One Man's Volcano

SELECTED LETTERS OF MALCOLM LOWRY edited by Harvey Breit and Mar-gene Bonner Lowry. 459 pages. Lippincott. $10.

The geography of Dante's inferno was fixed. As a 14th century Florentine, he knew it was somewhere under Tuscany. For Malcolm Lowry, a 20th century mystic, it lay under the volcano that looks down on Cuernavaca in Mexico and inside a bottle of mescal, a drink as hallucinatory, it seems, as mescaline, a drug which is also derived from the maguey cactus.

At 47, Lowry died of drink (which the coroner called "misadventure") in his native England in 1957. He also lived by it; it was his Vergil, guide to those infernal regions from which he returned a man possessed by demons. He exorcised them by the masterpiece called Under the Volcano, which can be read as a novel but understood only as a parable of the pit. "William James if not Freud," he wrote in a letter to his British publisher, "would certainly agree with me when I say that the agonies of the drunkard find their most accurate poetic analogue in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his powers."

The Forest. Under the Volcano was rejected by twelve New York publishers before it finally appeared in 1947. On the surface, it tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic and almost derelict British consul in a town strongly resembling Cuernavaca, where Lowry himself lived for two years. However, its subterranean reputation continued to grow until it is now taught in college courses on the modern novel.

"The novel should reform itself by drawing upon its ancient Aeschylean and tragic heritage," he wrote to his publisher. "There are a thousand writers who can draw adequate characters till all is blue for one who can tell you anything new about hell fire." Lowry set out to do just that. Most modern men do not believe in hell because they have not been there. Lowry did, because he had been there. He also believed in a number of other unmodern things--that "life is a forest of symbols," in fate, destiny, demons and spells, numerology and divination by study of birds and their behavior. What saved him from being--as so many mystics are--a bore and an embarrassment to plain men was his artist's eye and the controlled magic of his words, which made him a tragic novelist rather than a tiresome navel gazer.

Five Watchers. Such a man as Lowry has trouble in this world even when sober--which he was for long productive periods. His letters, collected by his widow and the New York Times's Harvey Breit, record enough of those troubles --neglect, poverty, manuscripts lost or burned--to make paranoiacs of 50 poets. Lowry first appears as "a small boy chased by furies." He strummed a guitar in dives, "ran away to sea," and the last thing he did to please his bewildered father, a Liverpool cotton broker who fox-hunted, was to graduate (third-class honors) in English from Cambridge. Years of wandering as a merchant seaman, a marriage in Paris, and a minor novel (Ultramarine, a Melville-and-blue-water affair) lay ahead before he fetched up in Mexico on a midget paternal subsidy.

From Oaxaca and the middle of what he called with desperate facetiousness his "last tooloose-Lowrytrek," he wrote a British friend: "I have, since being here, been in prison three times. Everywhere I go I am pursued and even now, as I write, no less than five policemen are watching me. This is the perfect Kafka situation but you will pardon me if I do not consider it any longer funny . . . There is a church here for those who are solitary and the comfort you obtain from it is non-existent though I have wept many times there . . . Incidentally I smell."

No Man's Land. But his burly rugger player's build survived both external abuse and the internal erosion of mescal; booze left unbleared a blazing eye. A woman turned up who would (he wrote) "share conditions which make Gorki's Lower Depths look like a drawing-room comedy," and who loved him, tidied his papers, married him, and cosseted his hangovers until he died. She was Margerie Bonner, an actress turned writer, to whose own person and work Lowry remained steadfastly protective (even when she was clearly protecting him). His father's money got him out of Mexico into Canada, where he found one of the few legal no man's lands left in a modern society--a strip between low and high tide in wilderness land near Vancouver. He built a cabin on stilts and sent letters out into the world like pigeons from the ark. The Lowrys were often close to starvation; the cabin burned down, and Lowry was badly burned himself saving his manuscript.

The theme of his work, said Lowry, quoting Critic Edmund Wilson, was "the forces in man which cause him to be terrified of himself." The theme of his letters could be the well-grounded fears that man has of other men. They are witty, light, profound and erudite. The tone is that of an infinitely gentle man whose capacity for pity was not--as in the case of most drunks--squandered on himself.

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