Malcolm Lowry's life and writing

Personal life and conditions

Lowry is widely recognized as an important writer who effectively articulated the spiritual desolation of the individual in the 20th cent. While still a student at Cambridge he wrote his first novel, Ultramarine (1933), later reworked and published in final form in 1962. (Grace p.45) His reputation is founded on his second novel, Under the Volcano (1947), a subtle and complex study of the dissolution of an Englishman's character. Set in Mexico during a 12-hour period on the Day of the Dead, the novel is highly autobiographical. Like his hero Geoffrey Firmin, Lowry was an alcoholic whose addiction all but destroyed his family life and caused him to seek peace in such disparate locales as the United States, British Columbia, and Mexico. (Grace p.15) Clarence Malcolm Lowry (LOW-ree) was the son of a rich British industrialist, Arthur Osborne Lowry, and was supported meagerly by his father throughout his life. After his early years, Lowry lived among the poor; however, he was partly distinguished from his neighbors by his receipt of monthly paternal stipends—an alienating situation that he could not leave behind as easily as he eventually deleted his first name. Indeed, his alienation also had various roots in his childhood, including his being largely or wholly blind from nine to thirteen, occasioning much bullying by the other boys in the private schools where his parents left him from the age of seven onward. At eighteen, he sailed to the Far East as a cabin boy, teased by the other sailors because of his father's wealth. His most notable alienation, however, was that from the age of fourteen he remained a heavy drinker, to the horror of his Methodist father, a teetotaler. This alienation often expressed itself in physical and psychological wandering. (Gabrial p.18)

Lowry returned from his cabin-boy experience, first to German studies in Bonn, then to a writing apprenticeship with Conrad Aiken in the United States, and then for somewhat longer to Cambridge University, from which he vacationed by working on a Norwegian freighter in order to meet the pro-Communist novelist Nordahl Grieg, author of Skibet gaar videre. The only relative success of Lowry's university studies was his thesis, the novel Ultramarine, published in 1933, but to indifferent reviews. That year, he had a reunion with Aiken in Europe, where Lowry met and married Jan Gabrial, an American. This was a fairly productive period, with Lowry placing his short fiction in the American magazine Story. (Costa p.17) By 1935, however, his drinking had caused him to be committed briefly to Bellevue Hospital, and his marriage was floundering. In 1936, he tried unsuccessfully to save his marriage during a trip to Mexico, where he was inspired to begin the long process of writing Under the Volcano (1947). (Grace p.45) In 1937, Lowry spent two months with Aiken, a reunion that also significantly influenced Under the Volcano, as well as Aiken's Ushant: An Essay (1952), where Lowry appears as the drunken character Hambo. Indeed, Aiken and ...