The Albatross of Self Hear Us 0 Lord From Heaven
Thy Dwelling Place. By Malcolm Lowry. (Cape, 18s.) 'Le style c'est l'homme. But who is this man? 'An Englishman who is a Scotchman who is Norwegian who is a Canadian who is a Negro at heart from Dahomey who is married to an American who is on a French ship in distress which has been built by Americans and who finds at last that he is a Mexican dreaming of the White Cliffs of Dover.'
Thus, Malcolm Lowry emerges from the thicket of his aliases in 'Through the Panama,' the most brilliant narrative in Hear Us 0 Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, a first post- humous collection of his writings. Its publishers have rather arbitrarily designated it as 'three short novels and four stories,' but the forms are not important. For what we rediscover in this book is the same bright, doomed, hallucinated world first glimpsed in Lowry's superb Under the Volcano, which has just been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic.
As always, the fictions are concealed autobiography. That dreaming Mexican began life as an English public school boy, spent a Year at sea, returned to Cambridge to write Ultramarine, his first novel, and then, in an ex- patriate career which makes tourists of Isher- wood and Auden, was washed up over a twenty-year period on the wastelands of New York, Hollywood, Mexico and Dollarton, British Columbia. Defenceless as the little toy boat in the first story of this collection, he remained at sea all his life; at sea in his emotions and in his compulsive drinking; a man filled, in his own words, with 'the inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are; the billows of inexhaustible anguish, haunted by the insatiable albatross of self.'
Yet this odd-man-out of his literary genera- tion fought the albatross in a dozen differing dis- guises and found ways to narrate his lostness as few expatriate writers have ever done. He did not always succeed in vanquishing the albatross, but when he did, notably in his persona of Geoffrey Firmin, His Majesty's dip- somaniac ex-consul in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, the note of self-pity and self-doubt disappeared and he produced a novel which, .in Edmund Wilson's phrase, 'has for its subject the forces that dwell within man and lead him to look upon himself with terror.'
This first posthumous collection deals with the Consul in varying disguises and in happier times. In The Bravest Boat' he is one Sigurd Storlesen, strolling in Vancouver's Stanley Park with the archetypal Lowry woman (pretty, gay, understanding). They admire the park's flora and fauna, stare with distaste at the city of Van- couver (disguised under the alias of Enochville- port) with its .'new beer parlors resembling gigantic emerald-lit public lavatories for both sexes.' They visit the zoo and reminisce about a home-made toy boat which he, a small boy, once set defenceless on the waves at Seattle and she, a small girl, found twelve years later, washed up in Vancouver Bay. They seem happy in these moments. Yet through the story, as 'through all the stories in this book, runs the sound of a freighter's engines: Frere Jacques! Frere Jacques! It is the sound of nemesis.
In 'Through the Panama,' superbly done in a Stephen Dedalus diary form, he is disguised as Sigbjorn Wilderness, a writer on a freighter voyage with his wife from Vancouver to Eng- land. The crew is French, the atmosphere con- genial and his wife (Primrose, this time) is in high spirits. But soon the 'engines sound their
note of menace, storms blow up—'great doctor of divinity's gowns of seas furling to leeward, the foam like lamb's wool'—the ship drifts rudderless, the writer is drunk. Frere Jacques! Frere Jacques! /Doom, doom, doom! /Doom, doom, doom!
In 'Strange Comfort Afforded by the Pro- fession,' we are in Rome, in calmer weather. Sigbjorn Wilderness (on a Guggenheim Fellow- ship) is taking notes on the contents of Keats's house. (Lowry makes masterly use of billboards and public notices to create a minatory sense of place.) Sigbjorn retires to a bar to read over his notes; comes on one about the Mamertine prison: the lower is the true prison. What does it mean? Horror at his own musings rises heavily within him. Grappas are quickly consumed and the story dies in a drunkard's laughter which turns into a bout of coughing. The Consul is again onstage.
Once more in Rome, under the unlikely pseudonym of Kennish Drumgold Cosnahan, a Manx writer half in love with his recent ephemeral success and terrified that it will not be repeated, we visit a zoo and experience a mystical easing of the tension; but again, sig- nificantly, a bottle of wine plays its part in the prescription. In The Present Estate of Pompeii,' disguised this time as Roderick McGregor Fair- haven, a Canadian schoolmaster (the archetypal wife is now called Tansy), we inspect the ruins while the slow musings of the protagonist carry us back to British Columbia and the ship's song of doom. Vesuvius may erupt at any moment. In British Columbia itself, there is, at most, an uneasy peace. First, as Sigbjorn Wilderness in 'Gin and Goldenrod,' and nameless at last (but disguised as a composer and former jazz musician) in the short novel entitled 'The Forest Path to the Spring,' Lowry writes a prose poem to the happiness of the squatter's life, the joys of hard labour, temperance, the love of a good woman and the wild beauties of the forest. But the freighter engines sound across the bay: Frere Jacques! Frere Jacques! A cougar lies in wait for him on his way back from the forest spring: he finds a rope on the path and wonders, appalled, if with this same rope he was once tempted to kill himself. Even though the novel ends on a note of lyrical affirmation, we have glimpsed once again the dread, doomed figure of the Consul.
Lowry believed that the agonies of the drunkard find a close parallel in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his powers. Though the note of affirmation in the joy of life sounds again and again in these writings, we are re- minded of the desperate cheerfulness of a man who is recovering from a frightening depression. Wives must always be gay and good; nature must always be lovely and life-enhancing for behind every moment of this self-forgetting lurks the iron shadow of the albatross. And so, almost despite himself, his subject becomes, as always, the fall of man, his remorse, his in- cessant struggle 'towards the light, under the weight of the past, which is his destiny.'
In a preface to the French edition of Under the Volcano, Lowry wrote: 'The idea I cherished in my heart was to create a pioneer work in its own class, and to write at last an authentic drunkard's story.' He said blackly of his book that 'It can be thought of as a kind of machine; it works, you may be sure, for I have discovered that to my own expense.' And in these stories as in his novel, by himself becoming the man he wrote about, out of his agony and travail he produced some of the most enduring work of any English writer of our time.
BRIAN MOORE
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