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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

Lowry was one of the great letter writers of his age, and Hoffmann has included the best of the correspondence. Fans will be disappointed to learn that no new material has been dredged. The letters have appeared in two volumes, impeccably edited by Sherrill E. Grace, while the excerpts from the unfinished novels Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid and October Ferry to Gabriola can be found in Penguin paperback. Any excuse to re-read Lowry is welcome, however, and Hoffmann has selected most of the treasures. Much of the material reads like a delayed postscript to the modernist experiment — Joyce and Faulkner hover over Lowry’s allusive, often humorous prose. Yet Lowry was equally at home in the sulphurous company of Hart Crane, Edgar Poe and Arthur Rimbaud (‘Alcoholics Hieronymous. Bosh!’, he punned of that self-destructive crew.) His haunting story ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’ (included) radiates a spooky, Poe-like aura.

Few writers have been so dogged by bad luck. In 1944, the squatter’s shack which Lowry shared in British Columbia with his wife Margerie Bonner burned down. Lowry may have had some dim hope of alcoholic recovery amid the fir trees and cougars of Canada. But it was not to be. In ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’, by any standards an exceptionally fine short story, Lowry recalls the Canadian idyll before the fire. The story is a love-letter to Margerie and also, one suspects, a peace offering. There had been fearsome brawls, and Margerie suffered beatings. Yet, for all the alcoholic tantrums, Lowry was able to see the comedy in life. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot he described in a letter of 1957 as ‘one of the most inspired pieces of bloody-mindedness since the crucifixion’.

The Voyage that Never Ends, while it remains distinctly minor Lowry (under Under the Volcano), is nevertheless a gorgeous plum pudding of a book, full of tragi-comic insights into the vexing devil booze and the self-delusions of the dipsomaniac. ‘Well, my sugar plums’, Lowry wrote to friends in 1952, ‘we had a generally merry (in our various ways) happy & fine Christmas together didn’t we?’, adding: ‘I’m sorry I became such a droop.’ He had drunk too much — again.