Sursum Corda!: The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Volume II: 1947-1957

by Malcolm Lowry, Sherrill E. Grace (Editor)

The general tone of this second volume of letters is considerably darker than that of the first. Though Under the Volcano (published in 1947) was behind Lowry, it would never leave him alone. The success of the novel became a curse: he could not avoid helping his translators; he longed for a film treatment of the book; he found it difficult to become fully engaged in new work; the celebrity associated with a best-seller was, as he put it in a poem, a 'disaster' akin to your house burning down.

Illnessses, the death of friends, threats of eviction from his beloved foreshore Dollarton home, and drink plagued Lowry. And yet, he made repeated attempts to escape his personal abysses. He made new friends, re-established a good working relationship with his editor Albert Erskine, began several new projects, and continued to write superb letters. The more than 400 included here, all written during the last decade of his life, reveal a man fascinated with films, bristling with plans for his masterwork The Voyage That Never Ends, eager to discuss the virtues of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, and the work of friends like Gerald Noxon or Jimmy Stern. There is also a selection from his several hundred 'love notes' written to Margerie Lowry and pinned to places in the Dollarton shack or to trees along the 'forest path to spring.' These notes, like much else in the volume, are published here for the first time, providing interesting glimpses into Lowry's private world. The letters written just before his sudden death in England in 1957 are among his most moving; they reveal a weariness of spirit, a deep regret for the loss of his Dollarton paradise, but also the courage, self-deprecating humour, love of language, and keen intelligence that characterize everything he wrote.

In addition to a critical introduction and detailed chronologies, this volume includes photographs, many of the drawings with which Lowry illustrated his letters, and reproductions of holograph letters.

896 pages, Hardcover

Published December 18, 1996

About the author

Malcolm Lowry was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up in a prominent, wealthy family and chafed under the expectations placed upon him by parents and boarding school. He wrote passionately on the themes of exile and despair, and his own wanderlust and erratic lifestyle made him an icon to later generations of writers.

Lowry died in a rented cottage in the village of Ripe, Sussex, where he was living with wife Margerie after having returned to England in the summer of 1955, ill and impoverished. The coroner's verdict was death by misadventure, and the causes of death given as inhalation of stomach contents, barbiturate poisoning, and excessive consumption of alcohol.

It has been suggested that his death was a suicide. Inconsistencies in the accounts given by his wife at various times about what happened at the night of his death have also given rise to suspicions of murder.

Lowry is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in Ripe. Lowry reputedly wrote his own epitaph: "Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery, whose prose was flowery, and often glowery. He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele," but the epitaph does not appear on his gravestone

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess we read literary letters in order to learn biographical detail and to gain insight into the subject's work. We also enjoy them because we often find they wrote letters in prose as rich and finely-written as that work. This 2d volume of Malcolm Lowry's letters, beginning right after publication of Under the Volcano, realizes all of those expectations as well as any volume of letters I've read in years. This is a comprehensive collection, and one I'd think would be of interest to any serious reader of Lowry's books. But the best here are those loving letters he wrote his wife Margery, a major inspiration. He was maybe most forthcoming about his own work to the young David Markson, himself just beginning a life in fiction but at the time of the initial letters engaged in writing a critical analysis of Under the Volcano. Lastly, some of the best letters Lowry wrote were those which so movingly display his love for the beach at Dollarton, British Columbia, his spiritual home.