The Sharp Side

In Saturday’s Guardian, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann wrote about Malcolm Lowry, in the context of his Lowry anthology The Voyage That Never Ends.

I’ve no idea how good the anthology is but I’m dismayed by Hofmann’s carelessness in his Guardian piece. Far from having no financial support, Lowry’s entire writing career was financed by his wealthy father, who gave him a regular and lifelong allowance. This meant that Lowry neither had to seek regular salaried employment nor needed to live off the proceeds of his writing (lucky for him; as sales dropped off, the U.K. royalties from Under the Volcano amounted to just under two pounds and twenty pence for the second half of 1950). Any wannabe writer would dream of a parent like that.

And Lowry did not leave the manuscript of his first novel in a taxi. It was in a briefcase stolen from the car of a publisher’s editor. Rather oddly, Hofmann cites the 1973 biography of Lowry by Douglas Day and makes no mention of the far more impressive, accurate and comprehensive one by Gordon Bowker, published in 1993.

Hofmann’s book received a lengthy review from Elizabeth Lowry (no relation) in the London Review of Books, 1 November 2007 (unfortunately not available on-line except to subscribers). It was not an over-enthusiastic review. In Elizabeth Lowry’s opinion Lowry’s later writings ‘hold little appeal for the ordinary reader’. She describes Lowry’s agent and editor as ‘long suffering’. But when she says that ‘much of Lowry’s surviving fiction is unreadable’ this is only true in a sense she doesn’t mean. It is unreadable because most of it has not been published in the form in which Lowry wrote it; it can literally only be read by scholars who have access to the manuscripts of his unedited writing. But in the sense that she does mean, this begs the question of what we mean by ‘readability'.

You don’t often see Under the Volcano in British bookshops these days. But then Lowry was a modernist. Writing was a self-questioning activity; a struggle. His narrative perspective was never monocular; his first novel, Ultramarine, is a collage text – soliloquy in conflict with demotic conversation.

His fiction is not for those readers who require suspense, clever plotting, the drip-feed of big event, controlled self-explaining prose and the consolation of an omniscient, upbeat ending. The texts reverberate with the possibility of making sense out of a blizzard of tiny happenings - daily contingency, under the pressure both of comic absurdities and the weight of memory. The texts invite us to discover meaning, then finally deny that possibility. Lowry always sought to challenge a conventional response: the published correspondence reveals his wish to defamiliarize the text of Under the Volcano by using Tristram Shandy-style typographical devices; it’s plain that his publishers were baffled by this and implemented it inadequately.

Under the Volcano begins with an absence – its first chapter is focused on a man who isn’t there – and then there is an attempt to fill that void with the narrative of a long, disintegrating day. It’s a day where nothing much seems to be happening; where the trivia of the everyday bears the crushing weight of turbulent memory. That turbulence is expressed stylistically: sentences are sometimes congested with accumulating materials, dragged out to the length of a page or more, overwhelming the reader. Or, just as often, they are starved of conclusion and fizzle out, terminating in dashes or ellipses. A sentence like ‘Hullo, good morning’ lands from nowhere: perhaps spoken by a real person, perhaps some echo in the mind. It is a style fit for a world where ‘Nobody seemed to be doing anything important, yet everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance.’

Lowry’s writing after the Volcano is one of crisis and hesitation. He had written a novel which he described as ‘a machine’. But having accomplished this great work of fiction he then, one might say, set out to challenge the spurious meanings it had secreted. His next novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid deconstructs Under the Volcano in a profound way. It rewrites Mexico, demythologising it. In place of transcendence there is now only shabby, comic frustration. But it is also a novel about a writer who feels creatively exhausted. From that exhaustion emerges the narrative. But, crucially, the narrative was never completed in conventional terms. It exists in three parallel versions: process not product. Unfortunately the only published version is a dubious collation, put together in a very questionable way.

The key to Lowry’s output in the final decade of his life is perhaps contained in his letter to his editor Albert Erskine, 14 October 1953. Referring to Hofmannsthal’s ‘Lord Chandos letter’ (Ein Brief, 1902), Lowry wrote (with reference to his final novel October Ferry to Gabriola), ‘it is this aspect of it that has made it so hard to write’. Isolated from any avant-garde, Lowry had stumbled on a key modernist text which made sense of his own writing crisis and sense of exhaustion. His writing had become an accumulation of fragments and variations. He had lost all confidence in ‘character’ and ‘plot’. His narratives became variations on the same theme: the writer in motion, on a bus or a boat or just wandering around a city. To express this movement required an unstable text. Narrative possibility overlapped; deepened; went nowhere and fizzled out. Narrative form accepted improvisation, jottings, diary entries, alternative versions, reflexive material about writers and writing.

On 6 January 1954, Erskine wrote terminating Lowry’s contract. He was unenthusiastic about his work-in-progress; it ‘lacked the surface drama and pure narrative to draw the reader in.’ Plot, he meant. Dramatic events, rounded characters, the trajectory of suspense, mystery and ultimate revelation. The stuff of 'readability'.

Lowry’s problem was that those he had professional dealings with in the world of publishing couldn’t read. His theme was that of a writer who no longer believes that fiction communicates a truth. Out of that perception emerged his writing, in a form which shattered orthodox narrative: the drama of a writer’s struggle. And what purer narrative could there be than writing about writing?