Under the Volcano Read Free Page B

Lowry than he, and yet Lowry loved him, as he loved a much closer tutelary spirit, Dostoevsky, and Gogol whose Mr Chichikov, along with Melville’s Ahab and with Don Quixote, contribute to the threadbare tweed of Geoffrey Firmin.
    Lowry wrote a poem — a kind of obscure epigraph — which he entitled ‘For
Under the Volcano
’:
    A dead lemon like a cowled old woman crouching in the cold.
A white pylon of salt and flies
taxiing on the orange table, rain, rain, a scraping peon
and a scraping pen writing bowed words.
War. And the broken necked streetcars outside
and a sudden broken thought of a girl’s face in Hoboken
a tilted turtle dying slowly on the stoop
of the sea-food restaurant, blood
lacing its mouth and the white floor —
ready for the ternedos tomorrow.
There will be no morrow, tommorow is over.
    Tomorrow is over but the poem isn’t. It runs on, the images configure and reconfigure, giving out different hints of meaning, none stable and none final, except that there is no tomorrow. In a letter he draws attention to the fact that he stole from a poem the image used in Chapter 12 of
Under the Volcano
where he likens the ‘groans of dying and of love’. Is it spiritual or creative bankruptcy that provokes this bleak recycling?
5
    Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born in New Brighton, Cheshire on 28 July 1909, the youngest of four brothers, into a well-to-do family of Liverpool cotton brokers. He had relations with his parents and siblings which in retrospect seemed troubled to him, though their recollection was that they were tolerant and supportive of an original and sometimes wayward family member. Certainly Malcolm resisted authority, a resistance which became almost pathological in later years, when he feared the representatives of established authority whether they be immigration authorities, policemen or publishers. And he mythologized his family relations. The first examples of his fiction exaggerate and fantasize his early years and ‘traumas’. It was not then and it did not become Ford Madox Ford’s ‘truth to the impression’; it was truth to a fantasy — how it might well have been, how terrible, how unjust. The fact that it wasn’t those things exactly is not recorded and the biographer must pick a path through volatile narratives grounded in physical fact but seldom in realevents. All Lowry’s writing is autobiographical but it is undependable autobiography. Geoffrey Firmin is the ultimate self-justification of the undependable narrator. Lowry’s farther Arthur Osborne Lowry was dependable, supporting his son with a regular allowance through thick and thin.
    Malcolm was dispatched as a boarder to a prep school at the age of eight and went on to public school near Cambridge in due course. He got deep into popular song; he played the ukelele and enjoyed jazz. Going to university was not part of his original plan but under pressure from his family he agreed to go up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge if he could travel first to the Far East. His father arranged the passage. Lowry’s heavy drinking may have begun on board ship. The rich boy was resented by the ship’s crew as a privileged outsider, taking a job from someone who might have needed it: a Melville with privileges. The transformation that takes place in Kipling’s
Captain’s Courageous
did not take place for Lowry, though in retrospect he sometimes pretends that it did, that he earned the respect and acceptance of his shipmates. These experiences helped to shape the character of Hugh in
Under the Volcano:
Hugh the guitarist, the revolutionary, the man with an education but also with the common touch.
    Lowry came back with relatively simple narrative plans which he wrote over and over until he had devised a dense and complex, wholly non-linear work,
Ultramarine
(1933). It was fourteen years before his next book appeared.
    In late 1928 and early 1929 he attended