Life Sentences (15 page)

Reiner Stach quite shrewdly sees what I did not see: that Felice, who says yes to this backhanded ill-meant proposal immediately—a response as astonishing as the question that provoked it—wants a husband who would keep her safe and well while she enjoys her own freedoms the way a young woman may protect herself with the companionship of a gay friend while traveling through macho-infested territories. Felice had her own family miseries—most everyone does, though she had not told me what they were: that her sister had secretly borne an illegitimate child, that her father was living with a woman not his wife, that her brother was a chiseler and a deadbeat—and the idea of being lifted out of such confines in an acceptable way must have seemed appealing. “I will get used to you,” she wrote me … but I did not want to become acceptable. So I wrote to Felice’s father about how unbearable I was. “I am taciturn, unsociable, glum, self-serving, a hypochondriac, and actually in poor health.” Oh, yes, and “I lack any sense of family life.” Felice intercepted this letter and prevented her father from reading it. We continued to play out our engagement in a landscape of fantasy, but it had become a barren courtyard shit upon by filthy flocks of words.

How did Franz break it off? He began writing to another girl—Grete—a friend of Felice. About Felice. About Felice at first. In precisely the same way that—at first—he wrote to Felice. Emboldened by his success with Grete, he proposed once more to Felice, who refused him quite firmly. But he persisted. Why did he persist? Because now he knew he would always be refused. And in a memorable moment, in a back room of a Berlin hotel, three women—Felice Bauer, her sister, Erna, and friend Grete, like the Fates—sat in judgment of me—well, of Franz, for I was scarcely there, though I felt the pain of their presumption, their disapproval, their disappointment. Still, I would not waver from my wavering. I had my own wounds to heal. My father had hurled apples at me. My father had sentenced me to death by drowning. Publication of
The Metamorphosis
had been delayed. I had begun my own
Trial
, a trial that would go well, because I would be judge as well as plaintiff, both court and accused, every worry expressed, woman present, or warder doing his duty taken straight from life. And now, in order to conclude this half decade of my biography, a war arrives. It will seem to bring peace while we wait for volume two.

Nevertheless, there was another yes. Despite misgivings, despite reproaches, despite all that has already befallen her, Felice arranges a private meeting between us in a border town. Well, not all of us. I don’t think Dr. Kafka was present. Except as a sign of stability in Felice’s mind. There, in Franz’s hotel room—where Fraulein Bauer might have compromised her virtue in some eyes by presenting herself—I embraced her as I was meant to.… No. What did I do? in my nervous apprehensions, cornered like a rat, what did I do? I read to her from
The Trial
. Franz cowered behind the measured wall of my words. They were about a man who spends his life waiting at a gate for admittance. These were meanings as cruel as any transformation. I was shy, of course, embarrassed, awkward, and I tried to explain myself by giving to Felice a sample of a masterpiece, an excuse for all I had done or would do; here is a slice of me, take it and eat; but this was no communion, no act of heresy; it was “going to the dogs.”

Still, through it all, I remained literature, as I had so often said. I clung steadfastly to that. Dr. Kafka had his job. In fact, he got another raise. Franz would write more letters as if he hadn’t written any. He was their bundle of energy, their silk ribbon, their stamp, their swirls of ink. I was insufferable—yes—I climbed my walls—yet I was literature. These were fragments shored against my ruin. I could not be deprived of that. Or my monstrosity.

Set the scene:
in 1949 Malcolm Lowry with the collaboration of his wife, Margerie Bonner, begin a film script for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel
Tender Is the Night
. Lowry has always been an avid moviegoer and is especially knowledgeable about the German silents. He pretends that he has done adaptations for a Hollywood studio in the past. He often dreams of seeing
Under the Volcano
on the screen. Some critics have perceived its cinematic qualities.

Reset the scene:
the screen fills with a page of the
Vancouver Sun
for August 1, 1947. It and some photographs run across four columns that are headed,
WEALTHY SQUATTERS FIND RENT-FREE BEACH
. One of the photos shows Malc about to take a dive from the rickety pier the couple had built at Dollarton.
Close-up
to show perilous
but apparently effective crisscross pattern of its construction.
Cut
to Lowry’s fuzzy barrel-shaped chest.
Linger. Lap dissolve
into this newsprint: “A successful novelist who could write a cheque for thousands, is ‘king’ of the beach squatters of Royal Row at Dollarton, ten miles east of Vancouver. Like hundreds of others in the Vancouver area, Malcolm Lowry occupies a tax-free house built on piling below the high-tide mark.”

On the sound track,
well in the background, children’s voices can be heard taunting in unison. Lowry is careful to assign to any scene he is imagining at least one significant visual, auditory, or intertextual presence that serves as its symbolic name and is expected to follow the action in the role of reminder (about which more later): for instance, a highway sign, a properly jazzy tune—

“… play a strange and melancholy piece on the piano, like the best kind of jazz, a thing of many twelfths in the left hand …”

—perhaps a few swooping seabirds, or even a nursery rhyme, such as (I might suggest):

This is the shack that Malc built.… This is the sack that sat in the shack that Malc built.… This is the malt that lay in the sack that sat in the shack that Malc built.… This is the fault that fermented the malt that lay in the sack that sat in the shack that Malc built .…

Note:
The Lowrys have lived here, off and on, since 1941, in a crude cabin that had been jerry-built by unemployed lumber mill workers in the 1930s. The present one is their third, and they designed and nailed it together themselves. Although the site furnishes them with nearly as many miseries as joys, joy in their bottle-to-mouth life is especially prized, and Malc thinks of it as paradise. Why not? Here he can stay sober for a month at a time. Eat and drink cheap. Swim in cool to cold to icy water. Work in furious manic bursts. Walk in wet woods. And here
Under the Volcano
has been licked into its final shape. Nevertheless, when they receive this unpleasant notice in the press, they are about to leave on a rather extended
trip through the Panama Canal. Margerie is bored with poverty’s paradise. She wants to experience for herself some of her husband’s sudden notoriety and enjoy their first decent financial footing. They intend to visit countries like France and Italy that have warmly welcomed
Under the Volcano
. Moreover, she has recently published her own book and needs to taste a bit of triumph. Luckily, the
Brest
is going to dock briefly in L.A., a city where she has friends, where she met Malc on a blind date, and where she had a fleeting career in film. Lowry is persuaded to go along, though not without trepidations. He was familiar with trepidations. They were like the shakes, only mental. Now success rather than failure was to expel him from his Eden.

Flash forward. Another opening. Similar but contrasting scene.
Do you remember any of those negligible movies in which we are shown a forlorn pregnant girl (maybe it is Bette Davis) sitting in a Pullman carriage while the train leaves the station with its wheels rasping a continuous refrain—Chi ca go … Chi ca go? The play of a similar card opens one of modernist literature’s more extraordinary novellas,
Through the Panama
, which readers will once again have available to astonish (and probably bore) them, thanks to this anthology of leftover, mostly ignored, and out-of-print pieces of literary wonderment we might say were shards from the working life of Malcohol Lowry (as Conrad Aiken called him). This time, though, the chant is made by a mongrel American-built Liberty ship with a French registry and Breton crew that’s headed for Holland, so its music is mongrel too.

The next sentence (in Lowry’s caps) is reminiscent of my parody (above) of a childhood exercise in rounds:

Stay loyal to the descriptive notes
while filming the scene that follows immediately—

—except replace the name of the ship (a charming change) with
Di der ot Di der ot Di der ot
. Malc’s joke, of course, but musically better than
Brest
.

Background note, do not try to film.
Through the Panama
is largely written in sentence fragments because it is supposed to be the journal of Sigbjørn Wilderness, Lowry’s stand-in; because drunkenness is full of discontinuities; because such a style suits Lowry’s cinematic imagination; and because it is actually based on the journals that Margerie and Malcolm Lowry kept on an exactly similar pilgrimage.

Their logs were a record that Malcolm dressed up and made presentable as if for a date: indeed, the very November 7, 1947, that Sigbjørn and his Primrose (the wretchedly named couple of the story) begin their voyage bound for Rotterdam from Vancouver, British Columbia, leaving behind just those shacks over which the credits scrolled. I spell out these details not only because the story does, but because Lowry’s notes for all his journeys are full of names like these, of places little and large, of advertising signs and other comeons—Burma-Shaves for one—map points which he will invest with prophetic or talismanic powers, lists of families found on graves, wisps of music, duly recorded snatches of overheard conversation, especially bits of local lingo, the more vacuous the better—“You like
egg?” “Si.
Oui
.” “Whose egg will you have?”—scraps of a bye-the-bye life he can then repeat like a mantra until they achieve that status, or by such use wear paths that the past may employ to gallop to the present with warnings about what’s coming; meanwhile inserting—to serve as a perception that will rivet the reader—images of exacting beauty. Who is getting off the boat at Port-au-Prince? “… ambassadors from a neighboring state, and medals like the inside of fantastic watches.” The “just jotted down” style not only disarms complaint, but encourages the dignitaries—who are wearing those medals that look like watch works—to walk the plank.

These notes and journal entries, these unfinished gestures and false starts—versions of short stories, hunks of novels, poems too, an intended play—were to be allowed to grow to their full size, and then, like ingredients tossed into a stew, mingled together, so that, after some time luxuriating in the author’s mind, they could finally be presented to the world as a
pièce de résistance
called
The Voyage That Never Ends
. It is an appropriate title, too, for this judicious new assemblage that Michael Hofmann has made. (Sherrill Grace also borrowed this name for her 1982 study of the fiction.) Lowry’s voyage, though, was a dream undreamt and a promise unkept. At one level the writer’s conscience must have known that the confident outline of this gargantuan project (of three, five, seven, or on occasion eleven volumes) could only momentarily ward off the worries of lovers and friends, and weaken the skepticism of editors, while the work that had to enjoy a sustaining wind if it was to reach shore would remain becalmed in a sea of Seagram’s, garnished by a guilty self.

If this volume manages to be a bit more than “an anthology held together by earnestness” (the fatal phrase with which Jacques Barzun condemned
Under the Volcano
when he reviewed it in
Harper’s Magazine)
, it will be because the collection contains more than one masterpiece, several of the more remarkable letters ever to confound the genre, and is unified by the sin-sore, hungover self-consciousness of Malcolm Lowry at the helm, unsteady as she goes.

Future flashbacks.
The reader will not immediately know that certain months of the year, as well as specific days in those months, were celebrated by Marge and Malc the way betrothals, birthdays, or other anniversaries are by ordinary folk, or were felt to be full of menace and bad luck like November 2, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, or, more privately for Malcolm Lowry, November 15, the date his Cambridge college friend Paul Fitte confessed that he owed money, was a homosexual, and had syphilis in dreadful addition. Lowry so sympathized with his friend’s plight that he helped Fitte wad his windows and a door with newspapers to assist the gas, and, when he saw the need for more gin, said, “Now do it,” as he left. Fitte did asphyxiate in his bed as advised, but what Lowry chooses to commemorate is the day of the body’s discovery, not the night before, when alcohol had helped them both erase reason, dull conscience, and seal a room.