Among all the writers whose biographies I’ve looked into, I’d nominate Malcolm Lowry as least likely to get a fucking thing done. He drank to scary excess, went through a doomed marriage, lived precariously (though without supporting himself financially), and more than once wound up in a mental hospital. The documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976) is mostly devoted to the gruesome side, with readings from his work interspersed, and visual choices and dour musical accompaniment that occasionally strain to achieve a grotesque effect. And though it benefits from being filmed early enough to include people who knew him in different stages of his life, it doesn’t make use of the quite helpful convention of identifying them by displaying their names and some words on their relationship to the writer, so that one has to figure it out or accept accounts from nameless witnesses. But most of all it fails to give equal attention to his inspirations and the work he must have put in to write his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), that is the only reason this documentary exists in the first place. Not salacious enough, perhaps. Nevertheless, with him I’m particularly interested in how he managed it. We learn something crucial about the process: his second wife, Margerie Bonner, to whom the book is dedicated, deserves more recognition for her involvement. It wasn’t just invaluable companionship and encouragement that continued after the novel was initially rejected by 12 publishers. She edited the book alongside him. She even saved the manuscript when their home burnt down. Still, I wasn’t satisfied. Finally seeing a modest novel in print would have been enough to qualify as a success. A few good reviews would have seasoned it. This man, who was at constant risk of damaging his mind irreparably with alcohol and endless self-flagellation, who might have died under a moldering heap of notes, drafts, diaries, and bottles in one foul setting or another practically unknown, writes a brilliant, all-encompassing novel, the power of which is sustained over close to 400 pages without letup, that’s never been out of print and that makes him a legend.
It
takes place in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, 1938. Lowry’s
method is to pour his own life in, more or less: the main character is the
Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, a man destroying himself with alcohol. He has bouts of
madness. Somewhere there’s a manuscript lying around. He’s visited by his
estranged wife, who’s there to save the marriage. This would suggest support
for the trite notion that we all have at least one book in us, which in my
experience hasn’t died. Actually reading a book like this should dispel it: Under
the Volcano is Lowry’s dissolute, tumultuous life coupled with a rare,
dazzling command of an array of literary techniques. The smooth flow between internal
and external, mental babel and immediate surroundings. A fine-grained,
expansive vision of Mexico that avoids both the simple foreigner’s distance and
horror and the temptation to narrowly focus on one man’s disastrous life. His feel
for the resonance of a scene, for the morsel of an image or detail. (No life is
enough if one doesn’t remember or know what to select or how to embellish.) His
ear for voices, including broken English that doesn’t travesty the speaker. His
language: vigorous, multilingual, maximalist—in sentence and paragraph length,
metaphor, lexicon, allusions, sources (advertisements, menus, letters).
And
his humor! Which caught me by surprise at first because I thought that, given
his subject, he’d be sure to shed a few too many tears in his mescal. Not so.
The Consul, who had waked
a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was
almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself,
plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he
hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the
sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers.
In the bathroom the
Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer;
his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously,
carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.
What have I got out of my
life? Contacts with famous men…The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for
instance.
Don
Quixote is namedropped throughout. At turns wry and grim, Lowry is capable of laughter
even in the middle of his most nightmarish scene without unsettling it.
Lowry
achieves a unique balance in tone: authentically ominous (not lugubrious) and
authentically playful (not arch). A continually striking contrast between the
deepest despair of a life, the human being as little more than rotten meat
destined for the abyss, and an intense zeal for life, as evidenced in his
voracious appetite for every aspect of it. Mood swings. Frightening dark,
rousing light.
And
finally, strangely and wonderfully, absorbing everything on offer in Under
the Volcano is challenging but not forbidding. Clearly Lowry doesn’t shy
away from difficulty. But his theme is transparent, acting as a firm thread for
the reader to grip no matter where the book goes.
The best answer to the question of how Lowry pulled off his grand novel is a metaphor he took to heart: He built a pier in the pond outside his home in Dollarton, British Columbia, where the novel was largely written. It was flimsy, unprepossessing. But, when a storm came and went, it was still standing.
It was
still standing.
The
story of his rapid upward trajectory would be funny, or funnier, if it ended
there. Success, however, proved to be yet another hell. So I can’t say whether Malcolm
Lowry would have appreciated my appreciation.
