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 English
novelist, short story writer, and poet, best known for his book
UNDER THE VOLCANO (1947), a 20th century classic. Like many of Lowry's
publications, the novel is highly autobiographical. Lowry spent
his post-Volcano years drinking and planning a cycle of novels
built around his masterwork.
Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
And died playing the ukelele.
(Epitaph)
Lowry was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, as the son of
Arthur Lowry, a wealthy cotton broker. Like his three brothers,
he attended public boarding schools. Lowry was educated at Caldicote
School, Hertfordshire, and at the Leys school, Cambridge. Rebelling
against his bourgeois upbringing, Lowry interrupted his academic
studies and went to sea to work as a deckhand. Later he continued
his studies at the University of Cambridge. He obtained a first-class
degree in English and wrote his first novel ULTRAMARINE (1933),
which received a mixed critical reaction. It drew upon material
from his voyage to Yokohama on the S.S. Myrrh's. The book showed
a considerable debt to Blue Voyage by his friend Conrad Aiken,
in whose autobiography Ushant (1952) he was to appear as
Hambro.
Lowry travelled to Spain with Aiken and met the American writer
Jan Gabrial. They married in 1934 and moved in 1935 to the United
States. He spent some time in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital
in New York City. Lowry wrote the novel LUNAR CAUSTIC (1961) and
went to Mexico, which became the settings of Under the Volcano.
In Cuernavaca and the nearby volcanoes he found the perfect landscape
for his drunken Divine Comedy. The snowy peak of Popocatepetl
was for him a symbol of aspiration, and the deep woods in the surrounding
area formed the opposite, lower depths. By the time Lowry left Mexico,
his first marriage was in ruins. In Los Angeles he met his second
wife, the novelist Margerie Bonner. In 1939 Lowry moved to Dollarton,
British Columbia, where he built a squatters shack in which to live.
The hut burned down in 1944.
After a short visit to Mexico in 1945, the Lowry's returned to
Canada, where they stayed until 1954,before moving to England. During
his last years Lowry planned a modern Divine Comedy, a sequence
of seven novels built around Under the Volcano, titled The
Voyage That Never Ends. Simultaneously Lowry worked on a number
of manuscripts, unable to bring his plans to completion.
"Neurosis, of one kind and another, is stamped on almost every
word he writes, both neurosis and a kind of fierce health. Perhaps
his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth
and it is this that adds to his isolation and so to his sense
of guilt."
(From Hear Us O Lord heaven thy dwelling place, 1962)
 By
1940 Lowry had written an early edition of Under the Volcano.
The next five years he spent rewriting and deepening the magical
and mythical elements, especially after meeting a Cabbalist, Charles
Stansfield-Jones, spiritual son of Aleister Crowley. The novel went
through innumerable revisions, many with Margerie Lowry's help,
and was published by Jonathan Cape ten years after the author started
to work on it.
The story is set in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. It depicts the last twelve
hours on November 2, 1938, in the life of Geoffrey Firmin; a British
Consul in a Mexican city situated under two volcanoes. Firming is
an alcoholic who has rejected the love of his wife Priscilla and
his friends, and has taken to drink as an escape from the inhumanity
of the modern world and his own sense of failure. Other central
characters are Jacques Laurelled, failed filmmaker and adulterous
lover, who looks back on the dramatic events of the Day of the Dead,
and Hugh, the consul's half-brother, an anti-Fascist journalist
much preoccupied by the Spanish Civil War. The novel - partly written
in stream of consciousness - shows influence of Joseph Conrad and
James Joyce. Despite the gloomy subject matter, the book is written
in a lyrical style and is full of humour.
...Suborn realized that he really must be pretty
tight if he was talking as lightly as this, could dismiss that
dreadful incident as lightly as that. 'Still I made my Consul
get into enough trouble here for ten.'
'Your Consul. What did you do to him?'
'My Consul in the book.'
'What happened to him?'
'Someone shot him and then they threw him down a
ravine.'
'Bad luck always waits you in the barranca,' Eddie
said grimly. 'How did he come to get in that spot?'
'He drank. Well, Hippolyte knows all about the Consul
by now.'
'Yes. I liked him very much. I was sorry to see him
go. I fact it was my opinion that your character Yvonne should
have gone over the ravine and the Consul and his half-brother
lived happily ever afterward, the house and the mescal and everything
to make them happy.'
(from Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, 1968)
Lowry's alcoholism and mental disorders were finally treated with
lobotomy. He died in Ripe, Sussex, England on June 27, 1957, of
an overdose of sleeping tablets, and was buried in the graveyard
of the village church. A number of Lowry's works were published
posthumously. In the unfinished novel DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN
MY FRIEND IS LAID, (1968) the protagonist Sigbjørn Wilderness is
Lowry's alter ego - a writer unable to write, whose voyage of self-destruction
ends against all odds with a possible happy ending. The collected
edition of Lowry's poetry, still undervalued branch of his literary
production, was published in 1992.
For further reading: The Making of Malcolm Lowry's "Under
the Volcano" by Frederick Asals (1997); Forest of Symbols by Patrick
McCarthy (1994); The 1940 "Under the Volcano", ed. by Paul Tiessen
and Miguel Mota (1994); Pursued by Furies by G. Bowker (1993);
Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver Days by Sheryl Salloum (1987); Lowry,
a Biography by Douglas Day (1973); Lowry by Tony Kilgallin (1973);
Lowry: the Man and His Work by G. Woodcock (1971)
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