The Sharp Side

The White Cottage, Ripe

Fifty years ago today Malcolm Lowry went on his last trip to the pub. In the evening, he strolled with his wife Margerie from Ripe, where they were living at The White Cottage, to nearby Chalvington, where they went for a drink at The Yew Tree Inn. They seem to have had a quarrel and Margerie began crying. Lowry bought a bottle of gin from the landlord, which only upset her more. She went home, Lowry following. There, they finished the gin and had another row, which climaxed with her smashing the bottle and storming out to spend the night with the woman who lived next door. Lowry was found dead the next morning. He may have died late on 26 June 1957 or in the early hours of the next day; no one will ever really know. The exact circumstances of his death are equally obscure. Murder and suicide have each been suggested, but the Coroner’s verdict was Misadventure:

Twenty-seventh June 1957. Found dead White Cottage. Cause of death:
1a. Inhalation of stomach contents, 1b. Barbiturate poisoning. 2. Excessive Consumption of Alcohol. Swallowing a no. of barbiturate tablets whilst under the influence of alcohol.

When Malcolm Lowry died (aged 47) all his fiction was out of print in English, including his masterpiece Under the Volcano, which is a kind of exotic Ulysses – a life in the day of an Englishman named Geoffrey Firmin in Mexico in 1938. Except that this day is a special one because it will end with Firmin’s casual murder by fascists outside a bar. The surname puns on "infirm" and the death of an Englishman out of his depth far from home both echoes the defeat of the Left in the Spanish civil war and anticipates the great global conflict to come. Like its Joycean template, Under the Volcano is rooted in the banal and the everyday, while resonant with myth and embedded with the fragments of a shattered culture. It is also, of course, the greatest novel ever written about drinking and delirium.

Lowry’s reputation did not take off until the late 1960s. There followed a glut of academic monographs, editions of his letters, his unfilmed screenplay of Tender is the Night and two biographies. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that the novel he’d read the most times in his life was Under the Volcano, and its influence can surely also be felt in the passive, sensitive heroes of J. G. Farrell’s novels of imperialist crisis. Donald Barthelme namechecked it in Snow White, as did William Styron in Sophie’s Choice and John Fowles in Daniel Martin. B S Johnson’s Trawl seems heavily indebted to Lowry’s sea voyage novel Ultramarine. Other Lowry fans include W. H. Gass and Anthony Burgess.

The publishing history of the novel is legendary. In 1945 Jonathan Cape offered to publish the manuscript but wanted changes (“its favourable reception will be helped tremendously by the alterations”). It was too difficult, too wordy; couldn’t Lowry make it more accessible? The publishers’ reader who deplored Lowry’s style was William Plomer, then a prominent member of the London literary scene, now an utterly forgotten figure. Plomer was, among other things, a poet; he wrote admiring verse about the royal family. Lowry, famously, dug his heels in and at great length defended the form of his novel. Cape, wisely, surrendered. The novel went on to make the firm a great deal of money – but not instantly.

When Under the Volcano was published it received rapturous reviews in the U.S.A. and grudging ones in Britain. Lowry’s fiction never really took off in his homeland until Penguin Books bravely put out a pioneering paperback edition in 1962. By now the traditional insularity of British literary culture was beginning to crack. Under the Volcano became an unexpected, runaway success and went through 18 reprints over the next two decades.

Today, Lowry’s reputation has once again subsided in his native land, while remaining high in Europe and America. In a culture of fiction-lite his books are too demanding, too literary. His congested, allusive, expressionistic prose is out of fashion in a culture which prefers a more easygoing and straightforward style of fiction. Lowry’s inspirations were international rather than local – Dante, Melville, Joyce. His fiction delivers little in the way of plot or suspense. His world was that of the anguished individual, struggling through the banal non-events of the everyday. But like Joyce, Lowry makes that journey simultaneously mythic and comic. And memory always presses in; the seething, turbulent inner life of the mind is always as important as what is going on out there in the room or the street. His last novel October Ferry to Gabriola is mostly about a bus journey; not the stuff of a modern publisher’s bestseller dreams.

The only Lowry title you are nowadays likely to see in a British bookshop is Under the Volcano, and even that is often hard to find. It’s a pity because Lowry’s theme is the end of the world, set in a landscape of sweltering heat which gives way to apocalyptic thunder and lightning. It might be Mexico but in an age of increasingly extreme climate change it doesn’t exactly lose its resonance. But the fiftieth anniversary of Lowry's death looks as if it will pass almost unnoticed in his native land, apart from a small one-day conference at the University of Sussex.

Perhaps Lowry's most under-rated novel is Dark As The Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (the title derives from an elegy by Abraham Cowley). Based on Lowry’s return to Mexico after the war, it’s a unique novel about a writer returning to the biographical sources of a previous novel and discovering how things have changed. The story has run on, people have died, everything is different. Dark as the Grave deconstructs Under the Volcano and strips down its mythic grandeur, returning the reader to a place of endless possibility where fiction is a lie and everything is shapeless, unformed, always wriggling free of the forms which fiction falsely fits to experience. Aptly, Lowry’s narrative exists in multiple forms – process not product – but ironically the manuscript has only ever been published, posthumously, in an edited version which compresses this multiplicity into what the original publishers regarded as an acceptable form. An authentic edition is long overdue but seems unlikely in the current publishing climate. (There is very little textual analysis of Lowry’s fiction available online but two responses to Dark as the Grave can be found here and here.)

In tribute to Malcolm Lowry's special anniversary I’ve just finished reading Jan Gabrial’s memoir Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry. Gabrial was a young American who plunged into an early marriage with Lowry. They lived in Paris, New York and Mexico, both dreaming of becoming writers, until their marriage collapsed. A woman of independent spirit, Gabrial tired of Lowry’s drunkenness and long absences and eventually departed for California. Lowry found a new female admirer to worship and attend to his genius and divorce quickly followed.

It’s an entertaining read. Gabrial plainly owns a valuable private treasure trove of letters and diaries which she draws on to tell her side of the story. A thread of indignation runs through the book as she sets the record straight and refutes the anecdotes of Lowry’s friends and the monstrous distortions of biography. She is especially outraged by the claim that she received a large cash settlement when they were divorced.

Comic disappointment attended their joint literary ventures:

Malcolm was in his Melville period and had planned for us to sail at once for New Bedford, which he envisioned as a nineteenth century whaling village.

Alas, “New Bedford depressed us both”. Gabrial abandoned her aspirations to become a writer, which seems wise, judging by her style. At one point she tells how “his prose flowed rich as ancient brandy”. She cites one of her own letters to him, in which she wrote:

Without you I feel brittle as coral, small pieces snapping off forever tumbled in a gray indifferent tide.

She indignantly adds that Lowry made fun of her correspondence in Under the Volcano, grumbling that “he reconstructed their contents so haphazardly”.

Lowry for his part sent her telegrams which said things like

DARLING, DARLING, DARLING, SAID THE CHINESE NIGHTINGALE.

Back once more in the U.S.A., their lives went off in different directions. Lowry went north to Canada with his new admirer. There he spent the war years writing and rewriting his masterpiece. Jan Gabrial found employment in Hollywood, working as James Stewart’s secretary.

Replying to fan mail, sending out masses of Christmas cards – such work could boring – but sharing the lives of such famous individuals was absorbing in itself, and I was more and more frequently meeting other celebrities in the world’s film capital.

Malcolm Lowry and Jan Gabrial never saw or communicated with each other again.