Lowry's Private Trip

...Moreover, the attempt to track down and identify the inexhaustible ramifications of Lawry's symbolism in Cabbalistic terms either leads to sophomorisms ("In spite of his avowed disgust with life . . . Hugh is representative of the life force"), or founders in Lowry's encyclopedic eclecticism—as Mrs...

...He is particularly preoccupied with the coexistence, at different levels, of contradictory phenomena...

...A writer's writer when he died in 1957, virtually unknown to the general public, he has since surfaced with a vengeance...

...And is his fate tragic—or is it not, perhaps, rather bathetic...

...Did Lowry bring it off...

...Most important to the effectiveness of Lowry's writing is a powerful visionary sense of nature and natural phenomena, of stars and sky and changing seasons...

...I believe, however, that a clearer understanding of what the novelist was about in Under the Volcano, as well as a yardstick for measuring his achievement, is to be found in another book by Lowry himself...

...1 love Under the Volcano...

...And with every page one's admiration for Under the Volcano deepens, for Lowry's triumph in transmuting these base metals into gold—a feat literary rather than alchemical, pace Mrs...

...Thus, his fictional alter ego in Lunar Caustic becomes passionately concerned about the fate of two fellow patients—a pathetic old man and a brilliant, deranged boy—remarking in wonderment "that I should have to come all the way from England to a madhouse to find two people I really care about...

...As can be seen from his letters, Lowry positively relished the continuous tragedies in which he passed his own life...

...as yet unaware, even as the sun was setting, of the approaching storm"—much like a Magritte painting...

...He is concerned with common experience-persons and things outside himself—only to the extent that his interior world is coextensive with it...

...As Mrs...

...we have a solid volume of Selected Letters...

...On the other, the sensation persists that he himself is writing the narrative as he goes along, that he is God standing at the center of a self-created universe, the supreme subject...

...For the most part, though, Lunar Caustic is obviously work-in-progress and offers no more than a hint of what might have been...

...Yet like Dark as the Grave, it does lay bare the mechanics of Lowry's creativity...

...In fact, Dark as the Grave is little more than a long and enormously self-indulgent gloss on the earlier work, an account of a journey Lowry made to Mexico with his wife to revisit the Volcano setting...

...Did not Lowry himself, in a burst of candor, liken the book to the "Churrigueresque or overloaded style" of Mexican architecture...

...after Mrs...

...The endless self-absorption is not absorbing to the reader...

...When he mined this seam, his writing was touched with genius...

...Under the Volcano remains a very private trip...

...He was only a drunk, he thought...

...a third volume, possibly intended as the Paradise was destroyed by fire in one of the mysterious disasters that the writer felt pursued him...

...Yes indeed...

...Lunar Caustic, much expanded, was to have been the Purgatorio...

...Though he had pretended for a while that he was not, that he was mad with the full dignity of madness...

...In The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano and the Cabbala (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 241 pp., $6.95), Perle Epstein grabs the bull (Mithraic, as she would be the first to point out) by the horns (here the symbolism is practically inexhaustible—start with cuckoldry and go on from there...

...It is difficult to believe, however, that this project would ever have come to fruition...

...By failing to tackle this issue, I fear Mrs...

...One's irritation sharpens with every page, with each fresh access of uxoriousness, each new longueur of self-explication, each farfetched or whimsical aside...

...Everywhere in his work, but especially in Under the Volcano, he establishes an intimate correspondence between the natural environment and the inner life of his protagonists, so that at times of crisis there is felt to be no division between them: Inner and outer are experienced as one...

...That he read widely in the literature of magic and mysticism and consciously set out to use the Cabbala as "the mythopoeic framework for his novel" is not in dispute: Lowry himself told this to anyone who would listen, notably British publisher Jonathan Cape, in an extraordinarily persuasive letter defending his masterwork...

...In Under the Volcano, he made a heroic effort to transcend his inferno, to turn himself inside out and embrace the whole world in his multiform subjectivity...

...It would free even one . . . it would free mankind...

...and Under the Volcano, the magnum opus on which his reputation essentially rests, is firmly established in the reading man's cultural baggage...

...His central preoccupation, both in work and life, was to turn his crippling weaknesses—dipsomania and pathological self-absorption—into strengths...

...Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (New American Library, 284 pp., $5.95...

...His comic gift and his chronic sense of doom—neither of which could have existed without the other—needed no metaphysical authentication...

...When one speaks of Cabbala, one can be referring to nearly anything of an occult, mystical or theosophical nature...

...Epstein...

...that is, to the degree that he has the courage, or perhaps the energy, of his solipsism...

...The key to Lowry's literary pathology is an inextricable confusion between subject and object—between God and His world, between the writer and the book...

...Not being mad, he is thrust out of the madhouse and returned to the lonely indignity of barroom self-destruction...

...the agonizing over other people—particularly his wife—is distasteful, since it is plain that their only existence is as lay figures in his interior passion play...

...What is fascinating is that everything that is wrong with it must also have characterized Under the Volcano in its formative stages...

...Lowry had one truly fertile obsession: the compelling attractiveness of self-destruction, the pleasures of damnation—what he called "the nostalgia of delirium" and "the loathsome, patient calm" of being in hell...

...Thus, in Lunar Caustic the hero watches people asleep in a park below, "content still in an eighteenth century day...

...Dark as the Grave is layer upon layer of autobiography: a variorum edition of Lowry's interminable dialogue with himself about the meaning of his life and the trials of being a writer...

...Epstein's line-by-line explication of the text, I'm a believer...

...And it does, it does...

...the genesis of great writing is always of interest...

...If he falls short of Faustian stature, the Consul is nevertheless a memorable tragicomic creation...

...To all this, the essence of what makes Lowry so haunting a writer, the Cabbala can add nothing but superstructure...

...While Mrs...

...Epstein herself seems to realize...

...In addition, Lowry found that by combining the idea of the Jungian archetypal hero with the Faust legend, he could simultaneously indulge his taste for magic and mysticism...

...The Consul, too, embraces destruction with infectious gaiety, and so long as he is the center of attention, the book is irresistible...

...Kalowski, but would, in a fantas-tic sense, free (hem...

...But (he trick fails: It is just more solipsistic posturing...

...Epstein puts it: "He had determined that the Consul's destruction should have the universal significance of the sacrificed god-man, or scapegoat...

...There are intermittent flashes of the hallucinatory brilliance that pervades Under the Volcano—Lowry was always good at the d.t.'s—and several marvelous character sketches...

...Epstein's book is undoubtedly a useful piece of research...

...As he put it, "cheerfulness keeps breaking in...

...Lowry is peculiarly vulnerable to this kind of criticism—he was often drunk, after all, and not infrequently portentous—and if his unique gifts are to be properly appreciated, his weaknesses had better be faced squarely...

...I have always been vaguely aware that there is a lot of Cabbalistic embellishment in Under the Volcano, just as there is a lot of everything else...

...Throughout Dark as the Grave, for example, Lowry wrestles with two extreme possibilities...

...Much the same may be said about Lunar Caustic (Grossman, 78 pp., $3.50), another piece of thinly veiled autobiography...

...The number 7 can stand for nearly anything...

...Like his entire oeuvre...

...It is a conscious pilgrimage through the author's interior landscape, a deliberate harrowing of hell in which he again challenges the demons he had before so lovingly conjured...

...Almost everything he wrote has now been published, including fragmentary and unfinished work...

...the tireless establishment of symbolic correspondences between everything and everything else, past, present and future, is tedious and contrived...

...The "action," as in most of Lowry's writing, is all inward...

...Put together by his widow and literary executor from a mass of autobiographical material left behind by the wordy old solipsist, this was brought out last year as "a new novel by the author of Under the Volcano...

...What is all this mumbo jumbo for, and does it really work...

...At these moments, his images have a surrealistic vividness...

...It was apparently his intention to turn this raw material into a novel, but the process of literary transmutation was scarcely begun...

...Epstein has simply provided fresh ammunition for the detractors, like the New York Times reviewer who recently sneered at Lowry's "verbal im-pasto" and dismissed him as a portentous drunk...

...On the one hand, there is the suspicion that his life is actually a narrative being written by someone else, by God or his own demon, and that he therefore has no independent existence and is wholly an object...

...Magnificent as the book is, I do not think he succeeded...

...Above all, the purportedly Faustian agonies and ecstasies are hollow stuff, mere Promethean posturing, and are not redeemed by Lowry's rueful comment: "But on the surface he was merely a drunk and an unsuccessful writer...

...But so what...

...It was only a matter of time before someone tried to explain the symbol system of that obscure but endlessly fascinating book...

...Ironically, his prodigious gifts served only to potentiate his solipsism, to raise his private nightmare to a higher power...

...The preoccupation with the Cabbala in Under the Volcano was Lowry's attempt, as both writer and man, to resolve this antithesis and manipulate the world into a meaningful relationship...

...While Dark as the Grave and Lunar Caustic retrospectively deepen one's admiration for Under the Volcano, at the same time they explode any claims that Lowry was a sort of potential Dante of our time who was cut down before he could reveal the full range of his vision...

...The piece bristles with undigested symbolism: Storm and shipwreck are the master images, and references to Rimbaud and Melville abound...

...That is the heart of the matter...

...Here as elsewhere, we see Lowry trying to make drink more than drink, to dissolve his isolation by investing self-destructiveness with universal significance: "He even imagined himself expunging [his mistakes] by some heroic sacrifice, that would not only justify him to Garry and Mr...

...But the Sephirotic Tree of Life, the novel's 12 chapters representing both the zodiac and the 12 stages of initiation, the use of alcoholism to symbolize misuse of mystical powers—none of this can deliver the Consul, like his creator, from the prison of the self alone...

...But to what extent did his mystagogic proclivities help or hinder his purposes as a writer, and how much knowledge of these matters is necessary for an appreciation of his work...

...Free them...

...It is a work of extraordinary, visionary beauty, one of the 10 books I would take with me into exile on that hypothetical desert island...

...Epstein provides a great deal of interesting information about the Cabbala itself, and is often illuminating on symbolic details in the novel, she does not begin to ask these larger questions...

...He tried to use writing as a means of redemption, and also as a way of breaking out of his private nightmare into the world of shared experience...

...Still, it has to be admitted that the Cabbalistic grand design, with its "maze of colors, numbers, and heavenly worlds," is not sufficient to invest the Consul's self-destruction with universal meaning...

...I am telling you something new about hellfire," he announced to his publisher, and it is true that Under the Volcano was planned as the Inferno of a Dantesque trilogy...

...Is the Consul, in the end, more than a drunk—a tremendously witty, erudite and entertaining drunk, to be sure, but a drunk nonetheless...

...Unfortunately, she takes Lowry's preoccupation with the occult as deadly seriously as he did himself...

...Lowry drank himself into Bellevue on one of his trips to New York, and in this novella he describes his brief sojourn among the derelicts in the ward...