Remaking the Voyage: New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and in Ballast To
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Remaking the Voyage LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 86 REMAKING THE VOYAGE New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and In Ballast to the White Sea Edited by HELEN TOOKEY and BRYAN BIGGS Remaking the Voyage LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2020 Liverpool University Press The right of Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-183-9 cased ISBN 978-1-800-34821-9 limp epdf ISBN 978-1-78962-763-3 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library, which has been made possible by the generous support of Liverpool John Moores University. In memory of Vik Doyen 1942–2018 Contents contents Acknowledgements ix Contributors xi Introduction 1 Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs 1 Haunted by Books: Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine and In Ballast to the White Sea 21 Patrick A. McCarthy 2 ‘We’ve got a bastard duke on board’: Class, Fantasy and Politics in Malcolm Lowry 31 Ben Clarke 3 Malcolm Lowry and the End of Communism 47 Mark Crawford 4 In Ballast to the White Sea: The Springboard for Russian Influences on Malcolm Lowry’s Visionary Intellect 61 Nigel H. Foxcroft 5 In Ballast to the White Sea: A Plunge into the Matrix 77 Annick Drösdal-Levillain 6 Walking with Shadows: Index, Inscription and Event in Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea 95 Cian Quayle vii remaking the voyage 7 ‘Hva vet vi?’: In Ballast to the White Sea and the Weighting of Evidence 119 Chris Ackerley 8 Identity and Doubles: Being and Writing in Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea 135 Pierre Schaeffer 9 The Lost Other: Malcolm Lowry’s Creative Process 151 Catherine Delesalle-Nancey 10 Infernal Discourse: Narrative Poetics among the Ashes of In Ballast to the White Sea and Under the Volcano 167 Christopher Madden 11 ‘Leaning forward eagerly’: Malcolm Lowry’s Moviegoers and In Ballast to the White Sea 183 Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen 12 From In Ballast to the White Sea to Rumbo al Mar Blanco: The Spanish Reception of Malcolm Lowry’s Unfinished Novel 199 Alberto Lena 13 ‘Glimpses of Immortality’: Our Voyages with Vik Doyen 217 Sherrill Grace Index 223 viii Acknowledgements Acknowledgements The starting point for this book was the International Malcolm Lowry Conference held in Liverpool in July 2017. We are grateful to its hosts, Liverpool John Moores University and Bluecoat, for supporting the conference, and to all who participated in it. Particular thanks go to Sherrill Grace, who not only gave the keynote but subsequently encouraged the idea of Remaking the Voyage, and who – following the sad and unexpected death of Vik Doyen in 2018 – put together such a moving tribute to him for the book. All the writers we invited to contribute to this new volume responded immediately and enthusiastically. We were delighted to receive such an insightful and complementary set of chapters, which include contri- butions by eminent and long-standing Lowry scholars and perspectives from the fields of poetics, Russian literature, modernism, cinema studies, photography and political theory. We hope this book will stimulate further discussion and study of In Ballast to the White Sea in relation to Lowry’s wider oeuvre. We are grateful to the team we worked with at Liverpool University Press, the manuscript readers for their very useful suggestions, Carnegie Book Production, and copy-editor Andrew Kirk. We are also grateful to LJMU for supporting an open access edition of the book, and to Tate for licensing the cover image by Eric Ravilious. This book comes out of an ongoing project, which began in 2009, of ‘re-placing’ Malcolm Lowry on his native Merseyside – that is, exploring the ways in which the port of Liverpool and the Wirral peninsula of his youth continued to resonate in his writing throughout his life. Through a public programme of activities organised annually as the ‘Lowry Lounge’, our aim has been to raise awareness of Lowry locally as a major twentieth-century writer and a figure to be celebrated. This project could not have happened without ‘the Firminists’ – Mark Goodall, Robert ix remaking the voyage Sheppard, Ailsa Cox and Colin Dilnot – nor indeed without the Lounge ‘regulars’ who have supported and participated in the events. In the context of this book, we owe a huge amount in particular to Colin Dilnot, whose researches into the background material and physical landscapes of In Ballast to the White Sea helped inform Chris Ackerley’s annotations to the critical edition of the novel. They have also been central to our understanding, as outlined in the introduction to this book, of the ways in which the recovery of In Ballast casts new light on Lowry as a political writer of the 1930s and a writer deeply grounded in the social, political and geographical landscapes of the north-west of England. Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs Liverpool, April 2020 x Contributors Contributors Chris Ackerley is Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His field is modernism, and his speciality annotation. He co-authored A Companion to Under the Volcano (1984), and the Grove/ Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (2005). He has annotated several works by Beckett, notably Murphy and Watt (which he edited for Faber, 2009), and the Textes pour rien / Texts for Nothing (Garnier, 2018), a bilingual annotation. As part of an international team he recently annotated three Lowry volumes (Swinging the Maelstrom, In Ballast to the White Sea and The 1940 Under the Volcano) for the University of Ottawa Press. Bryan Biggs is Artistic Director of Bluecoat, Liverpool’s centre for the contemporary arts, where he has curated exhibitions and other contem- porary visual art and performance work for forty years. He also writes about art and popular culture, and has edited and co-edited several books including Art in a City Revisited, Liverpool City of Radicals and (with Helen Tookey) Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World. In 2009 he curated a gallery exhibition and programme of events celebrating Lowry’s centenary, and since then has coordinated the annual Lowry Lounge event, at which he often DJs. A fine art graduate of Liverpool Polytechnic, he continues to make art and does a drawing a day. Ben Clarke is Associate Professor of Post-1900 British Literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is author of Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (2007), co-author of Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (2011), and co-editor xi contributors of Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice(2018). He has published on authors including Virginia Woolf, Jack Hilton, Edward Upward and H.G. Wells, and subjects including public houses, mining communities, Englishness and Western representations of Taiwan. Mark Crawford is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Athabasca University and a specialist in Canadian politics and government, public policy and political theory. During the completion of his doctorate at Oxford University from 1990 to 1995, he taught at Central European University in Prague, Jagiellonian University in Cracow and Kiev-Mohyla Academy in Kiev, and later drew upon his experiences in post-communist Europe for his courses on democratic transitions and democratic theory. His current research interests are in the areas of health policy, trade policy, democratic reform and the intersection of political theory and literature. Catherine Delesalle-Nancey is a Professor at University Jean Moulin-Lyon 3 (France) where she teaches modernist and contemporary British literature and translation. She started working on exile in Malcolm Lowry’s works for her PhD thesis in 1995, and has published articles on various aspects of his oeuvre. In 2007 she received a grant to work on Lowry’s original first edition of Ultramarine at the University of British Columbia. Her latest major contribution to Lowry studies is a book entitled La Divine Comédie Ivre: Répétition, ressassement et reprise dans l’oeuvre en prose de Malcolm Lowry (Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2010). She also writes regularly on Joseph Conrad. Annick Drösdal-Levillain has taught English at the University of Strasbourg. Her research has mainly been focused on the ‘Lowryan echo-system’, cosmic resonances in Lowry’s work, tracking down the symptoms and metaphors embedded in the body of the text, and exploring landscapes and soulscapes. She has contributed to several essay collections including Lowry’s Poetics of Space (ed. Richard Lane and Miguel Mota, 2016), La Fureur et la Grâce. Lectures de Malcolm Lowry (ed. Josiane Paccaud, 2017) and L’Epoque Conradienne n° 40 (ed. Nathalie Martinière and Catherine Delesalle, 2017). She is presently working on the Norse connections and influences revolving around Lowry. Nigel H. Foxcroft is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Russian and European Studies at the University of Brighton. He has published xii contributors extensively on Malcolm Lowry, including The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry: Souls and Shamans for Lexington Books, USA in 2019. His journal articles and book chapters – in English and Russian – on modern Anglo-American literature (J.M. Coetzee, Malcolm Lowry and Toni Morrison), Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Anton Chekhov), and Russian historical linguistics have appeared in France, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Taiwan and the UK.