Malcolm Lowry: A Preface To His Fiction by Richard K. Cross

Over the past few days I’ve read this very fun (for me, maybe not for you!) academic text from 1980 that explores the writing and (somewhat) the life of one of my favourite (if such a term is appropriate) 20th century depressed alcoholic white male novelists: Malcolm Lowry.

Split into three sections, the academic writer Richard K. Cross (so close to being named “Dick Furious” (“cross” is old English slang for “angry”)) explores first the early writing of Malcolm Lowry, then the composition process and final text of the literary masterpiece Under The Volcano, before finally looking at the numerous texts written and worked on by Lowry after that, most of which (except for some of the pieces in a collection of short stories, Hear us o lord from heaven they dwelling place) remained incomplete at the time of his death and were published only in versions featuring heavy editing by Margerie Bonner-Lowry, Malcolm’s literary executor, widow and – according to at least one of his biographers – murderer.

Dick Furious was writing decades before the wider publication of even more of the Lowry archive – this is many years prior to the recovery of a manuscript form of In Ballast to the White Sea, this is looong before the publication of Lowry & Bonner’s bizarre faux-screenplay of Tender Is The Night, and is even before the publication of an academic text of the in-progress La Mordida (which I haven’t yet read), which Cross explicitly states is far too fractious to have any interest to anyone other than a scholar, which is sort of something everyone interested in Lowry quite quickly becomes…

Because Under The Volcano is so good and because this is where the completed oeuvre of Lowry ends, anyone seeking more is – for the earlier posthumous stuff going through the editorial work of his wife, and for the later posthumous stuff going through the collation and annotation of academics – almost immediately thrown into an archive.

One can now read almost ten “books” credited to Malcolm Lowry, yet only two of those were actually completed pieces, and the earlier of those – Ultramarine (1933) – he had basically written off as juvenilia.

The vast, vast majority of Lowry’s published work, then, was unfinished at the time of his death, and bent into finished form slash published without completion without the hand of the author.

Are these books, then, actually works by Malcolm Lowry or merely notes towards works? Drafts towards works? Scribblings? Nothings? Words?

It’s difficult to know.

Reading this book by Cross gives a non-academic Lowry reader an opportunity to engage again with Lowry’s work and life, and though it is an academic text, it isn’t unapproachable, and does offer a fair weighting of engagement to Under the Volcano compared to the texts that Lowry didn’t complete.

It does, alas, call to mind the squander and the squalor of Lowry’s life… his failure to maintain the potency and power he was able to achieve with one work, and reaffirms the difficulty and effort of that novel’s composition: it took him almost a decade to produce Under the Volcano, while doing little else other than drinking and working on other writerly projects.

There were moments of Lowry’s life that seem more enviable than most other writers – putting all that effort in and it all fucking paying off, believing in the text and ploughing at it until it paid off, giving up on everything else and only doing the novel……

But there are times, especially that last bleak decade, where it seems like one of the worst…

Never being able to get back to that point, never being able to focus enough to pull something else together, never stopping drinking long enough for the sobriety to hold, not being able to stay living in the paradise he’d found and having to go back to England, fucking England, where only death, decay, depression and destruction are permitted…

I enjoyed this book, but the elements of Lowry’s biography included here did make me fucking weep a lot, so who’s to say if it’s good or not?

Probably out of print, but for the #Lowryfan it’s definitely not a bad way to spend a few hours…