Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [0]
Malcolm Lowry
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PENGUIN MODERN
UNDER THE VOLCANO
Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 at New Brighton and died in England in 1957. He was educated at the Leys School, Cambridge, and St Catherine's College. Between school and university he went to sea, working as deckhand and trimmer for about eighteen months. His first novel, Ultramarine, was accepted for publication in 1932, but the typescript was stolen and the whole thing had to be rewritten from the penultimate version. It was finally published in 1933. He went to Paris that autumn, married his first wife in 1934, and wrote several short stories in Paris and Chartres before going to New York. Here he started a new novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, which he completed in 1936. He then left for Mexico. His first marriage broke up in 1938, and in 1939 he remarried and settled in British Columbia. During 1941-4, when he was living at Dollarton, he worked on the final version of Under the Volcano. In 1954 he finally returned to England. During half his writing life he lived in a squatter's shack, largely built by himself, near Vancouver. His Selected letters, edited by H. Breit and Margerie Lowry, appeared in 1967 and Lunar Caustic, part of a larger, uncompleted work, appeared in 1968. Margerie Bonner Lowry and Douglas Day have completed, from Lowry's notes, the novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid and October Ferry to Gobriola, which, with Ultramarine and a collection of stories, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, have also been published.
First published by Jonathan Cape 1947
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Reissued in Penguin Modern Classics 1963
Reprinted 1966, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977.
1979. 1980, 1981, 1983
Copyright B) the Estate of Malcolm Lowry, 1947
Dedication
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To
MARGERIE, MY WIFE
Epigraph
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Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escape.
Sophocles—Antigone
Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance.
John Bunyan--Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.
Whosoever unceasingly strives upward... him can we save.
Goethe
I
Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaux. Overlooking one of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above sea-level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic of Cancer, to be exact, on the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude as the Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much farther west, the southernmost tip of Hawaii--and as the port of Tzucox to the east on the Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or very much farther east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal.