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The Voyage that Never Ends

Not under the volcano

edited by Michael Hoffmann
New York Review of Books, 514pp, £16.99,

Ian Thomson

Wednesday, 13th February 2008

Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry's poems, letters and fictions

His reputation rests on one novel only: Under the Volcano (1947). Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, it describes the last 24 hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-Consul, as he drowns in liquor and despair under the shadow of Popocatepetl. Lowry’s genius was to transform Firmin’s shabby addiction into a parable of universal significance and the story of Everyman in search of salvation. The novel’s mescal-inspired grotesqueries — grinning chocolate skulls and twitching centipedes — seemed to issue from the charnel-house of Baudelaire’s imagination. For all his modernity (Kafka and T. S. Eliot were clear influences), Lowry wrote in the timeless tradition of the damned poet who sees a holiness in going down the drain.

Like many alcoholics, Lowry is a murderous subject for biographers: not only could he make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Originally his biography was to have been written by the Canadian scholar Conrad Knickerbocker (a fine Lowryesque name); but, in 1966, Knickerbocker committed suicide. Another critic, Douglas Day, brought out his life of Lowry in 1973: it was marred by psychoanalytical humbug and factual errors. Gordon Bowker, Lowry’s most trustworthy exegete, published his compelling biography, Pursued by Furies, in 1993; it is unlikely to be surpassed.

In many ways, Lowry’s life was his own finest creation. All his writing — three unfinished novels, six or seven short stories, hundreds of letters and poems — was thinly veiled autobiography. According to Michael Hoffmann, Lowry intended the ‘whole bolus’ to be part of a continuum called The Voyage that Never Ends, with the great Mexican novel at its centre. Only fragments of this Dantean scheme remain, but the novella Lunar Caustic, begun in 1935, was to represent purgatory. (It was based on Lowry’s internment in the Bellevue mental hospital, New York.)

Edited by Michael Hoffmann, The Voyage that Never Ends gathers into one volume a selection of Lowry’s scattered poems, letters and fictions. For most of his brief life, Lowry was on the move — in search of harbour — and his delinquent genius flourished abroad. In the 1930s he had left his native England (‘Land of Christmas trees and swamp adders’) to escape his Methodist upbringing and uncomprehending father, a wealthy Cheshire cotton broker. Rome provided a setting for some of his greatest short stories (‘Elephant and Colosseum’, a gem, not included here), while Mexico saw one of the most remarkable literary documents of our time: Lowry’s 35-page letter to his publisher Jonathan Cape, written on New Year’s Day 1946, explaining why Under the Volcano should be left as written. In a mood of angry depression Lowry defends, chapter by chapter, his masterpiece, and refutes a wrongful charge of plagiarism.