LITERATURE & HUMANITIES

MALCOLM LOWRY'S UNDER THE VOLCANO

George Donaldson, on 20 February 2001

Malcolm Lowry was born in Cheshire in 1909 and died in Sussex in 1957. His life and the autobiographical fictions which he created out of it are both soused in his alcoholism, from his late adolescence until his `Death by Misadventure', in middle age. His addiction and his all-inclusive writing are both ways in which he was impelled by forces he could not control. As he described these, `it was as if he were the character, being moved about for the purposes of some other novelist and by him, in an unimaginable novel, not of this world, that did not, indeed, exist'. Lowry's life in the world as it did, indeed, exist was a wayward itinerary: He travelled to the Far East, New England, and Norway, to Paris (where he met his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in 1934), and then to New York, Los Angeles, Acapulco, Mexico City, and Cuernavaca. A short story, begun there, became the germ of Lowry's one great novel, completed years later, Under the Volcano. His first marriage over, he returned to the United States, where he remarried in 1939. He then moved northwards, to a fisherman's shack on Burrard Inlet, Dollarton, near Vancouver. Here he worked hard on his Mexican novel; and, during a return trip to Mexico, he wrote to the publisher, Jonathan Cape, successfully persuading him to publish it. Under the Volcano was published in London and New York in 1947, to critical acclaim. Its success seemed to lead only to Lowry's drinking more, and more dangerously to himself and to his wife, with his descent into physical and psychological decline reaching its sudden and drink-sodden end in his killing himself, whether by intent or by wilful accident. Lowry's life consisted of many deliberate fabrications and falsifications; his life's work was to be the creation of a single elaborately deliberated fiction, incorporating and integrating everything he had written, was writing or re-writing or would one day write, The Voyage that Never Ends. It was unfinished when he died. His first wife had once described `his flight headlong from the meaning of his life'; and, in Under the Volcano (the finished `inferno' of the unfinished `commedia'), and in its hero, the English ex-Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, Lowry made tragically meaningful that headlong flight from meaning.

A chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the narrative, without its superstructure of `Churrigeresque' embellishments can tell the story of that day; but in the novel's densely layered texture and complexly interrelated structure, Lowry aspired to more than telling that story. In the novel's central character he sought to represent a hero of tragic stature; in the man-made and natural landscape's multifaceted featuresstreets, houses, cantinas, volcanoes, forests and ravinesto depict a world of metaphorical and even metaphysical implication; and, in the recurrently heard or read catchphrases: `perfectamente borracho', `absolutamente necesario', `no se puede vivir sin amar', `dolente...dolore!,' `Es inevitable la muerte del Papa', ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN? ¿QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!', to invoke a choric echoing of the novel's tragic theme. The text's subterranean currents of literary, historical, mythological, magical and biblical reference add manifold resonances to what is the last day of Geoffrey Firmin's life, the Mexican Day of the Dead, in November 1938. It is the day that his former wife, Yvonne, who had left him a year earlier, flies in to salvage her marriage and, with the help of Geoffrey's brother, Hugh, to save her husband. However, they all become bound in chains of events which lead to both Yvonne's and Geoffrey's deaths.

One such chain, followed in more detail, discloses its complex and subtle interconnectedness. In the first chapter, M. Laruelle, former friend to Geoffrey and former lover of Yvonne, looks back from 1939: `What had happened just a year ago today seemed already to belong to a different age. One would have thought that the horrors of the present would have swallowed it up like a drop of water. It was not so. Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué.' This remembrance is one that the novel brings into question in its narration of what did happen and
how it happened. At the climax of the novel, Geoffrey Firmin is interrogated and eventually killed by a group of fascist vigilantes, as he sinks into the self-abandonment of drunkenness. They come to suspect that he is a spy. Their suspicion is aroused by, among other things, his giving his name as that of the explorer, William Blackstone. This does not tally with the name, `Firmin', on the carbon copy of a telegram they find in his pocket. The telegram, however, is not his own, but is from his journalist brother, Hugh, to the Daily Globe in London. It reports the active involvement of the German legation in Mexico City in an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign. In addition to the telegram, the vigilantes also find in Geoffrey's pocket `a card he didn't know he possessed': declaring Hugh's membership of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. (Hugh is involved in shipping explosives to the anti-fascist Loyalist forces in the Civil War in Spain.) They do not find Geoffrey's passport, which would provide him with an official means of identifying himself. The absence of his passport and the presence of the crumpled and incriminating telegram, in their contribution to his fate, is made poignantly explicable by what does and does not happen five chapters earlier. Then, already drunk, he had found himself aboard a fairground looping-the-loop machine, advertized as the Máquina Infernal. At the top of the loop, everythingincluding, he thinks, possibly his passportfalls out of his pockets and plummets to the ground far below (`What did it matter? Let it go!'). The ride over, he unexpectedly discovers himself to be the centre of concern to a group of children who, to his surprise and gratitude, return his missing possessions to him, one by one. (But `no passport. Well, definitely he could not have brought it.') Among the possessions returned, however, is `a crumpled paper', `some telegram of Hugh's'. There is, of course, only one telegram of Hugh's: returned to him now by a child, it is later discovered by the thugs. The surname, Firmin, in the telegram may not be `a mere misprint in a communiqué', but it is Hugh who is named by it, not Geoffrey. The days `when an individual life held some value' are days when an individual may, nonetheless, be given the wrong value by being mistakenfatally mistakenfor someone else. It is in such detailing of the process of Geoffrey Firmin's tragic progress that the pitilessness and terribleness of the infernal machinery that delivers him to his doom is manifested.

After the talk, there were questions about, and discussions of, Lowry's self-consciously complicated style in Under the Volcano. His alcoholism and its consequences for both Lowry's life and his art were also discussed. In addition, George Donaldson spoke briefly about some of the other novels and short stories which Lowry wrote.

George Donaldson