PREFACE

Trying to follow Malcolm Lowry's life is like venturing without a map into a maze inside a labyrinth lost in a wilderness. The maze itself is a shadow-filled hall of distorting mirrors, some of them cracked. In what little light there is we catch sight, from time to time, of a figure in various disguises, luring us on like a will-o'-the-wisp first down one trail and then along another. The pursuit is made even more confusing by others, travelling in the opposite direction, offering conflicting advice on which way to travel. It is a merry, often exhausting, but always exhilarating dance. No wonder that one of his earliest critics predicted that Lowry would be the despair of his biographer.

Lowry was, of course, the contriver of some of the most complex and compelling fiction of modern times, and his life, it sometimes seems, was his most complex and compelling fictional contrivance of all. This is almost certainly attributable to his sense as a young man that he was somehow different from his contemporaries, a man with a calling, set apart, and fated by virtue of the special creative gifts he possessed to suffer for the sake of producing great literature. To this end, he centred all his imaginative effort around himself and exposed himself to the most appalling dangers, both physical and psychological, in order to have something original to say about the human condition. The central characters in his novels and short stories, therefore, are all Malcolm Lowry in one guise or another.

It is not surprising, then, that the fiction tended to take over the man and transform him into a myth. The real Lowry and the mythical Lowry are often difficult to separate, and he himself worked hard to blur the difference. He romanticized his past life and, like the Ancient Mariner, seemed able to persuade all those on whom he fixed his glittering blue eyes that the legends he wove around his experiences were in fact the truth. Certainly there is always the note of conviction about even his most exaggerated claims. When, for instance, in Ultramarine, he refers to his autobiographical hero, Dana Hilliot, as 'a small boy chased by the Furies', one recognizes the feeling he had of being picked out for punishment by cruel gods of his own invention, a theme which recurs throughout his poetry and fiction and which was borne out by many painful experiences.

Perhaps he never grew up, and the remarkable thing is that the small boy, so relentlessly pursued by the avenging agents of fate, survived to the age of almost forty-eight. Certainly he was on the run from an early age, seeking refuge from his private terrors in the imaginative world of romantic literature and the unreal state of alcoholic oblivion. He began drinking at fifteen and at seventeen he escaped to sea, but found it impossible to break free from what he called 'the tyranny of self'. At twenty-four he took off into exile, beginning a journey which led him through innumerable seedy bars, into two unstable marriages and in and out of gaols and mental institutions on three continents. He recorded everything. The reckless flight was also a reckless pursuit of pain and pleasure and the words and images to transform them through language into art.

The pain and terror encompassed many gripping fears - a fear of women and of being rejected by them, of sex and the danger of contracting syphilis, the fear of authority and especially of the police and being spied on, and the fear of being exposed as a plagiarist. Some of the most telling images through which he expressed these painful fears arose out of other, more intellectual obsessions. He was obsessed by the legend of Faust, by German Expressionist cinema, by mirrors and magic, by metaphysical ideas about time and the inventive nature of human life. But perhaps his most abiding obsession took the form of an identity crisis of such agonizing proportions that, according to Conrad Aiken, his mentor, he could only have a sense of existing by taking on the identities of other writers and living, as he put it, 'in introverted comas'.

This sense of having no identity of his own certainly led him to 'take over' other writers - Melville, Conrad, Eugene O'Neill, Nordahl Grieg and especially Aiken himself. But he also came to identify closely with his own characters, with Dana Hilliot in Ultramarine, Bill Plantagenet in Lunar Caustic and notably Geoffrey Firmin in Under the Volcano. In creating these characters, Lowry invented for himself a series of alter egos apparently doomed, like the Wandering Jew, to drift aimlessly through uncharted and hostile territories - the lunatic interior of the psychiatric ward, the hellish landscape of Mexico, the Paradise Garden from which expulsion is imminent. And this chosen underworld of the self in turn became a prison and a purgatory from which he was unable to escape and inside which he was destined to die. It was as if he had become his own torturer and the confessions he extracted from himself provided us with the poetry and fiction which now stand as his epitaph. This image of himself comes to us, as if from beyond the grave, in Under the Volcano, in a letter from the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, to his wife, discovered a year after his death.

And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.

This is at once the underworld of the poet Orpheus, the nightmare Expressionist world of Dr Caligari, the apocalyptic vision of the doomed Dr Faustus. There are echoes here, too, of the shadowy and threatening fictional worlds of Kafka - the disorienting interiors of bureaucratic empires where the lone individual is subjected to the terrifying uncertainty of arbitrary powers.

That is the most powerful metaphor for a life embodied in Lowry's fiction - the journey into a labyrinthine world of menacing shadows, threatening illusions and unpredictable disasters to which the reckless voyager is condemned once he abandons the set and certain path of rectitude and orthodoxy. This vision is given an added significance by Lowry's obsession with the sea, and the title he chose for the grand design which was to include all his novels, The Voyage that Never Ends. The destiny of modern man, he seems to be saying to us, is to travel dangerously but never to arrive.

In life, of course, Lowry, like many others of the generation which grew to adulthood in the early thirties, was attempting to break free from the enclosed world of middle-class propriety and guilt-ridden Victorian morality into which he had been born. But whereas writers like Orwell, Spender and Auden set out to find the alternative society through organized political action, Lowry embarked on a lonely and seemingly undirected search for an alternative identity in and through literature. While the mainstream rebels, fuelled and inspired by ideology, sought the mirror-image society, Lowry, the lone wolf, fuelled and inspired by poetry and alcohol, sought the mirror-image self.

The obsession with self was reflected in his life as well as in his art. Lowry's old friend, the short-story writer James Stern, recalled how fascinated he was with mirrors, and others have told of catching him staring at his own reflection. In Ultramarine, Dana Hilliot sometimes seems to be more interested in his own performance than in the behaviour of his fellow sailors.

I put down the glass noisily then picked it up again, and gazed mournfully at my own reflection. Narcissus. Bollocky Bill the Sailor . aspiring writer, drawn magically from the groves of the Muses by Poseidon.

But Bollocky Bill was only one of the many images he created for himself. John Davenport, Lowry's friend from his Cambridge days, has noted how he presented different masks to different groups of his friends, and his French translator, Clarisse Francillon, remembered his habit of slyly watching for audience reaction whenever he was behaving outrageously.

In the numerous photographs of him, some of these performances have been captured and frozen - the ukulele-playing poet, the drunken genius clutching his book and his gin bottle, the tough guy with the enormous chest expansion, the Chaplinesque clown with the baggy trousers, the lost and helpless victim of a cruel world, the pioneer hippy and visionary sage at one with nature at his shoreline shack in British Columbia. One picture even shows him holding a mirror reflecting himself being photographed.

His prose also has a mirror-like quality, reflecting not just a life, but a life reflecting upon itself and the world around it. By the time he wrote Under the Volcano, the personality had become truly kaleidoscopic, as had the prose. 'You look down,' wrote one of his first reviewers, 'the bottom is never reached, but the reflections are fascinating.' It is this ever-changing, insubstantial, dissembling and elusive quality which he shared with his narrative texts which gave his self-obsession its wider significance. The image purveyed is so blurred and so ambiguous that it could be Everyman.

I see myself as all mankind in prison,

With hands outstretched to lanterns by the ocean;

I see myself as all mankind in mirrors,

Babbling of love while at his back rise horrors.

This extraordinary ability to project himself on to the world and to reflect the world back upon himself is seen by some of his keener critics as Lowry's most profound achievement....