Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry with an introduction by Stephen Spender 3/692 and an afterword by William T. Vollmann To Margerie, my wife Contents Introduction by Stephen Spender Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Afterword by William T. Vollmann A Biography of Malcolm Lowry Introduction by Stephen Spender IN 1936 MALCOLM LOWRY wrote a short story called “Under the Volcano.” It is the account of the excursion to the Fiesta at Chapultepec of a man called only the Consul, accompan- ied by his daughter, Yvonne, and her fiancé, Hugh. The outing is brutally interrupted by a scene of murder. The body of an Indian—his hat pulled over his eyes to conceal a wound, from which blood flows over his face—is discovered lying under a hedge on the roadside. The bus in which the three are travelling is stopped, the passengers get out, and, owing to the Mexican laws which can make those who go to the assistance of the victim of violence accessories after the fact, they are unable to do anything to help the Indian. Be- fore the disaster, the Consul, who is a drunkard, has no- ticed, conspiratorially, a fellow passenger, a pelado (“pela- dos,” he thought, “the peeled ones, were those who did not have to be rich to prey on the really poor”). The pelado was “very drunk indeed, and he felt a queer envy of him, albeit 7/692 it was perhaps a stir of fellowship.” After the encounter with the corpse, the Consul is the one to notice that the pelado has stolen the dying man’s money, with which, indeed, he basely and impertinently pays his fare. The bus arrives at the Fiesta, and the Consul and Hugh notice the pelado swagger into a pulquería, “stepping high and with a fatuous smile of triumph on his face.” The plot of the novel published more than ten years later under the same name is complete in this story. It in- tegrates the tragic fatalism of Mexico (the dying Indian un- aided, the despoiler of the corpse triumphant) with the Consul’s own situation, his mind guiltily preoccupied with the question of where he is going to get his next drink, his companions involved in their relationship which excludes him. Like Joyce’s sketch of the morning walk of a travelling salesman through Dublin, which was the seed of Ulysses, Lowry’s rather sketchy story grew into a masterpiece. In the book, two essential and revealing changes have been made. Yvonne is no longer the Consul’s daughter. She is his wife, who, having left him on account of his dipsomania, has come back. Her fiancé, Hugh, has become the Consul’s half-brother. Putting the two fictions side by side, the ambivalence of the father-daughter relationship, and that of the rival who is also half-brother, throws light on the Consul. The novel explores the Consul’s past and 8/692 present, relates his private doom to the tragic fatalism of the Mexican scene: what was an episode extends into a calvary. At the outset here, I should dispose of what may seem to some readers a serious objection to this novel: the Consul’s dipsomania. A book in which for three quarters of the time the hero is drunk may seem too special, too much a case history. It is not, they may protest, about normal life, and therefore it does not concern them. The objection has some weight. In fact, in the last scenes of the book I think that the disintegration of the Consul does—perhaps inevit- ably—tend to “take over” too much—the Consul becomes an object, the tragic ending seems too fragmented. But it is only at the very end that the Consul seems his own special case. The fragmentariness of this last section rather serves to underline the control and lucidity of all that happens un- til the Consul’s death. For this is a most lucid novel. Under the Volcano is, it is true, perhaps the best account of a “drunk” in fiction. The Consul’s addiction is treated as a kind of tragic game, in which there are as many moves as moods, played by the Consul to deceive the oth- ers, but still more to deceive himself. The root cause of his drinking is loneliness. The early pages of the book in which M. Laruelle meditates on his boyhood friendship with the Consul indicate this clearly enough. For those who seek it 9/692 out, the clinical history of the Consul’s longing for compan- ionship, fear of sex, deeply idealistic puritanism, rejection of the world, and suppressed homosexual tendency, is em- bedded in the narrative. By the time we have finished this novel we know how a drunk thinks and feels, walks and lies down, and we experience not only the befuddledness of drinking but also its moments of translucent clairvoyance, perfected expression. All the same, that Lowry elaborates the distinctions between beer and wine and Bols and the Black Mass experience of mescal is only incidental to the Consul’s real tragedy, which concerns this world in these times. Funda- mentally Under the Volcano is no more about drinking than King Lear is about senility. It is about the Consul, which is another matter, for what we feel about him is that he is great and shattered. We also feel that he could have written the novel which describes his downfall, and this means that, considered as an art of consciousness attained, this is no downfall, but his triumph. Most of all, Under the Volcano is one of a number of works about the breakdown of values in the twentieth cen- tury. Just as the collapse of power in King Lear is envi- sioned through the shattered mind of the king, so in Under the Volcano is the tragic despair of Mexico, and, beyond Mexico, the hopelessness of Europe torn by the Spanish 10/692 Civil War, seen magnified and distorted in the minds of the Consul and of Hugh. The Consul, then, is a modern hero—or anti- hero—reflecting an extreme external situation within his own extremity. His neurosis becomes diagnosis, not just of himself but of a phase of history. It is artistically justified because neurosis, seen not just as one man’s case history, but within the context of a wider light, is the dial of the instrument that records the effects of a particular stage of civilisation upon a civilised individual: for the Consul is es- sentially a man of cultivation. The most sensitive individual, although not the most normal, may provide the most representative expression of a breakdown which affects other people on levels of which they may be scarcely con- scious. Yet seeing the needle on the disc of the recording instrument, they know that what it registers is also in some sense their own case. So Under the Volcano has to be considered in the context of the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s which pro- duced Ulysses, The Waste Land, The Orators, and other works about the modern “breakdown of values.” At the same time it is utterly different from these works, for the reason that Lowry was—to an extent discon- certing even to himself—different as a man and in his approach to writing from Joyce and Eliot—most of all from 11/692 those 1930s writers whom he considered the “schoolmas- ters of poetry.” The difference was that Lowry’s approach to writing was autobiographic, personal, subjective even, whereas the aim of writers like Joyce and Eliot, whom he adored, dreaded, imitated, misunderstood, was to invent a modern “objective” literature which was purged of autobiographic, subjective elements. Joyce, Eliot, and Pound aimed at writing which was “an escape from,” not “an expression of,” personality. Their devices of symbolism and mythology, their attitude towards tradition, their detachment and irony, were all directed towards an ever greater objectivisa- tion. In the consciousness of these poets and novelists there seems the map of an immense landscape with, on one side of a central divide, the order of the past, on the other, the chaos of the present. According to their aesthetic, the poet is an instrument of sensibility acted upon by the situation in which he lives, relating past order to present chaos, exercising judgement, but not communicating his personality. His aim is to create a work of classical objectivity in which the order of the past is re-created, in a form which reflects the fragmentation of the present. The poet himself wears an impersonal ironic mask. The remoteness of Malcolm Lowry from such intel- lectualised aims becomes apparent if one compares his use 12/692 of myths and symbols in Under the Volcano with Joyce’s and Eliot’s. Several critics have pointed out that Under the Volcano is crammed with references to myths. An example occurs early on in the book. M. Laruelle, the French film producer, who was a boyhood friend of Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul, and who later falls in love with Yvonne, thinks over the events of the Consul’s death, several years later, as he walks along the plateau on which lies Quauhnahuac: Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner.

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