MALCOLM LOWRY: The Man and His Work
INRODUCTION
by GEORGE WOODCOCK
WRITING A DECADE AGO IN Canadian Literature, the American critic, Robert B. Heilman, could still talk of the admirers of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano as a "semi-secret order with a somewhat odd, quite small, but very dispersed membership." It was, also, an order with a limited field in which its admiration could be deployed, since Under the Volcano was then the only book by Lowry readily available. Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place appeared in the same year as Heilman's article; Lowry's early and virtually unobtainable novel, Ultramarine, was not reissued until 1962. There followed through the sixties volumes of poems and letters, the novella Lunar Caustic, and the edited versions of the two incomplete novels, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid and October Ferry to Gabriola.
This vast posthumous publication of the works of a writer who published little in his lifetime, is even now not complete. We are given to understand that there is a second volume of stories to come, and a fuller collection of the poems; there is also the last uncompleted novel, La Mordida. This means that, even now, the critic who has been unable to travel to Vancouver and consult the Lowry archive in the University of British Columbia is still discussing a writer with whose total work he is of necessity unfamiliar. The unfolding of Lowry's achievement to the public eye has already taken fourteen years since his death in 1957, and it may still be several years--perhaps even another decade--before everything he wrote of publishable quality is finally available. And even then, until scholarly editors produce variorum editions embracing all the false starts and abandoned passages of his later works, we shall not know the fulness of that verbal inventiveness which in the end seemed to choke with its excess Lowry's will to complete any book.
Because, roughly every other year since 1961, a hitherto unknown Lowry work (unknown at least to the public) has been published, the criticism of his writings has inevitably assumed a tentativeness that parallels Lowry's own massive hesitancies. His aficionados are no longer--and have not been since the mid-six- ties--the "semi-secret order" of which Heilman wrote. The cult has come out of the catacombs, and Lowry has indeed been subjected to the kind of popularization, based mainly on the aura of romantic self-destructiveness that enwraps his life, which is not entirely appropriate to a writer so complex and in so deep but obscure a manner revelatory of the agonies of our age. But the critic has still been faced with the possibility that the next volume to be plucked from the air-conditioned shelves of the archive may somehow dislodge any verdict he has reached. And so a habit has arisen among writers on Lowry of making their discreet bows to the books yet unpublished, and of declaring themselves as unfinal in their judgement as the author himself.
This situation has had the healthy effect of postponing until Lowry's reputation has settled to some fairly stable level the writing of anything that might count as a major critical or biographical study. Only one book on Lowry has yet appeared and that--Perle Epstein's The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry--deals with merely one aspect (the Cabbalistic) of Under the Volcano. Two brief general studies in series that cater mainly for the campus market will shortly be published. Otherwise we are still at the stage where a multi-faceted collection of essays, dealing with Lowry's varied aspects and marking the shifts in critical attitude towards him, may be more useful than a premature attempt at definitive treatment.
This is the function the present volume is meant to fulfil. It intends to present the works, the man, and the sources in himself and his world from which he constructed what--again to quote Robert Heilman--can be described as "a multival ued poetic fiction, with its picture of the ailing soul, its sense of horrifying dissolution, and its submerged, uncertain vision of a hard new birth off in clouded time" which "is apparently the especial labour of the artistic conscience at our turn of the epoch."
From the beginning, as editor of Canadian Literature, a journal originating in a region peculiarly associated with Lowry, and published by the University that holds his papers, I felt it of peculiar importance and appropriateness to seek a range of critical articles that might eventually form a spectrum of observation and opinion illuminating Lowry's writings and their sources. Two special issues of Canadian Literature have been devoted to Lowry; individual writings by and on him have appeared in other issues; these form the basis of the present collection, but other essays, hitherto unpublished, have been added.
I have proceeded on the assumption that in the critical eye the works of a writer must always take precedence over the writer himself, and the collection therefore begins with a series of essays which consider all the works of fiction that Lowry regarded as important--Under the Volcano, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, Lunar Caustic, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid and October Ferry to Gabriola.
There is a sense--a visionary sense--in which Lowry, even when he wrote in prose, was entirely a poet; he himself compared the great trilogy he planned but never completed to Dante's work rather than Proust's. But at the same time as he wrote the ambitious poetic fictions on which his reputation will always principally rest, he also produced, copiously and often in many versions, a great many lyric poems of fine quality, and a selection of these, with notes by his friend and fellow-poet, Earle Birney, forms the bridge to the second, more biographical part of the collection.
Here Lowry--who has already spoken to us in the first part through the Preface to the French edition of Under the Volcano--appears again in his own voice in hitherto unpublished letters, and in the essays in which Hilda Thomas discusses his published letters and Downie Kirk tells of the Lowry he knew through correspondence. In a period when intermedia--the cross-fertilization of art by art--is a matter of especial interest, Lowry appropriately takes his place. His mental world was shaped not only by direct experience and books, which he read in prodigious variety, but also by his passions for jazz music and for the cinema. And I suggest that the essays published here on his reading and on his interests in music and film are among the most valuable in the collection because, by concentrating on special fields of preoccupation outside his writing (though of course by transmutation inside as well) they reveal a great deal in an intensive way about the nature of Lowry's creativity.
Indeed, it seems to me that, because of their intensiveness, they also reveal more about the man himself than the items which present direct personal recollections. I do not mean to belittle the essays which perform that function. William McConnell, a Vancouver lawyer who is also a short story writer and runs a private press, and Maurice Carey, a man of unliterary pretensions who was Lowry's host in his early days in Vancouver, present interesting partial views of Lowry. But one is aware how much the essential Lowry, that shy and defenceless man, has eluded them and so evades the reader. I have experienced the same sense of the essential absence of the whole man in talking to people who had known Lowry much more intimately--to his brother Stuart in England, for instance, and to his Cambridge friend, the late John Davenport. Each had his own Lowry to reveal, but neither of them was entirely the man who wrote Under the Volcano or October Ferry to Gabriola. Yet if we assume that the heroes of those books are in any more literal sense portraits of Lowry we are risking benightment in that maze of personal ambiguity to which every writer surrenders himself by the very act of creation. I suspect that Lowry will be the despair of his biographer.
There is one book by Lowry which has not received separate treatment in any essay of this book, though allusions to it recur. That is his first novel, Ultramarine. In his later years Lowry regarded the book with disfavour, and he did not allow it to be reprinted while he was alive. But, though greatly inferior to Under the Volcano in quality of writing and in breadth of conception, Ultramarine is not really a book one can regard as a discredit to a writer in his early twenties, and it is unfortunate that in general critics have followed Lowry's lead, and avoided this early work which in many interesting ways anticipates the later novels. It is a measure of the book's neglect that, while every year I am asked as editor to consider several essays on other works by Lowry, I have never received one on Ultramarine. It may not, therefore, be out of place for me to sketch out a view of this early novel in anticipation of the essays on the rest of Lowry's fiction with which this book begins.
In 1927, when he was not yet eighteen, Lowry sailed as a ship's boy on a cargo steamer bound for China and Japan. Ultramarine tells the story of a boy who set out on a similar enterprise. But the mere voyage is not the real theme of the novel, whose "dreamed-of-harbour" is rather the proving of one's self among other men.
It begins with the hero, Hilliot, already in the China Seas, recollecting the day he signed on for the ship "Nawab"; the day he chose, in his own mind, the men who would become his friends upon the voyage. His expectations have not been satisfied; the barrier of class--for he is an intellectual's son seeking experience-- has risen between him and his shipmates, and his voyage has been a long effort to break out of his loneliness by winning the precious acceptance of the rest of the crew. His efforts to work well are treated with contempt; his intentions of proving himself sexually in the brothels of the Oriental seaports are frustrated by indecision and end in bouts of drunkenness which are self-righteously condemned by the rest of the crew. In the end a trivial incident resolves the situation and turns the cook, Andy, his great enemy, into a friend. A pigeon, which one of the men has rescued from the topmast and has kept as a pet, falls into the harbour because its wings have been clipped; Hilliot tries to jump in and save it, but the other men restrain him because they think the waters are infested by sharks. The incident creates a comradeship, and the death of the captive that can neither fly nor swim releases Hilliot from the particular cage of his own loneliness. He does not soar far, it is true. He is accepted as a seaman, and yet at this final point his longing for the life he has left behind, and for the girl who represents it in his mind, is renewed. The past triumphs, and we know, as the novel ends, that what Hilliot has striven for, now it is gained, is wished no longer. The "dreamed-of-harbour" has changed its name and in his heart he is already on a different voyage. He is, like the hero of October Ferry so many years later, "outward bound."
Ultramarine is written consistently from Hilliot's inner point of view, in passages of interior monologue, largely reminiscent and ranging back into his childhood and away to Norway and England and to the girl Janet he has loved in both lands, alternating with passages of dialogue on the part of the crew which he sometimes overhears and sometimes shares in. It is largely derivative, but it anticipates the liberation into originality of Lowry's greater novel. The influence of Conrad Aiken's Blue Voyage was freely admitted by Lowry, while in the centre of the novel there is an elaborate rendering of a drunken night in an Eastern port which is reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses, yet also looks forward to the great nightmare debauch in which Under the Volcano reaches its culmination and the hero, Geoffrey Firmin, dies by murder.
In Ultramarine, lived experience is incompletely fused into fiction; the general weakness of pattern and the particular weakness of characterization are accentuated by the nostalgic self-pity that pursues the hero from beginning to end. Yet much of the matter of his early novel finds its way, transformed, into Under the Volcano, and its experiments with time and memory, with the reality of the past making the present unreal, will be repeated in all the major novels. A reading of it is indispensable to a full understanding of Lowry.
I would end in expressing my thanks, more directly than in mere acknowledgement, to Margerie Lowry for her cordial co-operation both in the preparation of the special issues of Canadian Literature devoted to Malcolm Lowry, and in granting the necessary permission to reprint the items by him contained in the present volume.
George Woodcock