The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director
for Margerie Bonner Lowry and Malcolm Lowry
He was driven, volcanic, to sea, to write, to unfold a story of man and the sea. Man and the heavens. Man the voyager. He shipped out to Singapore, China, Siberia, Siam, the Philippines. Hired on as stoker on a tramp steamer to Archangel, jumped ship to find the Norwegian poet Grieg, who wrote The Ship Sails On. For years worked on a play, The Ship Sails On. Began In Ballast to the White Sea, a novel. Sailed to America for Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage, with only Moby-Dick in his trunk. Played his taropatch and planned to measure the height of Montserrat. Wrote Ultramarine, lost it, rewrote it in “Hotel Room in Chartres.” For years wrote Under the Volcano. For years The Voyage That Never Ends, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, La Mordida, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven.
He would rewrite the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, every fellow passenger singing of the real in man’s imagined universe. Two thousand pages of it burned in a Dollarton shack on the west coast of Canada. His shack called Eridanus after a ship that sank there. Eridanus the celestial river pouring from Aquarius, marking the crazed path of Phaethon driving the sun. Eridanus, across the inlet from the _hell Oil refinery.
He sailed in a bauxite hauler to Haiti, then in a French cargo ship through the Panama to France. Rode buses and trains to another hotel, another bar, another French pension’s wrong instructions. A game en route with Margerie listing all breeds of ducks, rabbits, geese, turkeys, grasses and chickens: Yokohama bantams, silkies, silver Sebrights, rosecombs, Andalusians, mille fleurs, dark brahmas, bull-faced polishes.
She, too, a writer, a novelist, a Hollywood actress with sister Priscilla in Paying the Price, let him take her to Cuernavaca to live in the real fictional house of the imaginary Jacques Laruelle, Under the Volcano’s Parisian film director, friend of the alcoholic consul Firmin, lover of his wife, Enid, who in draft four real wife Margerie had renamed Priscilla making her an actress like herself and her sister whose real husband, 20th Century Fox studio doctor Bertie Woolfan (after an affair with director Preston Sturges), stabbed himself and bled to death in Priscilla’s arms, telling medics to do nothing, he was a doctor. Real wife Margerie subsequently renaming alcoholic consul’s Priscilla Yvonne and excising from Under the Volcano his morose daughter Yvonne, who brooded over college boyfriends and annual abortions. Margerie trampling imaginary wife Yvonne with a horse reared up in a flaming sky where Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, the Ursas she’d taught him in real Dollarton whirled a carousel around Polaris. The Horse in the Sky, the Pegasus in her novel that her imagined Thurles, a black-browed ruffian maidservant, craved to ride. Real wife Margerie imagining Lady Althea disowned for marrying her groom, Lady dying penniless leaving her daughter Thurles to drunken stableman father, Dungarvan. Thurles hiring on as maid to white-columned mansion Felicity who teaches Orion, Sirius, and Procyon to her stubborn, determined maid. Imagined gentleman husband of imagined wife Felicity looks boyish and happy as he reads aloud the history he’s writing of Lenawee County, Michigan, in the fictional house where he lives with his wife, mother, two children, and servants. Real-life Margerie (living in shack on pittance from real husband’s disowning father) imagining Thurles, rescued by grandmother’s money, buying the stable, buying stormy black stallion, and keeping drunk father, Dungarvan, as groom. Imagining Thurles in a timeless instant when horse and rider leaped against the sky, then hurling her heroine under its trampling hooves.
In her next novel, real wife Margerie overdosed imagined wife Jocelyn on heroin (real husband hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and mental breakdown in Port-au-Prince, and then again in Paris). The imagined husband, an English playwright, who went through life like a ghost and nothing seemed real but the words that were going oh so slowly and with what agony, leaves wife in Swiss clinic, meets American Jocelyn travelling in Italy. Real-life Margerie’s playwright dreams of Ibsen, Strindberg, Eliot, Fry, he would rebirth the Joycean mélange, the grand poem-novel-play, right down through German expressionists, constructivists, Cocteau, the Russian use of spectacle. Real-life Margerie makes him play on the beach with imagined American typist, makes Rimini Castle loom over them, a smouldering volcano. Imagined playwright rants about Gradgrinds teaching undergradgrinds, playwright admiring O’Neill, Sartre, impressionism. Tells American typist the road to Provincetown is not through Cambridge [real husband’s alma mater] but through the sea, the honky tonks of New Orleans, the Singer Sewing Machine in Argentina. Every bar in town, she writes, playing Duke Ellington’s “St. James Infirmary” over and over. Margerie the real makes playwright the fiction proclaim jukeboxes the answer of Adam’s race to Heaven which, after the giants, had built the Tower of Babel and confused the tongues and minds of mortals so that even two people who spoke the same language could not understand one another. Then Margerie sends imagined husband playwright and imagined lover Jocelyn into Dante-fabled Castle of Malatesta where handsome Paolo Malatesta sneaks up through trap door of locked-up wife of lame brother and reads Lancelot and Guinevere. Their kiss costs them eternity whipped by the winds of hell.
He drove his crazed heavenly path on sky’s stage, then stuttered at noseless whores and mildewed ronyons. Haunted by Mother Gettle beaming from her tin of soup. Haunted by a stranger’s gawk in the street. Loathing the broken scrap-iron skyscrapers of Enochvilleport, its moldy stock exchanges, its beer parlours like emerald-lit public lavatories. The insatiable albatross of self. He sliced his arms. Banged his head between toilet bowl and wall. Jumped in a hotel pool and breathed water. He said he’d no gift for writing, said he was a plagiarist who wanted to be a poet but became a drunkard thanks to the bully boys and schoolmasters of English literature, the Gradgrinds who ruled the American literary scene. He called his publisher an office boy. Refused to speak at New York parties. Beeped out jazz tunes in a chair by himself. Stood in the white-tiled bathroom in his undershirt flinging bubbles of blood from nose to ceiling. He climbed trees in his pajamas. Shunned his old mentor and guardian, Conrad Aiken.
Margerie’s imagined playwright and American typist trade insults:
You just want to go back to your smug schoolmaster’s life, your plans for fame and success.
Your whole trip over here to track down a husband, isn’t it? I dare say you’ll trap some beetlebrain.
Flirting with servant girls – you’ve found your level.
What a bloody snob you are. She likes me fine. Then you come along and start playing Electra and Medea.
For a playwright, you don’t have much power of invective if that’s all you can think of.
The only remarkable thing about you is you’re not already twice divorced and a widow too, traveling with a beady-eyed Mom, having killed off one meal ticket, on the lookout at the corpse’s expense for another.
He invented himself as Ethan Llewelyn, a prosperous criminal lawyer. At an art film, imagined lawyer meets imagined wife Jacqueline, daughter of a Scottish feminist suicide and a white magician. (Real wife former starlet in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, The Sign of the Cross, and Cleopatra.) He imagines her not wanting anything obvious from life, unchanged by even their ghostly imagined son. Pictures her not a joiner, not a stitcher, not a social busybody. Real Dollarton shack burns down, like imagined one in Niagara, lawyer driven to leave his practice by his belief that his own fears are causing fires to spring up around him. They wander from place to place. Like the hero and heroine, Ethan reflects, of separate films playing in separate and adjoining cinemas.
He imagined Mr. and Mrs. Wilderness, Sigbjørn and Primrose. Or she was Astrid Storlesen or Lovey L’Hirondelle or Tansy Fairhaven. Sigbjørn Wilderness an unsuccessful Canadian composer or an American writer on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Rome or an alcoholic jazz musician. Real Margerie typing away La Mordida, where Sigbjørn and Primrose bus to a fiesta in Tecalpulco, Sigbjørn watching devil dancers he’d written into his Valley of the Shadow of Death (real-life Volcano), watching in this new n
ovel, La Mordida, a sinister figure that real Margerie wrote in her real notebook shuffled round and round in tattered clothes carrying a little stuffed ferret.
With each new sight in their travels, Sigbjørn’s brain clamoured with so many poems – had he not gone mad with them – that he could see nothing at all except through Primrose’s eyes. Out of spite, he refuses to look at craggy windswept scenery, sees instead a scene from his Valley novel, then thinks, It was as if he [Sigbjørn, the novelist] were the character, being moved about for the purposes of some other novelist, and by him, in an unimaginable novel, not of this world [the world of an imagined novelist in a novel about himself encased in the unimaginable world and novel of the author Lowry]. Sigbjørn nevertheless lacking all interest in “character” and holding nobody more disastrously ill-equipped than the novelist to observe such a creature. Real people, Sigbjørn thought, are good or evil omens, menaces, warnings, emblems, investments, wastes of time. Least of all to be trusted were those novelists claiming to love their characters, since almost no one, Sigbjørn included, was capable of loving others. Sigbjørn mulls over suicide.
Real-life Mexican authorities hold them in Acapulco, make them come back day after day to Migración, demand Margerie go alone to Cuernavaca for papers and money, Margerie writing in her notebook on the night bus: cattle browsing, do they never sleep … suddenly a village of leaping torches … The fat Mexican keeps falling against me leaning on me in his sleep. A woman is vomiting, the noise & then the smell, the terrible roar of the motor. At Taxco we change drivers. The new one is large & fat & drunk. Where is your husband? He tries to take my hand and feel my knee while changing gears.
Returning to Acapulco after two days on buses, no sleep, she finds real husband hallucinating on drink that real Juan Fernando Márquez (Zapotec, Volcano’s imaginary Dr. Vigil) is scolding him for distressing real wife, she now saying, Get up, you drunken bastard. But they do not pay la mordida. Mexican authorities put them under arrest back in the real fictional house of Volcano’s imaginary Parisian film director where they receive letters from Jonathan Cape and Reynal & Hitchcock accepting real Volcano as is. The house is a mess, Margerie writes in notebook (real husband folding several such into his novel La Mordida): no clean linen, bugs in kitchen, floors filthy with cigarette stubs & dirty clothes covering all chairs . . . I am so tired so tired, tired, tired, I don’t care except for dull anger that flames & rages against Malcolm & hatred & disgust that I am dragged down myself in trying to drink with him & hatred of bottles & exhaustion & sense of my soul slipping away & my whole grip on life. Pencils in palm-size black notebook, a despair so utter that all I want is death. Why don’t I kill myself? Is it some vague lingering loyalty to Malcolm whom I must still love but now only hate & despise & fear – above all fear? Asks (in palm-size black notebook continued from blue) how many times have I said in passionate praying & meaning it, oh God give Malcolm his success, let his volcano be recognized for the great thing it is & I will die or be damned in payment – so perhaps that is what happens. Pencils in palm-size black notebook (someone has labelled La Mordida), the stabbing burning unendurable agony of seeing the one you love reduced to a shambling idiotic dirty animal.
After seizing their bond of five hundred pesos, Mexican authorities jail and deport them for Malcolm’s failure to pay a fine (overstaying his visa), and for his bad behaviour and drunken offences: borracho, borracho, borracho reads his file. They go back to British Columbia Dollarton / pretend Eridanus, which he dreamed of making a novel where Sigbjørn and Primrose, in the real fictional house of Volcano’s imaginary Parisian film director, would talk over their idyllic times living in a real shack on a real beach on the western edge of land known fictionally as North America.
Then Sigbjørn and Primrose set out again to France on a French cargo ship, the SS Diderot / real-life SS Brest, the name in itself ironic enough, down the west coast fictionally known as the United States, past haunted and forever-closed-to-him Mexico, and through the Panama, which becomes the title of a novella cast as the journal of Sigbjørn planning a novel in which a character named Martin Trumbaugh becomes enmeshed in the plot of a novel he has written in Mexico, as Sigbjørn has, tangling him in the real fictional house of his imagined film director, Sigbjørn’s novel being The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Sigbjørn being haunted by imagined Parisian film director Jacque Laruelle’s incessant “Frère Jacques” drumbeat in the ship’s engines. Martin’s thoughts invade the journal with memories of his little cabin by the sea, memories of a misty winter sunrise through its windows, the sun a tiny little sun framed in one of the panes like a miniature – unreal, white. Martin plans to call his novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Martin has been reading The Crack-Up and thinks his little cabin by the sea would have saved Fitzgerald.
In his cabin on SS Diderot, Sigbjørn Wilderness finds a newspaper clipping about an albatross shot by a John Firmin, undoubtedly a relative of Volcano’s alcoholic consul. Don’t shoot, the crew, said, reminding Firmin of the Ancient Mariner. But he’d killed the bird anyway because it was the only one of its kind.
Nothing could be more unlike real experience, Sigbjørn the character novelist comments, than the average novelist’s realistic portrait of a character. Despite this, he tells us, his imagined character Martin Trumbaugh had been on this planet for so long that he had almost tricked himself into believing he was a human being. Much of Martin’s suffering, says Sigbjørn, comes from the fact that he could not find his vision of the world in any books and the fact that he’d got into pretending that he thought like other people. Other characters. The real ones.
On the other hand, Sigbjørn records in his journal an excellent fellow on board the SS Diderot, a Mr. Charon, who, just like Consul Firmin in pretend novel Valley of the Shadow / real novel Volcano, says, as acting Norwegian consul, he has no country. Man not enmeshed by, but killed by his own book, muses Sigbjørn, whose journal now carries along its edges Coleridge’s glosses to the Ancient Mariner. The crew on SS Diderot capture an albatross but Old Charon won’t come look at it. All in all though, gentlemen, Sigbjørn records from a book on the canal, what I would like to say about the Panama Canal is that it is a work of genius – something like a novel – in fact just such a novel as I, Sigbjørn Wilderness might have written – indeed without knowing it am perhaps in the course of writing.
The SS Diderot (named for author of Jacques le fataliste) hits a storm so violent that character novelist Sigbjørn records the ship lurching and twisting in agony, wracked by clanks, rattles, whistles, thumps, and mad hammering, then jumping out of the water and shuddering from end to end, all the lifeboats smashed, no one at the wheel that spun wildly by itself, the rudder crippled, and gigantic seas, rising all above us as if we were in a volcano. Sleep impossible for being pitched from bunk, Sigbjørn can only cling to his desk for days distracting himself with comparisons of death to the rejection of a manuscript or the embarrassment his death would cause the skipper – character Martin imagined by imagined character novelist to find these thoughts idiotic attempts to short-circuit grief for Primrose.
Sigbjørn listens for six short and one long whistle, abandon ship, can’t tell what’s happening on deck at all, but absolutely nothing to be done about it. His character Martin tells him to put on your life jacket. This is a position all novelists find themselves in eventually. Sigbjørn’s imagined thoughts thrash through SOS signals, lines from “Frère Jacques,” and instructions to Go to your cabin, cover yourself warmly, put on your gill-netting of sauvetage.
Put your arms through the shoulder straps, Martin the character tells Sigbjørn the novelist, but he can’t. Nor can either of them put a life jacket on Primrose.
She’d seen it coming in Haiti, writing in the real Golden West palm-sized notebook of spiderwebs twenty feet high and scarlet poinsettias thirty feet across, writing how the sun thru the royal palms and the coconut palms makes their long blowing rustling stiff fronds glitter and sparkle like
green patent leather, how the trumpette rattles its huge maple-like leaves, the banana trees flap, the mango, with its slender leaves like a willow but darker, richer green, and shaggy bark, flutters, how swifts and dragonflies and huge jet black bumblebees dart and flash . . . Ah how beautiful it is, how strange, she wrote, too easy, too perfect, the weather always the hot sun and cool breeze and people to pick up everything, do everything and how easy just to drink and let time and money slip away. Writing in golden flip-page reporter’s pocket notebook of M rising dramatically: my brother, I give you my shirt, to a refugee from Trujillo, likely to be killed by spies at any moment, everyone hushed as spy enters bar. Writing in real pencil, We drive to Le Rivier Froid thru the hot dark night, great palms and banana leaves starting out in the headlights, to stand on the bridge and look at the stars . . . suffering. Next day speechless gazing at blue sea, the rolling billows of whipped-cream clouds, birds like scattered bits of white paper, M carrying on about Voodoo, Baron Sandhi, the Lord of the Dead, demonical possession. Now at the river, she writes on faint blue lines in Golden West notebook, we dress behind a bush. I chased by a black pregnant goat step in its excrement. Good, says M, now you can go in the water and be purified. I am scratched and bitten, feet bleeding from the rocks. Friday awaken to amber and turquoise dawn but cannot face it, thoughts of what might have been. The market: people surging up, garbage in piles under foot, trying to buy cigarettes, haggling over centimes, the furious, gnarled face of the woman breaking into smiles as we have to cease haggling as the bus is leaving, horrible road, second and first gear, M’s exhausted swollen face and hand on mine from the seat behind. She writes of daturas and grass too emerald to be real, like the bright artificial grass in Easter baskets of childhood.
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