[In the following essay, Wood contends that Lowry's short story “Ghostkeeper” reveals insights into his creative process and acts as a model for his later work.]

The 1973 publication of “Ghostkeeper” in American Review made available one of the most tantalizing of Malcolm Lowry's later stories. Most commentators who have mentioned it note that it exists only in a first draft with inserted notes for revision; and Margerie Lowry includes an apologetic footnote to this effect in her Psalms and Songs version (1975).¹ Yet this story, with its hesitations, variants for the next draft, Lowry's inserted notes, and apparent confusions and philosophical speculations, offers revealing glimpses into Lowry's creative processes. Moreover, while “Ghostkeeper” seems incomplete as a story by Malcolm Lowry, it functions as a complete story about a writer called Tom Goodheart who struggles to bring a story he is writing to completion. “Ghostkeeper” is, in fact, a remarkable piece of metafiction—a fictional work about the process of writing fiction.² Approaches to metafiction have appeared whenever storytellers within a fiction result in an inner frame, as in James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), or Beckett's trilogy, Molloy, Malone muert, L'Innommable (1951-53). The genre was first fully developed in Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926) but has continued to appear since, with impressive examples by Borges, Böll, Barth, Oates, and Ozick.³ Metafictional works dominate Lowry's output after Under the Volcano (1947), and “Ghostkeeper” presents a paradigm for all of these.

The story begins with Tom Goodheart and his wife Mary wandering through Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia. Landmarks are clear to anyone who knows the park; their route is easily followed. The focus of the story, however, centers on three occurrences bearing a mysterious relationship: first, the discovery of a wrecked boat on the beach with the name “H. Ghostkeeper” scrawled on it in chalk; second, a conversation with a Frenchman who tries to sell them a Swiss watch (they have left their watches at home); third, the finding of a watch inscribed with the name “Henrik Ghostkeeper” immediately after Tom has admonished some boys for throwing stones at the ducks in Lost Lagoon. Sprinkled through the narrative are various inconsequential events: “a man reading a Spiritualist newspaper, with a headline saying: Policemen Pursue Poltergeist” (PS, p. 205); another man reading a newspaper report of flying saucers (PS, p. 206). This sequence of events takes up roughly the first half of the story; the rest details the Goodhearts' attempt to locate the owner of the watch, who finally turns out to be not only one of the boys throwing stones, but also the person who had written his name on the boat.

At first the story seems conventional, utilizing a combination of narrative dialogue and description. Very soon, however, the story, while simple enough, begins to feel fragmented and incomplete, largely because of two complicating threads running through it. The first of these is internal. Tom Goodheart is the author of a daily newspaper column called “I Walk in the Park”; throughout the story he writes in a notebook and speculates about the story possibilities of this particular walk. After the Goodhearts find the watch in the park, a series of coincidences occur: in a movie they see a scene involving an exchange of watches; that night (February 5, 1952) Mary's watch stops at 10 p.m.—the exact hour, they learn the next morning, when King George VI died. Inspired by the speculation that he is now an “Elizabethan” writer, Tom begins writing a story about his walk in the park before the incidents he is writing about are resolved in real life. Soon he finds himself “standing within the possibilities of his own story and of his own life” (PS, p. 223). This leads to confusions, “wheels within wheels” (PS, p. 220): “fact is so confounded with fiction in Goodheart's mind that he … has the sense … that he is now a character in a story of which perhaps another or that other Henrik Ghostkeeper is the author, though perhaps Henrik Ghostkeeper hasn't yet made up his mind either what to do with him” (PS, p. 225). When Goodheart finishes his story about the events we have just witnessed, the events seem too inconclusive to make a story. Author and reader alike are disturbed:

He had finished his story but his mind was still sorely troubled. That Ghostkeeper! And “I Walk in the Park.” But who else walks in the park? Who else, up there, was writing? … And tell[ing] strange stories—Who else was writing, up there, about Kings dying, Elizabethans, invisible watches, flying saucers, … mandarin ducks … Henrik Ghostkeeper! If only one could be sure he were playing a game!

(PS, p. 227)

The second complication for the reader derives from the parenthetical notes incorporated into the story. Many consist of undeveloped narrative, others suggest alternate ways of developing the story, and still others are prefaced by the word “Mem,” suggesting either “memos” or “memories” to be incorporated in a revised draft:

The beach reminded the man of his birthplace, New Brighton, England, (if this can be done, because one theme is, or should be, rebirth.)

(PS, p. 203)

Mem: bottle like a grebe below in the bay: the bottle almost had the iridescence of a bird's plumage: ethereal, sea-green, bobbing, swimming.

(PS, p. 204)

(This brings me to Ortega—“A man's life is like a work of fiction, that he makes up as he goes along: he becomes an engineer for the sake of giving it form etc.”) I don't think any of the above should appear in the story—or do I?—of course and indeed now I've written it I scarcely know what it means.

(PS, p. 223)

To complicate things further, the story has clearly been dictated to Lowry's wife, Margerie. At one point it reads: “Mrs. Goodheart must be placed as a tiny, pretty woman, all but hidden in your sweet spooky grey costume, Margie dear” (PS, p. 206); a little later, this entry: “Mem: Important: Use Margie's note here about the young Frenchman and his watch. (This note follows)” (PS, p. 208). The shift from second to third person in references to Margerie suggests that Lowry may have tinkered with the dictated version later; in any case, what follows apparently is an excerpt from her journal (PS, pp. 208-10).

The use of such varied materials in “Ghostkeeper” makes it subject to the most persistent criticism of Lowry's work, especially since the release of Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961): as the anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer put it, “the roots of this whole collection are too transparently autobiographical … (which) may undermine the colossal achievement of Under the Volcano.”⁴ William Van O'Connor found “self-consciousness about writing, and the absence of a true subject” to be Lowry's “linked limitations”;⁵ for similar reasons Phoebe Adams described these stories as “of debatable relevance.”⁶ Reviewing Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (1968), Howard Kaye wrote that “Lowry's later writing is strictly and unabashedly autobiographical. … Only the names are changed, and that, indeed, is largely the work of his posthumous editors.”⁷ Matthew Corrigan, initially impressed with the book, later changed his mind: “It would seem feasible to publish the Grave manuscript simply as a journal—dropping the label ‘novel’ altogether, which is misleading. … Let's face it, Malcolm Lowry is not for public consumption.”⁸

These dismissals constitute a serious failure of critical interpretation, overlooking the development in these works of a highly individualistic metafiction quite unlike that being produced today. An array of writers have experimented by turning the writing process back upon itself to produce metafiction of great ingenuity. In John Barth, for example, whose experiments with this genre began with The Floating Opera (1955), sheer inventiveness has resulted in a virtuoso slickness most evident, perhaps, in Chimera (1972). With Lowry, however, the metafictional process works as a psychological—almost therapeutic—solution for the traumas, doubts, insights, and obsessions involved in being a writer. Here a species of metafiction emerges which has a biography, which is in fact a formal solution to a complex authorial problem: the entanglement that writing itself brings into the life of a writer.

An appreciation for the autobiographical aspects of Lowry's writing, and the subsequent development of metafiction, can only be gained through some acquaintance with the elements of his tumultuous life:⁹ a moderately wealthy but repressive family that gave him a privileged education, leading to intellectual excellence combined with guilt and early rebellion; an early sea voyage to the Far East, followed by a lifelong odyssey that took him back and forth between Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Canada (Under the Volcano was begun in Mexico, continued in California and British Columbia, completed in Ontario, and submitted for publication from Vancouver; Lowry received his acceptance in Mexico, read galleys in British Columbia and page proofs in New Orleans, and wrote a preface—never used—on a boat to Haiti); a violent, sometimes childish, always guilt-ridden personality that ruined one marriage and repeatedly shook a second; a remarkable ability to absorb and remember, making it possible for him to assimilate diverse experiences and use them in his fiction; a heroic struggle to write, first with complex manuscripts through repeated revisions, later with agents and publishers and reviewers, complicated by the apparently inevitable disasters of lost and burned manuscripts; and all of this punctuated by legal tangles—with his father's lawyers and representatives, American immigration officials, Mexican police, and civic authorities in Canada. Lowry was a wandering risk: consumed by dipsomania and able to drink in abnormal quantities; prone to disappearing, getting lost, falling in ditches; embroiling himself ever deeper in disaster. He was hospitalized for a broken back, admitted to Bellevue for psychiatric treatment; and toward the end of his life his alcoholism and unpredictable violence almost led to corrective surgery. Even his “death by misadventure”—consuming too many pills while impossibly drunk—was consistent with his style.

The more of Lowry's life that is known, the more accessible his work becomes, even while the sense remains of unplumbed depths. Events, even plot lines in all his works are illuminated by biographical knowledge. Yet Under the Volcano is the only work which has not suffered at the hands of the critics as the facts of Lowry's life have been made known. Even his biographer, Douglas Day, who spent seven years researching his subject—enough time to have discerned and penetrated Lowry's obsessions and their metafictional expression—breaks down before the central stories in Hear Us O Lord:

There is little to be said for the four pieces that follow “Through the Panama.” … “Elephant and Colosseum,” though much longer than “Strange Comfort [Afforded by the Profession], is just as insubstantial. … “Present Estate of Pompeii” is … certainly the most egregious failure in the collection. … Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place is, even considered as a series of meditations instead of short stories, rather bad.¹⁰

Day's study breaks down as literary biography where it fails to make the life illuminate Lowry's writings. Consistently this occurs with the metafiction.

Broadly speaking, the use of autobiography in Lowry's work occurs in two phases. Before Under the Volcano (1947) we find events of Lowry's life fictionalized in his works—principally in Ultramarine (1933), Lunar Caustic (1963: begun in 1934), “Enter One in Sumptuous Armour” (1975: written about 1930), “Hotel Room in Chartres” (1933), and “June the 30th, 1934” (1975).¹¹ The second phase occurs after Volcano, though not all the works written after 1947 are involved. Three stories in Hear Us O Lord—“The Bravest Boat,” “Gin and Goldenrod,” and “The Forest Path to the Spring,” along with the unfinished novel October Ferry to Gabriola (1970), utilize the same kind of fictionalized autobiography found in the early works. But in the middle stories of Hear Us O Lord, the second phase appears, signaled by the appearance within the story of a writer who is Lowry with a different name. This phase includes not only Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid but also the unfinished novel La Mordida and a projected novel to be called Eridanus. This catalogue does not include Under the Volcano, which is the axial work of Lowry's career, for it was the making of Volcano through ten years and four long drafts that progressively entangled Lowry in his own writing. Metafiction was simply the artistic expression of this entanglement.

Innumerable events of Lowry's life eventually found their way into Under the Volcano, though apparently not with the inevitability that we might initially assume. In June 1933, Lowry met a glamorous young American girl called Jan Gabrial, whom he married on January 6, 1934. From the start this marriage was a rocky affair. By late 1936, after a series of moves, separations, and returns including the sojourn at Bellevue Hospital in New York, the ill-fated couple had found their way to Los Angeles. Unable to find work (scriptwriting) and short of money, they decided to move to Mexico where expenses would be lower. Arriving in Acapulco on November 1 or 2, they were, by Christmas, living in a three-room bungalow at Number 15, Calle de Humboldt, in Cuernavaca, within sight of the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. The house had a garden and a swimming pool, and bordered on one of the town's several barrancas. Here, almost immediately, Lowry wrote the short story “Under the Volcano” (PS, pp. 187-201); moreover, as soon as it was done he apparently began to expand it into a novel. By May 1937, he had written a complete version of some 40,000 words—though the manuscript was later lost. Over the next several months, according to those who visited the Lowrys—Conrad Aiken, Arthur Calder-Marshall¹²—Lowry not only drank a great deal but experienced severe marital problems as a result of Jan's infidelities. Then, after a flamboyant affair with a neighbor, Jan abandoned Lowry in December 1937. Immediately following this estrangement Lowry took a trip alone to Oaxaca some 300 miles south of Cuernavaca—a kind of descent deeper into Mexico to what Lowry later termed “a city of dreadful night.”¹³ According to letters written to John Davenport, Conrad Aiken, and James Stern,¹⁴ the next few weeks were a dark night of the soul, full of hallucinations, suspicions, horrible dangers, “an absolutely fantastic tragedy” of isolation (SL, p. 11). He may have imagined being pursued and watched by the police but he was, at least once, thrown into jail. During this period, apparently, he established one remarkable friendship with an adventurous Zapotecan called Juan Fernando Márquez, with whom Lowry fenced and drank and, on at least one occasion, traveled into the hill country—until, just before the end of 1937, Márquez was transferred to Cuicuitlan. Alone again, Lowry wrote to Aiken early in January 1938: “Have now reached condition of amnesia, breakdown, heartbreak, consumption, cholera, alcoholic poisoning, and God will not like to know what else, if he has to, which is damned doubtful. … I have been imprisoned as a spy in a dungeon. … I spent Christmas—New Year's—Wedding Day there. … Don't think I can go on. Where I am it is dark. Lost” (SL, p. 15). Somehow Lowry managed to salvage himself from this labyrinthine nightmare, finding his way back to Mexico City by June and out of Mexico by July—though not without some complications when his visa expired.

Lowry's twenty months in Mexico eventually formed the foundation and ground plan of Under the Volcano, which was completed in a second draft of 360 pages about a year later in Los Angeles. The terrain of the story consisted of an artistically rearranged Cuernavaca (renamed Quauhnahuac), complete with the three-room bungalow, pool, garden, towering volcanoes, and plunging barranca. The central figure, the British Consul, is a doomed alcoholic plummeting ever deeper into the misery of a failed marriage and incapable of being rescued by his daughter, Yvonne, who arrives on the last day of his life. The framework, drawing on Lowry's own disastrous marriage with Jan and the subsequent terrors of Oaxaca, is largely autobiographical, with one difference: Lowry escaped the fate that his Consul could not.

As time went on the autobiographical elements in the novel accumulated. In Hollywood, in June 1939, Lowry met Margerie Bonner, a striking woman who had behind her a successful career as a horsewoman in western movies dating to the era before the talkies. Margerie followed Lowry to Vancouver, Canada, where they were married some time after settling in the idyllic Burrard Inlet community of Dollarton. There, with Margerie's help, Lowry wrote the third draft of Volcano, completed in the spring of 1940, and subsequently rejected by twelve publishers. In the course of the fourth draft, written between 1941 and 1944, the Consul's daughter Yvonne was altered to become his wife with a background strikingly like Margerie's—a brief career in Hollywood Westerns and an impressive knowledge of astronomy. All of this was superimposed on the original story drawn from Lowry's earlier marriage to Jan. Added too, was the distant northern wilderness which is so much a part of Yvonne's desire and dream through Chapter 9 of the published book—a paradise drawn from the tiny squatters' community at Dollarton where the Lowrys were living.

This kind of summation might lead one to imagine Under the Volcano to be rather thinly disguised autobiography, whereas the autobiographical basis is not discoverable from the novel alone. The finished book has such a powerful layering of meaning and symbolism that it reads initially as a remarkable work of imagination—as indeed it is. Few readers can imagine a real life as densely hopeless as the Consul's giving birth to a book of such cosmic proportions.

Since Lowry had successfully turned life into art of immediately acknowledged greatness, the question naturally arises as to why he chose another direction in subsequent works. Why did he not simply take up other experiences and invest them with the same kind of symbolic layering which made Volcano a remarkable success? Admittedly, he was well on the way in the unfinished October Ferry to Gabriola; but almost all of the other materials left at his death veered into metafiction. The explanation for this shift lies in a perhaps unexpected place.

The crucial factor in the emergence of Lowry's metafiction after 1947 is the ten-year-long process of writing Under the Volcano, including the multiple drafts and publishers' rejections. One of the book's earliest admirers, Robert B. Heilman, has placed Lowry, along with Dostoevsky, Melville, and Lawrence, in the tradition of Plato's Ion as a possessed artist. Heilman's evidence is textual:

The sense of a largeness that somehow bursts out of the evident constriction [the enclosing illness of the protagonist], the fertility that borders on the excessive and the frenzied, the intensity that is not a surrogate for magnanimity, and finally an apprehension of reality so vivid that it seems to slide over into madness—these are symptoms of the work of the “possessed” artist. … The materials appear to use him as an instrument, finding in him, as it were, a channel to the objective existence of art, sacrificing a minimum of their autonomy to his hand, which partly directs and shapes rather than wholly controls. This is how it is with Lowry.¹⁵

Putting it perhaps more succinctly, with the emphasis on the artist rather than the art, Margerie herself wrote to Harold Matson, Lowry's literary agent: “I tell you this: that only a person whose whole existence is his work, who has dominated and disciplined the volcano within him, at what a cost of suffering even I do not wholly understand, could have written such a book” (SL, p. 422).

Even without such testimony, however, the successive manuscripts tell a story of their own. Together they add up to more than 400,000 words, exclusive of the 1100 pages of “working notes” that led up to the final, fourth draft. The Herculean labor of all this, especially the writing of the fourth draft after twelve rejections, speaks eloquently of Lowry's determination to complete this novel; and the exegesis found in his 18,000-word letter to Jonathan Cape—“a document absolutely unique in literary history,” as Douglas Day describes it¹⁶—reveals his intention from the beginning to write a truly monumental novel.

It was Lowry's particular genius that he recognized his own obsession with the novel, ferreted it out, explored it, and eventually wrote it into the life of the Consul. Lowry's realization that a writer obsessed with greatness is a man entangled in his own work provided the paradigm which was then transformed and projected as the web of doom in which Geoffrey Firmin is caught. Like Lowry, the Consul is both a writer and an alcoholic; but Lowry's situation—an obsession with writing, and alcoholism as a minor complication—is reversed in the Consul, whose alcoholism becomes the metaphorical expression of his overwhelming obsession with self. So completely does his alcoholism dominate that the Consul's unrealized desire to write slips far into the background, a minor example of his paralysis of will, almost entirely overshadowed by his other demons. Lowry discovered that an obsessed life is a kind of living death, for it destroys everything else in its path: friendships, marriage, trust, desire, will, reason—even sanity. In Volcano he dramatized this discovery by presenting a life that was itself a living death, layering it with motifs from the Inferno, Doctor Faustus, The Waste Land, and La Machine infernale to secure the vision. What appears in the novel to be an overworked foreshadowing is really the Consul's obsession with the very doom which his obsession brings about. It is precisely this circular web—an obsession with death which guarantees it, a confounding of cause and effect—that reveals the origin of Lowry's metafiction. The writer obsessed with his own writing can possess only one story, and thus must write himself into his own fiction.

The implications of this dilemma are significant. Clearly the artist who is totally obsessed with his art must find himself in an unreal—which is to say, fictional—situation. Metafiction, at least in Lowry's case, is not simply a disguised account of a real life. Lowry writes from the other side of the metaphor, attempting to capture the sense that his life as an artist feels fictional: that much of the time his writing, with everything that the process entails, induces a sense of unreality.

Lowry's novel works at what Dale Edmonds calls “the immediate level”¹⁷ because Lowry created in the Consul's dipsomania an objective correlative for his own obsessions. But the novel works at numerous levels of symbolic meaning, too,¹⁸ and one of the most important—from the standpoint of the later metafiction—is to be found in the cabbalistic system running through the story. According to Margerie Lowry, Malcolm “jolted up” from his work on the book one day in the spring of 1942 and declared to her that his Consul was a black magician, or a white magician who had lost control and so was doomed by his own powers, which had turned against him.¹⁹ This twist of fate subsequently added a whole new range of symbolic layering to the book. Already conversant with such esoteric writers as Ouspensky, Swedenborg, Blake, Boehme, and Yeats, Lowry immediately plunged into The Cabbala; shortly after this he met a real Cabbalist, Charles Stansfeld Jones, better known in the Chicago group he formed as Frater Achad. Without attempting to follow the results of this influence through Volcano, it is sufficient to note that Lowry apparently believed in the power and efficacy of an invisible reality symbolized in The Cabbala; and he made the same kind of belief, though vastly disrupted, an integral part of the Consul's inescapable doom. In later works, too, suggestions of powerful magical forces continue to appear: the suggestion of poltergeists in “Ghostkeeper” (PS, p. 205), the witchcraft of Cosnahan's mother in “Elephant and Colosseum,”²⁰ and Ethan Llewelyn's cabbalism in October Ferry to Gabriola.

By the time Lowry had completed Under the Volcano late in 1944 the very writing of the book had created a stage upon which he would move for some time. In a certain sense this was simply an exaggerated version of the framework every author creates for himself with his works, beginning with their writing and continuing through the reading of galleys, page proofs, book reviews, and the inevitable contacts with new people that writing brings. In Lowry's case it was time to visit Mexico again, not only to look up Juan Fernando Márquez, his Oaxacan friend, but also to take Margerie to the landscape of volcanoes, barrancas, and cantinas that had occupied their imaginations so long. At this point, on a stage set by Volcano, Lowry suddenly felt his life turning into a fictional drama. During the final stages in its writing Lowry had felt the achievement of the book might be undercut by the appearance of Charles Jackson's bestseller, The Lost Weekend; en route to Mexico, dining one night in Los Angeles with Margerie's family, he found himself seated beside a photographer who had helped to film the movie version of Jackson's book. This was the first of what Lowry regarded as ominous events. Arriving in Cuernavaca and seeking accomodations, they found themselves directed to Number 24 on the Calle de Humboldt, the house which had served as the model for Jacques Laruelle's house in Under the Volcano. Immediately, as Lowry noted in his journals, he began to wonder if his fiction was consuming his life: if perhaps the death that he had evaded in 1938 was now about to consume him. The possibility that he had described his own death in the final chapter of his novel terrified Lowry. Perhaps he was enmeshed in a magical web; perhaps his obsession with death would lead to his own. When Jonathan Cape publishers suggested, then, that Under the Volcano (which they had kept for some six months) might not be publishable as it stood, Lowry was overwhelmed. One night, in the midst of writing his long reply to Cape (SL, pp. 57-88), he made a halfhearted attempt to slash his wrists. Five days later (January 16, 1946), having mailed the letter to Cape, Lowry set off with his wife for a visit to his “city of dreadful night,” Oaxaca, only to discover that the friend for whom they were searching, Juan Fernando Márquez, had been dead since 1939. Like Geoffrey Firmin, he had got completely drunk in a cantina, and, after getting into an argument with another drunk, had been shot to death. Thus, while Lowry had escaped the death invented for the Consul, his best friend had somehow been caught in the fiction.

Early in March, at the instigation of Margerie, they traveled to Acapulco, the scene of Lowry's visa problems in 1938. On the second morning after their arrival they were apprehended by representatives from the Immigration Office, ostensibly for an unpaid fine from 1938—a situation calling for the payment of la mordida, the extorted bribe familiar to tourists in Mexico. With little money and their passports back in Cuernavaca, they found themselves entangled in a monthlong struggle which confirmed Lowry's long-held belief that Mexico was his private hell. Identifying with his Consul, he found himself moving in a world he had invented: “It was as if he were the character, being moved about for the purposes of some other novelist and by him, in an unimaginable novel, not of this world, that did not, indeed, exist.”²¹

For Lowry all of this was a terrifying experience, for he felt caught in his own fiction. Under the Volcano, which had grown out of the nadir of Lowry's life, was a novel filled with darkness, but always a darkness with a strange luminosity—even clarity—about it: the gloom of the cantina where danger is clearly seen, the shadowy thunderheads that both conceal and reveal the overpowering volcanoes, the dark forest where Yvonne can see the wheeling constellations. But during his second sojourn in Mexico Lowry experienced a greater, almost total darkness descending, aptly captured in his next title: Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. He was alternately frightened and fascinated by a situation which, however fantastic it might seem, he took with utter seriousness. Suppose, having written a book about damnation and death, a book exploring the very foundations of hell, the author then found himself crushed in some way by the events of the book—pushed down, so to speak, even deeper than the deepest pits in the book. Facetiously, Lowry often said that he had returned to Mexico in 1945 to write a book called Under Under the Volcano (see SL, p. 267); and in Paris in 1948 he was asked, “Why do you write?” to which he responded: “Out of despair. I am always despairing, then I always try to write, I write always except when I am too despairing. If I should write again, I would write Under, Under, Under the Volcano.”²²

Dark as the Grave was the beginning of the metafictional writings, for it drew a new frame around the earlier book. Attributing Under the Volcano (renamed The Valley of the Shadow of Death) to an author called Sigbjørn Wilderness, Lowry places both book and author within a fictional frame. Wilderness is an author taking his wife Primrose to Mexico to show her the landscape of his fiction and meet a friend who was the model for a charactr in The Valley of the Shadow, as Martinez had been the model for Dr. Vigil in Volcano. This metafictional form was an ingenious expression of Lowry's continuing obsessions, especially his sense that his life was not only directed by his writing, but also that he himself was a character within his writing. As Lowry explained to his agent, Wilderness is “Ortega's fellow, making up his life as he goes along, and trying to find his vocation” (SL, p. 331). “I am absorbed in the new book to the extent of sometimes fifteen hours a day,” he wrote to his editor in 1949, “and boy, it has some theme, being no less than the identification of creator with his creation—Pirandello in reverse, or Six authors in search of his characters” (SL, p. 180).

Lowry worked on Dark as the Grave, concurrently with other works, for seven years until 1952, when he deposited the 705-page typescript in a bank vault where it remained until after his death. What was finally published in 1968 was a version edited by Margerie Lowry and Douglas Day, with the twelve-chapter pattern of Volcano repeated. Day is apologetic, and his expectations of what four more years might have done for the book are based on a comparison with Under the Volcano: “Lowry would have applied to it layer upon symbolic layer, tied together all his images in a tremendously complicated network of correspondences, and brought Sigbjørn Wilderness' quest into much sharper focus.”²³ It is notable that another critic, John Wain, while lamenting the tendency of the modern artist exemplified by Lowry “to gather his evidence from the self and leave it at that,” is thankful for “the simple and effective story of Dark as the Grave … which got out of his hands before he had a chance to inflate and overelaborate it, and which now comes before us with its own true, natural, and simple outlines.”²⁴

Both views, one damning what the other praises, seem irrelevant to the metafiction genre of the book, where neither symbolic layering nor simplicity are germane to the intent. It appears that we have here a breakdown only because the rhetoric of metafiction is improperly understood. If a traditional story with a coherent plot can be said to exist within a complete world which it creates (a description that would include fantasy and science fiction), the addition of the author inside a metafiction disrupts the coherence of this world. Once an author-writing-this-story is framed, a new story with a new emphasis results; the fictional center is no longer a written story but the process of writing itself. The written story is therefore likely to remain unfinished. Completion in metafiction results not when a story has been written, but rather when some sense of completion makes the writing of the story possible, feasible, or understandable. What has occurred in Dark as the Grave—at least in the edited publication—is an attempt to invent a new genre without a real break from the coherence of a traditional story. And, since the story looks traditional, it is generally criticized on the grounds that nothing happens; it lacks plot. A more relevant criticism of the book is the fact that it never accounts for itself. Thus, in a discussion of his writing, Wilderness is asked:

“Are you going to do some more work?”

“I don't suppose so. Because this would seem to be it.”

“What would you call it?”

“Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid.”

(DG, p. 157)

But we do have a book, which did involve more work. How? And why? The vital process of writing has been slighted in favor of a metaphysical knot.²⁵

Lowry's failure to grapple with the writing process makes perfect sense, for he apparently found little difficulty with it. His attention was captured by his sense of being enveloped within his writing: his most interesting metafictional experiments explore this sense through the device of inner frames and multiple frames. The most ambitious scheme was a series of interrelated novels, six or seven in all, which was to include both Ultramarine and Under the Volcano, bearing the title The Voyage That Never Ends. Lowry's plans and outlines were impressive, leading Robert Giroux, Editor-in-Chief at Harcourt, Brace and Company, to write in 1951 that Lowry's idea “promises what might be the most important literary project of the decade” (SL, p. 445). The development of its metafictional design is aptly illustrated in three of the works, of which only Dark as the Grave achieved any of its projected scope. Dark as the Grave, as already noted, contained The Valley of the Shadow of Death and its author, Sigbjørn Wilderness. A companion book, La Mordida, was to detail the incredible tangle that Wilderness and his wife encountered with Mexican authorities during March and April of 1946, while attempting to locate a friend who had figured prominently in The Valley of the Shadow. Thus La Mordida would have contained both Dark as the Grave and The Valley of the Shadow, like a series of Chinese boxes. The other companion book, Eridanus, was to consist of recollections of the Wildernesses as they sat in Laruelle's house in Cuernavaca remembering their life at Eridanus (Dollarton). The present time of Eridanus, then, would have fallen within the time chronicled in Dark as the Grave, but the major setting of the recollections, Eridanus, would have drawn into the fiction the place where not only Wilderness, but also the “real” author, resided while writing all of these books.

Clearly, this plan would have led to a voyage that never ended. In a labyrinth of reversing frames, Lowry would not only have had to write out his life, but also have his fictional authors write out theirs. The notebooks Lowry filled wherever he went suggest that this would have occurred had he lived longer. One can imagine a sequence of titles: Below the Dark Grave, Behind La Mordida, Beyond Eridanus—a kind of metavoyage that never ends. If this sounds like madness we should recall that the scheme all but drove Lowry mad. Possessed by his army of “familiars” like the Consul, haunted by personal demons, he continually found himself reliving the past, particularly when he was drunk, which was a good deal of the time. One has the sense of Lowry destroying himself, like Geoffrey Firmin, through sheer fecundity of imagination. Witness this letter from Europe in 1948 to Albert Erskine:

I have to confess … that in spite of this comparatively lucid burst of correspondence, that I am going steadily & even beautifully downhill: my memory misses beats at every moment, & my mornings are on all fours. Turning the whole business round in a nutshell I am only sober or merry in a whiskey bottle, & since whiskey is impossible to procure you can imagine how merry I am, & lucid, & by Christ I am lucid. And merry. But Jesus. The trouble is, apart from Self, that part (which) used to be called: consciousness. I have now reached a position where every night I write 5 novels in imagination, have total recall (whatever that means too) but am unable to write a word. I cannot explain in human terms the incredible effort it has cost me to write even this silly little note, in a Breughel garden with dogs & barrels & vin kegs & chickens & sunsets & morning glory with an approaching storm & a bottle of half wine.

And now the rain! Let it come, seated as I am on Breughel barrel by a dog's grave crowned with dead irises. The wind is rising too, both on the ocean & in the stomach.²⁶

Lowry seems to have moved about in a world so unreal that it looked fictional, constantly dreaming up more novels than he could possibly write. If Lowry was not lost in his own landscapes, he was lost in those of other artists—Brueghel's gardens, Dante's inferno, Goethe's Walpurgisnacht.

The failure of the projected Voyage That Never Ends, upon which Lowry worked for several years, was in part a lack of focus. Working on everything at once, he never quite completed anything, and left a huge collection of manuscripts at his death. This fragmented effort was, of course, symptomatic of his own fragmented condition. Profound psychological insight is not needed to grasp the psychic chaos at the center of his obsessive but curiously irregular alcoholism, his fits of depression, and his violent outbursts of anger. For Lowry, as for his Consul, equilibrium seemed impossible to maintain, even undesirable:²⁷ his usual condition consisted of a terrifying oscillation between almost complete isolation within the self and desperate attempts to flee from himself. Excessive self-indulgence was his solution: alcohol satisfied both extremes but resolved nothing. Chaos remained.

Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, virtually complete when Lowry died, provides us with a series of paradigms for Lowry's condition. The appropriate literary form is metafiction, in which the self-indulgent writer, writing about writing, finds his own identity blurring or breaking down. The first and final stories, “The Bravest Boat” (HUOL, pp. 13-27) and “The Forest Path to the Spring” (pp. 215-83), have paradisal settings in Stanley Park, and Dollarton, providing for the volume a point of departure and return, a kind of still point “on the very windrow of existence … at the edge of eternity” (pp. 242, 275) where the protagonists, like Lowry, are at peace with themselves. Between these stories are the metafictions. “The Bravest Boat” introduces these by posing a threat to the self, symbolized in the twelve-year voyage of a toy boat “through that chaos” which is the sea (p. 27). This is paralleled in the danger to a squirrel as it runs chattering across the top of a cage containing a pair of “the most Satanic beasts left living on earth,” Canadian lynxes (pp. 21, 23). Clearly, Lowry's selfhood was fragile, a kind of ride or run atop a frightening chaos. In the stories which follow, the threat becomes a genuine danger and a powerful force.

“Through the Panama” (HUOL, pp. 29-98) is based upon Lowry's sea voyage to Europe, which began from Vancouver on November 7, 1947, and carried him through the Panama Canal. The account is framed with an introductory title, “From the Journal of Sigbjørn Wilderness.” Major entries consist of a series dated from November 7 through mid-December, with various printed items interspersed. Some of these—newspaper clippings (p. 33), official forms given to the passengers (p. 49), the “Position Report” of the ship (p. 74)—are inserted in the journal by Wilderness; but the extended marginalia modeled after those in Coleridge's “Ancient Mariner” may be attributed to an exterior (implied) narrator who frames both Wilderness and his journal.²⁸ Within the journal itself, however, a series of inner frames appear, the primary level consisting of notes Wilderness is making for a novel about a certain Martin Trumbaugh: “the novel is about a character who becomes enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written, as I did in Mexico” (p. 30). This novel is The Valley of the Shadow of Death. “But now I am becoming enmeshed in the plot of a novel I have scarcely begun” (p. 30)—Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid—though the protagonist is no longer Wilderness but has become Trumbaugh. Or has it? Wilderness' notes for his novel are soon indistinguishable from Trumbaugh's notes for his. Both are writing a sequence of novels called The Voyage That Never Ends; both live at Eridanus; both have wives called Primrose. Much more completely than in Dark as the Grave, the identities of the author and his protagonist merge, leading Wilderness (Trumbaugh?) to note: “Man not enmeshed by, but killed by his own book and the malign forces it arouses. Wonderful theme” (p. 38). Every level of “Through the Panama” presents an author-protagonist plunging below his former Mexican novels; the appropriate subtitle for “Through the Panama” is, literally and figuratively, “Under Mexico.”

Geoffrey Firmin's descent in Under the Volcano into the “weight of the past,”²⁹ into the tyranny of self, is here transformed into the novelist's descent: a spiraling downward and inward until the writer is locked in his work. The locks of the canal function as the nadir of this journey, analogous to the frozen center of Dante's Inferno where Satan is locked in selfhood. Not surprisingly, Sigbjørn looks up at the controller of the canal machinery and sees not only a “ghastly image of the modern world” but also a model for his own metafiction:

All in all, though, gentlemen, what I would like to say about the Panama Canal is that finally it is a work of genius—I would say, like a work of child's genius—something like a novel—in fact just such a novel as I, Sigbjørn Wilderness, if I might say so, might have written myself—indeed without knowing it am perhaps in the course of writing. … God how the whole thing beautifully and silently works, this celestial meccano—with its chains that rise sullenly from the water, and the great steel gates moving in perfect silence, and with perfect ease at the touch of that man sitting up in the control tower high above the topmost lock who, by the way, is myself, and who would feel perfectly comfortable if only he did not know that there was yet another man sitting yet higher above him in his invisible control tower, who also has a model of the canal locks before him, carefully built, which registers electrically the exact depth of everything I do, and who thus is able to see everything that is happening to me at every moment—and worse, everything that is going to happen.³⁰

“Through the Panama” presents the possible escape and ascent from egoism, cast, as Geoffrey Durrant has so ably shown, in the symbolic framework of Neoplatonism.³¹ But the ascent is here only a possibility; before it occurs the metafictional blurring of identity continues, as protagonists are trapped in their stories or lost in the lives of other authors. “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession” (HUOL, pp. 99-113) presents Sigbjørn Wilderness again, but his metamorphosis from a Canadian novelist in “Panama” to an American writer on a Guggenheim Fellowship suggests the instability of identity central to these works. Wilderness is taking notes in Rome, where he visits (as Lowry did) the house in which John Keats died, with its displays of documents relating to Keats and Shelley. Retiring to a bar, an underground grotto reminiscent of the Mexican cantinas in Under the Volcano, Wilderness discovers earlier notes he made when he visited (as Lowry did) the house of Edgar Allan Poe in America, with its collection of relics. All of these were “intended to be private” (p. 107) but had become public, just as Lowry's private life had become public by its transformation into fiction. Opening a new notebook, Wilderness discovers a letter written in Seattle at “the lowest ebb of those low tides of his life” (p. 111). He finds that his own experience resembles Poe's, and an entry made during a visit to the Mamertine Prison, “The lower is the true prison” (p. 103), becomes “The lower is the true Seattle” (p. 110) in his musings.

Metafiction is here taken a step further as real authors, such as Keats, Shelley, and Poe, appear in the central frame with Wilderness in the outer frame—thus underlining his sense of being a fiction. Lowry's sense of being less real than his characters finds its appropriate vehicle through the reversal of frames, in which process the author is lost, waiting for his relics to achieve the public quality already attained by those of the great authors of the past.

“Elephant and Colosseum” (HUOL, pp. 115-73) provides still another metafictional exploration of lost or broken selfhood in the account of an author deliberately trying to further his public image by seeking a foreign translation of his book. Here the protagonist has written a novel called Ark from Singapore—a work whose plot has echoes of Ultramarine, with a publication success similar to Under the Volcano. Wilderness, with his shifting identities, has been replaced by Drumgold Cosnahan, whose birthplace on the Isle of Man aptly suggests the extremities of isolation Lowry is exploring. Cosnahan, the only Lowry protagonist after Volcano to travel without his wife, is wandering alone in Rome searching for proof of his reality in an Italian translation of his book. The translation may exist; Cosnahan never finds out. During the course of the story his single writing accomplishment is the composition of an empty publicity blurb (p. 154). In “Through the Panama” Wilderness is disgusted at the loss of identity implied in the reductive questions which passengers in transit must answer at the canal (p. 49); in “Elephant and Colosseum” Cosnahan registers no disgust at the journalistic half-truths of his reviewers (pp. 119-22), and his own blurb is equally reductive. Obsessed with guilt over his mother's death before he could reach her side, he wanders alone through crowds in Rome, discovering “an inferno, with twelve different kinds of buses coming at you from every direction, and swarms of motor-scooters hurtling at you!” (p. 129). In this extreme isolation his thought more than once breaks down into schizoid dialogue between “Cosnahan” and “Drumgold” (pp. 115, 139, 158).

If Cosnahan's previously published book and the reviews he carries provide one inner frame, a second occurs in the story “The Dinghy,” written by a fellow sailor, Quattras, years earlier. This story is a fabulous elaboration of adventures at sea which Quattras sees as more true than reality (pp. 145-46); and Quattras' later attempts to become a success in Canada reveal him as another Lowry persona.

Cosnahan's pursuit leads him into deeper isolation when the publishing agent in Rome knows nothing of him or his novel. Learning that the main office is located in Turin, he discovers he has been wandering in the wrong city. At this extreme point—he is lost, unknown, alone—the real world intrudes. The factual center of his sea voyage, artfully disguised in Ark from Singapore to the point that even Cosnahan had lost sight of it, forces itself upon him when he discovers Rosemary, the elephant which had accompanied him on the ship from the Far East, in the Rome zoo. In an emblematic passage he recalls saving himself from a storm by lashing himself to Rosemary's cage (p. 166). Realizing that his descent into fiction has been a flight into death, “Cosnahan felt that he'd woken up” (p. 169). The reunion with Rosemary—comically sexual in the absence of a female traveling companion—functions by restoring meaning, teaching him to accept his mother's death, redirecting his futile quest, and establishing a new contact with the real.

Like Wilderness, Cosnahan senses that he is somewhere inside a larger fiction. He feels himself propelled toward the zoo by a powerful magic inherited from his mother, a witch, suggesting the cabbalistic forces of Volcano. At one point, recalling the storm at sea, he remembers a scene remarkably reminiscent of the controller-novelist perched high above the Panama Canal: “At the silently turning wheel above on the bridge a dilatory man stood with his eye on wilder tropes than that of the compass: Quattras” (p. 168). This suggests an interaction of metafictional frames. Momentarily he is inside a fiction more true than the real. But he discovers, even while enmeshed in both voyage and book, the escape from the albatross of selfhood that comes with a discovery of tangible reality. With this, the fourth and central story, the downward progress of the volume reverses; the eventual return to equilibrium at Eridanus begins. The final stories move progressively from remembrance of to placement in Eridanus.

These remembrances occupy most of the attention of Roderick McGregor Fairhaven, protagonist of “Present Estate of Pompeii” (HUOL, pp. 175-200), as he tours the ancient ruined city with his wife Tansy. These recollections and the restored wife signal the return from isolation. Fairhaven and Tansy are versions of Lowry and Margerie, but his altered vocation—Fairhaven is a Canadian schoolmaster—eliminates metafiction. Indeed, metafictional possibilities are limited to the presence of Wilderness as a fellow resident of Eridanus; but his writing is not mentioned. The story functions as a forerunner to “The Forest Path to the Spring,” with the city of Pompeii carrying roughly the same symbolic weight attached to Enochville (Vancouver) in the later story. Roderick's lonely wanderings in Pompeii isolate him from his environment: “I was thinking,” he notes, “… about the malaise of travelers, even the sense of tragedy that must come over them sometimes at their lack of relation to their environment” (p. 177). In “The Forest Path” this tragedy of human isolation is associated with Enochville, across the water from Eridanus: the narrator has achieved wholeness and a meaningful identity in his escape from Pompeii-Enochville, just as Lowry himself achieved peace after his escape from Oaxaca-Vancouver.

As Hear Us O Lord moves to its conclusion through “Gin and Goldenrod” (pp. 201-14) to “The Forest Path” (pp. 215-83), wholeness of identity is restored, and the multiple frames of metafiction disappear. The splintering of identity created by inner frames in the central stories reveals that metafiction functions for Lowry as a formal expression of his own fears, obsessions, and guilt. At Eridanus, these are gone: the unnamed narrator of “Forest Path” who dedicates the story “To Margerie, my wife” is Lowry—unnamed, however, because his identity is no longer focused on authorship but instead absorbed into the “eternal flux and flow” of inlet, ocean, forest, stars, and spring—the time of rebirth, the source of life.³² Threats to identity disappear: a mountain lion slinks away into the forest on command (p. 262), an emblematic reversal of the terrible threat of the lynxes in “The Bravest Boat.”

The remarkable promise of Lowry's last but unfinished novel, October Ferry to Gabriola, tantalizingly close to realization, rests in its escape from the involution of metafiction. Like Under the Volcano, October Ferry is autobiographical, full of fears and traumas—but not about writing. In its promise of a relatively complete objectification of biographical materials, October Ferry would clearly have become the companion book for the earlier masterpiece. It does not fall far short. From this perspective the real nadir in the Lowry canon is not the barranca of Under the Volcano but rather the constricting spirals of Hear Us O Lord, with its frames within frames, fictions written by unreal authors, and stories in which the writer becomes an actor with no script, a character in search of his author.

“Ghostkeeper,” then, to return to the place we began, is paradigmatic of Lowry's metafiction and is, in fact, of a piece with the stories in Hear Us O Lord. The wrecked boat echoes the carved toy in “The Bravest Boat” found on the same beach; the same anxieties about writing appear in Tom Goodheart; and significant parallels—the flying-saucer omens of “Ghostkeeper,” for instance, appear in “Present Estate of Pompeii” (HUOL, p. 181)—link this story with the collection. “Ghostkeeper” may be unfinished, but its tentative notes and memos, false starts and irresolution are the very features characteristic of metafiction at its most effective. Moreover, this story is unique in that it occurs near the idyllic setting of Eridanus—a feature placing it apart from the rest of Lowry's metafiction. All of the other works examined suggest that Lowry's metafictions resulted from the threats to identity posed whenever he traveled away from Eridanus, back to Mexico, under Mexico, or beyond Mexico to Europe. “Ghostkeeper” appears to be the one story in which the form was used for artistic, as well as psychological, purposes. The metafictional stories in Hear Us O Lord date from Lowry's European trip between November 1947 and January 1949; “Ghostkeeper” dates from 1952—a time of creativity and stability for Lowry. What the story suggests is that Lowry had found a form appropriate for the peculiar maze of fears and anxieties felt in the months following Volcano—a form which he eventually might have developed, given enough time, into an artistic genre severed from the psychological chaos which had given it birth.

Notes

1. Malcolm Lowry, “Ghostkeeper,” American Review, No. 17 (May 1973), pp. 1-34; reprinted in Malcolm Lowry: Psalms and Songs, ed. Margerie Lowry (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 202-27. Cited hereafter in the text as PS.

2. Among the very few treatments of metafiction available the following are useful: Robert Scholes, “Metafiction,” Iowa Review, 1, No. 4 (Fall 1970), 100-15; Neil Schmitz, “Robert Coover and the Hazards of Metafiction,” Novel, 7, No. 3 (Spring 1974), 210-19; Larry McCaffery, “The Art of Metafiction: William Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife,” Critique, 18, No. 1 (1976), 21-35.

3. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 36-44, is one of several experiments in the same volume verging on metafiction; see also Heinrich Böll, “The Seventh Trunk,” in Eighteen Stories, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 233-43; John Barth, “Life-Story,” Lost in the Funhouse (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 116-29 provides a short introduction to the extensive metafictional experiments of a major author; Joyce Carol Oates, “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Again,” TriQuarterly, No. 15 (Spring 1969), pp. 5-21; Cynthia Ozick, “Usurpation (Other People's Stories),” Bloodshed and Three Novellas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 131-78.

4. “A Prose Waste Land,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 May 1962, p. 338.

5. William Van O'Connor, “The Echoing Ego,” The Saturday Review, 27 May 1961, p. 19.

6. Phoebe Adams, “Neurotic Limbo,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1961, p. 96.

7. Howard Kaye, “Autobiography and Novel,” The New Republic, 12 Oct. 1968, p. 38.

8. Matthew Corrigan, “Malcolm Lowry, New York Publishing, and the ‘New Illiteracy,’” Encounter, July 1970, p. 83. Corrigan's earlier treatment, “Masks and the Man: The Writer as Actor,” is found in Shenandoah, 19, No. 4 (Summer 1968), 89-93.

9. Principal sources for biography are Douglas Day, Malcolm Lowry: A Biography (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973); M. C. Bradbrook, Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974); and a number of personal remembrances, the most important of which are now reprinted in Psalms and Songs.

10. Day, Malcolm Lowry, pp. 453-59.

11. These stories and the novella Lunar Caustic are all available in Psalms and Songs.

12. Conrad Aiken, Ushant: An Essay (1952; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971) includes Lowry in the fictional guise of “Hambo”; see also Arthur Calder-Marshall, “A Portrait of Malcolm Lowry,” The Listener, 78, No. 2011 (12 Oct. 1967), 461-63.

13. Selected Poems, ed. Earle Birney (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962), p. 28. Cited hereafter in the text as SP.

14. Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965), pp. 11-13, 15, 27-30. Cited hereafter in the text as SL.

15. Robert B. Heilman, “The Possessed Artist and the Ailing Soul,” Canadian Literature, No. 8 (Spring 1961), pp. 8-9. This article incorporates Heilman's earlier review of Under the Volcano in Sewanee Review, 55, No. 3 (July-Sept. 1947), 488-92.

16. Day, Malcolm Lowry, p. 317.

17. Dale Edmonds, “Under the Volcano: A Reading of the ‘Immediate Level,’” Tulane Studies in English, No. 16 (1968), pp. 63-105, remains one of the indispensable studies of the work; this approach is extended to a detailed treatment of chapter 12 by Andrew J. Pottinger, “The Consul's ‘Murder’” Canadian Literature, No. 67 (Winter 1976), pp. 53-63. The most valuable study of the Consul's drunkenness is Art Hill, “The Alcoholic on Alcoholism,” Canadian Literature, No. 62 (Autumn 1974), pp. 33-48.

18. Apart from Lowry's letter to Jonathan Cape (SL, pp. 57-88), the most valuable treatments of symbolic levels in Volcano are Tony Bareham, “Paradigms of Hell: Symbolic Patterning in Under the Volcano,” On the Novel: A Present for Walter Allen on His 60th Birthday from His Friends and Colleagues, ed. B. S. Benedikz (London: J. M. Dent, 1971), pp. 113-27; and Douglas Day's outline for a Gestalt reading in Malcolm Lowry, pp. 322-50.

19. Perle Epstein, The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano and the Cabbala (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 13.

20. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961), p. 125. Cited hereafter in the text as HUOL.

21. Quoted by Day, Malcolm Lowry, p. 356, from the typescript of La Mordida, p. 58, housed in the Special Collections Division at the University of British Columbia Library.

22. Day, Malcolm Lowry, p. 400.

23. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, ed. Douglas Day and Margerie Lowry (Toronto: General Publishing Company, 1968), p. xxii. Cited hereafter in the text as DG.

24. John Wain, “Another Room in Hell,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1968, p. 86.

25. Because Dark as the Grave encloses a traditional situation—an invented fiction that looks like the real world—the equation Wilderness makes between living his life and writing his book fails. What appears to be required is a further step: the invention of a world that looks like a fiction, as William Gass has done in his story, “In the Heart of the Country” (1968). The result is that the narrator of the story is invented as part of the world that looks like a fiction. In this case, the equation between living his life and writing his story works exactly; indeed, comprehension depends entirely on realizing this equation.

26. SL, p. 165. From Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry. Copyright © 1965 by Margerie Bonner Lowry. Reprinted by permission of J. B. Lippincott Company.

27. See Martin Trumbaugh's musings on the undesirable state of “equilibrium” in “Through the Panama,” HUOL, pp. 77-78.

28. See Sherrill E. Grace, “Under the Volcano: Narrative Mode and Technique,” Journal of Canadian Fiction, 2, No. 2 (1973), 57-61, for a useful study of the implied narrator which perhaps ought to be extended to the metafictional works.

29. Under the Volcano (1947; rpt. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965), p. 280.

30. HUOL, pp. 62-63. From Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place by Malcolm Lowry. Copyright © 1961 by Margerie Bonner Lowry. Reprinted by permission of the J. B. Lippincott Company.

31. Geoffrey Durrant, “Death in Life: Neo-Platonic Elements in ‘Through the Panama,’” Canadian Literature, No. 44 (Spring 1970), pp. 13-27.

32. See Barry Wood, “The Edge of Eternity,” Canadian Literature, No. 70 (Autumn 1976), pp. 51-58, for a study of the interrelated symbolism and its relation to identity in “The Forest Path to the Spring.”