Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born28 July 1909 in New Brighton, England, scion of a comfortable bourgeois family. Educated well, he rejected his patrimony and went to sea. Most of the rest of his life would be marked by tramping and alcohol. He did return home, and graduated from Cambridge. He then went to London; he met his wife, Jan Gabriel, in Spain and married her in France in 1934. In 1933, he published his first novel, “Ultramarine” based open his time at sea. Like Thomas Wolfe, Lowry’s fiction would grow directly out of his own experiences. There followed much more travel.
He started writing the novel that would make his name, “Under the Volcano” in southern California in 1936—where he was also trying to break into Hollywood. In November, he and Jan moved to Mexico, for what was supposed to be a short stay but turned out to be long. Jan, tired of his drinking, left him, and he continued to write and drink, spiraling out of control, deported, and finally put up by his family in Los Angeles. There he met his second wife, Margerie Bonner. They ended up in a shack in Vancouver, where he and Margerie continued to work on Under the Volcano. The book was about his alcoholic descent—fictionalized as the struggles of a British consul—but he was imbuing it with spiritual, cosmological, and political significance, too.
A lot of this resonant material was suggested by an acquaintance Lowry made in 1943. Long interested in the occult and alchemy, Lowry made the acquaintance of Charles Stansfeld Jones, a Vancouverite who was deeply involved in Aleister Crowley’s magical order. Lowry and Margerie practiced yoga, astral projection, and the I Ching with the man they called Stan. Writing in the Fortean Times, Ruth Clydesdale noted, “A list drawn from Stan’s books together with direct quotes form a couple of them found their way into UTV; more importantly, Stan’s experience of misusing magical powers and plunging into the Abyss structured and thematised the novel. Lowry felt that he’d thereby developed the Consul from a mere ‘shallow drunkard’ into a figure of esoteric and allegorical significance. Indeed, Stan’s influence on UTV is s profound that it is hard to imagine what the book would have been like had Lowry never met him.”
He started writing the novel that would make his name, “Under the Volcano” in southern California in 1936—where he was also trying to break into Hollywood. In November, he and Jan moved to Mexico, for what was supposed to be a short stay but turned out to be long. Jan, tired of his drinking, left him, and he continued to write and drink, spiraling out of control, deported, and finally put up by his family in Los Angeles. There he met his second wife, Margerie Bonner. They ended up in a shack in Vancouver, where he and Margerie continued to work on Under the Volcano. The book was about his alcoholic descent—fictionalized as the struggles of a British consul—but he was imbuing it with spiritual, cosmological, and political significance, too.
A lot of this resonant material was suggested by an acquaintance Lowry made in 1943. Long interested in the occult and alchemy, Lowry made the acquaintance of Charles Stansfeld Jones, a Vancouverite who was deeply involved in Aleister Crowley’s magical order. Lowry and Margerie practiced yoga, astral projection, and the I Ching with the man they called Stan. Writing in the Fortean Times, Ruth Clydesdale noted, “A list drawn from Stan’s books together with direct quotes form a couple of them found their way into UTV; more importantly, Stan’s experience of misusing magical powers and plunging into the Abyss structured and thematised the novel. Lowry felt that he’d thereby developed the Consul from a mere ‘shallow drunkard’ into a figure of esoteric and allegorical significance. Indeed, Stan’s influence on UTV is s profound that it is hard to imagine what the book would have been like had Lowry never met him.”
In 1944, the Lowry’s shack suffered a fire that destroyed it, burned Malcolm, and consumed much of his writing—though Margerie saved the manuscript of Under the Volcano and Malcolm portions of another, that would later be published as “In Ballast to there White Sea,” pages of which mentioned the word fire—and Malcolm thought that he might have written reality—a conceit that was very Fortean, as Jeffrey Kripal has noted, and shared by Fredric Brown. He finally finished Under the Volcano, with extensive help from Margerie, and published it in 1947, to rave reviews. The book is dense and self-conscious, a stream of consciousness tale told from three perspectives, all centered on a single day—well, the first chapter flashes forward by a year—of the dissolution of the Consul’s marriage, his life, his wife’s life, and the ridiculous aspirations of his brother.
Lowry had a number of manuscripts under construction at the same time, some of which he planned to fit into a Dante-esque trilogy, Under the Volcano as Inferno, In Ballast the Paradiso, and another, Lunar Caustic, Purgatorio. But these were never finished, nor were his other projects. Lowry seems to have been deeply troubled, though this period of his life is characterized as relatively stable. He continued to travel, and to write, and to drink. But he was obsessed with the idea that he was causing fires, merely by his presence, as if some pyromaniac force followed him around. He worked on a third novel, October Ferry to Gabriola, which was not finished in his lifetime. Leaving Canada, the Lowrys settled briefly various places around the world, and Lowry twice tried to kill Margerie. Finally, he settled in Sussex.
Malcolm Lowry died 26 June 1957. He was 47 years old. The exact circumstances are unclear, but the autopsy revealed he choked on his own vomit, after having taken too many barbiturates and drank too much alcohol. October Ferry and In Ballast, both unfinished, were published much later, an unburned copy of In Ballast having been found at Jan’s house, saved their before their marriage fell apart.
**********
Exactly when Lowry discovered Fort, I do not know, but it must have bene in the early to mid-1930s. His first wife, Jan, remembered him introducing her to Fort, and she left him in 1937. The conditions under which he discovered Fort are better known, from a letter he wrote to Margerie’s mother in 1940. He was listing occult and metaphysical authors who had excited him—she was also intrigued by mysticism—and said, “And a neglected, but exciting American writer, whose specialty is the analysis of peculiar coincidences for which there exists no scientifically explanation, is Charles Fort, particularly for the three books ‘Lo!’ ‘The Book of the Damned” and ‘Wild Talents’. I look upon the day I first hit upon Lo! in a public library as a red-letter day in my life. I know of no writer who has made the inexplicable seem more dramatic than Charles Fort.” As with many Forteans, he was disappointed by Fort’s second book, his most cosmologically-oriented, “New Lands.”
Exactly how important Fort was to Lowry can be gauged by the book later published as “In Ballast,” which lay for more than a half-century in Jan’s belongings. As Clydesdale notes, Lowry is probably the most famous literary writer—almost the definitive example of high modernist prose—to be a deeply committed Fortean, and it would show in this work which (according to Clydesdale) Lowry wrote when he was reading Fort at the New York Public Library—the very place where Fort had discovered his anomalies: One measures a circle, beginning anywhere. She writes, “The book is littered with direct and indirect quotes from Fort, both in the characters’ speech and as an epigraph to a chapter.” Casper Hauser is here, as are a host of Fortean anomalies. “Very clearly,” Clydesdale concludes, “it was written while the thrill of discovering Fort’s work was still fresh.”
Lowry, unlike many other Forteans, was attuned to Fort’s philosophical project, and not just his collation of anomalies. One character develops a worldview rooted in Fort’s parable of the mad fishmonger. In chapter two, there is an extended quotation from “Lo!”: “Only to be phenomenal is to be at least questionable. Any scientist who claims more is trying to register divinity. If Life cannot be positively differentiated from anything else, the appearance of Life itself is a deception. If, in mentality, there is no absolute dividing-line between intellectuality and imbecility, all wisdom is partly idiocy. The seeker of wisdom departs more and more from the state of the idiot, only to find that he is returning. Belief after belief fades from his mind: so his goal is the juncture of two obliterations. One is of knowing nothing, and the other is of knowing that there is nothing to know.” Lowry had a similar sense about the world.
Fort continued to exert a pull in the early 1940s. His letter to Margerie’s mother was written in April 1940, by which point he was deep into “Under the Volcano.” a Manuscript version of the book from that year had explicit Fortean references. These were mostly pared out in subsequent drafts, though, and the finished version exhibits a more subtle Forteanism, its imprint allusions. At one point, the Consul mentions teleportation, for example, a word coined by Fort. At another, he looses off the praise “lost wild talents.” There is a reference to traveling in Trinidad that may be a reference to a report of vampirism collected by Fort; and a play on the word galvanic and the twitching of frog legs which may also have come from Fort. These are hardly structural elements of the book—but this was not the extent of Lowry’s Forteanism, just the most public example when he was alive.
Lowry’s penchant for Fort was reinvigorated in December 1953, when Margerie gave him Fort’s omnibus edition as an anniversary gift (already a suggestion of how much Fort meant to him.) Fort and his ideas became increasingly important to the drafts of his later books. Shortly after receiving Fort’s book as a gift, Lowry wrote a piece of “October Ferry” that focused entirely on Fortean phenomena, and explaining his own personal history. The story was called “The Element Follows You Around, Sir,” that title supposedly based on a comment a stranger had made to him after he had confessed all the various fires that seemed to dog him in life, since that one in 1944. Ethan Llewlyn, the hero of the story, suffers from strange fires, too, and in his desperation finds Fort—“obviously a genius if ever there was one.” The vignette, turned out in a rush of writing and submitted five days before Christmas, proved to anxious publishers that he was making progress. It was later include as chapter 18 of “October Ferry.”
Without wanting to exploit Lowry’s genuine tragedies, it is hard not to see something Fortean in the conjunction of Lowry and Fort, something beyond their obviously shared philosophy and interest in coincidences, their sense that the world was being written by some intelligence. Here Fort influenced one of the masters of high modernism, but the only novel of his two be published complete showed only vestigial traces of Fort. Rather the Fortean mark was on two unfinished manuscripts, published much later—damned things, in their own way, infernal creatures, in their way, too.
Lowry had a number of manuscripts under construction at the same time, some of which he planned to fit into a Dante-esque trilogy, Under the Volcano as Inferno, In Ballast the Paradiso, and another, Lunar Caustic, Purgatorio. But these were never finished, nor were his other projects. Lowry seems to have been deeply troubled, though this period of his life is characterized as relatively stable. He continued to travel, and to write, and to drink. But he was obsessed with the idea that he was causing fires, merely by his presence, as if some pyromaniac force followed him around. He worked on a third novel, October Ferry to Gabriola, which was not finished in his lifetime. Leaving Canada, the Lowrys settled briefly various places around the world, and Lowry twice tried to kill Margerie. Finally, he settled in Sussex.
Malcolm Lowry died 26 June 1957. He was 47 years old. The exact circumstances are unclear, but the autopsy revealed he choked on his own vomit, after having taken too many barbiturates and drank too much alcohol. October Ferry and In Ballast, both unfinished, were published much later, an unburned copy of In Ballast having been found at Jan’s house, saved their before their marriage fell apart.
**********
Exactly when Lowry discovered Fort, I do not know, but it must have bene in the early to mid-1930s. His first wife, Jan, remembered him introducing her to Fort, and she left him in 1937. The conditions under which he discovered Fort are better known, from a letter he wrote to Margerie’s mother in 1940. He was listing occult and metaphysical authors who had excited him—she was also intrigued by mysticism—and said, “And a neglected, but exciting American writer, whose specialty is the analysis of peculiar coincidences for which there exists no scientifically explanation, is Charles Fort, particularly for the three books ‘Lo!’ ‘The Book of the Damned” and ‘Wild Talents’. I look upon the day I first hit upon Lo! in a public library as a red-letter day in my life. I know of no writer who has made the inexplicable seem more dramatic than Charles Fort.” As with many Forteans, he was disappointed by Fort’s second book, his most cosmologically-oriented, “New Lands.”
Exactly how important Fort was to Lowry can be gauged by the book later published as “In Ballast,” which lay for more than a half-century in Jan’s belongings. As Clydesdale notes, Lowry is probably the most famous literary writer—almost the definitive example of high modernist prose—to be a deeply committed Fortean, and it would show in this work which (according to Clydesdale) Lowry wrote when he was reading Fort at the New York Public Library—the very place where Fort had discovered his anomalies: One measures a circle, beginning anywhere. She writes, “The book is littered with direct and indirect quotes from Fort, both in the characters’ speech and as an epigraph to a chapter.” Casper Hauser is here, as are a host of Fortean anomalies. “Very clearly,” Clydesdale concludes, “it was written while the thrill of discovering Fort’s work was still fresh.”
Lowry, unlike many other Forteans, was attuned to Fort’s philosophical project, and not just his collation of anomalies. One character develops a worldview rooted in Fort’s parable of the mad fishmonger. In chapter two, there is an extended quotation from “Lo!”: “Only to be phenomenal is to be at least questionable. Any scientist who claims more is trying to register divinity. If Life cannot be positively differentiated from anything else, the appearance of Life itself is a deception. If, in mentality, there is no absolute dividing-line between intellectuality and imbecility, all wisdom is partly idiocy. The seeker of wisdom departs more and more from the state of the idiot, only to find that he is returning. Belief after belief fades from his mind: so his goal is the juncture of two obliterations. One is of knowing nothing, and the other is of knowing that there is nothing to know.” Lowry had a similar sense about the world.
Fort continued to exert a pull in the early 1940s. His letter to Margerie’s mother was written in April 1940, by which point he was deep into “Under the Volcano.” a Manuscript version of the book from that year had explicit Fortean references. These were mostly pared out in subsequent drafts, though, and the finished version exhibits a more subtle Forteanism, its imprint allusions. At one point, the Consul mentions teleportation, for example, a word coined by Fort. At another, he looses off the praise “lost wild talents.” There is a reference to traveling in Trinidad that may be a reference to a report of vampirism collected by Fort; and a play on the word galvanic and the twitching of frog legs which may also have come from Fort. These are hardly structural elements of the book—but this was not the extent of Lowry’s Forteanism, just the most public example when he was alive.
Lowry’s penchant for Fort was reinvigorated in December 1953, when Margerie gave him Fort’s omnibus edition as an anniversary gift (already a suggestion of how much Fort meant to him.) Fort and his ideas became increasingly important to the drafts of his later books. Shortly after receiving Fort’s book as a gift, Lowry wrote a piece of “October Ferry” that focused entirely on Fortean phenomena, and explaining his own personal history. The story was called “The Element Follows You Around, Sir,” that title supposedly based on a comment a stranger had made to him after he had confessed all the various fires that seemed to dog him in life, since that one in 1944. Ethan Llewlyn, the hero of the story, suffers from strange fires, too, and in his desperation finds Fort—“obviously a genius if ever there was one.” The vignette, turned out in a rush of writing and submitted five days before Christmas, proved to anxious publishers that he was making progress. It was later include as chapter 18 of “October Ferry.”
Without wanting to exploit Lowry’s genuine tragedies, it is hard not to see something Fortean in the conjunction of Lowry and Fort, something beyond their obviously shared philosophy and interest in coincidences, their sense that the world was being written by some intelligence. Here Fort influenced one of the masters of high modernism, but the only novel of his two be published complete showed only vestigial traces of Fort. Rather the Fortean mark was on two unfinished manuscripts, published much later—damned things, in their own way, infernal creatures, in their way, too.
