Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place: Stories

By Malcolm Lowry

Seven stories and novellas by the author of Under the Volcano, a master of twentieth-century fiction.
 For fans of the novel Under the Volcano, this collection of stories—many of them published for the first time posthumously—provides great insight into the author’s genius. The stories range from heartfelt tragedy to exuberant triumph. In the novella “Through the Panama,” a burned-out, alcoholic writer tries to make sense of the literature that has kept him afloat while the pulse of his life grows harder to distinguish. In “The Forest Path to Spring,” a couple that has survived hell finds new life in the seclusion of a vast forest. And in “The Bravest Boat,” a young boy sends a message across the ocean to an unknown recipient. Together, these stories reveal a writer who traveled widely, observed keenly, and maintained an engrossing literary style that still reverberates today.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453286319

Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957) was born in England, and he attended Cambridge University. He spent much of his life traveling and lived in Paris, New York, Mexico, Los Angeles, Canada, and Italy, among other places. He is the author of numerous works, including Ultramarine and Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.

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Hear Us O Lord

From Heaven Thy

Dwelling Place

Stories

Malcolm Lowry

Edited by Nicholas Bradley

Image courtesy of UBC Library, Rare Books and Special Collections

Malcolm Lowry was born in New Brighton, Cheshire, England, on 28 July 1909. He attended The Leys School, a privately funded boarding and day school in Cambridge, and St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Before going to university he sailed on the S.S. Pyrrhus to the Far East, an experience that gave him a direct sense of life at sea and led to his first novel, Ultramarine, published in 1933. In 1934 he married Jan Gabrial, and left England for the United States and then Mexico. Lowry separated from Gabrial in 1937, and in 1939 moved to British Columbia. One year later he married Margerie Bonner, with whom he remained for the rest of his life.

Lowry is best known for his novel Under the Volcano, his masterpiece, which was published in 1947. The years after Under the Volcano were devoted to an unfinished project entitled The Voyage That Never Ends, of which Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place was to be a part. But Lowry did not cope well with success, and his final years were often troubled by neurosis, paranoia, and violence, which were likely exacerbated by his notorious alcoholism. He kept working, though somewhat erratically, on the stories of Hear Us O Lord until his death on 26 June 1957. The circumstances of his passing are obscure, although barbiturates and alcohol certainly played a part. The coroner’s record states that he died by misadventure.

The Manx Fishermen’s Evening Hymn was written by William Henry Gill and published in Manx National Songs in 1896. Lowry grew up near the Isle of Man and was influenced by Manx connections during both his childhood and adult life, which played a significant role in his adopting the first line of the hymn as the title for this collection of stories.

Contents

Introduction: Malcolm Lowry’s Pacific Hymnal

Note on the Text

A Chronology of Malcolm Lowry

Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place

The Bravest Boat

Through the Panama

Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession

Elephant and Colosseum

Present Estate of Pompeii

Gin and Goldenrod

The Forest Path to the Spring

Select Bibliography

A Biography of Malcolm Lowry

Introduction:

Malcolm Lowry’s Pacific Hymnal

Well ... What’s to stop us going to Canada, for instance?

"... Canada? ... Are you serious? Well, why not, but—"

Perfectly.

—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

1. But, ah, the storms they had come through!: A Vision of Paradise

The Bravest Boat, the first of the seven stories in Malcolm Lowry’s posthumous collection, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, begins and ends with a description of the mountains that surround the city of Vancouver. The freezing summits of the Canadian mountains, Lowry writes, jaggedly traversed the country northward as far as the eye could reach; several hundred miles to the south in Oregon, the snowy volcanic peak of Mount Hood stood on high. In writing these passages, Lowry must have also had in mind two mountains far beyond Mount Hood—Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the volcanoes, connected by the Paso de Cortés, that loom over the town of Quauhnahuac in Lowry’s masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947). That novel starts with a description of mountains that finds an echo in The Bravest Boat: Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.¹ Cuernavaca, the model for Quauhnahuac, and Vancouver are linked, in a geographic sense, by a spine of volcanoes that extends from Mexico along the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada. The final story in Hear Us O Lord, The Forest Path to the Spring, confirms what The Bravest Boat suggests, when the unnamed narrator recalls that he and his wife saw range beyond range of the Cascades—the great Cordilleras that ribbed the continent from Alaska to Cape Horn—and of which Mount Hood was no less a part than Popocatépetl. The mountains that connect Dollarton and Quauhnahuac in the Lowryan imagination embody the other links, biographical and metaphysical, between the otherwise distant places. In the cosmology of Lowry’s life and writing—which are intimately related—British Columbia represents an earthly paradise that offers the possibility of redemption to those who have suffered Mexico’s earthly hell.

In Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, Lowry affords the reader brief glimpses of this paradise in The Bravest Boat and Gin and Goldenrod and provides an extended depiction of it in The Forest Path to the Spring, a novella that is surely one of the most notable accomplishments of the English writer’s career beyond Under the Volcano. In addition, Hear Us O Lord includes three stories set in Italy and one that portrays in remarkable detail a passage through the Panama Canal; these stories, despite their settings, often invoke British Columbia and the hope of spiritual happiness. The stories in Hear Us O Lord are a counterpart to the tortured vision of Under the Volcano. They thus occupy an essential place in Lowry’s grand plan for the sequence into which all his works would fit, which would be called The Voyage That Never Ends. Yet the reader of Under the Volcano who comes to the stories for the first time may be struck by their failure to achieve the strange success of Lowry’s major novel; the reader who here encounters Lowry for the first time may simply be perplexed. Lowry’s reputation rests unquestionably on Under the Volcano, a novel that, despite its indebtedness to Dante and to James Joyce, among other influences, is a singular work of fiction. A tragic (but also grimly comic) love story and a harrowing depiction of alcoholism, Under the Volcano has often been acclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, an estimation that belies the resistance that Lowry encountered in his efforts to have it published: the novel was rejected by publishers a dozen times before it was accepted by Jonathan Cape in 1946. In comparison, all of Lowry’s other works, including Ultramarine (1933), the only other book published during his lifetime, and the several works published posthumously, appear less accomplished. Certainly the fact that Hear Us O Lord was written by the author of Under the Volcano makes it noteworthy. But this fact is not the sole reason for the stories’ value. Hear Us O Lord is a fascinating work of fiction in its own right, the merits of which both require and reward careful reading. Often beautiful, at times cryptic, and frequently very funny, the seven stories in Lowry’s collection combine depictions of artistic crisis and psychological despair with a romantic optimism about the existence of love and a common human decency.

Both optimism and despair characterized the author’s life, although perhaps not in equal measure. Lowry is famous for Under the Volcano but infamous for his staggering capacity for drink (although, as he once chastised a friend, An Englishman never staggers).² By his own reckoning he consumed, in 1948, an average of nearly three litres of wine a day; this account seems unusual for Lowry only because he preferred gin and beer to wine.³ Alcohol either caused or exacerbated his paranoia, neuroses, obstreperousness, and occasionally violent behaviour. He greatly feared both syphilis and border crossings. He worried that he might smell. He believed himself to be hopelessly unlucky—he lost manuscripts in a house fire, for example—and he was a tremendous bungler, often managing to cause for himself problems that the universe had somehow neglected to devise for him. As a consequence of his addiction and other problems, he was profoundly dependent on others, particularly, his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry, for even the most basic tasks. One of Lowry’s doctors recalled that the patient had difficulty even putting his shoes on after having been examined:

While we had been talking Malcolm had dressed himself. All except his shoes and socks. These he now proceeded to put on. Sitting on the low stool that I had used in examining his legs, he reached out for his shoe and started to slip it over his toes.

No dear, said his wife, put your sock on first. He dropped his gaze momentarily, grunted, and put on his right sock. Then his shoe. Then he reached out to the left side, groping, still talking to me. I was watching fascinatedly and by golly he did it. He picked up the other shoe and started to put it on his bare left foot.

No dear, said Margerie, you must put on the sock first. Malcolm looked down, grunted, and did as he was told. Margerie and I looked at one another and both of us shook our heads. This was a man who needed a lot of looking after.⁴

Despite his agonies, however Lowry retained a sense of humour. For example, he wrote for himself a mock epitaph that casts a portrait of the author as jester or fool:

Malcolm Lowry

late of the Bowery

whose prose was flowery

if somewhat glowery

who worked nightly

and sometimes daily

and died, playing the ukulele ...

Perhaps more accurate, however, is the self-portrait provided by another doggerel verse:

Down at the bottom of a well

I lie and know I am in hell

It stinks so badly I can tell

This is the end of Malcolm L.⁵

Here, too, Lowry writes with typically ironic humour, but the lines suggest something of his conviction that he led a profoundly troubled life and of his knowledge that his position—material and spiritual—was nearly always precarious.⁶

Lowry spent much of his life searching for a way out of the well of alcoholism, but he met with little success. He found some kind of peace, however, in Dollarton, just north of Vancouver, where he and Margerie resided, on and off, from 1940 until 1954. This location was where Lowry wrote a considerable portion of his body of work; British Columbia also provided the setting for several works, not only three of the stories in Hear Us O Lord but also October Ferry to Gabriola, an unfinished novel that was edited by Margerie Lowry and published in 1970. The Forest Path to the Spring, epiphanic and highly autobiographical, describes a couple’s happy existence in the once-wild forests around Dollarton. Lowry adopts the biblical myth of Eden to create a vision of a peaceful, contemplative life in nature. The narrator of the story strives to achieve a state of grace, which the glorious forests and coastline seem to make possible. Lowry does not disguise the apparent divinity of the place: There was everywhere an intimation of Paradise, his narrator claims. Imbued with Christian symbolism, the story describes a pastoral fantasy, an idyll that, at least for a time, is as peaceful as any Arcadia: We were still on earth ... but if someone had charged us with the notion that we had gone to heaven and that this was the after life we would not have said him nay for long.

When Lowry writes in the passage of his poem Doggerel that he lies in hell, he does use hell casually to mean physical or emotional distress. His hell is not simply despair but instead the nadir of a metaphysical journey that culminates in the approach to heaven. Lowry’s works, taken together, chart a Dantean trajectory from inferno to paradise. As the critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury observes, Lowry

came to see himself as a writer apart from his own generation, and from English culture, and, by the end, he had written of the adventures, the divine comedy, of the suffering modern artist—himself, or a version of himself—in all three of his different American wildernesses. The Last Address (later Lunar Caustic) was the Manhattan Inferno (or perhaps Purgatorio); Under the Volcano ... was the Mexican Purgatorio (or perhaps Inferno); the various books that were to follow, mostly left unfinished and then published posthumously, were the Canadian Paradiso.⁷

The appeal to God in the title of Hear Us O Lord strongly suggests the religious nature of the collection. By alluding to the distance between heaven and earth, it also reminds the reader, as perhaps it reminded Lowry himself, that the Canadian Paradiso was in fact part of the present world; for all the happiness that it granted Malcolm and Margerie, it was only like Paradise and not Paradise itself.

Lowry found the title of Hear Us O Lord in a Methodist hymn that the narrator of The Forest Path to the Spring calls a poem of God’s mercy. In the story itself, Lowry quotes the opening lines of the hymn:

Hear us, O Lord, from heaven Thy dwelling place,

Like them of old in vain we toil all night,

Unless with us Thou go who art the Light,

Come then, O Lord, that we may see Thy face.

Thou, Lord, dost rule the raging of the sea

When loud the storm and furious is the gale,

Strong is Thine arm, our little barks are frail,

Send us Thy help, remember Galilee ...

The hymn was written by William Henry Gill and published as The Manx Fishermen’s Evening Hymn in Manx National Songs in 1896. The Manx connection stems in part from Lowry’s childhood and in part from friendships he made later in life. Lowry’s family home outside Liverpool was not far from the Isle of Man and certainly Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, in the Methodist hymnbook, was familiar to Lowry from childhood.⁸ In the Notes to Hear Us O Lord, Lowry included a handwritten fragment of the score and noted that It is important that the music be printed, and that it should be Peel Castle, because there are two tunes and the other one is feeble. But Peel Castle is one of the greatest of hymn tunes. Friends such as Jimmy Craige, a Manx boatbuilder who lived in Dollarton, would have made the relation between the hymn and the stories more meaningful still; Manx characters figure in Elephant and Colosseum and The Forest Path to the Spring, in which Quaggan, the boat builder whose boat shed was large as a small church, is based on Craige. The rest of the hymn, which Lowry does not include in his story, further praises God and looks ahead to a time of salvation:

Our wives and children we commend to thee:

For them we plough the land and plough the deep,

For them by day the golden corn we reap,

By night the silver harvest of the sea.

We thank thee, Lord, for sunshine, dew, and rain,

Broadcast from heaven by thine almighty hand,

Source of all life, unnumbered as the sand,

Bird, beast, and fish, fruit and golden grain.

O Bread of Life, thou in thy word hast said:

Who feeds in faith on me shall never die.

In mercy hear thy hungry children’s cry:

Father, give us this day our daily bread!

Sow in our hearts the seeds of thy dear love,

That we may reap contentment, joy, and peace;

And when at last our earthly labours cease,

Grant us to join thy harvest home above.⁹

The pastoral hope for contentment, joy, and peace runs throughout Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. If Lowry himself found only fleeting contentment, the stories are evidence of his undiminishing faith that happiness could indeed be found on earth.

2. The Structure of Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place

As Richard K. Cross observes, If one excepts Kafka, the position of Malcolm Lowry as an author of posthumously published works of fiction is without parallel.¹⁰ Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place was the first of Malcolm Lowry’s books that Margerie Lowry published after her husband’s death. Margerie, herself a novelist, began editing the stories for the collection in 1957, not long after he had died.¹¹ Without her, certainly, there would be no such book. Lowry planned a collection with the title Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, but he was no more able to complete the manuscript than he was able to finish any other work after Under the Volcano. Lowry’s tremendous ambition was matched by a remarkable inability to see his writing projects through to a state of completion. His letters suggest, however, that he was highly enthusiastic about the attempt to conclude the manuscript of Hear Us O Lord. In early January 1952 he noted in a blustery letter to Clarisse Francillon, a Swiss novelist who translated his works into French, that the manuscript was nearly ready for publication:¹²

The new book I told you about is a collection of short stories entitled Hear us O Lord from Heaven thy Dwelling Place. I think you will really love some of the stories. Though Hal [Harold Matson, Lowry’s agent] so far never managed to sell any to any magazine whatsoever—whence our poverty. On the other hand, Harcourt & Brace in New York declare that they can be rated among the best ones they have ever read and they would like to publish them in one volume. So I still may write one of those famous prefaces for America. I’ll say: No one of these damned stories ever appeared in any of your Godawful magazines in this sickening country. So I really can’t see why you should want to read them now. Good night. Malcolm.¹³

A few months before he wrote the letter to Francillon, Lowry had shown an incomplete manuscript for Hear Us O Lord (and other works) to Matson, indicating that the stories formed part of a larger work in progress. According to the author’s plan, the aptly named The Voyage That Never Ends would include virtually everything that Lowry had written. The correspondence provides evidence of the shape that Lowry had hoped that Hear Us O Lord would take, but he continued to make revisions to the stories, and died without having completed them. There is no version of Hear Us O Lord that Lowry considered final and the only finished version, then, is the one that Margerie published in 1961.¹⁴

In that version and in its present form, Hear Us O Lord consists of seven stories: The Bravest Boat, Through the Panama, Elephant and Colosseum, Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession, Present Estate of Pompeii, Gin and Goldenrod, and, The Forest Path to the Spring. The second, fourth, and last of the stories are long enough to be considered novellas, as Lowry himself referred to them in his notes and letters. In the Black Hills, a story that Lowry had planned to include in Hear Us O Lord, was never published. Three of the stories—Elephant and Colosseum, Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession, and Present Estate of Pompeii—are set in Rome and in Pompeii, where there is, of course, a volcano; the opening conversation in Present Estate of Pompeii takes place inside the Restaurant Vesuvius. These stories thus form a distinct unit within the book as a whole. Through the Panama describes a voyage, as the title suggests, through the Panama Canal. The Bravest Boat, Gin and Goldenrod, and The Forest Path to the Spring are all set in British Columbia and therefore constitute another clear grouping, although the Italian stories frequently refer to BC. In The Present Estate of Pompeii, for example, Roderick Fairhaven remembers Dollarton fondly:

Now, in July, the forest, behind the pretty shacks built on stilts grouped around the bay with his father-in-law’s boatbuilding shed in the middle, would be in full leaf, celestially green and sunfilled, the winding path leading you through scent of mushrooms and ferns and dark firs to airy spaces where golden light sifted down through vine-leaved maples and young swaying hazel trees.

The book’s general movement is of departure and return; the path that in this passage only crosses Roderick’s mind later becomes the central image in The Forest Path to the Spring.

Despite the clear groupings of stories, Hear Us O Lord is not a straightforward or especially coherent book. Commentators have generally been effusive in their praise for Through the Panama and The Forest Path to the Spring, but the Italian sequence is not typically considered a vital part of Lowry’s body of work, although Lowry himself called Elephant and Colosseum a comic classic, or at least a masterpiece of nature.¹⁵ Some of the stories, especially when considered individually, are somewhat obscure, especially if the reader is not already familiar with Lowry’s biography and the stories’ close relation to it. Although they are interrelated, the stories vary in length, complexity, and allusiveness. The Bravest Boat and Strange Comfort seem relatively slight at roughly fifteen pages each compared to the nearly seventy pages each of Through the Panama, Elephant and Colosseum, and The Forest Path to the Spring. The length and scope of these stories distinguish them from the others. Through the Panama, which Stephen Spender classifies as a pretendedly fictitious journal, is also notable for its incorporation of newspaper clippings, marginal notes modelled on those in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, bureaucratic forms, and long historical digressions.¹⁶ Its formal complexity thus makes demands on the reader that the other long stories do not, although Elephant and Colosseum, and The Forest Path to the Spring are decidedly not simple tales. The formal variety on display in Hear Us O Lord, however, has precedents in the works of certain writers greatly admired by Lowry. For example, in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), the concluding story, The Dead, is substantially longer and more expansive than the other stories. William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), a collection of seven loosely interwoven stories, also displays certain parallels with Lowry’s book.

Despite its formal characteristics, Hear Us O Lord is in many respects a unified book, not just an assemblage of stories. Ample evidence exists that Lowry conceived of the stories as parts of a whole, even in addition to the fact that all of Lowry’s writings belong to his single imaginative endeavour of translating lived experience into fiction. The stories demonstrate many points of interconnection: the unifying elements include, in addition to the recurring settings, repeated motifs, characters, themes, allusions, and quotations. In The Bravest Boat, for instance, the rhythm of freighters’ engines reminds Sigurd Storlesen of Frère Jacques, the children’s song. The next story, Through the Panama begins by quoting the ship’s endless song:

Frère Jacques

Frère Jacques

Dormez-vous?

Dormez-vous?

Sonnez les matines!

Sonnez les matines!

Ding dang dong

Ding dang dong ...

Later in the story the last lines become more foreboding: Doom doom doom! In The Forest Path to the Spring, the Deep-sea freighters again sing the song more happily.

As the example of Frère Jacques suggests, Lowry in Hear Us O Lord is preoccupied by sailing and the sea. As a young man Lowry sought adventure by going to sea as a deckhand on the S.S. Pyrrhus; he used his experiences as the basis for his first novel, Ultramarine (1933), which can charitably be described as an apprentice-work. He was tormented by the notion—incorrect, as it turns out—that in writing the novel he had plagiarized the writing of one of his idols, the Norwegian novelist Nordahl Grieg. Ultramarine does shows the influence of Grieg and, especially, of Conrad Aiken, an American writer whose Blue Voyage (1927) provided the model for Ultramarine, from the subject matter to the very title. Melville’s Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Redburn (1849) and Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) provide earlier important points of comparison.¹⁷ Stephen Spender suggests that if Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville had been alive, Lowry would have projected the same transference on either or both of them followed by the same revolt as against Aiken and Nordahl Grieg.¹⁸ But Ultramarine’s sense of adventure is absent from Hear Us O Lord. Instead, the stories depict the voyage of a message-bearing bottle (The Bravest Boat), the often mundane impressions of passengers (Through the Panama), and rowing a small boat in relatively sheltered waters (The Forest Path to the Spring). Lowry had become a reflective writer; the comical rescue episode in Elephant and Colosseum may be understood as a parody of the younger Lowry’s desire for adventure at sea.

The characters provide perhaps the most significant links among the various stories and to Lowry’s other fiction. Because of the strong resemblance of Lowry’s fictional works to his life, the several narrative personae inevitably appear to be versions of the author himself. Sigurd Storlesen, Sigbjørn Wilderness, Kennish Drumgold Cosnahan, Roderick McGregor Fairhaven, and the narrator in The Forest Path to the Spring are all modelled very closely on Lowry, as their occupations and vocations might suggest: writer, jazz composer, flâneur, drinker. Lowry’s works, however, are more than covert autobiography and the personae are not simply stand-ins for the author—although Lowry’s particular genius in part consisted in his ability to perceive his own life in mythical terms and to transubstantiate the minutiae of this life into fiction. These characters nonetheless link the stories in Hear Us O Lord to Lowry’s other works. Sigbjørn Wilderness reappears, for instance, in Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid; he resembles Ethan Llewelyn in October Ferry to Gabriola; and he has affinities with Geoffrey Firmin, the consul in Under the Volcano. Lowry’s stories and novels are all intertwined, each text occupying a place in a complex fictional universe. His ideal reader will therefore keep one eye trained, as it were, on the often dazzling array of details in an individual text and the other eye focused on the themes and meanings that emerge from the entire corpus.

3. Malcolm Lowry: A Canadian Writer?

In the sixth section of The Forest Path to the Spring, the narrator describes lyrically the effect of the changing seasons on a familiar landscape: And how different the forest path was now, in spring, from the other seasons we had known it: summer, autumn, and winter. The very quality of the light was different, the pale green, green and gold dappled light that comes when the leaves are very small, for later, in summer with the leaves full out, the green is darker and the path darker and deeply shady. The Forest Path to the Spring is virtually a prose poem: it portrays, almost ecstatically, a place and the happiness that the two principal characters enjoy. Lowry’s descriptions of the beach and the forest assign an almost magical beauty to Dollarton; the infernal oil refinery that lies across Burrard Inlet offers an ironic reminder of the fragility of such beauty:

the oil refinery decided to put a great sign over the wharfs, as an advertisement: SHELL. But for weeks they never got around to the S, so that it was left HELL. And yet, my own imagination could not have dreamt anything fairer than the heaven from which we perceived this.

As Laurie Ricou notes, the squatter’s shack in Dollarton was for Malcolm and Margerie Lowry, as for their fictional counterparts in The Forest Path to the Spring, an essential symbol of reclusiveness and imaginative freedom, there, on that rocky beach between high-tide line and low, which is imagined to belong to no one.¹⁹ Yet the meaning of the symbol would not be evident without the constant reminder of the world’s encroachment.

Although Lowry is not a Canadian writer by birth or citizenship, British Columbia occupies a vital place in the imaginative geography of Lowry’s fiction. Without the redemptive possibility represented by Dollarton, the hellishness of Quauhnahuac could not achieve its full symbolic significance: without the promise of Paradise, his Mexico would merely be a place of ordinary, if unrelieved, suffering. Although Lowry responded ardently to the landscapes of Vancouver and Dollarton, his writing was not greatly influenced by Canadian politics, a sense of the country beyond southern British Columbia, or Canadian culture more generally, although some Canadian writers did visit Lowry at Dollarton, including the poets Earle Birney, who later edited Lowry’s poems, and Al Purdy, who met Lowry in 1952 when Purdy was still an unknown writer.²⁰ But as literary representations of British Columbia, Lowry’s stories are extraordinary. Their acute, passionate sensitivity to place and the ways in which people respond to their environment mean that literary BC can scarcely be imagined without some reference to Lowry.²¹ Quite apart from Lowry’s foreign nationality and his literary celebrity outside Canada, the conviction with which he conveys a sense of place in The Forest Path to the Spring and Gin and Goldenrod makes him an invaluable part of literature in British Columbia. Lowry is essentially an English modernist who placed the Pacific Coast at the centre of his world.

The BC settings are described realistically, although at times Lowry disguises, even thinly, the locations themselves. In The Forest Path to the Spring, most notably, Lowry renames Dollarton Eridanus, a name that connects present-day Dollarton to the Hades of Virgil’s Aeneid.²² Lost Lagoon, in The Bravest Boat, is the real name of the place, but also a name that certainly would have delighted Lowry with its inherent suggestiveness. Lowry’s deep appreciation of the natural beauty of Dollarton and Stanley Park, however, did not extend to Vancouver itself (or Enochvilleport, as it is known in the stories). Lowry made his distaste for the city apparent in a letter (January 1952) that anticipates the dismay over urbanization that runs throughout The Forest Path to the Spring:

For the time being we are living in the city of Vancouver—a rotten hole full of stool pigeons—toilets—policemen—ill manners—tedium—hypocrisy—spy hotel managers—repression—falsehood—and—brutality ... I hate it no less than hell. Sometimes I even hate the Canadians too—at least their scandal mongering authorities. Calvin’s Geneva and Tory England would have seemed cheerful compared to this place where one is forbidden to advertise a symphony concert on a Sunday. And yet they still use the penalty of the lash and sentence 15 year old children to hang for rape—as was the case only recently.²³

The continuing urbanization of the outlying areas of Vancouver since Lowry’s time makes Hear Us O Lord seem somewhat remote: Burrard Inlet is beautiful, but it is difficult to imagine, today, that the Lowrys made their home on a beach that is now part of an essentially urban park. Vancouver’s rapid growth also makes Lowry’s story, at the end of which the narrator realizes that paradise can never be regained, still more poignant. W.H. New’s observation in 1971 that Lowry would have been distressed by the fact that the wilderness along this forest path, though still beautiful, has been so largely tamed seems all the more true over thirty years later.²⁴

The emergence in the 1990s of environmental criticism as an important approach to literary studies has led to renewed critical attention to the relations in literature between places and their inhabitants.²⁵ Lowry’s stories occupy a prominent place in an understanding of Canada’s literary ecology. The Forest Path to the Spring is a parable of environmental destruction, a warning to preserve the world’s natural beauty that echoes the infamous message in Under the Volcano: ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN? ¿QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!²⁶ The garden in Hear Us O Lord is the beach and forest in Dollarton where the Lowrys found a temporary peace in the early 1950s. But Lowry does not use landscape solely as a symbol. He is also a curious, perceptive observer of the local flora and fauna who takes tremendous delight in watching and describing everything upon which his eye falls. The teeming forest is, for Lowry, fascinating and invigorating in its own right and evidence of a spiritual, if not religious, force in the world, even as he remains aware of the impossibility of finding a true paradise on earth. As he wrote in the Notes to Hear Us O Lord, he intended "no ‘back to nature’ or Rousseau-like message: there is no ‘back’ permanently to anywhere, the aim is harmony, so that the view is not intended to be sentimentalised. An enchantment with place puts The Forest Path to the Spring" and Hear Us O Lord more generally in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.²⁷ Lowry’s tranquil Dollarton is a version of the North American paradises that have existed, for brief times, at Walden Pond, in John Muir’s Sierra Nevada, in Mary Austin’s Mojave Desert, at Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House, and at Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place urges us to believe, with Thoreau, that the West ... is but another name for the wild; and ... that in Wildness is the preservation of the World:²⁸

High above the pine trees swayed against the sky, out of the west came the seagulls with their angelic wings, coming home to rest. And I remembered how every evening I used to go down this path through the forest to get water from the spring at dusk.... Looking over my wife’s shoulder I could see a deer swimming toward the lighthouse.

Laughing we stooped down to the stream and drank.

Footnotes

All of Lowry’s fiction corresponds closely to his biography. In addition, scarcely anything that Lowry read failed to become a part of what he wrote. As Gordon Bowker observes, He noted down whatever caught his eye—letters, advertisements, newspaper headlines, graffiti—and wasted little (A Closer Look 7). As a consequence, an exhaustive account of Lowry’s allusions, borrowings, and rewritings in Hear Us O Lord would require considerably more space than is available here, much as a commentary on Under the Volcano demands an entire book (in this case, the eminently helpful Companion to Under the Volcano, by Chris Ackerley and Lawrence J. Clipper [Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984]). In the notes that follow, I have not attempted to identify or explicate every reference that Lowry makes or every intertextual correspondence that his stories suggest. I have tried instead merely to indicate the extent to which Lowry drew on the works of writers he admired and to which his own works are each part of a larger whole; virtually every passage in these stories has close ties to other parts of Lowry’s corpus. At the same time, I have tried to avoid belaboring these aspects of his writing. Although Under the Volcano is Lowry’s great achievement, the stories in Hear Us O Lord are, I believe, worth reading for their own sake, not simply as supplements to Lowry’s crucial novel.

The notes frequently direct readers to Lowry’s letters, which are a vital aid to making sense of the stories, which are so deeply rooted in the author’s lived experience. Lowry often used letters as a testing ground for ideas, images, turns of phrase, and allusions that would later appear in his fiction. The abbreviation SC in the notes refers to Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry (2 vols.), edited by Sherrill Grace (see p. 360). Exact dates for the letters are not always available. Although each story can be read independently, I have made notes as if the stories were being read in sequence—recurring allusions are usually annotated on first appearance. The notes necessarily interpret the text only sparingly, but the books and articles listed in the Select Bibliography provide ample resources for interested readers of Lowry’s works. Grace’s "Symbols of Tenuous Order: Hear Us O Lord," chapter six of The Voyage That Never Ends, is a highly useful guide to the stories and an ideal point of departure. Bibliographical information for critical writing on Lowry’s works appears in the Select Bibliography (see p. 359), unless otherwise noted.

¹ Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), 3.

² For an account of this episode, see Douglas Day, Malcolm Lowry: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 400.

³ Day 413.

⁴ C.G. McNeill, Malcolm Lowry Visits the Doctor (1973) in Malcolm Lowry Remembered, ed. Gordon Bowker (London: Ariel, 1985), 160. This episode took place in Vancouver in 1949. See also Day 416.

⁵ Malcolm Lowry, The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Kathleen Scherf (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992), 170, 174.

⁶ Lowry wrote poetry throughout his adult life, producing a substantial body of poems even as he remained unsure of his own talents; verily I feel myself sometimes to be that saddest of all animals, he wrote, a poet who cannot write poetry (Letter to Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, April 1947, SC 2.37). The poems are of uneven quality, but various commentators have recognized their merits. George Woodcock claims, for example, that there are a great many lyric poems of fine quality (George Woodcock, ed. Malcolm Lowry: The Man and His Work [Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1971], 3); Frederick Asals asserts that the best poems are very fine, achieved individual works (The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry [review of The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Kathleen Scherf] in Malcolm Lowry Review, 31–32 [1992–93]: 19); and Earle Birney notes their considerable intrinsic value, quite apart from their interest as hitherto unknown products of an internationally distinguished novelist (The Unknown Poetry of Malcolm Lowry [1961] in Malcolm Lowry: The Writer and His Critics, ed. Barry Wood [Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980], 196). Furthermore, Birney claims that "in the poetry, we are confronted with the naked and doomed face of the man himself (Earle Birney, ed. Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry [San Francisco: City Lights, 1962], 7) and that the poems cry more openly and poignantly the personal agonies of the man behind the writings (Unknown Poetry 199).

⁷ Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (1995) (London: Penguin, 1996), 394.

⁸ Lowry’s family took a holiday on the Isle of Man in 1910, when Lowry was still very young. In the Notes to Hear Us O Lord, Lowry wrote that the hymn is No. 947 in the Methodist hymn book, or was when the author was a child. He mistakenly gives Eric Gill as the author of the words; Eric Gill (1882–1940) was a British typographer and artist.

⁹ J.R. Watson, ed., An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 356.

¹⁰ Richard K. Cross, review of Malcolm Lowry:

Reviews for Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place

[yamanokevin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Malcolm Lowry’s work has been steadily drifting into the realm of the obscure and forgotten as the years go by. A hard core fan base continues to revisit his old haunts, including the location of his shack near Vancouver, in which he finished his great novel “Under the Volcano.” That book continues to be reprinted and well stocked but his “lesser” works, both novels and stories, are becoming increasingly hard to find. If you come across this collection in a used bookstore somewhere, snap it up. It is worth whatever you might consider spending. So why is this an essential addition to the libraries of those who love literature? Quite simply, the last story in the collection, the novella “The Forest Path to the Spring,” is possibly one of the most beautiful and beautifully written stories in the English language.It is largely autobiographical, describing the sojourn of a husband and wife in the wilds of Vancouver, clearly drawn from Lowry’s life there with his second wife, former star of the silent screen, Margerie Bonner Lowry. The narrative readily paints a picture of Lowry himself, slaving over drafts and redrafts of “Under the Volcano,” as the tides washed in and out beneath the timbers of his shack. It traces the development of their relationship in what must have been an uncomfortable home, focusing on the daily journey they make for water from a nearby spring. Collecting water from the spring becomes a metaphor not only for their life, but also for all of life’s journeys that are filled with difficulties, fears, hopes, and uncertain endings.The other stories are interesting too, and if you are lucky, you might find a copy that includes “Luna Caustic,” Lowry’s fictionalization of his voluntary incarceration in Bellevue Hospital. My copy, by Penguin Modern Classics, includes a foreword to this story that briefly describes Lowry’s apocryphal arrival in New York--a real comedic gem: “when asked by a New York customs officer if he had anything to declare, he replied, ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’ They opened his large trunk. It contained one football boot and a copy of ‘Moby Dick.’” Classic.