Books, Arts & Manners: Extinct

Seldom have I found a famous novel so distasteful—so overwritten and underrealized—as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. (García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a close competitor.) One part ravings and rantings of an obnoxious drunkard buttonholing you in a bar with his imaginary greatness hanging like an albatross round his neck; one part sweatily subaltern emulation of Ulysses meant to exhibit greater erudition, vocabulary, literary bravura; and one part straining to ennoble a loathsome yet arrogant case of dipsomania and concomitant destructiveness and self-destructiveness, Under the Volcano is as ponderous, precious, and pretentious as a piece of writing can be. It is a masterpiece for the semi-or pseudo-literate, a cult novel for precocious ephebes, and an agglomeration of every conceivable literary device from symbol to abstruse allusion, from crisscrossing interior monologues to elaborate refrains and incremental repetition, from flashbacks to foreshadowing and grandiose parallels, from cinematic montage to Joycean punning—all, all to no avail.

Well, not quite all. There are some good evocations of Mexican land-and townscapes, of the flora and fauna (including some bestial specimens of the human animal), an authoritative portrayal of every stage of intoxication, and some effective similes and metaphors among many that fail. The book is anything but slapdash: Written first as a short story—which it probably should have remained—it was rewritten several times as a novel with the obsessive tenacity of a megalomaniacal sot who was going to spawn a masterwork if it killed him and all those who cared for and about him. Like many a drunkard, Lowry was an expert deceiver—was already so as a boy at the Leys School, Cambridge, England, where he had the same French master, S. C. Gillard, whom I had some 15 years later. As his biographer, Douglas Day, puts it, “He was . . . somewhat less than brilliant at modern languages—though he did learn enough in Gillard’s French class to deceive those who knew even less into believing that he was a natural and accomplished linguist.” His French, like his English and other languages in Under the Volcano, is indeed full of holes, but can fool people just as his writing does. Near the beginning of his biography, Day says of Lowry’s death from alcohol and barbiturates that it was the suicide of “one of the century’s greatest novelists, a man of such awesome talent that the word genius must be used to describe him.” Between Lowry and genius, the difference is as between night and Day.

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John Simon

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Seldom have I found a famous novel so distasteful—so overwritten and underrealized—as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. (García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a close competitor.) One part ravings and rantings of an obnoxious drunkard buttonholing you in a bar with his imaginary greatness hanging like an albatross round his neck; one part sweatily subaltern emulation of Ulysses meant to exhibit greater erudition, vocabulary, literary bravura; and one part straining to ennoble a loathsome yet arrogant case of dipsomania and concomitant destructiveness and self-destructiveness, Under the Volcano is as ponderous, precious, and pretentious as a piece of writing can be. It is a masterpiece for the semi-or pseudo-literate, a cult novel for precocious ephebes, and an agglomeration of every conceivable literary device from symbol to abstruse allusion, from crisscrossing interior monologues to elaborate refrains and incremental repetition, from flashbacks to foreshadowing and grandiose parallels, from cinematic montage to Joycean punning—all, all to no avail.

Well, not quite all. There are some good evocations of Mexican land-and townscapes, of the flora and fauna (including some bestial specimens of the human animal), an authoritative portrayal of every stage of intoxication, and some effective similes and metaphors among many that fail. The book is anything but slapdash: Written first as a short story—which it probably should have remained—it was rewritten several times as a novel with the obsessive tenacity of a megalomaniacal sot who was going to spawn a masterwork if it killed him and all those who cared for and about him. Like many a drunkard, Lowry was an expert deceiver—was already so as a boy at the Leys School, Cambridge, England, where he had the same French master, S. C. Gillard, whom I had some 15 years later. As his biographer, Douglas Day, puts it, “He was . . . somewhat less than brilliant at modern languages—though he did learn enough in Gillard’s French class to deceive those who knew even less into believing that he was a natural and accomplished linguist.” His French, like his English and other languages in Under the Volcano, is indeed full of holes, but can fool people just as his writing does. Near the beginning of his biography, Day says of Lowry’s death from alcohol and barbiturates that it was the suicide of “one of the century’s greatest novelists, a man of such awesome talent that the word genius must be used to describe him.” Between Lowry and genius, the difference is as between night and Day.