Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano (Penguin Modern Classics)

MalcolmLowry

PENGUIN MODERN
UNDER THE VOLCANO

Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 at New Brighton and died in England in 1957. Hewas educated at the Leys School, Cambridge, and St Catherine's College. Betweenschool and university he went to sea, working as deckhand and trimmer for abouteighteen months. His first novel, Ultramarine, was accepted for publication in1932, but the typescript was stolen and the whole thing had to be rewrittenfrom the penultimate version. It was finally published in 1933. He went toParis that autumn, married his first wife in 1934, and wrote several shortstories in Paris and Chartres before going to New York. Here he started a newnovel, In Ballast to the White Sea, which he completed in 1936. He then leftfor Mexico. His first marriage broke up in 1938, and in 1939 he remarried andsettled in British Columbia. During 1941-4, when he was living at Dollarton, heworked on the final version of Under the Volcano. In 1954 he finally returnedto England. During half his writing life he lived in a squatter's shack,largely built by himself, near Vancouver. His Selected letters, edited by H.Breit and Margerie Lowry, appeared in 1967 and Lunar Caustic, part of a larger,uncompleted work, appeared in 1968. Margerie Bonner Lowry and Douglas Day havecompleted, from Lowry's notes, the novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend isLaid and October Ferry to Gobriola, which, with Ultramarine and a collection ofstories, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, have also beenpublished.
First published by Jonathan Cape 1947
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Reissued in Penguin Modern Classics 1963
Reprinted 1966, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977.
1979. 1980, 1981, 1983
Copyright B) the Estate of Malcolm Lowry, 1947

To
MARGERIE, MY WIFE

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crossesthe white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges thatthreaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal,unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as theploughs go to and fro from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and thesea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leadscaptive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lairis in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, heputs the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hathhe taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hardlodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hathresource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; onlyagainst Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hathdevised escape.

SophoclesAntigone

Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have beenin the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perishunder the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, andthough I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that whichadded to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I diddesire deliverance.

John Bunyan--Grace Abounding for theChief of Sinners

Wer immer strebend sich bemht, den knnen wir erlsen.
Whosoever unceasingly strives upward... him can we save.

Goethe

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, formingbetween them a number of valleys and plateaux. Overlooking one of thesevalleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet abovesea-level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic ofCancer, to be exact, on the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude asthe Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much fartherwest, the southernmost tip of Hawaii--and as the port of Tzucox to the east onthe Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or verymuch farther east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal.
The walls of the town, which is builton a hill, are high, the streets and lanes tortuous and broken, the roadswinding. A fine American-style highway leads in from the north but is lost inits narrow streets and comes out a goat track. Quauhnahuac possesses eighteenchurches and fifty-seven cantinas. It also boasts a golf course and no fewerthan four hundred swimming-pools, public and private, filled with the waterthat ceaselessly pours down from the mountains, and many splendid hotels.
The Hotel Casino de la Selva standson a slightly higher hill just outside the town, near the railway station. Itis built far back from the main highway and surrounded by gardens and terraceswhich command a spacious view in every direction. Palatial, a certain air ofdesolate splendour pervades it. For it is no longer a Casino. You may not evendice for drinks in the bar. The ghosts of ruined gamblers haunt it. No one everseems to swim in the magnificent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty andmournful. Its jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two tennis courtsonly are kept up in the season.
Towards sunset on the Day of the Deadin November 1939, two men in white flannels sat on the main terrace of theCasino drinking ans. They had been playing tennis, followed by billiards, andtheir rackets, rainproofed, screwed in their presses--the doctor's triangular,the other's quadrangular--lay on the parapet before them. As the processionswinding from the cemetery down the hillside behind the hotel came closer theplangent sounds of their chanting were borne to the two men; they turned towatch the mourners, a little later to be visible only as the melancholy lightsof their candles, circling among the distant trussed cornstalks. Dr. ArturoDiaz Vigil pushed the bottle of Ans del Mono over to M. Jacques Laruelle, whonow was leaning forward intently.
Slightly to the right and below them,below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the desertedswimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace andsweetness of the town. It seemed peaceful enough from where they were sitting.Only if one listened intently, as M. Laruelle was doing now, could onedistinguish a remote confused sound--distinct yet somehow inseparable from theminute murmuring, the tintinnabulation of the mourners--as of singing, risingand falling, and a steady trampling--the bangs and cries of the fiesta that hadbeen going on all day.
M. Laruelle poured himself anotherans. He was drinking ans because it reminded him of absinthe. A deep flushhad suffused his face, and his hand trembled slightly over the bottle, fromwhose label a florid demon brandished a pitchfork at him.
"--I meant to persuade him to goaway and get dalcoholis," Dr Vigil was saying. He stumbled over the wordin French and continued in English. "But I was so sick myself that dayafter the ball that I suffer, physical, really. That is very bad, for wedoctors must comport ourselves like apostles. You remember, we played tennisthat day too. Well, after I looked the Consul in his garden I sended a boy downto see if he would come for a few minutes and knock my door, I would appreciateit to him, if not, please write me a note, if drinking have not killed himalready."
M. Laruelle smiled.
"But they have gone," theother went on, "and yes, I think to ask you too that day if you had lookedhim at his house."
"He was at my house when youtelephoned, Arturo."
"Oh, I know, but we got sohorrible drunkness that night before, so perfectamente borracho, that it seemsto me, the Consul is as sick as I am." Dr. Vigil shook his head."Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call soul. Pooryour friend he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies."