The 1940 Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry, Miguel Mota, Paul Tiessen

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780776623160
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The 1940 Under the Volcano—hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry's 1947 masterpiece—differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry's 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White Sea, The 1940 Under the Volcano takes its rightful place as part of Lowry's exciting 1930s/early-40s trilogy. Scholars have only recently begun to pay systematic attention to convergences and divergences between this earlier work and the 1947 version. Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen's insightful introduction, together with extensive annotations by Chris Ackerley and David Large, reveal the depth and breadth of Lowry's complex vision for his work. This critical edition fleshes out our sense of the enormous achievement by this twentieth-century modernist.Published in English.

Under the Volcano

MALCOLM BODEN LOWRY

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness … is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

HENRY JAMES

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

I

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 who poured himself a drink. They had been playing tennis, followed by billiards, and were sitting in the fragrance on the porch of the Casino de la Selva Hotel,⁵ high above the town.

On one side they could see, beyond Chapultepec⁶ and the rocks of Tepoztlán,⁷ the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl,⁸ clear and beautiful in the sunset, against which far vultures, xopilotes,⁹ in whose movements there also seemed to be a kind of ritual, were circling.

On the other side, purple hills, which always reminded Laruelle of Doré’s illustrations to Paradise Lost,¹⁰ sloped away into the distance.

Below them was the peace and sweetness of the town.

In the Hotel grounds the tennis courts and the jai-alai¹¹ courts, their huge walls covered with grass, were abandoned. They heard the little Chapultepec bus in the distance, and the ship’s siren of a train echoed mournfully. A fountain,¹² at which someone had reined up his horse to drink, played near.

Every now and then the tramplings of the ancient town seemed to be nearer and the cries of the fair,¹³ which had been heard intermittently all day, began once again, rising and falling.

The lights of a cinema,¹⁴ built on an incline and standing out sharply, suddenly came on, flickered off, came on once more.

Their attention was drawn by two young Americans, a boy and a girl, who had started a game of ping-pong on the verandah of the annex, laughing because they could not see the balls, and this gaiety seemed to break the mood of the two men.

“The Chapultepec bus ought to be here any minute,” Laruelle said.

The doctor smiled. “You’re not taking it, are you?”

They spoke in French, both Laruelle’s Spanish and the doctor’s English being erratic.

“No. As a matter of fact I was just thinking of the Consul.”

Vigil nodded sympathetically.

“Salud y pesetas,” Laruelle raised his glass.

“Y tiempo para gastarlas,”¹⁵ Vigil said. “Throw away your mind.”¹⁶

“How many years today is it? I think the Consul is haunting me.”

“Two, three years ago,” said Vigil reflectively. “Le jour des morts.”¹⁷

“That means Armistice day¹⁸ too, which isn’t far off.”

“Time isn’t our strong point in Méjico,” Vigil said. “It seems only yesterday we were going all round the bars looking for the Consul. I felt so sorry for that girl, Yvonne! And even in the Farolito they knew nothing.”

“Of course they didn’t know,” Laruelle exclaimed. “But my God, that was awful, looking for him those days, going from one cantina to another, from one disappointment, or reprieve, to another, in search of calamity.”

“It seems only yesterday too that boy Hugh was making up his mind whether or not to go and fight in Spain.”¹⁹

“He ought to be glad he didn’t go,” Laruelle said. “But it’s only naturel to be on the side of life, if you love it.” He paused. “Which brings me to my problem.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Supposing, Doctor, that a quarter of a century ago you’d fought a desperate war against Guatemala.²⁰ And you’d beaten her to a frazzle, an utter debacle. Then there was the usual aftermath, League of Nations’²¹ conferences, general disarmament conferences and so on. But that while those general disarmament conferences were being held, unknown to the people of your own country, your metal industry had agreed to Guatemala’s rearmament as the only way to stimulate your inner market, all of which they knew would only lead to war. And supposing—but why go on?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Why? You don’t have to go to the war. With that hole in your guts I wouldn’t pass you even for the Mexican army. It would give—shall we say?—Guatemala an unfair chance.”

“But I love France,” Laruelle said. “And sometimes I almost wish that I had no choice. I could do something. But then should I? Is it right to? I could go to America if I wanted and then feel a fool if she came into the war and find myself fighting for her anyway. But now—I ask myself—is it, morally, right to go? I tell you, my dear friend, that I’m torturing myself, night and day about this war. I can’t make out which side of me is cowardly. I have been a coward before, in other things—not physically I think, but morally. Why, I ask myself, do I have to be so scrupulous now when it comes to a matter of my own skin? When I say that, I tell myself I must go. But immediately a voice says: No, that way is anarchy, you are a coward to go. Then another voice²² at my back contradicts this coward and says: Go, you have done harm in your life—look what you did to the Consul, for example. Go, die heroically,²³ expiate it! And this is the voice of cowardice too.”

The doctor laughed. “Throw away your mind,” he raised his glass. “Almazán!”²⁴

“Camacho!”²⁵ Laruelle replaced his glass on the table and lay back in his seat, stretching his legs. “What depresses me sometimes,” he said musingly, “is that the Consul should not have been so absolutely wrong in his prognostications about Spain, about the rest of the world, for that matter.”

Vigil’s eyes were fastened on an advertisement tacked on a green beige door behind his companion which said: En la sala de conferencias, palacio de bellas artes. México D.F. La exposición Sobrerealista en París. Conferencia de Jacques Laruelle.²⁶

“Almazán or no,” he said, “reactions do have a bad habit of reacting too far.”

“My God!” said Laruelle, “If I only had the time to put a character like the Consul into a film!²⁷ Yes, supposing, Doctor, that all the suffering and chaos and conflict of the present were suddenly to take human form. And to become conscious of itself! That is the impression I would want to give of my man: a man to whom, like Jesus, the great betrayal of the human spirit would appear in the guise of a private, anguishing betrayal. And you would realize somehow too that this character of mine was yet aware of all the agonies with which the human lot would become presently involved. And now that I think of it, Doctor, it does almost seem possible that it already happened! Supposing that all these horrors of today before they became part of our lives had suddenly convulsed upon themselves to create a soul, and then that soul had sought a body, and the only body it had found sufficiently photophobic for its purposes was the Consul’s.” He was looking intently at Vigil, his eyes excited. “If I could only convey the effect of a man who was the very shape and motion of the world’s doom,” he went on, “But at the same time the living prophecy of its hope!”

“You would need a screen as big as the world to show it on,” said the doctor.

“His marriage might be shown as the real basis of his tragedy as a man,” continued Laruelle. “Although I doubt that it was. And perhaps the fact that his wife would give him no more children—”

“Ah yes, that would have been an added frustration,” said the doctor, “for Priscilla²⁸ too, had she done so. And perhaps,” he added diabolically, “for you too—”

“And violent quarrels—it’s too easy to say another man would have found his escape in other women, or in work, and that the Consul found his escape in drink. The question arises: for instance, was it an escape? I think that had he been able to objectify his misery in some other way—had he been a successful artist, for example—I don’t know quite how to express it. Or even if he’d only finished his book on secret knowledge²⁹—alchemy and Atlantis³⁰ and God knows what—from which he once almost gave me a film—”

“Please, please, my friend,” said Vigil, “Throw away your mind.”

“He could have been a great man, I sometimes think. He might have stood aside, like Goethe, from the false enthusiasms³¹ which, as you suggested, were perhaps by no means as false as we tend angrily to think at the moment. But to stand aside as he did, or, as it happened, not to stand aside as he did—”

“What you really mean is,” said his friend, but without offence, “that if you yourself can now stand aside from the false enthusiasms for the war, which are only false in that they are not enthusiasms, then you yourself may be a great man, and so on. I do not mean to encourage you to go to your war, but it might strike you nevertheless that you would be fighting for the right to make the very kind of choice which you now have.”

“Very picturesque,” Laruelle said, “But inaccurate. In the first place most of the French and English people have no choice. How can we have if we are to survive? In the second place, the French and English are fighting for different things. The American in turn thinks they are both fighting for something else again, for freedom, for American ideals. And this becomes true when innocent countries are invaded, when the struggle which always starts by being between evil and stupidity turns into one between darkness and light. But the English begin by fighting for an abstraction, just the same, and end—the ones who die—by fighting for decency and chivalry. What else have the English so valuable to defend as the pride of their own spirits? And what men will not bravely defend their ugly little country, because it is theirs, and their ugly way of living, crying out that it is beautiful to the end? There are some though, yes, and among the best, countries whose resistance is probably eaten away already just as mine is, Doctor, by the worm³² of the knowledge of what anarchy is! But the French, above all nations, fight for the beauty of their country, yes, even those who have made the war, even those they have put in prison. They will fight for the shape of their lands and the taste of their good wine and their right to be good or criminal in the French way. For the right even to start wars again in a French way. And there is nobody they would not willingly sacrifice in that struggle.”

“I am sure England must be as beautiful as France,” said the doctor. “At school we get such a picture of green hillsides in our mind, more beautiful than these, with artists with their easels standing on them. And beautiful, blonde, fat ladies—” he tried to say it in English and pronounced it ‘layees’—“and Shakespeare and Byron. And rivers and castles, oh, so charming. Wonderful! Yes, and what about the Hun?”

“I don’t know,” Laruelle said. “The Antichrist³³ is unpredictable. And successfully to resist him it certainly is necessary not to hate, but to understand him. But we may have no choice, because it occurs to me that we have made our Monster so avid of hate himself that he has already drained the small amount of that commodity left over for us of all its energy.”

The little bus, with Chapultepec-Zócalo³⁴ on its forehead, was now passing in front of the fountain—possibly coming back, Laruelle thought, from the bull-throwing. It scarcely paused for the few passengers to drop off, then passed on, convulsively.

Laruelle pointed after the departing bus with his pipe and was about to say something more.

“Ah!” the doctor exclaimed, “Wasn’t there something wrong with their car that day? Of course, they must have taken that very bus.” He interrupted Laruelle’s reply. “I never will forget speaking to your Consul that morning. I had really thought the previous night that he was going crazy. That was the night before his daughter³⁵ arrived. It was the first time I met him, you know. Our acquaintanceship was not of very long standing. But perhaps it was only the tequila made me think that. We had been drinking all night like madmen. I had gone to see Quincey³⁶ and the Consul was in his garden. Then I went back to his ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Note
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Under the Volcano
• Annotation
• Glossary of Foreign Terms
• Bibliography
• Textual Notes
• Afterword
• Contributors