The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (28 page)

To Lowry's surprise, his improvement did not thrill Margerie. She began drinking more heavily, and spent most days sitting in the house, shaking and crying. In October of 1956, she checked herself back in to a hospital for a long course of heavy sedation meant to calm her nerves. Lowry called her therapy “her Rip Van Winkle snooze.”

Before entering the hospital, Margerie had told their friend Dorothy Templeton that she'd had enough: she was putting aside all the money she could for the day she would leave Lowry. “She is absolutely callous towards ML,” Templeton wrote her companion, Harvey Burt, in July, 1956. “Her idea of love is not mine or the average woman's.”

During Margerie's hospital stay, Lowry wrote her letters about how happy he was in Ripe now; of working steadily again; of being the object of competition between their landlady and the vicar's housekeeper, who gave him his meals. He knew that his words did not make Margerie smile. He writes in his poem to Raymond, “As with the see-saw in the childhood rhyme/Now I am riding high poor Margerie is low.” Lowry speculated to Markson that Margerie felt “robbed of the potential in-a-sense nurseable object.” He did not know what to do about the change, and as a novelist part of him wanted simply to observe it. He wrote Markson, “The trouble is it is part of the plot of the book.”

 

T
HE VILLAGE OF
R
IPE
has changed little in fifty years. A dozen houses, a roundabout, and a pub named the Lamb Inn remain its
center. The narrow lanes out of the village still give way to the farmland of Sussex. At Lowry's grave, a terracotta marker bearing the last lines of “Volcano” now rests in front of his weathered headstone. The White Cottage, where Lowry died, is down a short pebble lane from the pub; a few months after the Lowrys arrived, in 1956, the proprietor banned them because Lowry was unruly.

In 2004, the
Times Literary Supplement
published a provocative article by Gordon Bowker, Lowry's most capable biographer, which revived some long-unanswered questions about Lowry's final days in Ripe. How trustworthy was the coroner's verdict of death by “misadventure,” or Margerie's insistence that her husband had committed suicide? Why would Lowry, in good spirits and finally writing again, kill himself? “Volcano” was about to be reissued as a Vintage. Classics paperback. And Hollywood directors were awakening to the book's cinematic potential; José Quintero had expressed particular interest. Jan Gabrial, Lowry's first wife, told an interviewer shortly before she died, in 2001, “Malcolm's death, to me, isn't quite explained.”

In England, coroners' reports are usually sealed for seventy-five years. But Bowker had persuaded the Sussex coroner to give him Lowry's. The document contained some news: after Lowry's death, Margerie could not at first find the bottle for the pills that Lowry had swallowed, and only produced it for the police several hours later. The bottle had been stashed in one of his drawers. The coroner's report also recorded Margerie's claim that she had found the bottle with its top screwed on—meticulous behavior for a man as sloppy as Lowry. Even at the time of his death, friends had wondered about the challenge that unscrewing a top would have posed for Lowry. Harvey Burt, in a letter written four months after Lowry died, expressed doubt that he could have done it: “I can't understand…. His powers of coördination at such times were very low.”

In the article, Bowker noted Margerie's habit of dosing Lowry with vitamin pills. He then offered a speculation: Lowry would
not have noticed if what she fed him that night were not vitamins but sodium amytal, the barbiturate that helped kill him. He suggested that Margerie had developed a crush on a writer friend, Peter Churchill, a viscount and a recent widower. Finally, Bowker laid out an accusation of murder: “Margerie had the motive (hankering after Churchill), the means (the pill-feeding ritual) and the opportunity (the cottage after dark).”

Bowker also reported that Margerie and Winnie Mason, the landlady, had both testified to the police that they had spent the evening chatting in Mason's cottage, next door. Later, however, they both said that Margerie had been at home with Lowry. (Margerie made this claim in a letter to Lowry's French translator, Mason in a 1966 BBC interview.) For Bowker, these statements suggested collusion.

Lowry scholars did not take offense at the murder theory when the
T.L.S.
published it. Many of them have been drawn to Lowry as much by the drama of his life as by his writing. On his birthday, they gather at Dollarton and drink gin. The possibility of foul play has only added zest to their work. Bowker's notion of a romantic motive did not strike them as convincing, though. By the fatal night, Margerie was so run-down by Lowry that she could barely get out of bed; she was in no state to take a lover. For some Lowry scholars, this became the point: the idea of murdering Lowry was not just conceivable but almost justifiable. Lowry had not only used Margerie's talent; he had taken over her life. Then, after abusing and exploiting her for eighteen years, he had grown weary of her. Recently, I asked a leading Lowry scholar, Sherrill Grace, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who edited the two-volume edition of Lowry's collected letters, if Margerie murdered Lowry. “Gordon's right,” she told me, then said of Margerie, “She should have done it sooner!”

The White Cottage is now owned by a farmer and his wife. When I knocked on their door this summer, they invited me to walk around the house. The cottage is dark and oppressively small,
though a previous owner had installed a skylight in the kitchen. The owners had not read “Under the Volcano,” but they knew about Lowry. We walked through a room with exposed wood beams and a hearth. “This was Lowry's study,” the husband told me, showing me the room in which Lowry had wrestled with “October Ferry.” The murder rumor had recently reached them—some visiting Japanese academics had mentioned it.

By the time the police arrived at the White Cottage on the morning of June 27th, Lowry had likely been dead for hours. He lay on his back by the side of Margerie's bed, the rug rumpled beneath him. According to the coroner's report, a transcript of which Bowker shared with me, a “quantity of sliced cold cooked meat” was by Lowry's arm. On the other side of the bed was a broken orange-squash bottle and a broken gin bottle. There were glass splinters on Lowry's chest and blood on his left palm. Two chairs had been thrown: an easy chair lay on its side by the window; a kitchen chair had been smashed to pieces.

After Margerie found Lowry's body, a constable named William Lord, from the nearby town of Selmeston, took her statement and that of Mason, the landlady. Margerie also spoke of what happened that night to Douglas Day. Lowry, she said, had once again fallen off the wagon. With the Lamb Inn off limits, they had walked to the Yew Tree pub in Chalvington, a mile away, where they drank beer. (The bartender recalled Margerie crying.) Lowry then bought a bottle of gin, over her objections, saying that it would cheer her up—he told the bartender that she was sad over their lost Dollarton home—and they walked back to Ripe on the country lane. They were planning to listen to the radio. Lowry began drinking from the bottle, getting wilder. Margerie said that after a BBC concert—Leopold Stokowski conducting Stravinsky—Lowry began “raving.” He turned up the radio. Margerie, who had been downstairs making supper, came up and turned it down, not wanting to disturb Winnie Mason next door.

According to the police report, Lowry struck Margerie. She grabbed the gin bottle and broke it to keep him from drinking it. Lowry then brandished the broken bottle and chased Margerie downstairs; she recalled to Douglas Day that her husband had “a fiendish look on his face.” She took refuge in Mason's house. She told Day that she then took a sleeping pill—she did not explain how she came to have one with her—and went to sleep. (Both she and Lowry were heavy users of sleeping pills; Lowry called them his “pink things.” They both had prescriptions for sodium amytal. In October, 1956, Lowry wrote Margerie of Dr. Raymond's appearing at his door in Ripe, “bearing, in hand like a malt-shovel, a half-dozen sodium amytals to tide me over.”)

Lowry's death made the regional paper, the Brighton
Argus,
with the headline
“SHE BROKE GIN BOTTLE—FOUND HUSBAND DEAD.”
All the same, the Sussex police did not press an investigation. Lowry had no connections in the area. No one knew who he was. (The
Argus
called him “Clarence Lowry,” and no other British paper recorded his death.) Locals did not like him; Roy Medhurst, the last living Ripe resident who knew Lowry, told me that Lowry was a “drunken yob” and said that his death left “some people relieved.”

The inquest was routine. Constable Lord told the coroner what he saw. Winnie Mason, in her deposition, recalled Margerie showing up at her door, distraught, and claimed that Margerie had not gone out after retiring to a camp bed that she had made for her. If she had, Mason insisted, “I would most certainly have heard her, being a light sleeper, and also my dog would have barked.”

Margerie at first told friends that there had been a suicide note but then said that there wasn't. The lack of a note surprised them. Alcohol would hardly have stopped his pen—he wrote while drunk all the time. And he was someone for whom written words accompanied nearly every moment of life; he even scrawled observations as he sat drunk in bars. Some four hundred jotted notes to Margerie are in the British Columbia archive—messages from
El Leon to Miss Hartebeeste. “Lowry was always saying, ‘Make notes,'” Markson told me. Lowry's despair was always part theatre; and, for such a person, self-destruction practically demanded documentation.

The coroner did not call Lowry's psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond, who, far from considering Lowry “incurable,” as Margerie told the police, thought that he was getting better. Angry that Margerie had kept drinking in Lowry's presence, he later refused to treat her for her emotional exhaustion. He also thought that Lowry's spiritual beliefs precluded suicide. The coroner failed to call members of Lowry's family—he had three older brothers. Had he done so, they might have told him that they were suspicious of Margerie; in an unpublished reminiscence, one of the brothers called her “the very material Margerie,” adding that the Lowrys, who thought she wore too much jewelry, referred to her as Bangles. Nor did the coroner speak to Dorothy Templeton and Harvey Burt, the couple who knew the Lowrys best. They had spent their summers near them in Dollarton for years; more recently, Templeton had visited them in Sicily, where Lowry had confided to her that Margerie had complained until he named her as his sole beneficiary. (In 1945, Lowry's father died, leaving a fortune that was the equivalent of ten million dollars.) In a letter, Templeton wrote of the couple, “I'm sure if she knew he would never write again she would hope for widowhood.” In another letter, she recalled watching them argue one night in Taormina, when “all of a sudden Marg turned into a ferocious maniac” and beat up the enormous, cowering, and incapacitated Lowry. And on another occasion, she wrote, Margerie broke Lowry's nose in a fight in “the
corso,
with hundreds looking on.” (Margerie told Douglas Day that this incident never occurred.)

“They think I murdered him,” Margerie told Burt and Templeton when they came to Ripe to help her, shortly after Lowry's death. Fairly or not, Burt and Templeton began to suspect Margerie, too. Publicly, she seemed devastated, but they found her
oddly energized in private. According to Bowker, to whom they spoke extensively, they thought that Margerie was playing the distraught widow.

In Ripe, I saw that Winnie Mason's cottage was so close to the Lowrys' that they almost formed one building. Margerie could easily have fled Lowry in his drunken rage, then returned home later for a pill. Perhaps, as she looked around for the sodium amytal, a decade of frustration caught up with her. Maybe she went to Lowry and told him that he'd better start preparing for his hangover with some vitamins. Her conciliatory manner would not have surprised him; their battles were often followed by more tender exchanges. Margerie, herself soothed by the barbiturate, could have returned to bed at Mason's several minutes before the pills would have knocked Lowry to the floor. The next day, Margerie would have discovered the body, just as she said she had.

Lowry's death will always remain a mystery. Even if his body were exhumed, it would offer no insight into how the barbiturates had entered his system. Maybe Margerie meant only to make Lowry sleep, as she had many times before—she had been drinking, too, and might have given too many pills by mistake. David Markson said of the murder theory, “What do I think? What I think is he was a drunk and then he died.”

New York Review Books has just published a compilation of Lowry's work, including portions of the posthumous books, which have long been out of print. “The Voyage That Never Ends,” as the volume is called, shows Lowry's extraordinary imagination and his ability to pull the English language in whatever direction he wanted to go. A typical aphorism: “The lightning, a good writer, did not repeat itself.” And this description of a storm at sea: “One could see, as the ship lurched…great doctor of divinity's gowns of seas furling to leeward, the foam like lamb's wool.” But the anthology does not change the impression that Lowry was a writer who brought only one significant book to fruition.