The 1940 Under the Volcano: A Critical Edition

On 28 July 1934, his twenty-fifth birthday, Malcolm Lowry left Southampton for New York to be with Jan Gabrial, his wife of seven months. Already the author of one novel,Ultramarine(1933), Lowry was working on a sequel, In Ballast to theWhite Sea, and both he and Jan had high hopes that he would prosper in New York, the centre of the American publishing world. In most respects, however, the next two years were to prove disastrous for Lowry: not only was he often separated from Jan, but in the summer of 1935 he was accused of having plagiarized...

The “splendid din” of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano , published in 1947, was well established across numerous countries and in multiple translations by 1965, whenthe Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowryappeared. Readers of the Selected Letters were enchanted by their moving and entertaining energy, or as Harvey Breit asserts in his introduction, by the “powerful and substantial gifts” of their “irony, erudition, manners, generosity, independence, humanity and literary taste” (419). The letters, laden with charm, wit, and good cheer, widened the “aura of genius that clung to [Lowry] during his lifetime” (Selected Lettersxii, xiv). But readers were...

It was the Day of the Dead.¹

From the graveyards and the lonely forests, the sound of incantation, the murmur of the processions of the living, who today feasted with the dead, were borne down to the two men. As they turned to watch, mourners, carrying candles in the dusk, wound among the corn above them, on the slope of the hill.

The friends sat in silence, as if caught up in dreams aroused by the unearthly quality of the evening, listening to the sounds which were like the sea, far away.

Dr. Vigil² pushed the habanero³ over to Laruelle,⁴...

Lowry’s echoes are a complex phenomenon. Margerie Lowry once told her husband that she thought that not many people who readUnder the Volcanowould be able to absorb it all, to understand all the references. Lowry replied, “Well, it doesn’t matter because they are all in the subconscious or unconscious mind of the western world. And the impact will be there whether they realise it or not” [Margerie Lowry, “His Mind Was Just Like a Fireworks Factory,” in Bowker,Malcolm Lowry Remembered134]. This is an expression of what Lowry called in one of his poems “the unimaginable library...

Three years before the release of his landmark study,The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano(University of Georgia Press, 1997), Frederick Asals produced the remarkable but little-known essay that we are delighted to include here as an afterword. Focused entirely on The 1940Under the Volcano, it is a demonstration of Asals’s erudition as a scholar working over many years with Lowry’s complicated archival remains. By 1994 Asals—whose career was with the Department of English at the University of Toronto, but who spent many summers meticulously reading and carefully considering the “Under the Volcano” manuscripts at the...