Lowry’s Planet

Michael Hofmann

Pursued by Furies: A life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker
HarperCollins, 672 pp, £25.00, October 1993, ISBN 0 00 215539 7
The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry edited by Kathleen Scherf
British Columbia, 418 pp, £25.00, January 1992, ISBN 0 7748 0362 2

Quauhnahuac, his Cuernavaca, is overlooked by the two volcanoes, but Malcolm Lowry’s life is ringed by non-events and no-shows that were even more spectacular, things that might have happened or threatened or promised to happen, but never did: such things as financial independence; a regular relationship with an editor, a publishing house, a landlord; a modus vivendi with alcohol; Jungian analysis in Zurich or lobotomy in Wimbledon. Above all, there is The Voyage That Never Ends, the cycle of novels that he mooted but never wrote, or wrote but never finished, with fantastic, phantom, harpooning titles like In Ballast to the White Sea, La Mordida, Swinging the Maelstrom. All these things – books, changed circumstances, surgery – are cures of one sort or another, for as Stephen Spender remarked in his introduction to Under the Volcano, ‘with Lowry one is never far away from the thought that although there is an illness there may also be a cure.’ They obtruded and impended like the gods in the life of a Greek, but when it came down to it, they remained offstage, sat on their hands, and he gave his life to their absence. He is the one whom the gods did not save. Despite the offer made to Faust in the third of Under the Volcano’s three epigraphs, ‘wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen’ – ‘whoever unceasingly strives upward ... him can we save’ – the gods did not come for him. And yet strive he did, indubitably. Passim. Even a graphologist would have to agree:

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Vol. 16 No. 2 · 27 January 1994 » Michael Hofmann » Lowry’s Planet (print version)
pages 16-17 | 3010 words

Letters

From Gordon Bowker

Michael Hofmann (LRB, 27 January) prefers Douglas Day’s 1973 biography of Malcolm Lowry to mine, because Day writes about Lowry whereas I write about Lowry’s life. Foolishly, I had persuaded myself that, having been contracted to write a biography, I was expected to produce a life-story. My mistake, it seems. Of course, if Hofmann prefers Day’s biography (the one which he thinks is not about Lowry’s life), then, chacun son goût. But the grounds offered to support his preference seem a little shaky. He cites my characterisation of Lowry’s reactions to a Christmas message from his mother, and to the assassination of Gandhi, and of his feelings for Kafka, arguing that they are based on inadequate biographical data. ‘As a writer,’ Hofmann asks, ‘why the suppositiousness, the skating over one’s essential ignorance of another’s being? Why should Lowry not have giggled at his mother’s letter, used Gandhi as a pretext [for going off to get drunk in Rouen], or found Kafka an absolute hoot (which he is, the funniest thing until, well, Lowry)?’

Hofmann supposes that, in the passages he quotes, I was supposing; but I was no more supposing than he was, and certainly no more than we all do in reading others’ intentions. There were witnesses in France to Lowry’s distress over Gandhi’s death and to his heading off to Rouen, where he was later found and brought back. I could have signalled this in a note, but one cannot add a note for every sentence written, and readers of biographies have, to some extent, to trust that a writer is not inventing everything which is not explained in a note. Of course, even Lowry’s witnesses cannot have known his state of mind, any more than Hofmann can know mine or I can know Hofmann’s. As to the mother’s Christmas message and my opinion of its effect on Lowry, Hofmann cannot have read the preceding pages. Shortly before, Lowry had been accused of plagiarism, which devastated him (he said), and his friend, Davenport, had failed to keep a promise to visit him in Cuernavaca, leaving him very depressed (if we can believe his letter to Davenport). It is not too wild a supposition, therefore, to say that his mother’s sentiments cannot have helped his self-confidence, bearing in mind also his fear of upsetting her and so losing his monthly stipend. As to Lowry’s reactions to Kafka, well, we have Lowry’s own words (in two letters quoted in my book) associating Kafka with his sense of being persecuted. Perhaps here again I should have given chapter and verse, but the quotations are there, and I was simply trying not to overload pages with footnotes.

Of course, Lowry’s state of mind might have been other than I depicted, but a biographer must have some licence to try to portray such moods and feelings if the evidence or context points strongly towards it. After all, Douglas Day, whom Hofmann admires, peers into Lowry’s mind through psychoanalytical goggles, even though, as far as I know, Day is not qualified to practise psychoanalysis. So what? I’m not necessarily against ‘suppositiousness’, even of the Freudian kind, from a biographer. It’s Hofmann who disapproves of it. At least, from his review of my book, I suppose he does.

Gordon Bowker
London W8