Under the Volcano (3 page)

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'.
⁵
Reed 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

Books by Malcolm Lowry

Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry
, eds. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (1965, 1967)

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry
, ed. Earle Birney (City Lights, San Francisco, 1962)

Ultramarine
(1933, 1963, 1974)

Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place
(1961, 1962, 1979)

Lunar Caustic
(1963, 1968)

Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid
(1968, 1969)

October Ferry to Gabriola
(1970, 1971)

Malcolm Lowry: Psalms and Songs
(1975)

About Malcolm Lowry

Ackerley, Chris, and Lawrence J. Clipper,
A Companion to Under the Volcano
(Vancouver, 1984)

Bareham, Tony,
Malcolm Lowry
(London, 1989)

Binns, Ronald,
Malcolm Lowry
(London, 1984)

Bradbrook, M. C,
Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life
(London, 1974)

Day, Douglas,
Malcolm Lowry: A Biography
(New York, 1973)

New, William H.,
Malcolm Lowry: A Reference Guide
(London, 1978) Wood, Barry (ed.),
Malcolm Lowry: The Writer and his Critics
(Ottawa, 1980)

Woodcock, George (ed.)
Malcolm Lowry: The Man and his Work
(Vancouver, 1971)

Books referred to in this Introduction

Paz, Octavio,
El laberinto de la soledad
(Fondo de Cultura Económica, México D.F., second edition, 1959)

Reed, Henry,
The Novel Since 1939
(British Council, 1946)

Seymour-Smith, Martin,
Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature
(Weidenfeld, 1976)

To

MARGERIE, MY WIFE

W
ONDERS
are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, had he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he ham resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escape.

SOPHOCLES
-Antigone