Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  while the very last day

  As I sat bowed, frozen over mescal,

  They dragged two kicking fawns through the hotel

  And slit their throats, behind the barroom door…

  Are these classical fauns strayed into a nightmare scenario, or natural fawns being slaughtered for the hotel guests? The horror for the onlooker, frozen by his vice, bowed (as his letters when he writes are bowed), is literal and figurative, exists in a life and epitomizes a conflict between cultures. Precisely the same image recurs in the novel. In a flashback Geoffrey remembers. Yvonne was leaving him in Mexico City. He sat in the bar of the Hotel Canada drinking iced mescal, swallowing the

  lemon pips, ‘when suddenly a man with the look of an executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought.’ It was on that night that he did not manage to meet Yvonne. It was on that night that he finally lost her.

  The poem includes the death of the cats, as in the novel, and is addressed to a ‘we’ (Jan Gabrial and Malcolm Lowry) on a final night, with the creatures of that night. He is a Mr Kurtz who somehow survived and, in the middle of the next century, provides a different and if anything a bleaker testimony than Conrad’s warped protagonist does. It is bleaker because solipsistic, with the solipsism — we get it in Dylan Thomas and in Sylvia Plath as well — that allows the situation of the self, its anxieties, alarms and aberrations, to displace the ‘objective’ reality of the world. The concerns of the self appropriate and colonize what belongs to a larger history, a history not properly subject to the distortions of a subjectivity. Aware of this peril, Lowry insisted that, in Under the Volcano, Chapter 6, from Hugh’s perspective, provides a kind of objective north against which, or upon which, Geoffrey’s subjectivity in particular can play its variations. The first chapter, too, consists largely of’verifiable detail’. In terms of narrative success, Chapters i and 6 are not the most effective, written as they were most directly against Lowry’s temperamental grain.

  In a poem entitled ‘Grim Vinegarroon’ he recalls frail acts of kindness and charity reduced to meaninglessness on ‘the mescal plain’. The vinegarroon or vinagrillo (vinegar cricket) is a curious beetle-like insect that looks like a stubby black cigar with a pointy tail. It emits a smell like vinegar and its sting is said to be very poisonous. But it is lumbering and traditionally stupid and it threatens the less for that He spares the insect: but he is the insect.

  How I congratulated my compassion!

  Yet was I too that grim vinegarroon

  That stings itself to death beneath the stone,

  Where no message is, on the mescal plain.

  There is a kind of negative mysticism in his alcoholic solipsism, and it is for this reason that Under the Volcano and Lowry’s other work has appealed to critics with a spiritual bent. He was drawn to various spiritual formulae and disciplines and plants them in Geoffrey Firmin (a student of the Cabala, the occult) and within the structure of his novel. All his characters are unnaturally sensitive to coincidence, fate, symbol. He reflects, for himself as for St John of the Cross: ‘What knots of self in all self-abnegation’. The ultimate self-abnegation is death and the contemplation less of its nature than of its effect. He writes in one of his few achieved poems, ‘For the Love of Dying’,

  … If death can fly, just for the love of flying,

  What might not life do, for the love of dying?

  Life (he quotes Baudelaire) is ‘a forest of symbols’: but where Baudelaire emphasizes the symbols and believes they might yield a consistent sense, Lowry stresses the forest, lost-ness, a dark suggestiveness rather than an interpretable meaning or pattern. As in the early poems of Dylan Thomas, so in the mature prose of Lowry metaphor generally displaces or blurs narrative, it seldom corroborates it. In the poem ‘Thunder Beyond Popocatepetl’ Lowry compares the clouds piled beyond the mountains — those towering cumulus that on rare clear days still stand behind the volcanoes — to the heart pinned by ‘the wind of reason’, ‘Till overbulged by madness, splitting mind…’ A natural phenomenon has projected upon it not a symbolic value but a physiological force: bits of the body, intensities of the spirit, of emotion, even paranoia, are forced into actual embodiment in natural phenomena. He isn’t finding metaphors in nature but magnifying the body through nature.

  Reason remains although your mind forsakes

  It; and white birds higher fly against the thunder

  Than ever flew yours, where Chekhov said was peace,

  When the heart changes and the thunder breaks.

  What is Chekhov doing here? No writer is more unlike Lowry than he, and yet Lowry loved him, as he loved a much closer tutelary spirit, Dostoevsky, and Gogol whose Mr Chichikov, along with Melville’s Ahab and with Don Quixote, contribute to the threadbare tweed of Geoffrey Firmin.

  Lowry wrote a poem — a kind of obscure epigraph — which he entitled ‘For Under the Volcano’:

  A dead lemon like a cowled old woman crouching in the cold.

  A white pylon of salt and flies

  taxiing on the orange table, rain, rain, a scraping peon

  and a scraping pen writing bowed words.

  War. And the broken necked streetcars outside

  and a sudden broken thought of a girl’s face in Hoboken

  a tilted turtle dying slowly on the stoop

  of the sea-food restaurant, blood

  lacing its mouth and the white floor —

  ready for the ternedos tomorrow.

  There will be no morrow, tommorow is over.

  Tomorrow is over but the poem isn’t. It runs on, the images configure and reconfigure, giving out different hints of meaning, none stable and none final, except that there is no tomorrow. In a letter he draws attention to the fact that he stole from a poem the image used in Chapter 12 of Under the Volcano where he likens the ‘groans of dying and of love’. Is it spiritual or creative bankruptcy that provokes this bleak recycling?

  5

  Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born in New Brighton, Cheshire on 28 July 1909, the youngest of four brothers, into a well-to-do family of Liverpool cotton brokers. He had relations with his parents and siblings which in retrospect seemed troubled to him, though their recollection was that they were tolerant and supportive of an original and sometimes wayward family member. Certainly Malcolm resisted authority, a resistance which became almost pathological in later years, when he feared the representatives of established authority whether they be immigration authorities, policemen or publishers. And he mythologized his family relations. The first examples of his fiction exaggerate and fantasize his early years and ‘traumas’. It was not then and it did not become Ford Madox Ford’s ‘truth to the impression’; it was truth to a fantasy — how it might well have been, how terrible, how unjust. The fact that it wasn’t those things exactly is not recorded and the biographer must pick a path through volatile narratives grounded in physical fact but seldom in real events. All Lowry’s writing is autobiographical but it is undependable autobiography. Geoffrey Firmin is the ultimate self-justification of the undependable narrator. Lowry’s farther Arthur Osborne Lowry was dependable, supporting his son with a regular allowance through thick and thin.

  Malcolm was dispatched as a boarder to a prep school at the age of eight and went on to public school near Cambridge in due course. He got deep into popular song; he played the ukelele and enjoyed jazz. Going to university was not part of his original plan but under pressure from his family he agreed to go up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge if he could travel first to the Far East. His father arranged the passage. Lowry’s heavy drinking may have begun on board ship. The rich boy was resented by the ship’s crew as a privileged outsider, taking a job from someone who might have needed it: a Melville with privileges. The transformation that takes place in Kipling’s Captain’s Courageous did not take place for Lowry, tho
ugh in retrospect he sometimes pretends that it did, that he earned the respect and acceptance of his shipmates. These experiences helped to shape the character of Hugh in Under the Volcano: Hugh the guitarist, the revolutionary, the man with an education but also with the common touch.

  Lowry came back with relatively simple narrative plans which he wrote over and over until he had devised a dense and complex, wholly non-linear work, Ultramarine (1933). It was fourteen years before his next book appeared.

  In late 1928 and early 1929 he attended a language crammer in Bonn. This was his (and Hugh’s) German Experience — Auden and his contemporaries had gone to Berlin. He went up to Cambridge in 1929. It was the period of I. A. Richards and William Empson, when Cambridge was waking up to contemporary writing. Everyone knew that Lowry would be a great prose writer — he made them believe in him. The evidence was slim but he was crowned in posse. He had fallen deeply under the spell of the American writer Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) who ‘saw him over’ the difficult period from 1927 to 1929. Aiken’s 1927 novel Blue Voyage lay behind Ultramarine and Aiken opened out American literature and America to the young Englishman. He was a heavy drinker, and this was a habit he shared with his protégé. Melville, one of his guiding lights, became Lowry’s star as well. Aiken encouraged the ornate and baroque in Lowry (a different mentor might have served him better). He employed montage techniques, where elements from different spheres in the same moment or time scheme are presented together, in the same sentence. The effect is more complex but less subtle than Virginia Wolf achieved in To the Lighthouse.

  Lowry was also drawn to the work of the once-popular Nordahl Grieg (1902-43), the Norwegian novelist, playwright and poet killed on a bombing mission over Berlin. He was a man of action and an intellectual at the same time, and much influenced (as few English writers at the time were) by Kipling. Lowry admired and imitated him in the early 1930s, especially Grieg’s 1924 novel The Ship Sails On (translated into English in 1927). Lowry set off to visit Grieg in the early 1930s but never met him. It is an irony that Lowry set his great novel in Mexico: he had an abiding fascination with Scandinavia.

  Critics perhaps make too much of Aiken and Grieg: they had their impact but it grew less. Conrad and Melville are at the heart of his imagination: Melville the Jacobean, the author of Moby Dick, and Conrad the mercilessly severe and always exotic moralist, author of Nostromo, the opening and parallel time schemes of which may lie behind elements in Under the Volcano, and Heart of Darkness. Conrad and Melville, with their emphatically male concerns and sensibilities, could not, or did not, create many convincing female characters. Nor did Lowry.

  It was at Cambridge that he read the poets (in part under Aiken’s influence): Dante, Melville (prose also), Eliot, cummings, Stevens came into focus for him. And the novelists: Mann, Faulkner, Henry James he read ‘in depth’. He scraped through his university course with a low Third, having pursued his own curriculum. How extensive it was and how deeply he read may be gauged from Ultramarine, with its complex derivations.

  In 1934 he married the radical young Jewish-American Jan Gabrial. She may have been a member of the Communist Party; she was trying to write a fictional account of the lives of Hungarian coal-miners (where better than Mexico to undertake such a mission?), and she certainly adjusted Lowry’s politics in global terms. She alienated him for a time from Aiken, who believed his disciple had wandered too far to the left. After her departure his sense of Mexican politics was adjusted by his close friendship with Juan Márquez. Without Jan and Juan Under the Volcano might have seemed mere solipsism, but it is the book’s uncertain politics, signalled in its setting within historical time — the defeat of the Republicans in Spain, the often bloody conflicts in Mexico at the time of Almazán, the impending World War — that make Geoffrey and Hugh and, to a lesser extent, Yvonne (Jan minus the politics, minus the intellect) emblematic. After Jan’s departure Lowry recoiled from his acquired radicalism and developed his interest in the occult; but politics were so bound up in the Mexican experience that he could not write them out of it.

  Jan and Malcolm Lowry travelled to Mexico where his alcoholism and despair precipitated the breakdown of their already shaky marriage. In 1940 he married Margerie Bonner, a woman he already knew. She proved the good angel who tended him, saved his manuscripts, encouraged and nursed him. On 6 April 1946 Under the Volcano was at last accepted by Jonathan Cape in London after long resistance. It was published in 1947. Lowry wrote his publisher an enormous letter which outlines precisely his intentions and seeks to justify the book movement by movement against the reservations expressed in Cape’s reader’s report. This letter is often taken as gospel by Lowry’s critics: his views are so clearly stated that we are freed from having to read with independent eyes. ‘It can be regarded as a king of symphony,’ he remarks, then catches fire: ‘or in another way as a kind of opera — or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, and so forth.’ Fortunately, in the teeth of such nonsense, it can be regarded as a novel, unique in its characterization and in the stylistic objectives it sets itself.

  Martin Seymour-Smith offers the received view: ‘Lowry succeeded only because he persisted in destroying himself with alcohol; he is consequently a disturbing as well as a tragic writer.’4 What needs emphasizing is that he fully succeeded only once, in a work which took him the better part of a decade to complete and with which he was never happy, and whose success he lived to regret and resent. His other works, for all their intermittent power, are at best peripheral. Lunar Caustic (written in 1934) is about his detention in Bellevue Hospital, New York, for alcoholism after the crisis of his first marriage.

  His return to Mexico in 1945–6 with his second wife, when he stayed in the same streets and met some of the same people he had known in the blissful and then the blighted months of his first visit, provided him with material for Dark is the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (published-posthumously in 1968). His main place of residence from 1940 to 1954 was at Dollarton, British Columbia, where he lived a settled squatters's existence in a community he felt a part of, marginal but making its own radical centre.

  He was, however, virtually an exile from the British literary world. His settings are seldom English; his sensibility, while it never took root anywhere else, lost its sense of Britain and Britain’s mission. Both the novels published during his lifetime were remaindered in his country: his success was largely a North American phenomenon. He died in England in 1957, since when his widow, friends like the Canadian poet and novelist Earle Birney, critics and scholars have endeavoured to complete some of the books Lowry left in draft. Stories, poems and novellas have emerged, intriguing for the extra shadows they add to the billowing ‘darkness visible’ of Under the Volcano.

  6

  Malcolm Lowry has rather lost his natural context. The Canadians with some reason feel proprietary: he chose to live in Canada, and Canada has provided much of the scholarship that has been invested in Lowry and houses many of his manuscripts. Yet he is unlike any other Canadian writer. His only close friend among the Canadian literati was earle Birney. He belongs, in formal and temperamental terms, among the English writers of his generation. The novelist he most resembles is the neglected Joyce Cary: a great reviser and rewriter, though less caustic than Lowry. He wrote brilliantly about Africa. Henry Reed declares, ‘His capacity for absorbing himself in his characters and in their milieu is unparalleled (save perhaps in Henry Green) in contemporary literature’.5Reed compares Cary to Defoe. ‘We do not merely watch a “character” whose actions and reactions are discontinuous and irresponsible; we become that character.’ To this skill he gives the name ‘objectivity’, the

  self-effacement which makes it possible for another self to emerge. He speaks of it also as clairvoyance.

  With Cary this is a manifest of art, where with Lowry, especially in Under the Volcano, it has a pathological aspect: the character is not created but in large part confessed; the created
elements are incorporated to plead, to make credible and exonerate. Lowry is in a sense Cary’s Gulley Jimson from The Horse’s Mouth,‘rowdy, dishonest, outrageous’. Jimson ‘is presented as a nuisance, and as a grotesque… but he does profoundly represent the visionary, obsessed artist who can never be popular except among a few of his contemporaries till after he is dead. In all of these books Cary has succeeded in eliminating himself— the aim of the author of Finnegans Wake’.

  Whatever the formal similarities, ‘eliminating himself was not Lowry’s objective. Earle Birney regards the ‘self as his sole subject, ‘teetering on a rope of comic fancies, between grandeur and self-pity, between exultation in his own power and agonies of self-contempt’. He adds in a flow of words his friend might have uttered in a lurid, sober moment: ‘… his whole life was a slow drowning in great lonely seas of alcohol and guilt. It was all one sea, and all his own. He sank in it a thousand times and struggled back up to reveal the creatures that swam round him under his glowing reefs and in his black abysses.’

  His writing was like his life, hence the continual revisions, the expression always approximate, not quite what he wanted. Balzac used to use his printer’s proofs as drafts and revised his novels on them, and then re-revised the revised proofs until his printers tore their hair. This is the direction Lowry comes from, hungering for the stylistic authority of Flaubert but in the end compelled to abandon the work to the printer rather than ‘complete’ it. Aware of the problem a reader would have, required to construe the text, to engage and struggle almost as the writer did, he suggests to his publisher that ‘… a little subtle but solid elucidation in a preface or a blurb might negate very largely or modify the reaction you fear…’ In the event Under the Volcano appeared without the prefatory ‘elucidation’, and later editions which have carried elucidations have attempted to tame the book. It is wild and throws off theorist and critic. It is a book for readers who need to know less than Lowry wanted to tell them (‘the four main characters being intended, in one of the book’s meanings, to be aspects of the same man’; or ‘the humour is a kind of bridge between the naturalistic and the transcendental and then back to the naturalistic again’); who accept the fact that symbols will change their valency in changing contexts, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon; and who realize that every object, every insect, every leaf and horseman, whore and spy, was real in the world where Lowry walked and drank and was alone, and in which he invested Geoffrey Firmin, his angels and demons, his fading family and friends.