The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters [Hardcover]

It’s all but impossible to review the writing of Malcolm Lowry without first drawing a shaky breath and addressing the life of the man. For his biography is so rife with dramatic incident, so enthrallingly egregious in every way, that it threatens to overwhelm any considerations of the work itself unless one can preempt it. The Spanish novelist and essayist Javier Marias has said that “Lowry does seem to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature, which is no mean feat, given the competition in the field.” And, indeed, the facts nearly bear out that assessment. Look at other exemplars of inglorious excess: say, Hunter Thompson, Anthony Burgess, Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, Jack London, et al. Many suffered from a dipsomania nearly as debilitating as Lowry’s. But some lived to be old men; all of them were far and away more productive; and none of them, despite their exertions, ever sank to the sordid, self-defeating, bathetic depths that Lowry did. Flip through the myriad pages of the canon, or rather, its footnotes and appendices, and it’s not until we reach the satirist and poet, John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, in the late 17th century, that we encounter an individual as debauched and dysfunctional. (And who, moreover, was dead from drink at the age of thirty-three, nearly fifteen years younger than Lowry was when he orchestrated his own demise.)
Much of this dysfunction, unavoidably, appears in The Voyage That Never Ends, a newly released collection of Lowry’s short stories, novel fragments, poems, and letters, edited by Michael Hofmann for The New York Review of Books. Its five-hundred-plus pages tell of divorce, psychiatric hospitalisations, a house fire, a broken back, a broken leg, broken ribs, head injuries, amnesia, tuberculosis, lost manuscripts, publishing contract disputes, multiple arrests, and expulsion from Mexico. Hofmann has mercifully left out material that might corroborate the more apocryphal elements of Lowry’s personal story: the attempts made on his life by sadistic nannies during his privileged upbringing, the time he sold the clothes off his back in order to buy a bottle of gin, his fistfight with a horse, and, not nearly as funny, the physical abuses doled out to his second wife. Hofmann says in his Introduction that he undertook this project for readers “who have conceived a kind of tendresse for Malcolm Lowry, personally.” After reading his books, I’ll admit to feeling a certain solicitousness for the man-enough that I want to believe, for Lowry’s sake and my own, the words of his mentor, Conrad Aiken:

“His whole life was a joke: never was there a gayer Shakespearean jester. A fact that I think we must remember, when everyone is saying What Gloom! What Despair! What Riddles! Nonsense. He was the merriest of men.”

Of all the social and psychological impedimenta that kept Lowry from his writing, the greatest seems to have been the phenomenal success of his second novel, Under the Volcano, published in 1947. That book was not merely written by a doomed alcoholic; it’s about a doomed alcoholic-an unemployed English consul drinking himself to death in Quauhnahuac during its Day of the Dead fiesta. It became a bestseller in the United States and Europe, was widely translated, was compared variously to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the works of Dante, and earned Lowry an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is tempting to include a derisory aside here about its reception in benighted Canada-Lowry’s adopted homeland for well over a decade-where, as he claims, it sold two copies in its first two years of publication, and received one dismissive review in a Vancouver newspaper. But it is a Modernist masterpiece, and perforce, an inhospitable work. Hostile bewilderment is hardly an unusual or even unwarranted response to literary genius-at least initially. Most of us who approach the novel for the first time are simply unequipped for the structural complexity and erudition within. Multiple readings will help ameliorate some complaints, as will deep knowledge of the Bible, Greek mythology, the Caballa, Weimar Germany, early American cinema, and a Spanish phrasebook. After examining Lowry’s correspondence with his publisher, one can see that he understood that a “classic” book needn’t be a “good” book, and given a choice, set out to make Under the Volcano the former. Its great achievement would loom over him the rest of his life, smothering all of his subsequent authorial efforts.
Lowry never lived to see another book published in his lifetime. The best he could manage between drinking binges was the placement of a few pieces here and there in other anthologies. Understandably, given the many distractions he suffered, much of what appears in The Voyage That Never Ends has a first-draft quality to it. His short story “Strange Comfort Afforded By The Profession” begins thusly: “Sigbjorn Wilderness, an American writer in Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship, paused on the steps above the flower stall...” It’s a prodding, amateurish sentence, impatient with itself, though the work that follows quickly gets better. Elsewhere, we get tortured metaphorical language like “the billows of inexhaustible anguish haunted by the insatiable albatross of self,” or “the haystacks stood together in the meekness of love, like loaves.” But there is real quality here, too. The short novellas, “Through the Panama” and “The Forest Path to the Spring”, which first appeared together under the title Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, won the author a posthumous Governor General’s Award in 1961. The first is echt Lowry-a waste-case literary type undergoes an alcoholic odyssey on a tramp freighter, and muses about art and life-but the second is a paean to the life he led in Dollarton, British Columbia, and is one of the strongest evocations of West Coast frontier life I have read.
The rest of the volume’s contents are similarly divergent. His poems, not surprisingly, have titles like “In the Oaxaca Jail”, “Delirium in Vera Cruz”, or “Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla”-despairing little verses about curtailed human freedoms and encroaching mortality. But his letters are exuberant, abstruse, logorrheic, the ravings of a hyperarticulate maniac who’s high on his own wordplay. (It must be said here that a brief introduction to each letter, something to contextualise the material that follows, would have been most welcome; Hofmann, alas, provides none.) At one point, Lowry jauntily describes to a correspondent an ongoing fictional project as “a kind of Strindbergian Tonio Kroger, by Maeterlinck, out of Melville.” Congratulations if you have any idea what that means. Much easier to relate to are the described seductions of drink, and the compounding torments the next morning when all the booze is gone. In Volcano he describes the voice that beckons him to imbibe as belonging to “a pleasant and impertinent familiar, perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry.” We never get a depiction of a hangover in that book, because its character never stops drinking long enough to experience one. In Voyage, however, we get two worth mentioning. The first, rather fancifully, describes its sufferer’s head as “an open basket swarming with crabs”; the second, all too verifiably describes a state where everything the sufferer sees “appeared touched with a cruel supersensual significance.” Say what you might about his other excesses and inadequacies, but the man wrote about the drinker’s life better than virtually anyone else.
In an essay on the alcoholic ruination of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clive James argues that “his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but we wouldn’t have those if he hadn’t been like that.” It’s a troubling paradox that is similarly applicable here. How many Lowry masterworks did the barkeep help deny us? Rather a few, judging by the talent on display in The Voyage That Never Ends, though we wouldn’t have been treated to even the one had young Malcolm not taken that first, fateful sip. Matt Sturrock (Books in Canada)

British precursor of everyone from the Beats to Bruce Chatwin, Lowry (1909-1957) published the fierce, feverish Under the Volcano in 1947, and, haunted by that novel's kitchen-sink perfection, worked on other projects but never completed another book before his alcohol-related death. Here, poet and translator Hofmann selects from among the plethora of Lowry's fugitive output: seven prose fiction pieces, a sampling of poems, excerpts of drafts from three posthumously edited and published works and a selection of letters from Lowry's writings. "Under the Volcano," a short story that was eventually engulfed by the novel, appears early on here. The story "Through the Panama," one of two stories concerning Sigbjørn Wilderness and his journal, mentions his novel "about a character... enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written," and proceeds through a thicket of allusion to British and American literature. The most memorable (and most reprinted) piece here is the heavily autobiographical "The Forest Path to the Spring," richly evocative of a northern British Columbia seascape and the outcasts who inhabit it. The specter of Fascism, the generations of writers in Lowry's head, and various figurative transformations ("something of vast importance to me had taken place, without my knowledge and outside time altogether,") play in throughout. The lack of annotations leaves one a bit at sea amidst the often startling flotsam and jetsam, but with Lowry it's almost appropriate.
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