Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry was born on 28 July 1909 in Wallasey, Cheshire and died on 27 June 1957 in Ripe, Sussex. Canadians consider him their greatest writer and dedicate a journal to him: Malcolm Lowry Newsletter (since 1977), since 1984 the Malcolm Lowry Review. His English biographer, Gordon Bowker, calls him “the most important novelist Cambridge has ever produced.” None of his novels take place in England, where he grew up and died in mysterious circumstances; most of his work is in Mexico, a country where he spent only two years. Is he, as many think, a tragically brilliant author, condemned to write a single book, which, after Under the Volcano (1947), was unable to complete another one? Or is it not precisely in his fragmentary works, published only after his death and constituting most of his production, that he is, hitherto misunderstood, but, according to Gordon Bowker, “the most important experimental author of our time,” who has radically expanded the concept of art and perceived a poet in every human being? Thus, he instituted the autobiographical style of his work, which he conceived as a continuum and which he had initially imagined as a trilogy, with Below the Volcano as the only central part - the only completed - of a watered Divine Comedy, and later as a septuor entitled The Endless Journey. Although the names of his main characters change, they are all caught in a cycle of guilt and also in the process of writing, in which Lowry saw himself trapped, as if he himself were a fiction, and that the works he often worked on simultaneously wrote him.

Throughout his life, Lowry, the fourth and last son of a wealthy Liverpool merchant, was plagued by fear of failure. Escape is its central theme; he and his heroes are tireless travelers, even if the distant and exotic lands offer for the most part only linguistic spaces and landscapes of the soul. It was only in the “brotherhood of alcohol,” in the intimate lair of the cantina, that L. felt safe, if only in moments. His tormented personality is analyzed with great lucidity, relentless and sometimes ironic, which explains why some critics celebrate Lowry's work, notably Under the Volcano and the masterful psychiatric novel Lunar Caustic (1963), as a triumph of the spirit torn away from drunkenness; of course, it's much more than that. Like Joyce, with whom he shared certain narrative techniques, Lowry was a mythomane, constantly in search of coincidences and mysterious links. On the day of the Dead of 1936, L. and his first wife, Jan Gabriel, whom he had married three years earlier, for she bore the same name as the heroine of his apprenticeship novel “Ultramarine” (1933), inspired by Conrad Aiken, a friend of his father, arrived in Mexico. The carnival festivities of the Day of the Dead left them with a striking impression of this country where three cultures mingle in a bitter-sweet contrast. In Cuernavaca, where Emperor Habsburg Maximilian and his wife had once taken refuge, the couple rented a bungalow.

Malcolm Lowry recognized in this landscape a magnificent theme: the “City of Eternal Spring,” the Garden of Eden, theater of a grandiose but tragically broken love, dominated by the beauty of the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuhatl, which had once formed only one body. In his exploration of the country's past, Lowry encountered a phantom cycle of deception and cruelty, which he rediscovered during a flight, an event that gave rise to a story that then developed into ten versions and culminated in Below the Volcano. The creature's powerlessness in the face of barbaric violence suddenly illuminated the intellectual and political climate of the 1930s and 1940s. In an analysis of the causes of an astonishing sobriety, he examines not only the fall of his alter ego, former consul Firmin, but also, as he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape on January 2, 1946, in a personal and singular interpretation of his novel, “the generalized intoxication of the world during the war… at all times.” Under the Volcano is a book of deception. Its internal structure resembles a wheel launched inexorably towards an abyss. The narrative circle lends itself to multiple interpretations. “No se puede vivir sin amar” writes the consul in golden painting on the wall of a house, thus transforming his miserable existence as an alcoholic into a cosmic parable.

Lowry completed this work with the help of his second wife, Margerie Bonner, in 1946, far from the ambiguous successes of civilization, in a wooden cabin near Vancouver. It was there that he also wrote the unfinished novel October Ferry to Gabriela (1970) and posthumously published news under the title Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961). These texts share a flow of consciousness close to the diary, reflecting the existential alienation of humanity and the power of destructive forces - a theme that also permeates the more than 500 poems he wrote along with his narrative work. L. was again attracted to Mexico. However, in the setting of his poetry, he found himself once again confronted with this country. He escaped the imminent loss of self by writing it again. In the fragment * Dark as my friend's grave * (published in 1968 and revised in 1985), Malcolm Lowry tries to bury the past, so to speak, and - at least on paper - to face the future. In La Mordida (1996), he recounts his expulsion from Mexico by the authorities, because the naive Englishman had refused to pay the usual bribes (la mordida in Spanish). Ten years later L. died. A forensic doctor said that the fatal blend of gin and pills was an “accident,” thus ensuring the ungodly drunkard a Christian burial at the cemetery in the village of Ripe. Malcolm Lowry, who has incorporated countless references to other texts, films, languages, sounds and musical works into his works, has inspired many artists - poets, painters, radio and theater writers, such as Michael Mercer (Goodnight Disgrace, 1985) or Albert Ostermaier (Zuckersüss & Leichenbitter, 1998) and John Huston, who directed Under the Volcano in 1984.