Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

”You are walking on the edge of an abyss where I may not follow. I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes. Who is to stand between? Who can prevent?”

Who indeed even now could prevent? He wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever before to be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her now?

“What’s the time?” “Sick,” answered the man. “No, it er ah half past sick by the cock.” “You mean half past six by the clock.” “Sí señor. Half past sick by the cock.”

that might have been a solution, to return there, to build, if not on his island, somewhere there, a new life with Yvonne. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Or why hadn’t she? Or had that been what she was getting at this afternoon, and which had half communicated itself to his mind? My little grey home in the west.

But now too at least this much was clear. He couldn’t go back to Yvonne if he wanted to. The hope of any new life together, even were it miraculously offered again, could scarcely survive in the arid air of an estranged postponement to which it must now, on top of everything else, be submitted for brutal hygienic reasons alone.

The Chief fired twice more, the shots spaced, deliberate. Thunderclaps crashed on the mountains and then at hand. Released, the horse reared; tossing its head, it wheeled round and plunged neighing into the forest. At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realised he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. “Christ,” he remarked, puzzled, “this is a dingy way to die.”

He could feel his life slivering out of him like liver, ebbing into the tenderness of the grass. He was alone. Where was everybody? Or had there been no one.

Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying … Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

Lowry spent years writing, revising, polishing, and finally finishing Under the Volcano (1947). The novel drew from Lowry’s own disintegrating life and his experiences in Mexico.

Under the Volcano would be the last novel Lowry published during his lifetime. In 1957, Lowry died from asphyxiation after a night of heavy drinking.

Lowry’s reputation grew with the posthumous publication of the story collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961) and the novel October Ferry to Gabriola (1970), among other titles.