Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry, writer. 28 July 1909 – 26 June 1957

"My secrets are of the grave, and must be kept, and this is how I sometimes think of myself...as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world. But the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course, but in the heart..." Extract from "Under The Volcano".

Malcolm Lowry was born near Liverpool, Cheshire, England in 1909 and educated at The Leys School and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He came from a family of four boys all of whom described their mother as cold and distant, something Lowry would carry with him for the rest of his adult life.

Between school and university at the age of 17, Lowry enrolled as a deckhand and sailed to the far east. This experience provided the material for his first novel Ultramarine which was published in 1933. It is the story of a privileged young man and his need to be accepted, by his shipmates. The story takes place during 48-hours on board a tramp steamer, the Oedipus Tyrannus, “outward bound for Hell.” The ship is caught in a furious tempest and the experience of the terrified animals aboard ship, being transported to western Zoo's from the far East brings to life for the first time Lowry's extraordinary prose and his relationship with subjects of death and the descent to hell. Like most of Lowry’s work it is a semi - autobiographical work, and contains themes he would later develop in "Under the Volcano"(1947).

By the time Lowry came to start work on "Under The Volcano" he was 27, living in Mexico, separated from his first wife, and already an alcoholic on the slow hellish slide that would end with his suicide at the age of 48 from an overdose of gin and barbiturate sleeping tablets.

"Under The Volcano" was published in 1947 after many rejections and re-writes, and at the time was hailed as the successor to James Joyces "Ulysees". Lowry was described as a genius, but all of this merely added to his unabated alcoholism and mental instability. He re-married and moved to British Colombia, settling in a lakeside cabin which eventually burnt down. Lowry was a haunted man and it was this interior, hellish landscape that he couldn't escape from no matter where he settled.

Despite the agonies of his addiction to alcohol, Lowry wrote and worked nearly constantly. In many ways, the only other artist to compare Lowry to, in his self destruction and constant seeking for salvation from himself, is the painter Jackson Pollock. The difference being that it is regarded Pollock created his best work during a long period of abstinence from alcohol, where as alcohol fueled and fired Lowry's writing. Indeed it has been said of "Under The Volcano", that no other book captures the life of the alcoholic quite as acutely and in such raw and unnerving detail.

Of Lowry's other work, the novella "Lunar Caustic" really brings home the true cost of Lowry's alcoholism. It’s the story of Bill Plantagenet who, after a long night’s drinking, awakens to find himself in New York’s notorious Bellevue psychiatric hospital (based on events taken from Lowry's earlier life in New York) surrounded by the truly dispossessed and insane. The story is as much about Lowry as it is about the “anxieties of the age he lived in.” Early versions were published in literary magazines, and Lowry eventually created a novella he thought too painful to publish in his own lifetime.

Malcolm Lowry seems to have slipped into obscurity when compared to other writer's of his generation, perhaps owing to his short life and relatively small amount of printed work, but it is undeniable that "Under The Volcano" is indeed a work of genius, to be read and re-read, and that no other work exists like it to this day.

In 1976, Malcolm Lowry's life and his greatest work were the subject of an Oscar nominated documentary, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. It is a brilliantly paced and unflinching look at the man, his life, his work and the demons that possessed and drove him. With readings from the late Richard Burton and interviews with family members, colleagues, friends and his second wife Marjorie Bonner, the film brings Lowry's pain and neurosis to life in vivid and unsettling detail. To truly understand the work and life off this great writer, and his 'dark night of the soul', read "Under The Volcano", then read it again.