The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  The brief notoriety from the enthusiastic initial critical praise that Under the Volcano garnered when it was finally published in 1947 didn’t solve Lowry’s problems, rescue him from that darker sea. And while most reports from friends tell of him usually being extremely likeable, even childlike and often a hell of a lot of fun with his ukulele and his impromptu singing and joking around, his life was also marked by an inability after the one successful book to finish to his satisfaction any other major writing project, more lost than ever in the pain and complications—both physical and psy-chological—of continuing alcoholism, complete with harrowing bouts of the DTs. His father was a very wealthy cotton broker, a stern Methodist who disapproved of Lowry’s behavior and cut him off from all but minimal financial support, and Lowry and his second wife lived poor in western Canada. When they had to abandon a beloved seaside squatter’s cottage they’d painstakingly built from scratch outside of Vancouver, they tried to set themselves up in rural England, Lowry eventually receiving a solid inheritance. During a particularly bad bender in 1957 he gobbled a vial of sleeping pills; the coroner in the Sussex village where it happened attributed what most likely was suicide to “death by misadventure.” He was only forty-seven.

  And this is what I am getting at. Something definitely struck me there on Calle Donceles, something in the sheer and all-too-obvious irony of the juxtaposition. To think of the pain of Lowry’s life—especially some of the worst scenes from it played out there in Mexico City only a couple of streets over at the Hotel Canadá and environs, as explained—then to think that I was holding an expensively bound, gold-stamped special edition of the novel that only existed because of, almost could be seen as the direct product of, that torment that haunted him till his too-early death. Which is to say, there were the words of the novel on the slightly yellowing pages, words translated into Spanish, the language of the country that had once officially deported him as an undesirable, with a respected publisher in that country declaring here that the work was an acknowledged masterpiece of its century. But beyond the words, this copy of the book existed on another level, almost waiting for me on this particular shelf on this particular hot afternoon; it somehow had its own inevitability, a life of its own that wasn’t only in the text of Under the Volcano but also in this copy’s ability to whisper to a stranger like me, a writer himself who had reached that stage in his own living where he had started to have occasional doubts about the entire pursuit of writing, asking himself the usual old questions: “What does it all add up to?” And: “Is it, in fact, the living or the writing that matters? Is it worth sacrificing the former for the latter?”

  Bear with me a little more on this.

  3. A Signet Paperback

  But probably I haven’t made clear just how crazy I’ve always been about Lowry’s novel. Sometimes it feels like I’ve logged as much time recommending the book to somebody as actually working on my own fiction. Well, nearly that much time, the whole process starting with somebody wisely recommending it to me in 1968.

  When I was at college at Harvard in those late sixties, I might have held a strange record for the number of creative writing courses taken. It was another era altogether, when Harvard still had glossy emerald ivy on its red brick walls (all of it later pried loose, after it was concluded that the strong, tenacious vines were damaging, slowly wedging apart, the old stone and mortar), and a time when the stuffy Department of English kept creative writing as something you usually had to take without credit toward the set literature curriculum (which included a required full year of soporific line-by-line classroom analysis of Chaucer) or as an extra course completely. One semester a young instructor named Carter Wilson taught a section of English C, a mid-level creative writing course. Wilson was just a few years older than us students under his guidance and had actually published a couple of novels; I remember going down deep into the pulp-fragrant stacks of Widener Library, lit by bare bulbs strung along ancient exposed electric wiring, and seeing Wilson’s books, which made for the kind of undergraduate’s confirmation I needed that Wilson was a legitimate novelist, even if I can’t remember actually checking the books out and reading them. I don’t think booze has ever been any problem whatsoever for me. Nevertheless, there was enough of it in the sloppily typewritten and quite predictable short stories I was turning out at the time; one or two of them involved me and my Wellesley College girlfriend, a painter, polishing off the better part of a bottle of Old Crow bourbon together in the upper bunk in my room in Quincy House on Saturday night, just talking there for hours and doing what undergraduate couples do repeatedly do in a bunk on a Saturday night, while maybe the dreamily slow, psychedelically electric harpsichord of a Donovan album played on the KLH “component” stereo. (Now that I think of it, how lucky does a citizen get?) Yes, I guess there was enough booze in my own fiction that Wilson—a cheerful, mild-mannered guy and good teacher—said that I really should read Under the Volcano, a book all about booze, he assured me. Which is how I came to acquire the Signet paperback that I still have to this day, bought at the Harvard Coop, and that is right here on my desk in Austin, Texas, over thirty-five years later.

  Mass-market-sized, its white jacket works on a motif of red, black, and gold for the title and author and then a sketch of a lone, somewhat abstract figure, Giacometti-ish, casting a shadow in front of the crooked outline of a pyramidal mountain rise and a giant spherical sun behind that. The page edges are stained red, something they don’t seem to do on paperbacks anymore, and the August 1966 printing makes the standard promise of the day that it is “Complete and Unabridged,” the price ninety-five cents. There’s a fine, fine introduction by Stephen Spender that I myself reread— slowly, savoringly—every time I reread the novel. I do so not only for its large general ideas and insights concerning symbolism, as well as the whole sticky issue of autobiography as art, but also simply as a reminder, perhaps, of what gracefully written critical prose, with original commentary fully understanding of the magic of words and the complexity of the heart, once looked like; or what it looked like in a time before most critics—the academic ones, anyway—abandoned a love of, and even a humble submission to, the great literature they wrote about and substituted a latching-on to any trendy, usually imported “theory” of the moment, as that unfortunately became what was necessary to bolster and advance a campus career. Picking up the copy from my desk now, I see how I have carefully and repeatedly mended the worn cover with transparent tape over the years to keep it intact, a few of the pages up front having let loose from the glue binding and protruding, frayed to one step short of mummy’s wrappings. The book has had some use. Besides rereading the novel on my own, I’ve probably brought this very copy into my creative writing classes every semester in my thirty years of teaching to read aloud from the masterful opening paragraph. It employs a cinematic panning, to go from the entirety of Mexico, to Cuernavaca, to the grounds of the crumbling Casino de la Selva there, to a specific table on the casino’s terrace, where a French movie director and a local Mexican doctor are having drinks at sunset after tennis on the Day of the Dead in 1939; they begin to discuss the genuine tragedy of their mutual friend, the Consul, who was casually shot by tough, fascistic Mexican police exactly a year earlier in the course of another alcoholic episode. If there are a better few paragraphs to teach students how any setting that truly transports the reader is without doubt a matter of pure and uncut mood, I don’t know about them; here’s a taste:

  The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill just outside the town, near the railway station. It is built far back from the main highway and surrounded by gardens and terraces which command a spacious view in every direction. Palatial, a certain air of desolate splendor pervades it. For it is no longer a Casino. You may not even dice for drinks in the bar. The ghosts of ruined gamblers haunt it. No one ever seems to swim in the magnificent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty and mournful. Its jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two ten
nis courts only are kept up in the season.

  And beginning in college, I myself have personally pushed the book on girlfriends, other writers, literate relatives and, of course, many students, having loaned out who knows how often my Signet edition. (On page 91, somebody apparently tore off the top of that page in a crescent, the sentences truncated along the intriguing words, one below the other in successive lines at an angle, “Consul,” “paddled,” “hinges,” and “bougainvillea”—I trust that whoever took the missing passage needed and made good use of it, what’s gone from my copy forever.) I repeatedly and energetically told people they had to read it, realizing now that to say that to somebody is nothing less than to flatly announce to them: “You are put on this earth for only so many years, and I am telling you to take several valuable hours out of that time to experience something that might make that time more valuable, richer indeed...I hope.” The tentative ending suitable for that thought, because there’s probably no rejection greater in life than pushing a book on somebody and having him or her quietly return it to you, with at best an excuse of having been so busy with other things lately, or at worst an outright dismissal bordering on honest enough distaste.

  Which is what once happened to me after a public display of my total and unabashed affection.

  In my senior year I somehow got admitted to English S, the advanced creative writing class offered every spring semester at Harvard. At the time it was often considered to be a gathering of the dozen or so best budding writers on campus, both in fiction and poetry, who were selected on the basis of manuscript submissions from probably thirty or forty applicants. Embarrassing to think of now, but I had once read something by John Updike saying that on repeated tries every year at Harvard, he had never been admitted to English S, so in my mind I saw the achievement as very major. At the start of the term, late one January afternoon when I trusted nobody else would be there, I snuck over to the yellow clapboard building that was the home of the Department of English, Warren House, to nervously glance up at the bulletin board in the hallway and see my name posted on the typed list of those chosen. It could have been the Nobel Prize announcement, as far as I was concerned.

  But once the class started I revised my opinion about the whole idea of English S. Taught that year by a well-known— probably famous—classical translator and sometime poet, the class turned out to be far from what I had expected. Those selected were not the wild hearts who had been keeping low for most of their undergraduate days and simply writing and writing some more—fellow oddballs, diamonds in the old rough like me, I egotistically assured myself. There were mostly just the usual suspects, a predictable cast: some campus literary players from the Harvard Advocate literary magazine (of the ilk who often later went on to become editors in Manhattan rather than writers, a fittingly sad fate for undergraduate literary players, I suppose); and then those I had come to realize populated a lot of the tough-to-get-into creative writing classes at Harvard, which were usually taught by males back then—the most attractive of Radcliffe English majors, who just happened to more than frequently turn up (another early lesson, I suppose, in how the real literary world works); plus the one guy, an obvious and enviable natural talent, who had a contract to write a novel for Doubleday already, and everybody with writing aspirations on campus knew about him (to my subsequent knowledge there was never a published novel). What was strange about this class was that the teacher—smallish, hoary-haired, and competent enough, always speaking low and with good enunciation, as if he was quite used to having an audience take in his every word—did, in fact, have a separate gallery of maybe fans there; a number of what looked like Cambridge matrons sat in straight-backed chairs around the periphery of the rest of us officially enrolled students at the oval oaken table, high-class perennial auditors, apparently, with nothing to do with the university. When the teacher gave us the assignment early on to bring into class a piece of writing we admired, I produced the Signet paperback. I probably read from one of those rolling passages where the Consul—his actress ex-wife, Yvonne, having returned to Mexico to see if she can save him, and his swashbuckling British journalist half-brother, Hugh, traveling to Mexico and wanting to help her try to save him—a passage where the Consul leaps further into his alcoholic visions and transport, at the peak of it communicating with the stars and even the ages, it seems, not in the least interested in being saved, when he’s honest about it: the basic premise of such ushering back into the safe world appears to him at that stage the final failure, the worst sellout. Lowry’s Consul—like Hamlet and Faust and Dante’s pilgrim, the personages he’s compared to in much criticism—will prove to be questing after the biggest of messages as the novel progresses, Secret Knowledge itself.

  No, I have no idea now exactly what passage it was, but let me provide one, the sort it might have been. Here the drunken Consul drifts half lost through his lush, sprawling garden after almost stumbling into the deep barranca at the edge of this veritable Eden, as he strains to find a way back to his own house and Yvonne now waiting for him there— which is to say, as he tries to find his way home. In his tequila drunkenness, the world takes on a glowing and revelatory too-clearness of things, and a fleeting image of the airy liberation of the soul materializes right before his wide eyes in an encounter with the cat of his stuffy American neighbor, Mr. Quincey. But there are many stresses indeed in the Consul’s peaceable kingdom.

  Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary. The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in the garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another tree, a bottle-green hummingbird exploring a flower, another kind of hummingbird, voraciously at another flower; huge butterflies, whose precise stitched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about with indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multi-colored love letters, tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to drop rings on you; whore’s shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes of glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay the Mexicans! The horticulturists made the occasion, as they made every possible occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for hours, as if the Consul did not exist.) Then the behavior of Mr. Quincey’s cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught an insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured, delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating, for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat’s mouth, he approached his porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvelously flew out, as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees...

  Full prose that wears the old heart on the sleeve, all right, a rhythmic, darkly comic, semi-hallucinatory mind flow (note the deft use of the parentheses for triggered stray thoughts) that taps all the complexity of substance-induced envisioning and certainly offers a tip of the hat to the master of that mode, De Quincey himself (note t
he echoing name of the neighbor whose cat it is).

  I’ve never been that good at dramatic performance of anything, but I thought I read it reasonably well that day in class. And finished, the Signet held open before me, I surely expected writing like that to bring down the house. The other students, however, were silent, waiting for the teacher’s response before they gave theirs—it was that kind of class. At the head of the table, he took his time, nodded his head a bit, as if in some consternation while he obviously carefully constructed what to say, and ultimately did offer something along the lines of how when he had been a book reviewer years before on the staff of Time magazine, Under the Volcano came to his desk, though after reading it he decided it was maybe too excessive, too verbally and emotionally indulgent for his taste, so it didn’t merit a Time review from him:

  “I chose to pass on it,” he concluded lowly—and imperially, the way I saw it, even if he was being completely honest.

  And I might have been a kid, and he might have been the famous translator of classical Greek and Latin and a published, sometime poet, but the dismissal really stung, assaulted everything I believed in then and to this day, as far as literature goes. To ease the awkwardness for me a little, one of the ritzy Cambridge matrons—I can still picture her, an elderly Marianne Moore type with a complicated hat—did pipe in from the gallery in a dramatic warbly voice, “Lowry, Lowry, such a trah-gic life,” providing some support. Though to twist the emotional stiletto yet more, reinforce the unjust absurdity of it—again, as I saw it—the next student at the table to deliver a piece of writing that she admired was a breathtakingly beautiful Radcliffe girl—I can really still picture her, lithe, with pouty lips and wispily long auburn hair, an affection for miniskirts and sort of ballet-slipper shoes with ribbon tie-ups—who read aloud in her melodious sensual voice a poem that I can’t remember (admittedly it could have been something major, eerie Emily Dickinson or Marvell’s little masterpiece “To His Coy Mistress”); the poem had been copied out in meticulous script and mounted on a 9x12 white art-stock slab with a band of soft felt making a framing border, her own very accomplished pen-and-ink sketches of flowers and leaves all around the verses. Honestly.