Under the Volcano Read Free

dependable witness to facts in other areas, and manuscripts do not abound. Many were burned when his squatter’s shack in Dollarton, British Columbia went up in smoke. If we even half-believe him, then we must imagine a writer at work drafting and redrafting for the best part of nine years. Chapter 11 was the last he wrote, completed ‘in late 1944’; Chapter 3 was first written in 1940 and completed in 1942. Part of Chapter 6 was first written in 1937, revised in 1943 and then 1944. Chapter 7 was first written in 1936, he declares, and continually rewritten: in 1937, 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1944. Chapter 9 was originally written in 1937 but Lowry later changed the narrative perspective (originally assigned to Hugh). Chapter 10 , begun in 1936-7, was rewritten at various times up to 1943. One imagines that when he says ‘rewritten’ he means just that: not revisions, but back to the drawing board.
    Chapter 12 was composed in 1937 and more or less completed in 1940. Thus the book knew almost exactly where it was going for the last four years of its composition: the final crisis had to shudder its way back through what had come before, had to reconfigure in all its complexity the ‘inevitability’ that led to it and nowhere else. If anything contributes to the static effect of the novel, its sense of being preordained rather than inevitable, it is this. Geoffrey Firmin is given a paralysing excess of motive.
4
    How could a writer who himself suffered from alcoholism write so complex a novel? It was perhaps precisely the complexity of conception that made the writing possible. There is an underlying formula: the constituent parts are largely predetermined and of a manageable length. A different, a looser structure, a freer attitude to language and symbolism, would have betrayed Lowry here, as it did in some of this other prose writings, into a kind of wilfulness. His symbolism may be arbitrary in the novel, but there is nothing arbitrary about the design.
    The drunkenness of Geoffrey Firmin in the twelve hours we share with him is compound. There is beer, tequila and, crucially, mescal. The drunkenness induced by mescal, which Lowry must have tasted in its most refined forms in Oaxaca, where it originates, has the effect of producing great concentration and extremely lucid depression, the kind that sees through actions and knows any action to be vain: the action of refusing to take another gulp, for example; or of welcoming the reappearance of an estranged wife; or of defending oneself when assaulted. The mescal drinker sees through possible actions and therefore does not act. His passivity is a self-conscious choice, aware of the world in which his refusal to act has its consequences and aware of the effect of his inaction on himself.
    In his poem ‘Xochitepec’ 3 Lowry includes a literal and chilling image:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â while the very last day
As I sat bowed, frozen over mescal,
They dragged two kicking fawns through the hotel
And slit their throats, behind the barroom door…
    Are these classical fauns strayed into a nightmare scenario, or natural fawns being slaughtered for the hotel guests? The horror for the onlooker, frozen by his vice, bowed (as his letters when he writes are bowed), is literal and figurative, exists in a life and epitomizes a conflict between cultures. Precisely the same image recurs in the novel. In a flashback Geoffrey remembers. Yvonne was leaving him in Mexico City. He sat in the bar of the Hotel Canada drinking iced mescal, swallowing the
    lemon pips, ‘when suddenly a man with the look of an executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought.’ It was on that night that he did not manage to meet Yvonne. It was on that night that he finally lost