Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Under the Volcano

  Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 in New Brighton and died in England in 1957. He was educated at the Leys School, Cambridge, and St Catharine’s College. Between school and university he went to sea, working as a deckhand and trimmer for about six months. His first novel, Ultramarine, was accepted for publication in 1932, but the typescript was stolen and it had to be rewritten from the penultimate version. It was finally published in 1933. He went to Paris and married his first wife in 1934, and wrote several short stories in Paris and Chartres before going to New York. Here he started a new novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, which he completed in 1936. He then left for Mexico. His first marriage broke up in 1938, and by 1940 he had remarried and settled in British Columbia. During 1941-4, when he was living at Dollarton, he worked on the final version of Under the Volcano. In 1954 he finally returned to England. During half his writing life he lived in a squatter’s shack, built largely by himself, near Vancouver. His Selected Letters, edited by H. Breit and Margerie Lowry, appeared in 1967 and Lunar Caustic, part of a large, uncompleted work, appeared in 1968. Margerie Bonner Lowry and Douglas Day completed, from Lowry’s notes, the novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid and October Ferry to Gabriola.

  Michael Schmidt is Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and Editorial Director of the Carcanet Press. He was born in Mexico in 1947. He is the author of Lives of the Poets (Weidenfeld) and editor of The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English.

  MALCOLM LOWRY

  UNDER THE VOLCANO

  With an Introduction by Michael Schmidt

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Jonathan Cape 1947

  Published in Penguin Books 1963

  Published with a new Introduction in Penguin Classics 2000

  11

  Copyright © the Estate of Malcolm Lowry, 1947

  Introduction copyright © Michael’Schmidt, 2000

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition dut it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–19067–9

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Bibliography

  Under the Volcano

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  ‘The novel gets off to a slow start,’ Malcolm Lowry concedes.1 Is this indeed ‘inevitable’ and ‘necessary’? Many readers find it hard to break into Under the Volcano. Their difficulty is a shadow of the trouble Lowry had in writing it. Like other major novels of its kind – Moby Dick, for instance, and Nostromo (Melville and Conrad meant a great deal to the young Lowry, and both authors struggled hard for those books); like The Rainbow, and Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus– it can take several attempts before one really gets going. Readers who have visited the novel’s ‘terrain’ – landscapes, plazas, the very buildings – marvel at the accuracy and miasmic clarity of the evocations but wrestle with the narrative strategies. After three false starts I first read the book through when I was twenty-two, even though I grew up in the very streets that Lowry describes.

  Lowry wrote Under the Volcano in emphatically rhythmic prose. When he was composing it he read passages aloud to his wife and friends. It is hard to imagine how his voice might have unfolded, for example, the tortuous sentence that opens Chapter 3. There are others even more taxing. This is not the natural, if rather fussy, elaboration of Henry James whose longest sentences retain some contact with the speaking and feeling voice. This is syntax as architecture, a strained high baroque: it is not to be understood so much as unpacked and paraphrased. It is ‘vertical’, balanced, stilled in time, not ‘horizontal’, in flow — despite the prosody.

  Sometimes Lowry breaks into a long iambic run that sounds almost like natural pentameters. This repetitive, predictable pace – Shakespearean, or rather, Marlovian — is unnatural to fiction. So are the elaborate time-schemes, switch-backs and gradual accretions of information which mean that the book makes the kind of sense Lowry intends only on a third reading. He devises a style to push through recalcitrant matter; yet how recalcitrant is his matter? The plot is simple enough. Well

  before a third reading is complete, the reader might suspect that the problem is less structural: the problem (and pleasure) is the style itself. What is recalcitrant is character — not the dramatis personae but the character of the author who concedes that he ‘is’ his protagonists. The book points back to him again and again.

  Lowry’s writing has this (and much else) in common with the work of the poets of his generation and concern — Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham. It was after all the age of Fitzrovia, Apocalypse and the Great Alcoholics. Thomas became his friend in London in 1932 and figures larger in Lowry’s biography than vice versa. There was also the wonderful neglected Anna Wickham, who rests in Hampstead Cemetery. Lowry is best understood in the company of poets, a fact he accepted when writing to Jonathan Cape defending his novel in 1946. The ‘irremediable’ defect of the book was that ‘the author’s equipment, such as it is, is subjective rather than objective, a better equipment, in short, for a certain kind of poet than a novelist’. He compares the difficulties of the novel’s allusiveness with those of The Waste Land.

  Under the Volcano is a masterpiece because the style is, for the most part, uncannily apposite: the novelist has struggled against the odds to create it; he uses it like Theseus uses the thread to find a way back through the dizzying labyrinth, having caught and slain his principal character, that version of himself, the tragic, comic, appalling and endearing Minotaur Geoffrey Firmin. And Lowry knew that in his style he had made something unique and rather wonderful: ‘the top level of the book, for all its longueurs, has been by and large so compellingly designed that the reader does not want to take time off to stop and plunge beneath the surface’. The language, with its root system of symbolic connections and counter-references, its symmetries, its constancy of tone, is complete and sufficient in a particular way. ‘Is it too much to say that all these chords, struck and resolved, while no reader can possibly apprehend them on first or even fourth reading, consciously, nevertheless vastly contribute unconsciously to the final weight of the book?’ It is, probably, rather too much to say; yet Lowry’s intention appears to have been to endow his novel with something like a human complexity of consciousness, to make it in effect ‘creaturely’, with a mind of its own as complex and troubled as that of his principal character.

  2

  Legend has it that Malcolm Lowry arrived in Mexico with his American wife Jan Gabrial on 2 November, the Day of the Dead, 1936. T
hey stepped into the calendar setting and the lurid ceremonial of his novel-to-be. Its twelve hours’ action takes place on the Day of the Dead 1938, told from the vantage of that day in 1939.

  How do we steal from Hell its terror? By anticipating it on earth? In Geoffrey Firmin’s case, by suffering DTS, by going out and finding the goblins and providing them with pitchforks. Magic, cabalism and simple hallucination weaken and then displace more conventional and communal belief – unless the magic is shared with the community. It is hard to discuss the morality or generalize the meaning of a novel in which the principal character cannot stabilize himself, lacking the will and the power to do so; and in which the environment itself is ceremonially out of control. What is true at one moment is false the next.

  The Day of the Dead (All Souls) is one of those Catholic–pagan festivals which defines the peculiarly baroque, pagan–Christian spiritual culture of Mexico. Its symbols dig into the literal soil where the dead lie, not always consolingly but with a brutal irony: it is only in terms of this life that the afterlife finds expression, this life heightened and ritualized. The dead hunger and thirst as the living do, but more intensely, like alcoholics. In the candle— and torch-light they are momentarily satisfied (because though they are supposed to be in eternity they linger in time) with the sugar skulls, the pulque and mescal, the sweetmeats, chanting and dancing, the release of emotion and inhibition that traditional Fiesta sanctions.

  In 1950, three years after Lowry’s novel appeared, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz published The Labyrinth of Solitude, an extended essay in which he devotes a chapter to ‘All Saints, Day of the Dead’. Through its feast-days the Mexican character reveals its deeper nature to which, among English writers, only Lowry and Lawrence have gained (appalled) imaginative access:

  If we make ourselves anonymous in daily life, in the whirlwind of the Fiesta we let go. We don’t just open up: we tear ourselves open. Song, love, friendship: it all ends in howling and tearing. The violence of our feast-days reveals just how far our hermeticism seals off our lines of communication with the world. We know delirium, song, outcry and monologue, but not dialogue. Our Fiestas, like our intimacies, our loves and our attempts to reorder our society, are violent breaches with the old and the established. Each time we wish to express ourselves we must break with ourselves. And the Fiesta is just one example, perhaps the most typical, of violent rupture. […] The Mexican, gloomy being that he is, confined within himself, suddenly bursts, opens his bosom and reveals himself with a degree of complacency, lingering on the shameful or terrible crannies of his intimacy. We are not frank, but our sincerity can reach extremes which would appal a European. The explosive and dramatic, sometimes suicidal way in which we lay ourselves bare and yield ourselves up, almost helpless, reveals how something stifles and inhibits us. Something impedes our being. And because we dare not or cannot confront our being, we revert to the Fiesta. It releases us into the void, a self-immolating drunkenness, a shot into the air, an artificial fire.2

  ‘Something impedes our being’ — and as Lowry’s protagonist realizes, the only way the impediment can be shifted, and then only tenuously, is through the renewable Fiesta of alcoholism and the soul-eating mescal which makes even absinthe seem like gripe water. Lowry understands this fact of spiritual anthropology. It is endemic in the culture where he plants his characters, and it is why Geoffrey Firmin, the British Consul, takes root there and becomes a Mr Kurtz: with all his resources of learning, linguistic genius and wit, he surrenders. He is conscious of surrendering. Here is a modern kind of tragic hero aware at every stage of his circumstances. There is no anagnorisis, no moment of recognition. The whole book is a dénouement.

  3

  Anyone familiar with Cuernavaca (the Quauhnahuac where Lowry sets Under the Volcano) between the 1940s and the mid-1960s will be astonished at the accuracy of Lowry’s description of the little city: the run-down, once-opulent hotel Casino de la Selva, the railway station

  with its air of wan expectation, the forest of blue eucalyptus; and across the gullies, the plaza, Cortez’s palace with the celebrated Diego Rivera murals, the Borda Gardens where an emperor and empress briefly enjoyed imperial romance, the Cathedral, the gulches (dug deeper in Lowry than they are in fact) and bridges, the very houses in which Firmin lived. Lowry closes the open circuit of the literal street-plan to make it possible for his characters to come full circle. He makes Quauhnahuac’s layout more like that of Dante’s Inferno. Each place he describes actually existed, and each has unstable symbolic values.

  The sense of specific place, of place remembered (Lowry wrote the book largely in Canada), is more precise, if less intimate, than Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. It’s odd that Cuernavaca has not become a place of literary pilgrimage, with Firmin-day, a Lowry tour and Lowry bars serving the relevant potations. The film of the book starring Albert Finney was made largely nearby in Cuautla because Cuernavaca changed radically in the 1970s and is no longer recognizably the pacing-ground of Lowry’s characters. It is possible to read into his urban geography, and into the environs, elements of Cuautla and of Oaxaca, where Lowry went after his first wife left him and where he was imprisoned, less for being drunk than for getting into a political fracas with some fascists.

  However he changes a scene, it is worth remembering that his imagination exaggerates and distorts, forces connections and recurrences, but it does not in general invent detail. If the book at times feels assembled, this is because it is. In its composition there was none of the flow, the release of pent-up energies which writers such as Lawrence experienced, becoming a medium, a passive agency, letting the pages flow. Lowry imposed on himself a twelve-hour structure (rather loosened by the opening chapter which looks back from the distance of a year), shorter than the time-span Joyce allows himself for Ulysses. In those twelve hours certain events coincide; at the end of the book, awkwardly, he must narrate events in the final chapter which happen a few moments before those narrated in the previous chapter. In such a fisted time-scale the leisurely, even the orderly, even the coherent, unfolding of plot is a problem.

  Each chapter Lowry regarded as almost free-standing, a poetic structure with verbal and symbolic coherence, belonging to one of the four main characters, with a position in the narrative which feels more geometric than dramatic. The author quarried passages from his poems, from earlier and other writings, to fit them into Under the Volcano. The book was conceived, he reports, in 1936, and later regarded as the Inferno part of Dantesque trilogy, The Voyage that Never Ends, which he did not complete. By 1937 he had part of a first draft — 40,000 words. He did not find it ‘thorough or honest enough’ and continued his labours. He rewrote parts of the book in 1940, awaiting call-up for military service.

  The twelve chapters or ‘blocks’ (intended to recall Homer’s, Virgil’s and Milton’s twelve-book epics, as well as some of Lowry’s more recherché numerological and mystical concerns) were composed out of chronological order and revised discretely. Are we to believe the elaborate account of composition Lowry wrote to his publisher? He is not a dependable witness to facts in other areas, and manuscripts do not abound. Many were burned when his squatter’s shack in Dollarton, British Columbia went up in smoke. If we even half-believe him, then we must imagine a writer at work drafting and redrafting for the best part of nine years. Chapter 11 was the last he wrote, completed ‘in late 1944’; Chapter 3 was first written in 1940 and completed in 1942. Part of Chapter 6 was first written in 1937, revised in 1943 and then 1944. Chapter 7 was first written in 1936, he declares, and continually rewritten: in 1937, 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1944. Chapter 9 was originally written in 1937 but Lowry later changed the narrative perspective (originally assigned to Hugh). Chapter 10, begun in 1936-7, was rewritten at various times up to 1943. One imagines that when he says ‘rewritten’ he means just that: not revisions, but back to the drawing board.

  Chapter 12 was composed in 1937 and more or less completed in 1940. Thus the book knew almost exactly wh
ere it was going for the last four years of its composition: the final crisis had to shudder its way back through what had come before, had to reconfigure in all its complexity the ‘inevitability’ that led to it and nowhere else. If anything contributes to the static effect of the novel, its sense of being preordained rather than inevitable, it is this. Geoffrey Firmin is given a paralysing excess of motive.

  4

  How could a writer who himself suffered from alcoholism write so complex a novel? It was perhaps precisely the complexity of conception that made the writing possible. There is an underlying formula: the constituent parts are largely predetermined and of a manageable length. A different, a looser structure, a freer attitude to language and symbolism, would have betrayed Lowry here, as it did in some of this other prose writings, into a kind of wilfulness. His symbolism may be arbitrary in the novel, but there is nothing arbitrary about the design.

  The drunkenness of Geoffrey Firmin in the twelve hours we share with him is compound. There is beer, tequila and, crucially, mescal. The drunkenness induced by mescal, which Lowry must have tasted in its most refined forms in Oaxaca, where it originates, has the effect of producing great concentration and extremely lucid depression, the kind that sees through actions and knows any action to be vain: the action of refusing to take another gulp, for example; or of welcoming the reappearance of an estranged wife; or of defending oneself when assaulted. The mescal drinker sees through possible actions and therefore does not act. His passivity is a self-conscious choice, aware of the world in which his refusal to act has its consequences and aware of the effect of his inaction on himself.

  In his poem ‘Xochitepec’3 Lowry includes a literal and chilling image: