Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry
July 27, 2009 3:20 PM Subscribe
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. A feature-length documentary focusing on Malcolm Lowry, author of the novel Under the Volcano.
Previously.
Previously.
You get this on disc 2 of the Criterion Collection re-issue DVD of the John Huston adaptation of Under the Volcano as well. Stunningly powerful book, and film, both.
I wish there were a real way of putting into words what this work means to me, but it's not really possible. Suffice it to say that I love Mexico like an ancestral home, and that I loved drinking in Mexico better than anywhere on earth, back when I was drinking. I think I can understand the oblivion that Lowry was describing The Consul moving towards, as I have been in that place, spiritually, emotionally, and temporally. I got out with my life, but that book and movie take me back, and really give me something to reflect upon when it comes to who I was when I was seeking that oblivion too. I try not to dwell on the past, but to gain somehow from the experience, and Lowry's work provides an additional perspective from which to see and grow.
I wish he'd made it through, somehow -- he was a hell of an artist.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:57 PM on July 27, 2009 [2 favorites]
I wish there were a real way of putting into words what this work means to me, but it's not really possible. Suffice it to say that I love Mexico like an ancestral home, and that I loved drinking in Mexico better than anywhere on earth, back when I was drinking. I think I can understand the oblivion that Lowry was describing The Consul moving towards, as I have been in that place, spiritually, emotionally, and temporally. I got out with my life, but that book and movie take me back, and really give me something to reflect upon when it comes to who I was when I was seeking that oblivion too. I try not to dwell on the past, but to gain somehow from the experience, and Lowry's work provides an additional perspective from which to see and grow.
I wish he'd made it through, somehow -- he was a hell of an artist.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:57 PM on July 27, 2009 [2 favorites]
Awesome, thanks for that.
Under the Volcano has long been on of my absolute favourite books. There's something utterly engrossing in his writing style in it (especially compared to his other books which were almost unreadable for me). Maybe it's the power that this book had for me in drawing me in to the character's point of view and making me see the story with their eyes in such a total way - never before had I cared so much about the fullness of a glass in someone's hand.
posted by vodkaboots at 4:09 PM on July 27, 2009
Under the Volcano has long been on of my absolute favourite books. There's something utterly engrossing in his writing style in it (especially compared to his other books which were almost unreadable for me). Maybe it's the power that this book had for me in drawing me in to the character's point of view and making me see the story with their eyes in such a total way - never before had I cared so much about the fullness of a glass in someone's hand.
posted by vodkaboots at 4:09 PM on July 27, 2009
My favorite sentence of all time is in Under the Volcano." It goes:
It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engineered freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for a moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightening, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of the beach, while the floats, for these are timber driving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightening within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightening in the blue evening, unearthly.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:14 PM on July 27, 2009 [5 favorites]
It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engineered freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for a moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightening, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of the beach, while the floats, for these are timber driving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightening within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightening in the blue evening, unearthly.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:14 PM on July 27, 2009 [5 favorites]
That line describes the view from Lowry's house in Deep Cove over the water. Someone read it to me on Wreck Beach the other day.
posted by mek at 9:25 PM on July 27, 2009
posted by mek at 9:25 PM on July 27, 2009
Thanks for the link. Makes me proud to be Canadian taxpayer.
I saw the Lowry film long ago ... but not the Albert Hoffman one which is available on the same page. Great to see the old men of LSD telling the real story, without histrionics or hyperbole.
Do check it out.
posted by philip-random at 11:18 PM on July 27, 2009
I saw the Lowry film long ago ... but not the Albert Hoffman one which is available on the same page. Great to see the old men of LSD telling the real story, without histrionics or hyperbole.
Do check it out.
posted by philip-random at 11:18 PM on July 27, 2009
Incidentally, the world's most notable Malcolm Lowry scholars just wrapped up the 2009 Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference (July 23-25, 2009) at The University of British Columbia. Amazing stuff.
Thanks for the post.
posted by rumbles at 1:29 AM on July 28, 2009
Thanks for the post.
posted by rumbles at 1:29 AM on July 28, 2009
What mek means to say is that I read that passage to him on Wreck Beach the other day. When I had finished, I looked up to see that someone else had stopped and sat down beside me to listen.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:40 AM on July 28, 2009
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:40 AM on July 28, 2009
I'm also glad that rumbles brought up the very recent Conference. MeFi's own kaspen gave the talk “Elephants and Volcanoes: Memory, Multiplicity, and Reading Oneself in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction”. I'll goad him into posting about the conference tomorrow.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:47 AM on July 28, 2009
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:47 AM on July 28, 2009
I read Under the Volcano last summer. It inspired me to read War and Peace and drink mezcal.
I'm guessing this film mentions the theory of Lowry's wife slipping him pills and killing him? It was described in a New Yorker article just over a year ago, I believe.
posted by hyperizer at 5:27 AM on July 28, 2009
I'm guessing this film mentions the theory of Lowry's wife slipping him pills and killing him? It was described in a New Yorker article just over a year ago, I believe.
posted by hyperizer at 5:27 AM on July 28, 2009
One of my uncles gave me Under the Volcano when I was 16. It's still one of the best I've ever read.
posted by mareli at 8:07 AM on July 28, 2009
posted by mareli at 8:07 AM on July 28, 2009
Exellent film, great writer. Though the unannounced shots from the syphillis museum in Liverpool have left me feeling a little unwell.
posted by johnny novak at 10:41 AM on July 28, 2009
posted by johnny novak at 10:41 AM on July 28, 2009
I haven't the capacity at present to do justice here to the life and death of Malcolm Lowry, in fact I'm still recovering from the conference's grand finale of our troupe of international Lowry scholars, heavy on the french contingent, boarding an old yellow school bus with several bottles of fine mescal, crossing Vancouver as out-of-season clouds grew more ominous overhead, only to break into the heaviest rain we ever see in these parts, drumming deafeningly on the roof of the bus as thunder clapped ever closer, and we wondered whether we should wait it out, and read some more, and raise another glass, or aught we venture into the rain where his cabin once stood. We read then the final section of Forest Path to the Spring, the finale of his posthumously published short story collection Hear Us Oh Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, which I will transcribe as follows, and which describes the sense of peace whose absence defines Volcano and which at last, briefly, he found in Eridanus, the shores of Vancouver's inner harbour. The rain let up, slightly, suddenly as it came, and we were each given an MP3 player with an audio file of strange sounds and audio interviews with those who knew him, including Margerie Lowry. I must state that the conclusion that New Yorker piece made is far from uncontentious; Margerie was instrumental in his work, clearly loved him, and spent the rest of her life editing and seeing published his remaining manuscripts. It was an inglorious end, "death by misadventure" it was ruled, it was the greatest of tragedies in that the work he left us holds so much promise, his plans were so ambitious, and his talent so prodigious and indelible that the reading of his unpublished oeuvre is haunting in its own beauty, in what it could of been, and how it speaks to his own end. The movie which constitutes this FPP covers it all fairly, and I believe also contains the incredible footage of his shack actually being bulldozed and burnt to the ground. The only reason we have most of his manuscript fragments at all is because friends of his soon after scoured the beach, collecting literally piece by piece the fragments which are now housed at UBC archives. I have held a charred fragment in my hands, funnily enough it speaks of "the beauty of the fire". As we came to the end, to the beach where that bulldozed cabin once was, the sky was consumed in the most unusual of sunsets, a massive blotch of yellow, like fog turned to fire. And as that yellow school bus dropped me in the rain on the side of the highway, and I trundled off mescal in hand, waving at the bus and the busload waving in turn, fireworks suddenly booming in the distance, I did not care that I was soaked, only that I did not know what to do now that Malcolm Lowry had come into and so quickly out of the world, and left fiction and the linguistic expression of the phenomenology of consciousness forever changed. God bless Malcolm, the barranca takes us all, but this earth is a volcano, wherein one day we all will rise again. This is what we read:
Now, somewhere in the unseen west where it was setting, the sun broke through the clouds, sending a flare of light across the water turning the rain into a sudden shower of pearls and touching the mountains, where the mist rising now almost perpendicularly from the black abysses fumed heavenward in pure white fire.
Three rainbows went up like rockets across the bay: one for the cat. They faded and there, in the east, a widening rift of clouds had become a patch of clear rain-washed sky. Arcturus. Spica. Procyon overhead, and Regulus in the Lion over the oil refinery. But Orion must have already set behind the sun so that, though we were Eridanus, Eridanus was nowhere to be found. And on the point the lighthouse began its beneficent signaling into the twilight.
And the spring? Here it was. It still ran, down through the jack-in-the-pulpits, down toward Hi-Doubt. It purified itself a bit as it came down from the mountains, but it always carried with it a faint tang of mushrooms, earth, dead leaves, pine needles, mud and snow, on its way down to the inlet and out to the Pacific. In the deeper reaches of the forest, in the somber damp caves, where the dead branches hang bowed down with moss, and death camass and the destroying angel grow, it was haggard and chill and tragic, unsure measurer of its path. Feeling its way underground it must have had its dark moments. But here, in springtime, on its last lap to the sea, it was as at its source a happy joyous little stream.
High above the pine trees swayed against the sky, out of the west came the seagulls with their angelic wings, coming home to rest. And I remembered how every evening I used to go down this path through the forest to get water from the spring at dusk. ... Looking over my wife's shoulder I could see a deer swimming towards the lighthouse.
Laughing we stooped down to the stream to drink.
posted by kaspen at 11:02 AM on July 28, 2009 [1 favorite]
Now, somewhere in the unseen west where it was setting, the sun broke through the clouds, sending a flare of light across the water turning the rain into a sudden shower of pearls and touching the mountains, where the mist rising now almost perpendicularly from the black abysses fumed heavenward in pure white fire.
Three rainbows went up like rockets across the bay: one for the cat. They faded and there, in the east, a widening rift of clouds had become a patch of clear rain-washed sky. Arcturus. Spica. Procyon overhead, and Regulus in the Lion over the oil refinery. But Orion must have already set behind the sun so that, though we were Eridanus, Eridanus was nowhere to be found. And on the point the lighthouse began its beneficent signaling into the twilight.
And the spring? Here it was. It still ran, down through the jack-in-the-pulpits, down toward Hi-Doubt. It purified itself a bit as it came down from the mountains, but it always carried with it a faint tang of mushrooms, earth, dead leaves, pine needles, mud and snow, on its way down to the inlet and out to the Pacific. In the deeper reaches of the forest, in the somber damp caves, where the dead branches hang bowed down with moss, and death camass and the destroying angel grow, it was haggard and chill and tragic, unsure measurer of its path. Feeling its way underground it must have had its dark moments. But here, in springtime, on its last lap to the sea, it was as at its source a happy joyous little stream.
High above the pine trees swayed against the sky, out of the west came the seagulls with their angelic wings, coming home to rest. And I remembered how every evening I used to go down this path through the forest to get water from the spring at dusk. ... Looking over my wife's shoulder I could see a deer swimming towards the lighthouse.
Laughing we stooped down to the stream to drink.
posted by kaspen at 11:02 AM on July 28, 2009 [1 favorite]
kaspen: July 28th is my birthday as well. Thanks for alerting me to the synchronicity.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 3:59 PM on July 28, 2009
posted by thescientificmethhead at 3:59 PM on July 28, 2009
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