision.” The book did not, she said, “quite emerge from under the burden of the author’s preoccupation with what might be described as the Dunn[e] theory of time” (CL 2:926).
This was the worst possible news for Lowry: not only the rejection of the novel, but perhaps even more devastatingly the end of any further conversation with Burnett. The rejection of the manuscript by Story Press unnerved Lowry profoundly, so closely interwoven did he imagine his and Story’s future, so high were his expectations of his relationship with Burnett. He had approached Story Press in a spirit of happy familial obligations, performing in full flourish the rich emotional vein of the return of the prodigal son, only to be personally spurned. What Lowry was looking for was affirmation not only of his book but of himself as a writer well known to, and nurtured by, the people at Story Press. Frederick Asals puts it like this: “He had a good deal of emotional investment not only in the novel’s quick acceptance, but in the endorsement such an acceptance would convey, that ratification of merit he had had from Burnett in the past and felt he had every reason to expect for this far more important work” (The Making 73–74). For Lowry the 7 October 1940 letter from Matson vastly exceeded in impact the news of other publishers’ rejections yet to come: “No other single letter from Matson is likely to have affected him so deeply” (Asals, The Making 74). Asals’s assessment is prescient since, like Matthew Corrigan over twenty-five years earlier, he did not have access to the Collected Letters. We can push Asals’s argument one step further and state again that Lowry’s work was a finished manuscript in physical appearance but not in spirit: it was instead an invitation, an open-hearted overture to friendly discourse, a thinly veiled suggestion for further collaboration on a text that Lowry himself in fact recognized was not complete.
On 12 October 1940 Lowry replied to Matson that he was “somewhat hurt about Whit, who has said not a word to me all this while,” and expressed his bitterness that Story Press had kept the novel for so long “without a word when I had told them that I was working against […] time itself” (CL 1:357). Foley’s words, relayed in Matson’s letter, struck Lowry as the sabotaging and mocking of his romantic idea of familial loyalty: “so help me God,” he said to Matson, “it was entirely because I felt I had an obligation to Whit that I sent the latter the damn book in the first place” (CL 1:357). Trusting he was not trying Matson’s patience, he suggested yet again that Matson forward the work to Houghton Mifflin’s Linscott who, he said, was already holding a book of Lowry’s poems and a draft of In Ballast to the White Sea. As Gordon Bowker points out, what Lowry did not know was that Matson, before sending it to Linscott, had in fact been circulating the novel among other publishers for some weeks, and that he had received Martha Foley’s verdict six weeks before he informed Lowry of Story Press’s decision. Lowry, Bowker continues, echoing Corrigan, “felt acutely the problem of being so far removed from New York” (Bowker, Pursued 302).
Lowry’s 17 October 1940 letter to Matson, written while he was unsuccessfully trying to sell one of his stories (published much later with the title “June 30th, 1934”), reveals Lowry’s heavy sense of Burnett’s betrayal. Having already experienced trouble placing the short story himself, Lowry pushed hard on his new literary agent, Matson: “surely some magazine would be able to see that it has a certain power and grim irony. Or you could persuade them” (CL 1:358). But one option was verboten: “if Story is the only possibility I would rather you tore it up, on bitter thinkings” (CL 1:359). To Aiken he wrote gloomily a month later, on 22 November 1940: “the Volc is at Linscotts. I should have taken your advice and sent it him first. But I was duty bound to send it to Burnett, who, it turned out, didn’t even read it” (CL 1:362).16 In fact, as Bowker points out, neither Burnett nor Foley had read the manuscript, and the reaction of the Story Press reader who examined it—and who was amused by Lowry’s claim to Burnett that it “might compare not unfavourably with Kafka’s The Trial” (CL 1:321, 336; also 293)—would have only intensified Lowry’s humiliation, for he praised Lowry’s letter to Burnett over the novel itself:
“The letter is good,” it began, with heavy irony, “you might use it. But the book’s another thing.” It was not really a novel and did not belong to the story or characters, “but to some several quirks in the author’s mind.” These were all right, but unfocused. His real interest lay in Dunne’s theory of Time. “He writes it as fiction, people at talk, begrudging like pearls before commoners. And his political ideas—a ‘communism.’” His letter, however, was fascinating. “I wish he’d write the book he describes in the letter….” The author had gagged on his own portentousness, and the story was incoherent—too much talk, too opinionated. “The comparison with Kafka is outrageous, & I think he doesn’t know what he is writing.” The good parts were the landscapes and the symbolism. “He makes such a good case for his novel, then writes so impalpably, that some may feel they can’t be sure, maybe they missed something.” … Recommending rejection of the novel, the report concluded, “Try a collection of his eloquent letters.” (Bowker, Pursued 302–03)
Even without knowledge of the reader’s comments, Lowry felt he had been dealt an ultimate insult by Whit Burnett, and for a long time remained stunned, shattered, “upset and hurt” at the fracturing of what he had imagined as a blossoming literary relationship (Bowker, Pursued 302). His resentment took on churlish overtones, recalling later to Matson that he had become “mad over not hearing a mumbling word from Burnett about Volcano” (CL 1:387). He fell into a depressed state, a desperate darkness that, as Asals surmises, was lifted only when Margerie was able to lure him step by step into starting up his work again (The Making 73–75).
Lowry never saw the reader’s report on his manuscript. But he continued to carry with him memories of his failed attempt to reach out to Burnett, tinged undoubtedly by his bitterness at what he saw as Burnett’s abandonment in 1940.17 He maintained with Burnett a kind of shadow jousting. In an astonishing culminating and climactic note to their relationship, he wrote Burnett one more time, during the afterlife of Under the Volcano, a full year after the novel had been published triumphantly to great critical acclaim in New York in February 1947. In March 1948, writing from France where he was working on the French translation of what was becoming his widely celebrated work, Lowry combined gestures of embrace with the implicit rebuke of a failed family member. He started with “Dear old Whit: It’s been a long time,” and continued by alluding to their grand past together from 1934 to 1936 and even, recalling his first appearance in Story, to 1933 when Lowry was still in Europe: “I have never forgotten the debt of gratitude I owe you from the old times.” Acting as a kind of broker for work by a French-based American writer—a story called “The Pig” by Eda Lord, whom he had only recently met—he proposed to Burnett almost verbatim the plan of action that he himself had pursued eight years earlier: “I would be immensely beholden to you if you would see that it (a) has a sensible reading in your office (b) if it does not hit with you (though it certainly does—avec reservations—with me) send it to Hal (i.e. Harold Matson…) whom you perhaps—er—remember” (CL 2:116). Lowry’s impish play on “er” raises a sense of “old times” filled with embarrassments and missteps, but also of a situation now utterly altered by Lowry’s recent victories as a writer. Drawing attention to the “successful fate” of Under the Volcano for its respective publishers, including Cape in London, Lowry permitted himself to indulge in a touch of schadenfreude, thanking Burnett for his “having rejected Under the Volcano, as it then was”—abstractly perhaps still holding him accountable that it had not even been from him personally that he had received that rejection. He added that he was “mortified” that he had not sought out Burnett in New York during the ten- or twelve-day period of the launching of Under the Volcano, explaining why such a meeting could not take place: “I assure you it was impossible—for […] I daresay an inhibiting factor was that I felt sick you were not publishing the bloody book yourself” (CL 2:116).
Lowry’s 1948 letter to Burnett strikes an uneasy balance between genuine sincerity and veiled resentment. He could now address Burnett from a radically changed position as celebrated author of the great novel on which Burnett had refused to collaborate, but the feelings of rejection and disappointment lingered. On balance it mattered little that he had been rejected too by a long list of big-name publishers, to whom he never gave much thought anyway, for with them he had never bothered pursuing the mythology of a happily bonded literary family. Repeatedly throughout his life, Lowry’s writing projects “let him place himself in a whole series of family circles, complete with the possibility of family occasion, the trappings of familial trust, forgiveness, loyalty, longing, and solidarity, even the threat of prodigality and the fear of betrayal” (Tiessen in Lowry, Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon note 4). Conrad Aiken, Harold Matson, Gerald Noxon, Albert Erskine, and, strikingly, Frank Taylor during the Tender Is the Night film script project were for Lowry family members who functioned as both prerequisite for and by-product of creation. Lowry’s “fierce need to share the creative process with those people in his symbolic family support system” (Grace in CL 1:xxi) was the kind of moral obligation that Burnett refused to either recognize or meet. Now Lowry was reminding Burnett what it meant for them to have lost this rare opportunity to perform the kind of brotherly gestures Lowry coveted and had tried to refine into existence. He did not point out to Burnett that his entire visit to New York in February 1947 had been an alcohol-fuelled disaster. Nor was he ready to acknowledge, as he would in his short story “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession,” the joke of a writer locked into projecting a self-pitying persona.
Upon visiting Lowry in Mexico from late May to early July 1937, Conrad Aiken read Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea manuscript. He reacted with wonder mixed with wariness: “Gosh, the fellow’s got genius [….] Wonderful. Too much of it, and directionless, but for sheer tactile richness and beauty of prose texture a joy to swim in” (Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken 218; see also McCarthy in Lowry, In Ballast xlii). And he read as well an early rough version of Under the Volcano, which a few months later would be the forty-thousand-word draft that Calder-Marshall mentioned to Watkins in New York (Asals, The Making 19; see also CL 1:503). When Aiken claimed thirty years later to have read “the whole of Under the Volcano” back in 1937, he used language that echoes that of his description of In Ballast: “The first draft, but complete, and with a different ending: the horse theme had not then been developed. In short, that book was going to be rewritten for the next nine years. No wonder, given his genius for language, that it is such a miracle of English prose, which, I think, is its chief virtue” (Aiken in Asals, The Making 407, note 3).
What Aiken called Lowry’s “genius for language” is already evident in the 1940 Under the Volcano. In Mexico—persisting with his New York plan to write a novel, or rather a series of novels—Lowry had found a subject that matched his growing ambitions and reinforced his maturing comic-tragic vision of humankind. He saw in the terrible beauty of the country a Churrigueresque or Baroque expressiveness of its terrain and its history, while recognizing also the sinister political realities of daily life, conditions that emerged for him with particular clarity in the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). At the same time, Lowry was drawing on the literary and historical traditions of his own past and present reading. In the 1940 Under the Volcano his capacity for absorbing and reflecting other books as well as print ephemera in the environment around him is starting to reveal itself—what Chris Ackerley and David Large, the annotators of the present volume, call (after Borges) Lowry’s Universal Library—all in the service of an increasingly dense and elaborate intertextuality.
Lowry “conceived” his new narrative “about an alcoholic” in November 1936, he told Jonathan Cape a decade later (CL 1:503). Upon arriving in Mexico he had “decided really to go to town on the poetical possibilities of that subject” (CL 1:503). He suggested to Cape that the best parts of the final version were some of the “drunk passages about the Consul” (CL 1:503), and already in 1940 Lowry was moving toward those best parts. Chapter XII, which focused on the frighteningly isolated Consul in both the 1940 and 1947 versions and which Lowry always considered the strongest in the book, was, he argued, already quite recognizable in the earlier version. He began to write it, he recalled, early in 1937 in Mexico, and had “scarcely changed it since 1940” (CL 1:524). Lowry had been aiming since 1937 toward the ecstatically dramatic and intensely drawn expression of tragedy that he achieves in Chapter XII. Frederick Asals argues that this chapter was for Lowry “the bellwether chapter, embodying a standard, a richness of vision and brilliance of rendering, toward which the rest of the novel had to aspire” (The Making 130). As Asals puts it, “the repeated alterations and revisions of the rest of the book were in fact a determined effort on Lowry’s part to produce a novel worthy of its climactic chapter, an attempt to discover through its creation just what character, what action, what fictional world could have produced the appalling and beautiful vision of its final pages” (The Making 140). Though Lowry did make some revisions to Chapter XII in 1942, the core of the chapter’s aspirational sensibility is already there in 1940.
Yet the 1940 Under the Volcano—serving, with Margerie’s invaluable help, as the full-length blueprint for the final version—also has qualities that distinguish it from the 1947 text: a stronger stylistic spareness, a clearer narrative line, a more coherent articulation of political sensitivities. To be sure these differences do not necessarily make the earlier text a better novel, but the 1940 Under the Volcano might surprise readers who, if they have heard of it at all, have thought of it merely as the text of a justly rejected manuscript. Some of its distinct qualities are evident, others remain buried in the wishfulness of intentionality that Lowry built into it during the five months in which he rewrote it, with Margerie as accomplice. Through those five months he was keeping his mentor Aiken actively clasped to his side with his sometimes breathless and frenetic correspondence. His letters to Aiken of this period offer a running report of his January to June 1940 work-in-progress, though it is a report infused with a wishfulness that often fails to convey the pitfalls of his work.
Lowry’s 1940 letters to Aiken accompanied a period of breakneck productivity on his manuscript, starting when his second draft arrived from Los Angeles where, from April to June 1939 Carol Phillips had been typing it for him. Announcing in a 27 January letter that he was making progress on what he felt was his most mature work, “the first real book I’ve written,” in the same breath he insisted to Aiken that Margerie was now a close partner on the project: “Margie has become essential. In drawing together, work has become a communal thing between us. Margie is now as much interested in Under the Volcano as I am. We work together on it day and night” (CL 1:281). Margerie—herself given to theatrical hyperbole—threw in her own voice almost simultaneously (on 29 January) in a letter to Aiken’s wife, Mary Hoover. Offering a parallel account, she too wanted their work seen as demonstration that they would be good citizens should they become, as they then hoped, neighbours of Aiken and Hoover:
We are now up to our ears in the Volcano and working like mad to get it done. We wake up in the morning talking about it and go to sleep still sitting up in bed writing [….] Malcolm is writing with flying pen and a gleam in his eye and turning out work that anybody would be proud of [….] He might never re-achieve the feeling and enthusiasm and flow that he has now were he to be interrupted and I can’t let that happen since I feel that his work is the most important thing in his life. (A/L Letters 263)
Lowry further contextualized the intensity of their work and commitment by noting the pressure brought on by the war, and by a sense of having to overcome and put behind him the intellectual games he felt he and those around him had played during the late 1930s. He must have had in mind the political pretences and posturings, the economic analyses, including presumably the debates between himself and Aiken in Mexico in 1937, that now made their way into his novel:
The certainty of war has let loose a hell of a lot of pent up energy and all played against the background of false idealisms and abstractions of peace that we wasted our time with when we should have been thinking about living, of which we are bitterly reminded when perhaps there is not much time any longer. All this is making for a real drama, something possibly first rate, within its limits. (CL 1:281)
Lowry claimed that he and Margerie “seem to be playing our parts within this drama,” and he added, “we’ve got started on an absolutely new and important character in it which is her idea” (CL 1:281).18
A mere eleven days later, on 7 February, Lowry repeated the sense of his and Margerie’s intensely focused work on the manuscript, a vast improvement, he insisted, on the earlier versions, and alluded to ingredients that might appeal to Aiken who, on rereading a draft of In Ballast to the White Sea, was pushing Lowry to add “a little more gusto” to his work: “guts, juices, blood, love, sunsets and sunrises, moons, stars, roses,—for god’s sake let’s let in the whole romantic shebang again, it’s high time” (A/L Letters 72; see also Grace in CL 1:285, note 1). “We are working night and day on Under the Volcano,” Lowry wrote in response, “and am sure at last have got something. It has blood, guts, rapine, murder, teeth, and, for your entertainment, even some moonlight and roses. And a couple of horses” (CL 1:284). To this Margerie again contributed her own voice, this time on 23 February: “we have been working like mad on Under the Volcano, which Malcolm is completely re-writing and which is now about half done. It is unlike anything he has written before and, I think will be truly a great book when it is finished—and it must be finished. Malcolm is a genius and if you could see the work he is doing now […] you would agree with me” (CL 1:287). Lowry, reading the letter, retracted “the genius stuff” but agreed, “the new book is going well” (CL 1:288).
In a late February report to Aiken, Lowry again underlined Margerie’s crucial role in the project, for she was helping him strip his work of so much talk, “too much loquacity and not enough action,” adding narrative enticements and colour, some “hams in the window”: “she helps me immeasurably by her censorship and suggestions [….] [S]he has become an inextricable part of my work” (CL 1:292). Often conflating the writing with the conditions in which he was producing it, and continuing to seek Aiken’s interventions with his father, he added: “We are not only writing Under the Volcano, we are living smack down in it. We cannot help kidding about it but nevertheless our position is bloody desperate” (CL 1:291). The constraints within which they worked gave Lowry the hope of accomplishing something like “the Gogols and the Kafkas,” at least in parts of the manuscript. He had enough confidence to say that he and Margerie might produce “not just one book but a large body of work stamped at last with an individual imprint” (CL 1:293). It might not be Anna Karenina, he admitted on 24 April, but—“unless I am very sadly deceiving myself”—it should be saleable (CL 1:321). His confidence remained high some weeks later. “I am on the last chapter of Volcano,” he wrote to Aiken, adding that the 1940 manuscript was “a strange book and I think it makes an odd but splendid din” (CL 1:309).
Lowry opened his 9 April 1940 letter to Aiken with high flattery of both the man and his work, registering his gratitude for what Aiken was offering him on multiple levels: “I think that you’re one of the five living greatest writers and most other people do too, to whom literature is not merchandise” (CL 1:309). But in the same letter Lowry also presented a complicated review of the relation of his 1940 manuscript to Aiken’s work and his life, especially as Lowry encountered it in Mexico. Lowry was taking stock of what Ron Walker calls “the muddle of real events” that marked the lives of both men (296). He began by insisting that his 1940 version was not beholden to Aiken’s work, though he added it occasionally reflected details of their shared conversation in Mexico.19 It was there that parts of the sometimes vicious and misanthropic arguments of Chapter X had their roots. In Lowry’s manuscript the Consul echoes some of Aiken’s politically conservative arguments, while Hugh (accused of “indoor Marxmanship”) assumes some of Lowry’s then left-leaning posture (Sugars in A/L Letters 126, note 3). As Lowry put it, uncomfortably parodying self-abjection: “It is the first book of mine that is not in one way or another parasitic on your work. (This time it is parasitic however on some of your wisecracks in Mexico, & upon your political opinions! Poor Malc.)” (CL 1:309). Indeed Lowry had parted from Aiken on uneasy terms in Mexico, even telling John Davenport in August 1937 that he “no longer thought of the pro-fascist Conrad [Aiken] as a friend” (CL 1:168).
But even as he acknowledged certain borrowings from Aiken, Lowry justified the direction he felt he had taken. They had agreed, had they not, what “good fun” it would be to draw on their experiences of Mexico. Mischievously, he added that he should not think that the “‘character’” who “gets—er—pushed over a ravine” was Aiken, or at least not Aiken alone but also partly Lowry and “partly the little ghost of what was once bad between us, bad about me” (CL 1:309). He indicated that Aiken made up much of the “good parts” of the Consul (CL 1:309), including the Consul’s “wise cracks” and love of cats (Asals, The Making 21–22). Carefully camouflaging the strain he was beginning to feel in relation to Aiken—as the prodigal son prepared to break from the father—Lowry clowned cheerfully, begging Aiken “to regard any apparent similarities or NUANCES with the fatherly twinkle, and for the rest, with a detached psychological amusement” (CL 1:310).
Lowry insisted that “deep down in [his] psyche”—where were located his and Aiken’s experience of divorce, their “conflicts of soul torn between England and America”—he was “damned like you” (CL 1:310). To honour his “ancient doppelganger,” his book was, he said, “a gesture on the part of a grateful pupil to his master,” and he added (implicitly evoking the vivid image of the broken bottle at the end of Swinging the Maelstrom), it was also approaching the end “with a sense of triumph”: “what I can and could do was to write a book which put down my own reflection of the moon in my own real broken bottle. And I think I have done” (CL 1:310). That it was produced in “horrible […] abhorrent conditions” in the one attic room that he and Margerie had so far not left in months—though with the aid of the many letters he and Aiken had “tossed to and fro” as acts of “loyal and sincere friend[ship]”—made it all the more lovely that “much […] has bloomed” (CL 1:310). Still he concluded with these words (from Cocteau) about his writing: “The very last of my book offers stubborn resistance. Truly, as someone said, ‘our books detest us’” (CL 1:311; see also Grace in CL 1:312, note 7).
Finally, with the help of “some God of some sort of good,” a god that was, he said, possibly Aiken himself “in disguise,” things were nearly finished. Lowry retained an air of confidence on 15 May 1940: “I have not much doubt but that it is a good book.” But while expressing gratitude for what had been achieved—“far more […] than meets the eye for good and good alone between us all”—he now felt too that his time with Aiken also was nearly complete, this so-called family having done its work: “I do not see how you can assist us any further save by letting your genius storm into our spirits from time to time in these strange hours” (CL 1:327).
In the 1940 Under the Volcano successful and tedious passages sit uneasily side by side; lyrical bursts texturally evoking or describing inner or outer landscapes mingle awkwardly with longueurs comprising seemingly interminable talk. Though the Consul rails repeatedly in the course of the novel against “people with ideas,” Lowry in fact creates a central character who is himself much too prone to the self-important spouting of “ideas” in the context of debates—with Hugh, Yvonne, or Laruelle—that are themselves too abstract or merely uninteresting. All the characters in fact often appear to serve merely as “mouthpieces” (Asals, The Making 50) for ideas that are as cumbersome as they are laboured. Such is the case, for example, in much of the dialogue between Yvonne—who, crucially, is here the daughter and not, as in 1947, the estranged wife of the Consul—and Hugh, including “their playful construction of an ideal society” (Asals, The Making 366) laid out in Chapter XI, with its long list of literary, cinematic, philosophical, and artistic references that more resemble a pretentious exchange between two Cambridge dons than the intimate flirting of two young lovers.
Lowry described his text in some detail to Whit Burnett when he submitted his manuscript directly to him on 22 June 1940 (CL 1:335–36). Starting with these calmly uttered (though simultaneously doubt-inducing) words—“My novel is now on its way to you [….] I have made this book as good as I possibly could”—the letter then turned more hyperbolic. Unable to anticipate how his words would later be mocked by Story Press’s reader, Lowry made clear that on the broadest scale the kind of book he was aiming at in having written this one was something like Kafka’s The Trial. And he cited also Kafka’s The Castle for its “[i]nexhaustibility,” its invitation to multiple readings, each offering the reader “something new.” In support of Lowry’s claim, Richard Cross has noted that the ending, in particular, does in fact recall The Trial. And though Cross is speaking of the 1947 version, his commentary applies equally to the 1940 manuscript, which in this instance gestures distinctly and fairly fully toward the final version:
The scene outside the Farolito, with its atmosphere of unreality perforated by flashes of an all too actual horror, recalls the closing pages of The Trial. In both instances the guilt-ridden protagonists appear to collaborate with their executioners and, at the same time, to yearn for signs of compassion [….] In each case, those who inflict death do so in a manner calculated to degrade the victim: K. perishes, as he says, “like a dog”; the Consul’s slayers throw a dead cur after his body into the barranca. (130–31, note 57)
Lowry recognized in Mexico an expansion of the European crisis, and the ending of his novel underlines the absurdist condition that Kafka saw in Europe. Spurred on by the 1939 outbreak of a war even more horrific than the Spanish Civil War, as well as of course by Lowry’s own cultural and historical traditions, the 1940 work carries a distinctive Eurocentric sensibility, made all the more visible by Lowry’s reading of the Mexican condition and the longstanding presence there of the conquistador. Indeed, Lowry viewed the 1940 manuscript as a post-Kafka apocalyptic narrative, written “as it were out of Europe’s ‘unconscious’”:
As the last scream of anguish of the consciousness of a dying continent, an owl of Minerva flying at evening, the last book of its kind, written by someone whose type and species is dead, even as a final contribution to English literature itself, the final flaring up and howling, for all I know—and other things pretentious—this book, written against death and in an atmosphere of total bankruptcy of spirit, might have some significance beyond the ordinary. (CL 1:337)
As he wrote to the wartime censor in a somewhat strained note that accompanied his letter to Burnett, his manuscript was neither pacifist nor in any way subversive: “The book, intended simply and solely as a work of art is, although non-political, by implication a denunciation of the Nazi system and Nazi methods” (CL 1:334). That he had written it (as he confided to Burnett) “in an atmosphere of total bankruptcy of spirit,” out of desperate straits and dire conditions, ironically gave his novel its strength—a sense of empathy with the breaking up of a Europe at war with itself, a world hiding behind the empty rhetoric of big “ideas,” within which the freedom-loving individual was rendered mute. The epigraph from Henry James (drawn from one of James’s letters to the novelist Howard Sturgis) immediately laid out Lowry’s concerns. Writing his lament at the very outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, James spoke of “[t]he plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness” as an agony-laden contradiction, yet also a fulfillment, of the “whole long age” that had preceded it (3). Lowry wanted James’s statement to “illumine[ ] the whole book like a revolving light” (CL 1:335), including the “Atlantis theme” with its evocation of an ideal world destroyed and lost.
* * *
Perhaps Lowry’s “Atlantis theme” connected in his mind to an equally significant “Atlantic theme,” for the sea, the ocean, is there in every chapter of the 1940 Under the Volcano, expanding the inner consciousness of the characters—the Consul’s and Hugh’s especially—yet also simultaneously bridging and separating worlds, whether continents or historical periods, sensibilities or ideologies. We are reminded throughout of the sounds and significance of the sea, starting with the epigraph from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and the Consul’s letter in Chapter I (“just as the sea has divided me in nationality, just as my life has been broken in half, so the Atlantic of my soul, crashing on widely separated coasts of thought, storms in me day and night” [18]). When Yvonne tries to fall asleep in the next chapter, there is, among other strong and distracting sounds (and vivid smells), “the indrawing sound of the beach breathing the sea” (35). Later in Chapter II—in a prolonged and sweet scene between Hugh and Yvonne that is laden with references to the sea and extends to their aeroplane ride (a ride that responds to the raw pleasure of the flight in chapter XIII of In Ballast to the White Sea)—Hugh looks out to sea, and the accompanying sound carries an exquisite beauty: “When a siren sounded far away in the morning haze Yvonne thought it was as though a God somewhere had plucked the very heartstrings of the morning” (41).
The sea is also there in the opening line of Chapter VIII when the Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh ride together on the bus that “soon was rolling like a ship in a heavy sea” (151), and it is there too in the dark moments of the same chapter when the bus passengers come upon the dying Indian:
His chest heaved like a spent swimmer’s, his stomach contracted and dilated rapidly yet there was no sign of blood. One hand was thumping the dust continually as if summoning help from the bowels of the earth [….]
There was a silence between them all worse than death itself.
They could hear the man’s breathing and thumping: it was the sea dragging itself down a stone beach. (159–60)
In Chapter IX Lowry structures one of Yvonne’s epiphanies in terms of the sea:
So great was the strength of her faith in him that she was triumphantly certain it would make no difference, and as this certainty rooted itself, the sea, and all Hugh’s divided loyalties to it and love, the sea which had separated them and caused him such anguish, took Yvonne’s mind, obliterating all and bridging all. Presently this sea receded until it became a shimmering lake and then that too slowly changed in her mind’s eye to a sheet of glass. But the ocean returned, shattering the glass, burying the past with its disappointments and horrors, spreading to the limits of her consciousness until it lay there boundless and calm. (180–81)
Images such as these culminate romantically for Yvonne—who in the past has had only meaningless affairs, some followed by abortions—in her triumphant and ecstatic sexual union with Hugh at the end of Chapter XI. For the Consul, the image of the sea becomes degraded in the end, where it is the song of the drunken German silver miner that provides the vulgar chorus to the Consul’s closing moments: “Drei Segelmann, drei Segelmann—” (“Three sailors, three sailors”; 247).
As with so much else, of course, Lowry would develop and complicate his use of imagery in the 1947 Under the Volcano, but such symbolism already carried its own distinct resonances and associations in 1940. Particularly notable in this context is Lowry’s use of sound and noise in the 1940 version of the novel. In his letter to Burnett, Lowry explained the “protracted nightmare” of the opening chapter—Laruelle’s Dunnean dream sequence—as a “musical statement” that introduced the themes of the book, themes that later resurfaced in order to be “[torn] to pieces” (CL 1:336). Drawing further on one of his favourite musical tropes, Lowry felt also that the book might be viewed as “a good swing record […] which you could play over and over again” in order to savour its effects (CL 1:336). Abandoning “conventional” presentation of character, Lowry’s use of musical idiom extends to the contrapuntal technique of “overlapping in diction and consciousness,” hinting at “a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices,” giving play to the novel’s “imponderables” (CL 1:337).20
There is, in fact, a great deal of music and sound and noise and “splendid din” running through the book, figuring deeply as part of the texture, affecting the consciousness of the characters, influencing through juxtaposition and counterpoint the interpretation of the text. Having been greeted by the opening caption, “It was the Day of the Dead,” the reader is immersed immediately in sounds and silences that suffuse the worlds of Laruelle and Dr. Vigil as they sit quietly and meditatively, entranced by sounds that exceed any capacity of spoken language:
From the graveyards and the lonely forests, the sound of incantation, the murmur of the processions of the living, who today feasted with the dead, were borne down to the two men. …
The friends sat in silence, as if caught up in dreams aroused by the unearthly quality of the evening, listening to the sounds which were like the sea, far away. (5)
Whether from natural or artificial sources, sounds—as also at times their conspicuous absence—proliferate right to the silence of the last line of the novel. Many sounds come from clocks, regulating the rhythm of the narrative, measuring the characters’ consciousness and actions, keeping especially the Consul on alert, and keeping the reader alerted in turn to the state of the Consul. Clocks “wheezing” (125), striking with “harsh, rapid strokes” (249); making “whip lashes of sound driving the evening on” (32); concluding on “two wry, tragic notes, piercing [the Consul’s] heart: bing-bong, whirring” (91); meeting with an “emptiness in the air […] filled with whispers; hopeless, hopeless, hopeless” (91). On their horse-back ride, Hugh (in his cowboy costume) and Yvonne hear distant sounds from the San Francisco cathedral: “carillons of bells in the distance rise and fall, fading away and sinking back as if into the very substance of the day” (82). Ever transforming for the reader the spaces of the novel, the chiming of the cathedral’s bell clock is heard several times, echoing “sadness, sadness” at the start of Chapter IX (169), elsewhere whispering “alas, alas” (190). The sounds of, and conversations about, clocks throughout the text hint at a world of mechanical normalcy governed by everyday conventions of time. Yet in the arbitrariness of their tyrannical pronouncements the clocks also produce a sense of anxiety, of relentless and ominous movement toward a fateful end.
At times, too, the cacophony of noise gives way significantly to moments of silence. At the end of Chapter IX, the loud chimes of the San Francisco cathedral having just barely died away, the Consul, Hugh, and Yvonne—with undercurrents of tension between Hugh and the Consul gaining in intensity, and with Yvonne playfully enjoying her increasing comfort with Hugh—gaze in awed silence at the spectacle that emerges in fragmented intervals from the doorway of the cantina Todos Contentos y Yo También. “They all [stand] watching” as “something”—one old and lame Indian carrying another even more decrepit strapped to his body—materializes before them and finally disappears in a bend in the road, “shuffling through the grey white dust in his poor sandals …” (191). The chapter ends with the ellipsis, so that the following chapter sustains the moment as the three protagonists, still however momentarily in a kind of unity, “[f]inally” walk to the Salón Ofélia “in silence” (192). Asals, who offers a wonderful analysis of the rhythm and musicality of the 1947 Under the Volcano (The Making 340ff), also provides a pithy account of the parallels and echoes by which Lowry organized Chapter IX of the 1940 version, but he finds these too mechanical and formally construed, “the echoes too blatant” (350). Nonetheless his reading, leading to his discounting the “powerful image” of the two old Indians at the end of the chapter as having “no bearing on the structure” (350), might be challenged as too limiting in this instance. As juxtaposition, the image is both daunting and haunting, deftly linking Chapters IX and X, and through “silence” deepening the meaning of what is stirring in the unspoken layers of the story.
Radios, like clocks and other sounds, also offer persistent markers of the private journeys undertaken by the three main characters in the novel. Seemingly detached and random in relation to action, character, or theme, they nevertheless sometimes threaten to reverse the figure and ground of the story and inevitably invite comment in Lowry’s use of them. The “blaring” radio in Laruelle’s dream (26), for example, joins in the cacophony of sound that seems to propel the bus on which he is riding:
The noise of the bus could not drown the distant music from whirligig and radio. A despondent American tune, borne rising and falling over the fields, a full wind blown surge of music from which skimmed a spray of babbling, did not break so much as thump against the walls rushing past them. Then with a moan it would be sucked back into the distance. And other sounds too mingled with this, the shuffling of sandals in the dust, the grating of skates, and the purr of the tread of tires all around the city. (28)
A radio also dominates the opening of Chapter VI, where Hugh, lying “full length” on the day bed of the Consul’s porch, fiddles distractedly with the dial: “With his ear inclined to the radio he thought he could hear the pulse of the world beating in its carved, latticed throat” (107). This radio in fact plays a prominent role throughout the chapter, as when it transmits “an oily voice […] preaching about red-blooded Americans, subversive influences, our solemn duties—God knows they were solemn enough without having these jelly-bellies say so. Below this were the voices of static. These were the gibberings of the countless poltergeists of the ether, shackled in the eternal recurrence of the sound waves, jeering without end at real and unreal alike—clacquers of the idiotic. Listen to us, they jibber-jabbered, one thing only is wrong: clarity” (108). At the end of Chapter XII a right-wing radio broadcast shouts out, seeming to mock the position of the defenceless Consul before his death. In contrast, at the moment of Hugh and Yvonne’s sexual bliss at the close of Chapter XI, there is a softness of sound—an absence of clocks or radios—that merges lyrically with the magical beauty of the visual world:
The wind had dropped completely, leaving a breathless quiet in the jungle. They could see in the distance another hilltop on the side of the valley, with a little cemetery cut into it, swarming with people visible now only as candles lit against the twilight, like fireflies.
While they watched it grew darker; the night was becoming a vast, slowly swaying chandelier. Soft cries and lamentations, of the mourners praying, or gently chanting over the candles on the coffins of their loved ones, wandered down to them.
The Day of the Dead—
It was as though the candles, unearthly to them in the green evening, were gently shaking their waxen jewels, filling the bowl of the whole world with muffled, multitudinous tintinnabulations that perhaps were really goats going down by the ravine or guitars sounding on graves as the procession moved on, and then, swinging out of sight altogether, left its echoes with them among the grasses and the stirring of the leaves. (224)
Sounds take on complexity also through Lowry’s treatment of spoken language, his ear “exceptionally sensitive to the way Mexicans speak English” (Costa 102). Richard Costa provides examples from the 1947 version, but these are already present in 1940, though in less labyrinthine contexts: for example, in Chapter I Dr. Vigil’s “those who have nobody them with” (10) and his “throw away your mind” (5); or at the opening and closing of Chapter IX, the “Half past tree by the cock” (169) and the “Half past sick by the cock” (190), both spoken by the little man at the door of Las Novedades, the former echoing the betrayal of Christ, the latter anticipating the Consul’s failed sexual encounter with the whore María in Chapter XII. Indeed the closing paragraphs of the final chapter brim with a cacophony of sound that accompanies the Consul’s fast-approaching end. At first the Consul’s final thoughts
drifting through his mind were accompanied by a music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The Siciliana. Finale of the D Minor Quartet by Moses. No, it was something funereal, of Gluck’s perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality to it: Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England, in the seventeenth century. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the distant clamour of the waterfall and with what sounded like the cries of love. (251)
Voices too accompany his final visionary reverie, as do the sound of laughter and the shrieking of an ambulance, these suggestive of comfort and longing, hopefulness and nostalgia. Finally he hears the voice of the volcano itself: “for there was a noise as of foisting lava in his ears, perhaps not only the volcano but, yes, the world itself was in eruption [….] / Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream of pain were being tossed from one tree to another as its echoes came back from this forest, and after, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying” (252).
* * *
In reaching for that “certain universality” that he hoped might recall writers like Kafka, stylistically Lowry claimed to have strived, at the same time, to be more “entertaining” than Kafka, more commercially appealing—more “‘publishable at a profit’” as he put it to Aiken (CL 1:293). He maintained that his story carried “a dime novel theme” (CL 1:336) that, with its melodramatic plot, should contribute to sales. For all the text’s complexities and demands of content and style, he insisted that he had drawn and created his characters from a “different cheaper sort of novel altogether,” so that “Bruce the butcher’s boy” would get something out of it (CL 1:337). Every character’s life was plotted, he said, in terms of his or her “historical, economic, and even esoteric position” (CL 1:336). For “the general reader,” too, he claimed to have produced a work with a strong sense of “continuity” (CL 1:336), of a straightforward narrative—especially beyond Chapter I. Lowry obviously underestimated the complexity and interiority of his work, but his comments nevertheless provide fascinating insight into his desire for the broadest possible readership.
Frederick Asals rightly reminds us that Lowry wanted to achieve more than he was able to attain in 1940. Indeed Lowry later wrote to Derek Pethick about the process of shaping his novel into the work it finally became: “after a while it began to make a noise like music, when it made the wrong noise I altered it—when it seemed to make the right one, finally, I kept it” (CL 2:210). Nevertheless, that the 1940 Under the Volcano is a text fascinating in its own right, itself a varied and vibrant achievement, is made evident by the complex invitation it offers to its two annotators, whose work is on rich display in the present volume. In their notes to the text, Chris Ackerley and David Large convey a sense of Lowry’s interest in the intentionality of the details of his work, providing us with a map of Lowry’s intellectual preoccupations and interests. Integrated with their vast digital project, Under the Volcano: A Hypertextual Companion, which focuses on the 1947 edition, Ackerley and Large’s annotations to the 1940 text are massive in their totality but always sensitive, suggestive, and probing in their individual and cumulative force. Their annotations function as connectors to other texts, both by and beyond Lowry, taking us into the brilliant workshop of Lowy’s own mind.
Lowry’s trilogy of the period 1936–1944—the 1940 Under the Volcano, Swinging the Maelstrom, and In Ballast to the White Sea—reveals a sustained period of productive work during a time that has often been perceived as a long and barren fourteen-year interval between the two novels that he published in 1933 and 1947. We can now see with increased clarity the kind of overarching vision of his own work with which Lowry was struggling. During the early months of 1940 Lowry, as already noted, boldly and optimistically reported to Conrad Aiken that if he and Margerie could just “stick together” as they had during the preceding weeks, they “could produce not just one book but a large body of work stamped at last with an individual imprint” (CL 1:293). He was looking at his individual pieces of fiction as comprising one large related text, conceiving of his current work-in-progress as a Dantean trilogy. To Harold Matson he wrote in January 1942 that his three manuscripts “make, strangely enough, one book, complementary in theme, an inferno, a purgatorio, and a paradiso, an honest Baedeker, I believe, for he who would travel in hell” (CL 1:388). Although Lowry had begun both Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea before he started writing Under the Volcano late in 1936 and was composing a great deal of poetry as well, he decided to put on a great final push in 1940 and finish Under the Volcano first. He then turned to the other two novels, even as he was rewriting his Under the Volcano manuscript.
Sherrill Grace, noting that what Lowry would call The Voyage That Never Ends “was to be [his] magnum opus,” indicates that the idea for this project emerged for him in the late 1930s (Grace in CL 2:451). He had used the phrase with Aiken in the fall of 1939, though without linking it to his own work (CL 1:249). In December 1939 he referred to the three works—the manuscripts for In Ballast to the White Sea, Under the Volcano, and “The Last Address”—in a single breath, indicating to Aiken that as a group these represented “several years work” (CL 1:256). By May 1942—in a letter to, of all people, his own father—he again drew on the voyage phrase in relation to the trilogy: “I am working on a book, […] and when I say a book I mean a big book, in fact it is a trilogy, three novels in one, to be called The Voyage That Never Ends [….] [I]t aims to be a classic” (CL 1:396). To his sister-in-law and mother-in-law he wrote in August 1942, both comically in his description of himself and exaggeratedly regarding the delivery date of his Under the Volcano manuscript: “I am writing a trilogy called The Voyage That Never Ends—of enormous length and horrendous content. I feel I shall probably sell the first third of it, a novel in itself, this year. When you read it you will probably decide that Margie has married a lycanthrope” (CL 1:407).
Later, writing in 1945 to a more literary correspondent, Jonathan Cape, to whom he had sent his “mescal-inspired phantasmagoria” (CL 1:502), he recalled that already in 1940–1941 he had conceived of the trilogy by that name. Once Cape’s reader had responded to the manuscript in rather negative terms, Lowry contextualized and defended it to Cape by suggesting that while rewriting Swinging the Maelstrom he had
conceived the idea of a trilogy entitled The Voyage That Never Ends for your firm (nothing less than a trilogy would do), with Volcano as the first, infernal part, a much amplified Lunar Caustic [“The Last Address”/Swinging the Maelstrom] as the second, purgatorial part and an enormous novel I was also working on called In Ballast to the White Sea as the paradisal third part, the whole to concern the battering the human spirit takes (doubtless because it is overreaching itself) in its ascent toward its true purpose. (CL 1:503–04; see also CL 1:479)
He informed Cape that the third text—the Paradiso volume which by the end of 1941 had reached “1000 pages of eccentric word-spinning”—had been destroyed a year earlier in the great fire of 6 June 1944 that ravaged his cabin and also part of his Purgatorio volume.21 Lowry would repeat these comments in the first of his approximately seventy letters to his American editor Albert Erskine, in which he explained that “Under the Volcano was originally planned as the inferno part of a Dantesque trilogy to be called The Voyage That Never Ends” (CL 1:580) and told him too about Swinging the Maelstrom (what he was at this point calling “Lunar Caustic”) and In Ballast to the White Sea, “completely destroyed in the fire” (CL 1:580). The 1940 Under the Volcano, then, takes its place in close historic proximity to and partnership with Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, with which it forms part of a trilogy that Lowry saw as central to his life work.22
As a group, the volumes of the trilogy testify to Lowry’s literary achievement and considerable experimentation as a novelist during the 1930s and early 1940s. Though without forming any kind of exact narrative continuity, the three boldly different works nevertheless stand in marked juxtaposition. In Ballast to the White Sea, set in and around Cambridge and Liverpool and on a sea voyage from England to Norway, grew out of Lowry’s August to September 1931 journey by sea in search of the writer Nordahl Grieg, whose novel The Ship Sails On had deeply affected him. Once a draft of the In Ballast manuscript was circulating among publishers in New York, Lowry started work on the project which would become the novella Swinging the Maelstrom. This text—known in an early version as “The Last Address” and published posthumously as Lunar Caustic in yet a different version heavily edited by Margerie Lowry and Earle Birney—was based on Lowry’s experience in the psychiatric ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where he spent time in May 1936 and where he was deeply affected by the horror that he witnessed (Day 199–201). He showed this work to Burnett at Story magazine and by August 1936 was claiming—and, as already demonstrated, vastly exaggerating—to his old mentor Aiken that Story would be publishing it in its September 1936 issue. In early September—with no contracts finalized with publishers in the case of either In Ballast to the White Sea or Swinging the Maelstrom—Lowry left New York for Mexico with his first wife, Jan Gabrial, taking with him one copy of In Ballast, leaving another with Jan’s mother in New York. The third novel is set, of course, in Mexico, where Lowry lived from the fall of 1936 to July 1938, before moving first to Los Angeles and then to Vancouver, where he would continue his work on the book alongside his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry.
The more than 1,200 annotations in this volume incorporate a large and revealing number that operate in relation to this work’s presence as part of a trilogy. That about 100 of these allude to In Ballast, and, indeed, that a similar number of the annotations in the In Ballast volume allude to at least one of Lowry’s Under the Volcano manuscripts, hints at the particular kinship especially between these two works. At the same time, it is interesting to speculate that had Lowry’s copy of In Ballast to the White Sea not been lost in the fire, and had he had enough time to work on it, it might have reached the kind of heights that Lowry found with the 1947 Volcano.
* * *
If the 1940 Under the Volcano has important links to Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, it is of course in many ways inseparable from its later 1947 articulation. It may seem irreverent to speak in the same breath of the 1940 and 1947 versions of Under the Volcano, for in 1940 Lowry was still on his way in the course of this project to finding himself fully as a poet. And yet there is, in fact, already a good deal of wonderfully poetic and achingly lyrical writing in the 1940 text. As Frederick Asals has lucidly noted, “what is most impressive about the Consul in 1940—and about the novel that contains him—is his poetic response to an apprehended scene, real or imagined, the ability to conjure up a particular time and place with all the loveliness or horror it may evoke in the beholder” (The Making 67). Offering vivid examples from various chapters, Asals observes: “It is in these passages that we are closest to the final Volcano, for they contain […] the texture and feeling (and indeed often the language) that will persist through all revision. It is Lowry the lyric poet in prose we find here, not Lowry the ‘novelist’” (67).
Not surprisingly the 1947 text carries many vestiges of its precursor. As a blueprint for its successor, the 1940 Under the Volcano provided Lowry with a basic narrative structure as well as the necessary tension against which to play off his expanding and deepening vision. The 1940 text gave him a practical framework within which he could discover and explore the densely “poetical possibilities” of his subject. Because Lowry could take his plot largely for granted once he had established the 1940 manuscript, “he was freed to devote himself to concerns of structure and texture that would realize both the individual unity of his chapters and their ‘interrelat[ionships]’” (Asals, The Making 346). It was not so much his other work of the 1930s that prepared him for his 1947 victory, but rather “the repeated rewriting of this one novel: Lowry’s apprenticeship for Under the Volcano is Under the Volcano” (69).
Indeed the “stylistically spare and straightforward narrative” (Bowker, Pursued 334) of the 1940 version—though simultaneously not without what publishers saw as its “obfuscations and overwriting” (Asals, The Making 80)—gave Lowry a usable outline from which to work. It was not a “completed work, but simply the essential terms of his fable, with the first of their interpretations” (69). In rewriting he drew closer to what he saw as his essential writerly self, as he would put it in 1946 to Cape: “the author’s equipment, such as it is, is subjective rather than objective, a better equipment, in short, for a certain kind of poet than a novelist [….] [T]he conception of the whole [1947] thing was essentially poetical” (CL 1:500). But his poetic sensibility—what Aiken called “his genius with language,” what makes his novel “such a miracle of English prose” (Aiken in Asals, The Making 407, note 3)—is already evident in the 1940 version. “It would be a gross oversimplification,” suggests Pierre Schaeffer in an important study of dialogic techniques in the respective texts, “to claim that The 1940 Under the Volcano is totally insipid or uninteresting; the difference between the two versions is one of degree, and the earlier version, despite its obvious weaknesses, already contains some of the ingredients that went into the making of the 1947 masterpiece” (84). The 1940 text, Schaeffer argues, is already “rife” with the effects of a sometimes quite “sophisticated” dialogic wordplay “that depends heavily on translinguistic or plurilingual effects” (84, 88; see his excellent discussion 84–91). He offers the menu in Chapter X, with all its playful nonsense, as an ideal example (Schaeffer 88–89).
Still, comparatively speaking, the 1940 text is stylistically much more rudimentary and prosaic in its reach than the 1947 version. The 1947 text, with its vibrantly poetic texture dominating the prose of the external action, to some extent reverses the proportion or ratio of poetry and prose of the 1940 work, where an omniscient narrator is asked to do a good deal of the work, not least in maintaining a clear order of events. It suppresses what in the earlier work is “clumsy, talky, even boring and pretentious” (Day 270) or, to take an alternate list, what is “choked with naive social criticism, boring character analyses, and tedious exposition” (Grace 39). It leaves behind the “flat” writing “over-loaded […] with soap-operatic, tedious talk” (Schaeffer 83). Or as Asals puts it: “What the early drafts of the Volcano lack is not symbolic extension—this is almost as ‘symbolic’ a work in 1940 as it would be in 1947, although not always in the same ways—but intellectual, emotional, imaginative resonance” (The Making 5).
Richard Costa gives as an example the paragraph describing a snake, “a regular pouncing sarpint,” near the start of Chapter V as an instance where Lowry is overly explicit and literal minded in establishing the Consul’s link to Adam in the 1940 version: “The scene bristles with the evidence of contrivance” (77). Or, to take Schaeffer’s comment on the same scene, the 1947 text “thrives somewhat more on suggestion and indirection” (105, note 13; see also 90). But the 1940 version does have its own inner revelations to commend it. Walking to the public garden beyond the edge of his own garden, the Consul comes upon the sign that later grows into a more dynamic force in the inner and outer worlds of the Consul, though it is here already given some degree of weight:
He had now just shut the gate in this fence, through which he had the sole right of entry until the law decreed otherwise, behind him, when he found himself confronted with a newly erected notice: ¿Le gusta este Jardín? ¿Que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus Hijos lo destruyan! / You love this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! / The Consul was stunned. It might have been a final judgement upon him, and taking the accusation into his very being, he wandered gloomily down to the very bottom of the annex, where the cesspools were, the rank smells of death. (87)
With his attention to texture Lowry followed what biographer Douglas Day described as a kind of “mythopoeic bent” that led him into “ever-increasing intricacy of allusion,” until Under the Volcano became “not a novel at all” but what Day called “a kind of monument to prodigality of vision” (270). Sue Vice argues that “[Lowry] treats his own works as he does those of other writers, extracting and grafting together the components of literary sense into a coherent surface. Lowry’s rewriting almost conforms to a definition of (self-)parody: repetition is accompanied by critical distance” (50). Operating mainly in a worldly—and wordy—register, the 1940 text does not yet sing in an otherworldly scale. As Gordon Bowker, taking note of Lowry’s 22 June 1940 covering letter to Burnett, states,
[t]he concept was too grandiose to justify the result; he knew he had a potentially great novel but had not yet acquired the skill to write a sufficiently complex work and had tried to produce it quickly when his natural pace was slow and painstaking. His strength was exactly the unpalpableness which lifts his writing at its best from the particular to the universal and scatters his texts with enigmas. (Pursued 303)
But even though the 1940 text falls short on many counts in relation to the 1947 novel, there is nevertheless a particular kind of energy in this 1940 blueprint, in this “notation,” as Lowry came to call it, “for the hard work of a later time” (CL 1:377). The annotations in this volume provide their own body of coherent interpretation of the movement from the 1940 to the 1947 texts, attentive to both similarities and differences alike. They are full of links and distinctions between the 1940 Under the Volcano and the 1947 Under the Volcano, replete as they are with their anticipatory expressions of “not yet,” “in revision,” “survived into,” “would become,” “reappeared,” “persisted into,” “would assume major significance,” “would remain essentially unchanged.” Especially they reveal that there was between the two texts what Costa calls a “deepening conception of the whole” (94).
One crucial part of the narrative that would change, of course, is the transformation from the earlier work as very much a 1930s text written near the start of the Second World War to one completed at the war’s end. The difference in the temporal relationships between the opening chapter and Chapters II through XII in the respective versions is explored by Asals in an important essay that deftly connects the sense of historical time in the novel with the historical moments of Lowry’s writing the two versions (see afterword). In the 1940 version there are vivid allusions in Chapter I to the Second World War, then underway, including those involving Laruelle’s concern about enlisting on the side of France, set in relation to his anxieties about completing his film. This concern parallels Lowry’s in Vancouver in 1940, where he held in tension the prospect of either enlisting in the war or finishing his novel. That he was in Canada, which was at war, rather than in the United States, which was not, complicated the matter for him and increased his interest in returning to the States (which did not enter the war until December 1941). In Chapters II through XII, begun in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War and continued in Los Angeles, Lowry was drawing on Mexico to produce a commentary on Europe at war, particularly in Spain, and on the crises of humankind’s fate especially in light of the military and economic tensions of the twenty-five-year period from 1914 to 1939. In the 1947 text, which Lowry finished years after the Spanish Civil War, and with the Second World War ending (the Third Reich was defeated in April 1945, a month before Lowry sent his Under the Volcano manuscript to Matson), explicit historical elements became more submerged. Lowry built the later text on the back of the earlier one, pillaging the 1940 version while pushing the evolving 1947 novel to its poetic limits, in the process seeming to obliterate much of the earlier text. Asals provides an astonishingly long catalogue of key passages in the 1947 version “that make no appearance, […] however faint,” in the 1940 manuscript. It is an impressive list, restricting itself entirely to Chapter I, yet including more than fifty noteworthy examples (The Making 381–82). At the same time, however, there remains an uncanny connection between the two texts—not least in the way that the rejection of the 1940 text implicitly haunts our response to, as also Lowry’s understanding of, the 1947 version, a version that in terms of sacrifice and intensity of effort came at great cost to him.
* * *
Under the Volcano, as the world came to know it in 1947, is a mesmerizing work: in sensibility and tone, range and scope, rhythm and temper, myth and symbol. While its 1940 predecessor paid eloquent attention largely to exterior action and landscape (with only occasional overlapping and evocative interior interludes), the 1947 text more fully explores the complex relationship between language and the subject. Frederick Asals calls the 1940 work, with its roving omniscient narrator, “a fiction of gesture,” in which “a kind of novelistic semaphoring is substituted for genuine rendering” (The Making 42). Indeed, as Asals puts it, “the single most important alteration Lowry made after 1940, the one with the most radical implications for Under the Volcano as a whole, was […] the decision to abandon a technique of narrative omniscience for one of alternating central consciousnesses” (“Revision and Illusion” 94). Above all, representation from within displaces narrative assertion from the outside. In 1940 symbols threaten to be more talked about than performed. In Chapter XII the narrator provides the following glimpse of the Consul’s consciousness in a passage that does not appear in the 1947 text:
Life was a forest of symbols, was it, Baudelaire had said? But, it occurred to him, even before the forest, if there were such a thing as “before,” were not there still the symbols? Yes, before! Before you knew anything about life, you had the symbols. It was with symbols that you started. From them you progressed to something else. Life was indeed what you made of the symbols and, the less you made of life the more symbols you got. And the more you tried to comprehend them, confusing what life was, with the necessity for this comprehension, the more they multiplied. (232)23
Richard Cross points out that following revision, such “abstract discourse yielded to indirect methods of presentation” and only a trace of this passage survives in the Consul’s impression in the máquina infernal that “it was symbolic, of what he could not conceive, but it was undoubtedly symbolic” (48).24
In January 1942 both Malcolm and Margerie signed a thoughtful letter—written in Margerie’s voice—to Harold Matson in which she expressed their belief in the value of the 1940 version of Under the Volcano: “we know that within its matrix there is a novel which is not only truly good but saleable.” At the same time, they expressed relief and “a sort of gratitude that by some fluke it was not sold in its present form”—that is, sold by some “fluke” to, presumably, a publisher other than Story Press, to a publisher, in other words, with whom Lowry had built up no sense of personal interrelationship. Now, she said, Malcolm was working on what they both agreed was a “better version of the Volcano” (CL 1:385).
In a 4 March 1941 letter to Matson, Lowry, while acknowledging that “there is too much preoccupation with time, and the pattern does not emerge properly,” still was willing only to go reluctantly partway in his acceptance of Martha Foley’s assessment of the 1940 text, suggesting that her judgment was “maybe a just one in part” (CL 1:372). On 6 July 1941, to Whit Burnett and Foley, he capitulated more fully: “I find now that your words are quite right and just: the issue is confused by Dunne stuff” (CL 1:376). His conclusion in both letters: “I am rewriting it” (CL 1:372, 377). Both of these letters speak of his having confused an artistic or aesthetic triumph with what was “only a sort of” moral or spiritual victory. But he could not dismiss altogether the idea that “the pattern” was there within the “matrix” of the 1940 narrative (CL 1:372, 385). Neither, evoking his days with Burnett and Foley in New York, did he let go of his deep and necessary faith in a mutually supportive community of writers: “that you believed in it then still gives me a lot of encouragement” (CL 1:377). Like the Consul at the end of Chapter XII, he understood the importance of the community that could sustain him—especially when it was not there to help.
1. A limited print run of a preliminary transcription of the 1940 manuscript (edited by Tiessen and Mota), under the title The 1940 Under the Volcano, was made available to readers in 1994 in a non-critical edition (MLR Editions, 1994).
2. During the early 1970s, scholars such as Day (296) and Corrigan (87) established the practice of referring to the version we are publishing in this critical edition as the third draft. Other than the version published in 1947, this is the only completed manuscript. For the more nuanced views of Doyen and Asals, see our comments just below.
3. Matson’s 7 October 1940 letter appears in appendix 2 in the second volume of Lowry’s Collected Letters (CL 2:926).
4. Even Lowry’s brilliant defence and exegesis of his own work, his January 1946 “pleading”—funny, poignant, and desperate—“for a rereading” of the final manuscript of Under the Volcano, appeared before the public for the first time in 1965. So too, we might add on a happier note, did Lippincott’s hardcover edition of the 1947 novel with its new introduction by Stephen Spender, this reissue along with the letters marking a new phase in Lowry readership and scholarship.
5. For purposes of clarity and consistency, we follow the practice employed in Vik Doyen’s recent edition of Swinging the Maelstrom: A Critical Edition by referring to Lowry’s Bellevue hospital narrative as Swinging the Maelstrom, even though, strictly speaking, that is a title that Lowry ascribed to it only later, in December 1951. See Lowry, Swinging xli, n1. For a discussion of other phases of, and titles for, the narrative, including “The Last Address” and Lunar Caustic, see Doyen and Mota’s introduction in Lowry, Swinging xxv–xxvi.
6. Corrigan’s article, “Malcolm Lowry, New York Publishing, & the ‘New Illiteracy,’” appeared in the British literary magazine Encounter, itself edited by Stephen Spender, author of both a blurb for the original 1947 publication of Under the Volcano and, much more substantially and influentially, the introduction to Lippincott’s 1965 reissue of Lowry’s novel.
7. See page 254 below. Among those listed, Houghton Mifflin had its official headquarters in Boston, Lippincott in Philadelphia.
8. Except for a brief and, as it happens, misleading reference to his connection with “The Last Address” (Day 197–98), Burnett is largely absent even from Douglas Day’s 1973 Malcolm Lowry: A Biography.
9. The writer Arthur Calder-Marshall, a contemporary of Lowry who had been at Oxford, knew him through their mutual Cambridge friend John Davenport. Calder-Marshall’s short story, “One of the Leaders,” had also appeared in that September 1934 issue (see Colin Dilnot’s Gutted Arcades of the Past). Conrad Aiken’s award-winning short story, “Impulse,” had appeared in the April 1933 issue of Story—when, as it happens, Lowry and Aiken were travelling in Spain. Gerald Noxon would later adapt “Impulse” as a radio drama, broadcast from Toronto on 26 February 1950 on the Trans-Canada Network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the CBC); in 1992, it was published in Malcolm Lowry and Conrad Aiken Adapted (Noxon, “Impulse”).
10. Lowry’s relationship with Erskine as his editor, first at Reynal & Hitchcock and after 1952 at Random House, was interrupted when Harcourt, Brace acquired Reynal & Hitchcock in 1948. Giroux then became Lowry’s editor until 1952, when Harcourt, Brace released Lowry from his contract with them.
11. In 1974 Muriel Bradbrook, examining Lowry’s undergraduate years, describes versions of “the family life he so deeply needed,” whether in the Case family, where he stayed on vacations with his University of Cambridge friend Martin Case and Martin’s brothers during his undergraduate years; in the literary set at Cambridge with friends like John Davenport; or in the “addled” salon and household of J. B. S. and Charlotte Haldane. Bradbrook proposes “the ‘family’ of the Dollarton fishing community,” where he lived from 1940 to 1954, as a later version of familial connection for Lowry (Bradbrook 129).
12. While in Vancouver, Lowry managed to keep an eye on the reputation of Story Press and its evolution, staying up to date on recent changes at the publisher. After having published their Story Press Books in association with Harper & Brothers since 1936, Burnett and Foley switched their association in 1939 to Lippincott (Neugeboren 256, 264). In May 1940 Lowry slipped a parenthetical note into a letter to Aiken: “(Story Press and Lippincott, any good?)” (CL 1:327). And in June, reiterating his sense of loyalty to what he imagined was the “trust[ing]” Whit Burnett, he added a touch of concern: “I do not know quite what to do: I don’t know anything about the new Story Press” (CL 1:332).
13. Noxon had been at Trinity College, Cambridge, starting his undergraduate studies a year before Lowry arrived at St. Catharine’s College. He was publishing editor of Experiment when, in 1930 and 1931, that “little magazine” published two of Lowry’s earliest short stories, “Port Swettenham” and “Punctum Indifferens Skibet Gaar Videre.” Lowry introduced Noxon to Aiken in September 1930 in Rye. In 1933 while Lowry and Aiken travelled in Spain—where Lowry met Jan Gabrial—Gerald and Betty Noxon rented Aiken’s home in Rye.
14. Asals, examining the brand of bond typing paper, the colour of typewriter ribbon, and the style of the typeface, provides a meticulous account of the stages of the 1940 typed draft (see The Making 388–93 [appendix A]). Asals’s account builds on Doyen’s earlier analysis (see Doyen 225–27, n24; 232–33, n65).
15. After Lowry’s arrival in New York, Burnett had encouraged him to submit Ultramarine to a literary competition with a thousand-dollar prize cosponsored by Story and the gigantic Doubleday, Doran & Company (Neugeboren 253). Lowry, always eager to explicate his own work and intentions, saw this as an opportunity to reopen Ultramarine, proposing to Burnett that he might write a foreword “explaining the symbolism of the Tarot Pack & the pigeon etc” in the novel, while quipping—probably quite seriously—that he wished he could have “pruned it a bit”: “there is a kind of 1910 pornography about certain parts which are perhaps neither good manners, good art, nor incidentally, good pornography” (CL 1:154).
16. When Linscott, though saying that he favoured the manuscript himself, indicated that his firm would not be publishing it, Lowry conveyed a quite relaxed air to Aiken in a 30 November letter: “[Linscott] was for it, others were agin.” He needed only one believer in a publishing firm, and he found Linscott’s letter “very encouraging,” and also claimed to Aiken that he was not at all distressed because Linscott “thinks somebody will take it eventually” (CL 1:364). Grace, however, after reading Linscott’s letter with its adverse reader’s report, states: “If this is indeed the letter to which Lowry is referring […], then it is difficult to see how he could call it ‘very encouraging’” (Grace in CL 1:365, n2). To be sure, in a 14 November 1940 letter Linscott told Lowry that the manuscript reflected “a very special taste and that it would be a devil of a job to publish it with any chance of commercial success”; Linscott’s reader had confessed “to some alarm at the thought of trying to describe this book to a bookseller in such a way as to induce him to order it” (see Asals, The Making 417, n1). “Above all,” the reader complained, “the pattern of the story fails clearly to emerge, lost as it is in meditation, description, and verbal pyrotechnics” (415, n8). In a subsequent letter eleven days later, Linscott wrote that the novel might be sold “as is,” but that it would take finding a publisher “willing to run the risk—and a pretty good sized risk—of losing money on it” (417, n1). Lowry, in denial, nursed the notion that Linscott, a friend of Aiken, was prepared to talk with him in the personal and intimate ways that he valued, but that Linscott’s editorial colleagues—faceless bureaucrats in Lowry’s world—were the naysayers. He was projecting an example of what Corrigan has pointed to: attachment to a sole supporter in a publishing house where others were blind to him.
17. For at least over half a decade Lowry carried with him another sign of his connectedness with Burnett. Attentive to the burden of debts of all kinds, Lowry bore with him from New York to Vancouver his memory of a forty-five-dollar debt. In 1936 Burnett had paid Lowry a forty-five-dollar advance on Lowry’s novella “The Last Address” when he tentatively accepted it for publication, but which, as we have seen, he felt was still “inchoate” (Bowker, Pursued 200). The forty-five dollars was, as Bowker puts it, “the first money he had earned from writing done in America and must have encouraged him to hope that he might after all be able to live by his writing” (Pursued 200). Five years later, in July 1941 when he finally wrote to Burnett and Foley again (CL 1:377), Lowry was still letting Burnett know that he had that money owing, and in January 1942, through Matson, Lowry indicated to Burnett that he hoped to make up for the money “in kind” (CL 1:387), that is, with the submission of a short story. For Lowry the debt seems to have been part of the genteel dance he felt a writer and his editor should be able to politely practice, without the coarseness of money again having to change hands. (He had another such debt with Ann Watkins, as we have seen [see also CL 1:387].) He was to admit to Matson, however, that he was wrong in having tried “to mix up the personal debts and the stories” (CL 1:387). In the meantime, Burnett had written Matson what Bowker calls a “waspish” letter informing him that he was again rejecting “The Last Address,” even though Lowry had rewritten it (Pursued 313).
18. Asals suggests that Lowry here might be referring to the French film director, Jacques Laruelle, who occupies centre stage in Chapter I, and whose identity might have been influenced by Margerie’s past experience in Hollywood (The Making 20, 30). Of course Lowry too had always been a close observer of the film scene, both in Hollywood and in Europe, and Laruelle might well have been his own creation.
19. Lowry was clearly experiencing some anxiety about possible accusations of borrowing from Aiken. Having once had a deeply unsettling encounter in 1935 over what Grace (CL 1:330, n2) calls a “preposterous” charge of plagiarism from Doubleday literary editor Burton Rascoe, who had read his Ultramarine with a suspicious eye, Lowry wrote to Rascoe in May 1940, letting him know that he was “working hard on a book for Whit Burnett” (CL 1:330). Indeed it had been Burnett who had in 1934 asked Lowry to submit Ultramarine to the competition cosponsored by Story magazine and Doubleday. Lowry did not now want his prospects with Burnett severed by interference from someone like Rascoe. In his 1973 dissertation, “Fighting the Albatross of Self: A Genetic Study of the Literary Work of Malcolm Lowry,” Vik Doyen presents the first overview of Lowry’s encounter with Rascoe (46–47; 213–17). For a further discussion of Lowry and Rascoe, and Lowry’s ongoing anxieties about his literary borrowings, see Patrick A. McCarthy’s introduction to In Ballast to the White Sea xxvii–xxxii; and xlvii, nn13 and 14.
20. Lowry’s phrase here, “a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices,” is taken verbatim from Aiken’s Blue Voyage (290), where Demarest muses on the deserved criticism his work has received. It is intriguing that Lowry uses the phrase to indicate the virtues of his own work. He surely could not have expected that Burnett would have been unaware of its origin. Our thanks to David Large for this observation.
21. Of course the powerful myth that held for seventy years, from 1944 to 2014, that the Paradiso volume was burnt to little more than a few pages of ashy remains in the 1944 fire has been undone with the publication in 2014 of the recently discovered 1936 draft of In Ballast to the White Sea. Further, the presence now of In Ballast to the White Sea recontextualizes the approach to the 1940 Under the Volcano. In temper and tone, as in its sense of narrative distance, In Ballast has at least some affinities with the text that we are publishing in this volume.
22. In his seemingly endless quest to explore the history of the human spirit and imagination, Lowry would later alter and significantly enlarge his idea about what should comprise “The Voyage That Never Ends.” By 1951 the proposed project included what would have been a rewritten Ultramarine as well as a series of novels on which he was then working but which would remain unfinished, published only after his death. For a detailed discussion of the evolution of the project, see Grace, The Voyage That Never Ends (1–19).
23. In his Forests of Symbols Patrick McCarthy explores this passage in relation to Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” (44–45).
24. A nuanced but telling distinction between the use of symbolism in the two texts lies in the closing line of each. The 1940 text adheres to literal-minded storytelling, the 1947 text moves more abstractly. In the 1940 Under the Volcano, the Consul, wandering near the barranca at the start of Chapter XII, “stumbl[es] over a dead dog” (230). The ten words of the last line of the book—like the seven words of the opening line comprising the whole of the paragraph, and in altered context reiterating the expression “the dead/Dead”—bring us back to that dog: “Somebody threw the dead dog after him down the ravine” (252). In the 1947 edition, the text is released from the 1940 insistence on an unbroken and objective continuity: “Someone threw a dead dog after him down the ravine” (Under the Volcano 375).
A/L Letters: The Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry, 1929–1954
CL: Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry
Ackerley, Chris. “The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under the Volcano:’ Frederick Asals’ Reconstruction and Victor Doyen’s Critique—a Critical Dialogue.” The Malcolm Lowry Review 41–42 (Fall 1997 & Spring 1998): 73–83.
Ackerley, Chris, and David Large. Under the Volcano: A Hypertextual Companion. <http://www.otago.ac.nz/englishlinguistics/english/lowry/>.
Aiken, Conrad. Blue Voyage. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927.
_____. Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken. Ed. Joseph Killorin. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978.
Asals, Frederick. The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1997.
_____. “Revision and Illusion in Under the Volcano.” Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry. Ed. Sherrill Grace. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s P, 1992. 93–111.
Bowker, Gordon, ed. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano; A Casebook. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987.
_____. Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry. London: HarperCollins, 1993.
Bradbrook, M. C. Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life—A Study in Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974.
Corrigan, Matthew. “Malcolm Lowry, New York Publishing & the ‘New Illiteracy’.” Encounter 35.1 (July 1970): 82–93.
Costa, Richard Hauer. Malcolm Lowry. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Cross, Richard K. Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to His Fiction. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980.
Day, Douglas. Malcolm Lowry: A Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Dilnot, Colin. Gutted Arcades of the Past. <http://guttedarcades.blogspot.co.uk/>.
Doyen, Victor. “Fighting the Albatross of Self: A Genetic Study of the Literary Work of Malcolm Lowry.” Diss. Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, 1973.
Foley, Martha. The Story of Story Magazine: A Memoir. Ed. and with an introduction and afterword by Jay Neugeboren. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980.
Gabrial, Jan. “The First Wife’s Story.” In Malcolm Lowry Remembered. Ed. Gordon Bowker. London: Ariel Books, 1985. 91–102.
_____. Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
_____. “Marriage beneath the Volcano.” In Malcolm Lowry Remembered. Ed. Gordon Bowker. London: Ariel Books, 1985. 113–27.
Grace, Sherrill. The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1982.
Grieg, Nordahl. The Ship Sails On. Trans. A. G. Chater. New York: Knopf, 1927.
Lowry, Malcolm. The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry’s “Tender Is the Night.” Ed. and with an introduction by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990.
_____. The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry. Ed. and with an introduction by Kathleen Scherf; explanatory annotation by Chris Ackerley. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1992.
_____. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Ed. Douglas Day and Margerie Bonner Lowry. New York: New American Library, 1968.
_____. In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition. Ed. and with an introduction by Patrick A. McCarthy; annotations by Chris Ackerley; foreword by Vik Doyen, Miguel Mota, and Paul Tiessen. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2014.
_____. The Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry, 1929–1954. Ed. Cynthia C. Sugars. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. Cited as A/L Letters.
_____. The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940–1952. Ed. Paul Tiessen. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1988.
_____. Lunar Caustic. Ed. Earle Birney and Margerie Bonner Lowry and with a foreword by Conrad Knickerbocker. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
_____. The 1940 Under the Volcano. Ed. by Paul Tiessen and Miguel Mota. Introduction by Frederick Asals. Waterloo, ON: MLR Editions, 1994.
_____. Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry. Ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965.
_____. Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry. Ed. Sherrill Grace. 2 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995, 1996. Cited as CL.
_____. Swinging the Maelstrom: A Critical Edition. Ed. Vik Doyen with an introduction by Vik Doyen and Miguel Mota; annotations by Chris Ackerley; foreword by Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2013.
_____. Ultramarine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962.
_____. Under the Volcano. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
_____. “Work in Progress: The Voyage That Never Ends.” Malcolm Lowry Review 21–22 (Fall 1987 & Spring 1988): 72–99.
Lowry, Malcolm, and Margerie Bonner Lowry. Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Introduction by Paul Tiessen. Bloomfield Hills, MI: Bruccoli Clark, 1976.
McCarthy, Patrick A. Forests of Symbols: World, Text and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1994.
Neugeboren, Jay. “Introduction.” In Martha Foley, The Story of Story Magazine: A Memoir. 7–24.
Noxon, Gerald. “Impulse.” Adaptation of the short story by Conrad Aiken. Malcolm Lowry and Conrad Aiken Adapted. Ed. Paul Tiessen. Waterloo, ON: The Malcolm Lowry Review, 1992. 127–80.
_____. On Malcolm Lowry and Other Writings. Ed. and with an introduction by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen. Waterloo, ON: MLR Publications, 1987.
Schaeffer, Pierre. “Achieving Intensity: Notes on the Dialogic Evolution of Under the Volcano.” In A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century. Ed. Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000.
Vice, Sue. “Narrator Dethroned: The Making of Under the Volcano.” Encounter 69.3 (Sept.–Oct. 1987): 46–52.
Walker, Ronald G. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern English Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.