The hoary teacher’s response, following his lingering, appreciative smile, was most positive, to put it mildly; he pronounced, “A very lovely poem from a very lovely young lady.” Honestly.
And writing this now and seeing the tone I assume when describing a forgotten winter afternoon in cold, gray Cambridge closing in on four decades ago, I know—and it should be obvious—that the hurt lingers. I mean, do I have to call him, the much-honored man who is long deceased, a “sometime poet,” get in a dig like that even today? Still, his failing to recognize Lowry’s achievement, even his possibly running the risk of cutting the readers of Time magazine off from getting the word on it when it appeared in 1947 (though my checking now indicates somebody did review it anonymously for them), he deserves my venting of spleen, I’d say, which, if nothing else, stresses what Under the Volcano means to me.
Anyway, when I pushed the book on another party, a half-dozen years later, I got a response exactly the opposite, the variety of which any of us is obviously longing for when we recommend a book to somebody else.
To my surprise, no doubt, I had started publishing some short stories in literary magazines, had actually been given a chance to teach creative writing myself at a small state college in the sweet Green Mountains of northern Vermont, which spared me from having to return to the bleak routine of the daily-newspaper work that had been my livelihood right after graduation. I couldn’t believe my good luck, granting it was originally just for a summer session and by no means a regular appointment. Living next to me on the faculty floor of a dorm was a playwright up from New York, part of an ensemble theater group, with directors and Equity actors included, in residence for the summer. I hit it off with the playwright, only five years older than me but with solid success already for his startling avant-garde work, plays done by the Lincoln Center Rep and Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theater. In fact, he already had somewhat of a legend about him: linebacker big and a former college athlete, grizzly bearded, prone to wearing head bandannas and bib-front overalls, he had married early and had kids, taught English and Latin at a prep school out on Long Island, before he just left behind the entire package of the square life to write his plays in a cramped one-room apartment in the Village and support himself with a job that amounted to little more than being a resident roadie, lugging speakers and setting up shows at the old Fillmore East rock venue. In other words, he canned most everything for his writing, and living for a while now in a dorm room next door to him, I knew how hard he worked, a single exchange of dialogue labored over and written again and again, the exchange polished maybe for hours...before moving on to the next line of dialogue, and that then written again and again and again. Recently, a play of his had been brought out as a book in the prestigious and hip Grove Press contemporary drama series, putting him alongside Ionesco and Beckett on the shelf. The playwright seemed to have made it, and done so on his own terms without compromising; true, before too long there would be some extremely troubled times for him—big personal issues to wrestle, plus vanishing interest in daring work like his in an increasingly middlebrow, commercialized American theater scene—but that summer his situation was anything other than that. I ate breakfast every morning at a table in the student dining hall with him and the rest of the theater people, and probably right from the start I launched into my preaching about Lowry, one morning carrying the Signet paperback from the dorm, sliding it across the table and positioning it beside his plate of sausage and scrambled eggs to make sure he had it, then the playwright carrying it back to the dorm. The exchange was made.
The teaching schedule was such that most of us wrote in the a.m. and taught in the afternoons. And I suppose I didn’t notice the silence in his room next door as I banged away at my own light green Hermes portable for several hours, didn’t notice the time (this could happen when you were young and giddy about being able to write anything you wanted to, namely prose fiction, delivered from the sometimes sixty hours a week of writing meaningless newspaper copy), and soon it was well past noon. I figured I would see if the playwright wanted to go over to the dining hall for lunch. I knocked, heard nothing, then knocked again.
“Yeah.” His voice was deep and gravelly, soft right now.
“It’s Pete,” I said. “I’m going to lunch.”
“Pete, come on in.”
I opened the door to the dim little cinderblock cubicle. The curtains were drawn against the midday July glare outside, and dressed in his bib-fronts and T-shirt, his Chuck Taylors kicked off, he was sitting stretched out on the bed, a sizable man. A dorm pillow propped his back, and a single desk lamp glowed a yellow cone of light over his shoulder and onto a book, my Signet paperback; in his huge hands he cradled it gently, like a dove, maybe. He looked disoriented by my interruption.
“I see you’re reading the book,” I said.
He must have been going at it all morning, for the four hours or so since he’d gotten back from breakfast, reading instead of writing, because when he carefully placed a ballpoint pen to mark his spot, I noticed he was halfway through the near four hundred pages. Still on the bed, he looked at me, the voice not just deep and gravelly and soft but dead serious, too, and very slow, so honest he could have been speaking more to himself than to me. He said:
“I’ve been reading this book all my life.”
Which has always struck me, ever since, as the ultimate triumph in that scenario of recommending a book to somebody, the iconic affirmation. And whoever I have tried to tell about the book after that (I just pushed it on a guy in my department last week, a twentieth-century-novel scholar who confessed he was embarrassed for not having read it, promised he would go through it, studiously, as an upcoming summer project) has never been able to give such a response, one that also gets smack at this matter I’ve been wondering about: Again, there is the Signet paperback that contains, “Complete and Unabridged,” that handsome prose and the tale of the last day of the dipsomaniacal Consul’s life in 1938, but there is also this same Signet paperback, an object that I have often used to say what I can’t say myself, that has made for a message in itself that I can physically hand to somebody and beat what becomes more and more as I get older the troubling frustration—or huge pure futility?—that Baudelaire defined well in the second of his two published introductions to Les Fleurs du Mal, “the appalling uselessness of trying to explain anything whatever to anybody whatever.”
And that seems to be very much the other life of that copy, the specific purpose in my own life of the worn-soft, falling-apart Signet paperback.
4. Where Words Go
One night recently, in a bar here where I live and teach here in Austin, Texas, now, I got to talking to a painter I know, a guy whose canvases sell well both in the U.S. and internationally. He is an avid reader, and he spoke to me of a longtime affection for Lowry’s work. As he put down his fresh, syrupy black Guinness pint after a first long sip, he looked up from under the visor of his baseball cap and told me outright:
“I’ve once even held the manuscript. I mean, it was wild, having it right there in my hands.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.
“No, see for yourself. Right over at the HRC.”
The HRC is the rare books and manuscript library at the University of Texas. And I have been on the university’s faculty for almost twenty-five years, admittedly an academic low-profiler in my English department, being a so-called creative writer. My cluttered office with cracked yellow plaster walls on the first floor of Parlin Hall actually looks out to the HRC. Located in a massive reinforced-concrete rise from the 1970s—a blank limestone veneer and somewhat in the style of an imposing Soviet mausoleum—the library was founded by a past university president and systems chancellor, the controversial Harry Ransom; his critics said he called it the Humanities Research Center, or HRC, possibly with the dreams of grandiosity that haunt too many ego-inflated, big-university administrators, knowing that eventually the name of this HRC could deftly
be changed to the Harry Ransom Center—which it was. And there I was, a confirmed Under the Volcano addict to match any Under the Volcano addict, I liked to think, and for close to twenty-five years I had been in an office just a few hundred feet away from the original manuscript, but I had no idea of that. For some reason I felt beyond embarrassed, positively ashamed, and I mumbled some face-saving excuses to the painter as I confessed, no, I never had seen it.
In my defense here, I should say that by choice I’ve pretty much avoided that rare books and manuscript library. I head over there only when a reading or talk by a visiting writer is held in one of its quite sumptuous upstairs meeting rooms, with their Oriental rugs and good furniture and cut-glass decanters for sherry at receptions. For me, there’s a certain off-putting, precious atmosphere surrounding the place, not only in the fetishization—as collectible objects—of books and an author’s personal trappings (Arthur Conan Doyle’s eyeglasses, Gertrude Stein’s cape, etc.), but also in the message of how money, and plenty of it, can buy all of that and put it in surroundings possibly posher than most anything else on what often appears a very posh campus, its hefty endowment originally coming from substantial oil-property holdings. The library seems to endlessly host literary “events” and “galas,” some very lavish and with deep-pocketed donors festively abounding; over the years, you might have mistaken—by the mode of attire—more than one of the HRC directors and top curators for a bank executive or corporate lawyer, a mover and shaker rather than an academic. It could be that from the angle of somebody who actually writes, it’s not always that easy to see what a lot of HRC activity has to do with anything in the bigger scheme of genuinely important literary concerns, other than continuing to stoke up money to buy more, well, “things.” Yet I know there’s no denying the inherent value of studying an author’s manuscripts and papers, and I—all grouchy criticism above notwithstanding—certainly wanted to touch the Lowry manuscript, examine it myself, a piece of my literary True Cross, I suppose.
One thunderstorming morning last summer, I went over there to track down the manuscript. I had to get a special buff card issued in my name, then go into a glass-walled cubicle and watch a five-minute instructional video on how to request and subsequently handle manuscripts, narrated in an even-toned voice that sounded like that from one of those schoolyard-safety films or such we were bombarded with as kids in the fifties. I must say the librarians on duty proved most accommodating, totally encouraging. And there in the spacious, well-appointed main reading room, the two boxes of Lowry holdings were delivered on a cart pushed by an undergrad work-study student who had taken a class from me the semester before, a smiling guy wearing a backward rapper’s cap who still seemed gushingly grateful for the B that I had given him. I sat at a table under the gaze of corny bronze busts of everybody from John Steinbeck to George Bernard Shaw, and I began my examination according to the rules.
Security was understandably tight. There were the uniformed campus cops I had passed down in the lobby, monitoring a large panel of state-of-the-art electronic surveillance screens, and there was now the restriction that I was allowed to take notes only with the single brand-new, sharpened yellow Number 2 with a fresh pink eraser issued to me, using the one sheet of note paper that had been stamped, to certify I had brought it in and could take it out again. According to the instructional film, you were supposed to leave all manuscript material except specifically what you were using on the cart in front of the long, low counter the several librarians sat behind, taking only what you needed to a table for examination, item by item. The manuscript was in four cloth-covered, orange-red binders, a small white label on the spine of each bearing the title and binder number; the card catalogue said this was a “composite manuscript,” and the very yellowing pages, often with the ghostly rust imprints of paperclips at the top from where probably notes had once been attached, were each encased in a plastic sleeve.
And there was a rush to just being this close to the artifact, seeing the neat typing (apparently Lowry’s second wife, the detective novelist Margerie Bonner, performed that part of the job when they lived in the squatter’s cottage in Canada) and the profuse pencil notes. The notes sometimes filled the margins or sometimes blanketed the entire back of a page, ideas on cuts and expansion, more revisions still. It all established a sense of utterly hard and utterly long and ceaseless labor; I knew it was tough indeed to imagine how Lowry worked on this book, how he questioned himself at every turn, longed only for perfection. And I might insert here as evidence two quotes I have on hand concerning how he went as far as frankly and repeatedly apologizing to his agent Harold Matson in New York for giving Matson an imperfect, therefore unsalable, manuscript; the quotes are from letters in a volume of Lowry’s selected correspondence, and the first is dated March 1941:
I’m sorry I’ve only given you further disappointments with “Under the Volcano,” so far, and it may be that the adverse conditions under which the book was finally written influenced me to think it was an artistic triumph when it was only sort of a moral one.... So I am rewriting it.
And later, Lowry, still not satisfied when writing to Matson in June 1942, but obviously deep in the near-transcendent throes of work once more:
But I shan’t trouble you again until I have reduced the risk of being a strain on the petty cash department to a minimum. I promise you this: something really good is on the wing this time, sans self deceptions, from this side.
Yes, perfection was the single goal, nothing short of it, as—alcohol problem or not—Lowry always kept writing. And in the HRC, I soon figured out that this “composite manuscript” was exactly that, a pieced-together draft and one of the who knows how many Lowry wrote (scholars usually indicate four basic versions) over the ten years or so he worked on the novel, roughly between 1936 and 1945. As a kind of exercise, or prayer-like invocation, I read and silently mouthed the syllables of the opening sentence, which comes before that descriptive passage I quoted earlier—“Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus”—then I examined closely, several manuscript pages later, how Lowry had penciled in with large letters the old Indian name he uses for his fictionalized Cuernavaca in the novel, drawing a box around it, identical to the way it occurs on page 34 of my Signet, to reproduce the image of the sign on the town’s tiny railway station:
QUAUHNAHUAC
I kept leafing through the pages in the protecting plastic sleeves.
Those wild early summer Texas thunderstorms must have been booming outside, but in this fortress of thick, thick concrete I didn’t hear them. And I must have been in there for a couple of hours, looking at the orange-red binders, one after another, marveling some more at the amount of sheer work that went into the composition, some pages typed, some handwritten, notes and notes and more notes, Lowry pondering, weighing, reconstructing everything everywhere…until I got to the last binder, where after a while none of it was typed whatsoever, simply Lowry’s own holograph pencil writing on the yellowing sheets, with more imprints of rusted paperclips—the novel’s ending was there, but the last fifty or sixty pages were completely in pencil. Which is what was maybe most significant for me, because somehow with this “composite manuscript” going from the typing of the early chapters to the faded gray penciling of the later ones, the diminishing progression seemed to take a stand against all the rather overdone emphasis on the corporeality of books that this swank HRC stood for; it whispered the larger phenomenon of the words themselves nearly moving toward the final step and evanescing away from corporeality altogether, going into some cleaner, clearer, definitely purer realm, back to the limitless and awe-inspiring invisibility of the imagination unshackled, that place where art’s Secret Knowledge does reside.
The other life of this copy of the book, the manuscript itself, was somehow to speak to anybody who carefully looked at it, pored over it, to tell that somebody something very important. And I pictured
it speaking to not just a vaguely able writer like me, occasionally uneasy about his own calling at this aforementioned later stage (a bit of age brings telling honesty, if nothing else), but possibly to a rare and hauntingly obsessed younger writer with a gift and potential worthy of Lowry’s inspiration—I saw it speaking specifically to him or her and affirming that all wasn’t lost in the sacrificing of the living for the writing, the conundrum that the edition I came upon in Calle Donceles in Mexico City seemed to pose, a point that might be applied, as well, to my dear longtime friend, the fine playwright who also put himself through so much. I saw it convincing this imagined younger writer to keep at it, no matter what the personal cost; the results might be astounding and the adversity—and pain—might even prove the subject of the art.
Or, to put it another way, this manuscript of Under the Volcano seemingly had most everything of the final version of the novel within the four ever-so-neat, orange-red binders (I’ve since learned in a bibliography that it is the only existing reasonably complete manuscript, the fourth draft and very close to the published novel), it contained more or less the full text, but it also possessed an other life very much its own.
Not an entirely new idea, as I admitted early on, but its implications can become nothing short of staggering, in my opinion, anyway.
5. Because Maybe
I mean, look at it still another way, the real heart of the matter, going well beyond everything I’ve tried to say here.
The City at Three P.M. Page 14