The 100 best novels: No 68 – Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece about the last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico is set to the drumbeat of coming conflict
Robert McCrum
Monday 5 January 2015
It is November 1939, the Day of the Dead in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Two men in white flannels, one a film-maker, are looking back to last year’s fiesta. It was then, we discover, that Geoffrey Firmin – the former British consul, ex-husband of Yvonne, a rampant alcoholic and also a ruined man – embarked on his via crucis, an agonised passage through a fateful day, that would end in Firmin’s killing.
Lowry himself, a refugee from the Fitzrovia of his contemporary George Orwell and the young Dylan Thomas, described Under the Volcano as “a prophecy, a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie, and a writing on the wall”. At the back of his mind, he was inspired by Melville (No 17 in this series) and the capacious majesty of Moby-Dick. Lowry’s Captain Ahab, however, is fighting a more nebulous nemesis than a whale. In 12 chapters corresponding to the 12 hours of the consul’s last day on earth, Lowry takes Firmin on a colossal bender, fuelled by beer, wine, tequila and mescal (“strychnine” to our protagonist). He is drinking himself to death, like Lowry himself, though Under the Volcano is about much more than alcoholism. Halfway through, the consul decides that “It was already the longest day in his entire experience, a lifetime”. Formally, then, the novel’s narrative technique owes a huge debt to Joyce, Conrad, and Faulkner (Nos 46, 32, and 55 in this series). Lowry’s text also teems with allusions to classical and Jacobean tragedy, echoing the cadences of Christopher Marlowe and the Elizabethans.
Malcolm Lowry |
One of mescal’s side-effects is a highly lucid, almost brilliant, depression: this is a dominant mood throughout much of Lowry’s introverted, strangely compulsive narrative. Again and again, he insists that he is present in all his characters, an assertion of complex consciousness that is also a deranged kind of solipsism provoked by tropical drink and drugs. We are in the Mexico that attracted many interwar English literary travellers, notably Lawrence, Waugh and Greene, but it’s a Mexico that has become a hell on earth.
The background to the consul’s Day of the Dead is the drumbeat of conflict, both public and private. Germany is re-arming. Yvonne, Fimin’s divorced wife, has come back to challenge his drinking. “Must you go on and on forever into this stupid darkness?” she asks. At the edge of darkness there is death. Under the Volcano began in Lowry’s mind when, arriving in Mexico, he saw a local Indian bleeding to death by the roadside, which is how Firmin will end, shot in a cheap bar before being tossed into a ravine with a dead dog. The last moments of the consul at the end of the “Day of the Dead” (chapter 12) become one of the greatest passages of English prose on the eve of the second world war.
A note on the text
No writer in this series had as much trouble as Malcolm Lowry, from inside and out, with his work-in-progress. For the struggling author, in the making of his masterpiece, over nearly a decade, almost nothing went right. At first, in 1936, living in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the shadow of two volcanoes (Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl), galloping alcoholism and a failing marriage, Lowry wrote a short story (not finally published until the 1960s) entitled “Under the Volcano”, a sketch of the bigger canvas that was to follow, including a horse branded with the number seven.
The first, raw draft of Under the Volcano followed soon after. He considered this to be the “Inferno” element of a trilogy, The Voyage that Never Ends, modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Ultimately, fate determined that only the first part of this ambitious project would ever be completed to its author’s satisfaction. In 1940, Lowry commissioned a New York literary agent, Harold Matson, to find a publisher for this manuscript, which was roundly rejected, up and down Manhattan.
Next, between 1940 and 1944, Lowry revised the novel, with crucial editorial assistance from the actress Margerie Bonner, who saved him from the worst of his alcoholism and later became his second wife. This process absorbed him completely: during those years Lowry, who had previously preferred to address himself to several projects at the same time, worked on nothing but his manuscript. In 1944, the current draft was nearly lost in a fire at Lowry’s beach house (a squatter’s shack) in British Columbia. Bonner rescued the unfinished novel, but the rest of Lowry’s works in progress were consumed in the blaze.
The novel was finished in 1945 and immediately submitted to a number of publishers. In late winter, while still travelling abroad, Lowry heard that his novel had been accepted by Reynal & Hitchcock in the United States and Jonathan Cape in Britain. Cape had reservations about publishing and asked for drastic revisions. He added that if Lowry didn’t make the changes “it does not necessarily mean I would say no”. Lowry’s reply, written in January 1946, was a prolonged, vehement, slightly mad defence of the book as something to be considered a work of lasting greatness: “It can be regarded as a kind of symphony,” he wrote, “or in another way as a kind of opera – or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce and so forth … Whether it sells or not seems to me either way a risk. But there is something about the destiny of the creation of the book that seems to tell me it just might go on selling a very long time.”
Cape published the novel without further revision. To Anthony Burgess it was “a Faustian masterpiece”. Yet, Under the Volcano was remaindered in England, and out of print when Lowry died of alcoholism in 1957. Thanks to a better response in North America, especially Canada, its afterlife has been lusty and international, featuring regularly on several “best novels” lists. Now it’s recognised as a classic.
Three More From Malcolm Lowry
Ultramarine (1933); Lunar Caustic (1968); October Ferry to Gabriola (1970).
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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