A resentment psychology is developing rapidly. In college a young man, presumably in love with Lowry, commits suicide, and this event, too, becomes one of the crimes which haunt his heroes. By now every crime which he conceives for himself is also another injury done him, and he is already drinking more than much.
Thus eyes, fires, follow him. Disaster. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. And it is true that he cannot competently manage his life. He does put himself in bad hands, the hands of exploiters (in photos his own are often in his pockets). His squatter’s shack at Dollarton does burn; a manuscript, not the first, is lost; he has constantly to fear eviction; he slips from the pier he’s built there, which means so much to him, and thereby injures his back; the cold drives him every winter into travel so that homelessness can continue his motto, and paradise return with the spring. He is kicked out of Mexico, in alcoholic horror held for a time in an Oaxaqueñian gaol where he decides an unsuccessful attempt to castrate him has been made. He suggests through the mail that he’s been mistakenly imprisoned for spying, and that he must drink furthermore from his pisspot … probably.
The list winds on like a bus on a mountain road. Wounds, bruises, broken bottles, suicidal gestures, blackouts, falls, fire: attacking the self he is alone in, he cuts a ridiculous figure, and Douglas Day has difficulty depicting Lowry’s redoubtable charm, for charm is evanescent and does not lend itself to anecdote. More than one friend describes Male as puppylike, refers to his infectious disarming grin, his amazing amusing memory, his simple devotion, the bulk of his chest, his strength, the jokes told on the soul.
Yet in Grenada, his huge head shaded by a great touristy sombrero, this borracho inglés, trailed by mocking children and eyed by the Guardia Civil, lurches shamefully through the streets, his trousers held up by a tie. During a friendly drunken tussle shortly after arriving in America to see Conrad Aiken, he tosses his new father figure into the fireplace and fractures his skull. “Look what happens when I try to touch …” Ashes, ashes, all fall …
And into every happening there entered, early, imagination like a liar and a thief, arranging reality as it ought and was felt to be, until sometimes it seemed to Lowry he was himself a fiction, and that the work he was writing was writing him. That enmeshment, itself, became a theme.
… the novel is about a character who becomes enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written, as I did in Mexico. But now I am becoming enmeshed in the plot of a novel I have scarcely begun. Idea is not new, at least so far as enmeshment with characters is concerned. Goethe, Wilhelm von Scholz, “The Race with a Shadow.” Pirandello, etc. But did these people ever have it happen to them?6
It must have begun in the most ordinary way, Malcolm Lowry’s habit of making up life as he went along. It must have begun with little elaborations, lies as harmlessly decorative as those sugar flowers whose stony blooms enliven our birthday cakes. We all did it—added frills. We do it still: we penny-candle conversations, ice anecdotes, bake ourselves in pies. When we were maybe a boy with a ball or a worm in a can, there was no entrance easier than of fact to fancy, because we were more likely to be living on the inside of our nature then, where distant skiers safely slid the hazardous slopes of our sheeted beds, and little facts came along like sticks in a stream to be snatched up. The garage’s broken window could become a bullet wound, a furtive peerpoint, violent eyecrash. The step seems a small one, but the difference between an imaginary world which flows around the real one and uses it, catch as catch can, and a real world which is hung each way one turns with dreams like evergreens by bagworms, is—
And if at first our daydreams merely close and open softly on reality like a convolvulus, we find it useful later, with our little fabrications, to make life move more centrally around us. Thus do we appoint ourselves a sun, to shine and tan in turn; we compel our inner shapes and outer shadows to coalesce; we speak sternly to experience in romantic German till der als ob ist, pointlessness becomes plan, sheer coincidence design, and it is no longer surprising that the wages of sin should be exhibited in plaster of Paris on Paradise Street.
The wormy ubiquitousness of the sign reminds many of Ulysses, but the similarity is deceptive because Lowry’s feeling for the world is in no way like Joyce’s, nor are his literary skills, although both pun. For Stephen Dedalus, walking along Sandymount strand, the world is a series of words which find their final connections in the mind, but for Lowry it is not simply that some grand Master moves each piece of life into a single sentence, it is rather that each piece has its own lungs and legs, and a sign is, for instance, the advertising poster which follows the Consul like an urchin uttering itself. It shouts, to be sure, like one of the furies, like a messenger of the gods. It is itself alive and menacing, as full of private mischief as any chief of Rostrums or sub-chief of Migración.
Lowry could not invent at the level of language, only at the level of life, so that having lied life into a condition suitable for fiction, he would then faithfully and truthfully record it. No wonder he felt enmeshed. No wonder, too, that he had to revisit in order to revise; repeat the same difficult passage of existence in order to plunge further into it, make the necessary changes, get it right; and this meant only too often that he had to drink himself back into madness again, to resee what was to be rewritten: to fall down in a ditch, to find vultures perched on the washbasin, fold fearfully up in a corner like a pair of discarded trousers, or bruise his head between toilet and sink in some dirty anonymous John.
But he now became conscious of something more frightening yet taking place in his mind. It was a feeling that permeated the high ill-lit yellow walls of the hotel beer parlour, the long dim corridor between the two beer parlours, on which the door now seemed to be opened by an invisible hand …, a feeling which seemed a very part of the ugly, sad, red-and-brown tables and chairs, something that was in the very beer-smelling air, as if—the feeling perhaps someway arising, translated to this surrounding scene, from the words themselves—there were some hidden correspondence between these words and this scene, or between some ultimate unreality and meaninglessness he seemed to perceive adumbrated by them …, and his inner perception of this place: no, it was as if this place were suddenly the exact outward representation of his inner state of mind: so that shutting his eyes for a long moment of stillness … he seemed to feel himself merging into it, while equally there was a fading of it into himself: it was as though, having visualized all this with his eyes shut now he were it—these walls, these tables, that corridor.… 7
Words, walls, percepts, feelings, this or that cantina, this small victory, that great defeat: all were one behind the colon, a line drawn through his writing to indicate a sum. As he merged with his environment the way numbers enter one another, disappearing entirely without losing themselves, he heard, as if in his own voice yet in a voice now no longer his, prophecies in labels, omens in emblems, spying eyes like whispers looking out of objects, threats in signs.
And as his guilt grew and his terrors multiplied, as his hands refused to write and his fuddled head fell farther toward his knees, he became more and more dependent on Margerie, not only for mothering and other small corrections, but for experience itself, since they went everywhere together, suffered everything together, resolved to begin a new pier, new cabin, new journey, new book, new life together, the glass which poisoned all these plans, although he often drank from it alone, held jointly; so it was Margerie’s fault he was such a sot, he felt, and he saw how the powers he possessed were slowly passing to her: he needed her to punctuate his prose; he needed her to smooth out the creases in his style; he needed her guidance and her notes; he would need her to publish his posthumous works. He lived, furthermore, in the presence—literally beneath the gaze—of the person he had most injured, before whom it was no longer possible to put on a new soul like a suit for Sunday—who knew his fears, his incapacities, so many of his secrets, who knew that so many of his lies were lies. He was intolerably uncovered, and there was nowher
e finally to go … both petal and anvil had arrived.
In the little English town of Ripe (place names follow him snickering even to the grave) … Lowry chases his wife away with the shattered neck of a gin bottle.
It was a sort of suicide, a swallow larger and more reckless than usual, this death by misadventure, as the coroner kindly decides to call it, and dying in a scatter of food and glass was no doubt dingy enough to satisfy the Consul, though it had entelechy, like a habit which has finally completed itself. After this death, which Day describes so well, the weekly Brighton Argus headstoned and then columned him:
1 Douglas Day, Malcolm Lowry: A Biography (New York: Oxford, 1973).
2 Dr. C. G. McNeil, “A Memory of Malcolm Lowry,” American Review 17, pp. 35–39.
3 If one is familiar with Aiken, one can indeed feel his presence in Lowry’s books. The two authors continually intercross, because of course Lowry figures in Aiken’s autofictional biography, Ushant, and is the model for a character called Hambo in Aiken’s autofactual fiction, A Heart for the Gods of Mexico. They borrow one another like roommates steal shirts for an evening out, yet the bodies which wear them remain distinct and the shirts get returned after use.
4 Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry, Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry (New York: Lippincott, 1965), p. 165.
5 This is the first paragraph of Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (New York: New American Library, 1968). Douglas Day and Margerie Lowry have edited this posthumous novel. There is an excellent brief introduction by Day.
6 A quotation from “Through the Panama.” This profoundly self-reflexive novella was written in the fifties, and although its concerns are now a commonplace, the fictional techniques employed remain in advance of our time. Lowry’s collection of short stories, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Philadelphia & New York: Lippincott, 1961), contains another masterpiece, “The Forest Path to the Spring.” Margerie Lowry is apparently gathering another sheaf of shorter pieces, and Lowry’s life as a dead author will soon be longer, as it is already more productive, than his life as a live one.
7 From the astonishing “Wandering Jew” chapter of October Ferry to Gabriola (New York: World, 1970), a work which, while now enclosed by covers, is no more than a pile of rusted and beautiful wreckage.
Wisconsin Death Trip
History passes over them like the angel of death; not only these people of Jackson County, Wisconsin, the occupants of this book,1 alive and dying in Black River Falls and environs during the two decades around which the century turned, but also the enormous anonymous mass of men who have perished that we might be here, in our turn, to perish too.
And although there’ll be photographs which embalmers (for a fee) will guarantee to take of our rouged and cottoned cheeks, photographs of the coffin banked by glads and guarded by wire-rigged wreaths; and even though there’ll be brief notices of comfort and commemoration (paid for by the grieved) placed in columns beside the Want-Ads and resembling the For Rents, like the one here from The Badger State Banner; and though we shall no doubt leave behind us albums of images, snaps of us in all our ages, with weddings, births, and vacations by the Lake or at the Dells predominating; still, history will ignore these traces just as it always has before—because historians want their documents to state sums or be signed by ministers and kings; because we belong to the poor and nonpolitical and cannot pay them; because we are among those whom George Eliot described as living faithfully a hidden life and resting in unvisited tombs.
Wisconsin Death Trip represents an effort to recapture the consciousness of a neglected people and in this way contribute to the understanding of an old contrast—city vs. country—a polarity so traditionally important to the interpretation of American history. Michael Lesy has collected and arranged a number of remarkable old photographs; he has culled accounts, principally of death, depression, and disease, from local papers; recorded a little local gossip; snipped pertinent paragraphs from the region’s novelists; then to accompany these composed a brief though eloquent and perceptive text, and put all this handsomely and artfully before us.
The result is an impressive example of the poetry of history, linear in form as history naturally tends to be, yet curiously still and fixed like a piece of statuary or one of those stiffly posed photographs he’s both reproduced and doctored here. As we read, we do not so much pass from death to death as we more deeply enter one life on its painful way there, and we enter it the way water enters stone, through the steadily repeated smack of similar little facts spattering on its face to dissipate into the air.
Photographs represented occasions once upon a time. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money; they recorded important moments; you faced front; you seldom smiled, since levity was not the mark you wanted put across your face forever; yet the result of this resolute Egyptian solemnity was to separate people as they sat or stood together, man and wife or members of a band, to emphasize the withdrawn, inward look they all had, because there was nothing in front of them but a lens as cold and darkly caped as God’s eye. Even the dogs were docile, cow-jawed, stiff as porcelain. There were, of course, no cats.
The people were often strangely posed: if not before a painted drop, then in the middle of a chicken scratch or vast infertile field, chair and occupant put down there as if by a terrible wind; now and then a storefront or a string of fish was taken, people and fish alike overlapping, and an entire family snapped stoically sitting in a yard of weeds; or the film was exposed at that hour of the day when even a city’s wooden sidewalks and dirt streets seem as empty and endless as a wilderness; or a woman in her best black would be stood against a white clapboard wall, the lines behind her already folding into one another at infinity, to make so negative a space you’d think she was the entrance of a cave; and though the younger men’s faces seem beautifully stupid and naïve sometimes, the sunken mouths and eyes of the older women wear their suffering the way clothes and furniture show theirs, the skull behind the skin burning like a dim bulb.
The loneliness trapped in these figures is overwhelming, and one thinks of the country, and how in the country, space counts for something, and how the individual is thrown upon his own resources, how he consequently comes to sense his essential self; and then you notice with a guilty twinge three generations posed in front of a small unpainted shack, and you realize that these families are as closely thrown together as potatoes in a sack; that, like men on a raft, space is what confines them; and that the tyranny of the group can here be claustrophobic, crushing, total.
Times were tough, the earth was not easy, businesses failed, banks went bust. Tramps roamed the countryside—stealing, burning. The men drank. The women relied on patent medicines and madness. Diphtheria and other epidemic diseases, as Lesy says, “inverted a natural order—that is, they killed the youngest before the oldest; they killed the ones who were to be protected before their rightful protectors; they killed the progeny before the forebears; they killed the children before their parents.”
There were open fires, faulty chimneys, careless cooks, lamps, candles, kerosene, log and board buildings, brush, scrub, barns full of grain, hay in stables, wood in sheds, each easy to set afire and difficult, once burning, to put out, for it was often a long way to water, and then it lay in wells; there were few brigades; and there were hungry men roaming the woods so callused their bodies were clubs, women and even children who had nothing more in their hearts but malice and nothing to live for but revenge, so that although fires were set for profit, by accident, or to cauterize a house infected with disease, arsonists were always feared, invariably suspected, inevitably blamed.
The weather didn’t help, but Lesy has no clippings about high winds, heavy snows, deep freezes: the long oppressive winters in which cold filled the space you were supposed to be so free in and drove you, as the dark did, under the blankets early. In his best paragraph, he writes: “In winter, the only men left in town were either so
young they were in school or so old they were in bed, or so spineless they sold things to ladies. Everyone else was off in the pineries.” Surely there were tales of thaw and freeze, but Lesy says: “I concentrated only on the stories and accounts that concerned the psychology or personality of events.”
Perhaps for that reason we learn nothing of how the animals died, except for the man who gave “a colored boy $1.00 to shear a big Newfoundland dog and anoint him with kerosene oil,” a fuel they later set alight (although there are photos of a shy-cocked horse with a mane like Goldilocks); there is nothing a politician said; while perhaps for other reasons there are no reports of weddings, christenings, sewing bees and circles, the length of the year’s longest pike, or what might be called amusing anecdotes of human interest: what the band played in the park on the 4th of July, or how many fell sick eating chicken salad at the Norwegians’ picnic.
Still, there is the tantalizing history of Mary Sweeny, the compulsive window-breaker, another, equally compulsive, who was a woman hugger, some misers, a few charges of rape and incest, a little lesbian by-play, an ossified man, a charming bit about a woman who expelled a frog from her stomach, the Negro barber who had given himself over to startling opinions, and several stories of misfortune falling so thickly on a single sad head you had to affront Job by laughing. Things reach us in this work which normally never do, yet, in general, the world which can’t be quoted in the weeklies can’t reach history. The rest we must infer.
People became “shack-wacky.” No wonder. At any rate, they went insane with a frequency which would be significant if we knew what was meant by it. There were hearings: a judge determined the matter; and you were sentenced to asylums as people were to prison. The inhabitants believed in madness as they believed in arson. As we once believed in Communist conspiracies. They were crazed. They knew it certainly, the way doctors knew diphtheria, and what Lesy gives us is a record of their convenient, resolute, excited, fearful diagnoses. The photographs encourage us to see it … to pass through those enlarged eyes into the desolate outdoors.
World Within The Word Page 4