Malcolm Lowry Biography and List of Works

English novelist, short story writer, and poet, best known for his book UNDER THE VOLCANO (1947), a 20th century classic. Like many of Lowry's publications, the novel is highly autobiographical. Lowry spent his post-Volcano years drinking and planning a cycle of novels built around his masterwork.

Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
And died playing the ukelele.
(Epitaph)

Lowry was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, as the son of Arthur Lowry, a wealthy cotton broker. Like his three brothers, he attended public boarding schools. Lowry was educated at Caldicote School, Hertfordshire, and at the Leys school, Cambridge. Rebelling against his bourgeois upbringing, Lowry interrupted his academic studies and went to sea to work as a deckhand. Later he continued his studies at the University of Cambridge. He obtained a first-class degree in English and wrote his first novel ULTRAMARINE (1933), which received a mixed critical reaction. It drew upon material from his voyage to Yokohama on the S.S. Myrrh's. The book showed a considerable debt to Blue Voyage by his friend Conrad Aiken, in whose autobiography Ushant (1952) he was to appear as Hambro.

Lowry travelled to Spain with Aiken and met the American writer Jan Gabrial. They married in 1934 and moved in 1935 to the United States. He spent some time in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Lowry wrote the novel LUNAR CAUSTIC (1961) and went to Mexico, which became the settings of Under the Volcano. In Cuernavaca and the nearby volcanoes he found the perfect landscape for his drunken Divine Comedy. The snowy peak of Popocatepetl was for him a symbol of aspiration, and the deep woods in the surrounding area formed the opposite, lower depths. By the time Lowry left Mexico, his first marriage was in ruins. In Los Angeles he met his second wife, the novelist Margerie Bonner. In 1939 Lowry moved to Dollarton, British Columbia, where he built a squatters shack in which to live. The hut burned down in 1944.

After a short visit to Mexico in 1945, the Lowry's returned to Canada, where they stayed until 1954,before moving to England. During his last years Lowry planned a modern Divine Comedy, a sequence of seven novels built around Under the Volcano, titled The Voyage That Never Ends. Simultaneously Lowry worked on a number of manuscripts, unable to bring his plans to completion.

"Neurosis, of one kind and another, is stamped on almost every word he writes, both neurosis and a kind of fierce health. Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth and it is this that adds to his isolation and so to his sense of guilt."
(From Hear Us O Lord heaven thy dwelling place, 1962)

By 1940 Lowry had written an early edition of Under the Volcano. The next five years he spent rewriting and deepening the magical and mythical elements, especially after meeting a Cabbalist, Charles Stansfield-Jones, spiritual son of Aleister Crowley. The novel went through innumerable revisions, many with Margerie Lowry's help, and was published by Jonathan Cape ten years after the author started to work on it.

The story is set in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. It depicts the last twelve hours on November 2, 1938, in the life of Geoffrey Firmin; a British Consul in a Mexican city situated under two volcanoes. Firming is an alcoholic who has rejected the love of his wife Priscilla and his friends, and has taken to drink as an escape from the inhumanity of the modern world and his own sense of failure. Other central characters are Jacques Laurelled, failed filmmaker and adulterous lover, who looks back on the dramatic events of the Day of the Dead, and Hugh, the consul's half-brother, an anti-Fascist journalist much preoccupied by the Spanish Civil War. The novel - partly written in stream of consciousness - shows influence of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce. Despite the gloomy subject matter, the book is written in a lyrical style and is full of humour.

  ...Suborn realized that he really must be pretty tight if he was talking as lightly as this, could dismiss that dreadful incident as lightly as that. 'Still I made my Consul get into enough trouble here for ten.'
   'Your Consul. What did you do to him?'
   'My Consul in the book.'
   'What happened to him?'
   'Someone shot him and then they threw him down a ravine.'
   'Bad luck always waits you in the barranca,' Eddie said grimly. 'How did he come to get in that spot?'
   'He drank. Well, Hippolyte knows all about the Consul by now.'
   'Yes. I liked him very much. I was sorry to see him go. I fact it was my opinion that your character Yvonne should have gone over the ravine and the Consul and his half-brother lived happily ever afterward, the house and the mescal and everything to make them happy.'
(from Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, 1968)

Lowry's alcoholism and mental disorders were finally treated with lobotomy. He died in Ripe, Sussex, England on June 27, 1957, of an overdose of sleeping tablets, and was buried in the graveyard of the village church. A number of Lowry's works were published posthumously. In the unfinished novel DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN MY FRIEND IS LAID, (1968) the protagonist Sigbjørn Wilderness is Lowry's alter ego - a writer unable to write, whose voyage of self-destruction ends against all odds with a possible happy ending. The collected edition of Lowry's poetry, still undervalued branch of his literary production, was published in 1992.

For further reading: The Making of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" by Frederick Asals (1997); Forest of Symbols by Patrick McCarthy (1994); The 1940 "Under the Volcano", ed. by Paul Tiessen and Miguel Mota (1994); Pursued by Furies by G. Bowker (1993); Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver Days by Sheryl Salloum (1987); Lowry, a Biography by Douglas Day (1973); Lowry by Tony Kilgallin (1973); Lowry: the Man and His Work by G. Woodcock (1971)

ULTRAMARINE, (1933)