There are smaller questions. Gordon Bowker, in his 672 pages, lays repeated stress on the ‘tiny size of his penis’, which at school earned Lowry the nickname ‘lobster’. In later life also, comrades mocked his lack of ‘endowment’. On the face of it, the size of the novelist’s tool should be of no more literary significance than Virginia Woolf’s anything but tiny nose, but in Lowry’s case it links – or so it is speculated – to his dipsomania. Switch to the alternative theory. There is a striking episode in the second chapter of Volcano in which the hero and his recently divorced wife are sitting in a cantina, drinking. It is morning. ‘Must you’, Yvonne asks, ‘go on and on for ever into this stupid darkness? … Oh Geoffrey, why do you do it!’ But it’s not darkness, Geoffrey replies: ‘Look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you’ll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning.’ And suddenly, ‘uncannily’, Yvonne sees that it is beautiful: light, not darkness. Geoffrey is searching, as he thinks, for that moment of drunkenness when he alone in the world is sober. Of course his life is a catalogue of disaster: he has failed as a consul, a husband and a brother. But somehow, when his body is tossed into the ravine (that grotesque womb) at the end of the narrative, along with a dead dog, it is exaltation. ‘He had reached the summit.’
Lowry was the youngest of four sons of a prosperous cotton broker in Cheshire. His siblings pursued eminently respectable careers while Malcolm went to the bad – and created literature. He was sent to the best boarding school in Cambridge, and a good college in the same city, St Catharine’s College. In between, aged sixteen, he ran away to sea for a brief period as a cabin boy on a Conradian voyage to the Far East. His fellow crew-members hated and humiliated him.
At university, Lowry – already manifestly alcoholic – infuriated his teachers. He apprenticed himself, instead, to an American writer – his Mephistopheles – Conrad Aiken. Aiken was the first to perceive Lowry’s genius, and fused it with his own artistic experiments in self-destruction. Drunken, divorced, fired from Harvard for ‘moral turpitude’, his life forecast that of his protégé. Aiken was a tutor from hell, but his Blue Voyage (1927), chronicling a phantasmagoric Atlantic crossing, was influential on Lowry’s first published novel Ultramarine (1933), based on the sixteen-year-old author’s maiden sea voyage. He scraped out of Cambridge with a third (only by virtue of his submitting scraps of his novel-in-progress, one of his examiners said), in 1932. For the next thirty years, he would live on a monthly pension from his father. Like that supplied to William S. Burroughs, part of the deal was that he should stay out of his family’s way – and, ideally, out of England. Calamity, as Aiken’s wife Clarissa observed, followed Lowry like a shadow. It took him five years to write Ultramarine, and two years to get it accepted. The manuscript was promptly lost by the publisher who took it on, Jonathan Cape. Luckily a carbon copy survived from the wastepaper basket into which the author had thrown it.
Lowry married his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in Paris in 1934. She was American, cultured and an actress. Lowry wooed her with the typescript of Ultramarine and she fell, as she said, ‘totally in love with the writer’. About the man she was never so sure. She confessed herself unimpressed by his lack of (penile) ‘inches’ and his ejaculatio praecox. He learned, however, to control his prematurity by singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ to himself during sex. The only child Lowry is known to have engendered was terminated by abortion, soon after his marriage.
In New York, in 1935, Lowry spent his first spell of several in a lunatic asylum, New York’s Bellevue – this was the raw material for Lowry’s incomplete novel, Lunar Caustic (1963). The couple moved on to Mexico, it pleased him to observe, on the Day of the Dead, 1936. It was a place where an expatriate could live cheaply on the £150 a month the ‘old man’ forked out. The Lowrys settled for two years in Cuernavaca (‘Quauhnahuac’ in Volcano) but during this period, as with ‘Geoffrey Firmin’, Lowry’s marriage broke up and, with the expropriation of foreign oil companies, Britain’s diplomatic representation in Mexico was withdrawn. The Fascists had won Spain and looked likely to take over the rest of Europe, and, over the same period, Lowry spiralled into drinking excessively, even by his heroic levels of intake: ‘Once he consumed a whole bottle of olive oil thinking it was hair tonic with a high alcoholic content. Finally he got the shakes so bad that he improvised a pulley system to hoist the glass to his lips.’ Destructive to his liver, it was grist for Under the Volcano. Having gathered his material, Lowry went off to the west coast of Canada to live, relatively abstemiously, and write it up. In this monastic exile he was supported by his second wife, Margerie Bonner, another American, former actress, divorcée and herself a novelist.
From 1940 onwards, Lowry wrote and rewrote his great work. It took nine years in all: ‘time enough to fight three world wars’, he sardonically noted: although he left warfare to others, doing everything he could to avoid conscription. His brothers, meanwhile, kept the Lowry name honourable by fighting for their country. After a huge number of rejections, the novel was published in 1947 and enjoyed immediate success. Lowry sketched out various ambitious sequels, but they came to nothing, leaving only a scatter of brilliant short stories.
Now well off, he and Margerie returned to England in 1955, to live in a cottage in Ripe, East Sussex. After a spectacularly drunken evening, Lowry died – whether it was suicide (he habitually swallowed barbiturates like ‘lemon drops’) or accidentally inhaled vomit which killed him has never been established. He died, as he lived, leaving questions, and one great novel. The novel’s greatness was not much augmented by a John Huston-directed, Albert Finney-starring film in 1984.
FN
Clarence Malcolm Lowry
MRT
Under the Volcano
Biog
G. Bowker, Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (1993)
POSTSCRIPT
200. Charles R. Jackson 1903–1968
There isn’t any cure. From The Lost Weekend
During the long composition and revision of Under the Volcano, Lowry – who had been repeatedly, and plausibly, accused of plagiarism during his career – was appalled by the publication in 1944 of Charles R. Jackson’s The Lost Weekend. His own novel, complete but still unaccepted, would not be published until 1947. Jackson’s account of Don Birnam’s terminal, five-day binge in 1936 Manhattan has striking similarities with Geoffrey Firmin’s final bender. In both novels there is a trio of principal characters – two brothers and a dithery girlfriend. Sections of the novels, notably the description of hallucinatory DTs, are eerily similar. In The Lost Weekend, a tiny mouse emerges from a crack in the wall, opposite the sodden Birnam. A bat swoops, there is a crunch, and a stream of blood streaks down the wall. Birnam screams. In Under the Volcano the Consul is sitting ‘helpless’ in the bathroom, while the wall in front of him is swarming with insects:
A caterpillar started to wriggle toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae. A large cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its head … the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm.
When he read the novel in April 1944, Lowry wrote nervously to a friend: ‘Have you read a novel The Lost Weekend by one Charles Jackson, a radioman from New York? It is perhaps not a very fine novel but admirably written about a drunkard and hangovers and alcoholic wards as they have never been done (save by me of course).’ He later wrote to Jackson, who seems not to have been worried (he had, after all, got his boozeiad out first). It compounded Lowry’s nervousness that the novel was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1945.
Jackson’s life was quite as chaotic as Lowry’s. He was born in Summit, New Jersey, one of five children. His father walked out when he was ten; a younger sister and brother were killed in an automobile accident a couple of years later. Charles had no education beyon
d school, leaving Syracuse University shortly after enrolling. Presumably as with his clearly autobiographical hero, Don Birnam, who is kicked out of Dartmouth for homosexual overtures to fraternity brothers, there was some ugly, hushed-up, scandal. Jackson worked in a New York bookstore and contracted TB in 1927. It was four years before he was pronounced cured, after treatment in various sanatoriums, including two years in Switzerland (inspired to go there by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). He came through his ordeal with the loss of one lung. It was during these years that he acquired his catastrophic drinking habits. He returned to New York at the depth of the Depression, and in the period of universal alcoholic excess following the repeal of Prohibition. He finally cleaned up in 1936, with the help of the newly founded AA fellowship and the woman who became his wife, Rhoda Booth, a Fortune magazine editor (the original of ‘Helen’ in the novel). He landed a job with CBS, doing drama scripts.
Like Don Birnam, and his novel ‘The Bottle’, Jackson resolved to write the first novel to describe alcoholism as it really is, rather than as it is demonised in temperance tract fiction such as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, or romanticised as a ladder to the stars in novels such as Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald was, none the less, a writer Jackson idolised – there’s a comic moment in the novel when Don, smashed, phones up the wearily sober great author. The Lost Weekend was a bestseller and its sales, along with the $50,000 he got for the film rights, enriched its author. He bought a large house in New Jersey, and retired there with his wife and two daughters. He wrote three more novels over the next ten years. Only The Fall of Valor (1946) enjoyed anything like the éclat of its predecessor. It takes on another ‘daring’ subject: a married man, with two daughters, falls in love with a young marine officer. By the early 1950s Jackson had fallen off the wagon and was in financial difficulties. His last ten years were painful, and his life fell apart, beyond any hope of being put together again. In addition, his pulmonary problems returned. His final novel, the grim A Second-Hand Life (the story of a sexually loose girl, Winifred Grainger) was published in 1967. He committed suicide the following year at the Chelsea Hotel, the favourite resort of bohemian writers in New York.
Billy Wilder’s film of The Lost Weekend, which is viewed on TV reruns more often than Jackson’s novel is read nowadays, makes two substantial alterations to its source text. One change is to the fatalism of the novel as regards alcoholism. Jackson’s Don Birnam, a ‘periodic’ drunk, is not ‘cured’ as is Ray Milland’s Birnam in the last scene of the film. He will, we apprehend, have other lost weekends and bouts, until either the closed ward or the morgue brings him to the Last Weekend. As the homosexual attendant Bim tells him in Bellevue (where his public drunkenness has brought him):
There isn’t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? … If they do stop, out of fear or whatever, they go at once into such a state of euphoria and well-being that they become over-confident. They’re rid of drink, and feel sure enough of themselves to be able to start again, promising they’ll take one, or at the most two, and – well, then it becomes the same old story all over again.
The other change is to Birnam’s homosexuality, which is glossed over entirely in the film. In the novel it is clear that Birnam’s drinking is at least partly driven by sexual confusion and the explosive pressures that build up in the closet. And the drink closet.
FN
Charles Reginald Jackson
MRT
The Lost Weekend
Biog
M. Connelly, Deadly Closets: The Fiction of Charles Jackson (2001)
201. Nicholas Monsarrat 1910–1979
Who remembers the old fights? Who wants to?
No novelist of his time conveyed more articulately than Nicholas Monsarrat the tepid rage of Britain in the post-war period when the country won a war, mislaid a great Empire, lost its national nerve, but preserved a saving decency. There is an illustrative moment in The Cruel Sea, when the captain hero (as sterling a type as ever appeared on a Players’ cigarette packet) returns to port from the deadly Western Approaches, leaving in his wake corpses still bobbing on the waves, to find civilian dock-workers on strike for more wages: ‘These were … the people whom sailors fought and died for; at close quarters, they hardly seemed to deserve it.’ None the less, Captain Ericson returns to battle.
Monsarrat was the son of an eminent surgeon in Liverpool, the second of three boys, two of whom came to tragically early deaths. At the family’s country home in Anglesey, he developed an early love of yachting. He was educated at Winchester, where he was bullied and progressed to Trinity College, Cambridge, to complete his gentleman’s education with a third in Law. It would not have disqualified him from a good career. But Monsarrat never bought into the values of his class – nor, however, did he ever quite discard them. For most of the 1930s he chose to be like the black-sheep down-and-outer Orwell describes in the doss-house – his ragged trousers held up with an Etonian tie. In London, with only a typewriter in his luggage, he slept rough and ‘saw life’. He wrote novels which were promisingly smart, but never earned back the standard £30 advance. He sold the Daily Worker in Piccadilly, marched with the unemployed and proclaimed an ‘ardent’ pacifism.
By the end of the decade, he was actually getting somewhere with his fiction. His fourth novel, This is the Schoolroom, a Bildungsroman, was well received by the critics. But, published a week before the outbreak of war, it was swallowed up by history. It was a hectic period. Monsarrat married in the same week (to Eileen Rowland; they had one son). An avowed pacifist, he donned the black uniform of the St John Ambulance Brigade, based (as befitted his background) in Harley Street. The bombs didn’t come. Ambulanceman Monsarrat patrolled the streets ‘armed with iodine and sal volatile in case any ladies fainted’. Things changed when his father sent him an advertisement from The Times (‘a paper I would not be seen dead with’), asking whether ‘gentlemen with yachting experience’ would be interested in commissions ‘as Temporary Probationary Sub-Lieutenants in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve’. Was ever an invitation colder? Monsarrat joined up, telling himself that ‘pacifism was useless in wartime.’ He would spend three years on escort corvettes – unglamorous bathtubs armed with popguns, so unstable on high seas that sailors unlucky enough to sail them jested they ‘would roll on wet grass’. Sub-Lt. Monsarrat (former ambulanceman) was given the task of tending to the survivors from sunk ships. It was horrific: ‘What did one do for the tortured lascar with the mortal oil seeping down into his gut? … Often I willed such men to die, even as I tended them; and sometimes they agreed.’
Monsarrat, himself a ‘temporary’, admired the permanent officer class, while inwardly mocking their incorrigible bone-headedness. He was good at the job and ended up commanding a frigate. After 1945 he could have continued at the Admiralty, commanding a desk. Instead he joined the Colonial Service. What finally induced him to abandon, for the rest of his life, the country he had fought for was an official recipe from the Ministry of Food to senior civil servants, recommending ‘a squirrel pie recipe’. For those who qualified, ‘free cartridges would be supplied by the local pest officer to shoot the squirrel with’. If gentlemen were reduced to eating rodents it was time to leave. He was appointed to Johannesburg, to open the UK information office. In the boredom of that job, between heavy drinking and reckless adulteries (about which he is engagingly frank) he wrote The Cruel Sea (1951).
By now he expected little from publishers, but the British book trade was desperate for the British The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer’s authentically eye-witness, war-is-hell novel. This, Cassells decided, was it. The Cruel Sea went on to become an international bestseller and an Eric Ambler-scripted film in 1953. The emblematic scene in both page and screen versions is the depth-charging of shipwrecked British sailors, hooraying as they mistakenly assume that the corvette is steaming forward to pluck them out of the water, when the Captain, as mistakenly, thinks there is a submarine beneath them and
has decided that they are expendable and must be blown up. Captain Ericson, played throatily by Jack Hawkins, gets drunk and in the film (not the novel) later comes out with his agonised groan: ‘it’s the war, it’s the bloody war’.
Monsarrat was now rich, and could indulge himself with the first Jaguar XK120 in South Africa and a second wife, Philippa Crosby (he would, in fact, marry three times and own many fine cars). He stayed on in the service and took a posting to Ottawa, Canada, which was relatively unbloody. Disdaining the war novel sequel his publishers craved, he produced The Story of Esther Costello (1953), a satire on American hucksterism which, as a novel and a Hollywood adaptation, was a thought-provoking flop. He resigned the Colonial Service in 1956. He could not have stayed on, what with the novel he published that year: The Tribe That Lost its Head is far and away Monsarrat’s best thing in fiction. Set in an imaginary island, Pharamaul, off the West Coast of Africa, it allegorises the tensions of old, complacent British colonial rule (more benign than that in the nearby Republic of South Africa) in the aftermath of Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency – on which Monsarrat had views which would have made Sanders of the River look namby-pamby.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 76