Voyage That Never Ended

HEAR US O LORD FROM HEAVEN THY DWELLING PLACE (283 pp.)--Malcolm Lowry--Lippincott ($4.95).

The late Malcolm Lowry was the Dylan Thomas of modern fiction. Like Thomas, he was a hypnotic user and abuser of language. Like Thomas, the author of Under the Volcano erupted in lava flows of talk and lapsed into broody silences. Like Thomas, Lowry was a compulsively heavy drinker. At 47, he died an alcoholic's dreadful death: lying on his back in a drunken stupor, he began to vomit and choked to death. Finally, like Thomas, he spawned the kind of cult that makes a writer seem worth more dead than alive.

The Lowry cultists have had only one big book to stand on. In Under the Volcano, Author Lowry compressed fiery emotional thrust within a Joycean time scheme to record the one-day odyssey of a dipsomaniacal British ex-consul living in Mexico. The hero is at war with his half brother, his estranged wife, himself and, perhaps most pertinently, with modern civilization. The theme is what Lowry himself has dubbed "the migraine of alienation." Lush as a tropical jungle, the book alternates between fierce introspection and a hallucinatory evocation of the Mexican scene. When it was published in 1947, it received rave notices from serious critics but also made the lower rungs of bestsellerdom. Recently, it was brought out in Italy by Feltrinelli, the first publisher of Doctor Zhivago.

It now appears that the worldwide Lowry vogue is to face its sternest test, a spate of posthumous manuscripts. There is a novella, Lunar Caustic, set in the psychiatric wards of New York City's Bellevue Hospital, and a full-length novel, October Ferry to Gabriola, about a guilt-haunted alcoholic, the latter work to be published in 1962. A couple of years ago, a longtime Lowry friend, Canadian Teacher Downie Kirk, salvaged a 3-ft. stack of manuscripts (poems, letters, stories, drafts of novels) from Lowry's British Columbia home, a squatter's cottage. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place is a collection of short stories that are not really stories but anarchic fragments of autobiography.

From the Wastebasket. Sometimes in passages, sometimes in no more than a phrase, the book contains the entire Lowry life and legend. He was the rebel son of a prosperous English cotton-broker father, and he shipped to the Far East as a deck hand at 17 after reading O'Neill's Moon of the Caribbees. The publisher lost the sea novel, Ultramarine, that Lowry wrote about his voyage, and Lowry rewrote the book from notes fished out of a Cambridge roommate's wastebasket. After graduating with honors in English, he drifted to Hollywood, New York and Cuernavaca, and from country to country, was married to and divorced from an "actress-secretary," and began the nine-year ordeal of getting Under the Volcano on paper.

He moved north in 1939 to a beach colony of squatters at Dollarton, near Vancouver, B.C., and married again, this time an actress-turned-mystery-story writer, Margerie Bonner (The Last Twist of the Knife). The newly weds happily roughed it with coal-oil lamps, driftwood fuel and an outdoor privy. Lowry, a barrel-chested man with piercing blue eyes, drank, swam, drank, sang bawdy Spanish ditties to his own ukulele accompaniment, and drank. When the cottage caught fire, he was badly burned rescuing the entire manuscript of Under the Volcano, which came to be the one and only literary success of Lowry's life. At his death he was drafting a massive cycle of novels to be aptly titled The Voyage That Never Ends.

Writer's Lot. There is no chronology to Hear Us, and some of these episodes are merely hinted at. One piece, The Forest Path to the Spring, is masterly--a vibrant nature idyl that is in a direct spiritual descent from Thoreau's Walden. But the bulk of the book displays an occupational disease of 20th century writers : writing about writing and the writer's lot. In Elephant and Colosseum, Lowry tries the bulky device of symbolizing his work as an elephant, presumably patient, massive, mnemonic, with a final trumpeting of glory. In Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession, he links his premonitions of death and damnation with the fates of Keats, Poe and Kafka.

Nothing much happens in these stories, and nothing much is meant to happen. There is tension without release, motion without direction. As a mask dropper, Lowry keeps reappearing under names that are part symbol, part joke and part hoax: Sigbjo/rn Wilderness, Kennish Drumgold Cosnahan, Roderick McGregor Fairhaven. It would be easy to dismiss these characters as anxious bores if they were not also unholy ghosts, shadows of a perturbed spirit, "ghouls of past delirium, wounds to other souls, ghosts of actions approximating to murder, betrayals of self and I know not what, ready to leap out and destroy me." One always begins, in Lowry, by rejecting the self-pity and ends by respecting the suffering.

Born Circler. There are writers who shoot and there are writers who encircle their subject. Hemingway is an example of a writer who shoots and brings back the pelt. Lowry is a born circler. He scours the landscape--internally of his mind, externally of nature--hoping to surround and throttle the invisible demon that was both the subject and the object of his writing. His individual images are arresting, but what he did well, he overdid. There are page-long cascades of imagery, torrents of metaphors. The Wagnerian school of U.S. writing--Faulkner, Wolfe, Lowry--has apparently never heard of the pause that refreshes.

Apart from his personal demonology, what haunted Lowry and what was he driving at? He was a highly civilized man, but he was sick of civilization. "Creator of deathscapes," he called it. Like D. H. Lawrence, he was drawn to the "blood consciousness," and he felt that urban industrialized life cut man off from innocence, vitality and a piety before nature. On a brittle, sophisticated level, Lowry was weary of it all. On a more profound level, he felt the kind of metaphysical nausea that Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed in the lines:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell . . .

He railed against "ugliness and the complete baffling sterility of existence as sold to you." His only weapon was a Forest Primeval complex, the traditional romantic battle cry of back to nature. The sickness of the romantic ego, and Lowry had this sickness, is to turn escape into flight, the quest for solitude into a fascination with oblivion, to fall "half in love with easeful death."

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