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Friday 5 December 2008

The desperate fate of Malcolm Lowry

Allan Massie reflects on Malcolm Lowry

Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t pastiche Lowry?’ Crushing criticism; also just. At that time in my writing and drinking life I was in thrall to Malcolm Lowry. So indeed was Anthony and much of our late night/early morning conversation in bars drew heavily on Under the Volcano, often indeed consisted of quotations from the novel. ‘And often the poor guy, he had no socks’ — that sort of thing.

In a letter to his publisher Albert Erskine, Lowry described his character/alter ego Sigborn Wilderness, who features in several stories and in one of his rambling, unfinished novels (edited, added to, and published after his death by his widow, Margerie) as being ‘not, in the ordinary sense in which one encounters novelists or the author in novels, a novelist’.

On the contrary,

he simply doesn’t know what he is. He is a sort of underground man. Moreover, he is disinterested in literature, uncultured, incredibly unobservant, in many respects ignorant, without faith in himself, and lacking nearly all the qualities you usually associate with a novelist or writer.

In one respect, this was an accurate self-portrait, which was one part of Malcolm Lowry’s problem as a writer. Yet almost the exact opposite was also true, which was perhaps the other part of his problem.

Lowry wasn’t one of these unfortunates who are geniuses or nothing, though that is a tough enough fate. His position was worse; he was a genius and nothing. He couldn’t make any sense of his life, and so made nonsense of most of it; and yet there was a residue of sense there which rendered most other lives nonsense. He found it very difficult to finish anything, with the result that his grand title for everything he wrote, which to his mind was only one thing, had to be The Voyage That Never Ends. Steeped in alcohol, he spent a good deal of his life in a condition in which any communication with other people was beyond him; nevertheless he noticed, took in, and would later make use of, things that the sensible and sober never so much as glimpse.

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