The desperate fate of 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 selfportrait, 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. Under the Volcano, drawing on ghastly experience in Mexico, written — and obsessively re-written — during years of comparative sobriety while he lived in a shack on a beach in British Columbia, is his masterpiece. It was a critical success, and also gave him earned money for the first time in his life, though that didn’t last of course. When working on it, the writing for much of the time got in the way of the drinking, and he was happy. Afterwards the drinking got in the way of the writing, and he was often wretched, though, like the chap who tried to be a philosopher, ‘cheerfulness kept breaking in’. Actually it wasn’t so much the writing itself that was the problem; it was bringing anything to a conclusion. Characteristic was this, from another letter to the long-suffering Erskine:
But that the work has suffered does not mean that it’s suffered to its detriment, at least so far as Gabriola is concerned. This damned thing — which is now a short, perhaps even not so short novel — has cost me more pains than all the Volcano put together .... Meantime, the perilous chapel section obliged me to rewrite the ‘exposition’. But by the time I had done that, I realised that what was required was not one, but two, expositions...
And so on, and on, and on.
Sadly when, after his death, October Ferry to Gabriola was exhumed and published, it wasn’t really much good. That’s not the case with all the posthumously published work. The stories and two novellas in Hear Us, O Lord, from Heaven thy Dwelling-place (marvellous title, from a Manx hymn) are good, things I do find myself returning to. In the novella, Forest Path to the Spring, the narrator — Wilderness again, I think — expressed the noble ambition of trying ‘to write of human happiness in terms of enthusiasm and high seriousness usually reserved for catastrophe and tragedy’; and, astonishingly, he brings it off. If the Volcano is his Inferno, into which he draws the complicit reader, Forest Path is his Paradiso, to which I am now, thankfully, more likely to turn.
One can’t pretend it has the despairing glamour of the Volcano with its lurid comical/tragical depiction of the Consul’s last day of life, but then who ever preferred Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost? Still, it’s a cheering, life-enhancing work. ‘It was a day like a good Joe Venuti record,’ he writes somewhere, and asks ‘was it possible to be so happy?’
Allan Massie
Previous page
