Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano

Review

"One of the towering novels of this century." -- --New York Times

"The book obviously belongs with the most original and creative novels of our time." -- --Alfred Kazin

Product Description

Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico.Here the consul's debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life. Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul's life--the Day of the Dead, 1938. His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. Yvonne's mission is to save the consul is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half-brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical.

Under the Volcano remains one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition and one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano

PENGUIN MODERN UNDER THE VOLCANO Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 at New Brighton and died in England in 1957. He was educated at the Leys School, Cambridge, and St Catherine's College. Between school and university he went to sea, working as deckhand and trimmer for about eighteen months. His first novel, Ultramarine, was accepted for publication in 1932, but the typescript was stolen and the whole thing had to be rewritten from the penultimate version. It was finally published in 1933. He went to Paris that autumn, married his first wife in 1934, and wrote several short stories in Paris and Chartres before going to New York. Here he started a new novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, which he completed in 1936. He then left for Mexico. His first marriage broke up in 1938, and in 1939 he remarried and settled in British Columbia. During 1941-4, when he was living at Dollarton, he worked on the final version of Under the Volcano. In 1954 he finally returned to 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 have completed, from Lowry's notes, the novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid and October Ferry to Gobriola, which, with Ultramarine and a collection of stories, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, have also been published.

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 crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges that threaten 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 the ploughs go to and fro from year to year. And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts 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, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escape.

Sophocles--Antigone

Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance.

John Bunyan--Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners

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

Goethe

I

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaux. Overlooking one of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above sea-level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic of Cancer, to be exact, on the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude as the Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much farther west, the southernmost tip of Hawaii--and as the port of Tzucox to the east on the Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or very much farther east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal. The walls of the town, which is built on a hill, are high, the streets and lanes tortuous and broken, the roads winding. A fine American-style highway leads in from the north but is lost in its narrow streets and comes out a goat track. Quauhnahuac possesses eighteen churches and fifty-seven cantinas. It also boasts a golf course and no fewer than four hundred swimming-pools, public and private, filled with the water that ceaselessly pours down from the mountains, and many splendid hotels. The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill just outside the town, near the railway station. It is built far back from the main highway and surrounded by gardens and terraces which command a spacious view in every direction. Palatial, a certain air of desolate splendour pervades it. For it is no longer a Casino. You may not even dice for drinks in the bar. The ghosts of ruined gamblers haunt it. No one ever seems to swim in the magnificent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty and mournful. Its jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two tennis courts only are kept up in the season. Towards sunset on the Day of the Dead in November 1939, two men in white flannels sat on the main terrace of the Casino drinking ans. They had been playing tennis, followed by billiards, and their rackets, rainproofed, screwed in their presses--the doctor's triangular, the other's quadrangular--lay on the parapet before them. As the processions winding from the cemetery down the hillside behind the hotel came closer the plangent sounds of their chanting were borne to the two men; they turned to watch the mourners, a little later to be visible only as the melancholy lights of their candles, circling among the distant trussed cornstalks. Dr. Arturo Diaz Vigil pushed the bottle of Ans del Mono over to M. Jacques Laruelle, who now was leaning forward intently. Slightly to the right and below them, below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the deserted swimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace and sweetness of the town. It seemed peaceful enough from where they were sitting. Only if one listened intently, as M. Laruelle was doing now, could one distinguish a remote confused sound--distinct yet somehow inseparable from the minute murmuring, the tintinnabulation of the mourners--as of singing, rising and falling, and a steady trampling--the bangs and cries of the fiesta that had been going on all day. M. Laruelle poured himself another ans. He was drinking ans because it reminded him of absinthe. A deep flush had suffused his face, and his hand trembled slightly over the bottle, from whose label a florid demon brandished a pitchfork at him. "--I meant to persuade him to go away and get dalcoholis," Dr Vigil was saying. He stumbled over the word in French and continued in English. "But I was so sick myself that day after the ball that I suffer, physical, really. That is very bad, for we doctors must comport ourselves like apostles. You remember, we played tennis that day too. Well, after I looked the Consul in his garden I sended a boy down to see if he would come for a few minutes and knock my door, I would appreciate it to him, if not, please write me a note, if drinking have not killed him already." M. Laruelle smiled. "But they have gone," the other went on, "and yes, I think to ask you too that day if you had looked him at his house." "He was at my house when you telephoned, Arturo." "Oh, I know, but we got so horrible drunkness that night before, so perfectamente borracho, that it seems to 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. Poor your friend he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies." M. Laruelle finished his drink. He rose and went to the parapet; resting his hands one on each tennis racket, he gazed down and around him: the abandoned jai-alai courts, their bastions covered with grass, the dead tennis courts, the fountain, quite near in the centre of the hotel avenue, where a cactus farmer had reined up his horse to drink. Two young Americans, a boy and a girl, had started a belated game of ping-pong on the veranda of the annex below. What had happened just a year ago today seemed already to belong in a different age. One would have thought the horrors of the present would have swallowed it up like a drop of water. It was not so. Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqu. He lit a cigarette. Far to his left, in the northeast, beyond the valley and the terraced foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, rose clear and magnificent into the sunset. Nearer, perhaps ten miles distant, and on a lower level than the main valley, he made out the village of Tomaln, nestling behind the jungle, from which rose a thin blue scarf of illegal smoke, someone burning wood for carbon. Before him, on the other side of the American highway, spread fields and groves, through which meandered a river, and the Alcapancingo road. The watchtower of a prison rose over a wood between the river and the road which lost itself farther on where the purple hills of a Dore Paradise sloped away into the distance. Over in the town the lights of Quauhnahuac's one cinema, built on an incline and standing out sharply, suddenly came on, flickered off, came on again. "No se puede vivir sin amar," M. Laruelle said... "As that estpido inscribed on my house." "Come, amigo, throw away your mind," Dr. Vigil said behind him. "--But hombre, Yvonne came back! That's what I shall never understand. She came back to the man!" M. Laruelle returned to the table where he poured himself and drank a glass of Tehuacan mineral water. He said: "Salud y pesetas." "Y tiempo para gastarlas," his friend returned thoughtfully. M. Laruelle watched the doctor leaning back in the steamer chair, yawning, the handsome, impossibly handsome, dark imperturbable Mexican face, the kind deep brown eyes, innocent too, like the eyes of those wistful beautiful Oaxaquenan children one saw in Tehuantepec (that ideal spot where the women did the work while the men bathed in the river all day), the slender small hands and delicate wrists, upon the back of which it was almost a shock to see the sprinkling of coarse black hair. "I threw away my mind long ago, Arturo," he said in English, withdrawing his cigarette from his mouth with refined nervous fingers on which he was aware he wore too many rings. "What I find more--" M. Laruelle noted the cigarette was out and gave himself another ans. "Con permiso! Dr. Vigil conjured a flaring lighter out of his pocket so swiftly it seemed it must have been already ignited there, that he had drawn a flame out of himself, the gesture and the igniting one movement; he held the light for M. Laruelle. "Did you never go to the church for the bereaved here," he asked suddenly, "where is the Virgin for those who have nobody with?" M. Laruelle shook his head. "Nobody go there. Only those who have nobody them with," the doctor said, slowly. He pocketed the lighter and looked at his watch, turning his wrist upwards with a neat flick. "Allons-nous-en," he added, "vmonos," and laughed yawningly with a series of nods that seemed to carry his body forward until his head was resting between his hands. Then he rose and joined M. Laruelle at the parapet, drawing deep breaths. "Ah, but this is the hour I love, with the sun coming down, when ail the man began to sing and all the dogs to bark--" M. Laruelle laughed. While they had been talking the sky had grown wild and stormy to the south; the mourners had left the slope of the hill. Sleepy vultures, high overhead, deployed down-wind. "About eight-thirty then, I might go to the cine for an hour." "Bueno. I will see you this night then, in the place where you know. Remember, I still do not believe you are leaving tomorrow." He held out his hand which M. Laruelle grasped firmly, loving him. "Try and come tonight, if not, please understand I am always interested in your health." "Hasta la vista." "Hasta la vista." --Alone, standing beside the highway down which he had driven four years before on the last mile of that long, insane, beautiful journey from Los Angeles, M. Laruelle also found it hard to believe he was really going. Then the thought of tomorrow seemed well-nigh overwhelming. He had paused, undecided which way to walk home, as the little overloaded bus--Tomaln Zcalo--jounced past him downhill towards the barranca before climbing into Quauhnahuac. He was loth to take the same direction tonight. He crossed the street, making for the station. Although he would not be travelling by train the sense of departure, of its imminence, came heavily about him again as, childishly avoiding the locked points, he picked his path over the narrow-gauge lines. Light from the setting sun glanced off the oil tanks on the grass embankment beyond. The platform slept. The tracks were vacant, the signals up. There was little to suggest that any train ever arrived at this station, let alone left it: