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Under the volcano...but not under the radar

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Malcolm Lowry seems an unlikely candidate for a comeback. The British author, who died in 1957 at age 47, was perhaps the most unregenerate of all the alcoholic underachievers in the literary canon; after his second novel (and acknowledged masterpiece) ‘Under the Volcano’ appeared in 1947, he never completed another book. Yet Lowry wrote some of the lushest, most beautiful prose imaginable, especially when describing his life at Dollarton, British Columbia--where he spent many years on the beach in a squatter’s shack--which he evokes with such grace and acuity that it emerges as a three-dimensional landscape in your mind.

Now Lowry has returned, after a fashion. This April, HarperPerennial reissued ‘Under the Volcano’ (402 pp., $14.95 paper) with an afterword by William T. Vollmann; in late August, the New York Review of Books will publish ‘The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words’ (512 pp., $24.95), a collection of stories, poems, drafts and letters edited by Michael Hofmann, which marks the first American edition of new Lowry work in more than 30 years.

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What’s the draw? The obvious answer has to do with the 50th anniversary of the author’s death, since the publishing industry likes nothing better than an occasion to commemorate as an excuse for bringing out new books. But with Lowry, it is--as it should be--more complex. This is a writer, after all, whom few readers even remember, and even fewer have read. And yet his work is among the finest 20th century literature ever produced: vulnerable, thoughtful, transfigured by doubt and dissolution, loss and evanescence, as well as the proximity of death.

This is why Lowry drank so much, and it’s why he sabotaged his career in its moment of greatest triumph, retreating, not finishing, working in fragments that had to be pieced together after he was gone. As he writes in the poem ‘After the Publication of ‘Under the Volcano,’ ‘ which appears in the new book:

Success is like some horrible disaster
Worse than your house burning, the sound of ruination
As the roof tree falls following each other faster
While you stand, the helpless witness of your damnation.

Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul
Exposing that you have worked for only this--
Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss
And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail.

David L. Ulin

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