Under the Volcano (2 page)

The sense of specific place, of place remembered (Lowry wrote the book largely in Canada), is more precise, if less intimate, than Joyce's Dublin in
Ulysses
. It's odd that Cuernavaca has not become a place of literary pilgrimage, with Firmin-day, a Lowry tour and Lowry bars serving the relevant potations. The film of the book starring Albert Finney was made largely nearby in Cuautla because Cuernavaca changed radically in the 1970s and is no longer recognizably the pacing-ground of Lowry's characters. It is possible to read into his urban geography, and into the environs, elements of Cuautla and of Oaxaca, where Lowry went after his first wife left him and where he was imprisoned, less for being drunk than for getting into a political fracas with some fascists.

However he changes a scene, it is worth remembering that his imagination exaggerates and distorts, forces connections and recurrences, but it does not in general invent detail. If the book at times feels assembled, this is because it is. In its composition there was none of the flow, the release of pent-up energies which writers such as Lawrence experienced, becoming a medium, a passive agency, letting the pages flow. Lowry imposed on himself a twelve-hour structure (rather loosened by the opening chapter which looks back from the distance of a year), shorter than the time-span Joyce allows himself for
Ulysses
. In those twelve hours certain events coincide; at the end of the book, awkwardly, he must narrate events in the final chapter which happen a few moments before those narrated in the previous chapter. In such a fisted time-scale the leisurely, even the orderly, even the
coherent
, unfolding of plot is a problem.

Each chapter Lowry regarded as almost free-standing, a poetic structure with verbal and symbolic coherence, belonging to one of the four main characters, with a position in the narrative which feels more geometric than dramatic. The author quarried passages from his poems,
from earlier and other writings, to fit them into
Under the Volcano
. The book was conceived, he reports, in 1936, and later regarded as the
Inferno
part of Dantesque trilogy,
The Voyage that Never Ends
, which he did not complete. By 1937 he had part of a first draft — 40,000 words. He did not find it ‘thorough or honest enough' and continued his labours. He rewrote parts of the book in 1940, awaiting call-up for military service.

The twelve chapters or ‘blocks' (intended to recall Homer's, Virgil's and Milton's twelve-book epics, as well as some of Lowry's more recherché numerological and mystical concerns) were composed out of chronological order and revised discretely. Are we to believe the elaborate account of composition Lowry wrote to his publisher? He is not a 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.

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:

              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 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 has
appealed 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',

… 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 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?

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 real
events. 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.