The desperate fate of Malcolm Lowry

Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t pastiche Lowry?’ Crushing criticism; also just. At that time in my writing and drinking life I was in thrall to Malcolm Lowry. So indeed was Anthony and much of our late night/early morning conversation in bars drew heavily on Under the Volcano, often indeed consisted of quotations from the novel. ‘And often the poor guy, he had no socks’ — that sort of thing.

In a letter to his publisher Albert Erskine, Lowry described his character/alter ego Sigborn Wilderness, who features in several stories and in one of his rambling, unfinished novels (edited, added to, and published after his death by his widow, Margerie) as being ‘not, in the ordinary sense in which one encounters novelists or the author in novels, a novelist’.