Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry

...Lowry attempted suicide, and then wrote back to Cape that the "Word-spinning flashback while the Consul is lying down flat on his face in the Calle Nicaragua is really very careful exposition...

...Lowry admitted that much of the work of his contemporaries was simply incomprehensible to him...

...Aiken was the author of his own sea narrative, Blue Voyage, that inspired Lowry...

...But there was no truth to the matter—the affair was no more than a shakedown, though that realization seems to have eluded them for several weeks...

...Cape had already accepted the book, but the minor writer William Plomer, one of Cape's readers, maintained that it was overburdened with "word-spinning" and suggested extensive revisions...

...The letters collected here also reveal a man either extraordinarily stupid or simply oblivious...

...violence at the hands of police in a poor and corrupt country is a deadly reality, and betrayal is the order of the day...

...Firmin's murder occurs on the margin of a global conflict centered in Spain, the Bosnia of its time...

...Lowry, who clearly sought a literary father figure, maintained a close—perhaps too close—relationship with Aiken, then a prominent American modernist, for several years, writing him detailed letters about his projects and ambitions, and spending time with Aiken and his entourage in Spain and elsewhere...

...The assertion about feminism, furthermore, is not only irrelevant, it is imaginary...

...Grace has sought to annex Lowry to herself—the leaf facing the title page bears a list of her works, not his...

...She annotates a reference to Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas, who ruled from 1934 to 1940—the period in which Under the Volcano is set—by writing that Cardenas "provided money for rural education, nationalized the oil companies and created a more liberal environment in which the foundation of the Mexican feminist movement was possible...

...She is ignorant of basic facts, and when she clearly does not know, she improvises...

...Grace's professional defects, alas, are far from fictional...

...In January 1938 Lowry wrote from Oaxaca to his mentor, Conrad Aiken, "Have now reached condition of amnesia, breakdown, heartbreak, consumption, cholera, alcohol poisoning, & God will not like to know what else if he has to which is damned doubtful...

...As with his perspicacious and prescient insights into the horrors to come in the twentieth century, Lowry seems even to have anticipated the buffoonery of "scholars" such as Grace...

...The chaos began when a Mexican official demanded that Lowry pay 50 pesos—even then no more than $10, a ridiculously minor sum—for a fine ostensibly levied during his earlier visit in 1937-38...

...his life story is a horrific sequence of lost manuscripts and burned-down residences...

...Unlike the humorless and megalomaniac writers on "unexplained phenomena" today, Fort and Dunne had a lighter touch and were entertaining and genuinely provocative...

...His self-centered method, which made his own travails the focus of all reality, reminds one of clinical paranoia, in which the patient views everything around him in the context of his own suffering...

...He died by "misadventure" in England in 1957, choking to death on a medicine-bottle cap while sedated...

...On the same page, she mistranslates "ley de fuga" or "law of flight," the law by which prisoners could be killed if they attempted to escape...

...Even then, they got into further absurd quarrels with Mexican officials and foreign diplomatic representatives, concluding with their virtual deportation to the United States, in which they lost manuscripts and other possessions...

...This episode remains the most obscure and mysterious incident in his life, and there are unfortunately no letters that cast light upon itin this collection...

...This world is an inferno like Dante's, filled with signs of damnation, burning, devils, and hopelessness...

...El The American Spectator October 1995 73...

...The efforts of professor Grace indicate he is equally incomprehensible to her...

...For once the unlucky man had the last laugh...

...E ven when she is right, she is awkward...

...This was probably more reportage than rhetoric...

...In fact, the phrase appeared regularly in newspapers throughout the world as the German offensive against France drew to a conclusion in May 1940...

...L owry believed Under the Volcano produced "evidence of the magical basis of the world," and reworked the manuscript many times over...

...The letter deterred Cape from greatly mutilating the book...

...In a letter from April 1940, he listed writers on "the frontiers of the mind," that is, on mysticism, who had influenced him—including J. W. Dunne and Charles Fort, two authors who caused great sensations in their time and are now mainly forgotten...

...She obviously misses Lowry's main point about Cardenas's oil expropriation: Many of the seized properties were originally owned by the British, and the president's action touched off a wave of anti-British sentiment in Mexico that is a leitmotif in Under the Volcano and a contributing element in the murder of the Consul...

...Octavio Paz, Mexico's outstanding modem poet and a Nobel laureate in literature, called Under the Volcano one of the best books ever written about his country...

...Like Hemingway and Orwell, Lowry took up the theme of the rational and cool Anglo-Saxon mind encountering the violence of the Latin world...

...John Huston even turned it into a (horribly failed) movie...

...Why are there not stained glass windows in memory of all the authors, & all the publishers too...

...Grace renders it as "flight from the law...

...Was he also bonkers...

...Grace hides in the annotations a reference to a letter from Lowry's first wife, suggesting that their 1937 problems with the Mexican police were aggravated by his habit, "in every Oaxacan bar," of accusing an unknown traveling companion named Harry Mensch of being a Communist...

...But not everybody agrees: Beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti once told me he disliked the book because it was just "about a guy getting drunk and having delirium tremens...

...He was drunk for months at a time, and upon his first visit south of the border, "in and out of Mexican jails," in the words of Sherrill E. Grace, who has edited the inital volume of this first complete collection of Lowry's correspondence...

...There are more to come, then, and it is a minor tragedy—albeit, given his life story, an apt one—that Lowry is so poorly served by this collection...

...The Spanish Civil War, with all its massacres and horrors, is concluding, and Lowry draws myriad parallels between Spain and Mexico—the one's civil war and the other's declining revolution, fascist armies on the march and nasty policemen who kill strangers, the failure of the West to save the Spanish Republic and the lonely death of a drunk Englishman...

...One June 1946 entry of twenty-one printed pages describes a seven-week-long imbroglio with the Mexican authorities during his second visit to the country...

...Obscure encounters between individuals constituted Lowry's chief literary device, and there is some irony in an obscure academic performing such a travesty of scholarship on his correspondence...

...Canada imposed censorship after it entered World War II in 1939...

...the American Smith Act had nothing at all to do with Canadian affairs, and would not have affected Lowry's work...

...Indeed, Lowry was hospitalized in 1936 for several days in the psychiatric ward at New York's Bellevue Hospital...

...In Under the Volcano, however, he created one unmistakable literary masterpiece...

...It was only popular in the forties because nobody then was writing about getting high on drugs and having hallucinations...

...Lowry's account of the consul's alcoholic descent in Mexico was certainly based on direct experience...

...It is a world, as one character tells the protagonist, "the consul" Geoffrey Firmin, of "those who have nobody them with...

...Fort accumulated and published notes on such phenomena as rains of frogs and blood, and Lowry's second wife presented him with Fort's collected works as an anniversary present...

...rather, Lowry and Margerie Bonner, his second wife, insisted they should get to the truth of the matter and clear it up...

...sent to his publisher Jonathan Cape in January 1946, it takes up thirty printed pages and offers a defense of publishing the novel largely as he submitted it...

...About a February 1940 letter in which Lowry uses the phrase "the sitzkrieg become a blitzkrieg," Grace writes: "A typical Lowry word-play in German: the sitting war becomes a lightning war...

...Her phony politicizing is worse yet...

...Women were active in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, and female figures appeared in leading roles in Mexican culture and history even before that—but "the feminist movement," as understood today, had to wait in Mexico, as elsewhere in the world, for the 1960s...

...Lowry wrote at the end of the journey, "Our joy and relief at entering the United States were boundless...

...Like many with an immense talent for the manipulation of words—which, according to mystical traditions, are reality—Lowry's day-to-day life was something of a shambles...

...The reference is tossed into the pseudo-scholarly soup as a perfunctory swipe at American anti-Communism, the kind of insult in passing de rigueur in scholarly writing today...

...She has committed every one of the academic transgressions that infuriate writers and drive them to believe that, if the price of literary fame is exploitation by professional parasites, perhaps it would be better to cease writing altogether...

...He seems not to have had enough cash on hand to pay the amount and write it off as a bribe, or mordida (bite), part of life in Mexico...

...But he was also a heavy drinker, and his influence, as Grace acknowledges, may well have sunk Lowry deeper into the bottle...

...He married twice, had no children, and, uniquely among the modernists, was an excellent golfer...

...THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF MALCOLM LOWRY, VOLUME ONE: 1926-1946 Edited by Sherrill E. Grace University of Toronto Press / 688 pages / $49.95 reviewed by STEPHEN SCHWARTZ T he son of a successful Liverpool businessman from whom he became disastrously alienated, Malcolm Lowry went to sea aboard a merchant ship at 17, an experience from which he wrote his first novel, Ultramarine...

...In a discussion of censorship in Canada during World War II, Grace adds a gratuitous reference to the Smith Act, forbidding advocacy of the violent overthrow of the United States government...

...In a November 1946 letter to Albert Erskine, his American editor for Under the Volcano, Lowry wrote, "My God, how does one survive it, if indeed one does survive it...

...L owry's exceptional misfortune continues after death, in that the editing of his letters has fallen into the hands of Grace, professor of English at the University of British Columbia and one of the most obnoxious exemplars of contemporary literary scholarship...

...He was also extraordinarily unlucky and inept...

...He later attended Cambridge, and throughout his life wrote incessantly, producing several other unsuccessful but interesting novels...

...A most remarkable letter included here documents those efforts...

...Dunne experimented with his own dreams in attempting to comprehend time...

...It is a degraded and homicidal world, very much like the one we find in our daily headlines...

...Under the Volcano offers a complex meditation on a world in crisis—a sick world in which distant wars produce inconceivable atrocities, Stephen Schwartz is a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle...

...Her notes and comments are self-indulgent, even running to a page-long digression in which she discusses how "editors, and literary scholars in general, have received a surprising amount of fictional attention of late," citing works such as Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum...

...The letters in this collection take us up only to the end of 1946, when Under the Volcano was accepted for publication...

...This powerful novel about the murder of an alcoholic Englishman—at the hands of Mexican police on the Day of the Dead, the day after Halloween, in 1938—surely ranks among the most important works of English prose in our century...