MALCOLM LOWRY
Sue,—Frank Tuohy's introduction to this greatly gifted writer is as penetrating as might have been expected; but it contains some errors of fact, which should perhaps be repaired immediately, to avoid future misunderstanding.
For instance, it is misleading to say that Lowry 'ran away to sea.' He left the Leys School, Cam- bridge, at the normal leaving age in 1927 (he was born in 1909) and went to sea, working as deckhand and trimmer, for about eighteen months; but he was driven to the Liverpool docks in his solid father's solid motor-car. He had no ambition to be anything other than an ordinary seaman; it was a literary, not a marine, apprenticeship; to go to sea was a psychological need, appreciated by his father. It is also misleading to say that 'he wrote Ultramarine a year later.' The first draft was completed by the time he turned up at Conrad Aiken's apartment in Cam- bridge (Mass.) in' July, 1929. They worked on it together, and I saw the results in November of that year in Cambridge (Eng.). Lowry continued to work on it for the next three years. The final version was completed in the summer of 1932 when it was ac- cepted for publication. The typescript of the fair copy was stolen from lan Parsons's motor-car, and the whole thing had to be re-written from the penulti- mate version. ,It was published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, and represented nearly five years' work.
He went to Paris that autumn, married his first wife in January, 1934, and wrote several short stories in Paris and Chartres before going to New York in the summer. In New York he started a new novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, which was com- pleted by the, time he came to stay with me in Hollywood in October, 1936. He left for Mexico just before Christmas and settled at Cuernavaca, the Quauhnahuac of Under the Volcano. His first mar- riage broke up early in 1938, and his life became
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a prolongation of the consul's last nightmarish day, but he completed the first draft of Under the Volcano before tLe end of the year. In 1939 he left Mexico and wrote a second version of the book' in Holly- wood. That autumn he remarried and settled in British Columbia; the third and final version of the novel occupied the four years 1941-44, when he was at Donation. With intervals for travel this was his centre until 1954, when he finally returned to Europe. It is misleading to say that 'he spent the greater part of his writing life in the poverty of a squatter's shack near Vancouver.' Half of it, yes; but his writing life was continuous from the time he left school until his death in Sussex four years ago. Incidentally, the shack was largely built by himself on a miraculously idyllic site, since ruined; and the poverty was only relative, as from the time he went down from Cambridge he continued to receive a decent allowance from his father, whose principal heir he eventually became. Also, the success of Under the Volcano (1947) was phenomenal every- where except in England, where it received reviews of cretinous inadequacy.
101IN DAVENPORT
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