{"id":30,"date":"2008-02-15T14:16:59","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T21:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=30"},"modified":"2008-02-17T16:07:44","modified_gmt":"2008-02-17T23:07:44","slug":"not-under-the-volcano-by-ian-thomson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/02\/15\/not-under-the-volcano-by-ian-thomson\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Under The Volcano by Ian Thomson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions<\/em><\/p>\n

\"UnderMalcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age of 48, from an overdose of barbiturates, having written his epitaph:<\/p>\n

Malcolm Lowry
\nLate of the Bowery
\nHis prose was flowery
\nAnd often glowery
\nHe lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
\nAnd died playing the ukulele.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His reputation rests on one novel only: Under the Volcano (1947). Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, it describes the last 24 hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-Consul, as he drowns in liquor and despair under the shadow of Popocatepetl. Lowry\u2019s genius was to transform Firmin\u2019s shabby addiction into a parable of universal significance and the story of Everyman in search of salvation. The novel\u2019s mescal-inspired grotesqueries \u2014 grinning chocolate skulls and twitching centipedes \u2014 seemed to issue from the charnel-house of Baudelaire\u2019s imagination. For all his modernity (Kafka and T. S. Eliot were clear influences), Lowry wrote in the timeless tradition of the damned poet who sees a holiness in going down the drain.<\/p>\n

\"Malcolm<\/a>Like many alcoholics, Lowry is a murderous subject for biographers: not only could he make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Originally his biography was to have been written by the Canadian scholar Conrad Knickerbocker (a fine Lowryesque name); but, in 1966, Knickerbocker committed suicide. Another critic, Douglas Day, brought out his life of Lowry in 1973: it was marred by psychoanalytical humbug and factual errors. Gordon Bowker, Lowry\u2019s most trustworthy exegete, published his compelling biography, Pursued by Furies, in 1993; it is unlikely to be surpassed.<\/p>\n

In many ways, Lowry\u2019s life was his own finest creation. All his writing \u2014 three unfinished novels, six or seven short stories, hundreds of letters and poems \u2014 was thinly veiled autobiography. According to Michael Hoffmann, Lowry intended the \u2018whole bolus\u2019 to be part of a continuum called The Voyage that Never Ends, with the great Mexican novel at its centre. Only fragments of this Dantean scheme remain, but the novella Lunar Caustic, begun in 1935, was to represent purgatory. (It was based on Lowry\u2019s internment in the Bellevue mental hospital, New York.)<\/p>\n

[ click to read full article by Ian Thomson in The Spectator<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}