‘The novel gets off to a slow start,’ Malcolm Lowry concedes.1 Is this indeed ‘inevitable’ and ‘necessary’? Many readers find it hard to break into Under the Volcano. Their difficulty is a shadow of the trouble Lowry had in writing it. Like other major novels of its kind – Moby Dick, for instance, and Nostromo (Melville and Conrad meant a great deal to the young Lowry, and both authors struggled hard for those books); like The Rainbow, and Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus– it can take several attempts before one really gets going. Readers who have visited the novel’s ‘terrain’ – landscapes, plazas, the very buildings – marvel at the accuracy and miasmic clarity of the evocations but wrestle with the narrative strategies. After three false starts I first read the book through when I was twenty-two, even though I grew up in the very streets that Lowry describes.
Lowry wrote Under the Volcano in emphatically rhythmic prose. When he was composing it he read passages aloud to his wife and friends. It is hard to imagine how his voice might have unfolded, for example, the tortuous sentence that opens Chapter 3. There are others even more taxing. This is not the natural, if rather fussy, elaboration of Henry James whose longest sentences retain some contact with the speaking and feeling voice. This is syntax as architecture, a strained high baroque: it is not to be understood so much as unpacked and paraphrased. It is ‘vertical’, balanced, stilled in time, not ‘horizontal’, in flow — despite the prosody.
Sometimes Lowry breaks into a long iambic run that sounds almost like natural pentameters. This repetitive, predictable pace – Shakespearean, or rather, Marlovian — is unnatural to fiction. So are the elaborate time-schemes, switch-backs and gradual accretions of information which mean that the book makes the kind of sense Lowry intends only on a third reading. He devises a style to push through recalcitrant matter; yet how recalcitrant is his matter? The plot is simple enough. Well
before a third reading is complete, the reader might suspect that the problem is less structural: the problem (and pleasure) is the style itself. What is recalcitrant is character — not the dramatis personae but the character of the author who concedes that he ‘is’ his protagonists. The book points back to him again and again.
Lowry’s writing has this (and much else) in common with the work of the poets of his generation and concern — Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham. It was after all the age of Fitzrovia, Apocalypse and the Great Alcoholics. Thomas became his friend in London in 1932 and figures larger in Lowry’s biography than vice versa. There was also the wonderful neglected Anna Wickham, who rests in Hampstead Cemetery. Lowry is best understood in the company of poets, a fact he accepted when writing to Jonathan Cape defending his novel in 1946. The ‘irremediable’ defect of the book was that ‘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’. He compares the difficulties of the novel’s allusiveness with those of The Waste Land.
Under the Volcano is a masterpiece because the style is, for the most part, uncannily apposite: the novelist has struggled against the odds to create it; he uses it like Theseus uses the thread to find a way back through the dizzying labyrinth, having caught and slain his principal character, that version of himself, the tragic, comic, appalling and endearing Minotaur Geoffrey Firmin. And Lowry knew that in his style he had made something unique and rather wonderful: ‘the top level of the book, for all its longueurs, has been by and large so compellingly designed that the reader does not want to take time off to stop and plunge beneath the surface’. The language, with its root system of symbolic connections and counter-references, its symmetries, its constancy of tone, is complete and sufficient in a particular way. ‘Is it too much to say that all these chords, struck and resolved, while no reader can possibly apprehend them on first or even fourth reading, consciously, nevertheless vastly contribute unconsciously to the final weight of the book?’ It is, probably, rather too much to say; yet Lowry’s intention appears to have been to endow his novel with something like a human complexity of consciousness, to make it in effect ‘creaturely’, with a mind of its own as complex and troubled as that of his principal character.
Legend has it that Malcolm Lowry arrived in Mexico with his American wife Jan Gabrial on 2 November, the Day of the Dead, 1936. They stepped into the calendar setting and the lurid ceremonial of his novel-to-be. Its twelve hours’ action takes place on the Day of the Dead 1938, told from the vantage of that day in 1939.
How do we steal from Hell its terror? By anticipating it on earth? In Geoffrey Firmin’s case, by suffering DTS, by going out and finding the goblins and providing them with pitchforks. Magic, cabalism and simple hallucination weaken and then displace more conventional and communal belief – unless the magic is shared with the community. It is hard to discuss the morality or generalize the meaning of a novel in which the principal character cannot stabilize himself, lacking the will and the power to do so; and in which the environment itself is ceremonially out of control. What is true at one moment is false the next.
The Day of the Dead (All Souls) is one of those Catholic–pagan festivals which defines the peculiarly baroque, pagan–Christian spiritual culture of Mexico. Its symbols dig into the literal soil where the dead lie, not always consolingly but with a brutal irony: it is only in terms of this life that the afterlife finds expression, this life heightened and ritualized. The dead hunger and thirst as the living do, but more intensely, like alcoholics. In the candle— and torch-light they are momentarily satisfied (because though they are supposed to be in eternity they linger in time) with the sugar skulls, the pulque and mescal, the sweetmeats, chanting and dancing, the release of emotion and inhibition that traditional Fiesta sanctions.
In 1950, three years after Lowry’s novel appeared, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz published The Labyrinth of Solitude, an extended essay in which he devotes a chapter to ‘All Saints, Day of the Dead’. Through its feast-days the Mexican character reveals its deeper nature to which, among English writers, only Lowry and Lawrence have gained (appalled) imaginative access:
If we make ourselves anonymous in daily life, in the whirlwind of the Fiesta we let go. We don’t just open up: we tear ourselves open. Song, love, friendship: it all ends in howling and tearing. The violence of our feast-days reveals just how far our hermeticism seals off our lines of communication with the world. We know delirium, song, outcry and monologue, but not dialogue. Our Fiestas, like our intimacies, our loves and our attempts to reorder our society, are violent breaches with the old and the established. Each time we wish to express ourselves we must break with ourselves. And the Fiesta is just one example, perhaps the most typical, of violent rupture. […] The Mexican, gloomy being that he is, confined within himself, suddenly bursts, opens his bosom and reveals himself with a degree of complacency, lingering on the shameful or terrible crannies of his intimacy. We are not frank, but our sincerity can reach extremes which would appal a European. The explosive and dramatic, sometimes suicidal way in which we lay ourselves bare and yield ourselves up, almost helpless, reveals how something stifles and inhibits us. Something impedes our being. And because we dare not or cannot confront our being, we revert to the Fiesta. It releases us into the void, a self-immolating drunkenness, a shot into the air, an artificial fire.2
‘Something impedes our being’ — and as Lowry’s protagonist realizes, the only way the impediment can be shifted, and then only tenuously, is through the renewable Fiesta of alcoholism and the soul-eating mescal which makes even absinthe seem like gripe water. Lowry understands this fact of spiritual anthropology. It is endemic in the culture where he plants his characters, and it is why Geoffrey Firmin, the British Consul, takes root there and becomes a Mr Kurtz: with all his resources of learning, linguistic genius and wit, he surrenders. He is conscious of surrendering. Here is a modern kind of tragic hero aware at every stage of his circumstances. There is no anagnorisis, no moment of recognition. The whole book is a dénouement.
Anyone familiar with Cuernavaca (the Quauhnahuac where Lowry sets Under the Volcano) between the 1940s and the mid-1960s will be astonished at the accuracy of Lowry’s description of the little city: the run-down, once-opulent hotel Casino de la Selva, the railway station
with its air of wan expectation, the forest of blue eucalyptus; and across the gullies, the plaza, Cortez’s palace with the celebrated Diego Rivera murals, the Borda Gardens where an emperor and empress briefly enjoyed imperial romance, the Cathedral, the gulches (dug deeper in Lowry than they are in fact) and bridges, the very houses in which Firmin lived. Lowry closes the open circuit of the literal street-plan to make it possible for his characters to come full circle. He makes Quauhnahuac’s layout more like that of Dante’s Inferno. Each place he describes actually existed, and each has unstable symbolic values.
The sense of specific place, of place remembered (Lowry wrote the book largely in Canada), is more precise, if less intimate, than Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. It’s odd that Cuernavaca has not become a place of literary pilgrimage, with Firmin-day, a Lowry tour and Lowry bars serving the relevant potations. The film of the book starring Albert Finney was made largely nearby in Cuautla because Cuernavaca changed radically in the 1970s and is no longer recognizably the pacing-ground of Lowry’s characters. It is possible to read into his urban geography, and into the environs, elements of Cuautla and of Oaxaca, where Lowry went after his first wife left him and where he was imprisoned, less for being drunk than for getting into a political fracas with some fascists.
However he changes a scene, it is worth remembering that his imagination exaggerates and distorts, forces connections and recurrences, but it does not in general invent detail. If the book at times feels assembled, this is because it is. In its composition there was none of the flow, the release of pent-up energies which writers such as Lawrence experienced, becoming a medium, a passive agency, letting the pages flow. Lowry imposed on himself a twelve-hour structure (rather loosened by the opening chapter which looks back from the distance of a year), shorter than the time-span Joyce allows himself for Ulysses. In those twelve hours certain events coincide; at the end of the book, awkwardly, he must narrate events in the final chapter which happen a few moments before those narrated in the previous chapter. In such a fisted time-scale the leisurely, even the orderly, even the coherent, unfolding of plot is a problem.
Each chapter Lowry regarded as almost free-standing, a poetic structure with verbal and symbolic coherence, belonging to one of the four main characters, with a position in the narrative which feels more geometric than dramatic. The author quarried passages from his poems, from earlier and other writings, to fit them into Under the Volcano. The book was conceived, he reports, in 1936, and later regarded as the Inferno part of Dantesque trilogy, The Voyage that Never Ends, which he did not complete. By 1937 he had part of a first draft — 40,000 words. He did not find it ‘thorough or honest enough’ and continued his labours. He rewrote parts of the book in 1940, awaiting call-up for military service.
The twelve chapters or ‘blocks’ (intended to recall Homer’s, Virgil’s and Milton’s twelve-book epics, as well as some of Lowry’s more recherché numerological and mystical concerns) were composed out of chronological order and revised discretely. Are we to believe the elaborate account of composition Lowry wrote to his publisher? He is not a dependable witness to facts in other areas, and manuscripts do not abound. Many were burned when his squatter’s shack in Dollarton, British Columbia went up in smoke. If we even half-believe him, then we must imagine a writer at work drafting and redrafting for the best part of nine years. Chapter 11 was the last he wrote, completed ‘in late 1944’; Chapter 3 was first written in 1940 and completed in 1942. Part of Chapter 6 was first written in 1937, revised in 1943 and then 1944. Chapter 7 was first written in 1936, he declares, and continually rewritten: in 1937, 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1944. Chapter 9 was originally written in 1937 but Lowry later changed the narrative perspective (originally assigned to Hugh). Chapter 10, begun in 1936-7, was rewritten at various times up to 1943. One imagines that when he says ‘rewritten’ he means just that: not revisions, but back to the drawing board.
Chapter 12 was composed in 1937 and more or less completed in 1940. Thus the book knew almost exactly where it was going for the last four years of its composition: the final crisis had to shudder its way back through what had come before, had to reconfigure in all its complexity the ‘inevitability’ that led to it and nowhere else. If anything contributes to the static effect of the novel, its sense of being preordained rather than inevitable, it is this. Geoffrey Firmin is given a paralysing excess of motive.
How could a writer who himself suffered from alcoholism write so complex a novel? It was perhaps precisely the complexity of conception that made the writing possible. There is an underlying formula: the constituent parts are largely predetermined and of a manageable length. A different, a looser structure, a freer attitude to language and symbolism, would have betrayed Lowry here, as it did in some of this other prose writings, into a kind of wilfulness. His symbolism may be arbitrary in the novel, but there is nothing arbitrary about the design.
The drunkenness of Geoffrey Firmin in the twelve hours we share with him is compound. There is beer, tequila and, crucially, mescal. The drunkenness induced by mescal, which Lowry must have tasted in its most refined forms in Oaxaca, where it originates, has the effect of producing great concentration and extremely lucid depression, the kind that sees through actions and knows any action to be vain: the action of refusing to take another gulp, for example; or of welcoming the reappearance of an estranged wife; or of defending oneself when assaulted. The mescal drinker sees through possible actions and therefore does not act. His passivity is a self-conscious choice, aware of the world in which his refusal to act has its consequences and aware of the effect of his inaction on himself.
In his poem ‘Xochitepec’3 Lowry includes a literal and chilling image:
while the very last day
As I sat bowed, frozen over mescal,
They dragged two kicking fawns through the hotel
And slit their throats, behind the barroom door…
Are these classical fauns strayed into a nightmare scenario, or natural fawns being slaughtered for the hotel guests? The horror for the onlooker, frozen by his vice, bowed (as his letters when he writes are bowed), is literal and figurative, exists in a life and epitomizes a conflict between cultures. Precisely the same image recurs in the novel. In a flashback Geoffrey remembers. Yvonne was leaving him in Mexico City. He sat in the bar of the Hotel Canada drinking iced mescal, swallowing the
lemon pips, ‘when suddenly a man with the look of an executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought.’ It was on that night that he did not manage to meet Yvonne. It was on that night that he finally lost her.
The poem includes the death of the cats, as in the novel, and is addressed to a ‘we’ (Jan Gabrial and Malcolm Lowry) on a final night, with the creatures of that night. He is a Mr Kurtz who somehow survived and, in the middle of the next century, provides a different and if anything a bleaker testimony than Conrad’s warped protagonist does. It is bleaker because solipsistic, with the solipsism — we get it in Dylan Thomas and in Sylvia Plath as well — that allows the situation of the self, its anxieties, alarms and aberrations, to displace the ‘objective’ reality of the world. The concerns of the self appropriate and colonize what belongs to a larger history, a history not properly subject to the distortions of a subjectivity. Aware of this peril, Lowry insisted that, in Under the Volcano, Chapter 6, from Hugh’s perspective, provides a kind of objective north against which, or upon which, Geoffrey’s subjectivity in particular can play its variations. The first chapter, too, consists largely of’verifiable detail’. In terms of narrative success, Chapters i and 6 are not the most effective, written as they were most directly against Lowry’s temperamental grain.
In a poem entitled ‘Grim Vinegarroon’ he recalls frail acts of kindness and charity reduced to meaninglessness on ‘the mescal plain’. The vinegarroon or vinagrillo (vinegar cricket) is a curious beetle-like insect that looks like a stubby black cigar with a pointy tail. It emits a smell like vinegar and its sting is said to be very poisonous. But it is lumbering and traditionally stupid and it threatens the less for that He spares the insect: but he is the insect.
How I congratulated my compassion!
Yet was I too that grim vinegarroon
That stings itself to death beneath the stone,
Where no message is, on the mescal plain.
There is a kind of negative mysticism in his alcoholic solipsism, and it is for this reason that Under the Volcano and Lowry’s other work has appealed to critics with a spiritual bent. He was drawn to various spiritual formulae and disciplines and plants them in Geoffrey Firmin (a student of the Cabala, the occult) and within the structure of his novel. All his characters are unnaturally sensitive to coincidence, fate, symbol. He reflects, for himself as for St John of the Cross: ‘What knots of self in all self-abnegation’. The ultimate self-abnegation is death and the contemplation less of its nature than of its effect. He writes in one of his few achieved poems, ‘For the Love of Dying’,
… If death can fly, just for the love of flying,
What might not life do, for the love of dying?
Life (he quotes Baudelaire) is ‘a forest of symbols’: but where Baudelaire emphasizes the symbols and believes they might yield a consistent sense, Lowry stresses the forest, lost-ness, a dark suggestiveness rather than an interpretable meaning or pattern. As in the early poems of Dylan Thomas, so in the mature prose of Lowry metaphor generally displaces or blurs narrative, it seldom corroborates it. In the poem ‘Thunder Beyond Popocatepetl’ Lowry compares the clouds piled beyond the mountains — those towering cumulus that on rare clear days still stand behind the volcanoes — to the heart pinned by ‘the wind of reason’, ‘Till overbulged by madness, splitting mind…’ A natural phenomenon has projected upon it not a symbolic value but a physiological force: bits of the body, intensities of the spirit, of emotion, even paranoia, are forced into actual embodiment in natural phenomena. He isn’t finding metaphors in nature but magnifying the body through nature.
Reason remains although your mind forsakes
It; and white birds higher fly against the thunder
Than ever flew yours, where Chekhov said was peace,
When the heart changes and the thunder breaks.
What is Chekhov doing here? No writer is more unlike Lowry than he, and yet Lowry loved him, as he loved a much closer tutelary spirit, Dostoevsky, and Gogol whose Mr Chichikov, along with Melville’s Ahab and with Don Quixote, contribute to the threadbare tweed of Geoffrey Firmin.
Lowry wrote a poem — a kind of obscure epigraph — which he entitled ‘For Under the Volcano’:
A dead lemon like a cowled old woman crouching in the cold.
A white pylon of salt and flies
taxiing on the orange table, rain, rain, a scraping peon
and a scraping pen writing bowed words.
War. And the broken necked streetcars outside
and a sudden broken thought of a girl’s face in Hoboken
a tilted turtle dying slowly on the stoop
of the sea-food restaurant, blood
lacing its mouth and the white floor —
ready for the ternedos tomorrow.
There will be no morrow, tommorow is over.
Tomorrow is over but the poem isn’t. It runs on, the images configure and reconfigure, giving out different hints of meaning, none stable and none final, except that there is no tomorrow. In a letter he draws attention to the fact that he stole from a poem the image used in Chapter 12 of Under the Volcano where he likens the ‘groans of dying and of love’. Is it spiritual or creative bankruptcy that provokes this bleak recycling?
Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born in New Brighton, Cheshire on 28 July 1909, the youngest of four brothers, into a well-to-do family of Liverpool cotton brokers. He had relations with his parents and siblings which in retrospect seemed troubled to him, though their recollection was that they were tolerant and supportive of an original and sometimes wayward family member. Certainly Malcolm resisted authority, a resistance which became almost pathological in later years, when he feared the representatives of established authority whether they be immigration authorities, policemen or publishers. And he mythologized his family relations. The first examples of his fiction exaggerate and fantasize his early years and ‘traumas’. It was not then and it did not become Ford Madox Ford’s ‘truth to the impression’; it was truth to a fantasy — how it might well have been, how terrible, how unjust. The fact that it wasn’t those things exactly is not recorded and the biographer must pick a path through volatile narratives grounded in physical fact but seldom in real events. All Lowry’s writing is autobiographical but it is undependable autobiography. Geoffrey Firmin is the ultimate self-justification of the undependable narrator. Lowry’s farther Arthur Osborne Lowry was dependable, supporting his son with a regular allowance through thick and thin.
Malcolm was dispatched as a boarder to a prep school at the age of eight and went on to public school near Cambridge in due course. He got deep into popular song; he played the ukelele and enjoyed jazz. Going to university was not part of his original plan but under pressure from his family he agreed to go up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge if he could travel first to the Far East. His father arranged the passage. Lowry’s heavy drinking may have begun on board ship. The rich boy was resented by the ship’s crew as a privileged outsider, taking a job from someone who might have needed it: a Melville with privileges. The transformation that takes place in Kipling’s Captain’s Courageous did not take place for Lowry, though in retrospect he sometimes pretends that it did, that he earned the respect and acceptance of his shipmates. These experiences helped to shape the character of Hugh in Under the Volcano: Hugh the guitarist, the revolutionary, the man with an education but also with the common touch.
Lowry came back with relatively simple narrative plans which he wrote over and over until he had devised a dense and complex, wholly non-linear work, Ultramarine (1933). It was fourteen years before his next book appeared.
In late 1928 and early 1929 he attended a language crammer in Bonn. This was his (and Hugh’s) German Experience — Auden and his contemporaries had gone to Berlin. He went up to Cambridge in 1929. It was the period of I. A. Richards and William Empson, when Cambridge was waking up to contemporary writing. Everyone knew that Lowry would be a great prose writer — he made them believe in him. The evidence was slim but he was crowned in posse. He had fallen deeply under the spell of the American writer Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) who ‘saw him over’ the difficult period from 1927 to 1929. Aiken’s 1927 novel Blue Voyage lay behind Ultramarine and Aiken opened out American literature and America to the young Englishman. He was a heavy drinker, and this was a habit he shared with his protégé. Melville, one of his guiding lights, became Lowry’s star as well. Aiken encouraged the ornate and baroque in Lowry (a different mentor might have served him better). He employed montage techniques, where elements from different spheres in the same moment or time scheme are presented together, in the same sentence. The effect is more complex but less subtle than Virginia Wolf achieved in To the Lighthouse.
Lowry was also drawn to the work of the once-popular Nordahl Grieg (1902-43), the Norwegian novelist, playwright and poet killed on a bombing mission over Berlin. He was a man of action and an intellectual at the same time, and much influenced (as few English writers at the time were) by Kipling. Lowry admired and imitated him in the early 1930s, especially Grieg’s 1924 novel The Ship Sails On (translated into English in 1927). Lowry set off to visit Grieg in the early 1930s but never met him. It is an irony that Lowry set his great novel in Mexico: he had an abiding fascination with Scandinavia.
Critics perhaps make too much of Aiken and Grieg: they had their impact but it grew less. Conrad and Melville are at the heart of his imagination: Melville the Jacobean, the author of Moby Dick, and Conrad the mercilessly severe and always exotic moralist, author of Nostromo, the opening and parallel time schemes of which may lie behind elements in Under the Volcano, and Heart of Darkness. Conrad and Melville, with their emphatically male concerns and sensibilities, could not, or did not, create many convincing female characters. Nor did Lowry.
It was at Cambridge that he read the poets (in part under Aiken’s influence): Dante, Melville (prose also), Eliot, cummings, Stevens came into focus for him. And the novelists: Mann, Faulkner, Henry James he read ‘in depth’. He scraped through his university course with a low Third, having pursued his own curriculum. How extensive it was and how deeply he read may be gauged from Ultramarine, with its complex derivations.
In 1934 he married the radical young Jewish-American Jan Gabrial. She may have been a member of the Communist Party; she was trying to write a fictional account of the lives of Hungarian coal-miners (where better than Mexico to undertake such a mission?), and she certainly adjusted Lowry’s politics in global terms. She alienated him for a time from Aiken, who believed his disciple had wandered too far to the left. After her departure his sense of Mexican politics was adjusted by his close friendship with Juan Márquez. Without Jan and Juan Under the Volcano might have seemed mere solipsism, but it is the book’s uncertain politics, signalled in its setting within historical time — the defeat of the Republicans in Spain, the often bloody conflicts in Mexico at the time of Almazán, the impending World War — that make Geoffrey and Hugh and, to a lesser extent, Yvonne (Jan minus the politics, minus the intellect) emblematic. After Jan’s departure Lowry recoiled from his acquired radicalism and developed his interest in the occult; but politics were so bound up in the Mexican experience that he could not write them out of it.
Jan and Malcolm Lowry travelled to Mexico where his alcoholism and despair precipitated the breakdown of their already shaky marriage. In 1940 he married Margerie Bonner, a woman he already knew. She proved the good angel who tended him, saved his manuscripts, encouraged and nursed him. On 6 April 1946 Under the Volcano was at last accepted by Jonathan Cape in London after long resistance. It was published in 1947. Lowry wrote his publisher an enormous letter which outlines precisely his intentions and seeks to justify the book movement by movement against the reservations expressed in Cape’s reader’s report. This letter is often taken as gospel by Lowry’s critics: his views are so clearly stated that we are freed from having to read with independent eyes. ‘It can be regarded as a king of symphony,’ he remarks, then catches fire: ‘or in another way as a kind of opera — or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, and so forth.’ Fortunately, in the teeth of such nonsense, it can be regarded as a novel, unique in its characterization and in the stylistic objectives it sets itself.
Martin Seymour-Smith offers the received view: ‘Lowry succeeded only because he persisted in destroying himself with alcohol; he is consequently a disturbing as well as a tragic writer.’4 What needs emphasizing is that he fully succeeded only once, in a work which took him the better part of a decade to complete and with which he was never happy, and whose success he lived to regret and resent. His other works, for all their intermittent power, are at best peripheral. Lunar Caustic (written in 1934) is about his detention in Bellevue Hospital, New York, for alcoholism after the crisis of his first marriage.
His return to Mexico in 1945–6 with his second wife, when he stayed in the same streets and met some of the same people he had known in the blissful and then the blighted months of his first visit, provided him with material for Dark is the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (published-posthumously in 1968). His main place of residence from 1940 to 1954 was at Dollarton, British Columbia, where he lived a settled squatters's existence in a community he felt a part of, marginal but making its own radical centre.
He was, however, virtually an exile from the British literary world. His settings are seldom English; his sensibility, while it never took root anywhere else, lost its sense of Britain and Britain’s mission. Both the novels published during his lifetime were remaindered in his country: his success was largely a North American phenomenon. He died in England in 1957, since when his widow, friends like the Canadian poet and novelist Earle Birney, critics and scholars have endeavoured to complete some of the books Lowry left in draft. Stories, poems and novellas have emerged, intriguing for the extra shadows they add to the billowing ‘darkness visible’ of Under the Volcano.
Malcolm Lowry has rather lost his natural context. The Canadians with some reason feel proprietary: he chose to live in Canada, and Canada has provided much of the scholarship that has been invested in Lowry and houses many of his manuscripts. Yet he is unlike any other Canadian writer. His only close friend among the Canadian literati was earle Birney. He belongs, in formal and temperamental terms, among the English writers of his generation. The novelist he most resembles is the neglected Joyce Cary: a great reviser and rewriter, though less caustic than Lowry. He wrote brilliantly about Africa. Henry Reed declares, ‘His capacity for absorbing himself in his characters and in their milieu is unparalleled (save perhaps in Henry Green) in contemporary literature’.5Reed compares Cary to Defoe. ‘We do not merely watch a “character” whose actions and reactions are discontinuous and irresponsible; we become that character.’ To this skill he gives the name ‘objectivity’, the
self-effacement which makes it possible for another self to emerge. He speaks of it also as clairvoyance.
With Cary this is a manifest of art, where with Lowry, especially in Under the Volcano, it has a pathological aspect: the character is not created but in large part confessed; the created elements are incorporated to plead, to make credible and exonerate. Lowry is in a sense Cary’s Gulley Jimson from The Horse’s Mouth,‘rowdy, dishonest, outrageous’. Jimson ‘is presented as a nuisance, and as a grotesque… but he does profoundly represent the visionary, obsessed artist who can never be popular except among a few of his contemporaries till after he is dead. In all of these books Cary has succeeded in eliminating himself— the aim of the author of Finnegans Wake’.
Whatever the formal similarities, ‘eliminating himself was not Lowry’s objective. Earle Birney regards the ‘self as his sole subject, ‘teetering on a rope of comic fancies, between grandeur and self-pity, between exultation in his own power and agonies of self-contempt’. He adds in a flow of words his friend might have uttered in a lurid, sober moment: ‘… his whole life was a slow drowning in great lonely seas of alcohol and guilt. It was all one sea, and all his own. He sank in it a thousand times and struggled back up to reveal the creatures that swam round him under his glowing reefs and in his black abysses.’
His writing was like his life, hence the continual revisions, the expression always approximate, not quite what he wanted. Balzac used to use his printer’s proofs as drafts and revised his novels on them, and then re-revised the revised proofs until his printers tore their hair. This is the direction Lowry comes from, hungering for the stylistic authority of Flaubert but in the end compelled to abandon the work to the printer rather than ‘complete’ it. Aware of the problem a reader would have, required to construe the text, to engage and struggle almost as the writer did, he suggests to his publisher that ‘… a little subtle but solid elucidation in a preface or a blurb might negate very largely or modify the reaction you fear…’ In the event Under the Volcano appeared without the prefatory ‘elucidation’, and later editions which have carried elucidations have attempted to tame the book. It is wild and throws off theorist and critic. It is a book for readers who need to know less than Lowry wanted to tell them (‘the four main characters being intended, in one of the book’s meanings, to be aspects of the same man’; or ‘the humour is a kind of bridge between the naturalistic and the transcendental and then back to the naturalistic again’); who accept the fact that symbols will change their valency in changing contexts, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon; and who realize that every object, every insect, every leaf and horseman, whore and spy, was real in the world where Lowry walked and drank and was alone, and in which he invested Geoffrey Firmin, his angels and demons, his fading family and friends.
Michael Schmidt