Christy Edwall on the booze-addled life and suspicious death of Malcolm Lowry.
There are some artists for whom place is everything: where geography gives either the seed or the germination. For Malcolm Lowry, who was both activated and anaesthetised by drink, place made certain plots possible.
In the novel which made him famous, Under the Volcano – a harrowing, inferno of a text set in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the Day of the Dead – an alcoholic Englishman known as the Consul makes his way from bar to bar, both pining after and evading the faithless wife who is trying to return to him. Rich, tortured, and erudite, Under the Volcano is an anti-Odyssey. The book is saturated with exquisite morbidity, and death appears on every page. ‘The name of this land is hell,’ writes the Consul in a letter to his wife. ‘It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.’
Lowry knew what he was writing about. The first draft of the novel was written during the 20 months he spent in Mexico between 1936 and 1938 as his marriage to his first wife, Jan Gabrial, unravelled. Now considered a Modernist masterpiece, and often found on lists of the best English novels of all time, Under the Volcano would make Lowry famous, but not happy. It proved both what he could do and could never do again.
If Mexico was hell, in April the East Sussex village of Ripe is closer to paradise, with only the distant smell of fertiliser to bring a visitor back to earth. It’s an unlikely resting place for a restless itinerant like Lowry, the verges surging with bluebells, young nettles, and the first stalks of cow parsley. Born in New Brighton in the Wirral to a well-heeled cotton broker, and an unlikely figure to take to the sea for five months’ toil before he went up to Cambridge, Lowry spent much of his life travelling, testing roots in Mexico, the States, and British Columbia.
Unless you are looking for Lowry’s grave, you might not think to make the pilgrimage to Ripe. The church – unremarkably Norman – is bare-walled. Here the bells do not say, as they do in Under the Volcano, ‘dolente – dolore’, but ring in optimistic dissonance. The church’s sparse funereal monuments raise a sense of curiosity rather than melancholy: Elizabeth Williamson, who died in 1728, the wife of the Rector of Ripe, was daughter of the previous rector; and Sergeant Tingley, who died in a training exercise with his regiment in 1898. (One wishes for more details.) The windows, on the whole, are plain and clear, except for the few panels above the altar, collaged from algae-coloured fragments. I walk around the
churchyard a few times before going back to the church bulletin board for directions. I wonder what the few childminders at the Owlets, a local nursery on the other side of the far wall, make of my skulking among the graves.
Eventually, I find Lowry buried opposite the west entrance, over the low stone wall in the additional burial ground, exiled from the central congregation. Was it an intentional separation? Lowry was an outsider. He and his wife, Margerie, moved into their rented rooms in the White Cottage in 1956. Or was it the way he died? Found by his wife on the floor of their bedroom, having taken sleeping pills and choked on his own vomit in June 1957. The coroner ruled the event ‘death by misadventure’, but whether it was an unintentional overdose, or a suicide, has been a matter of much speculation. In the years since Lowry’s death, there have been others who have suggested Margerie, a former actress, who helped type and edit his work, who liked gin just as much as he did, and with whom he had a turbulent relationship, may have had a hand in his death.
The couple came to Ripe on the advice of Lowry’s London psychologist, Dr Raymond. Ripe had its advantages, according to Lowry, who wrote, with what now seems like dramatic irony: ‘When you suggested I should live at Ripe/ I thought it very funny, it appealed to me/ Recalling the initials R.I.P.’
I find Lowry’s grave buried under a mound of overgrown and dead narcissus. Fresh bluebells erupt through the ground and a dwarf rose waits for warmer weather. My plant app identifies a cuckoo flower among the flowers, delicate and clustered, a plant I’ve only read about in a John Clare poem as an image of rural innocence. Someone has left a painted enamel plaque leaning against the gravestone, buried under the heaps of green.
By the time Lowry moved to Ripe, with a lifetime of heavy drinking behind him, he underwent ‘aversion therapy’ under Dr Raymond’s supervision. At his psychologist’s advice, Lowry had swapped gin for Cydrax, a non-alcoholic cider, so he hardly seemed on the course for self-destruction. Meanwhile, as he began to establish a working routine, Margerie began to drink more heavily, threatening to undermine his recovery.
White Cottage stands up a narrow lane near the village roundabout. Ripe is a sociable village: a circle of outward facing benches has been set up on the roundabout for people-watchers who pass by. At Ripe Village Stores, which is village shop, post office and, on a Thursday, a pub, everyone I spoke to was friendly and happy to talk about Lowry – a far change from his exasperated neighbours in 1957.
When I stop by the cottage, I find the door open onto a dark, low interior of walls lined with paintings, and sculptures in the window. Outside, pots of blown white tulips gape under wisteria. Next door, a flint-walled garden encloses roses, an archway. Are you an artist? I ask the current occupant, Clare Palmer, when she comes to the door. Smiling, ponytailed Palmer takes the interruption graciously, offering to move her car so I can better photograph the cottage.
She is not an artist, she says, but is the mother of one. Her son, Tom, a sculptor who has a studio in Firle, will be exhibiting at the Venice Biennale of Craft again this year. Tom Palmer’s website shows a catalogue of elemental objects, carved with a clear love of natural forms, rock, and the light that comes through it. His work is textured, patinaed, rippling, planetary. Looking at White Cottage now, in early spring, with its surging plants, and beautifully positioned objects d’art, the events of June 1957 feel fabricated and sordid.
According to Margerie, on the night of June 26th, she and Lowry had gone to the pub – not to the Lamb Inn, in Ripe, from which Lowry had been barred, but to the Yew Tree in Chalvington, a five-minute drive along winding country lanes. After they drank beer, he bought a bottle of gin and they headed home. Later, Margerie would tell the police that her husband became violent. She apparently smashed the bottle of gin to stop him from drinking it, and went next door to stay with their landlady. Lowry’s lifelong ‘alcoholocaust’, as he called it, lends her account credibility.
To others, however, certain facts disturb the congruence of Margerie’s account. The bottle of sleeping pills Lowry had taken had been produced by Margerie only after a search, and the top was still screwed on. (This would have been difficult for the uncoordinated Lowry to open, especially if he was incapacitated by drink.) And Margerie had a habit of giving him sleeping pills at night.
Nor was there a suicide note – a fact that surprised many of Lowry’s friends, since drink made him write more, not less. The coroner didn’t call Dr Raymond, Lowry’s psychologist, who thought that he was getting better, not worse, and, what’s more, thought that Lowry’s spiritual beliefs might prevent him from committing suicide. As far as motives go, underlining the tumultuous, codependent, violent relationship with his wife, Lowry had finally made Margerie the sole beneficiary of the considerable fortune he had been left by his father.
These facts led Geoffrey Bowker to raise the question of Margerie’s involvement in Lowry’s death in the Times Literary Supplement in 2004. The suggestion of Margerie’s involvement does not come up in John Kramer and Donald Brittain’s excellent 1976 documentary of Lowry, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry, in which a tight, toothy, smiling Margerie appears to enjoy answering the questions put to her. With excerpts from Under the Volcano read by Richard Burton – a fitting choice, given the actor’s own addiction – the documentary offers a frank and
sympathetic portrait of a genius in purgatory, as summed up by the survivors. Unlike other documentaries I’ve seen, which lean on verbal testimony, Volcano is committed to the supremacy of sound and image. Burton’s melancholic intonations play against a saturated sequence of images of Mexican life, colourful, alive, unselfconscious, sinister. Lowry’s own image-making powers are considerable, a Dantesque scene dominated by the twin volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the Emperor Maximilian’s palace (‘with its ‘broken pink pillars, in the half-light…’, it’s ‘pool, covered with green scum’), the barranca or ravine into which, by the end of the novel, the Consul’s body will be flung.
Indeed, despite its heavily symbolic apparatus – the twelve chapters, the volcanos, the horse with the number 7 – Under the Volcano has a documentary impulse, offering lists of objects on a surface, extracts from newspapers, from menus, advertisements. As Lowry writes towards the end, ‘The Consul noted all these things carefully.’ Such noting does not do the Consul any favours, although it did for Lowry, who – in one extended, tremendous, midwived labour – was able to turn what he had noted, together with painful personal experiences, into a dark and ruinous epiphany. The Farolito, where the Consul has his last mescal, was real. One assumes the many symptoms the Consul coolly notes about his delirium tremens, which his wife, half-brother and friends observe with distress, are also real.
But reality takes us only so far. It is a tempting mistake to look away from a work in the interest of hunting down correspondences between art and life. ‘Aha!’ is a dead end. You go no farther than the doorstep on which the excursion began. Besides, Lowry couldn’t manage the conversion of the real into art again, not completely. He did try, sketching out a masterplan for a cycle of work that would all interconnect, to be titled The Voyage that Never Ends. In the air at Ripe, despite the gravestone, one senses that for Lowry it never did end. There is only the place you pass through, where you leave your monuments – like Maximilian’s ruined palace – for later travellers to wonder at.