World Within The Word Read online

  There is a cantina at every corner of the Consul’s world. Sin and innocence, guilt and salvation, shape Lowry’s private square of opposition, and if sanctuary and special knowledge are its gifts in one guise, and gaiety and relaxation its gifts in another, catercorner from church and gym are brothel and prison. Here men are fastened to themselves as though they were both shackle and chain, their eyes on images: above the bar to advertise Cafeaspirina a woman wearing a scarlet brassiere is depicted reclining on a scrolled divan. Outside the cantina you can see the mountain, alongside runs a deep ravine. Symbols, surely, but remote and close, steep and frightening, just the same. El Farolito, with its diminishing inner rooms, the nesting innercubes of Hell, is the last cantina, sitting in the shadow of Popocatepetl as though under that volcano. There the Consul will wad himself into a slut the way we wedge with cardboard a skinny candle in its holder. There he will be mistaken for an anarchist, a Jew, a thief, a spy. There he will be murdered by backwoodsy fascists. Who has a hand upon his penis now?

  Wrider? you anticrista. Sí, you anticrista prik …

  And Juden …

  Chingar …

  Cabrón …

  You are no a de

  wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in

  Méjico …

  You no wrider …

  You Al Capón. You a

  Jew chingao …

  You are a spider.

  In the road in front of El Farolito the Consul is shot with a Colt ’17. “Christ, what a dingy way to die,” the Consul says, but that is merely his opinion. His body is thrown into a barranca, pariah dog tossed after him. Despite the fact that the scene is excessively operatic and the writing wails like an endlessly expiring soprano, there is no death in recent literature with more significance.

  Las Manos de Orlac

  con Peter Lorre

  Several leaves from one of Lowry’s little notebooks are reproduced in Douglas Day’s fine biography,1 and on one we can decipher:

  The psychology & horror of the shakes. The real horror is in the hands. All the poison to go down into the hands, mental and physical. Burning hot. There seems almost a buzzing inside your hands. Fear of coming into dining room with shakes, especially with captain present.

  Eventually he could not hold pen or pencil, not even to sign his name, and the hands which were so mysteriously stained, not like Lady Macbeth’s or Orlac’s were by the blood of murder, but—who knows?—by the masturbation of the bottle (the crystal phallus, in Berryman’s phrase), these hands he placed on their backs on his desk, his weight standing into them as he dictated to Margerie, hours at a stretch sometimes and of course day after day, until the knuckles became callused as an ape’s and the veins in his legs ballooned so badly he entered a hospital to have them stripped.2 They were swollen as if he’d had babies, although by then he’d only engendered Ultramarine, and the Volcano was still in utero.

  These stubby clumsy hands which he hated and hid because they gave his condition away the way rings around the eyes, I remember, were supposed to, and which shook drunk or sober, often uncontrollably, were hands with their own mean will. While absentmindedly fondling a friend’s pet rabbit, they somehow break its neck, and for two days Lowry carries the corpse of the rabbit about in a small suitcase wondering what to do with it. “Look what happens when I try to touch something beautiful,” their owner complains with a self-pity perfectly misplaced.

  Yet Lowry’s not a Lenny whose mice cannot survive his caresses. Yet Lowry’s love is as murderous as the simple-minded. Yet …

  And before he will agree to enter Cambridge he persuades his father to let him go like London and O’Neill romantically to sea, so he is driven to the dock in the family Rolls while reporters watch: RICH BOY AS DECK HAND, they headline him. He goes aboard shamed and of course finds no romance in the fo’c’sle. He sleeps in something called “men’s quarters” instead. Predictably, he scrubs decks, scrapes paint, polishes brass. He observes the coolie longshoremen coupling with their women in the cargo holds. He paints a bunker black. He is despised and teased. Clumsy. Bored. He carries meals to the seamen. Is often drunk.

  Perhaps life was a forest of symbols, as Baudelaire had said, but Lowry was no lumberman. He brought his shaping signs, as a priori as the best idealist’s, to his dreams, his drunkenness, his ordinary day-to-day concerns and his desires: sex, syph, stoker, bunker, fire … hand, shame, seaman. Eventually these hands refuse the vocation offered them. A poisoned brain burns there. Trapped flies buzz. Ashamed, stained, they blush, and terrified, enraged, they shake so violently the threatened air flees through their fingers. And he would live hand to mouth all his life. A cliché. A phrase. Yet associations such as these obsess him, compel him to run in front of his own blows, to fulfil prophecies as though they were threats, and promises as though they were designs against the self, since he will die by his own hand, too … by bottle and by pill … unsteadily … la petite mort.

  Lowry is a one-book author, everyone says, and the excellence of that book is accidental because he never learned how to write; he continually started and stopped, commenced and abandoned, caught in an endless proliferation of designs, so that the more evident it became that he would never complete his great work, the grander grew his schemes: everything he wrote would enter into them, one vast voyage, long as his life, just as confusing, just as deep, with ups and downs to rival Dante; yet he was wholly absorbed in himself and consequently could not create even an alter ego able to pull on socks ahead of shoes; at the uncork of a bottle he would fall into long dull disquisitions on the powers and bewilderments of alcohol; he hammered home themes like someone angry at the nail, yet buttered his bread on both sides and every edge; then, as if determined to destroy whatever mattered most, left manuscripts about like half-eaten sandwiches, and emptied Margerie of everything except the carton she came in.

  However, when one thinks of the general sort of snacky under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions, his Proustian plans, his desire to pump into every sentence such significance as a Shelley or a Shakespeare had, to bring together on the page, like fingers in one fist, sense, sensation, impulse, need, and feeling, and finally to replace the reader’s consciousness wholly with a lackaday magician’s—drunk’s—a fraud’s—his own.

  It was not glory or money, as a writer, Lowry wanted. He simply wanted masterpieces. He had no politics, particularly, no religion, no fastidious monkey-groomed morality, no metaphysics which would fancy up for him a world with more worth and order than a shelf of cheap sale books. It is hard to believe he believed in much, though he read Goethe and Dante, dabbled in the occult, and used the Cabbala as a symbolic scheme (even if its choreography was an afterthought), and to begin with laid down a political plot for his great book like a rug he then swept a mountain over. Attitudes he had, but attitudes aren’t philosophy. Redemption through art was his real creed. He was too eager to make use of what he read to be serious about it, and like Joyce he carried back to his books every tin-shine thought he came across, the way jackdaws beak bright buttons off one’s wash. He was not profoundly acquainted with literature, either, though he was quick to name-drop: Marlowe, Maitland, or Cervantes. His work is certainly contemporary, too, in expecting the most silent creatures of its author’s reading to be loud on every tongue. And again like Joyce, like Rilke, Lowry idolized certain irrelevant Scandinavians.

  The writers he really took to … well, he absorbed Conrad Aiken’s books, unabashedly plundered his conversations, copied his life-style, both served and assaulted his person, competed for his women, occupied his home, borrowed his figure for a father. Lowry was sufficiently conscious of this habit often to deny himself any originality, and felt he had stolen from or exploited others when he had not.3 Still, we must remain suspicious of these exaggerated claims of crime, inflated and misplaced to encourage our discounting or excusing
them as so much talk, just as the Consul, about to be shot, hears himself accused:

  Norteamericano, eh?

  Inglés. You Jew.

  What the hell you think you do around here?

  You pelado, eh?

  It’s no good for your health. I shoot de twenty people.

  and then dying gorges on the accusation as only conscience can:

  Presently the word “pelado” began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh’s word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had become the pelado, the thief—yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them all was close.

  And although the account seems to be carried away by itself, as Cyrano was by his nose, it is nevertheless true that the Consul is an exploiter, because an alcoholic, in the best old sense, depends: depends from his wives like their drooping breasts, clings to his mistresses, his friends, as moisture trembles at a tumbler’s edge; depends upon the mercy of the world … relies, requests, requires … yet in the devious way the hopeless loser hopes to win by losing big, the thorough soak employs all the brutal ruses of self-righteous helplessness, and by chemically keeping himself confined “in that part used to be call: soul” makes the world seem—so subversive is this stratagem—rather to depend on him … yes, and this isn’t difficult because consciousness is the thief par excellence, removing the appearances of things without a trace, replacing the body with the spirit.

  Since the cantina is the very image of the head, the world-within which is the single subject of Malcolm Lowry’s life and work, all those anxieties and adjectives, verbs of inaction, prepositions, copulations, shadowing names and paranoid suspicions, which obsessed his creator and pursue Geoffrey Firmin—Consul, pelado, and borracho—apply perfectly to the tragedy of the Volcano: the progressive loss of consciousness which we call “getting on” and should call simply “passing out,” instead.

  To his editor, Albert Erskine:

  Dear old Albert …

  I am going steadily & even beautifully downhill: my memory misses beats at every moment, & my mornings are on all fours. Turning the whole business round in a nutshell I am only sober or merry in a whiskey bottle, & since whisky is impossible to procure you can imagine how merry I am, & lucid, & by Christ I am lucid. And merry. But Jesus. The trouble is, apart from Self, that part (which) used to be called: consciousness. I have now reached a position where every night I write 5 novels in imagination, have total recall (whatever that means too) but am unable to write a word. I cannot explain in human terms the incredible effort it has cost me to write even this silly little note, in a Breughel garden with dogs & barrels & vin kegs & chickens & sunsets & morning glory with an approaching storm & bottle of half wine.

  And now the rain! Let it come, seated as I am on Brueghel barrel by a dog’s grave crowned with dead irises. The wind is rising too, both on the ocean & in the stomach. And I have been kind to in a way I do not deserve … A night dove has started to hoot & says incessantly the word “dream, dream.” A bright idea.4

  The bus windows were like mirrors—looking out, one saw in—and Margerie and Malcolm were always on buses, or perhaps a plane, some mode of travel, a ship, a train, and even on foot they window-shopped, the glass passing them, holding its images oddly upright like bottles on a tray, though they were moving, in Lowry’s insistently recurring word, “downhill,” since the world, for him, was always on edge, the land like his work running up and down, never nicely along, even when they found a path that had taken itself pleasantly through the woods, and every journey was mostly a descent, or rather, descending was a spatial metaphor for “going in.”

  The sense of speed, of gigantic transition, of going southward, downward, over three countries, the tremendous mountain ranges, the sense at once of descent, tremendous regression, and of moving, not moving, but in another way dropping straight down the world, straight down the map, as of the imminence of something great, phenomenal, and yet the moving shadow of the plane below them, the eternal moving cross, less fleeting and more substantial than the dim shadow of the significance of what they were actually doing that Sigbjørn held in his mind: and yet it was possible only to focus on that shadow, and at that only for short periods: they were enclosed by the thing itself as by the huge bouncing machine with its vast monotonous purring, pouring din, in which they sat none too comfortably, Sigbjørn with his foot up embarrassedly, for he had taken his shoe off, a moving, deafening, continually renewed time-defeating destiny by which they were enclosed but of which they were able only to see the inside, for so to speak of the streamlined platinum-colored object itself they could only glimpse a wing, a propeller, through the small, foolish, narrow oblong windows.5

  The paragraph encloses us like the fuselage of the plane. We progress down narrow overlapping phrases toward the bottom of the page, pushing our way through adjectives which gather like onlookers at an accident. Though feelings persevere, logic is lost like loose change. We suffer symbolic transformations (soul: shade, window and eye, cross: plane, hellbent); endure sentences which have the qualities they were constructed to account for; our reading eye, as Sigbjørn’s and the shadow of the plane, flitting over the ranges the way thought in its sphere, ourselves in our cylinders, pass like ghosts on schedules, wraiths with aims.

  Faulkner’s rhetoric also reaches for the universal as though its very pawing would create the ledge, secure the handhold. It is a style so desperate to rise, it would burst its own lungs.

  And if he had not been born, mistakenly, a Leo, he would have made a perfect Pisces: swimmer, sailor, soak, souse, sponge—all that absorbent—oral, impotent, a victim of undifferentiation and the liquid element, shoreless like his writing, wallowy, encompassing, a suicide by misadventure, bottle broken, drinker, diver, prisoner of self …

  Thrice doubly indented then, Lowry’s books in consequence have no boundaries. They are endless wells down which in a deepening gloom that is its own perverse illumination the reader passes; therefore every effort to give them the shape and normal accelerations of the novel is as futile as flailing air; and you remember how deeply into Tartarus Uranus hurled the rebellious Cyclopes?…… an anvil and a petal: nine days.

  Clínica Dr. Vigil, Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos Sexos, Vías Urinarias, Trastornos Sexuales, Debilidad Sexual, Derrames Nocturnos, Emisiones Prematuras, Espermatorrea, Impotencia.

  Guilty fears follow him everywhere. He is being watched. Espidered. Are those his father’s eyes behind those blackened glasses? In any case, his plans are known in advance. He is awaited at the border. He will be expelled from the country. He will be evicted from his property. He will catch the VD. How? through his hands? He has contracted it. He believes. Long ago … as a sailor. It is hidden in his blood, this punishment. Any rash bespeaks its presence, since the soul contains the body. And as a child …

  At one or two or three or four he claims to have been molested by nannies. He is five when his brother takes him to an anatomical museum in Liverpool (on Paradise Street, inevitably) where he sees bleach-pale plaster casts depicting the ravages of venereal disease. In his father’s house there was no smoking. While six he suffers a fall from a bike which leaves him with a jagged scar on his knee, a wound he will later say he received when his ship was caught in a Tong war along the Chinese coast. A glass of port at Christmas was indulgence enough. When seven he complains of being bullied by the other Cub Scouts. But cold baths made men—made Englishmen—stiffened the sinews, restrung the nerves. As did tennis, rugger, swimming, shooting, golf, church, long strenuous walks. And Malcolm became good at them. Still he is teased about the size of his penis. Away at the Caldicote School, now nine, he is struck in the eye playing ball. The injury is neglected and an infection sets in which leaves him partially blind for four years. Or so he chooses to believe. He also imagin
es that his mother, unable to bear the sight of her half-sighted boy, refuses to let him come home on vacations, and that everyone has left him alone.

  But he is becoming a touch-me-not. In America, visiting Aiken, he meets a young woman with whom he decides he is in love. He will convince her. “His attempt at this is remarkable,” Day judiciously observes, “and possibly unique in the history of erotic correspondence.”

  I cannot kiss anybody else without wiping my mouth afterwards. There is only you, forever and forever you: in bars and out of bars, in fields and out of fields, in boats and out of boats … there is only love and tenderness of everything about you, our comings in and our goings forth, I would rather use your tooth brush than my own: I would wish, when with you on a boat, that you would be sick merely so that I could comfort you. Nor is there one ounce of criticism in this. I do not conceal in my heart the physical repulsion which, not admitted to oneself hardly, exists usually in the filthy male. I would love you the same if you had one ear, or one eye: if you were bald or dumb: if you had syphilis, I would be the same; it is the love that one stronger algebraic symbol in a bracket has for its multiple—or complement … it cannot live without the other. (Day, p. 109)

  In short, Lowry loves her as he wants to be loved. And he wants to be loved by his mother.

  Thief and exploiter: that’s what we’re told pelado means: peeled: barefoot, bald. Where in his unconscious did Lowry deposit what he knew? that pelada is a kind of alopecia, which means, in dictionary speech, a distempered state of the body leading to a patchy loss of hair, and arising from a venereal cause.