"Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third.""Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.""War is being declared to-morrow here so perhaps you can understand that I have been working under difficulties, but difficulties negligible compared with what others have to go through."
Lowry was born in New Brighton, in the English county of Cheshire (now Merseyside), and was educated at The Leys School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. By the time he graduated in 1931, the twin obsessions which would dominate his life ... alcohol and literature ... were firmly in place. Lowry was already well travelled, having sailed to the Far East as a deck hand on the Pyrrhus between school and university and made visits to America and Germany between terms. After Cambridge, Lowry lived briefly in London, existing on the fringes of the vibrant Thirties literary scene and meeting Dylan Thomas, among others. Next, he moved to France, where he married his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in 1934. Theirs was a turbulent union, and, after an estrangement, Lowry followed her to New York (where he entered Bellevue Hospital in 1936 following an alcohol-induced breakdown) and then to Hollywood, where he tried screenwriting.
The couple moved to the Mexican city of Cuernavaca in late 1936, in a final attempt to salvage their marriage. They failed, however, and in late 1937, Lowry, alone in Oaxaca, entered another period of dark alcoholic excess, culminating in his being deported from the country. In 1939, he moved to Canada, and the following year he married his second wife, actress and writer Margerie Bonner. The couple lived and wrote in a squatter's shack on the beach near Dollarton in British Columbia, north of Vancouver. Margerie was an entirely positive influence, editing Lowry's work skillfully and making sure that he ate as well as drank (she drank too). The couple travelled to Europe, America and the Caribbean, and while Lowry continued to drink heavily, this seems to have been a relatively peaceful and productive period. It would last until 1954, when a final nomadic period ensued, embracing New York, London and other places.
Lowry died in the village of Ripe, East Sussex, where he was living with his wife. Certainly alcohol, and possibly an overdose of sleeping pills, contributed to what the coroner recorded as "death by misadventure."
Lowry published little during his lifetime, in comparison with the extensive collection of unfinished manuscripts he left. Of his two novels, Under the Volcano (1947) is now widely accepted as his masterpiece and one of the great works of the 20th century (number 11 on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.) It exemplifies Lowry's method as a writer, which involved drawing heavily upon autobiographical material and imbuing it with complex and allusive layers of symbolism. Under the Volcano depicts a series of complex and unwillingly destructive relationships and is set against a rich evocation of Mexico.
Ultramarine (1933), written while Lowry was still an undergraduate, follows a young man's first sea voyage and his determination to gain the crew's acceptance.
A collection of short stories, Hear Us, O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961) was published after Lowry's death. The scholar and poet Earle Birney edited Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (1962). He also collaborated with Lowry's widow in editing the novella Lunar Caustic (1968) for re-publication. It is a conflation of several earlier pieces concerned with Bellevue Hospital, which Lowry was in the process of rewriting as a complete novel. With Douglas Day, Lowry's first biographer, Lowry's widow has also completed and edited the novels Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend Is Laid (1968) and October Ferry to Gabriola (1970) from Lowry's manuscripts.
The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by his widow and Harvey Breit, was released in 1965, followed in 1995-6 by the two volume Sursam Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Sherrill E. Grace. Scholarly editions of Lowry's final work in progress, La Mordida and his screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night have also been issued.
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976) is an Oscar-nominated National Film Board of Canada documentary produced by Donald Brittain and Robert A. Duncan and directed by Brittain and John Kramer. It opens with the inquest into Lowry's "death by misadventure," and then moves back in time to trace the writer's life. Selections from Lowry's novel are read by Richard Burton amid images shot in Mexico, the United States, Canada and England.
Grace, Sherrill. (2009). Strange Comfort: Essays on the Work of Malcolm Lowry. Talonbooks: Vancouver: BC. ISBN 978-0-88922-618-0
An Anthology from X (Oxford University Press 1988). X ran from 1959-62. Edited by David Wright & Patrick Swift. Contributions from Lowry, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon , Stevie Smith, Robert Graves, David Gascoyne, et al.
