The 1940 Under the Volcano: A Critical Edition

By Malcolm Lowry, Miguel Mota, Paul Tiessen and 2 more

The 1940 Under the Volcano—hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece—differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry’s 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, The 1940 Under the Volcano takes its rightful place as part of Lowry’s exciting 1930s/early-40s trilogy. Scholars have only recently begun to pay systematic attention to convergences and divergences between this earlier work and the 1947 version. Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen’s insightful introduction, together with extensive annotations by Chris Ackerley and David Large, reveal the depth and breadth of Lowry’s complex vision for his work. This critical edition fleshes out our sense of the enormous achievement by this twentieth-century modernist.

Publié en anglais.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780776623160

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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The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Heritage Canada through the Canada Book Fund and by the Canada Council for the Arts. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Copy editing: Barbara Ibronyi

Proofreading: Michael Waldin

Typesetting: CS

Cover design: Lisa Marie Smith

Cover image: Red Volcano by Dr. Atl, 1921–23

Reproduced with kind permission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lowry, Malcolm, 1909-1957, author

The 1940 Under the volcano / by Malcolm Lowry ; a critical edition, edited and with an introduction by Miguel Mota & Paul Tiessen ; annotations by Chris Ackerley & David Large ; foreword by Vik Doyen & Patrick A.

McCarthy ; afterword by Frederick Asals.

(Canadian literature collection)

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7766-2315-3 (paperback).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2317-7 (pdf).--

ISBN 978-0-7766-2316-0 (epub)

I. Mota, Miguel, editor II. Tiessen, Paul, 1944-, editor III. Ackerley, Chris, 1947-, writer of added commentary IV. Large, David, 1982-, writer of added commentary V. Title. VI. Series: Canadian literature collection

The 1940 Under the Volcano published with permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright 1994 by The Estate of Malcolm Lowry

©University of Ottawa Press, 2015

Contents

GENERAL EDITOR’S NOTE

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

⋅

UNDER THE VOLCANO

⋅

ANNOTATIONS

GLOSSARY OF FOREIGN TERMS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TEXTUAL NOTES

AFTERWORD

⋅

CONTRIBUTORS

General Editor’s Note

This annotated edition of Malcolm Lowry’s 1940 version of his great 1947 novel, Under the Volcano, is the last of three related projects undertaken by an international team of Lowry scholars: Chris Ackerley (University of Otago), Vik Doyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Patrick A. McCarthy (University of Miami), Miguel Mota (University of British Columbia), and Paul Tiessen (Wilfrid Laurier University). The other projects are Doyen’s 2013 edition of the novella Swinging the Maelstrom (along with the distinct earlier version, The Last Address) and McCarthy’s 2014 edition of Lowry’s novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, previously thought to have been lost. Each edition is annotated by Ackerley, the present one in collaboration with David Large (University of Otago). Together, the three editions will provide scholars and other readers with detailed evidence of Lowry’s intentions and achievement during the period 1936–1944, a time of transition when he worked simultaneously on three books that he imagined as a Dantean trilogy: Under the Volcano as the Inferno; Swinging the Maelstrom as the Purgatorio; and In Ballast to the White Sea as the Paradiso.

For their invaluable assistance, advice, and support, the editors of these volumes would like to thank the University of Ottawa Press and Peter Matson. We would like to also thank the late Anne Yandle at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division, whose early encouragement and guidance were so crucial to all who have worked on these projects. All three editions have been made possible by the support of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, through its Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project. For his ongoing support as director of EMiC, we owe special gratitude to Dean Irvine.

MIGUEL MOTA

University of British Columbia

Foreword

On 28 July 1934, his twenty-fifth birthday, Malcolm Lowry left Southampton for New York to be with Jan Gabrial, his wife of seven months. Already the author of one novel, Ultramarine (1933), Lowry was working on a sequel, In Ballast to the White Sea, and both he and Jan had high hopes that he would prosper in New York, the centre of the American publishing world. In most respects, however, the next two years were to prove disastrous for Lowry: not only was he often separated from Jan, but in the summer of 1935 he was accused of having plagiarized Ultramarine, and in May 1936 he had to be checked into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, where he stayed for at least a week before Jan discovered what had happened and arranged for his release (Gabrial, Inside the Volcano 91). Even then, however, he was determined to make use of his experience, and soon he had a full draft of a novella, The Last Address (later revised and expanded as Swinging the Maelstrom), along with a nearly complete draft of In Ballast to the White Sea. By early September 1936, when he and Jan boarded a Greyhound bus for California and then Mexico, Lowry seemed to be making progress both personally and artistically. In Mexico Lowry planned to work on his marriage and on In Ballast, but his drinking led to more marital difficulties until late November 1937, when Jan left him. Even as his personal life fell apart, a series of incidents that seemed portentous to Lowry—perhaps starting with his arrival in Mexico either on or just before the Day of the Dead—led him to a new novel, Under the Volcano. A dying Indian by the roadside became linked in Lowry’s imagination to the death of a tourist called Erikson, the name of a character in In Ballast that he had modelled after the Norwegian author Nordahl Grieg, and both deaths were worked into Under the Volcano. An extended visit by Lowry’s former mentor Conrad Aiken led to long discussions and often drunken quarrels because of Aiken’s right wing views on world politics, including the civil war in Spain that had begun in July 1936 and that would become central to the novel’s political dimension. An innocuous sign in a public garden, essentially a request to keep children off the grass, became, through Lowry’s mistranslation, a threat of eviction, a modern version of the biblical expulsion from Paradise.

Whether sober or drunk, Lowry always jotted down notes in copybooks or on scraps of paper: poetic descriptions, fragments of conversation, signs, random thoughts, anything that caught his imagination. Soon, two characters started taking shape as he planned Under the Volcano: on the one hand Hugh, a young idealist who feels duty bound to volunteer on the side of the Loyalists in Spain; on the other hand the Consul, a cynical drunk who strongly objects to any interference, whether in international politics or in private matters such as his drinking or his failed marriage. The link between these two ideological counterparts is Yvonne, the Consul’s daughter, who has come to Mexico on the Day of the Dead, hoping to restore her parents’ marriage by convincing her father to stop drinking. In Mexico, however, she happens to meet Hugh, with whom she had a romantic encounter in Paris after a series of sordid affairs. Hugh realizes that his love for Yvonne has priority over his urge to fight in the Spanish war, while Yvonne realizes that she won’t be able to help her father and that she can start a new life with Hugh. For them the Day of the Dead ends with a consummation of their love. For the Consul, his alcoholic self-destruction culminates in death when he is shot in a drunken quarrel.

None of the pre-1940 typescripts for Under the Volcano survive, so what Arthur Calder-Marshall saw in Mexico in 1937 when he mentioned a forty-thousand-word draft and what Carol Phillips retyped in Los Angeles in 1939 remain a mystery. In the first half of 1940, while Lowry worried about being conscripted into the British army, the novel was entirely retyped in Vancouver by Margerie Bonner, who later became his second wife. We do not know whether Hugh’s decision to choose love instead of fighting in Spain was inspired by Lowry’s new-found love for Margerie or whether it was part of the plan for the novel earlier. In any case, the conclusion of Chapter XI is one place where the two extant versions of Under the Volcano, from 1940 and 1947, point in different directions. In 1940 there was still hope for love: not for the Consul, but at least for Yvonne. In the 1947 version, however, Yvonne is the Consul’s ex-wife, not his daughter, and his tragedy becomes hers as well, as the last moments of his life lead directly to her death. It must come as a surprise to readers familiar with the 1947 Volcano that in the 1940 text Yvonne’s experience of love is described in words that are echoed in the later version when she is trampled to death by a stampeding horse. But that is a perfect example of how Lowry revised this novel until it turned into one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.

Although the most important differences between the 1940 and 1947 versions of Under the Volcano involve style and perspective, readers of this version will probably be most alert to the extent to which the two narratives differ. The general structure is much the same in both cases, with the first chapter set on the Day of the Dead, the anniversary of the Consul’s death. In each case the opening chapter focuses on Jacques Laruelle, a French film director and long-time friend of the Consul (named William Ames in 1940, Geoffrey Firmin in 1947). His perspective shapes our early view of the novel’s protagonist, whose voice is first heard in an unposted letter to his ex-wife (Priscilla in 1940, Yvonne in 1947) that Laruelle finds in a book he had borrowed from the Consul. The next two chapters are quite different in the 1940 Volcano from the more familiar final version. Chapter II turns back the clock two or three years (not just one, as in 1947), to the eve of the Day of the Dead, with the Consul’s daughter, Yvonne, having arrived in Acapulco, intending to go on to Quauhnahuac to see her father and perhaps convince him to give up drinking and return to his wife. In Acapulco she encounters Hugh Fernhead, whom she had known in Spain and had seen several times. Fate seems to have brought them together, and she accepts his suggestion that they fly together to Quauhnahuac. In Chapter III they meet the Consul, who is determined to keep on drinking. Believing that she can better handle her difficult father alone, Yvonne asks Hugh to leave them now but to join them for lunch. The remainder of the novel generally follows the sequence of events that remained intact through 1947, the major exception being that Chapter XI concludes with the sexual union of Yvonne and Hugh, not with Yvonne’s death. Apart from changes in the relationships of Hugh and Yvonne to the Consul, most of the characters—even minor ones like the old woman with a chicken and dominoes who appears early in the novel and reappears in the last chapter—are much the same in both versions. There are also striking passages in the 1940 text that survive intact, or with minor stylistic changes, through 1947. One example is the ending of Chapter IX, where an old lame Indian carries on his back an older and more decrepit Indian. Lowry made a highly significant change: in the 1947 text the lame Indian carries not only the older man but also the weight of the past. This strengthens the connection between this passage and the novel’s theme of the past, the personal and universal repository of guilt, even as it heightens the contrast between the Indian’s willingness to shoulder another person’s burden and the Consul’s fixation on his own past.

When he began writing Under the Volcano, Lowry could not have imagined that he would endure nine solid years of continual failure, as he put it in Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (179), before the book would be accepted. After just three and a half years of work, he had enough confidence in the novel to send the typescript to Whit Burnett at Story Press. Lowry had good reason to believe in his novel’s potential: despite obvious weaknesses in dialogue, characterization, and perspective, the 1940 Under the Volcano was quite promising, enough so that a sympathetic publisher would have asked that it be resubmitted after significant revision. Had that been the course adopted by any of the twelve publishers who rejected the book during the months to come, Under the Volcano would have enjoyed some success, and Lowry would have been spared much of the anxiety that he experienced over the next years; but without far more extensive revision, it is doubtful that the Volcano would have been ranked among the best novels of the twentieth century. As it turned out, however, the rejection of the 1940 Volcano was fortunate because it led to the years of revisions that transformed the novel in essential ways, as Frederick Asals has demonstrated in his indispensable study, The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1997).

Even so, the 1940 Under the Volcano deserves our consideration as a novel, not as a prelude to one. There is much to admire in the novel at this stage, for example Lowry’s handling of alternating voices in the final chapter, when the Consul reads letters from his ex-wife Priscilla while a German silver miner, Wilhelm Bunge, tells him a strange dream about his dead sister. Priscilla is not dead, but the Consul regards his separation from her, represented by these letters that he had left unread at the Farolito, as a kind of death: Nothing was more homeless than these letters—worse, he thought, than letters arriving on board ship in port for a man who has died at sea (235). Neither the Consul nor Bunge appears to pay attention to the other as the Consul immerses himself in Priscilla’s letters while Bunge narrates his own story of despair, and that is perhaps one reason for the scene: each is drowning in his own sorrow. The scene in some ways resembles the earlier one with Señora Gregorio in Chapter VII, as the Consul realizes later in Chapter XII:

And he saw too, how all the occurrences of the day, the arrival of Yvonne, the snake in the garden, the scorpion, his hideous quarrel with Laruelle, and later with Hugh, the infernal machine, the encounter with Señora Gregorio, Priscilla’s letters, the decision not to go to Guanajuato and afterwards this meeting with the German silver miner, and much besides, had all been as swiftly passing milestones on this last stage of his headlong flight downhill. (242–43)

In both chapters, there are barriers to communication. The barriers in Chapter VII are primarily linguistic—Señora Gregorio’s poor English, the Consul’s even worse Spanish—but in Chapter XII the problem is that the Consul and Bunge are each oblivious of the other’s sorrow. The narrative moves back and forth between Priscilla’s voice and that of Bunge’s dead sister. Each is present in the scene by proxy, Priscilla through her letter as the Consul reads it, the sister through Bunge’s recitation of his dream. Bunge’s character was deleted from the 1947 novel, but this is still a touching scene, ending as it does with Bunge’s plea for sympathy: ‘You see that to understand such beauty you can’t be entirely degraded, don’t you?’ pleaded Bunge (238). It’s a remarkable question, similar in its intent to Gregor Samsa’s question in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis after his sister plays the violin: Could he really be an animal since music touched him so? Bunge is a complex character who elicits from the reader both sympathy (for his loss of his sister, which haunts him) and scorn (for his anti-Semitism).

Throughout the 1940 Volcano there are other passages like this. The novel at this stage is one in which many of the materials that will shape it into a masterwork are already in place, but in a rougher form: glistering pieces of diamond not yet chiselled into their final shape and sometimes hidden under sidetracks. Even passages that don’t quite work, and would have to be jettisoned, show Lowry working toward a more mature style than that found in his earlier works. Take for example the following passage, describing the moment in Chapter IX when Yvonne realizes she is in love with Hugh:

It was the experience of this feeling, but which she had possessed only for authors who were dead, for Keats, and then for Shelley, and, in her adolescence, for Ernest Dowson, that had brought her closest in her life to what she imagined it to be. She wondered now as she had wondered then if such an emotion, separated from its element of hysterical identification, could become, truly, the thing itself. And as she was trying whimsically to fancy how she might have behaved had Keats or Shelley been alive, her question was answered, and, simultaneously, she knew that, even now, she was falling in love with Hugh. (179)

In the next paragraph she sees the world as fundamentally changed by her recognition of her love for Hugh. Asals notes in the essay reprinted here as the afterword that this great epiphany is unconvincing because at this stage Lowry had not developed the close connection between narration and style he would use so effectively in the 1947 Volcano, where each chapter is tied to the perspective of one of four main characters. Yet if Lowry in 1940 had not yet found a way to present Yvonne’s consciousness directly, he was at least moving in that direction, and the appearance of passages like this, in which the thoughts of other characters—Jacques, Yvonne, Hugh—are allotted the same careful attention that Lowry would formerly have given only to the novel’s protagonist (and Lowry surrogate), is a major development in his fiction.

As a novel, then, the 1940 Under the Volcano may be read on its own and in relation to the 1947 version. As editors of the other Lowry editions in this series, Swinging the Maelstrom (2013) and In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), we also want to stress the importance of this edition in relation to its predecessors, each of which preserves part of a projected trilogy that Lowry called The Voyage That Never Ends. The meticulously researched introduction to this volume, by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen, sets forth in detail the nature of this voyage and much more besides. The editors demonstrate why Lowry was devastated by Whit Burnett’s rejection of the 1940 manuscript; assess the strengths and weaknesses of the novel at that stage; explore the roles in the novel of the sea, music, and radios; and call attention to many ways in which the 1940 Under the Volcano may be read. Any such reading will be greatly enhanced by the annotations compiled by Chris Ackerley and David Large, which plunge us headlong into the marvellous abyss of Lowry’s imagination. By pointing to Lowry’s half-hidden allusions and quotations, the annotations reveal the larger socio-cultural and political context of Lowry’s intellectual world. At the same time, like the introduction, they offer a bridge to the 1947 Under the Volcano, starting with annotation I.1, on the Day of the Dead. Finally, the afterword by Frederick Asals makes available an essay that is just as valuable today as it was in 1994, when it was first published. It would be hard to improve on Asals’s concise statement about the essential difference between the 1940 and 1947 versions of Under the Volcano: the music of these two texts is altogether different, a contrapuntal pop tune as opposed to a baroque cantata (487).

Of course pop tunes have their value too, especially for a writer who once aspired to be a successful composer of foxtrots. This edition of the 1940 Under the Volcano reveals that the failed text of 1940, though not as complex or fully integrated as the more famous 1947 version, and certainly not as funny, has its own music, its own charms.

VIK DOYEN

Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven

PATRICK A. MCCARTHY

University of Miami

Acknowledgments

Our thanks go first and foremost to the annotators of this volume, Chris Ackerley and David Large. While editing Malcolm Lowry’s The 1940 Under the Volcano, we were, for a while, simply—or complicatedly—observers, occupying a spot along the sidelines, while the two annotators did their hard work. Over a period of many months we received regular progress reports from Ackerley and Large, including bursts of cheering and sounds of groaning, as they worked relentlessly on the annotations for this book. Their wise and witty performance of seemingly limitless erudition has created a significant parallel text, deepening and transforming our understanding of Lowry’s 1940 manuscript. Please note that Ackerley and Large’s own acknowledgments appear later in this volume, near the start of the annotations section.

This volume has benefited enormously, too, by our ongoing conversation with Vik Doyen in Belgium and Patrick McCarthy in the United States, the editors, respectively, of Swinging the Maelstrom (2013) and In Ballast to the White Sea (2014). Ours has been a years-long conversation about the Lowry trilogy, supported by our having been brought together in 2009 by Dean Irvine through the opportunities provided by the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project.

Our long-standing interest in Lowry’s project received early support from George Brandak and the late Anne Yandle of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library at the University of British Columbia, as well as Joanne Buchan and Deborah Harmon at Wilfrid Laurier University. Our heartfelt thanks to all of them. Norman Levi, of Victoria, B.C., generously allowed us to examine a copy of the original typescript of the 1940 version of Under the Volcano, now in his possession (after having found it many years ago on the beach at Dollarton soon after the Lowrys had left their home there). And we are grateful, too, for having the opportunity to include as an afterword in this volume Frederick Asals’s excellent critical account of the 1940 manuscript. Both of us have benefited in our Lowry research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and we are grateful for its support, and, as always, for the support of Peter Matson and Sterling Lord Literistic of New York. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the encouragement of the University of Ottawa Press. We thank the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their judicious and useful corrections and advice as well as Elizabeth Schwaiger and Barbara Ibronyi for their meticulous and instructive copy-editing. And especially we thank Dominike Thomas, whose wisdom and good humour has kept us going throughout.

And last, but certainly not least, for their ongoing advice and patience, and for generally putting up with each of us, we would like to thank Margaret Linley and Hildi Froese Tiessen.

MIGUEL MOTA AND PAUL TIESSEN

UNMARKED COPY C OF THE 1940 UNDER THE VOLCANO. MALCOLM LOWRY COLLECTION, RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, BOX 26:6.

Introduction

Volcano … [is] a strange book and I think it makes an odd but splendid din…. [W]hat I can and could do was to write a book which put down my own reflection of the moon in my own real broken bottle. And I think I have done.

MALCOLM LOWRY TO CONRAD AIKEN, 9 APRIL 1940

I.

THE FAILED TEXT REVISITED

The splendid din of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, published in 1947, was well established across numerous countries and in multiple translations by 1965, when the Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry appeared. Readers of the Selected Letters were enchanted by their moving and entertaining energy, or as Harvey Breit asserts in his introduction, by the powerful and substantial gifts of their irony, erudition, manners, generosity, independence, humanity and literary taste (419). The letters, laden with charm, wit, and good cheer, widened the aura of genius that clung to [Lowry] during his lifetime (Selected Letters xii, xiv). But readers were astonished too by the darkness of those letters, by the seemingly endless parade of frustrations and failures that kept on plaguing Lowry throughout his life. In particular, for the first time readers were confronted in 1965 by a setback that reverberates through the volume that we are presenting here: the astonishing list of twelve publishers that made its appearance in appendix I of the Selected Letters. Those publishers were lined up in their expression of a chilling consensus about a major text by Lowry, speaking in one voice of their rejection of this work, what we are calling The 1940 Under the Volcano.¹ In 1965 readers were right to imagine too that this same list must have had devastating consequences for Lowry when he read it in a letter mailed to him from New York on 5 September 1941 by his literary agent Harold (Hal) Matson. Lowry had, after all, been developing and refining that manuscript for over three years and in June 1940 had submitted what was already his third draft.² What readers did not learn from the 1965 volume was that, for Lowry, yet grimmer news had preceded that September 1941 notice by nearly a year: a 7 October 1940 letter from Matson that deeply altered the course of Lowry’s view of himself, of his work on his Under the Volcano project, and of the publishing world.³

For the 1965 readers of the Selected Letters, that list was but one part of a repeating pattern of troubles and defeats in Lowry’s life that included the loss by fire in 1944 of the massive draft of In Ballast to the White Sea then in his possession and concluded with Lowry’s death by misadventure in 1957, the latter darkly announced as the final entry in the volume.⁴ In 1947 Lowry had won international acclaim for his masterpiece, what might be deemed the final version of Under the Volcano, inspiring enormous admiration as a major achievement renewing the tradition established by Joyce’s Ulysses twenty-five years earlier. It is hardly surprising then that the long list of rejections by a number of New York’s finest literary presses inevitably contributed to a general disregard by readers for the version that we are publishing here. Yet a small handful of scholars did dig more deeply, recognizing important relationships between the 1940 and 1947 manuscripts. Vik Doyen, focusing during the early 1970s on the textual histories of Lowry’s main fictional texts, came to understand the development of Under the Volcano in terms of six identifiable phases, each suggesting at least the possibility of an integral manuscript. During the mid-1990s Frederick Asals, apply[ing] the word ‘version’ to passages and chapters only, and not [except for the 1940 and 1947 texts] to the work as a whole (Ackerley, The Making 75–76), came to understand Lowry’s working method in terms of blocks of text rather than entire manuscripts. Asals, of course, was indebted to Doyen’s work nearly a quarter century before but had the benefit of looking more closely at the vast amount of archival material available to him. For both Doyen and Asals there are only two genuine ‘versions’ of the novel (Asals, The Making 395): the 1947 edition and the 1940 circulated fair copy that we are publishing here.

The few people who did examine the 1940 version of Under the Volcano inevitably read it in light of its failure in New York and the later success of the 1947 text. It is significant, too, that until very recently scholars could pay little attention to the relationship between the 1940 Under the Volcano and the major works that Lowry had underway alongside it: Swinging the Maelstrom and the long-thought-lost In Ballast to the White Sea. When we consider the 1940 text in relation to these texts—both recently published in scholarly/critical editions—we gain a new sense of the remarkable experimentation and variety of exploration that Lowry was undertaking throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. The publication of a critical edition of the 1940 Under the Volcano invites a careful examination of that work simply in its own right, just as the circumstances around Lowry’s carefully nurtured efforts to place it with a publisher encourage a closer look at that list of firms that in 1940 and 1941 so summarily rejected it. Lowry’s approach to the New York publishing world reveals a paradigm of what typified the highs and lows of his publishing efforts throughout his life. That is, much can be discerned about Lowry’s real and imagined life that for him enveloped the very act of creation.

The two-year period from the summer of 1934 (when Lowry turned twenty-five) to the summer of 1936 figured with extraordinary prominence in the fate of all of Lowry’s writing from the mid-1930s onward. These were his New York years, when he relished the role of the young Englishman abroad, eager to consummate his love affair with America (Bowker, Pursued 180). As part of this desire for consummation, Lowry went to considerable effort during this time to familiarize himself with the New York publishing world, investing enormous time and energy in a personal and social framework that he hoped would be stable enough to provide for him the kind of setting within which he could write as he chose, one that had the potential, in terms he in effect demanded, to offer him a close-knit and supportive community. He filled his letters with entertaining hyperbole and theatrics that conveyed his sometimes grim situation in order to secure and manage his place in the world. Projecting images of both himself and his correspondents, Lowry sought to nurture into existence a community where if others would only follow his prescription, they could come to fully understand and respect each other, in personal as well as professional terms. Always seeking to draw deeply on the close and supportive companionship of a mentor, editor, or other literary friend, Lowry hoped in the New York of 1934–1936 to ally himself with like-minded and sympathetic individuals whom he could trust and in whom he could confide in complex and complicated ways.

Along with his first wife, Jan Gabrial, Lowry attempted to piece together this social/professional community by making the rounds of New York literary parties and lunches as well as by approaching publishers directly. Such contacts, he hoped, would lay the framework for future possibilities. And indeed, it would be in part a handful of people from that world who would later sustain him during his adventures in Mexico, where he lived from the fall of 1936 to the summer of 1938, and where, shortly after his arrival, he not only found the material for his Under the Volcano project but also began to see that the latter might become the first leaf of the triptych of a kind of drunken Divine Comedy (Lowry, in Bowker, Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano, 32). Though he originally had planned to do so, Lowry did not return to New York. Instead he spent one year in Los Angeles (1938–1939), where Jan had taken up work after leaving Malcolm in Mexico in December 1937. He then began what was at first an enforced sojourn in Vancouver, arriving on 30 July 1939, less than three years after he had left New York. His arrival on unhappy terms in an unfriendly environment in Canada left him feeling incredibly remote from the New York world that he had tried to construct for future use.

In Canada he was cut off from direct regular communion with literary people. But his sense of strong and active associations in New York let him imagine a connection with an empathetic collaborative presence there: a kind of participant editorial voice, however remote. Lowry’s situation improved when Margerie Bonner, whom he had met in Los Angeles, came up to join him in Vancouver on 31 September 1939. She too was a writer, and a year later, after Lowry’s divorce from Jan, she would become his second wife. She was also, as Lowry’s friend Gerald Noxon later observed, an expert typist, because if it weren’t for that fact, I don’t think Malc could ever get round to putting [his manuscript] into legible shape (On Malcolm Lowry 29). In the fall of 1939 she immediately typed out a new copy of, first, the manuscript collection of poems, The Lighthouse Invites the Storm, that Lowry had underway, and, secondly, his novella, The Last Address (which later became Swinging the Maelstrom).⁵ With each successive stage of the Under the Volcano project, her contribution would become more substantive, as Noxon recalled: Margie has helped a lot to give [the manuscript] coherence and to steer Malc off the rocks of sheer introspective ramblings to which he is naturally inclined (On Malcolm Lowry 28). In domestic terms, as things turned out and much to their own surprise, Malcolm and Margerie were to make Vancouver and its environs their home for the next fifteen years.

Lowry’s submission of his 1940 manuscript occurred seven years after the publication of his first novel, Ultramarine (1933), and seven years before the publication of the version of Under the Volcano that the world has come to know. That its submission stands at the historical midpoint between the only two novels that he published during his lifetime signals its affiliation with the two other major works that he had underway at the time, and which he felt confident would shortly appear as part of his planned trilogy: the novella Swinging the Maelstrom and the novel In Ballast to the White Sea. The thought of these manuscripts filled Lowry with boyish glee when he discovered that his old and dear pal from his University of Cambridge days, Gerald Noxon, had returned to his native Canada in 1940. Given to dramatizing himself in his letters, to narrating his life, often histrionically so (see Grace in CL 1:xxii), Lowry flung his epistolary arms around Noxon in August 1940. He spiritedly proclaimed, if brimming with a little too much joy, that he had high hopes that what he called Lippincott and Story Press would take all his books, 5 tomes he said with more than a little exaggeration, although he did include among those hoped-for successes a volume of poetry and one, perhaps, of short stories: So that you see, or if you don’t see, I should point out, that with me […] it is going well (CL 1:347). His rejoicing was undoubtedly affected by the sense of well-being that came from his revelling in the fine wet ruin of a forest in Dollarton where he and Margerie had just taken refuge from the city, at first in a rented cabin: We dive from our front porch into a wild sea troughing with whales and seals. We have a boat, now diving at anchor. Everywhere there is a good smell of sea and timber and life and death and crabs (CL 1:346). He was enjoying life with Margerie, ecstatically describing her to Noxon as a one-time child film star […] now of age (CL 1:347). The baked oysters are calling! (CL 1:348) he hooted in closing, cheerily inviting Noxon and his wife, Betty, to visit. Lowry’s jubilation was immense, for in August 1940 he had not yet considered the possibility that the New York publisher of his choice, one he imagined as an integral part of his essential and carefully cultivated literary community, might in fact utterly reject his work.

* * *

The publication of The 1940 Under the Volcano asks that we consider anew what readers since 1965 have known only as a failed manuscript, rejected by publishers for being too cerebral, too depressing, too uncoordinated, too confusing (Day 286). It asks us too to take account of Lowry’s own sense of what he was attempting to achieve with his 1940 text—his negotiations with both the publishing industry and with himself as an author. We begin below examining his claims, both realistic and exaggerated, that he made about his manuscript-in-progress to the American poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, who had served as his mentor a decade earlier, and who had read the first—and now lost—version of the novel when he visited Lowry in Mexico in 1937. And we take note also of Lowry’s doubts. Not least, we try to gauge the meanings he attached to his very purposefully choosing to submit his manuscript first to Story Press, a small publisher with high literary ambitions that had emerged on the literary scene when Lowry was still in New York in 1936.

In what follows, the particularities of Lowry’s 1940 vision of his Mexico material become evident. Because there is another—and particularly astounding—text, a fulfillment in a way of this one, to follow seven years later, we might take pleasure in reading this book not as a failed text, but as a uniquely restless one. The 1940 Under the Volcano is a work simultaneously fixed and fluid, closed and open, curiously subject to, and indeed in many ways desperately hoping for, its own future iterations. Of course responses to it are contingent for most readers on knowledge of that later work. Yet any who may not have read the 1947 version and have only the knowledge that that celebrated work exists now have the opportunity to read both works in the order in which Lowry wrote and submitted them. The 1940 Under the Volcano is admittedly a text written in some degree of haste, produced on the run as it were, in conditions (with drafts and fragments written from 1936 to 1940) extraordinarily bad even for Lowry. But there is much to admire in the 1940 text, including ingredients that continue to exist (though in sometimes radically new iterations) all the way through to 1947.

By 9 April 1940 Lowry was calling it a strange book, one that made an odd but splendid din (CL 1:309). Strange, odd, splendid: these are indeed apt words for describing this often unpredictable work, one that in many ways haunts the later 1947 text. It contains many pleasures and surprises, including key passages and expressions that persist to the end, which here exercise their own unique effects. Indeed, this 1940 work might be seen as an adjustable blueprint (an expression that Lowry would later use to describe his 1950 film script [Lowry, Notes on a Screenplay]), awaiting its adaptation by someone—a literary friend, a spiritual collaborator—who understood the still-incipient intentions of its original creator. As a blueprint it provides a good deal of the narrative base and general structure that subsequently helped Lowry over a period of more than four years (from the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1945) to move freely, deliberately, and painstakingly in the direction of the grand orchestral performance of 1947. But even as a blueprint this edition has its own sturdy features and, as the annotations by Chris Ackerley and David Large at the back of this volume so generously reveal, it contains surprising layers and depths embedded in its many symbolic and allusive gestures. Readers will find for themselves that it is a work full of many small and some large revelations. In the end, not least, its presence makes all the more visible the brilliance and mystery of the 1947 work.

Finally the appearance here of The 1940 Under the Volcano, published by University of Ottawa Press in the company of the two related volumes, Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, reconsiders Lowry’s life and career during the 1930s and early 1940s in ways readers and even most scholars are only now beginning to discern and assess. Marked as Lowry’s life was by failures, setbacks, and defeats—the grim effects of his drinking throughout the 1930s and again after 1944; the disastrous experiences in Mexico especially in 1937–1938; the divorce from his first wife, Jan Gabrial, who could not live with his alcoholism; the failed attempts in 1939 and the early 1940s at re-entry into the United States; the June 1944 fire in Dollarton that took his cabin and thousands of pages of his work; his miserable death in Ripe, Sussex, in June 1957—the publication of these three volumes reveals a creative and productive mind astonishingly active and far reaching during the period that would otherwise appear to have been submerged in an alcoholic haze. This and the other two editions invite a reconsideration of the magnitude and achievement of his ambitiousness and productivity during these years. Lowry’s regard for these three quite different texts as belonging to a single project is reinforced by the annotations in this volume and in the other two volumes in this series; they provide a sense of the extent to which these three works draw from a single sensibility: the European in the New World, eagerly trying to establish himself as a writer between the mid-1930s and early 1940s.

II.

KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY

For Lowry work in progress ideally spawned relationships. It created sustained dialogue. And, though undoubtedly frustrating for any editor, it resisted fixity. No major text was ever finished. He was ever wary of the supposition that any of his longer written or for that matter published texts stood as his final statement. Even as late as 1951, while laying out a detailed map of his seemingly never-ending work-in-progress for his literary agent and his editor, both in New York, Lowry was suggesting that the 1947 Under the Volcano was only a more or less finished novel, that has already been published, but which is a cub that can still stand a little further licking (Lowry, Work in Progress 77; see also McCarthy 117). Hence when working on what he considered major work, he remained always expectant that it might compel or entice enough interest to lead to a committed conversation. Because Lowry fit such conversation into the contours of a kind of intimate domestic discourse, it inevitably included rituals of confession, forgiveness, and redemption. This was true especially where, as at times was his wont, he felt he had been in some way recalcitrant, even when he had been filled with lugubriousness among kindly hosts extending to him their succour (CL 1:474).

Matthew Corrigan sensed early on Lowry’s need of sophisticated editorial friendship. In 1970, focusing on the later 1940s and 1950s, he recognized a pattern of Lowry’s desperate searches for an empathetic publisher, a friendly literary voice. Corrigan saw that Lowry’s success as a writer ran parallel with this ability to maintain a productive dialogue with an editorial companion. Lamenting that New York Publishing had not bothered to develop an adequate editorial relationship with Lowry, he insisted that this failure accounted for Lowry’s persistent trouble in finding his way out of his piles of manuscripts. Corrigan’s approach, brought into focus by the quality of the manuscripts published in the ten or twelve years after Lowry’s death, provides insight into the Lowry we encounter from the New York days of 1934–1936 to the Vancouver of 1940.⁶

Except for complicated and awkward moments much later, in 1947 and 1954, Lowry moved in a geographic orbit very much outside New York after the 1934–1936 years: Mexico, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and, from 1954 until his death, his native Europe. Yet after 1939, amidst the desperate solitude of British Columbia (87), New York became the imagined home that for him lent substance and sustenance to the survival and hoped-for publication of his manuscripts. But the New York establishment did not have the means to extend itself enough to a writer who was unable to perform according to contractual timetables or other imposed arrangements. With only rare exceptions there were no New York publishers able to come to grips with Lowry’s approach to his art, and no one who then, on the basis of that terrifying knowledge, knew how to deal with him (88). Lacking the means to cope with the writing habits fostered by his instincts as a visionary seeking a voice capable of expressing agony, hope, and suffering—the terrors of both damnation and salvation—these publishers were unable to offer Lowry the kind of nurturing, encouragement, and, above all, understanding that would lend him the time, space, and sense of purpose to pursue the kinds of writing that he was exploring. Eventually, argues Corrigan, in the later 1940s and into the 1950s, hidden in their brusque criticism (88) was their prefer[ence] to chalk up his recalcitrance and delay to alcohol (84). Even Albert Erskine, the editor who oversaw the publication of Under the Volcano at Reynal & Hitchcock, had his hands tied in the end, Corrigan insists, by the judgments of his later colleagues at Random House (88). Erskine was a man dear to Lowry, the editor whom in his seventy or so published letters to him Lowry embraces as Dear Brother, Dear Brother Albert, Dear old Albert, My god, you old rapscallion, or Dear bro. Albert. Yet none of this prevented Random House from cutting off their contract with him in 1954. Sherrill Grace rightly asserts that it was in the personal terms of the friendship, terms that involved his loyalty to Erskine, that Lowry felt most shattered: Lowry was bereft, as much by the realization that he had ‘let Albert down’ as by the loss of the publisher’s support (Grace in CL 1:578). The personal could—and often did—transcend the professional in Lowry’s making of books.

For his part, Lowry in turn did not understand [t]he world of New York publishing and those great judgment-day board meetings which threatened his survival as a writer (Corrigan 85). His painstaking letters from the backwash of British Columbia to his New York agent and publishers, Corrigan points out,

bridged for him, or so he thought, the carefully measured distance between himself and that concrete thermos (significantly, almost the furthest distance by straight line from New York he could manage in North America). The letters helped until he was left with the silence of expectation, awaiting a reply which seldom came in kind, a note suggesting he could survive as a writer cut off from society, that his instincts [as a writer] were right. (85)

Corrigan’s insights were spurred by the posthumous publication in 1968 of Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Though focusing on Lowry’s situation during the years after he submitted his 1940 manuscript, Corrigan in effect captures the years just before. Even without benefit of the biographical minutiae involving Lowry’s literary relationships of the period between 1934 (when Lowry arrived in New York) and 1940 (when from Vancouver Lowry felt he could close the deal on his relationship with his preferred New York contacts), Corrigan sensed in 1970 something of the symptoms of Lowry’s 1940 experience: "[Lowry’s] frustration with publishers can be seen as central to [his many] fears. For some reason he was unable not to be affected by their judgment on his work. The third version [actually the third draft] of Volcano had been sent to his New York agent in 1940, and subsequently rejected by twelve publishers" (87). Corrigan’s frightening vision of Lowry’s professional life helps illuminate details of the cultural politics and personal dynamics underlying Lowry’s submission of the text of the 1940 Volcano to what was for him his ideal and idealized publisher.

Corrigan would have seen news of the rejection of the manuscript of the 1940 Under the Volcano for the first time in 1965. There, making up the whole of appendix I, are the sobering words from September 1941, name stacked upon name, a roll call of twelve publishing houses. Harold Matson’s few words to Dear Malcolm, starting with I have regretfully come to the conclusion that I am not going to find a publisher and ending with am holding the script here for your instructions, (Lowry, Selected Letters 419) frame that list. Starting weightily from the top, it begins with these eleven: Farrar & Rinehart; Harcourt, Brace; Houghton Mifflin; Alfred Knopf; J. B. Lippincott; Little, Brown; Random House; Scribner’s; Simon & Schuster; Duell, Sloan & Pearce; and Dial Press.⁷

At the bottom of the list the name of the small publisher Story Press, relatively inconsequential among the rest, might have passed unnoticed by readers. Yet for Lowry it was the one that mattered most—not simply because Story Press was the first to reject his manuscript, but because that rejection, for reasons that exceeded the mere formal act itself, had a particularly searing effect on him. Story’s rejection was galling because for Lowry it held a uniquely emotional—almost, in his personal sphere, mythic—significance. Its disorienting effect was intense because it was for him not just professional but personal, so rooted in the face of the New York publishing world that he had been holding closest in his thinking and in his heart. Of course Story’s rejection of the manuscript had a practical impact on Lowry, but it was the small publisher’s apparently careless closing of the door on any future professional and personal relationship—without seemingly any acknowledgment of the connection that Lowry had been carefully nurturing and which he had mistakenly assumed as reciprocal—that produced the greater shock.

Extending Corrigan’s argument, and examining correspondence available only with the publication of Sherrill Grace’s Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry (CL), it becomes clear that the manuscript Lowry submitted to Story Press was in fact not at all one that he regarded as finished. It was, rather, a demonstration, a progress report, an earnest of what he could do and was doing. It was his plea for more time, for the continuation of a more engaged, fuller conversation. Lowry coveted the certainty of some kind of ongoing exchange—what for him incorporated the rituals of family. The manuscript, typed in enormous haste during the first half of 1940 in Vancouver, was put together as an early mirror of what Lowry was contemplating, an attempt to engage in fruitful dialogue with agents, publishers, and editors in New York whom he imagined as waiting for him to show up, as it were, and whom he preferred to embrace in terms of the protocols and codes of loyalty, confession, and yearning.

It was Whit Burnett (who with his wife, Martha Foley, owned Story Press) whom Lowry had selected as his most important partner. The intricate choreography of Lowry’s relationship with Burnett came to light only with the publication of Gordon Bowker’s 1993 biography, Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry; Sherrill Grace’s 1995–1996 Collected Letters; and Frederick Asals’s detailed 1997 study, The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.⁸ Drawing on those volumes, we can now examine in some detail the extent to which Lowry’s approach to use familial or familiar protocols generated the nuances of his professional relationships, for he insisted that agents, editors, and publishers first learn something about his life in order to fully understand his work. He was not drawing equations of theme or character, necessarily—though this did happen often enough—but rather calling attention to parallels between the physical and spiritual conditions that surrounded him when he wrote and the success, real or imagined, of that writing.

The long catalogue of publishers in that September 1941 letter from Matson might have sent Lowry into a state of shock, but it did not unsettle him as deeply as the rejection from Story. Still that list had embedded in it the names of others who had told him that they were holding out great hope for his new work. His knowledge of their hovering presence would have amplified for him the sense of those he had let down or betrayed. The list echoes names conveyed to him in Mexico in January 1938 by the New York literary agent Ann Watkins, after he had sent her parts of his early work on Under the Volcano (Grace in CL 1:344, note 3). Watkins had conveyed to him the interest in his project of ‘the Little Brown crowd,’ Bob Haas at Random House and Max Schuster [of Simon and Schuster] (Bowker, Pursued 237). Indeed in 1938 Watkins had explored the possibility of acting as his agent. Arthur Calder-Marshall, informing her that Lowry ‘had it in mind to send [his manuscript] direct to Whit Burnett’ (Asals, The Making 412, note 1), nevertheless urged her to pursue Lowry’s novel, which was then a forty-thousand-word draft that he had seen while visiting Lowry in Mexico in October 1937, and which he said sounded like ‘one of the most exciting books that has come down the line in a long time’ (Bowker, Pursued 237; see also CL 1:503). Watkins—who had lent money to Lowry towards expenses when he and Jan left New York for Mexico, and as a sort of retainer (Bowker, Pursued 202)—urged Lowry to offer it to her rather than to Whit Burnett, claiming that she was better placed to sell it (237). But Lowry was not prepared to submit the novel as it stood. He wrote much later to Jonathan Cape that the 1937 Mexico version was for him just not thorough or honest enough (CL 1:503). With Watkins’s urging ringing in his ears, Burnett became more and more entrenched in Lowry’s imagination, performing significant roles that in real terms went back to 1933 and continued to 1940–1941, and even to 1947–1948.⁹

* * *

During those two years in New York Lowry came to know at close range both Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, the husband-and-wife owners of Story magazine as well as Story Press (which they founded in 1936). In 1934, during his first fall season when things began to ferment literarily, Malcolm, along with his young wife, Jan, also a writer and equally keen to meet literary editors, got very active in the current literary movement in New York (Gabrial, The First Wife’s Story 98). Burnett and Foley in turn introduced the Lowrys around to others.

Through sheer grit and determination, Burnett and Foley had founded Story magazine in 1931 while living in Vienna, where they had moved after some time in Paris, and swiftly established it as an ambitious and exciting little magazine. Published as more or less a monthly (Neugeboren 245), it became a significant force in literary circles and moved from Europe to New York in 1933, with offices in the Random House quarters. The Lowrys, while committing themselves to writing but also caught up in the many, many literary cocktail parties (Gabrial, Marriage 126), kept their eye on developments at Story magazine and, in 1936, on Burnett and Foley’s expansion of their activities with their establishment of Story Press. Unfortunately, the social allures of New York also played on Malcolm’s self-damning side. He simply wasn’t good at the kind of socializing that went on there, as Jan pointed out, except with a glass in his hand, and then he became too often belligerent: so often he would wind up getting drunk and insulting somebody or yelling at somebody there. Jan hated seeing Malcolm stumbling and falling over his words and reeling, and seeing this marvellously versatile, wonderful gift that he had with words somehow being so bastardised the minute he got into heavy drinking (Marriage 126). The literary establishment in New York, as Corrigan points out, took note of Lowry’s tendencies.

One of Lowry’s first meetings with Burnett seems to have been in response to Lowry’s note to him at the end of August 1934 suggesting that they might have a word together (CL 1:154). Soon after, in September, he and Jan were guests of honour at a party hosted at Burnett and Foley’s home on the occasion of Story’s publication of Lowry’s Hotel Room in Chartres (Bowker, Pursued 187). In the course of trying to find a publisher in the United States for Ultramarine, Jan had successfully placed the story with Burnett just before Malcolm arrived in New York in August 1934 (Gabrial, The First Wife’s Story 97–98). This was precisely the kind of personal and professional connection that Lowry craved, the kind of burgeoning friendship that would allow him soon after to give his friend, the writer Alfred Mendes, the casual impression that he and Burnett would be lunching together later that day until late in the afternoon (CL 1:156). Lowry clearly felt relaxed in his interactions with Burnett, and he vigorously and optimistically worked on carefully cultivating the relationship. Flattering him in a note, he said that he felt very proud of his 1934 appearance in Story, that it put a bloom on his arrival in New York (CL 1:154). In fact, Story had already given Lowry’s career an auspicious boost the year before, with its inclusion of On Board the West Hardaway in the October 1933 issue. The front cover blurbs promised [n]ew stories of distinction within, and spoke of Story as [t]he magazine of the short story as literature (see Dilnot n.p.) In 1933 Lowry was still living in Europe, including Paris (where he and Jan had married in January 1934). Until that first appearance in Story, and aside from the notable achievement of publishing his first novel, Ultramarine, in London in June of that same year, he had published only in school periodicals and, later, in the literarily lively journals at Cambridge University, including Experiment and Venture. Story’s championing of Lowry provided him with an impressive introduction to readers of serious literary magazines—and with his literary debut in North America.

In recalling Lowry’s New York days, Martha Foley remembers his frequent visits to Story’s quarters—described as a welcoming literary place of utter happy confusion (Irwin Shaw in Foley 204, note 1). Jay Neugeboren, who published Foley’s memoir about the magazine, remarks with admiration on the broader world held together by the Story office: "How intimate it all was!—as if Story’s editors and readers and writers were part of an extended family, a family in which the new and young writers were the admired favorites [….] It was as if Martha and Whit were running a kind of general store in which the prime merchandise was good fiction—[…] a store in which one could always find good literary shop talk" (Neugeboren 12). In mid-1935, even after moving to a larger space, Story still happily broadcast the homey air of its new quarters. Lowry must have deeply appreciated its welcoming, intimate atmosphere. Like other writers—Tennessee Williams, Cornell Woolrich, Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell—who sometimes lacked the necessary funds to submit their manuscripts to Story by regular post, Lowry brought his manuscripts round by hand, submitting them personally for Story’s consideration. Story was able to provide for Lowry a place where he could simply, and without invitation, drop in: For weeks he visited my office everyday, writes Foley, sat around for a while, looked at books and magazines I had lying about (206–07). She remembers him as the most heartbreaking writer to visit her office, notably when, as sometimes happened, he was separated from his wife and dismally lonely in the United States. What struck her most was his frustration with the lack of progress he was making on his stories and the one novel he then had underway, In Ballast to the White Sea. "Except at Story, his work, including a novel, was being perpetually rejected," she recalls (206–07). For the next fifteen years he would publish no short stories at all, concentrating after 1934—on Ann Watkins’s firm advice (Bowker, Pursued 189)—on novels (and, additionally, on poems). During those visits to the place of refuge provided by Story, Lowry often appeared morose, disconsolately taking his leave after hanging around for a while. At one point, Foley says, he disappeared. When he returned he told me he had been placed for observation in Bellevue (Foley 206, 207).

Lowry’s self-imposed stay in the psychiatric ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, during May or June 1936, was, of course,