In 1944, a fire in North Vancouver nearly incinerated a literary masterpiece. It was the morning of June 7, and Malcolm Lowry was in his waterfront Dollarton shack when he smelled smoke and heard a faint crackling. He rushed outside amid a blazing blazing fire, surviving the tragedy along with his wife, Margerie Bonner, and the manuscript of his novel in progress, Under the Volcano, along with a few of his poems and some clothes. Years’ worth of Lowry’s writing was lost to the flames, but Bonner had saved what would come to be regarded as one of the finest novels of the 20th century.
Lowry had first arrived in Vancouver five years earlier. Until that point, his life had been turbulent and nomadic. Born in 1909 to a wealthy family in Northwest England, Lowry was sent to a prestigious boarding school in Cambridge where he took up two lifelong occupations: writing and drinking. After graduating in 1927, he enlisted as a ship hand on a freighter and made it as far as China before returning to England six months later. Apart from writing, he would never hold another job.
Lowry enrolled at Cambridge in 1929 but spent more time in local pubs than in the classroom. He drifted apart from his family, who increasingly found his intoxicated antics intolerable, though he continued to rely on money from his estranged father for most of his life. He barely finished at Cambridge in 1932 and published his debut novel, Ultramarine, based on his experiences at sea, the following year, later regarding the work as an embarrassment.
In 1933, Lowry travelled to Spain, where he met Jan Gabriel, an adventurous American actress and a fellow aspiring writer. The two began an intense courtship and married in Paris the following year. According to an account published by Gabriel in 2000, Lowry was a mercurial and unreliable partner. Though charming when sober, he became cruel and violent after a few drinks. She described the physical transformation that Lowry underwent during his binges in a 1933 diary entry: “His face swells and becomes beet-red; his eyes all but disappear; his mouth works; even his sailor’s gait turns into a travesty.” His drinking soon proved to be too much to handle, and Gabriel returned to her native New York. Lowry followed her there in 1935.
After a tumultuous year in New York—including possible affairs with men, a growing fear of syphilis, and a stint at the infamous Bellevue Hospital psychiatric ward—Lowry ran into issues with his visa. He and Gabriel left for Mexico in October 1936 and settled in the southern city of Cuernavaca within view of two towering volcanoes: Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. The landscape inspired Lowry to begin work on his second novel, aptly titled Under the Volcano and set in the same region of Mexico. His furious writing sessions were interrupted by calamitous binges. He had discovered tequila and mezcal, and he wound up in the local prison more than once while Gabriel was in Los Angeles pursuing a job offer.
Tailing Gabriel again, Lowry entered a drying-out clinic outside of Los Angeles in 1938. Following his release, he lived in the city under the care of his father’s attorney, finished a second draft of Under the Volcano, and met his soon-to-be second wife, Margerie Bonner.
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Lowry was driven north to Vancouver and placed in the care of another attorney following further immigration issues that forced him to temporarily leave the States in 1939. After a month in the city—“generally a rather Puritan atmosphere” he wrote a friend at the time—he tried to return to Los Angeles but was too drunk and broke to be granted passage at the Blaine border crossing. Bonner joined him in Vancouver and brought with her the Under the Volcano manuscript that Lowry had left behind in L.A. Together they lived in a small attic—“a freezing bison-smelling attic” he wrote in another letter—before moving to more comfortable accommodations. Lowry scrabbled together some money by writing a few articles for The Vancouver Daily Province and completed a third attempt at his novel with Bonner’s substantial support.
By the summer of 1940, Lowry and Bonner sought to escape the confines of the city, so they crossed Burrard Inlet and rented a shack on the Dollarton shoreline at the base of Mount Seymour. It was rustic living—their shack had neither electricity nor running water—and they were surrounded by forests teeming with wildlife: wolves howled in the winter, and songbirds sang in spring. The surrounding world still made itself known to them: their shack looked out across the inlet at the Shell oil refinery in Burnaby. The S on the refinery’s neon sign was out so that each night it spelled the word “HELL.”
Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner walk down a Vancouver street. Photo courtesy of the UBC Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.
Life in Dollarton was good for Lowry. His drinking moderated, and his moods stabilized. He and Bonner developed a close circle of friends. Together they hiked and swam, bird-watched and picnicked. A photo from the time shows a burly Lowry standing on a rock near the water, basking in the sun. It was, according to biographer Douglas Day, “what must surely have been the happiest three-and-a-half-years of Lowry’s life.”
By September 1941, Under the Volcano had been rejected by over a dozen publishers. Lowry spent four days in bed, mute, before rising to have a fourth try at the manuscript. Over the next three years, he extensively reworked the novel with Bonner’s help. In this revision, he altered his characters’ biographies and, under the influence of local Kabbalist Charles Stansfield-Jones, added mystical undercurrents to the plot. On the side, he wrote poetry and made progress on a draft for another novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. Most of this work had been lost to the fire in 1944, but Under the Volcano was spared, and Lowry remained determined to finish what he knew would be a great literary accomplishment.
After the fire, Lowry and Bonner were too upset to stay in the area, so they travelled to stay with a friend in Ontario. On a snowy 1944 Christmas Eve in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Lowry completed the novel for a fourth and final time. The response from publisher Jonathan Cape in November 1945 was more encouraging but still advised that the novel “should be couched in sharper or more dramatic form or something of that nature.” Lowry attempted suicide but recovered and sent a forceful defence of his work back to Cape. His rebuttal proved successful. After over a decade of torturous labour, the novel was finally published in 1947.
Under the Volcano is a strange and devastating novel set on a single day: November 2, the Mexican Day of the Dead. Protagonist Geoffrey Firmin, referred to as “the Consul,” is a washed-up English diplomat “oozing alcohol from every pore” who bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator. The novel opens with the Consul in a stupor at a cantina in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac—a fictionalization of Cuernavaca—where he is reunited with his estranged wife, Yvonne, who has returned to Quauhnahuac after leaving the Consul a year prior. Yvonne’s attempts to save her marriage and her husband are made more fraught with the arrival of Hugh, the Consul’s half-brother, who may or may not have had an affair with Yvonne. The three characters decide to travel by bus to nearby Pirian to watch a bullfight. Meanwhile, a storm builds, tensions mount, and the Consul drinks himself deeper into the abyss.
Throughout the novel, Yvonne and the Consul share the fantasy of an earthly paradise far removed from their hellish circumstances. It is a place “in some northern country, of mountains and hills and blue water,” where Yvonne and the Consul will finally find peace. In one scene, Yvonne imagines “the house, dappled with misty light that fell softly through the small new leaves, and then the mist rolling away across the water, and the mountains, still white with snow appearing sharp and clear against the blue sky, and blue wood-smoke from the driftwood fire curling out of the chimney.” In this “sober and non-alcoholic Paradise,” the Consul will write a book instead of drinking himself to death. This paradise was Lowry’s own Dollarton.
Lowry’s descriptions of Dollarton provide some of the novel’s most achingly moving passages. They are, it is fair to say, some of the most beautiful depictions of the area ever written. It should come as no surprise, however, that the Consul and Yvonne fail to reach their salvation. Paradise proved equally elusive for Lowry himself. While Under the Volcano received rapturous reviews—a critic for The New York Times called it “cause for rejoicing”—Lowry remained unsatisfied. As he wrote to his editor from Harrison Hot Springs in 1947: “I continue to receive good and generous reviews on the Volcano in the U.S. but have been more or less panned here, especially in Vancouver and Toronto, by people who have not read the book at all and have made no attempt to.” The novel fell out of print just a few years later.
Although Lowry and Bonner settled in a new cabin in Dollarton, the tranquility of that earlier era seems to have been lost in the blaze. Work on a new novel inspired by a trip to Gabriola Island soon sprawled into a mess of some 4,000 pages (his editor later called it “as tedious as anything I’d ever read”). His drinking spun out of control once again; he settled for aftershave if nothing else was available. At this time, the Dollarton area was being rapidly developed, and the local government was cracking down on squatters. In a posthumously published short story, Lowry writes of a “hideous slash of felled trees, bare, broken, ugly land crossed by dusty roads and dotted with new ugly houses where only a few years ago rested the beautiful forest they loved.” Lowry and Bonner left Dollarton for a final time in 1954. Three years later, Lowry died in England after one final night of heavy drinking. The death was ruled a result of “misadventure,” though some speculated suicide; others, murder. The last of the Dollarton shacks were razed that same year.
As is all too often the case, Lowry’s stature has grown in the years since his death. Bonner ensured the posthumous publication of much of his work: a collection of short stories, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, won the Governor General’s Award in 1961. A 1976 National Film Board documentary on Lowry’s life narrated by Richard Burton was nominated for an Oscar, and a film adaption of Under the Volcano directed by John Huston followed in 1984. His work drew the attention of voguish French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and has spawned hundreds of dissertations. Still, Lowry remains a curious figure in the history of English literature, or indeed Canadian literature. His reputation rests upon a novel that is too long and unwieldy to feature on many class syllabi, and he is seldom mentioned in the same league as peers such as Orwell, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Today he is recognized as much for the genius of his work as for the tragedy of his life.
Just as Vancouver left its imprint on Lowry’s work, so too has Lowry left his mark on the city where he came closest to finding peace. His papers, his personal library, and early drafts of Under the Volcano are held in UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections. Across the inlet, the Malcolm Lowry Trail runs through the trees of Cates Park/Whey-ah-whichen, near where the shacks once stood. Hemlocks and cedars crowd both sides of the path, offering a momentary glimpse of Dollarton as it might have appeared in Lowry’s time. There, among the “mountains and hills and blue water,” one is surrounded by the natural beauty that broke through the torment of Lowry’s life and gave him the strength to complete his masterpiece.
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