Under the Volcano

‘The novel gets off to a slow start,' Malcolm Lowry concedes.
¹
Is this indeed ‘inevitable' and ‘necessary'? Many readers find it hard to break into
Under the Volcano
. Their difficulty is a shadow of the trouble Lowry had in writing it. Like other major novels of its kind –
Moby Dick
, for instance, and
Nostromo
(Melville and Conrad meant a great deal to the young Lowry, and both authors struggled hard for those books); like
The Rainbow
, and Thomas Mann's
Dr Faustus
– it can take several attempts before one really gets going. Readers who have visited the novel's ‘terrain' – landscapes, plazas, the very buildings – marvel at the accuracy and miasmic clarity of the evocations but wrestle with the narrative strategies. After three false starts I first read the book through when I was twenty-two, even though I grew up in the very streets that Lowry describes.

Lowry wrote
Under the Volcano
in emphatically rhythmic prose. When he was composing it he read passages aloud to his wife and friends. It is hard to imagine how his voice might have unfolded, for example, the tortuous sentence that opens
Chapter 3
. There are others even more taxing. This is not the natural, if rather fussy, elaboration of Henry James whose longest sentences retain some contact with the speaking and feeling voice. This is syntax as architecture, a strained high baroque: it is not to be understood so much as unpacked and paraphrased. It is ‘vertical', balanced, stilled in time, not ‘horizontal', in flow — despite the prosody.

Sometimes Lowry breaks into a long iambic run that sounds almost like natural pentameters. This repetitive, predictable pace – Shakespearean, or rather, Marlovian — is unnatural to fiction. So are the elaborate time-schemes, switch-backs and gradual accretions of information which mean that the book makes the kind of sense Lowry intends only on a third reading. He devises a style to push through recalcitrant matter; yet how recalcitrant is his matter? The plot is simple enough. Well

before a third reading is complete, the reader might suspect that the problem is less structural: the problem (and pleasure) is the style itself. What
is
recalcitrant is character — not the
dramatis personae
but the character of the author who concedes that he ‘is' his protagonists. The book points back to him again and again.

Lowry's writing has this (and much else) in common with the work of the poets of his generation and concern — Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham. It was after all the age of Fitzrovia, Apocalypse and the Great Alcoholics. Thomas became his friend in London in 1932 and figures larger in Lowry's biography than vice versa. There was also the wonderful neglected Anna Wickham, who rests in Hampstead Cemetery. Lowry is best understood in the company of poets, a fact he accepted when writing to Jonathan Cape defending his novel in 1946. The ‘irremediable' defect of the book was that ‘the author's equipment, such as it is, is subjective rather than objective, a better equipment, in short, for a certain kind of poet than a novelist'. He compares the difficulties of the novel's allusiveness with those of
The Waste Land
.

Under the Volcano
is a masterpiece because the style is, for the most part, uncannily apposite: the novelist has struggled against the odds to create it; he uses it like Theseus uses the thread to find a way back through the dizzying labyrinth, having caught and slain his principal character, that version of himself, the tragic, comic, appalling and endearing Minotaur Geoffrey Firmin. And Lowry knew that in his style he had made something unique and rather wonderful: ‘the top level of the book, for all its
longueurs
, has been by and large so compellingly designed that the reader does not want to take time off to stop and plunge beneath the surface'. The language, with its root system of symbolic connections and counter-references, its symmetries, its constancy of tone, is complete and sufficient in a particular way. ‘Is it too much to say that all these chords, struck and resolved, while no reader can possibly apprehend them on first or even fourth reading, consciously, nevertheless vastly contribute
unconsciously
to the final weight of the book?' It is, probably, rather too much to say; yet Lowry's intention appears to have been to endow his novel with something like a human complexity of consciousness, to make it in effect ‘creaturely', with a mind of its own as complex and troubled as that of his principal character.

Legend has it that Malcolm Lowry arrived in Mexico with his American wife Jan Gabrial on
2
November, the Day of the Dead, 1936. They stepped into the calendar setting and the lurid ceremonial of his novel-to-be. Its twelve hours' action takes place on the Day of the Dead 1938, told from the vantage of that day in 1939.

How do we steal from Hell its terror? By anticipating it on earth? In Geoffrey Firmin's case, by suffering
DTS,
by going out and finding the goblins and providing them with pitchforks. Magic, cabalism and simple hallucination weaken and then displace more conventional and communal belief – unless the magic is shared with the community. It is hard to discuss the morality or generalize the meaning of a novel in which the principal character cannot stabilize himself, lacking the will and the power to do so; and in which the environment itself is ceremonially out of control. What is true at one moment is false the next.

The Day of the Dead (All Souls) is one of those Catholic–pagan festivals which defines the peculiarly baroque, pagan–Christian spiritual culture of Mexico. Its symbols dig into the literal soil where the dead lie, not always consolingly but with a brutal irony: it is only in terms of this life that the afterlife finds expression, this life heightened and ritualized. The dead hunger and thirst as the living do, but more intensely, like alcoholics. In the candle— and torch-light they are momentarily satisfied (because though they are supposed to be in eternity they linger in time) with the sugar skulls, the
pulque
and
mescal
, the sweetmeats, chanting and dancing, the release of emotion and inhibition that traditional Fiesta sanctions.

In 1950, three years after Lowry's novel appeared, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz published
The Labyrinth of Solitude
, an extended essay in which he devotes a chapter to ‘All Saints, Day of the Dead'. Through its feast-days the Mexican character reveals its deeper nature to which, among English writers, only Lowry and Lawrence have gained (appalled) imaginative access:

If we make ourselves anonymous in daily life, in the whirlwind of the Fiesta we let go. We don't just open up: we tear ourselves open. Song, love, friendship: it all ends in howling and tearing. The violence of our feast-days reveals just how far
our hermeticism seals off our lines of communication with the world. We know delirium, song, outcry and monologue, but not dialogue. Our Fiestas, like our intimacies, our loves and our attempts to reorder our society, are violent breaches with the old and the established. Each time we wish to express ourselves we must break with ourselves. And the Fiesta is just one example, perhaps the most typical, of violent rupture. […] The Mexican, gloomy being that he is, confined within himself, suddenly bursts, opens his bosom and reveals himself with a degree of complacency, lingering on the shameful or terrible crannies of his intimacy. We are not frank, but our sincerity can reach extremes which would appal a European. The explosive and dramatic, sometimes suicidal way in which we lay ourselves bare and yield ourselves up, almost helpless, reveals how something stifles and inhibits us. Something impedes our being. And because we dare not or cannot confront our being, we revert to the Fiesta. It releases us into the void, a self-immolating drunkenness, a shot into the air, an artificial fire.
²

‘Something impedes our being' — and as Lowry's protagonist realizes, the only way the impediment can be shifted, and then only tenuously, is through the renewable Fiesta of alcoholism and the soul-eating mescal which makes even absinthe seem like gripe water. Lowry understands this fact of spiritual anthropology. It is endemic in the culture where he plants his characters, and it is why Geoffrey Firmin, the British Consul, takes root there and becomes a Mr Kurtz: with all his resources of learning, linguistic genius and wit, he surrenders. He is conscious of surrendering. Here is a modern kind of tragic hero aware at every stage of his circumstances. There is no
anagnorisis
, no moment of recognition. The whole book is a dénouement.

Anyone familiar with Cuernavaca (the Quauhnahuac where Lowry sets
Under the Volcano)
between the 1940s and the mid-1960s will be astonished at the accuracy of Lowry's description of the little city: the run-down, once-opulent hotel Casino de la Selva, the railway station

with its air of wan expectation, the forest of blue eucalyptus; and across the gullies, the plaza, Cortez's palace with the celebrated Diego Rivera murals, the Borda Gardens where an emperor and empress briefly enjoyed imperial romance, the Cathedral, the gulches (dug deeper in Lowry than they are in fact) and bridges, the very houses in which Firmin lived. Lowry closes the open circuit of the literal street-plan to make it possible for his characters to come full circle. He makes Quauhnahuac's layout more like that of Dante's
Inferno
. Each place he describes actually existed, and each has unstable symbolic values.