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Tooloose-Lowrytrek

Elizabeth Lowry: Malcolm Lowry, 1 November 2007

The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words 
edited by Michael Hofmann.
NYRB, 518 pp., £16.99, November 2007, 978 1 59017 235 3
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... The two central facts about Malcolm Lowry are that he wrote and that he drank. He drank while writing – or possibly he wrote while drinking. When he died in June 1957 after downing a lethal mix of barbiturates and gin (the coroner’s verdict was ‘death by misadventure’), he left behind a trunk full of unfinished manuscripts and an impracticably ambitious scheme to develop all his work in progress and his two published novels into a complex sequence for which the projected title was The Voyage That Never Ends ...

Lowry’s Planet

Michael Hofmann, 27 January 1994

Pursued by Furies: A life of Malcolm Lowry 
by Gordon Bowker.
HarperCollins, 672 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 215539 7
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The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry 
edited by Kathleen Scherf.
British Columbia, 418 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7748 0362 2
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... 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 ...

Casino in Small C

Mark Rudman, 8 June 2006

... for Jackson Lears But it was no longer a casino. You could not even dice for drinks in the bar. Malcolm Lowry I missed the turn-off for the capital ‘c’ Casino and couldn’t find a place to turn around and hoped the rocks on this uncombed road battering the bottom of this rented wreck wouldn’t crack an axle when I caught sight of the sign for a second casino somewhere further down the road: not a road – a space hacked out, levelled, cleared ...

Just off Lexham Gardens

John Bayley, 9 January 1992

Through a Glass Darkly: The life of Patrick Hamilton 
by Nigel Jones.
Scribner, 408 pp., £18.95, December 1991, 0 356 19701 8
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... life (he died aged 58) Patrick Hamilton was taking the cure in some Metroland establishment while Malcolm Lowry was being dried out in another not far off. That was around l960, and the two writers never met; but both had become something of a cult. Hamilton died two years later in more than averagely gloomy circumstances, back on the bottle again; and ...

Walking backward

Robert Taubman, 21 August 1980

Selected Works of Djuna Barnes 
Faber, 366 pp., £5.50, July 1980, 0 571 11579 9Show More
Black Venus’s Tale 
by Angela Carter.
Next Editions/Faber, 35 pp., £1.95, June 1980, 9780907147022
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The Last Peacock 
by Allan Massie.
Bodley Head, 185 pp., £5.95, April 1980, 0 370 30261 3
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The Birds of the Air 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 152 pp., £6.95, July 1980, 0 7156 1491 6
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... one has heard since that her vision of Hell can be traced as an influence in Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry, and her sort of Gothic fantasy in John Hawkes. In spite of this, when her books reappear it doesn’t seem to be so much in response to a public demand as because the time has come once again for a reappraisal. Has she a place of her own, in ...

Self-Extinction

Russell Davies, 18 June 1981

Short Lives 
by Katinka Matson.
Picador, 366 pp., £2.50, February 1981, 9780330262194
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... not last more than a couple of years after getting dysentery, and perpetually drunk, in Mexico. Malcolm Lowry, of course, boiled his head there for years, and made the Mexican Day of the Dead immortal. It was in Mexico, too, that Tom Bootman died, at the age of 36. The cause of death, ostensibly, was bad anaesthetic at a dentist’s: but it was one of ...

To Live like a Bird

Mark Rudman, 1 June 2000

Approximately Nowhere 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 77 pp., £7.99, April 1999, 0 571 19524 5
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... which he doesn’t trouble to peel. ‘Postcard from Cuernavaca’ is an oblique homage to Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano is set in Cuernavaca. In ‘Shivery Stomp’, Hofmann spells out his identification with Lowry and how ‘it produces a strange adjacency,/to have visited so many of your sites, Ripe and ...

The Dark Horse Intimacy

Daniel Soar: Helen Simpson, 16 November 2000

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life 
by Helen Simpson.
Cape, 179 pp., £14.99, October 2000, 0 224 06082 1
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... mantraps, with the smallest things made huge – it’s not a million miles from the strange space Malcolm Lowry created through an alcoholic haze, but here it’s done through the sheerest innocence (and why can’t the transformation happen in suburban London just as well as in Mexico?). The stories often effect, rather miraculously, abrupt changes of ...

Tribal Lays

D.J. Enright, 7 May 1981

The Hill Station 
by J.G. Farrell.
Weidenfeld, 238 pp., £6.50, April 1981, 0 297 77922 2
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... and Farrell’s Indian diary, all of them deserving better than to be thought of as padding. Malcolm Dean supplies a personal memoir, while John Spurling discusses Farrell’s relations with Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry, and, by reproducing Farrell’s notes, indicates the general course ...

In Service

Anthony Thwaite, 18 May 1989

The Remains of the Day 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 245 pp., £10.99, May 1989, 0 571 15310 0
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I served the King of England 
by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson.
Chatto, 243 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 0 7011 3462 3
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Beautiful Mutants 
by Deborah Levy.
Cape, 90 pp., £9.95, May 1989, 0 224 02651 8
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When the monster dies 
by Kate Pullinger.
Cape, 173 pp., £10.95, May 1989, 9780224026338
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The Colour of Memory 
by Geoff Dyer.
Cape, 228 pp., £11.95, May 1989, 0 224 02585 6
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Sexual Intercourse 
by Rose Boyt.
Cape, 160 pp., £10.95, May 1989, 0 224 02666 6
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The Children’s Crusade 
by Rebecca Brown.
Picador, 121 pp., £10.95, March 1989, 0 330 30529 8
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... There is one character who drops remarks about, or quotations from, Baudrillard, Calvino, Rilke, Malcolm Lowry. There is also some quite explicit referring-back to Jimmy Porter and those ‘good brave causes’ which are apparently even more grievous in their absence now than they were in the Fifties. But on the whole this ‘album of snaps’ is an ...

A History

Allan Massie, 19 February 1981

The Kennaway Papers 
by James Kennaway and Susan Kennaway.
Cape, 141 pp., £5.50, January 1981, 0 224 01865 5
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... sense, of which I’ve been so afraid, but to a different kind of related loneliness.’ Like Malcolm Lowry, Kennaway was hooked on the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset. Ortega’s notion that man is writing the novel of his own life appealed to him: but he had always ‘worried that my life was not full enough to enable me to ...

Oh for the oo tray

William Feaver: Edward Burra, 13 December 2007

Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye 
by Jane Stevenson.
Cape, 496 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 224 07875 7
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... in NY daily’). Four years later he and the Aikens went to Mexico and stayed for a while with Malcolm Lowry and his wife in Cuernavaca, fifty miles from Mexico City. Rain, altitude, the warring couples, sleeplessness and black widow spiders were bad enough but when Josefina the maid cooked them a rabbit whole, fur and all, in tepid water, he bolted ...

Mortal on Hooch

William Fiennes: Alan Warner, 30 July 1998

The Sopranos 
by Alan Warner.
Cape, 336 pp., £9.99, June 1998, 0 224 05108 3
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... midst of the girls’ spritely exchanges. These two modes exist in uneasy tension. Warner quotes Malcolm Lowry. He incorporates into the narrative a line from a poem by Apollinaire. He alludes to Lunar Caustic, Lowry’s account of a spell in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, New York. He has Father Ardlui listening to ...

Nutmegged

Frank Kermode: The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis., 10 May 2001

The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 506 pp., £20, April 2001, 0 224 05059 1
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... of its excellence. Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise.’ Malcolm Lowry is ‘a world-class liar’. The response to John Updike is slightly chilly, but loses its cool when required to be respectful: ‘enduringly eloquent . . . in a prose that is always fresh, nubile and unwitherable’. (Yes, it does say ...

Mon Charabia

Olivier Todd: Bad Duras, 4 March 1999

Marguerite Duras 
by Laure Adler.
Gallimard, 627 pp., frs 155, August 1998, 2 07 074523 6
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No More 
by Marguerite Duras.
Seven Stories, 203 pp., £10.99, November 1998, 1 888363 65 7
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... red wine, or jaja, as it was called in the Army. Duras certainly had stamina and could have drunk Malcolm lowry or Papa under the table. Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia and Moderato cantabile were good, hand-made books with a tone of their own. But then MD took to pastiching herself: Savannah Bay (1982) and La Pluie d’été (1990) are pretty ...

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