Richard Luckett on a dead volcano

"Frankly," wrote Malcolm Lowry, just out of a Haitian hospital where he had spent a week after having drunk himself unconscious, "I have no gift for writing. I started by being a plagiarist. Then I became a hard worker, as one might say, a novelist. Now I am a drunkard again. But what I always wanted to be was a poet." This crapulent self-assessment comes dangerously near to being a formulation of the case against Lowry; his first novel, Ultramarine, through not a plagiarism was certainly derivative; his second, Under the Volcano, for all its range of reference, the laborious layering of symbols and levels of meaning, remains outside many of those definitions of the 'novel' that have achieved critical respectability. Lowry certainly wanted to be a poet, but though he knew what he wanted he went on wanting; none of his poems are wholly convincing except as autobiographical documents, milestones on the long, hopeless pilgrimage from the Wirral through Cambridge and Fitzrovia to Paris, Spain, New York, Mexico, Vancouver, and finally Sussex where, with a canting appropriateness that might well have adorned his own fiction, he became the lush who died at Ripe. Douglas Day, making Lowry's end his beginning, and echoing in his biography*what Lowry described as the `trochar or circular structure of Under the Votcano. starts with a gruesome relation of the facts of death, Parts of his account are hypothetical since — as we might have expected — the facts are in doubt. Did Lowry commit suicide, the drowned sailor at last in a yeasty tide of alcohol and barbiturates? Was it an accidental overdose ("My faithful general Phenobarbus, treacherous to the last," a Lowry hero had once remarked)? Was it a ploy, an attempt to use emotional blackmail on Margerie, his wife, whose patience and love must be accounted heroic virtues? To what extent can it be seen as the final and logical state of what Professor Day describes as a classic instance of oral-compulsion?

With Lowry one cannot hope to win. Lowry was himself a habitual loser, redeemed only by his ability to describe his albatross, and he so ordered and disordered the pattern of his life as to place biographers and critics in much the same situation. When, shortly before his death, an attempt was made to condition him out of his alcoholic state by the use of apomorphine aversion therapy Lowry survived twenty-one days of a treatment which finished most patients in five. Two days after coming out he celebrated Christmas Eve by embarking on a forty-eight hour bender. It was as though he was determined, in the last analysis, to prove the analysts wrong. Yet the account of his condition which Professor Day sees as crucial — that Lowry was an oralcompulsive — was originally mooted by Lowry himself. His last days can be illuminated by an anecdote which Day does not record. It belongs to Lowry's undergraduate or immediately post-undergraduate days. Perhaps the only just point of comparison between Lowry and George Orwell is that both men were convinced that they smelt. Lowry was particularly concerned about his feet, and devised an interesting method of sweetening his shoes. Before retiring he would pour into these a few fluid ounces of eau-decologne, restoring the liquid to a bottle in the morning. One night, returning to his lodgings in a predictable condition, he was overcome by a need for further refreshment. He was in no state to discriminate between one bottle and another; moreover, for convenience, he had returned the eau-de-cologne into a bottle that had originally held a less stringent beverage. It was some little while before the full flavour of the inevitable disaster broke upon him.

This theme, with variations, was to be the constant in Lowry's life: there was always his Fhyness, his fear of what others might think combined with contempt for what others might think, his unappeasable and tyrannic thirst, the stomach-pump or drying out ward, and remorse. He demanded of the women he loved that they be maternal; his relationship with them was necessarily symbiotic. When they refused the role drink afforded both revenge and another return to the condition of the child. As Professor Day remarks, Lowry's only good reason for not drinking was to be able to write. What he wrote was about himself, his experiences, his drinking. When, after the war, Lowry returned to Mexico and revisited the scenes of Under the Volcano, he became terrified lest the novel should be playing itself out around him. In a sense he should not have been surprised, for he took his novel with him wherever he went. The other great circular novel is Fin negan's Wake; its circularity is that of the

dreaming mind. In some ways the pattern of Lowry's life put him, too, in a dream world. And it is not coincidental that Flann O'Brien 's

At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel in which the characters of real life are constantly threa

tened by the suspicion that they might be characters in a novel, was also the product of a vision in part coloured by alcohol.

Despite his devoted drinking, Lowry did a great deal of writing, though Under the Vol cano is the only substantial work that he managed to complete. This is not surprising; as a loser of manuscript, Lowry excelled even T. E. Lawrence, and a number of works in various stages of completion disappeared in the fires that dogged his domestic life. But it is unlikely that such writings, some of which survived and have been published in one form or another, would have greatly added to his reputation; the theme with variations had already reached its definititive shape, and been given its definitive performance, in Under The Volcano. Very properly Professor Day includes in his biography a full discussion of the novel. But his account reveals the extent to which Lowry is, and mus,t, remain, a literary freak. "Under the Volcano,

he tells us, "either excites its readers, or It does not." Again, and in the same vein, "If one

prefers . . . the aesthetic of exclusion,

whereby beauty is created through spareness of effect, then Lowry is not one's man." The take it or leave it tone of these remarks belies the clarity of his exegesis, but has, for all that, a certain significance. It is not an observation likely to be made by an admirer of Hardy, or Yeats, or even D. H. Lawrence.

I am not sure that Professor Day is right in making this implicit qualification. He is clearly a little embarrassed by the Lowry cult,

and is anxious to shift the emphasis in criticism of Under the Volcano away from mat

ters of esoteric significance and back to the areas that are personal and emotive. In this he is surely correct; Lowry talked of the novel as

a prose poem, but his chief concern was to, defend its subjectivity. "I am telling you,', Lowry said, "something new about hell fire.'

In his first chapter he intended to invoke "the slow melancholy tragic rhythm of Mexico itself," and against this sombre background another tragedy is worked out. That tragedy is Lowry's own, and is lit by the weird humour and odd learning that accompanied his own

staggering prgression through life. In Under the Volcano there is just enough of a world outside to allow the tragedy to seem, fitfully,

more noble than maudlin. And an honest critic, however misconceived or tedious he might feel much of the book to be, could reasonablY be expected to admit at least to that.

The limitations of Professor Day's book are very much the limitations of his subject. Repetition in life does not become more interesting when set out in print. Day manfully tries to sort out the reality from the myth, and the lies (often Lowry's) from the truth. He is best on Lowry's years in the Americas, weakest on his early days. Even here Lowry intervenes. Lowry was hopeless on urban geography; Day has the topography of Rye muddled. H. J. Chaytor, Master of Lowry's Cambridge college, is referred to as A. G. Chater, which suggests a mis-hearing in a crowded bar. Edward Burra, who lived near Rye and knew Conrad Aiken, Lowry's guardian and mentor, becomes "an American surrealist painter." The record of Lowry's Cambridge days is grievously confused; one of Lowry's closest friends is mentioned once, in passing, whilst the suicide of the man with

whom Lowry shared rooms is alluded to indirectly and ambiguously. Above all, the effect of the intellectual ambience is ignored. LowrY had a healthy contempt for Cambridge, but many of his interests and much of his reading can be traced back to those days. He maY

have claimed tO have learned his technique of 'layering' from Conrad Aiken, but his concerns, psychological, symbolical and even magical, closely reflect the teaching he received.

Not the least of the oddities of Under the Volcano is that it works the methods of analysis developed by I. A. Richards back to front. Lowry may have been in many respects a child, but he was never the innocent that some of his admirers have assumed. Professor Day takes us closer to the man than We have been before, but all the resourcefulness of the modern academic sleuth has failed to bring the fox in Lowry to the kill.

Richard Luckett is Director of Studies at St Catherine's College, Cambridge.