Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry

The sea! My God, what it may suggest to you! Perhaps you think of a deep grey sailing ship lying over in the seas, with the hail hurling over her: or a bluenose skipper who chewed glass so that he could spit blood, who could sew a man up alive in a sack and throw him overboard, still groaning! Well, those were the ancient violences, the old heroic days of holystones; and they have gone, you say. But the sea is none the less the sea. Man scatters ever father and farther the footsteps of exile. It is ever the path to some strange land, some magic land of faery, which has its extraordinary and unearthly reward for us after the storms of the ocean.

Dana Hilliot, the Norwegian-British sailor of Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, is not quite a sailor. He has shipped off on a yearlong voyage aboard the Oedipus Tyrannus for reasons that are obscure, both to the reader and himself: they have something to do with proving himself to his girl at home, Janet, and something to do with "gaining experience," and something to do with a cargo ship called the Oxenstjerna that he and Janet have seen appear and reappear on the horizon like a mystic vision. But as it turns out, sailing is hard work, and Hilliot is bad at it. He's widely hated by his fellow sailors and tortured by the temptations of shore, anxiously obsessed with keeping faithful to Janet, who has yet to send him a letter. He's two months into a yearlong voyage, and the remaining ten months look less like "experience" and more like purgatory.

The parent-rival on the Oedipus Tyrannus is the chinless cook, Andy, who is the ringleader of the anti-Dana sentiment on board. Hilliot seethes under Andy's contempt even as he craves, in a deep dark way, his approval. When Hilliot at last ventures to shore in China, he gets roaringly drunk and lets himself get entangled with a Russian prostitute named Olga, only to leave and return to find--as is obviously required by the Oedipal metaphor at work here--her deep in the arms of Andy. Experience, as always, is mixed up with sex, and Hilliot's virginity becomes a torture; his love for Janet requires him both to be a true, pure virgin and an experienced man.

Lowry is the only author I've ever read who comes close to what James Joyce does with stream-of-consciousness. As in Under the Volcano, the real story in Ultramarine is in the psychosexual drama that roils inside the protagonist. And as in Under the Volcano, the real movement of the mind is best captured when the protagonist is roaring drunk, when the mind is at its most honest and most disordered. I think Ultramarine was more successful, to me, because it's about half the length of Under the Volcano, which became at length cryptic and suffocating. In Ultramarine, the eddies of Hilliot's mental anguish are punctuated with the earthy voice of the other sailors, interrupting each other with anecdotes, and dashes of strange humor: the Oedipus Tyrannus, we discover, has been charged with carrying a whole circus of elephants, tigers, and other exotic animals from China. (It's almost like the novel shifts from an Oedipus story, about a man tortured by his own sexual inadequacy, to a Noah's ark story--perhaps one in which Dana really does get to start his new life on the tip of Mt. Ararat.)

Some of Ultramarine is inscrutable. People's minds really are sometimes, I guess, so it only makes sense. But there's enough of work, of dirt, enough of booze, of the sea, to balance out the maziness of the novel and make it worth reading.

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

The new lane, peaceful, quite shady, deep-rutted, and despite the dry spell still full of pools, beautifully reflecting the sky, wandered on between clumps of trees and broken hedges screening indeterminate fields, and now it was as though they were a company, a caravan, carrying, for their greater security, a little world of love with them as they rode along.  Earlier it had promised to be too hot: but just enough sun warned them, a soft breeze caressed their faces, the countryside on either hand smiled upon them with deceptive innocence, a drowsy hum rose up from the morning, the mares nodded, there were the foals, here was the dog, and it is all a bloody lie, he thought: we have fallen inevitably into it, it is as if, upon this one day in the year the dead come to life, or so one was reliably informed on the bus, the day of visions and miracles, by some contrariety we have been allowed for one hour a glimpse of what never was at all, of what never can be since brotherhood was betrayed, the image of our happiness, of that it would be better to think could not have been.  Another thought struck Hugh.  And yet I do not expect, ever in my life, to be happier than I am now.  No peace I shall ever find but will be poisoned as these moments are poisoned--

On the Day of the Dead in Quauhnahuac, Mexico--possibly the most mispellable place in the world--British Consul Geoffrey Firmin's ex-wife comes back to him.  He hasn't answered any of her letters; but still she's drawn to return to him by an inescapable love.  When she arrives at seven in the morning, he's already in the cantina, drunk as un zorrillo.  Probably his drinking was what drove them apart in the first place.  But she returns to him anyway, hoping to save him from himself, and yet the passing year has only driven him deeper into the arms of the bottle.

She seeks refuge in the company of his visiting brother, Hugh, a committed Communist haunted by the Spanish Civil War, and with whom she may have already had an affair.  The entire book takes place over that day, the Day of the Dead, whose name is not, for the three of them, merely a coincidence but a promise.  We know from the first chapter, a flashforward, that the day ends with Geoffrey's violent death.

If In Search of Lost Time is the classic novel of memory, Under the Volcano is the novel of drunkenness.  Lowry captures the disorienting feeling of being borracho exactly, with all of its attendant hallucinations and phantasmagorias.  It's not easy reading: from one paragraph to the next, Geoffrey might end up in the bathroom and have to trace his own steps to figure out how he got there.  Lowry is coy about giving us an objectivity Geoffrey doesn't and can't possess; at one point he writes that the Consul "either thought or said" something.  Lowry's style, even in chapters closer to the point of view of Hugh or Yvonne, is characterized by long, circuitous, heavy sentences which take on a sinister maze-like quality when used for Geoffrey.  But what they capture, they capture exquisitely:

The Consul sat helplessly in the bathroom, watching the insects which lay at different angles from one another on the wall, like ships out on the roadstead.  A caterpillar started to wriggle toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae.  A large cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its head.  He turned, expecting the caterpillar to be much nearer, but it too had turned, just slightly shifting its moorings.  Now a scorpion was moving slowly across toward him.  Suddenly the Consul rose, trembling in every limb.  But it wasn't the scorpion he cared about.  It was that, all at once the thin shadows of the isolated nails, the stains of murdered mosquitos, the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm, so that, wherever he looked, another insect was born, wriggling instantly toward his heart.  It was as if, and this was what was most appalling, the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and now was closing, rushing in upon him.

Among the perfectly rendered phrases in that passage, I want to select for special praise the description of the cricket with "polished fuselage."  Lowry is full of perfectly alienating phrases like that, which despite being just plain beautiful, communicate the alienation of Geoffrey from his surroundings.  I also liked a group of stags which look at the trio "in all their monarchical unlikelihood" and a description of "[r]ows of dead lamps like erect snakes."

But I couldn't help shaking the feeling that Under the Volcano is somehow less than the sum of all of its striking parts.  For every arresting paragraph there's three more that are plain slogs, that twist and turn and end up somewhere not quite worth the attention.  The story itself, such as it is, never quite operates on the level of believable human interaction.  Yes, I will buy that the Consul is incapable of making a fuss when his wife returns because his soul and his brain are so pickled.  But I don't quite buy the way that Yvonne shows up, not to have it out with Geoffrey, but to go off immediately on a horseback ride with Hugh.  When things do happen--like the violent climax, in which the drunk-ass Consul ineptly navigates his final encounter with la policia--it can be painfully muddled and obscure.  The narrative digs deep into the three characters' souls with such indelible detail and psychological realism that it never quite pays enough attention to the surface.