Malcolm Lowry's Poetics of Space

Richard J. Lane, Miguel Mota, Richard J. Lane, Miguel Mota

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780776623429
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

This collection focuses on Lowry's spatial dynamics, from the psychogeography of the Letterist and the Situationist International, through musical forms (especially jazz), cinema, photography, and spatial poetic writing, to the spaces of exception, bio-politics, and the creaturely. It presents previously unpublished essays by both established and new international Lowry scholars, as well as innovative ways of conceiving of his aesthetic practice. In each of the book's three sections, critics engage in the notion of Lowry as a multi-media artist who influenced and was deeply influenced by a broad range of modernist and early postmodernist aesthetic practices. Acutely aware of and engaged in the world of film, sensitive to the role of the graphical surface in advertising and propaganda, and deeply immersed in a vast range of literary traditions and the avant-garde, Lowry worked within an intertextual space that is also a mediascape, one which tends to transgress, or at least exceed, neatly controlled borders or aesthetic boundaries. These new approaches to Lowry's life and work, which make use of new and recent theoretical perspectives, will encourage fresh debate around Lowry's writing. Published in English.

III

Charting the Human Landscape

11

From Liverpool to Eridanus in the Twinkling of an Eye

ANNICK DRÖSDAL-LEVILLAIN

“We meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it”¹

Malcolm Lowry left Liverpool swearing never to return. Yet, though physically he never did return to the city of his birth, he did so repeatedly in his writing. Liverpool appears in most of Lowry’s texts, as if he had been attempting to write himself back to the city, akin to Sigbjørn Wilderness in “Through the Panama”: “But I never came back. Nevertheless I wrote, regularly, which was more than I did for myself very often” (Lowry, Hear 69).² Or was it Liverpool that kept returning to him? In this essay, I explore the extent to which Lowry’s childhood Mersey, identified by Muriel Bradbrook as the Maternal Eden (Bradbrook 108), informs and haunts Lowry’s fiction. After a topographic and historical survey, I offer a glimpse of Lowry’s soulscape as it coalesces with the landscapes of his British Columbian paradise of Dollarton/Eridanus, with a special focus on the structural motifs marking Lowry’s multilayered soulscape, where bells and stars guide the reader on the path through locks and dams, passing Bakhtinian whirlpools, where time and space flicker, slide, and overlap along the watery ways of Lowry’s silted ex-centered oceanic northwestern prose.

FROM TOPOGRAPHY TO SOULSCAPE

The topographic resemblance between Liverpool and Vancouver³ is the first striking element that must be considered with a few typically Lowryan scale arrangements: both are major port cities, ex-centered at the edge of a continent, situated by an ocean that provides a vital link with the rest of the world. Vancouver was put on the map in 1886, when it was chosen as the western terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and thus got its place on the symbolic “All Red Line,” a telegraph cable line linking London to the major ports of the British Empire. For its part, the Liverpool–Manchester railway, one of the first in Great Britain, was inaugurated in 1831, and Liverpool was a major British port on the Atlantic throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, serving the slave trade as well as several waves of European emigration to America. Both cities, then, have been connected with major national and global ventures, and have been deeply implicated with the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of native Americans. Both were, in addition, centres of adventurous engineering if we consider the technical feats necessary to cross the peat bogs north of Liverpool and, even more dauntingly, cut through the Rocky Mountains to reach Vancouver. Vancouver and Liverpool, both dubbed “Empire City” at different times, have been historically important metropolitan centres, as they have also each been home to the most economically impoverished neighbourhoods in Canada and Europe, respectively. Lowry hints at the Liverpool–Vancouver connection when he refers to Vancouver as “Gaspool” (“The Bravest Boat,” Hear 11)—in which we can hear the merging of Gastown, Vancouver’s historic downtown, and Liverpool. As a Liverpudlian in self-exile, Lowry carried to Vancouver the memory of the city of his birth. I will focus here on how Lowry managed to transpose the Liverpool–Wirral topography to the Vancouver–Dollarton–Eridanus topoi.

Dollarton/Eridanus echoes in several ways the Wirral Peninsula, where Lowry grew up. Both places face an estuary with impressive tidal flats, and the majestic mountains north of Dollarton can be seen as a “transoceanic” magnified echo of the Welsh Clwydian Range to the south of the Wirrall Peninsula. Both places are ex-centered from the hellish “city Moloch” (“The Bravest Boat”), out of direct sight and at least partly separated from the mainland by sea. Rock Ferry station, Birkenhead, is where Wilderness remembers last seeing his mother in “Through the Panama” (Hear 69). This paradoxical edgy combination of ex-centeredness and connection to the world perfectly suited Lowry who, we may say, was an exile all his life, and perhaps never more acutely so than in England. The sight of ships coming and going on Burrard Inlet, “cargoed with obscenities toward death” (“Forest Path,” Hear 231), while the Second World War raged elsewhere, is likely to have reminded Lowry of the intense traffic on the Mersey during the First World War—he was then between five and nine years old and Liverpool was heavily involved due to its port. That traffic also carried the threat of separation—“And would the war separate us?” (“Forest Path,” Hear 231). This fear, initially of separation, later of eviction, would actually fuel much of Lowry’s writing during his years in Dollarton and act as a sacred bond, not only between him and his wife, but also between him and the world; writing becoming Lowry’s way of coping with his symptom,⁴ of covering the rent, and coming to terms with the real. Lowry’s eldest brother, Stuart, recalls him wishing he had a hook instead of a hand (Bowker 15); luckily, his wish came true in the form not of a hook but of a pen that would allow him to reach out to both the world and himself.

If, for Lowry, Vancouver is a hellish sight appropriately announced by the missing “S” of the Shell neon sign above the oil refinery across the inlet from the narrator’s shack in “The Forest Path to the Spring,” then Liverpool hosts a likewise infernal memory of the Museum of Anatomy, on Paradise Street, where Lowry caught sight of “the famous pickled testicles” (Bowker 40), acquiring the consequent fear of venereal disease that never quite left him. As so often with Lowry, the coincidence is striking when one considers his fear of syphilis in the context of the devastation it, a European disease, had caused among the Aboriginal population in British Columbia a century earlier.

ON THE BELL-PROTEUS PATH⁵

Liverpool functions like a beacon, signalling the author’s origins, carefully inscribed in most stories of the collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, not unlike the inscription we read on the stern of the “wrecked steamer of the defunct Astra line that gave it its name … Eridanus, Liverpool” (“Forest Path,” Hear 226). References to Liverpool in the collection are generally brief, cynical, and contrapuntal, as if the city could not be evoked or looked at directly, but must instead be glimpsed from an impersonal, derisive, twisted angle, pointing at the necessity for separation, a detachment that seems to have a tempering effect even on the hellish refinery, which is “softened and rendered beautiful by distance” (Lowry, Volcano 82). Liverpool turns out to be Lowry’s archetypal city, that by which other cities are measured, and each evocation of Liverpool resounds in a deeply private vibration, revealing Lowry’s love–hate relationship with his place of birth. His poem “Iron Cities” features the transformational process at work in the invisible, unspoken depths of human psyche: “Iron thoughts sail from the iron cities in the dust, / Yet soft as doves the thoughts that fly back home” (Selected Poems 15).

A discreet homage to Liverpool is paid in “Through the Panama” when the narrator points out the exception of Liverpool for its “enormous sense of sea and ships” (“Panama,” Hear 68), as if Lowry were reticent to recognize his love for “that terrible city whose mainstreet is the ocean” (“Forest Path,” Hear 226). Similarly, the dunes surrounding the canal remind him of the “dunes at Hoylake, only infinitely more desolate” (“Panama,” Hear 68). Liverpool vacillates flickeringly between presence and absence, signalling in the dark like “that lamp of love” (“Forest Path,” Hear 279) lighting the window of the shack in the night. Stars were all the more important for Lowry given that during his years in Dollarton/Eridanus, he lived, so to speak, under the stars he so much enjoyed watching and integrating into his prose. Indeed, stars (Greek: aster) are omnipresent in “The Forest Path to the Spring”; they shimmer and glitter through a wide range of signifiers scattered throughout the text: wild asters growing near the shack; the name of the shipping line, Astra, itself based in Liverpool; Astrid’s very name in “The Bravest Boat”; and numerous direct references to the constellations, not least of course Eridanus itself. Lowry’s early biography reveals the emergence of the star motif that probably acted as a beacon for the three-year-old Lowry, fond of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In a birthday letter to Lowry, his beloved nanny, Miss Bell, recalling his singing that song to her (Bowker 10), remembered the “dear little baby with a brown face and blue eyes [who sang] ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’” (Bowker 40). This must have been all the more traumatic to the child, given that Miss Bell had left the family to seek employment on a cruise liner just a few short months prior to Lowry’s third birthday.⁶ That stars are associated with both happy times and separation from Miss Bell, the substitute for an inadequate mother, suggests that stars and bells had strong emotional resonance for Lowry. This hypothesis finds textual support first in an apparently passing remark concerning the name of one of the inhabitants of Eridanus in “The Forest Path to the Spring”: “Bell’s name had no meaning that I knew of” (258). Yet the reader may also hear a faint voice humming, “I miss Bell,” as if Lowry were pointing toward something ever missing, the gap left by the loss of love and pleasure known in youth. Bells and stars might be considered as traces of what Lacan called lalangue, that little language made of the remnants of the subject’s entrance into language, the emergence of which is often connected with nursery rhymes, but also puns, narrative breaks, and repetitions. Was “Frère Jacques” another of those happy-days songs? Emergences of lalangue point at the loss of an unattainable jouissance, and result in a blind spot signalled by linguistic, narrative, and lexical devices accommodating a special occurrence of a voice that transcends all other voices.

HAUNTING THE “GUTTED ARCADES OF THE PAST”

The final, equally painful separation from Miss Bell took place when Lowry went to school. He developed “chronic chilblains” (Bowker 19) and was given electrical treatment for his swollen fingers. He was then five, and this is also when he learnt to write. It is worth noting that from very early on writing was Lowry’s way of making friendships, so that it became his passport to the school community and, later, as a published author, to the world. Could his swollen, cracked fingers be the unconscious response of the little boy trying to reach out toward the loved one but not succeeding for lack of big enough hands? Other physical symptoms such as constipation echo on a symbolic level with his difficulty to release the object of desire, reverting to endless revisions of his manuscripts. Quite significantly, about a year before his death, Lowry was diagnosed with Hirschsprung disease (Bowker 583), causing intestinal obstruction, which provided him with a plausible explanation for his alcoholic drive. Lowry called this deformation of the bowel “the great empty hall” (583). Indeed, the hall could never be filled, and the object of desire would be ever missing, out of reach, out of sight, too, hence the ulceration of the cornea. Incidentally, Lowry considered himself an eyesore to his parents, his schoolmates, and, later, by identification with his shack, to the residents of Vancouver threatening to pull down the “eyesores” on the beach (“Forest Path,” Hear 277). Although Hirschsprung disease is named after its discoverer, its literal meaning—the deer’s spring—can be added to the eerie coincidences jotting Lowry’s life and fiction, since it takes us back to the end of “The Forest Path to the Spring.” Could this be a “dirty trick” of the unconscious? Or what Lacan called a trait d’esprit carved out in the body of the writer and his work?

It seems that Lowry’s bodyscape cried out after the lost object all his life. No wonder that Lowry could not finish or deliver his manuscripts. “Know thyself,” said the sign at the Liverpool Museum of Anatomy, and Lowry took note of it (Bowker 40); but that personal, singular knowledge has to be processed into something universal that not only makes sense for the artist, but rings with the community of readers, because we all walk around with our symptom and struggle with it in our own singular way. Artists are both gifted with the ability and burdened with the ordeal to pass their mysterious knowledge on to the world. The creative act of writing enabled Lowry to “haunt the gutted arcades of the past” (Lowry, Collected Poetry 185) and reach out to the “high forgotten shelf,” which might figure the unconscious. That s(h)elf is the radiating spot which, as soon as it is attained, slides from the horizontal plane to the vertical of the “mast … where one sways crucified twixt two of me” (185). In this movement from horizontality to verticality, the poem shifts from shelf to self and invites readers to explore the layers of meaning of a stratified text unfolding in time and space.

MISSED ENCOUNTERS

Lowry knew something about missed encounters, the most striking one being his father’s death before he completed the publication manuscript of Under the Volcano. This is made clear in “Elephant and Colosseum”: “Ah, this was what hurt, that his ‘making good’ had come too late; his father was dead, his mother was dead” (“Elephant,” Hear 141–42; emphasis added). Repeatedly missed encounters point at what Lacan called “neurosis of destiny,”⁷ which sounds quite likely, considering Lowry’s “disastar”-paved path.⁸ This may be what the inscription on the mirror of the weighing machine in “The Bravest Boat” is hinting at: “Your weight and your destiny” (Hear 13). Is Lowry’s destiny inscribed in the American writer’s name—Sigbjørn Wilderness—in “Strange Comfort”? The following explodes the narration into free indirect discourse: “Sigbjørn Wilderness! The very sound of his name was like a bell-buoy—more euphoniously a light-ship—broken adrift, and washing in from the Atlantic on a reef” (“Strange Comfort,” Hear 102)—as if signifiers were like bell buoys, both ringing to the ear and catching the eye with their glitter. Or could we also hear “bell boy,” and by association the emblematic “Frère Jacques” rhythmic theme? This would then be another interesting occurrence of lalangue where the bell and star motives are intertwined among the debris of the past, which Lowry has woven into his prose to become part of his chiming, twinkling, ringing style, finally celebrating “some great spiritual victory of mankind” (“Forest Path,” Hear 280) and echoing Lowry’s own spiritual progress, however chao...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Situating Under the Volcano
• II The Spatial Dynamics of Sight and Sound
• III Charting the Human Landscape
• Coda
• Contributors