Sifted Ashes

By F.R.

Next to Malcolm Lowry, even such notorious literary flameouts as Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane seem like models of mental health. During his 48 years, Lowry wrote one extraordinary novel, Under the Volcano (1947), and spent nearly every other waking hour looking for ways to destroy himself. His search for oblivion was as successful as it was arduous. Though born to a well-off British family, Lowry was penniless ^nd drunk for most of his adulthood. He did time in jail and in mental wards; he was down and out in Mexico, New York, Hollywood and British Columbia. Even the success of his book did little to exorcise his private demons. By the time Lowry died, in the midst of an all-night binge, in 1957, he had turned to after-shave lotion as a cheap substitute for booze.

Volcano, a National Film Board of Canada documentary, lays out the facts of the novelist's tortured existence so that we may judge what went wrong. The film's approach to its subject is often imaginative--particularly by the standards of conventional nonfiction movies. In addition to the expectable interviews with Lowry's surviving relatives and friends, Volcano fills out its subject's life and writing with ripe color photography of Cuernavaca's raunchy bars, Cambridge University's student haunts and Times

Square's flesh palaces. While some of these settings no longer look as they did in Lowry's day, Director Brittain wisely sacrifices strict factual accuracy to the greater cause of establishing an emotional texture for his story. The atmosphere is further enhanced by Richard Burton's eloquent recitations of Lowry's prose on the sound track.

For all its aesthetic resourcefulness, however, Volcano never offers insights into the novelist's torments. Brittain rattles off Lowry's formative emotional traumas--his strained relationship with his parents, his early brushes with homosexuality, his bizarre first marriage--without ever relating them to the rest of his biography. Certainly Lowry devotees will find these psychological clues reward enough, but others may wonder why they should spend 100 minutes watching a film that never uses its esoteric subject to make a larger point. Volcano is a movie to see --but only after reading the book. -- F.R.

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