Malcolm Lowry

"Lowry's masterpiece...has a claim to being regarded as one of the ten most consequential works of fiction produced in [the twentieth] century." — Los Angeles TimesGeoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life—the Day of the Dead—his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one significant day unfold against an unforgettable backdrop of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical.Under the Volcano remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

'Staring out at the river his agony was like a great lidless eye' In this stark, compelling and greatly autobiographical novella, Malcolm Lowry tells the story of Bill Plantagenet, a piano player and ex-sailor who has lost his band and his mind drinking in New York. As Plantagenet commits himself to a Psychiatric hospital to suffer his recovery, Lowry writes with eloquent ferocity on the delusions of madness, and the true meaning of sanity.

Malcolm Lowry, who would permanently stake his claim to literary immortality with the masterpiece Under the Volcano, wrote Ultramarine, his debut, as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Displaying the linguistic virtuosity and haunting imagery that became signatures of Lowry's mature style, Ultramarine, a novel he continually rewrote and revised from publication until his death, is one of his central works, and this new edition offers the opportunity for a fuller assessment of his place in the modern canon.Ultramarine is the story of Dana Hilliot's first voyage, as mess-boy on the freighter Oedipus Tyrannus bound for Bombay and of his struggle to win the approval of his shipmates, trying to match their example in the bars and bordellos of the Chinese ports while at the same time remaining faithful to his first love, Janet, back home in England. Alternating between Dana's own narrative and the ribald humor and colorful language of the seamen's conversation, Ultramarine depicts a boy's initiation into the company of men.

Unpublished in his lifetime, this book returns to the Mexico of the author's "Under the Volcano". Sigbjorn Wilderness descends into an inferno of abysses, labyrinths and demons to confront his past and his destiny. His search finally takes him to the scene of the worst terrors of his drunken past.

Three short novels and four stories illustrate the influence of nature, the sea, and world travel on the modern English author's writings

While famous for his celebrated novel, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry always considered himself a poet. First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

October Ferry To Gabriola

"In Ballast to the White Sea" is Malcolm Lowry's most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been "written." After a fire broke out in Lowry's squatter's shack, all that remained of In Ballast to the White Sea were a few sheets of paper. Only decades after Lowry's death did it become known that his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript. This scholarly edition presents, for the first time, the once-lost novel. Patrick McCarthy's critical introduction offers insight into Lowry's sense of himself while Chris Ackerley's extensive annotations provide important information about Lowry's life and art in an edition that will captivate readers and scholars alike.

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINALNotorious for a misspent life full of binges, blackouts, and unimaginable bad luck, Malcolm Lowry managed, against every odd, to complete and publish two novels, one of them, Under the Volcano , an indisputable masterpiece. At the time of his death in 1957, Lowry also left behind a great deal of uncollected and unpublished stories, novellas, drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels (Lowry was a tireless revisiter and reviser—and interrupter—of his work), long, impassioned, haunting, beautiful letters overflowing with wordplay and lament, fraught short poems that display a sozzled off-the-cuff inspiration all Lowry’s own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various volumes, all long out of print. Here, in The Voyage That Never Ends , the poet, translator, and critic Michael Hofmann has drawn on all this scattered and inaccessible material to assemble the first book that reflects the full range of Lowry’s extraordinary and singular achievement.The result is a revelation. In the letters—acknowledged to be among modern literature’s greatest—we encounter a character who was, as contemporaries attested, as spellbinding and lovable as he was self-destructive and infuriating. In the late fiction—the long story “Through the Panama,” sections of unfinished novels such as Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid , and the little-known La Mordida —we discover a writer who is blazing a path into the unknown and, as he goes, improvising a whole new kind of writing. Lowry had set out to produce a great novel, something to top Under the Volcano , a multivolume epic and intimate tale of purgatorial suffering and ultimate redemption (called, among other things, “The Voyage That Never Ends”). That book was never to be. What he produced instead was an unprecedented and prophetic blend of fact and fiction, confession and confusion, essay and free play, that looks forward to the work of writers as different as Norman Mailer and William Gass, but is like nothing else. Almost in spite of himself, Lowry succeeded in transforming his disastrous life into an exhilarating art of disaster. The Voyage That Never Ends is a new and indispensable entry into the world of one of the masters of modern literature.

11x18. 1979. Broché. 346 pages.

Malcolm Lowry es un escritor maldito típico, hijo de padres acomodados, escritor pese al escándalo familiar, adicto a la tequila y al mezcal, aventurero, protagonista de episodios oscuros jamás aclarados, víctima de incendios en los que desaparecen sus manuscritos, trabajador irregular que reescribe su única obra importante, Bajo el volcán , cuatro veces en lugares y circunstancias completamente distintos, muerto de mala manera después de una última crisis etílica. Y su novela es una de las escasísimas grandes novelas de todos los tiempos. Y porque pocos lo han leído, quisiéramos que estas dos cartas sirvan de incentivo a su lectura. En ellas Malcolm Lowry se retrata como creador y como persona. La primera carta, dirigida a su editor, que le pedía la supresión de unos pasajes del libro, es un largo estudio crítico, serio e irónico, de Bajo el volcán : Lowry analiza a fondo su propia obra para rechazar los cortes propuestos y justificar la absoluta necesidad de publicarla tal como fue concebida a lo largo de diez años de reflexión. La segunda es la historia kafkiana de dos personas, él y su mujer, metidos en el más intrincado e infernal laberinto burocrático y administrativo debido a un error, llamémosle así, de la policía mexicana. Lowry murió sin haber podido conocer los motivos por los que se vio envuelto en aquel embrollo que lo llevó al calabozo y a la expulsión de México. Y porque Jorge Semprún dice que Malcolm Lowry exige lectores exigentes (“Somos unos cuantos”, añade) – y porque a Malcolm Lowry le gustaban los prólogos-, le pedimos que escribiera algo sobre estas cartas de Malcolm Lowry. Lo hizo, finalmente. Y para que entendiéramos de una vez que “no nos vendría mal la irrupción de algunos tipos como Malcolm Lowry”, arremete contra algunos de los tabús de nuestra academia, contra el escritor/funcionario, “que después o antes de sus obras de oficina”, “funciona oficinescamente como escritor”, y contra el escritor/sacerdote, “portador de valores eternos”, en este caso culturales, exquisitamente culturales: “no ejerce una mera función, sino una misión, un sacerdocio”.

Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano and one of the most celebrated English novelists of this century, was also a writer of superb letters. Collected here for the first time are close to 800 letters spanning more than thirty years, most of them never before published and all of them carefully annotated. Lowry's letters range from his detailed, erudite, 35-page-long exegesis of his masterpiece to impassioned letters and notes to his wives. They include witty, ironic self-parodies, letters to younger writers, full of generous advice and literary discussion, and letters with analysis and acute insight into politics and current affairs. Lowry frequently illustrated his letters with drawings, marginal sketches and symbols of good cheer such as his seagulls which adorn many of the later letters. These illustrations have been reproduced in both volumes of The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry together with many photographs of Lowry and his correspondents, and reproductions of interesting holograph letters.

Although Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) published only two novels― Ultramarine and Under the Volcano ―in his lifetime, numerous other works, most of which have since been edited for publication, were in various stages of composition at his death. La Mordida , the longest and most significant of the manuscripts that have not been previously published, is a draft of a novel based on Lowry's visit to Mexico in 1945–46, which ended in the arrest and deportation of Lowry and his wife following a nightmarish run-in with corrupt immigration authorities. On its most immediate level, the title La Mordida― which means "the little bite," Mexican slang for the small bribe that officials are apt to demand in order to expedite matters―refers to the autobiographical protagonist's legal difficulties. In a larger sense, however, it also represents his inability to escape his past, to repay the fine, or debt, that he owes.The central narrative of La Mordida involves a descent into the abyss of self, culminating in the protagonist's symbolic rebirth at the book's end. Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism. Above all, La Mordida was to have been a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them and who is not only unable to write but suspects that he is just a character in a novel.A reading of La Mordida in the context of Lowry's aesthetic theories and psychological problems shows why he dreaded the completion of his projects to such an extent that he called success a "horrible disaster" and compared death to "the accepted manuscript of one's life." The reason, La Mordida makes clear, lies partly in the aesthetic theories that led Lowry to attempt a book that he prophetically called "something never dreamed of before, a work of art so beyond conception it could not be written."Patrick A. McCarthy's edition of La Mordida is based on materials held in the Malcolm Lowry Archive at the University of British Columbia. Its publication provides essential evidence for a balanced assessment of Lowry's creative processes and his achievement as a writer.

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic vision of the world as a madhouse ( The Last Address , 1936), via the apocalyptic metaphors of a world on the brink of Armageddon ( The Last Address , 1939), to a world that, in spite of all its troubles, leaves room for self-irony and humanistic concern ( Swinging the Maelstrom, 1942–1944).

Psalms and Songs Malcolm Lowry Plume books 1975

The general tone of this second volume of letters is considerably darker than that of the first. Though Under the Volcano (published in 1947) was behind Lowry, it would never leave him alone. The success of the novel became a curse: he could not avoid helping his translators; he longed for a film treatment of the book; he found it difficult to become fully engaged in new work; the celebrity associated with a best-seller was, as he put it in a poem, a 'disaster' akin to your house burning down.Illnessses, the death of friends, threats of eviction from his beloved foreshore Dollarton home, and drink plagued Lowry. And yet, he made repeated attempts to escape his personal abysses. He made new friends, re-established a good working relationship with his editor Albert Erskine, began several new projects, and continued to write superb letters. The more than 400 included here, all written during the last decade of his life, reveal a man fascinated with films, bristling with plans for his masterwork The Voyage That Never Ends, eager to discuss the virtues of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, and the work of friends like Gerald Noxon or Jimmy Stern. There is also a selection from his several hundred 'love notes' written to Margerie Lowry and pinned to places in the Dollarton shack or to trees along the 'forest path to spring.' These notes, like much else in the volume, are published here for the first time, providing interesting glimpses into Lowry's private world. The letters written just before his sudden death in England in 1957 are among his most moving; they reveal a weariness of spirit, a deep regret for the loss of his Dollarton paradise, but also the courage, self-deprecating humour, love of language, and keen intelligence that characterize everything he wrote.In addition to a critical introduction and detailed chronologies, this volume includes photographs, many of the drawings with which Lowry illustrated his letters, and reproductions of holograph letters.

Hotelzimmer in Charters - Erzählungen - bk1492; Rowohlt Verlag; Malcolm Lowry; pocket_book; 1986

"Através do Canal do Panamá" é uma das oito novelas de "Ouve-nos Senhor do Céu que é a tua Morada", livro que Malcom Lowry começou a escrever em 1949 e ficou incompleto, só depois da sua morte sendo publicado.O livro fazia parte de um conjunto de obras entre si relacionadas sob a designação de "A Viagem que Nunca Acaba", espécie de "Divina Comédia" do século XX, tendo o Vulcão por Inferno."Ouve-nos Senhor..." foi iniciado depois do regresso de Lowry a Dollartan, numa viagem feita com a sua mulher, Margarie Bonner, durante a qual atravessaram o Canal do Panamá.

Sin duda, Malcolm Lowry se convirtió -tras la muerte de Lawrence y Conrad- en el único heredero de las dos grandes épocas de la poesía inglesa, la "elizabethiana" y la romántica, armonizadas en una concepción moderna de la tragedia individual. Esta serie de relatos del autor de "Bajo el volcán", inéditos incluso en el mundo de las letras inglesas desde su publicación inicial en los años treinta, abarca la mayor parte de sus obras de juventud, y presenta por primera vez en castellano la obra póstuma de Lowry, "Ghostkeeper", cerrando así el ciclo de sus grandes novelas por los dos aldos del tiempo.

«De manhã cedo um homem sai de uma taberna ao pé das docas, com o cheiro do mar no nariz e uma garrafa de uísque no bolso, a deslizar tão levemente na calçada como um navio que abandona a barra.»Nos últimos dias de vida, em clareiras de lucidez que lhe permitiam o regresso a hábitos de escrita, Malcolm Lowry trabalhou no texto de Cáustico Lunar e desde há quatro anos tinha «parado» o primeiro esboço da novela a que ele quereria chamar Ghostkeeper ou Henrik Ghostkeeper, ou Lost and Found, ou I Walk in the Park, ou But Who Else Walks in the Park?, ou O. K. But What Does it Mean?, ou ainda Wheels Within Wheels, como ficamos a saber pelas hesitações registadas no manuscrito.Juntar estes dois textos no mesmo livro nada tem de arbitrário. São assombrados ambos por um destroço de barco, carcaça desfigurada pela usura do tempo e que se faz anúncio de uma inevitável mas indescortinável catástrofe. […]Malcolm Lowry tinha passado por dois períodos de tratamento psiquiátrico; o primeiro em 1935 — aquele que nos interessa — num hospital de Bellevue em Nova Iorque, internamento de dez dias celebrado à saída com uma vingadora bebedeira de quarenta e oito horas. É a experiência literariamente transposta para Cáustico Lunar, uma hiperlucidez visionária mais tarde diluída em opacidades anuladoras de toda a criação. […]Em Cáustico Lunar, o adolescente Garry vive obcecado pelo prenúncio de uma destruição universal sonhada através da imagem da carcaça de uma lancha de carvão anos antes encalhada ao pé de um hospital de Nova Iorque; em Ghostkeeper, Tom Goodheart associa o encontro que tem, com os restos de um salva-vidas naufragado, ao mau presságio que o domina sem nunca definir a sua mensagem nem denunciar a sua dimensão.Estes barcos destroçados são como que centro emocional em ambas as novelas, o foco que em Cáustico Lunar ilumina a percepção do mundo de Bill Plantagenet, que em Ghostkeeper projecta uma luminosidade sombria sobre o futuro de Tom Goodheart. Aníbal Fernandes

Ο Clarence Malcolm Lowry γεννήθηκε στις 28 Ιουλίου του 1909. Υπήρξε ένας άγγλος ποιητής και πεζογράφος, περιστατιακά και σεναριογράφος ο οποίος έγινε γνωστός από το μυθιστόρημα του Κάτω από το ηφαίστειο. Πέθανε στις 26 Ιουνιου του 1957 στο Ανατολικό Σάσεξ όπου ζούσε με την γυναίκα του. Πιθανή αιτία θανάτου αναφέρεται η υπερβολική κατανάλωση αλκοόλ σε συνδυασμό με υπνωτικά χάπια.

" Il blesse les yeux du cœur, ce fabuleux vieux navire grecEn surcharge, il nous blesse tous par sa beauté,Intimant des pensées de fuites dans les vieilles plaques du monde... "Malcolm Lowry plaçait la poésie si haut qu'il se défendait presque d'en écrire. L'œuvre romanesque de l'auteur de Sous le Volcan a longtemps occulté la force lyrique et brûlante de ses poèmes. On y retrouve ses thèmes majeurs : l'océan et ses déchaînements, le goût de l'alcool et ses excès, les passions amoureuses, la solitude aussi. Cet ouvrage réunit des poèmes choisis extraits des Poésies complètes parues dans une nouvelle traduction en 2005.Né en 1909, Malcolm Lowry s'embarque à bord du vapeur Pyrrhus à dix-huit ans ; Jack London, Eugène O'Neil et Joseph Conrad sont alors ses maîtres en littérature. Sa vie est marquée par de nombreux voyages, notamment ses séjours mexicains qui seront au centre de son œuvre. Auteur de romans, de nouvelles et de poèmes, il meurt en 1957 d'une overdose de somnifères.Traduit de l'anglais et présenté par Jacques Darras

-Sous le volcan - Sombre comme la tombe où repose mon ami -Lunar Caustic - Le Caustique lunaire - Ecoute notre voix, ô Seigneur - Choix de poèmes