Death of the Optimist

DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN MY FRIEND IS LAID by Malcolm Lowry. 255 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

Malcolm Lowry suffered the agonies of a man who combined Proustian ambitions with a writer's block. He conceived of an organic body of work to be called The Voyage That Never Ends, at the heart of which would rest his one masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947). That novel--perhaps the only story of an alcoholic ever to succeed at the level of tragedy rather than self-pity --revealed in Lowry a dark, obsessive genius that kept struggling for light. It never shone fully in his two other novels (Ultramarine, Lunar Caustic), his poems, or in the short stories (Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place) that up to now have constituted the slim remainder of Lowry's published work.

In 1957, Lowry died in England at 47 after one of his legendary drinking bouts. The coroner's euphemism--"misadventure"--seemed curiously apt. Yet Lowry's struggle with his demons (including a suicide attempt in 1946) had been more productive than was generally known. Among three unfinished novels, six or seven unpublished stories and hundreds of poems, he left 705 pages of typescript, which Lowry's second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. and Editor Douglas Day have now wrestled into book form.

Tormented Transit. Typically, it all started with notes that Lowry, an inveterate journal keeper, took during a trip to Mexico in late 1945 and early 1946. "By God, we have a novel here!" Lowry cried on first rereading them. Editor Day more accurately describes Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid as "a notebook on its way to becoming a novel." Yet this fragmented, compulsively self-centered, brilliant half book does not at all misrepresent its author. For Lowry was less a novelist than, in Day's words, "a diarist, compulsive notetaker, poet manque, alcoholic, philosophizing rambler." Writing for him was a mysterious journey that never quite reached its destination. Both as an artist and as a man, he lived in tormented transit.

Dark ax the Grave is the story of a Dantean pilgrimage into the inferno of the past with Lowry transparently disguised as Sigbjorn Wilderness, a hard-drinking and "monumentally unsuccessful" novelist. A man given to "making up his life as he goes along," Wilderness is not sure whether his journey is in search of salvation or some ultimate bonfire of damnation.

Does he go to reconnect with old sources of life or to seek out a familiar place to die? The risk is written on every page, beginning with an astonishing, tumbling opening sentence of 198 words (". . . the moving shadow of the plane below them, the eternal moving cross . . ."). At first, Wilderness seems like a man going to be buried rather than resurrected. The news catches up with him that his latest novel, The Valley of the Shadow of Death (Lowry's original title for Under the Volcano), has been turned down by his British publisher. After that disappointment, he takes to full-scale drinking, surrounded by an unending hangover and cantina jukeboxes blaring I'm Dreaming of a White Christinas.

Even Match. Beset by a whole choreography of fears ("Every man his own Laocoon"), hardly able to leave his room. Wilderness half holds himself together by one purpose. The final objective of his Mexican pilgrimage is to see an old friend named Juan Fernando Martinez, fellow drinker and philosopher, who mirrors like some doomed twin the life-death forces at war in Wilderness. The ending is both pat and heartfelt. When Wilderness discovers that Juan Fernando had died six years before, he is redeemed into a kind of rebirth, and the novel fades on wheat fields ripening.

"I wouldn't have thought that your daemon specialized in happy endings," Wilderness' wife Primrose remarks. Yet that is exactly what Lowry has written, with desperate passion, despite the fact that he considered it "rather a second-rate ambition to be an optimist." Lowry could no more round off his hope than his book. But at a time when the fashion for the novel is basic black--when despair has gone slick--Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid once again gives the struggle between good and evil the dignity of an even match, and the excitement of a metaphysical cliffhanger.

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