Life Sentences (16 page)

One could include June 7, 1944, when a fire destroyed the couple’s beach house and consumed the manuscript for a novel,
In Ballast to the White Sea
, revisions for another called
Lunar Caustic
, most of their clothes, all of their furniture, a swatch of skin from Lowry’s back, and immeasurable amounts of recent optimism.

All-sins days also had significance for the Lowrys because of their importance in the lives of Lowry’s characters, with whom their author often became enmeshed, forgetting he was not the Consul of
Under the Volcano
, or Sigbjørn Wilderness of
Through the Panama
. He had drawn so intimately upon his own doubts and addictions to create them that he sometimes became confused and acted in the real world the way he might have imagined his surrogate behaving in his fictive one. But these were only the simplest of the mix-ups. In
Through the Panama
, Lowry’s protagonist is said to be writing a novel whose principle character, Martin Trumbaugh, is also (what a coincidence) the author of a manuscript called
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid
, so that sooner or later the reader will encounter a sentence that will have been enacted in Malcolm Lowry’s life, and in the life he writes for Wilderness as well as in the life Wilderness
is said to have written for Trumbaugh, such as, “where did I put my shoe, did I have a shoe? I did, and the lost one seemed in the right place, but then where are the cigarettes, and where am I?” Indeed, where are we? For our first wonder should be about Lowry himself: did he mislay his shoe or did he borrow the loss of it from two stories and a few stupors away?

The Basilisk, remember, dies from the look in his own eye when he peers for the first time into a mirror. Here, the mirror is customarily behind a bar, or sometimes it is the window of a bus, or the glassy surface of a still sea. In one case, it is a photograph of Margerie holding up a mirror in which Malcolm can be seen taking the picture.
Through the Panama
is one of the earlier and more significant self-reflective texts (the champions in this genre are Flann O’Brien and Paul Valéry, an odd pair, though Lowry is thinking of people like Pirandello), and demonstrates, over and over again, how “realistic” the maneuver and the mix-up are.

Note to department of special effects,
who will have to superimpose images of these several selves like closed—and then fanned—hands of cards. The rationale is as follows:

We are constantly inventing additional versions of ourselves, either to unsettle our friends by making surprisingly dissimilar responses to familiar situations, or to meet changes in circumstances with an equally changed self, and sometimes to prepare ourselves for surprising eventualities—as we often do in sexual daydreams. We populate our lives with the lives we need to live them—dreaming ourselves into the selves we fear we are, or desperately want to be; and if we retell our little fictions often enough they pass from wishing ’twere, to seeming such, then to being so. Reiteration is a prominent feature of reality. And Malcolm Lowry is a master of reiteration. Then sometimes our voices, our values, and our presentation of self shift abruptly, in unforeseen ways, so that our bowling persona arrives in time to hear the Sunday sermon, or we wink at the wrong coworker at an unpropitious moment. Come on, we say to the preacher, let’s have a drink.

(A quite subordinate note: the principal problem with John Huston’s film of
Under the Volcano
is that Albert Finney’s performance treats the Consul as little more than a fall down drunk, and forgets that Geoffrey Firmin is also a stand up Malcolm Lowry.)

Technically challenging shot
(about which warning was given above)
of five Albert Finneys in El Farolito.
(Camera should not miss the seven Coca Cola signs that enliven its bland façade.) Alcohol makes you garrulous even when talking to yourself, have you noticed? You are sitting two abreast on both sides of the bar—you pour, you drink, you talk, you listen, you nod—how easily bought is agreement—you have several yards of fellow feeling between you and the next stool, where you sit in communion with that pleasant other guy who will finally fill you with remorse and loathing, anger and resentment, because a perfectly comfortable evening has turned ugly—why had the bartender so contemptuously splashed into your glass? And the mirror blinds your eye when only a moment before it had shown you sitting with a smile meant for a girl—why is someone tugging at your arm—a friend, lover, wife—a wife become whore, become enemy?—and it makes you want to fling things, angry now with the people you’ve hurt because their wounds still bleed, angry about the way they ruin a moment you were enjoying with your inner self, when peace between the five of you had seemed to have been established, but now only war … only war appears possible.

Cast of characters.
Yes, the bartender (provider of the good, yet with the evil offer of the apple), the imbiber (the nursing babe and parasite), the mariner (and teller of tales, thief of texts, confessor, bearer of guilt), the wedding guest (who now should know better than to lend an ear, also a witness for the prosecution), the angel of assent (the weak will’s weak adviser, liquor’s toady, chief in charge of excuses and the hero’s only friend), hail fellows all, well met, each uneasy parts of a seated self who might readily be given a starring role in a forthcoming fiction, are enjoying a pleasantly shaded early evening in one another’s company until … until the albatross (or some similar emblem) is shot and the bird hung about the imbiber’s
neck, consequently—alas—bottles become empties because drink is immediately siphoned off by the gods, the bar closes, or provisions are exhausted, as when at sea, far from supplies, rationing is required; and then the tale cannot be concluded, the tongue is sundried, your companions leave you to seek success elsewhere; so the check—alas—will not be paid, no cheek—alas—will receive your tears when you weep, no sympathetic ear will hear you gagging in the john, and all your intentions will be snickered at, because the only wish you have left is for the next drink, which will steady you, reform your purpose, alert your listeners, and entice you, the bartender, to ask if you, the sot, will have another.

A cinematic issue.
Although a writer of fragments (and a movie script is as prefragmented as a jigsaw), everything that Malcolm Lowry does has to pass through Malcolm Lowry, is digested and assimilated and relieved by him from breath to bowels, so that inter-as well as intratextuality has to become a major method. He sees a shore, swallows a glass of wine, reads a bit of news, absorbs a few frames of a silent film, is moved by a bit of your book or mine, writes a drunken line, says hello or stumbles in the street: it all becomes his, is owned by his consciousness, and that passing shore or reflecting glass or bit of news—the film, the panorama, or the greeting—if he feels he’s paid his price for it, we may only rent.

The novels of B. Traven, Nordahl Grieg, and Conrad Aiken, for example, were adopted, and became his, even to the edge of plagiarism. All the books of boozers, like Fitzgerald, become his property. In particular,
Under the Volcano
is tethered to him. He does not release his books to have an independent life, because they are his present not just his past, and form his future. Henry James closes the covers of one novel in order to start another, but Malcolm Lowry tried to have his other texts, enlarged by further work, swallow like a whale his only triumph.
Under the Volcano
’s protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin, does not die with a dog down in a ravine. He is up and about in the next book, just a ghost under an assumed name.

Of course, when writers record such internal tussles between our multiple selves; when they treat art, other texts, ideas and dreams,
with the same seriousness and importance to consciousness as acts, emotions, sights, and scenes; when they drop concert programs, official forms, or clippings onto their pages as if spilling a purse, they are deemed difficult, artificial, self-referential, arcane, cold, unreal, indifferent to their audiences, who apparently want their reality as customized as their cars, quiet as death, as equipped with the same lies as their lives, and providing a ride over even the bumpiest pavement so smooth and easy that they’ll need to stir the cream in their coffee simply to create a spiral.

Through the Panama
reenacts a pilgrimage, and that requires a journey. Whether Lowry is going by boat, bus, plane, or train, he is usually performing a penance, and seeking to be thus shriven for a mess he has made in someone’s bathroom, or worse, because he has put hands to the throat or fist to the eye of a lady he has got drunk and who will be easier to kill than himself. It is significant, I think, that a particularly ugly April night, when he choked, beat, and kicked a girl he protested he loved nearly to her demise, does not receive a mention in Lowry’s calendar of those days that are so threatening, drear, and heavy with guilt, he has to hide from them at home or flee by road or rail to any obscure destination.

However, this nearly murderous episode adds significance to the ad depicting “a murderer’s hands laced with blood” that ominously appears and reappears in
Under the Volcano: Las Manos de Orlac: con Peter Lorre
.

Reset scene.
Our principals, Primrose and Sigbjørn, are bunking in the chief gunner’s cabin. Wilderness approves of the ship, and they like the good grub. Martin, however, has been given a little shack on the beach, about which he has nightmares full of fires and flooding waters. Here is a technically superb passage in which the three selves merge. Each thinks the first two sentences, though they are attributed to Martin.

“Hm” is a sign that this reference will be pondered and gain depth, for Henry Fielding is another of Lowry’s imaginary drinking companions—a rake whose indiscretions are said by friends to have contributed to his jaundice, his asthma, and his gout, but who protests that these ailments are due to daily work and his devoted service to his country. Fielding describes his journey to Lisbon, seeking a warmer climate than either London or Bath can offer, in a journal that will be published bearing that forthright title. Moreover, the journal invokes epic parallels and constructs an allegorical struggle, as Fielding’s biographer, Ronald Paulson, observes, “between the captain and the wind, and, with the wind, allusions to Aeneas, Aeolus, and Neptune’s
Quos Ego
.” As Fielding, felled by gout, is carried aboard ship, he feels as if he is running a “gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it) through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed of paying their compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery.”

More evidence of the importance of this text to
Through the Panama
is furnished by Fielding’s opening entry (“Wednesday, June 26, 1754. On this day the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook.”) This is the selfsame wintry sun that appeared for Martin just a moment ago, because Lowry will always remain obedient to the principle that sentences of the same syntax, games with the same structure, symbols with the same subject, coincidences of all kinds, myths of the same form,
stories with the same plot, journeys with the same aim, and all who thirst and suffer from guilt and perpetual dryness, girls of the same slimness, souls who need numbness, lives that play with death as if life were checkers played in a kitchen, each and all are the same girl, soul, sentence, game, myth, plot, song and cinema; they are victims of the same plight, have made the same messes, and have the same pain.

What would clinch these distant identities? Crimes of the same kind. Smollett had accused Fielding of stealing two of his characters from
Roderick Random;
Lowry had pleaded guilty with innocent intentions for his liberal borrowing from Aiken and Grieg; as for Coleridge … his thefts from the German philosophers were notorious. And related to addiction too. It was “the spectre that would haunt the rest of his career.” You cannot call it “borrowing” because the plagiarist cannot return his thefts with a note of thanks.

The crew is chipping rust. Next they will be painting the ventilators.

A return to the movie.
As our ship is about to stretch out along the long coast of Mexico, the weather grows warmer, the engines labor somewhere in that monotonous refrain like an insect thrashing in a web, the sea seems as sullen as the sky, and we switch cameras to follow the shadow of a plane falling south through the beautiful opening pages of
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid
(handy to one’s hand because it is only pages away in this collection). In contrast, the beginning of a story, “June the 30th, 1934,” stresses engine noise by suppressing it: “Silently the train for Boulogne drew out of the Gare de l’Est. This was surprising. One had expected an excruciating din.…” However, the deep-sea freighters of “The Forest Path to the Spring” that arrive in the bay as quietly as mist, leave with their lumber and “a great list, tilted like wheelbarrows … their engines mumbling …”—guess what?

Brother Jack will show up in text after text, but sometimes, the way a bird’s
teach-er, teach-er, teach-er
will, in the next moment, sound like
cheat-er, cheat-er
to the same ear, the engines will say,
“Please go on! Why not die!” in the plainest English, before reverting to
“Sonnez les matines”
in the clearest French.