Malcolm Lowry: The Man and His Work

by George Woodcock

With compassion and honesty, George Woodcock presents Malcolm the man and his works. The portrait that emerges depicts a series of complex and destructive relationships that lead to an existential exploration of alienation, exile, and identity and to what many critics regard as some of the finest writing to come out of the twentieth century. This compelling collection of essays provides considerable insight into the challenges Lowry set for himself—as an artist and as a man. The first section of the book, “The Works,” considers all of Lowry’s fiction and the evolution of his style as he struggled to find the form appropriate to a new approach to reality. The influences that shaped his world and gave form to his work are considered in the second section, “The Man and the Sources.” From Lowry’s love of jazz and the cinema, to the books he read, Woodcock follows Lowry’s a life marked by violent alcoholism, two unstable marriages, and stints in jails and mental institutions as he drifted to and from London, Paris, New York, and Mexico. Contributors Robert B. Heilman, Anthony R. Kilgallin, George Woodcock, Geoffrey Durrant, David Benham, Matthew Corrigan, Conrad Aiken, Hilda Thomas, Downif Kirk, W.H. New, Perle Epstein, William McConnell, and Maurice J. Carey. George Woodcock (1912–1995)—award-winning poet, author, and essayist and widely known as a literary journalist and historian—published more than ninety titles on history, biography, philosophy, poetry, and literary criticism.

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Woodcock was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but moved with his parents to England at an early age, attending Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow and Morley College. Though his family was quite poor, Woodcock had the opportunity to go to Oxford University on a partial scholarship; however, he turned down the chance because he would have had to become a member of the clergy.Instead, he took a job as a clerk at the Great Western Railway and it was there that he first became interested in anarchism (specifically libertarian socialism). He was to remain an anarchist for the rest of his life, writing several books on the subject.

It was during these years that he met several prominent literary figures, including T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley and became good friends with George Orwell despite ideological disagreements. Woodcock later wrote The Crystal Spirit (1966), a critical study of Orwell and his work which won a Governor General's Award.

Woodcock spent World War II working on a farm, as a conscientious objector. At Camp Angel in Oregon, a camp for conscientious objectors, he was a founder of the Untide Press, which sought to bring poetry to the public in an inexpensive but attractive format. Following the war, he returned to Canada, eventually settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1955, he took a post in the English department of the University of British Columbia, where he stayed until the 1970s. Around this time he started to write more prolifically, producing several travel books and collections of poetry, as well as the works on anarchism for which he is best known.

Towards the end of his life, Woodcock became increasingly interested in what he saw as the plight of Tibetans. He travelled to India, studied Buddhism, became friends with the Dalai Lama and established the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society. He and his wife Inge also established Canada India Village Aid, which sponsors self-help projects in rural India. Both organizations exemplify Woodcock's ideal of voluntary cooperation between peoples across national boundaries.

George and Inge also established a program to support professional Canadian writers. The Woodcock Fund, which began in 1989, provides financial assistance to writers in mid-book-project who face an unforeseen financial need that threatens the completion of their book. The Fund is available to writers of fiction, creative non-fiction, plays, and poetry. The Woodcocks helped create an endowment for the program in excess of two million dollars. The Woodcock Fund program is administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and has distributed $887,273 to 180 Canadian writers, as of March 2012.