Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions
Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age of 48, from an overdose of barbiturates, having written his epitaph:
Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose was flowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukulele.
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.
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.
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