Under the Volcano

MAD LOVE

Finishing Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which took weeks to get through, I had to concede it’s not a great book but a great bad book. Fought it not just because it’s a ceaseless journey into the Hell of drunkenness, or because of its hit or miss cinematic style, but also—maybe mostly—because of what it insanely purports to be: an illumination of genius in alcohol. Though partially autobiographical—Lowry, like his central character Geoffrey Firmin, was an incorrigible drunk—the book is a maddening wish fulfillment that booze is a blessing instead of a curse. Lowry attempts to persuade us a writer immersed in liquids can achieve mind-blowing success, with endless slugs from the bottle a person can fight off loneliness as well as lovelessness. No one needs to be an AAer to know it’s all a big lie—or, as Lowry himself writes somewhere in the novel, “dehydrated excrement.” His own biography as well as the book’s notorious unreadability are confirmation of the fraud he’s perpetuating. Nevertheless, his gasbagging can be astounding; the interpolation of sloshed perceptions and prolixity as streams of foggy consciousness—embellishing the story of a 1930s Mexico losing moral values to fascism—have been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And who would doubt Lowry aimed for these lofty literary heights? Yet a good case could be made he’s only a step or three away from the novels he quite possibly lifted from: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and from D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, as they are onlooker transient dissections on Mexico and Spain. Because Lowry employs movie devices—flashbacks, flashbacks-inside-flashbacks, camera-like instructions, descriptions of settings and characters as if close-ups, having characters involved in the movie business (Lowry spent some time in Hollywood), using movies and their titles symbolically—it’s understandable why the book has been said to have attracted more directors and writers than any other novels except Heart of Darkness and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. Lowry even tried to adapt it. (Apparently he had some skill: Christopher Isherwood praised Lowry’s treatment of Tender is the Night, believing it needed to be filmed and published.) But Volcano’s cirrhotic theme of alcoholism the major attraction and challenge, about which director John Huston intimately knew. He and screenwriter Guy Gallo are more than reasonably faithful to the novel—everything is elementarily reverent. It’s also what is the trouble with the movie, having structured the story and the text in the safe zone, a shoulder-shrugging compromise or resignation after realizing they couldn’t find a way to bring much of Lowry’s soused verbiage to the screen with matching visuals. Though there are fleeting glimpses of the symbolic Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl supplied by Gabriel Figueroa, they’re obligatory and figuratively vacant as the adaptation. And Mexico itself—the setting is Cuernavaca but filming was at several sites in the state of Morelos—is too clean, as if sirvientas Spic and Spanned away the gloomy doomy of Lowry’s pesadillo before the camera started to roll. As with Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, Lowry’s descriptions of the country’s dense serpentine mythologies are the archeological darker parts of his book.

Huston keeps his Firmin—Albert Finney—in constant motion, preventing the chatter from becoming overly weary, yet it also makes us see Finney’s dependence on peripheries, using the externals because he’s doesn’t have the word heaps from the novel to get into Firmin’s hallucinatory flights. (One such heap is at left, with the regret Richard Burton neither played Firmin, as Huston wished, nor recorded the novel, which more than the former might have been a game changer.) As in Murder on the Orient Express and The Dresser, Finney is a gifted native technician: confirming once again the British make great screen dipsos, his “chief of borrachos” Firmin has the bloated tummy and engorged fingers as alarms of disease, and when he’s guzzling straight from the bottle, sometimes making near-gurgling sounds, chug-a-lugging aftershave, wobbling through hopscotch or flopping down on streets, the waste is obscene and frightening. In pictures published in Douglas Day’s 1973 Malcolm Lowry: A Biography and displayed in the 1976 Oscar-nominated documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry, when he’s particularly flabby from drink and in his goatee—suggesting a blend of D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Lenin—he never quite got into the habit of wearing belts, which is nodded to in the movie when Finney uses a tie to keep his white suit pants up. By conclusion and with an audience unsure over what’s been achieved, Finney expires as mere dissipated waste lost in The Days of Tequila and Mescal.

The more you consider the disappointment of Under the Volcano as movie, the more you might believe the material needs to be an opera. Persuasively arguing in favor is educator Anthony Suter in “Wagner under the volcano”. Will only add that all those verbose paragraphs cry out for rich, expansive voices: imagine a powerful tenor scaling as Firmin and a Greek-like chorus igniting to flames the descriptive prose. In both the book and movie there are references to Las Manos de Orlac, a movie better known to audiences as Mad Love, the 1935 Peter Lorre chiller in which he plays a doctor who grafts the hands of a murderer onto a pianist. A grand operatic ingredient, as Lowry is saying his own hands were sacrificed to his mad love—he couldn’t detach them from the bottle. Under the Volcano is his literary epitaph as tortured genius; in real life, bingeing on gin—probably Bole’s and the last music he likely heard was “Le Sacre du Printemps”—he died, at 47, in his own vomit induced by an overdose of sodium amytal. Not until we read Gordon Bowker’s Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry, breaking the silence of Lowry’s wife and biographer Douglas, did we learn of the reprehensible serpentine plumage he fanned in encouraging a college friend named Paul Fitte to commit suicide in 1929 by gassing himself because he was gay. Lowry helped him tape the windows and left him with these killer words: “Now do it!” Haunted by his own betrayal to the end, Lowry either did himself in or had his usual bedtime medicinal beverage weaponized by his wife* twenty-eight years later on June 26th—one day before Fitte’s birthday. And mine. Had me hitting my own mad love—Myers, original dark.

* In the December 17, 2007 issue of The New Yorker writer D.T. Max speculates on the possibility Lowry’s second wife Margerie could have been responsible for his death. On the night of June 26, 1957, she may have given him not the customary heavy dose of vitamins to aid his recovery from the inevitable morning hangover but either accidentally or intentionally a fatal dose of sodium amytal on top of the gin he had been swigging down. According to Max, the couple had been warring as well as drinking that day, with Margerie perhaps reaching the absolute limit of his various abuses. (He twice tried to strangle her while on a trip to Europe, and was loathed by nearly everyone, including his own family, who hadn’t any prolonged contact with him.) There’s no proof other than gossip and fuzziness of details she did him in and no way to know unless she left self-incriminating evidence after her death in 1988. Thus far no such discoveries. The other angle in Max’s aptly titled book Day of the Dead is its elucidation as clarification over Under the Volcano’s on-going major question: is the novel a meaningful read or inescapably incoherent? With numerous drafts providing her editing notes as documentation, Margerie coalesced the huge rambling mess into the ever-disputed “masterpiece” it became. Her forbearance over Lowry’s boozed storms reminds us patience may not merit the pentagram of honorable reward as it does justice.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com