Lost and Found

The real Lowry lost manuscript

23rd July, 2009 - Posted by Horatia - No Comments

Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909, in New Brighton, a small town for which I have a soft spot, just “over the water”, as we say, from Liverpool. He was a restless spirit who wanted to write, and did not want to follow his three older brothers into the family cotton-broking business. At the age of 18, he set sail from Liverpool as a deck-hand on a freighter bound for Yokohama.

Lowry’s first novel, Ultramarine, appeared in 1933 when he was 24 years old. Contrary to popular belief, Lowry did not leave the manuscript of this first novel in a taxi. The manuscript was stolen, yes, but it was in a briefcase taken from the convertible car of the publisher’s editor, Ian Parsons. Lowry alleged that he was forced to re-write the entire work in a matter of weeks because of this loss, but there was a carbon copy in existence, supplied by his friend, Martin Case, who had typed the final manuscript and kept the carbon copy Lowry had chucked in the bin.

Malcolm Lowry at work

Ultramarine tells the story of a young man growing up during a voyage to the Far East – so far, so autobiographical. The book was not a commercial success and Lowry was accused of plagiarism; he spent much of the rest of his life trying to suppress its circulation.

After Ultramarine appeared, Lowry began travelling through Europe with his friend and mentor Conrad Aiken, got married to the writer Jan Gabrial in Paris, and, in 1935, began a novel called In Ballast to the White Sea.

Also in 1935, Lowry moved to New York. He had begun a deep and meaningful relationship with alcohol at an early age, and this relationship continued while he and Jan moved to Los Angeles, then Mexico. Here he began what would turn out to be his masterpiece, Under the Volcano. By 1937, Lowry’s drinking caused Jan to leave him, and he was jailed in Oaxaca. When he was deported in July 1938, he returned to Los Angeles. Here he met Margerie Bonner, an aspiring writer and former silent-film child star. When Lowry moved to Canada after his American visa expired, Bonner followed him. They were married on December 2, 1940. For the next 14 years, they lived as squatters in a cabin without plumbing or electricity at Dollarton, up-inlet from Vancouver.

It was an isolated place. They had little money, apart from Lowry’s life-long allowance from his father, of course. And in 1944, their house burned down, immolating most everything they owned, including what had become a 1,000-page draft of In Ballast to the White Sea, nine years of literary labour, which Lowry never re-wrote. But Under the Volcano was published and has been acclaimed as the work of genius the dipsomaniac sobered up long enough to write.

In February 1956, Lowry and Margie came to live in another seaside town: Ripe, on the south coast of England. They were not happy. When Lowry threatened Margerie with a broken bottle, she said, she fled. She returned to the house on the morning of June 27, 1957 to find Lowry dead from an overdose of sleeping pills.

In a nice twist on the planet of lost manuscripts, before T.E. Lawrence burned his personal library, he saved the books he liked. One of these was a relatively unknown seafaring novel called Ultramarine. If he liked that so much, what would he have made of the truly disappeared In Ballast to the White Sea? An early draft of the novel has turned up in Jan Gabrial’s papers since her death, but the rewrites of Dollarton are truly gone.