Under the Volcano Read Free Page A

her.
    The poem includes the death of the cats, as in the novel, and is addressed to a ‘we’ (Jan Gabrial and Malcolm Lowry) on a final night, with the creatures of that night. He is a Mr Kurtz who somehow survived and, in the middle of the next century, provides a different and if anything a bleaker testimony than Conrad’s warped protagonist does. It is bleaker because solipsistic, with the solipsism — we get it in Dylan Thomas and in Sylvia Plath as well — that allows the situation of the self, its anxieties, alarms and aberrations, to displace the ‘objective’ reality of the world. The concerns of the self appropriate and colonize what belongs to a larger history, a history not properly subject to the distortions of a subjectivity. Aware of this peril, Lowry insisted that, in
Under the Volcano
, Chapter 6 , from Hugh’s perspective, provides a kind of objective north against which, or upon which, Geoffrey’s subjectivity in particular can play its variations. The first chapter, too, consists largely of’verifiable detail’. In terms of narrative success, Chapters i and 6 are not the most effective, written as they were most directly against Lowry’s temperamental grain.
    In a poem entitled ‘Grim Vinegarroon’ he recalls frail acts of kindness and charity reduced to meaninglessness on ‘the mescal plain’. The vinegarroon or
vinagrillo
(vinegar cricket) is a curious beetle-like insect that looks like a stubby black cigar with a pointy tail. It emits a smell like vinegar and its sting is said to be very poisonous. But it is lumbering and traditionally stupid and it threatens the less for that He spares the insect: but he
is
the insect.
    How I congratulated my compassion!
Yet was I too that grim vinegarroon
That stings itself to death beneath the stone,
Where no message is, on the mescal plain.
    There is a kind of negative mysticism in his alcoholic solipsism, and it is for this reason that
Under the Volcano
and Lowry’s other work hasappealed to critics with a spiritual bent. He was drawn to various spiritual formulae and disciplines and plants them in Geoffrey Firmin (a student of the Cabala, the occult) and within the structure of his novel. All his characters are unnaturally sensitive to coincidence, fate, symbol. He reflects, for himself as for St John of the Cross: ‘What knots of self in all self-abnegation’. The ultimate self-abnegation is death and the contemplation less of its nature than of its effect. He writes in one of his few achieved poems, ‘For the Love of Dying’,
    â€¦ If death can fly, just for the love of flying,
What might not life do, for the love of dying?
    Life (he quotes Baudelaire) is ‘a forest of symbols’: but where Baudelaire emphasizes the symbols and believes they might yield a consistent sense, Lowry stresses the forest, lost-ness, a dark suggestiveness rather than an interpretable meaning or pattern. As in the early poems of Dylan Thomas, so in the mature prose of Lowry metaphor generally displaces or blurs narrative, it seldom corroborates it. In the poem ‘Thunder Beyond Popocatepetl’ Lowry compares the clouds piled beyond the mountains — those towering cumulus that on rare clear days still stand behind the volcanoes — to the heart pinned by ‘the wind of reason’, ‘Till overbulged by madness, splitting mind…’ A natural phenomenon has projected upon it not a symbolic value but a physiological force: bits of the body, intensities of the spirit, of emotion, even paranoia, are forced into actual
embodiment
in natural phenomena. He isn’t finding metaphors in nature but magnifying the body through nature.
    Reason remains although your mind forsakes
It; and white birds higher fly against the thunder
Than ever flew yours, where Chekhov said was peace,
When the heart changes and the thunder breaks.
    What is Chekhov doing here? No writer is more unlike