| | |  Entertainment | Books | October 2008 
Malcolm Lowry's 'Day of the Dead' and his Life Under the Volcano
 Ed Hutmacher - mexicobookclub.com
| | For more information on Malcolm Lowry's 'Under the Volcano' or other books with Mexico-related themes, please visit MexicoBookClub.com. | | |
For all the acclaim Malcolm Lowry received for his novel Under the Volcano, little of it seems to have done the writer any good. Published in 1947, the book sold very well in the literary bastions of Europe and North America, where critics hailed it a masterpiece and Lowry a genius. One would think any writer would revel in the approval. But not the conflicted, alcoholic Malcolm Lowry, a man constantly at war with himself.
While readers and critics were captivated by the tragic but wonderfully wrought story and the exotic Mexican ambiance, Lowry was at odds with his newfound celebrity, saying, "Success may be the worst possible thing that could happen to any serious author."
The burden of success and his incurable alcoholism apparently did him in. Not only was Under the Volcano Lowry’s magnum opus, it would be his only novel of any significance. Ten years later, in 1957, his wife found him dead in his bedroom overdosed on a mixture of booze and barbiturates. With apt poetic flair, the coroner labeled Lowry’s demise, "death by misadventure." He was 47 years old.
Perhaps no better example of art imitating life can be found than in Lowry’s Under the Volcano. It’s a disturbing tale, set in Quauhnahuac (Cuernevaca), Mexico, about a booze-besotted Englishman, Geoffrey Firmin, whose life becomes increasingly disoriented during the course of a single day, the Day of the Dead.
He finds that his estranged wife, Yvonne, has come back to town in an attempt to save their marriage. Paralyzed by his alcoholism, Firmin wanders from cantina to cantina, considering ways to reclaim Yvonne, with whom he is still in love — but he never acts. By nightfall, Firmin is dead in a ditch, shot by Mexican paramilitaries.
The story is highly autobiographical. Lowry and his first wife, Jan Gabrial, traveled around Mexico in 1936-37, and eventually settled in Cuernevaca. Geoffrey and Yvonne's marital troubles in the novel are based in large part on real-life issues erupting from Malcolm's deep-seated personal traumas and his stormy marriage to Jan — drunkenness, infidelity, alienation, depression. Similar to Geoffrey's habit, Malcolm would disappear from family and friends for extended tequila-drenched explorations through the barrios of Cuernevaca as an escape from his own sense of failure.
Jan finally had enough of Lowry's debauched lifestyle and left him. Feeling abandoned and alone in Mexico, Lowry sank into despair, arriving at what he claimed was a 'condition of amnesia, breakdown, heartbreak, consumption, cholera [and] alcoholic poisoning.'
In Cuernevaca and the nearby volcanoes, however, Lowry found the perfect landscape for his story. The snowy peak of Popocatepetl was for him a symbol of aspiration, and the deep woods in the surroundings became the lower depths to which a man might sink.
The uneasiness that hovers over the protagonists' daylong odyssey is magnified tenfold because it is The Day of the Dead. While Firmin drinks himself to death, he is surrounded by all manner of skull-and-skelton decorations. The juxtaposition is jarring—like Lowry himself, Firmin's inner demons were a part of his personal cosmology.
Like other artists, Malcolm Lowry cultivated his own misery. He was a chronic boozer and manic-depressive, a tortured soul whose living hell shadowed most of his writing. The terrifying thing about the living dead—people who flitter between the here-and now and the there-and-gone—is that they're alive but can't stay that way; they are unable or refuse to live by the rules of the normal world.
Lowry once spoke of his towering novel as being 'principally concerned with the guilt of man, with his remorse, with his ceaseless struggling toward the light under the weight of the past, and with his doom.'
In other words, Under the Volcano is a novel by a possessed man writing about a possessed man.
Ed Hutmacher is Editor in Chief of MexicoBookClub.com. To read more about Under the Volcano and other books about Mexico, please visit the website. |
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