Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Literary Addiction

I first read Under the Volcano in 1968. At that confused cusp in time between teen aged idealism and adult cynicism, I had travelled to Cuernavaca in pursuit of my first love whose father had moved his family there - I was sure at the time, but mistakenly, in order to ensure his oldest daughter did not succumb to my inept entreaties. As it turned out I discovered that I liked her family more than I liked her. So the trip turned into a bit of a disaster.

So in an attempt at literary therapy I threw myself into Lowry, who satisfied my romantic needs on several levels. First, he turned the city itself into something of a post-colonial paradise that was insulated from the cares of the world and its physical necessities. “The eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico,” exactly matched my own depressive mood. As I tried to follow Lowry’s Ulysses-like travels around the city, I could see the pervasive poverty of Cuernavaca as quaint; the rubbish tip of its central ravine as a melancholy barranca and entrance to the underworld; the obvious Mexican racism as an easy co-existence of Spanish-American and European culture alongside that of the still visible Aztec, Olmec, Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations. Mexico’s sadness became bearable.

And although a problem shared - in this case an immature affair of the heart - may not be a problem halved, it certainly allows for the serotonin-like effects of Schadefreude. However badly I was feeling, I wasn’t, like Lowry’s Geoffrey, drinking myself into paranoid oblivion; nor, like his brother, Hugh, was I gripped by terminal guilt; nor, as his wife, Yvonne, was I in the grip of an Electra (or Oedipal) fixation. And, despite my sadness, I hadn’t ‘lost it’ as we said in those days, referring to the elusive mental self, as had the Consul whose “equilibrium, and equilibrium is all, precarious--balancing, teetering over the awful unbridgeable void, the all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning back to God?” In the scheme of things, I was getting off fairly lightly.

Finally, it was clear to me that Under the Volcano was referencing many things about which I had not the slightest clue - people, places, and events (not to mention vocabulary and cognate puns) which Lowry knew about and I didn’t were integral to his story. But I also knew he was using them as symbols. These things were more deeply meaningful than they appeared on the surface. And I had to learn about them in order to understand life - at least the life that Lowry described.* Call it ‘hope’ through lack of understanding. Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, which I could see from my bedroom window within the walls of ‘The Family Compound’, for example, took on a significance that was simultaneously mysterious but concretely other than mere mountains. They pointed elsewhere to hidden meanings, and therefore to my own youthful ignorance (and what really did happen in the bunker?). This was liberating since it distracted me entirely from the issue of lost love.

In short, Lowry helped me to grow up. Just at the moment I needed some way out of an emotional dead end he showed up with his posse of flawed characters in another-worldly world. I moved, however incrementally, from a state of emotional distress to one of imaginative possibility. Once that happens, for good or ill you’re hooked. Life without Lowry’s kind of writing is impossible thereafter. Oh well, I suppose there are worse addictions - just as Lowry suggests.

*This is an issue that largely has been solved by the internet. An indispensable guide to the book is publicly available and makes all Lowry’s references and allusions clear: https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-lingu...

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