The Misadventurer

By R.Z. Sheppard

MALCOLM LOWRY

by DOUGLAS DAY

483 pages. Oxford. $10.

The untidy life and death of Malcolm Lowry have provided one of those feverish legends that persist in the literary bloodstream. With good cause. Lowry's was a life that both offends and fascinates--which is to say it excites the voyeuristic instinct. There were his Faustian bouts with alcohol as some kind of sorcerer's abused magic potion. There were his Baudelairean rumblings at the back door to salvation. There was also some basic tight-vested Freudian neurosis and a not quite redeeming sense of irony.

For all the lush seriousness of his prose, Lowry was quite aware of the ridiculous, troublesome figure he cut for most of his 47 years. A touch of buffoonery even creeps into Under the Volcano, that hellish pressure cooker of a novel that was his only important work.

Lowry died 16 years ago after taking too many barbiturates. Death by "misadventure" is what the coroner kindly called Lowry's end, and Biographer Douglas Day, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, makes sure that the verdict resonates through all the chapters of Lowry's life.

Lowry started most promisingly as a son of a rich Liverpool businessman. The senior Lowry and his other sons were interested in sports and moneymaking. Malcolm's own view of his childhood was far from sanguine, and quite possibly exaggerated. He blamed his later difficulties on such things as insensitive parents, a sadistic nanny, and locker-room ridicule aimed by school chums at his genitalia.

Sailor-Poet. But according to Day, young Lowry was not just a budding aesthete. After losing his baby fat, he turned into a credible rugger player, a strong swimmer and an excellent golfer. He wrote jazz songs and played the ukulele, an instrument that accompanied him all his life. He even spent a year as a deck hand aboard a freighter (driven to the dock in the family Rolls). Upon his return he entered Cambridge, where he played the experienced sailor-poet, began work on his first novel, Ultramarine, and started serious drinking.

The literary Lowry was founded on poetic rather than narrative talents. He was heavily influenced by the complex psychological lyricism of Conrad Aiken. Poet Aiken was to become Lowry's friend, surrogate father and even baby sitter. At one stage Lowry's father, worried about his son's disorderly ways, hired Aiken at $100 a month to keep an eye on Malcolm.

Biographer Day shows a good deal of discernment when treating Lowry as a charming poseur. He quotes some apt lines from Auden's In Praise of Limestone that characterize those youths who are unable To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral/ And not to be pacified by a clever line/ Or a good lay.

Lowry spent much of the '30s and early '40s following Aiken to America or visiting friends clustered in quiet, inexpensive towns in Spain and Mexico. He was by most accounts great, though trying, company. Aiken's wife constantly feared that he would absentmindedly set fire to his mattress or break a leg falling downstairs. "He moved like a somnambulist, his blue blazer spotted and rumpled, a necktie holding up his trousers," she recalled. Another friend remembers Lowry morosely entering a London restaurant with a dead white rabbit in a suitcase. Like Lenny, the moron in Of Mice and Men, Lowry had broken the animal's neck while fondling it.

Alcoholism landed Lowry in the Skid Row ward at New York's Bellevue Hospital, a searing experience that became the subject of his novella Lunar Caustic. He was also jailed and deported from Mexico, the scene of Under the Volcano, a novel that took ten years, at least four revisions, and the love, patience and help of Lowry's second wife, Margerie Bonner, a former Hollywood actress. Given Day's cool, unenthusiastic and quite accurate assessment of Lowry's poetry and stories, it comes as something of a surprise to find him pulling out all the stops for Under the Volcano. "The greatest religious novel of this century," Day proclaims.

The claim is eloquent and sincere. But next to Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory, Under the Volcano is far too hermetic and selfabsorbed. To be sure, its theme is the pathetic death of a talented alcoholic who discovers that his tragedy lay in failing to realize that salvation was not in heaven but in loving on earth. Lowry's vision of heaven and hell is not religious but symbolic in a rather overly literary way. This is to say nothing of his lavish, interior decorator's use of mysticism and the occult. The novel does have considerable power and cohesiveness. But it is the cohesiveness of a desperately inventive mind that bends all to fit its private torment. It is not condescending to say, however, that Under the Volcano is the century's greatest novel about alcoholism, written by a man who deserves--and gets from Biographer Day--understanding, sympathy and respect.

. R.Z. Sheppard

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