Which country, if any, does Malcolm Lowry belong to?
25 Years in England. 15 in Canada. 2 in Mexico. 6 months in the United States. A few visits to Spain & French. Odd tho his major novel is set in Mexico he had an abiding fascination with Scandinavia.
Who gets to claim Malcolm Lowry, aside from his legions of fans, fans both sober and proudly drunk? What country does he represent as an artist? Does it even matter if now Under the Volcano seems to belong to the world?
Is Malcolm Lowry a product of Mexico, where he spent 2 years and based his masterpiece novel?
What about the United States, where he spent a brief alcohol-induced 1936 nervous breakdown?
What about Canada, where he spent 15 years and was the most productive a writer he’d ever been?
Or England, where he’d spent his first 18 years surrounded by butlers, tennis courts, distinguished guests, a cook, a nanny, and even a small golf course, which young Malcolm did not waste. At age 15, he won the junior golf championship at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, at Hoylake.
But at 18, he insisted on seeing the world by ship. And he left for the Far East on the S.S. Pyrrhus.
So that’s 18 years in Britain, plus 5 more from 1929 to 1934, for 23 years. Plus 5 years at the end of his life. That’s half a century year spent in England. That’s longer that Richard I, the Lionheart, spent in England.
Despite his exquisite descriptions of Cuernavaca on the Day of the Dead in 1936, Lowry only spent 2 years in Mexico abnd was so drunk most of the time that he could not bend over to tie his shoes (a disability he incorporated into his novel and his hapless Consul).
If you ask me, which you won’t, a 47-year old man who lived a quarter-century of his life in England can only be an Englishman.
I asked a library clerk once if she had any more information relating to Malcolm Lowry’s time at sea. A 5-month period he used to write the stories that comprised 1933’s Ultramarine. (It is thought that his willingness to “be one of the guys” led to his heavy drinking aboard the ship.)
His growing up with a silver spoon in his mouth, with several maids, a tennis court, an automobile, a telephone, and other did not endear him to his shipmate’s, who knew he was taking the spot of a man who needed the job, not merely wished to see the high seas. Despite the fact that he tinkered with it until his death, he would later repudiate Ultramarine, calling it “a bad piece of apprentice work.”
Ultramarine is similar to any aspiring novelist’s typical bildungsroman[1] or künstlerromam[2], in which Lowry’s surrogate protagonist, Dana Hilliot, wants nothing more than the belong to society, not to be the outcast he is treated as from the moment he steps on ship.
It did not help that his father drives him all the way to the Liverpool waterfront while the local press watched, interviewed the youg Lowry, and waved goodbye as he set sail on the S.S. Pyrrhus.
He was fifteen years old and uncomplaingly took on whatever physical labor was expected as a deckhand on a tramp steamer to the Far East. Eventually his shipmates warmed to him, but only afyer shoving him through the gates of several Mariner rites of passage. He lost his virginity to a prostitute in the far East, some say Japan, others Malaysia. He also began to drink so heavily that when he returned, his parents hardly recognized him. He swore like a sailor. He drank like a dispomaniac. And, one of the biggest sins of all in interwar England, he wore a beard.
“We do have National Film Board documentary you should see,” the library clerk informed me. The documentary is called Volcano: An Inquiry into the Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976). You can watch it for free at the bottom of this post. It is a heavily slanted peice of journalism, all but coming out and saying Lowry’s second wife killed him. I do not agree with its conclusions, but it is a work of art, with many beautiful shots and pieces of Lowry’s novel and other poetry read aloud by Richard Burton, another man who knew his way to the bottom of a bottle.
At one point a woman is shown at dawn in a bar, alone, while Burton reads:
How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken? I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours. A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing.
“He was a remittance man,” shrugs Lowry’s older brother in the film, the disdain still plain in his voice all those years later, if not a hint of envy too. “Paid to stay away on holidays. And all other days ending in “Y”.”
If you’re not prone to loneliness, who wouldn’t mind getting betting paid for drinking on holidays and having you family foot the bill, so long as you didn’t show up.
In Mexico and Los Angeles, Lowry’s father sent Malcolm’s rent cheques directly to the hotel owner, while still sending his son what he thought was a pittance, a token allowance, but which was more than enough for Lowry to get and stay drunk his entire time in Mexico, from his arrival on the 2nd of November 1936, the Day of the Dead…which made a lasting impression on the more experienced than most, but still stiff-upper-lip British man. Jan hated it and left later in 1936. Malcolm gave clumsy chase and ended up staying briefly in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, an experience that caused him to write an unfinished work titled Lunar Caustic, another novel whose primary questions seem to be, as Lowry’s official biographer put it in his lengthy introduction to the screaming skull version of Under the Volcano, he asks “How do we still from Hell its terror? By anticipating it here on Earth?”
This seems to be was exactly Lowry just did, losing Jan forever while drinking non-stop and working on his Mexican novel. Interesting, the night she made her final decision to leave him he was drinking at a place called The Hotel Canada. He couldn’t bear to set his novel on the day he lost her,so instead set his novel in 1936 on the Day of the Dead, the day he lost Jan forever. Of course, in the book Jan in Yvonne, and she comes back to him, though he knew in real life she never would.
He also seemed to know that he would die relatively young. His typical toast to his Mexican drinking buddies went: "Salud y pesetas / Y mas fuerza a las brazos / Y muchos amores esconditos / Y tiempo para gozarlos.
Translation: “Health and money/And more power to your elbow/Have many hidden love affairs/And the time to enjoy them.” So perhaps Lowry wasn’’t just ignoring Jan for the bottle. Maybe there was a secret senorita. Or two. Or twelve. When you to get a certain point of drunkenness, you’d fuck a watermelon. Or a waitress with fresh stitches on her head.
He was only in Mexico for 2 years, but when he returned to Quauhnahuac to finish his book, he found he was no longer welcome in town. (Perhaps the machinations of his father? Or were the townspeople simply sick of the gringo who couldn’t handle his cerveza and mezcal?) Lowry left Quauhnahuac under mysterious circumstances, culminating in his deportation from Mexico in the summer of 1938. He made his way slowly up the Pacific coast.
His family put him up at the Hotel Normandie in Los Angeles where he continued working on his novel and met his second wife, the actress and writer Margerie Bonner. His father sent his rent checks directly to the Normandie’s hotel manager.
Seeking a fresh start, Margerie and Malcolm moved to Dollarton, B.C., which is why Canada is trying to claim his as theirs. To Canada’s credit, Malcolm Lowry lived in Canada for much of his active writing career and is thus also considered a significant figure in Canadian literature. The shack was destroyed by fire in 1944, after which the Lowry’s were relatively nomadic.
By 1940, he was married to the American actress Margerie Bonner, who not only helped Lowry edit his manuscript on a nightly basis, she saved the entire manuscript, at great personal risk to herself, Without her heroics, the novel may never have seen daylight, joining the rest of Lowry’s extensive collection of unfinished books, ideas and manuscripts, starting with October Ferry to Gabriola, Luna Caustic, In Ballast of the White Sea (which did finally see publication in 2015).
Although it did not receive much attention in its day, it has now been voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.
After Lowry’s death, a collection of short stories, Hear Us, O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961), was published after Lowry’s death. The scholar and poet Earle Birney edited Selected. Poems of Malcolm Lowry (1962). Birney also collaborated with Lowry's widow in editing the novella Lunar Caustic (1968) for re-publication. It is a conflation of several earlier pieces concerned with Bellevue Hospital, which Lowry was in the process of rewriting as a complete novel. With Douglas Day, Lowry’s first biographer, Lowry’s widow also completed and edited the novels Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend Is Laid (1968) and October Ferry to Gabriola (1970) from Lowry’s manuscripts.
This latter novel was supposed to be Lowry’s masterpiece, according to Margerie Bonner, but this may have something to do with the prominent place she’s ostensibly taken in the story. It was a lover story between her and Malcom, not Malcolm and booze, and she was eager to see it finished. She and Lowry had taken just such an October ferry to Gabriola together.
The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by his widow and Harvey Breit, was released in 1965,followed in 1995–96 by the two-volume Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Sherrill E. Grace. Scholarly editions of Lowry’s final work in progress, La Mordida (“The Bribe”) and his screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night have also been published.
All of Lowry’s posthumous works should be taken, however with a grain of salt. First of all, he was a prose perfectionist, and it was not unusual for him to decide that a side-story he’d been working on for eight months was redundant and burn it completely.
Lowry’s 15 years in Canada, were his most productive by far, because it’s where he wrote over 85% of the novel on which his reputation rests. Japanese literary critics and scholars said that Under the Volcano “belongs to the centuries.”
Humiliatingly, his novel was remaindered in his home country. But still, to hear that one’s novels “belongs to the centuries”? Like the Bible? Isn’t that just about the finest compliment a writer can receive? To be told that, years after his death, young people, old people, middle-aged people of all kinds will pick up his book, and if they break through the initial chapter, which some have called difficult. (It isn’t. It merely takes place one year exactly after the events of the novel proper. Like Joyce, Lowry picked a location he knew well. Unlike Joyce, Lowry gave himself just twelve hours in his novel, not a full twenty-four.
Unlike Joyce, Lowry wanted to fit into society, not stand out from it. But after Volcano was released, his fellow writers accused him of walkinf well-trod ground. The hugely popular American novel The Lost Weekend, about a writer struggling with alcoholism, had been adapted into an Oscar winning film in 1945. It’s not quite the same, because Under the Volcano was published in 1947, but it’s not hugely dissimilar to the American book-reading public facing a dilemaa akin to what American movie goers had to deal with in 1998? Deep Impact or Armaggedon, which came out 7 weeks aparr? Or the year before with Volcano and Dante’s Peak, which came out within 2 months of each other?
The Lost Weekend is not a bad book about alcoholism. Neither is The Night of the Gun.
1996’s Trainspotting is a masterpeice. 2000’s Requiem for a Dream is a godawfuldepiction at addiction by a director who didn’t know what he was doing and a witer who hadn’t used drugs in decades.
So good for him! Hubert Selby Jr. famously declined morphine on his deathbed, even though he was going to die anyway. Darren Aranovsky should’ve made that fuckin movie. See, some writers are so alone in their work, so outside of whatever is being wirrten in the world at the time (Donna Tartt, Steve Erickson, Hubert Selby Jr) that they almost comprise their own little clique or club, cliques and clkubs thry would decline membeship in.)
So where does Malcolm Lowry he fit now that he’s dead? Now that he’s written the great novel ever about drinking?
Two movies come close. #2 is Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway is Barfly, wrriten by Charles Bukokwski, a lifelong unrepentent alchohlic. Unlike most movis of this ilk, the two lead protagonists have no intention of qutting drinking. Here’s how the two meet:
Rourke: Hi.
Dunaway: Hi.
Rourke: What do you do?
Dunaway: I drink.
And and does she ever. Henry Chinaski, a lifelong barfly, can barely keep up with her.They sound made for each other don’t they? A relationship built on a co-dependency of interest. What could go possibly go wrong?
But the greatest movie ever made about drinking is Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, a 1996 American dark comedy and the debut of Steve Buscemi as both writer and director. It features a large ensemble cast of actors, including Buscemi, Anthony LaPaglia, Chloë Sevigny, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Here’s what Roger Ebert, himself a twelve-stepper with over 30 years of sobriety when he died, wrote about Trees Lounge:
Steve Buscemi, who plays Tommy and also wrote and directed the film, knows about alcoholism from the inside out and backward, and his movie is the most accurate portrait of the daily saloon drinker I have ever seen.
Tommy is 31 years old, an unemployed auto mechanic. For eight years he dated Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco), but recently she dumped him, married his ex-boss, and is having a baby (maybe Tommy's but who knows?). Tommy, who lives in an unremarkable section of Long Island, spends his days in Trees Lounge, a corner bar that is perfectly established in an early shot showing Bill, an aging alcoholic, gazing blankly into space before rousing himself to use sign language to order another double shot.
He is above all able to project the quality of bone-weariness. It is almost a little noble, the way he endures what the disease of alcoholism is putting him through. He keeps planning, dreaming, hoping. And always there is Trees Lounge, where the living dead sit at the bar, waiting for him to return with news of the world.
The close-up of Bill's face is a complete portrait of a man whose world has grown smaller and smaller, until finally it has defined itself as the task of drinking.
This is something I have thought about and talked about at meetings of my own. People tend to go through life thinking “well, if I didn’t hate my job so much I wouldn’t drink” or “I would be fine if I could just _____” or “I would know contentment IF I could just ______. THEN I’d sop drinking.
Ebert: Drunks always think that if they could fix all the things that are wrong, then they could stop drinking. It never occurs to them to stop drinking first. [Buscemi] is above all able to project the quality of bone-weariness. It is almost a little noble, the way he endures what the disease of alcoholism is putting him through. He keeps planning, dreaming, hoping. And always there is Trees Lounge, where the living dead sit at the bar, waiting for him to return with news of the world.
Buscemi also got the Canadian alt-rocker with the baritone to write a perfect song for the film. Only a drunken idiot out of ideas would say “you have a pretty name. Pretty like your name. Let’s play a drinking game,”
Now, those are the greatest drinking movies. Under the Volcano is the great book about drinking book. Ever.
Lowry spent 15 of the first years of his life in England, departing for the seas in 1927 and arriving home in 1929. In autumn of that year chiefly to placate his parents, he enrolled at Cambridge, where during his first term his roommate killed himself.
From Wikipedia: Fitte had wanted a homosexual relationship, which Lowry refused. Lowry felt responsible for his death and was haunted by it for the rest of his life.
Lowry was already well traveled by this point, and flitted back and forth between Spain, France, and England. He’d married Jan Gabriel in 1934 but was such unpredictable drunk by then that she began to flee from him. As mentioned earlier, he followed her to New York City, where he spent some time in 1936 as a mental patient.
Wikipedia: When the authorities began to take notice of him, he fled to avoid deportation and then went to Hollywood, where he tried screenwriting. At about that time he began writing Under the Volcano. Lowry and Jan moved to Mexico, arriving in the city of Cuernavaca on 2 November 1936, the Day of the Dead, in a final attempt to salvage their marriage. Lowry continued to drink heavily though he also devoted more energy to his writing. The effort to save their marriage failed. Jan saw that he wanted a mother figure, and she did not want to mother him. She then ran off with another man in late 1937.
Despite the low Canadian sales of his “big” book, Lowry won the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction in 1961 for his posthumous collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.
Mexico claimed Lowry as theirs TOO, but once they learned about the red-tape and costof repatriating a body, they declined their brief but important association.
The United States made a perfunctory claim to him, due to his brief residence at Bellevue, but they didn’t try to very hard.
In 1955, Malcolm and Margerie moved back to England, and rented a cottage in the village of Ripe, Sussex. There, they struggled financially, and Margerie pressure her husband to finish October Ferry to Gabriola, so they could receive a much-needed advance. Lowry was working diligently, but in June 1957 (oddly, no exact date of death has ever been given, not even the week he died), Malcolm Lowry died in his sleep in June 1957. He had been ill and impoverished for some time before his death, often skipping dinner in order to buy alcohol instead.
From Wikipedia: The coroner’s verdict was death by misadventure, and the causes of death given as inhalation of stomach contents, barbiturate poisoning, and excessive consumption of alcohol. It has been suggested that his death was a suicide. Inconsistencies in the accounts given by his wife at various times about what happened on the night of his death have also given rise to suspicions of murder.
The White Cottage, Ripe, East Sussex, Malcolm Lowry’s last home.
His gravestone in the churchyard of St John the Baptists Church, Ripe, East Sussex. His famously playful epitaph is missing from the headstone.
I personally find it inexplicable that a woman who lived Lowry during the worst of his years would suddenly decide to kill him one night. It makes much more sense that a man who drank every single day of his life from his age of 14 to 47 would suddenly die one night of what the English called any drink-or-drug related death back then: Death by Misadventure. They got drunk as they did every night, they argued about something unknown, then they went to bed and Malcolm never woke up. That’s it. She was trying to keep him healthy enough to write October Ferry to Gabriola.
Death by Misadventure. Only 7 people attended his funeral. When Joyce died, hundreds attended his funeral, which took took place on the afternoon of Wednesday 15 January 1941 at the Friedhofkapelle at Fluntern cemetery.
Lord Derwent, the British Minister to Bern, spoke of Joyce as part of a great tradition of Irish writers in English, and finished by saying: “George Moore is gone; Yeats is gone; and now Joyce.”
James Joyce’s playful epitaph never made it to his headstone either:
He lived he laughed he loved he left.
Malcom Lowry, who spent less than 25 of his 47 years in England, nevertheless remains an English writer. His epitaph was supposed to say:
Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery, whose prose was flowery, and often glowery. He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele.
If Lowry had lived long enough to produce even one more novel of the quality of Under the Volcano, he’d be an unquestioned titan if literature. Instead he walked the streets of Cuernavaca and drank and was alone, dreaming of his fading family and friends.
Can you believe a souse like Lowry wrote the following sentence at the age of 24?
Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass.
No wonder nobody came to his funeral. Friends of writers tend to be other writers. And they knew damn well he was finer prose writer and poet than any of them.I don’t think his wife killed him. I know the documentary slants that way, but who expresses surprise that a drunk has something other than alcohol in his system? Barbituates. Luds. Cocaine. Meth. Ketamine.
But enough of that. Which country, if any, does Malcolm Lowry belong to?
Sorry Canadians. I am a proud Canadian and I still say only an Englishman could write like that.
Sorry Americans, I love your scrappy noir stuff, but only an Englishman could write like that.
Sorry Mexicans, I love your floweryand poetic stuff, but only an Englishman could write like that.
Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery, whose prose was flowery, and often glowery.
He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele.
He’s a man of the world now because he went sailing.
He drank happily, fought scrappily, and lives affably now in the hereafter, his sought-after laughter reach to the rafters.
In a golden bar called Heaven.
Where he writes in full possession of faculties never lost.
Only the booze that ran him full cost.
His skills remain inside him like tattoos embossed.
No boots beat the hour like in psychiatric penitentiaries
He’s just a man with a book that belongs to the centuries.
Here is the Canadian National Film Board documentary Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcom Lowry:
“To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool ... You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering ... Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself.”
MALCOLM LOWRY
[1] a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education.
[2] A story dealing with a young artist’s journey to a skillful and mature artist.