In Ballast to the White Sea

Malcolm Lowry, Patrick A. McCarthy

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780776621791
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry's most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been "written." After a fire broke out in Lowry's squatter's shack, all that remained of In Ballast to the White Sea were a few sheets of paper. Only decades after Lowry's death did it become known that his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript. This scholarly edition presents, for the first time, the once-lost novel. Patrick McCarthy's critical introduction offers insight into Lowry's sense of himself while Chris Ackerley's extensive annotations provide important information about Lowry's life and art in an edition that will captivate readers and scholars alike.

In Ballast to the White Sea

I

Perhaps we always nocturnally retrace the stretch we have won wearily in the summer sun.

RILKE¹

The two undergraduates looked down from Castle Hill² on the old English town. From their position on the grass mound opposite the prison³ even the highest roofs of Cambridge⁴ were below them; in the afternoon light⁵ of winter the streets appeared spotless and empty, but sun-haze swam on sun-haze among the walls and towers and terraces far beneath. A brawling wind carried from the railway station,⁶ which never slumbered, the racket of the acceleration of engines, shunting the drowsy carriages: but from time to time this would relapse utterly, giving way then to the cries of rowers on the river or the gunshot of traffic that now would be growing in volume as swiftly as the other sounds diminished. Now the brothers inclined their ears⁷ to the cheering at a football match, now to the sudden jaunty music—loud, loud—of the hurdy-gurdies on Midsummer Common:⁸ but again these clusters of sounds, each of them a hail and farewell from separate worlds of objectivity,⁹ would die away almost in their swelling, as the groan of aeroplane engines quickly vanishes to a sigh in the gale.

Standing by the pole marking the spot of the last hanging on the Mound,¹⁰ their fair hair blowing, their eyes bright with the sun and wind even when despair was behind them, they were like two castaways on a raft, shading their eyes towards the flat world against some vanishing hope, while all around them the surf broke, a spray not of sea but of dust and straw. But to Sigbjørn,¹¹ the younger, the wailing of the wind about the prison was like wind in the rigging of a ship, in the telegraph wires above them he heard once more the threnody¹² that the wireless aerial sheathes in the Bay of Bengal¹³ and the banging of a loose shutter somewhere might have been the groaning of the strakes¹⁴ of a boat labouring in a heavy swell; yet if he felt within him again that special anguish of the sea, for Sigbjørn had been a sailor, he could detect also within himself for the first time in some weeks today on Tor’s¹⁵ return from a brief stay in London the schism between them and narcissistically much of the ebb and flow of the other’s very different feelings.

For between these two brothers there existed marked chemic¹⁶ dissimilarity. In fact it was the first time since an accident¹⁷ to them in childhood in Norway that they had been brought close together in spirit. Only six weeks had elapsed since one of their father’s ships, the Thorstein,¹⁸ had gone down off the coast of Montserrat¹⁹ with enormous loss of life. Since that period, during the investigation and the resulting public obloquy, they had been in spite of former differences inseparable. They drew together in defence. An armistice was signed ceasing the spiritual hostilities²⁰ between them. They accepted now what they had formerly, and vainly, contested together or as against one another, the inner solitude of an environment which no familiarity with the other students, the English language, the flat countryside—after the mountain ranges and torrents of Norway their very hearts had to stoop to walk it—the life, and the chilled climate, could change from the permanently alien. This quality common to them both that separated them from the mass of students was not however implicit in their foreignness. It arose rather from an inability to contact life at first hand, even if only to connect²¹ was their deepest desire: rather was it that each had become by virtue of the other’s existence one place removed from life as though the body of one brother lay across the opening of the cave of self²² in which the other lay captured, obstructing the light, yes, existence itself.

Each term, the train they travelled down on from Liverpool to Cambridge²³ gathered more and more students on the way. There were long waits on the platform. And their two bare white heads seen among the other golden brown English where they waited, might seem to an onlooker as freakish as a pair of white swallows among their dun fellows awaiting the signal for the summer migration. From Lincoln to Ely this term they had stood in the corridor, too shy to sit down: yet resting it seemed in their common grief. And all this term, neglecting their work they had stood together so: each walking every alternate day the two miles to the other’s rooms: all the indignation of the past with each other melted away in this sorrowful, but warm fealty.²⁴ But now as the sea tugs at the very souls of the sister ships lying in harbour, or as the moon draws the disconsolate twin tides of the day to herself from the shore, so a dual magnetism seemed to be pulling these brothers out again towards the separate poles of their oceanic destiny.²⁵

Or it was as if each had to face separately again, the world, with the icy courage childhood brings to the first walk alone.

Who can say who guards him? What dangers threaten that white head in his first tremulous setting out?²⁶

—God knows, Tor was saying, I’m still frightened of something—you know what Dostoievsky²⁷ said—something I can’t conceive, which doesn’t exist, but which rises up before me as a horrible, distorted, irrefutable, fact.

—It may be the flood, who knows? Sigbjørn said, and laughed for the first time that term. Or Dante.²⁸ That Italian paper!

At this moment an object, evoked, Sigbjørn could not help thinking afterwards, by some evil malice, evil more by virtue of what it did not divulge than by what it did, and which he now saw to be a newspaper, had disentangled itself from a hedge below and was blowing towards them. Tor trapping it absently with his stick and foot peered down at the muddied columns. Sigbjørn stood by him looking over his shoulder.

Mount Ararat²⁹ in eruption. Thousands panic.

Now as if simultaneously released from the tension and shame of the last weeks both men started to shake with laughter, and as they did so into Sigbjørn’s mind came a picture of two ships, their ropes cast off from the wharf, but their immediate passage through the dock gate suddenly obstructed.

—So there won’t be anywhere to go at all now.

—But let’s hope Dante is the only irrefutable fact.

—The old rascal is enough!

—But the Inferno is child’s play to what readers of the English Tripos³⁰ must go through…

—Yes, Tor, where shall we go now in that ark of yours you always talk of building?

—The only thing I shall have in common with Noah now is I shall get drunk³¹ perhaps. But to be serious, it’s not that only, it’s not only the fear of the exam—

Sigbjørn looked up at the stake planted on the site of the old gallows.³² And for a moment he had the nightmare notion that this hill where they were standing was actually Mount Ararat itself. Why make any journey? But if that were true, if the papers could be believed, it was a dangerous spot. Indeed, already in eruption without their being aware of it! He exclaimed:

—Think of something else, of the last man hanged on this hill, think what he must have suffered. Twenty-two years ago! It’s nearly that since we were born, Sigbjørn went on, but there are unhappier places even than this.

But Tor was absorbed in his own private joke about Mount Ararat.

—The station platform for instance, Sigbjørn said, is an unhappier place than this, a roar coming, and subsiding, as quickly as it had come, from that direction.

—Yes, the station platform, Tor replied at last. Where there are so many partings. Its heart cracked with grief, I used to think when a child, he added, and went on laughing, for were they not, after their penance, free to laugh once more? He peered down again at the trapped newspaper.

—And all wharves, Tor. That smoke which is so evanescent, so like pity, like love, like a dream of the sea.³³ Ah my God if only—But look here! The way must have looked just as easy and straight as it does now…don’t you think so?

—What way? Tor was laughing. To whom? What do you mean?

—To him up there, of course. Sigbjørn was looking up at the stake and adding impatiently, to that last hanged man of course. Doesn’t it seem so easy? As though you could walk to the North Pole³⁴ on a day like this. It seems so simple, so folded over in peace, and there’s a kind of sea feeling to it too. Don’t you see the meadows beyond; it’s like a calm on the line,³⁵ blowing and furling…

—Mount Ararat, Tor shook, I’m sorry I can’t get over it. It’s the funniest thing I ever heard. And he laughed again, crouching down and bending over the fouled newspaper. Sigbjørn pointed out over the fens³⁶ towards the sea.

—My soul turns like a compass needle³⁷ towards the Pole.

—Other things lacking, it’s polite to have a soul, Tor said relapsing as he did sometimes, into the broken English of his youth.

Sigbjørn still pointed, staring with sea-gazing eyes over the flat world, as flat as the grey sea which at noonday makes the sailor off watch dream of meadows at home. Now that his heart was still he could think again of the chain of watches, the abysmal concentric conversations³⁸ reflecting in a torrent of words his own distraction, the back-breaking work of coal-passing,³⁹ the ship staggering and wallowing in a green sea, the immediate experience of which had been intolerable with ecstasy; but the ecstasy was being withdrawn from him as quickly as around him the ebb of one tide of sounds was displaced by the flood of another: and as soon as he saw its exacting cause the mood disappeared altogether. How to break the circle of self,⁴⁰ even in the shadow of disaster, he knew that was the thought in the hearts of them both, how to break from this hill on which they were standing, the cursed coward circle from which neither had ever emerged.

Below them the lamplighter,⁴¹ in hard daylight, like Diogenes, lit the lamps with his long pike against the coming dark—but who could say for certain it would curve towards them tonight? A sudden gust tore frantically at the hair of the grass: shadows drifted before the sun, and swept the mound where they were standing: a mournful shadow rested with them for a moment, enveloping them, as though they were its victims, then galloped off to westward.

—Darkness begins at midday,⁴² was all Tor said, laughing.

—As the Chinese, is it the Chinese, say?

—You always bring in the sea, Tor said, temporarily controll...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• GENERAL EDITOR’S NOTE
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• IN BALLAST TO THE WHITE SEA
• ANNOTATIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• TEXTUAL NOTES
• CONTRIBUTORS