CHAPTER VI

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150.1 Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in.

Dante's Inferno

It. "In the middle of the bloody road of our life I found myself in": the opening lines of Dante's Inferno [see #3.7]. Lowry invariably quoted this line with "in" rather than the correct per. Though only 29 (the phrase normally indicates 35, halfway between Hugh and his half-brother [see #183.6], and Dante's age at the time of writing), Hugh is very much at the mid-point of his life, seeking the right path.

Asals points out [Making, 110-11] that Lowry in 1941 assigned Hugh his own age of 33 (as many clouds passing by, "his years"), but adjusted it to 29, his age in 1938 [UBC 30-1, l]. There, Lowry opened the chapter with the shaving scene. Margerie's outline [UBC WT 1-14] headed "Geoffrey and Hugh" testifies to this change of age.

150.2 his thirtieth year.

An echo of François Villon's 'Testament' (1461), in which the poet reviews his life, his mistakes, his tragedies of love and his sufferings; expressing his horror of sickness, old age, the jail, poverty and death; and makes a number of "bequests", many ironic or facetious, to those in his life. The poem begins:

150.3 A.E. Housman.

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), poet and classical scholar, best known for his A Shropshire Lad (1896), which treats with an economy of diction and simplicity of style treat the sadness of passing youth and the inevitability of death, as in Poem XLIX:

150.4 in the twinkling of an eye.

From I Corinthians 15:52; like Laruelle [10], Hugh feels intensely the passing of time. The "four years" he adds to his present 29 brings him to thirty-three, the age at which Christ died, having accomplished his mission.

151.1 Old Compton Street.

A short street in Soho, London, off Charing Cross Road to the west of Tottenham Court Road; for many years, the centre of the music-publishing industry.

151.2 prepared to lead the whole Jewish race out of Babylon itself.

The Babylonian Captivity is that period of exile for the Jewish nation after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (II Kings 24 & 25), until the conquest of Babylon by the Persians in 538 BC, when Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Palestine. Psalm CXXXVII recollects this time of bondage: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, / Yea we wept, when we remembered Zion."

151.3 The seagull.

Compare the ‘Circe’ scene of Joyce's Ulysses, where seagulls fly to Bloom's rescue during his imagined trial, reminding him of the corporeal work of mercy he had earlier performed. The episode anticipates the hint of Chekov's The Seagull in the Consul's "little white birds" [see #228.4], and Yvonne's releasing the eagle [320]. The "edible stars" are, literally, starfish. See also 'The Glaucous Winged Gull' [CP, #136]. In a draft of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-21, 622], Lowry offers a gloss: "Hail to the seagull, in the Empyrean / Who man's head useth as a spare latrine" (repeated in October Ferry [307]).

152.1 a reflected small sun.

As it has done (or will do) at the outset of the novel [see #4.9].  

152.2 Oxford Street.

An important shopping street in central London.

152.3 on his uppers.

In total poverty (the soles of his shoes worn through).

152.4 Shades of Charles Dickens!

In Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), Bob Cratchit, the ill-used clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge [see #223.3], leads a life of penury until the unexpected generosity of the repentant Scrooge safeguards his family's happiness.

152.5 Is it nothing to you all ye who pass by?

Hastings St War Memorial, Vancouver

In Lamentations 1:12 Jeremiah bewails the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity: "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be an sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger." This verse is inscribed on the War Memorial in Hastings Street, Vancouver, which Lowry often passed en route to the bus station [Rick Asals to CA].

152.6 the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street.

The Fitzroy Tavern, 16 Charlotte Street, just north of Soho, was in the 1930s a bohemian pub and one of Lowry's favourite haunts. George Orwell, a committed socialist, avoided the Fitzroy once it became "overbourgeoisified" [Weintraub, The Last Great Cause, 89].

153.1 when even the Russians had given up.

By October 1938, the Russians, who had initiated the idea of the International Brigades and contributed substantially towards them, agreed to their withdrawal; and by the end of November the last volunteers had left Spain. Stalin's motivation was twofold: the writing was on the wall for the Republicans, and he was already contemplating the alliance with Hitler that would be the ultimate betrayal of international socialism [see #328.7].

153.2 the City of Destruction.

In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Christian flees the City of Destruction [Isaiah 19:18], leaving his wife and children, his friends and comforts, and makes his way through the Slough of Despond and the Valley of Humiliation towards the Celestial City. The "old dodge" is that employed by his neighbours, who accuse him of deserting his family and responsibilities; "to shake the dust from one's feet" derives from Matthew 10:14, where Jesus tells his disciples: "And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet."

153.3 A piece of driftwood on the Indian Ocean.

The Patna of Conrad’s Lord Jim hit something like this in mid-ocean [see #33.1].

153.4 an untouchable.

In India, a member of the lowest caste, numbering millions, contact with whom was considered to defile those of higher status, especially Brahmins. Gandhi, calling them Harijans, "Children of God", did much to remove discrimination against them.

153.5 The Andaman Islands.

A group of islands in the Bay of Bengal, forming part of the Indian state of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Port Blair, the only real town, was established as a penal colony in 1858, following the Indian Mutiny, and gained an unenviable reputation as a settlement rife with disease and brutality, from which few returned. At one point, the British considered sending Gandhi there.

153.6 until England gives India her freedom.

Under the leadership of Nehru's Congress Party and with the moral guidance of Gandhi, the Indian nationalist movement made dramatic gains in popular support during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1938 it was clear that independence was only a matter of time, and despite huge political and religious problems (including the status of Kashmir), freedom and the partition of the sub-continent were finally realised on 15 August 1947.

153.7 Mahatma Gandhi.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian politician, social reformer and moral leader, whose policies of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience were largely responsible for forcing the British government eventually to grant Indian independence. The title Mahatma, "Great Soul", was given to him by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, in recognition of the moral and practical qualities that led him to denounce imperialism as a satanic system, to work for the rights of the untouchables, and to improve both social and spiritual conditions for millions. Gandhi opposed Indian involvement in World War II, even in return for independence, and he viewed the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 as a spiritual tragedy and a personal disaster. On 30 January 1948, at a prayer-meeting in Delhi, he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.

153.8 Stalin.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (1879-1953), Soviet statesman and leader of Russia for almost thirty years. Born in Georgia, he studied for the priesthood (like Juárez), but became an active revolutionary and took part in the civil war of 1917. After the death of Lenin he took power, beating off the challenge from Trotsky, and by a series of five-year plans and sweeping legislative changes he made Russia into a giant industrial state. Hugh ignores with the ruthless purges and forced labour camps that Stalin used to eliminate all opposition. Hugh's respect for Stalin, apparently odd when set alongside that for Gandhi, Cárdenas and Nehru, was not untypical of many English socialists and liberals in the 1930s, when the full extent of Stalin's oppressive measures was unknown and before the unholy alliance with Hitler. Similar attitudes are reflected in In Ballast to the White Sea, where the journey to Russia is a dominant metaphor.

153.9 Cárdenas.

Lázaro Cárdenas (1895-1970), Mexican president, 1934-40, admired by Hugh for his policies of socialist and agrarian reform [see #107.7].

153.10 Jawaharlal Nehru.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), Prime Minister of India on independence from 1947 to 1964. Educated in science and law at Harrow and Cambridge, he played a vital role in the negotiations over independence, and under his relatively enlightened Congress Party, India made dramatic social and industrial progress. Hugh's respect for Nehru in 1938, before Indian independence, shows that he is closely in touch with world politics.

154.1 poltergeists of the ether, claquers of the idiotic.

Poltergeists (Ger. poltern "to make a great noise" and Geist "spirit"): ghosts responsible for otherwise inexplicable noises; claquers (Fr. claquer, "to applaud") are fawning admirers. In a crazy parody of Geoffrey's familiars and the demonic realm of existence, the voices tell of the deluge ("news of a flood"), misery and disaster. Epstein comments [120]: "All occultists consider the ether to be a fifth element. More refined than the others, it contains all events of our world, past, present, future. It can be 'tuned in' only by those who are sensitive to its presence." Keyserling's The Recovery of Truth [113] argues that there is "no strict line between external and internal phenomena: man is no less responsible for what befalls him than for what he does ... Man encounters only occurrences allowed to his particular nature, since his unconscious conjures up the accidents that befall him."

154.2 Joe Venuti.

Joe Venuti

"Joe" Guiseppe Venuti (1898-1978), violinist. The son of immigrant Italian workers, he was raised in Philadelphia where he met Eddie Lang [see #154.3], a consistent member of his celebrated "Blue Four" with whom he made countless recordings. After Lang's death, Venuti brought a group to London, where he recorded on violin and guitar, and, back in the States, regularly led his own band. Lowry often pointed out that Venuti was born in mid-Atlantic, which made him a kind of Atlantean; soaring above the "abyssal fury".

154.3 Ed Lang.

Eddie Lang

Eddie Lang, real name Salvatore Massaro (?1902-33), guitarist. While still at school he became a friend of Joe Venuti, and for most of his career worked alongside him. When Lang died in 1933 (from complications following a tonsillectomy) they had made over seventy recordings together, including many of Lowry's favourites. His death is recalled in Lowry’s poem, ‘Letter from Oaxaca to North Africa’ [CP, #16]:

154.4 poetical names like Little Buttercup or Apple Blossom [sic].

Recordings by Joe Venuti's Blue Four (details from James Doyle, MLN 7, 12-13):

154.5 bacon scrubber.

One who removes (with hot water) the bristles from the carcass of a pig before it is cut up for pork. Hugh's summation is similar to that in Tom Harrisson’s 'Letter to Oxford' [13].

154.5 Newcastle-under-Lyme.

An industrial town in north Staffordshire, in the heart of the Arnold Bennett country, "quite another thing" from Newcastle, Delaware [84].

155.1 Wardour Street ...  the Marquis of Granby ... the old Astoria in Greek Street.

The Marquis of Granby

Tithebarn Street

Hotels and streets in the Soho area of central London, off the Tottenham Court Road. The Marquis of Granby, at 2 Rathbone Street, was an occasional haunt of Lowry's [Day, 149]. Tithebarn Street, however, is in downtown Liverpool.

155.2 Like a nightmare in the soul of George Frederic Watts.

'Hope'

George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), English painter and sculptor, whose first and lasting renown was for his portraits, though in his later years he turned increasingly to sculpture, fresco, and allegory. Untouched by Pre-Raphaelitism and impressionism alike, he regarded his art as the expression of a moral idealism that captured the essence of the human soul. As the phrase ‘giving up hope’ suggests, Hugh has in mind Watt's best known painting, 'Hope' (1886), now in the Tate Gallery: a figure, seen at first as a picture of Despair but exemplifying the hopelessness out of which Hope arises, sits on a globe, her eyes covered, clutching a "songless lyre" with but one string left.

155.3 steamflies.

Blattella germanica, or the German cockroach.

155.4 Segovia.

Andres Segovia (1894-1987), self-taught Spanish master of the classical guitar whose excellence forced classical audiences to recognise the guitar as a serious musical instrument. He extended its possibilities by developing new techniques, particularly for the right hand, to create a wider range of tone and volume; and, to increase the quality of the repertory, transcribed works by other composers and encouraged other players to do the same. Exiled he was, having been forced to leave his home in Spain by the Civil War; dying he was not, since he was still giving concerts in the early 1980s.

155.5 Django Reinhardt.

Django Reinhardt

Jean Baptiste Reinhardt (1910-53), Belgian jazz guitarist who grew up in a gypsy camp, was burned in a caravan fire, and had to devise new fingering techniques to overcome the handicap of a mutilated left hand. He worked with Stephane Grappelli and became an international celebrity, living in France, but recording with top American jazz musicians. A gifted composer and teacher, he was above all an outstanding soloist with a profound sense of harmony, melodic resourcefulness, and a flair for spontaneity.

155.6 Frank Crumit.

Frank Crumit (1889-1943) was an American singer and composer of popular songs, with a repertoire of over ten thousand tunes. He appeared in music hall, on the radio and on Broadway, usually accompanying himself on a ukelele or (less often) guitar or banjo. Hugh's "God help him" reflects Crumit's popular success with songs like 'Abdul Abulbul Ameer' and 'Down on a Bamboo Isle', as opposed to the art of Reinhardt and Venuti.

155.7 the Scotch Express.

The 4472 "Flying Scotsman", on the overnight 392-mile Edinburgh to London route (then the longest non-stop journey in the world). The service was inaugurated 1 May 1928 and aroused great public interest as successive journeys chipped minutes off the record. An oblique reference to Geoffrey's drinking and death-train may be intentional (one would expect ‘Scots’).

155.8 Parlophone.

In New York and London, the label of the firm who were leaders in the field of popular song and jazz during the 1920s and 1930s. Hugh's "rhythm classic" picks up the theme of 'Juggernaut' in the opening paragraph of the novel [see #3.5(d)].

156.1 writing songs at school.

As had Lowry. Douglas Day [88-90] offers an account of his collaboration with Ronnie Hill, and features two songs they wrote together, ‘I’ve Said Good-bye to Shanghai’ and ‘Three Little Dog-gone Mice’ [see #157.1].

156.2 New Compton Street, London.

An address mildly inconsistent with that given earlier [151]: "Old Compton Street". New Compton Street was a continuation (now blocked off) of Old Compton Street, on the other side of Charing Cross Road. ‘Three Little Dog-gone Mice’ was published (1927) by Worton David Ltd of 6 New Compton Street.

156.3 another frustrated artist, Adolf Hitler.

Adolph Hitler (1889-1945), German demagogue and Führer of a Germany which in 1938 was only too obviously set on war. In his early years, Hitler had entertained the thought of becoming an artist. At eighteen he applied for entrance into the Vienna Academy of Art, but failed the entrance examination. During his next few years, before the outbreak of war in 1914, he eked out a precarious living, partly by selling his drawings (some through a Jewish dealer), by drawing posters and advertisements for small shops, and by various poorly paid labouring jobs including, at least once, painting houses.

156.4 the tin-pan alleys.

The original Tin Pan Alley, on 28th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, was the hub of America's popular song and music publishing industry in the 1890s and 1900s. As pianos, guitars and ukeleles became cheaper and more popular, publishers became aware that a huge popular market had suddenly emerged.  The name of the street soon came to be used for the sentimental songs published there and for the world of popular music.

156.5 at some crammer's.

O.E. crammian, "to squeeze"; one who prepares students for an examination by force-feeding facts. After returning from the East, Lowry lodged for a time in 1928-29 in Blackheath, at 5 Woodville Road (no longer identifiable). He attended the "cramming" establishment of "Jerry" Kellett, an ex-Leys master, to get respectable academic credentials before going up to Cambridge.

156.6 the Public Trustees.

Persons appointed by the courts to act as controllers of wills or settlements; they are in charge of money or property left to others, and pay out such moneys according to the directions left in the will [see also #78.7]. Lowry was in such hands for much of his life.

157.1 he had other songs.

As Hugh is aware, the pseudo-southern titles of these "other songs" are a likely measure of their originality. His 'I'm Homesick for Being Homesick' may be equivalent to the vocal fox-trot, 'I've Said Good-bye to Shanghai' ("With ukelele accompt."), by Malcolm Lowry and Ronald Hill, published in 1927, but not featured with great success by anybody [Day, 90; see #156.1]. The covers of 'Three Little Dog-gone Mice' ("Just the Latest Charleston Fox-Trot Ever") and 'I've Said Good-bye to Shanghai' ("Vocal Fox-Trot [with Ukulele accompt.]") are featured in Day [89], and the words are given by Kathleen Scherf [CP #427 & #433]. Both were "Written and Composed" by Malcolm Lowry and Ronald Hill, and priced 6d; the former ("featured with Great Success by ALFREDO and his Band") was published by Worton David Ltd, 6 New Compton Street (Lazarus Bolowski was earlier David Bolowski [UBC 30-4, A]); the latter was published by B. Feldman & Co., 125, 127, 129 Shaftesbury Avenue.

In a letter (4 April 1962) to the Liverpool Daily Post, his "old shipmate" Joseph Ward recalled the words of 'I've Said Good-bye to Shanghai':

Two others, not published, were 'Dismal Swamp' and 'Hindu Babe' [CP #436]. Ronnie Hill described the first as "one very weird number ... full of extraordinary imagery, but very beautiful". The second required Lowry "to fart in rhythm" [Bowker, Lowry Remembered, 23 & 33].

157.2 profound, if not positively Wordsworthian.

Hugh’s homesickness perhaps mocks Wordsworth’s 'The Solitary Reaper':

157.3 the Marine Superintendent's office.

Mercantile marine offices were established by the Mercantile Marine Act of 1850 to act on behalf of merchant seamen and to see that the requirements of the Mercantile Shipping Acts and Board of Trade were complied with (the marine superintendent was the head of such an office). For purposes of administration, the UK was divided into five districts (though each port had its office), and seamen engaged on British ships trading outside home waters were required to sign an agreement at a mercantile marine office.

157.4 Garston ... Oswaldtwistle.

Garston is a dockside suburb of Liverpool, some distance from the small east Lancashire town of Oswaldtwistle. Ultramarine opens by "signing on" at a similar Liverpool office.

157.5 the S.S. Philoctetes.

Lowry at sea

An S.S. Philoctetes, a cargo steamer built in 1922, was registered with the Blue Funnel Line, Alfred Holt and Company, Liverpool [see #159.5]. H.M.S. Philoctetes, aka the "Flock of Fleas", was the shore base in Freetown, Sierra Leone, during World War II.

157.6 Bix Beiderbecke.

Bix Beiderbecke

Leon Bix Beiderbecke (1903-31), cornet and jazz trumpeter, who joined up with Frankie Trumbauer in 1925 and died an alcoholic at 28; in both his life and death he exemplified all that the total jazz musician stood for, and after his death he became a cult figure. His 1927 'Singin' the Blues', recorded with Trumbauer, is a jazz classic and one which expressed to Lowry "a moment of the most pure spontaneous happiness" [see #164.5].

157.8 the infant Mozart.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91), child prodigy and musical genius. He learned to play various instruments at four, to compose at five, and gave public performances at six, when with his father Leopold he undertook a long series of tours through the courts of Europe. There are stories of him picking up a violin and playing without training, of improvisation at will, and of remembering on a single hearing and writing out in full a miserere that was the jealous preserve of the Sistine Chapel choir. Despite his precocity, Mozart was a happy child, but his early genius did not preserve him from later penury.

157.9 the childhood of Raleigh.

The Boyhood of Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh (?l552-1618), courtier, poet, historian and adventurer; founder of Virginia and explorer of Guiana. A favourite of Queen Elizabeth, he incurred her displeasure by marrying her maid and under both Elizabeth and James I spent long periods in the Tower before being executed for treason on a dubious charge. Little is known of Raleigh's boyhood (even the year of his birth is uncertain), but Hugh has in mind the painting by Sir John Everett Millais, 'The Boyhood of Raleigh' (1870), now at the Tate, which depicts a small boy sitting at the foot of a sailor, listening spellbound to tales of the sea. In October Ferry [152], the painting is mentioned by name.

157.10 he had been reading too much Jack London.

Jack London

Jack London (1876-1916), American novelist, socialist, and adventurer; in turn an oyster-pirate, hobo, sealer, gold-miner, war correspondent, writer, alcoholic and suicide, who cast himself in the role of rugged individualist and Nietzschean superman. Hugh seems at times almost consciously to imitate his life. London's life and socialism was fraught with contradiction [see #95.2], and he is at his best when depicting the ferocious individual struggle rather than the collective human dream. His best-known works are The Call of the Wild (1903), The People of the Abyss (1903), White Fang (1906), Martin Eden (1909), as well as those Hugh mentions:

157.11 Seamen and Firemen mutually to assist each other.

A direct quotation from the 1894 Seamen's Articles, the official contract between the owner or ship-master and his seaman, setting out the conditions and obligations of service. The words (also recalled by Dana Hilliot in Ultramarine [19]) read in full:

The clause is not part of the standard agreement, but part of a set of extra conditions, printed on gummed paper and usually added to the agreement before signing. The phrase ‘without conscience or consideration’ does not appear in the articles, but is lifted directly from the German anti-Semitic propaganda quoted in Hugh's telegram [94].

158.1 Rabat.

The capital of Morocco, where Geoffrey, not yet kicked downstairs, is in consular service. Given the political tension in nearby Spain and Spanish Morocco [see #234.4], the position is one of some delicacy.

159.1 Friday the thirteenth of May.

An ominous date of departure, since ships traditionally avoid sailing on any Friday, let alone the thirteenth. 13 May 1927 was a Friday, but Lowry's departure from Liverpool on the Pyrrhus of the Blue Funnel Line was scheduled for Tuesday 17 May 1927, at 6 pm.

159.2 Frankie Trumbauer ... For No Reason at All in C.

Frankie Trumbauer

Frankie Trumbauer (1900-56), C-melody saxophonist and vocalist. Raised in St. Louis, he played piano, trombone, flute, and violin before turning to the C-melody saxophone. At 17 he formed his own band and worked with many lead jazz musicians, including Bix Beiderbecke. Lowry's date is correct: 'For No Reason at All in C' was recorded in New York, 13 May 1927, by "Trum, Bix and Eddie": Frankie Trumbauer (C-melody sax), Bix Beiderbecke (piano), Eddie Lang (guitar); Parlophone R 3419, Columbia LP CL845 [James Doyle, MLN 7, 13]. The song is invoked in 'Forest Path to the Spring'.

159.3 to be a Conrad.

The phrasing suggests the hymn 'To be a Pilgrim' (words by John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress). The allusion is apt, given the pilgrims on the Patna in Conrad's Lord Jim.

159.4 No silk cushions for Hugh, says Aunt.

Lowry at sea

Lowry's real-life version of this episode was even more embarrassing: he was quoted in the London Evening News [14 May 1927, 5] as having said: "No silk-cushion youth for me. I want to see the world, and rub shoulders with its oddities, and get some experience of life before I go back to Cambridge University" [Day, 91]. The Liverpool Echo [Friday 30 Sept. 1927] read on his return: "Seeing the World with a Ukelele / Liverpool Schoolboy's Trip to Sea" [Bowker, Lowry Remembered, 31-32]. Joseph Ward's response [see #157.1] confirms that "false footing” with his shipmates [see #159.10].

159.5 Philoctetes.

Philoctetes was the most celebrated archer among the Greek forces attacking Troy, but also very much a victim of misfortune. The son of Poeas, he received from his father the famous bow and arrows of Heracles [see #159.7], but wounded in the foot (in some versions by his own arrows; in Sophocles's Philoctetes by a snake), he was left behind on Lemnos when the Greeks went to Troy. Because the Greeks needed his skills, he was tricked into returning to Troy, where he mortally wounded Paris in an archery contest.

The analogy between Philoctetes' bow and Hugh’s guitar suggests Edmund Wilson's essay, ‘The Wound and the Bow’ (1941), where Wilson, applying Freudian psychology, sees the bow as the blessing given to the artist, the creative gift necessarily accompanied by the wound, or neurosis: suffering is thus a necessary accompaniment of creativity and something that necessitates the artist's alienation from his society. Wilson's essay was used by Lowry this way in his screenplay of Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.

159.6 Poeas.

The father of Philoctetes, to whom he gave the mighty bow and arrows that Heracles had given to him, when he set fire to the pines that formed the hero's pyre [see #159.7].

159.7 Heracles.

Heracles, or Hercules, son of Zeus and Alcmena, greatest of the Greek heroes. Still in his cradle, he strangled two snakes that Hera had sent to destroy him, and throughout his life performed prodigious feats of strength, including the 12 labours imposed as penance for having killed his children in a fit of madness. After inadvertently putting on the poisoned shirt of Nessus, Heracles made and ascended his funeral pyre, gave his bow and arrows to Poeas, who kindled the pines, and was then carried off to Olympus among the immortals.

159.8 cross-bow.

As in Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) [lines 79-82]:

For this gratuitous act a curse falls on the ship and the mariner is condemned by his fellows to wear the bird hung round his neck, until he is able to feel pity and pray, at which moment the albatross falls from his neck and into the sea.

159.9 Cathay and the brothels of Palambang.

The romanticised Orient:

159.10 he was on a false footing with his shipmates.

Much of what follows is based upon Lowry's personal experiences and miseries when he went to sea (as described in Ultramarine), but a there is a literary precedent for Hugh's humiliations in Melville's Redburn, where the hero is resented by the common sailors because of his supposedly rich background and his going to sea "for the humour of it". In Chapters 9 and 10, Redburn "converses with the sailors", who abuse him relentlessly: "They asked me what business I, a boy like me, had to go to sea, and take the bread out of the mouth of honest sailors, and fill a good seaman's place."

160.1 chipping hammers.

Small hammers with triangular-shaped heads used for chipping rust from the decks and metal fittings of a ship.

160.2 red lead.

Red oxide of lead (minium), the base of an anti-corrosive red paint; hence the paint itself. Also slang for tinned herrings in tomato sauce. Joseph Ward tells of how Lowry received the full contents of a red lead drum, and the entire crew of the Pyrrhus did a "whahoo Indian dance" at the spectacle of fourteen days of "Lobs" looking like an Indian brave.

160.3 fagging.

In British public schools, the menial work, such as running errands or shining shoes, which younger boys are required to do for their seniors.

160.4 the forecastle ... the poop.

The forecastle is the raised forward part of a ship, where the common sailors' quarters are traditionally located [see #104.1(c)]; the poop is the raised deck at the stern. Compare R.H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), the story of a Harvard undergraduate who goes to sea and describes with grim romantic realism his forecastle quarters and life.

160.5 the Isle of Man boat.

A ferryboat plying between Liverpool and Douglas, on the Isle of Man.

161.1 six and eight bells.

Eight bells signals the end of a four-hour watch; six bells marks the end of the third hour.

161.2 bosun's mess.

A bosun (or boatswain) is a petty officer on a ship, in charge of deck work; the ‘mess’ is the area where he eats, separated from the ordinary seamen.

161.3 tabnabs.

Buns, pastries and confectionery reserved for first-class passengers; hence, pieces to be nabbed from the table. 'The Cook in the Galley' [CP, #6] reads: "The stoker's tabnabs need his care".

161.4 the Sea Wolf.

The sadistic captain of Jack London's novel [see #157.10(a)].

161.5 the P.O.'s mess.

The eating area of the petty officers (the lowest rating of non-commissioned naval officers); popularly known as "the Virgin", since screened off from the general mess area.

Lowry at sea

162.1 a fantastic mobile football field.

The twin masts of a turreted merchant ship, linked with a crosspiece, were commonly known as "goal posts". The S.S. Pyrrhus, on which Lowry sailed, was a "goal-post ship."

162.2 Chips.

The invariable name of a ship's carpenter. On most merchant ships, the bosun is the senior petty officer. The dispute is revisited in 'Through the Panama': "the eternal argument between the bosun and the carpenter as to who was the senior; in fact, the carpenter is, though he is technically a tradesman."

162.3 a tramp.

A freight ship that has no regular schedule, but picks up passengers and cargo where it can. The word has connotations of makeshift or shabby, hence the captain's fury. The Pyrrhus was not a tramp; Joseph Ward testifies to the indignation caused by this description (by Lowry, of the Pyrrhus) in the Liverpool Echo (30 Sept. 1927). Lowry had his say in Ultramarine [67]: "That bloody fellow Joe Ward, too – always grumbling."

162.4 Typhoons were to be expected.

Joseph Conrad's 'Typhoon' (1902) is set off the China coast in the monsoon season. Captain McWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, is an unimaginative, dour man, but when the barometer falls "during the season of typhoons" and the ship is smashed by winds and waves he is man enough to face the hurricane and bring her through.

163.1 the Bitter Lakes.

Two lakes (Great Bitter, 14 miles long, and Little Bitter, 8 miles) in the Isthmus of Suez, Egypt, linked and utilized by the Suez Canal. A "bitter lake" is one whose waters contain unusually large amounts of sodium sulphate and various carbonates and chlorides.

163.2 in the roads at Yokohama.

Yokohama is the port for Tokyo and the major harbour of Japan. To avoid the heavy fees charged at such a port, a ship might lie "in the roads", that is, at anchor awaiting unloading in a protected place near the shore, but not tied up at the wharves.

163.3 going through the Suez ... sphinxes, Ismailia ... Mt. Sinai.

Passengers passing through the Suez Canal might get off the ship at Giza, visit the Sphinx; then rejoin it at Ismailia, on Lake Timsah at the midpoint of the canal; to pass by Gebel Musa (Ar. "Mount of Moses"), which is usually identified with Mt Sinai where Moses received the Tablets of the Law [Exodus 34:28-29] and where may be found the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saint Katherine, founded in 250 AD.

163.4 through the Red Sea ... Hejaz, Asir, Yemen.

After leaving the Suez Canal, a ship outward bound would enter the Red Sea, pass by Hejaz (inland of which are the holy cities of Medina and Mecca), then travel along the southwest Arabian coast of Asir to reach Yemen (past Doughty's Arabia Deserta, Felix Arabia, and the lands of T.E. Lawrence), before leaving the Red Sea and entering the Gulf of Arabia.

163.5 Perim.

Perim is a barren volcanic island some five miles square in the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb (Ar. "Gate of Tears"), at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. It was acquired by Britain in 1857 as part of the colony of Aden and was used as a coaling station until 1936. It is now part of South Yemen. The island is mentioned in the anonymous Greek Periplus Maris Erythraei of the first century AD, but Hugh's statement that it once "belonged to India" seems dubious: the island was known to Egyptian, Greek, Arabian and Indian traders of antiquity, but despite its strategic location on the spice route its total lack of water precluded settlement, and there is little record of it "belonging" to anyone until it was explored by the Portuguese in 1513 and garrisoned briefly by Britain in 1799.

163.6 An Italian Somaliland stamp with wild herdsmen on it.

Italian Somaliland, now part of Somalia, was the coastal strip on the African side of the Red Sea, then under Italian domination. It forms the setting for Gerald Hanley's novel, The Consul at Sunset (1951). The stamp Hugh is thinking of cannot be readily identified, as no Italian Somaliland stamp of this description exists, certainly not before 1927; the only one to fit this description even vaguely is a 1932 design depicting a herdsman standing next to a prominent termite nest.

163.7 Guardafui.

Cape Guardafui (the Cape of Spices in the ancient Periplus Maris Erythraei), on the horn of Africa south of the Gulf of Aden, forms the easternmost point of the African continent.

163.8 Cape Comorin.

The rocky headland that forms the southernmost point of India.

163.9 Nicobar.

A group of 19 islands, 185 square miles in all, in the Bay of Bengal 100 miles south of the Andamans, forming part of the Indian state of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

163.10 the Gulf of Siam ... Pnom-Penh.

The Gulf of Siam lies between the Malay Peninsula and what was in 1927 Indochina; Pnom Penh (now in Cambodia), on the Mekong River that flows into the Gulf of Siam, was in 1927 the capital of French Indochina, and the gateway to the fabulous ruins of Angkor Wat, the remnants of once-mighty Khmer temples dedicated to Vishnu.

163.11 thrummed.

Conrad Aiken

A word used by Conrad Aiken throughout Blue Voyage for the noise of the ship's engines; as on the last page [166], where it is heightened with sexual anticipation:

163.12 videre; videre.

Nordahl Grieg

L. "to see; to see". The engines echo Nordahl Grieg's Skibet gaar videre (1924), translated into English by A.G. Chater as The Ship Sails On (1927). The novel tells of the Mignon, "A Moloch that crushes the lives of men between its iron jaws", on her journey from Norway to the Cape. When Benjamin Hall joins her, he finds the forecastle full of whores. Despite being accepted by his fellows he finds the trip a miserable experience and finally contracts VD.  At the end of the voyage, holding the diseased ship's dog in his arms, Benjamin climbs over the rail to end it all [see #229.1], but changes his mind and climbs back to face whatever lies ahead. Hugh's thoughts here echo The Ship Sails On [57], where Benjamin contemplates sea and sky: "The boundless space around became so intimately small, since infinity has no scale. All was sky and sea. A little strip of wake bubbled behind the ship, and round about gleamed a few friendly miles of water."

Lowry's short story 'Punctum Indifferens Skibet Gaar Videre' (“At the Point of No Return the Ship Sails On”), was strongly influenced by Grieg. It was published as 'Seductio ad Absurdam' in Best British Short Stories of 1931, edited by E. O'Brien, then incorporated as chapter 4 of Ultramarine. Told in broken snatches of dialogue by the ship's crew, it leads up to the moment that Dana Hilliot, baited by the men, finally confronts his chief antagonist, Andy Bredahl.

Sherrill Grace [4] comments on Lowry's title: "The point is pointless because individual existence and reality are never still but always moving on into the future; temporal flow cannot be broken down into static points of past, present, and future." In 'Through the Panama' and his screenplay of Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night Lowry preferred "the old canon, Frère Jacques", which he described in his notes to the latter as "the result of twenty years' search for an onomatopoeia for a ship's engine". When annotating his copy of Ultramarine [25], Lowry proposed changing ‘cloom-cloom-cloom-cloom’ to ‘videre’.

The words ‘to see, to see’ ("to sea, to sea") suggest that, despite Hugh not having read a word of Conrad, Lowry has in mind the artist's role in Conrad's Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898): "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see."

163.13 the Pharisaism of his English elders.

The Pharisees were a dominant Jewish sect in the early Christian era, but their arrogance and rigid adherence to the letter of the law and to the traditions of the elders aroused Christ's censure (see Luke 18:10-14); hence Phariseeism, se1f-righteousness and hypocrisy in matters of religion (with a pun on "elders" in the Presbyterian sense).

163.14 the lamptrimmer.

The officer who tends and trims the oil-fuelled lamps (port, starboard and masthead) and reports every half-hour at night all navigational lights as correctly burning.

163.15 the Forsyte Saga.

A series of novels written by John Galsworthy (1867-1933) between 1906 and 1929, the main theme of which is the possessive instinct embodied to an exaggerated degree in the figure of Soames Forsyte, a man with a passion for collecting all things desirable; extending from the late Victorian age to the depiction of a society shattered by the Great War, it forms a suitable study in bourgeois decay for any budding communist.

163.16 Peer Gynt.

A lyrical drama by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), published in 1867. Peer, though having the capacity for good, is a boaster and a dreamer who flees his home to wander the world. At one point his life is likened to an onion, with no centre, and when he finally returns home he meets at the crossroads the button-moulder who will melt him down for having been neither actively good or bad, but simply worthless [see #359.1]. Earlier [UBC 30-4, D], Hugh had been reading Ibsen's Brand, which testifies more directly to his dream of becoming an artist. See also Lowry’s poem, ‘Peter Gaunt and the Canals’ [CP #15].

164.1 the Red Hand.

An Ulster magazine that appeared briefly (four issues only) in 1920, with left-wing views on Irish sovereignty and unity, and a general pro-Labour policy. The red hand is the badge of Ulster – a heraldic hand, erect, open, and couped at the wrist. Compare, too, Milton's Paradise Lost [II.174], where the "red right hand" of God is raised to smite the fallen angels (the sense in which Lowry uses it in Lunar Caustic, 14).

164.2 'Murder of Brother-in-Law's Concubine'.

Efforts to locate this have failed, yet it seems likely that Lowry saw such a headline. The headline in the Singapore Free Press (since 1835, the best known British weekly then circulating in the Far East) is identical to that seen by Dana Hall in 'On Board the West Hardaway' [P & S, 34] and by Dana Hilliot several times in Ultramarine; but as seen by Hugh in Under the Volcano possesses ominous implications previously lacking.

164.3 Penang.

An island in the Strait of Malacca, ceded by Kedah to Britain in 1786 as the first British Straits settlement; the most important port and anchorage of the Malayan mainland.

164.4 breaks.

In jazz, a section of a song between the initial statement of the melody and its reprise; an opportunity for soloists to improvise.

164.5 Singing the Blues.

Either Hugh is right up with the latest jazz or Lowry was not bothered about the slight implausibility, for, as James Doyle points out [MLN 7, 13-l4]:

'Singin' the Blues'

Lowry comments in 'Forest Path' [257]:

In Charlotte Haldane's I Bring Not Peace [97], the failed musician, James Dowd (modelled on Lowry), comments, "that's the greatest 'break' there's ever been in all music." Charlotte Haldane, who was Jewish and on-coming, is "the ghost, mercifully transformed" (John Davenport to Lowry [UBC 1-17]) of Mrs Bolowski; Lowry probably did not have an affair with her, but his friend Martin Case did.

164.6 Birkenhead Hippodrome.

The New Birkenhead Hippodrome was opened in December 1908 in opposition to the famous Argyle as a music-hall and variety venue, but it was soon given over to films exclusively (Hugh is equally thinking of the Argyle, whose "twice nightly" shows were a feature). The Hippodrome nostalgically recalled by the homesick Dana Hilliot in Ultramarine. Like the Argyle, it was destroyed by German bombs in September 1940.

165.1 the Oedipus Tyrannus.

Lowry at sea

The Greek form of the more usual Oedipus Rex, but unlike the Philoctetes [see #157.5], neither name is recorded among the vessels of the Blue Funnel Line (whose ships were invariably named after classical figures). The Oedipus Tyrannus is Dana Hilliot's ship in Ultramarine, the name revised by Lowry from the Nawab for the second edition, in order to conform to In Ballast to the White Sea and Under the Volcano. Oedipus, son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of Thebes, was abandoned at birth because of a prophecy that he would slay his father and marry his mother. Oedipus eventually returned to Thebes, meeting and killing on the way Laius, his father. Thebes was plagued by the Sphinx, but Oedipus, solving its riddle, obtained the kingdom and Jocasta as wife. Discovering the results of his actions, Oedipus blinded himself in horror and, led by his daughter Antigone, retired to Colonus in Attica, where he died.

165.2 a foul berth.

Maritime legal terminology if a ship is forced to assume a dangerous position.

165.3 more days are more dollars.

As in the commonplace saying, “Another day, another dollar”; though American in origin ($1 per day was long a standard wage), it assumed wide currency.

165.4 fourteen months (Hugh had not yet read Melville either) is an eternity.

Hugh is still being a romantic: Melville's White Jacket is a brutally frank account of a 14-month tour which Melville spent on a United States Navy ship in 1843.

166.1 quarter.

The quarter of a circle to the rear of the beam of a ship, beginning amidships and circling to the stern. There are two after quarters, one to starboard and one to port. Observation of other ships or navigational aids is described in terms of their location on the quarters.

166.2 trankums.

Hugh means transoms, the transverse timbers or beams secured to the sternpost; hence, any kind of horizontal bar. The Oedipus Tyrannus is described [162] as "a fantastic mobile football field"; a transom is also the crossbar of a rugby goal post. A trankum is "A personal ornament, a trinket" (OED), but a cross-reference there to trangam suggests Lowry's meaning: "Applied to anything which the speaker views with contempt."

166.3 hull-down.

A ship hidden below the horizon except for her masts is said to be hull-down.

166.4 seven knots.

Seven sea-miles an hour; a very poor speed, which Hugh finds appealingly unmodern.

166.5 Colón.

Panama's second city, named after Christopher Columbus; a port at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, within what was then the Canal Zone, but forming part of Panama.

167.1 the dirty 'og.

From 'og wash, the sea: naval slang for a poorly paid seaman from the dockyard slums.

167.2 Lord Jim, about to pick up pilgrims going to Mecca.

In Chapter 2 of Lord Jim, Jim gives up the idea of going home and signs on board the Patna, "a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank"; and, after the ship has been painted, eight hundred pilgrims bound for Mecca are driven on board. When Hugh feels he had "nothing in his mind of Lord Jim", he simply means he was not tempted to abandon ship [see #33.1].

167.3 Miki.

There is a river port called Miki in southern Honshu, Japan, but Lowry's coaling port (with its ominous bunkers) is based on Port Swettenham, Selangor, a major refuelling depot. Ultramarine makes frequent mention of the Miki Bar and Dancing Saloon (little short of a brothel) in Tsjang-Tsjang (Yokohama).

167.4 a trimmer.

A coal-passer, the least prestigious job in a ship's crew. His duties include bringing coal to the furnaces, hauling and dumping ashes, cleaning the bilges and, in port, chipping the scale that has accumulated inside the boilers. If the coal (as here) is “near the stokehold floor”, that is, close to the furnaces as opposed to being in the back of the bunkers, the trimmer’s lot is considerably lighter.

167.5 No pity there either.

See Lowry’s poems, ‘Jokes Amidships’ and ‘Jokes in the Galley’ [CP #121 & #125], with their common refrain: “There is no pity at sea.”

167.6 through the hawsehole into the bourgeois upper air.

The hawsehole is a hole in the bows through which cables pass. To emerge from the hawsehole is to win promotion from the ranks of ordinary seaman or fireman (rather than joining as an officer-cadet); the socialistic phrasing reflects the ship's class structure and the mutual dislike of those working the decks and bridges and the firemen and stokers of the lower depths.

168.1 collapse like a heap of ashes.

For the debt to Nordahl Grieg's The Ship Sails On [163], see #72.3.

168.2 They lay at Gravesend waiting for the tide.

Gravesend, the outermost port of the Thames, is a pilot station for vessels using the port of London and lies on the Thames estuary, opposite Tilbury, about twenty miles east of London. The phrasing evokes the opening of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), where the cruising yawl Nellie awaits off Gravesend the turning of the tide.

168.3 the Yangtze-Kiang.

Commonly referred to by British seamen of the 1930s simply as ‘the River’, the Yangtze is the longest river of Asia and China, flowing 3,430 miles from the Tibetan highlands to the Pacific near Shanghai and passing through many of China's greatest cities. It forms a major trading artery and can be used for many miles by ocean-going vessels. The river was soon to become famous in British naval history because of the 1949 "Yangtze Incident," in which the gunboat H.M.S. Amethyst, attacked by the communists, held off and made her way 140 miles downstream.

168.4 someone knocked his pipe on a garden wall.

That is, the ship had pulled in so close to land that this seemed possible. Compare October Ferry [152], where the phrase is used more literally.

168.5 Silvertown.

A docking area of the Port of London, near Woolwich, some miles up the estuary but before the city proper.

170.1 Izzy Smigalkin and his orchestra.

The fictional name may be modelled on that of "Izzy" (Irving) Friedman, who recorded frequently (in New York) with Bix Beiderbecke, Ed Lang, and Frankie Trumbauer. Lowry's 'Three Little Dog-gone Mice' [see #157.1] was in like manner "Featured with Great Success by Alfredo and his Band" [Day, 89], as Lowry too became wiser in the ways of the world.

170.2 the Astoria .... the Elephant and Castle... the Kilburn Empire.

Hugh would have discovered at the Astoria (in Greek Street, Soho) that Izzy Smigalkin was playing at the Elephant and Castle (an hotel, the name a corruption of Infante de Castilla, now replaced, in the middle of the square of the same name, Southwark), rather than at the Kilburn Empire (not the celebrated Empire Theatre on Leicester Square, but rather a little dive in the Kilburn area of northwest London).

170.3 his exam to Cambridge.

Entry to Cambridge (as Oxford) was conditional upon success in a series of strenuous entry examinations, on the basis of which a candidate might be accepted by a college to which he (rarely she) had applied.

170.4 Wapping Old Stairs.

A narrow lane off the Wapping High Street in Wapping, a run-down dockside area of East London. The lane ends in a set of stairs (no longer in commercial use), leading to the beach. Pirates were hanged on the shore nearby, to await three turnings of the tide.

171.1 a certain resemblance to Adolf Hitler's.

That is, anti-Semitism. Hitler is said to have developed his anti-Jewish feelings during his early years as a struggling artist in Vienna.

171.2 the British Mercantile Marine.

The British Merchant Navy, flying under the Red Ensign (or "Red Rag"); the term ‘Merchant Navy’ was used from World War I on, but for official purposes ‘Mercantile Marine’ was preferred. Until 1850, legislation for merchant seamen conformed to that of the Royal Navy, but with the Mercantile Marine Act of 1850 the two services were differentiated and the rights and conditions of merchant seamen much improved.

171.3 pogroms.

From R. gromit’, "to batter"; an organised massacre, particularly of the Jews.

171.4 Rabat or Timbuctoo.

Rabat, in Morocco, from where Geoffrey sportingly sent his telegram [158]; Timbuktu, in the middle of the Sahara Desert and French West Africa (now Mali), is commonly used as the equivalent of "the middle of nowhere" [see #310.8].

171.5 Dr. Gotelby.

Not identified.

171.6 sheet anchor.

From M.E. shote, a cable of two ropes spliced together; alternatively, a large anchor, kept amidships, and used only in emergencies. Hence, a person to be relied upon.

171.7 the Bolshevists.

From R. bolshoi, "big"; that part of the Russian Social-Democratic party who took Lenin's side in the split within the party following its Second Congress in 1903; who gained control (at the expense of the more moderate Menshevists) of the party; and who seized power after the October Revolution of 1917. The word was commonly used in some circles of English society as equivalent to "Bogeyman".

171.7 the Daily Mail.

A popular daily, the first halfpenny morning paper, launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe); it set new standards in popular journalism, but soon became known for its jingoism and entrenched middlebrow attitudes.

172.1 Pangbourne Garden City.

Pangbourne was in the 1920s a conservative Thameside town in Berkshire, about six miles from Reading, and well-known for its delightful woods and gardens.

172.2 to do his good turn ... to be prepared.

A boy scout (Dr Gotelby had been a scoutmaster) is expected to do a good turn every day, and the motto of the boy scouts is "Be Prepared" – a phrase that less innocently implies carrying round a condom.

172.3 Blackheath ... Lewisham, Catford, New Cross, down the Old Kent Road, past, ah, the Elephant and Castle.

For a time in 1928 Lowry was living in Blackheath, southeast London (his address, 5 Woodville Road, is no longer identifiable), whence it is perhaps five miles or so into the City. Hugh's fifteen miles may be explained by his choice of route: Catford does not lie between Lewisham and New Cross, but is quite some way south (the directions are otherwise in a logical straight sequence). The Elephant and Castle [see #170.2] is a large intersection in Southwark at the end of the New Kent Road (a continuation of the Old), directly south of Blackfriars Bridge which leads into the heart of London; Hugh catches his breath as he is reminded of the embarrassing failure of his songs.

172.4 districts romanticized by Longfellow.

Henry W. Longfellow's essay, 'The Great Metropolis', romanticises the boroughs "in and below London", ignoring the squalor visible there. A typical passage reads:

173.1 senior tutor.

A prestigious faculty appointment, equivalent to a Dean of Studies, to oversee all aspects of student admission and life within the college, and with a special responsibility for student discipline. Despite the word ‘tutor’, the role has less to do with teaching than with pastoral care and oversight. 

173.2 have calmly gone up to–.

Cambridge

Cambridge: though one quite normally ‘goes up’ (from London) to Cambridge there is in Hugh's mind a conscious relief that he will not be ‘sent down’ in disgrace, as could well have been his fate in the strict conditions of the time.

173.3 the mowing machine.

An intimation of the Infernal Machine [see #67.4].

173.4 asses'-milk soap.

Asses' milk is popularly supposed to have a rejuvenating effect on the skin (Cleopatra is reputed to have bathed in it each day). This may be a brand name, as asses' milk contains no fat and is therefore unsuitable as a basis for soap. Hugh's act of shaving the Consul realises the potential pun of ‘Cuckold-shaven’ [see #11.5 and #59.3].

174.1 the wheels.

The "shakes" are the DTs, but as Hugh says in the 1940 Volcano [173], "At sea we called 'em the wheels" (presumably because the head spins round). The Consul responds, "The shakes are worse than the snakes." Lowry intends a reference to Ezekiel's vision of the chariot of God, with its four wheels, each of which was "as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel" [Ezekiel 1:16]. These wheels within wheels traditionally symbolize God's freedom to move as and where he wishes, and the Chariot of Ezekiel (Tarot card 7) is used in occult and alchemical thought as an image of successful projection. The Consul, however, has abused his mystical powers by too much drinking and instead of seeing Ezekiel's glory of God experiences the horrific tremors of an inverted vision; he is unable to stand on his feet, and he dwells among scorpions [Ezekiel 2:1-6].

MacGregor Mathers

MacGregor Mathers, in The Kabbalah Unveiled [Pt.2, note to #32], comments: "The four wheels are the four elements of the air, fire, water and earth, which are the abodes of the spirits, of the elements, the sylphs, salamanders, undines, and gnomes, under the presidency of the tenth sephira."

174.2 like being in a tank.

Geoffrey's reaction to the phrase suggests Lowry's friend, James Travers, who burnt to death in a tank in the western desert [see #188.4], and the "pandemonium of a million tanks" on the final page, as the Consul dies. See also #174.5.

174.3 bay rum.

A liquid used for cosmetic and medicinal purposes, mainly as a hair tonic; originally prepared by distilling the leaves of the West Indian bayberry tree with rum.

174.4 pernod.

A French aperitif, with the flavour of anisette, as described in Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta [20-21]: "Pernod is greenish imitation absinthe. When you add water it turns milky. It tastes like licorice and it has a good uplift, but it drops you just as far."

174.5 the polygonous proustian stare of imaginary scorpions.

Although scorpions have eyes, these are not polygonous or compound, and their sight is very poor. These are rather scorpions of the mind, proustian because they remind the Consul of a particular passage in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, in 'A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs' [751], or in Scott Moncrieff's translation, 'Within a Budding Grove' [Pt. II, 68-69]. As the narrator returns to the hotel, he has the sudden sensation of being watched by somebody not far off. He turns his head and sees a man looking intently at him, the eyes "dilated with observation ... shot through by a look of intense activity such as the sight of a person whom they do not know excites only in men to whom, for whatever reason, it suggests thoughts that would not occur to anyone else – madmen, for instance, or spies." Proust's great work is a sustained meditation on many matters of interest to the Consul: the unreality and reversibility of time; the power of memory to recover the past; and the subject's consequent power over life and death. Proust explores the power of involuntary memory, and shows how phases of experience forgotten and deadened by the years can be jerked back into consciousness by an apparently trivial association - just as the Consul's image "like being in a tank" has reminded him, sickeningly, of the furnaces of the S.S. Samaritan.

The word ‘proustian’ [lower case] is a pencil insert on the 1940 typescript [UBC 25-22, 25], transforming the allusion from its likely origin in Macbeth [III.ii.35-36]: "O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife." Lowry used it in a letter to John Davenport [UBC 1-73] to describe the eyes of the police.

174.6 Tit for tat.

In an early version of Chapter III, the Consul reflected on how he had helped Hugh out of a passport fix, “tat for tit, as it were.”

174.7 The old Cocanada.

The boat on which Geoffrey and Hugh had returned to England from India [see #78.6].

175.1 Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie.

By Éliphas Lévi, baptised Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-75), French occultist whose writings greatly influenced later students of magic. The son of a shoemaker, Lévi studied for the seminary but was obliged to leave because of his sexual permissiveness and his questioning of orthodox dogma. His writings include Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1855-56), La Clef des grands mystères (1861), and La Science des esprits (1865); these gave him a reputation as a great authority upon occult matters. Dogme et rituel was originally published in two parts: the first, Dogme (1855), dealing with the symbolism of numbers and the principles of occult thought; the second, Rituel (1856), dealing with the forms and rituals of magical invocation. The two were translated by A.E. Waite in 1896 as Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, Waite admitting Lévi's influence and importance as a magus who had opened the doors of the occult to many but criticising "his slipshod criticism, his careless reading and his malpractices in historical matters as not making "for a proper understanding of occult reveries" and as initiating "a new and gratuitous phase in the study of the Kabbalah" [The Holy Kabbalah, X.xvi, 490-95].

175.2 Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America.

Identified by Andersen [381] and Jakobsen [81], 'Serpent and Siva Worship and Mythology in Central America, Africa, and Asia', by Hyde Clarke (London: Trübner & Co., 1876), a 14-page tract from the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. The major concern of the article, despite its title, is comparative philology, Clarke arguing that the languages of the various Central American Indians have relations with those of the Old World and that, in particular, the worship of the Hindu God Siva is the survival of a prehistoric legend also found in Central America. The underlying connection, and the reason for the tract's interest to the Consul, is explained by another work by Clarke: 'The Legend of Atlantis in reference to protohistoric communication with America' (1886).

175.3 the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King.

The Book of the Goetia

Listed by Kilgallin [Appendix A] as in the magical library of Charles Stansfeld-Jones:

Goëtic art deals with incantations, sorcery, witchcraft, and black magic, this particular Goetia being the Lemegaton (or lesser key) which offers formulae to invoke demons. The book, dating from the 17th century, concerns the "Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic" (with a diatribe added by Aleister Crowley against A.E. Waite); its first part is "a Book of Evil Spirits, called Goetia" [7]. Crowley comments [Autohagiography, 178]: "Goetia means 'howling'; but is the technical word employed to cover the operations of that Magick which deals with gross, malignant or unenlightened forces." Later sections deal with different aspects of spirits, prayers, and orations, "the which Solomon the Wise did use upon the Altar of the Temple" [9], Solomon being reputedly one of the first and greatest of all Cabbalists. As the edition on the Consul’s shelf is "fairly new", it may be the small, blue-bound edition printed in Chicago in 1916.

175.4 Gogol.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52), Russian satirist, whose comic masterpiece Dead Souls (1846) was one of Lowry's favourite books and a model for his own novel ['Preface to a Novel', Woodcock, 11]. The hero, Tchitchikov, forms the plan of buying up on paper serfs who have died since the last census and are therefore officially alive in the records, gaining thereby the backing to raise money and acquire land. The book's lasting delight is its humorous and often savage portrait of all grades of Russian society, but Lowry's chief point is the significance of its title, as well as, perhaps, the echo of the mad doctor in The Hands of Orlac [see #24.4].

175.5 the Mahabharata.

Mahabharata

One of the two great epic poems of the Hindus, probably the longest of the world's epics, telling in some 220,000 lines and eighteen parvans or sections the story of the descendants of Bharata, the founder of the great Indian families of yore, and culminating in the war of succession between the Kauravas and Pandavas. Originally a short ballad composed in Prakrit, it is now preserved in Sanskrit and expanded to many times its original size with a considerable increment of digressive material – cosmology, theogony, statecraft, the science of war, ethics, legendary history, mythology, fairy tales, and philosophical interludes (the best known of which is the Bhagavadgita). The battle of Kurukshetra, round which the epic is centred, is tentatively fixed between 850 and 650 BC, but parts of the work are as late as AD 500 (Hindu World II, 8-9). The Consul's dream in Chapter V [see #125.1] arises directly from the Mahabharata, and many of the details [307] about soma, bhang, and the sacrifice of horses are discussed in detail in the Hindu epic. The edition on the Consul's shelf is probably the abbreviated poetic version by Romesh Dutt, published as #36 in the Temple Classics (Gollancz), 1898.

175.6 Blake.

William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and mystic, better known for such early works as 'Songs of Innocence' (1789), 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (1790-93) and 'Songs of Experience' (1795), rather than for his later more obscure prophetic writings. References to Blake's works in Under the Volcano are surprisingly few, considering the importance of the "path through hell" [36].

175.7 Tolstoy.

Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist best known for his War and Peace (1865-72) and Anna Karenina (1875-76), novels which afford the substance of an argument between Hugh and the Consul at the end of Chapter X. Tolstoy's tremendous command of detail, his strength of moral conviction, and his immense visionary powers made him a supreme novelist, though he later turned to religious mysticism and a way of life fraught with contradictions. In earlier versions of the novel, the Consul had been an expert on Tolstoy, but as he sadly admits [82], the only thing he can remember about War and Peace is that Napoleon's leg twitched.

175.8 Pontoppidan.

Erich Pontoppidan (1698-1764), Danish theologian and professor of theology at Copenhagen in 1738, Bishop of Bergen in 1747, and author of Annales Ecclesiae Danicae Diplomatici (1741-47), a Danish topography, a Norwegian glossary, and Norges Naturlige Historie (1752-53). The latter has attracted the Consul's interest; it was translated into English in 1755 and later published with a memoir on the Kraken signed by one Philalethes in 1775. Pontoppidan is mentioned twice in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: once in relation to the Kraken [Pt. I, Ch. 1] and once in relation to the frightful poulps and other monsters of the deep [Pt. 2, Ch. 18]. 

Jakobsen [81] and Andersen [342] suggest that the reference is to Henrik Pontoppidan (1858-1943), Danish author of The Promised Land (1896) and The Kingdom of the Dead (1900), but the later author's naturalistic style and emphasis upon social criticism is at odds with everything else on the shelf.

175.9 the Upanishads.

From Hindi upa-nishad, "a near-sitting"; works that embody mystical and esoteric doctrines of ancient Hindu philosophy, composed between 400 and 200 BC and so called because they were discourses given to chosen pupils permitted to sit at the feet of gurus and hear the sacred teaching. They form the philosophical and speculative portions of the Vedas (four ancient and sacred books of the Hindus) and have been the fountainhead of all Hindu philosophy. Their emphasis is upon metaphysical speculation, identifying the individual soul with the universal soul, and enquiring into the nature of Brahma. There are about 150 in all, though 108 are traditionally recognised, varying greatly in length. For the Consul they embody the mystical doctrine that drew his father beyond Himavat.

175.10 a Mermaid Marston.

John Marston (?1575-1634), English dramatist, poet, and satirist, best known for The History of Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge (1602), The Malcontent (1604), and the satiric poem 'The Scourge of Villanie' (1598), from which the Consul has quoted [see #130.6]. The Mermaid Series of The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists was published by T. Fisher Unwin in London between 1903 and 1909 (and by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York), but do not include a Marston. However, in the Mermaid Middleton, edited by Havelock Ellis, a note of volumes in preparation includes a Marston to be edited by J.A. Symonds, a promise apparently never fulfilled.

175.11 Bishop Berkeley.

George Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne, 1734-52, a philosopher of Irish birth whose work culminated in his Theory of Vision (1733). Berkeley's idealist philosophy, summed up in his famous dictum, esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived", is an attack on Locke's assertion of an external and material reality. Berkeley contended that material things and sensations can exist only insofar as they are perceived; that the mind cannot know external things but only the process of its own perception; that reality is essentially spiritual; and that man and this world exist, necessarily, as a perception in the mind of God. In his later years Berkeley was attracted to less rigorous and more metaphysical systems of thought, but his name is above all associated with a philosophical idealism that represented a total break from Cartesian dualism and Lockean materialism.

175.12 Duns Scotus.

Joannes Duns Scotus (12657-1308?), the Doctor Subtilis, a Franciscan who lectured at Oxford and Paris. An extreme realist in philosophy, he attacked the validity of natural theology, thereby being one of the first to undermine the harmony of faith and reason so central to the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. His followers, the Scotists, were a dominating scholastic sect until the 16th century, when their learning was attacked by humanists and reformers as a farrago of needless entities and useless distinctions, and the name Duns or Dunce, then synonymous with sophist, took on its present meaning of ignoramus.

175.13 Spinoza.

Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-77), a Jew of Portuguese origin who lived in the Netherlands. Expelled from the Jewish community because of his criticism of the Scriptures, he steeped himself in the doctrine of Descartes but rejected the Cartesian dualism of spirit and matter, affirming instead one infinite substance of which finite existences are modes or limitations. The universe was viewed sub specie aeternitatis, and God as its immanent cause, not a force outside it.  Spinoza's pantheism led to a denial of any transcendental distinction between good and evil, and of personal immortality. Morality he saw as founded upon the intellectual love of God, which moves man to develop and perfect himself, so that by goodness and piety he reaches perfect happiness.

175.14 Vice Versa.

Vice Versa, or A Lesson for Fathers, by F. Anstey (a pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie, 1856-1934). The novel, originally published in 1882, tells how Paul Bultitude, a rich but unfeeling merchant, is transformed into a schoolboy when he tells his son Dick who does not want to go to school, "I only wish, at this very moment, I could be a boy again, like you." Through the agency of a Garudâ stone, brought from India by his brother-in-law, that wish is granted, and the two swap roles, each retaining his own mind. Predictable complications follow before the charm is finally reversed, and Mr Bultitude, a changed man, regains his former shape. The story is described by the young narrator of 'Enter One in Sumptuous Armour' as "a favourite with the dormitory" [P & S, 245], and Hugh [176] sees his time at Cambridge like that "the ill-fated Mr Bultitude" spent at Crichton House. The reversal of roles vaguely suggests that Hugh and Geoffrey (the latter once a substitute father to the former) are two parts of one personality.

175.15 All Quiet on the Western Front.

A best-selling novel of 1929 by the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1897-1970). It affirms the brotherhood of men while telling simply and directly of the ugliness of war from the perspective of one who dies in October 1918, on a day so quiet that the army report confines itself to the single sentence – "All Quiet on the Western Front."

175.16 The Clicking of Cuthbert.

A volume of ten rather feeble stories put out in 1922 by P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975); also known as Golf without Tears. The stories, told in the clubhouse by the Oldest Member, concern the ironies of golfing love, and the first, which gives the volume its title, recounts the stirring tale of how young Cuthbert Banks wins Adeline Smethurst from Raymond Parsloe Devine and the Wood Hills Literary Society by impressing the visiting Vladimir Brusiloff (who "specialised in grey studies of hopeless misery where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide") with his greater knowledge of the literature of golf. "Clicking", from ME cleek, "a hook" [see #17.3], in a rough pun links golf to marriage.

175.17 the Rig Veda.

The most important of the four Vedas, or ancient and sacred texts of the Hindus, probably composed between 1500 and 900 B.C., the text fixed by 300 BC. It is a collection of miscellaneous fragments of old legends, chants, and hymns, many of great beauty. It is divided into ten books or mandalas ("circles"), some of which are concerned with praises of and invocations to the various deities; others of which celebrate the great families. Mandala IX is a unique book, being devoted to the single deity Soma [see #307.3].

175.18 Peter Rabbit.

Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit

The much loved children's story by Beatrix Potter, about the disobedient little rabbit who disregards his mother's warnings and sneaks into Mr McGregor's garden. As the Consul says, "Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit": the garden, the gardener, the eviction from Paradise, the fate of Peter's father, the jacket - even an oblique reference to MacGregor-Mathers, Cabbalist and occult writer. Lowry notes to Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 379] that when he is "chased by the gardener (The Chief of Gardens?)" Peter loses his jacket, and finally returns to his burrow, which "is now the abyss". The book's presence on the shelf is explained in the manuscripts [UBC 27-3, 26]; it had been stolen by the Consul, "once when tight on board the Aquitania."

175.19 Carruthers – the Old Crow.

Lowry had hoped to enter Christ's. In the late 18th century, Dr Samuel Peck, who "never took a fee" (but accepted gifts) would ride into college; a print of him, on his horse and laden with presents, hangs in the Smaller Combination Room at Trinity. Bradbrook suggests ['Lowry's Cambridge', 134] that the person of John Davenport is superimposed on T.R. Henn, Praelector of St Catharine's in Lowry's day. In the draft entitled 'Escruch is an old man' [see #223.3], the central character is one Mr Carruthers, a remittance man living in Q, where he leads an "abstract" life. ‘Old Crow’ is a brand of Bourbon.

175.20 the buttery .... gyps .... a supervision .... praelector.

176.1 Siegebert of East Anglia.

Siegebert became King of East Anglia, succeeding his half-brother Eorpwald in 631 AD, and converted his people to Christianity. After a short reign he abdicated to enter a monastery but was forced out reluctantly to lead his people against the invading Mercians led by Penda, and, not carrying any weapons, was slain in battle (between 637 and 644 AD). The monastery was near Cambridge, and since Siegebert was reputed to have founded a school in East Anglia, it was hotly debated among the champions of Oxford and Cambridge, vying to prove the antiquity of their institutions, whether he was thus the founder of Cambridge.

176.2 John Cornford.

Spanish Civil War

Rupert John Cornford (1915-36), poet and Communist, who graduated from Trinity College in 1934 with first class honours in history and became in 1935 a member of the Communist Party. Following the outbreak of war in Spain, he threw in his scholarship, and in August 1936 (the first Englishman to enlist) he went to Barcelona and joined the P.O.U.M. (the Partido Obrera de Unificación Marxista), a semi-Trotskyist movement fighting for the Republicans. He returned to England in September to recruit volunteers for the International Brigades, then returned to Spain, where on 15 November he was wounded at the battle of University City [see #101.3]. He was killed in battle at Lopera on the night of 27-28 December, the day of or after his 21st birthday (not, pace Kilgallin, Lowry's natal day). John Sommerfield's Volunteer in Spain [see #101.1] is dedicated to John Cornford. There is a strong element of Cornford in the characterisation of Hugh: the Communist leanings; the romanticism of Rupert Brooke (Cornford's name-sake); and the desire to rush off to Spain in defence of a dubious freedom.

176.3 Bill Plantagenet.

The mockingly resonant name of the failed musician in Lowry's Lunar Caustic, who has lost his wife, whose hands shake and will not stretch an octave, but whose real problems are diagnosed by the doctor [19]: "Perhaps it was your heart you couldn't make stretch an octave." Bradbrook suggests [156] Lowry’s first name, Clarence (the Plantagenet drowned in a butt of wine). Hugh's dislike of climbing the gate (the usual way of getting in after the college closed at midnight) is shared by Melville's Redburn [see #182.3].

176.4 Sherlock Court ... the wheel of St Catherine.

St. Catharine's College

Sherlock Court

St. Catharine's [sic] College, Cambridge University, was founded in 1475 by Dr Robert Wodelarke, third provost of King's College, and was Lowry's college, 1929-32. The college was named for St. Katherine of Alexandria, whose refusal to deny her faith and marry the Emperor Maxentius led to her being broken on a spiked wheel; her body was taken to Mt Sinai, to the Greek Orthodox monastery now known as St.  Katherine's. The college gates depict a small golden spiked Catherine's wheel, the arms of the college. Sherlock Court is a small inner court, named for Thomas Sherlock, an eighteenth-century master and distinguished polemicist, who went on to be bishop of London. St Catherine’s is an Oxford college, St Catharine’s is the Cambridge one; Lowry invariably spelled the name of his college incorrectly (which may account for his Third).

176.5 like Melville, the world hurling from all havens astern.

Moby Dick

As the wheel of St Catharine's turns into that of the Pequod, Hugh recalls Moby Dick [Ch. 96, 'The Try-Works'], where Ishmael, "starting from a brief standing sleep," becomes horribly conscious of something wrong:

D.H. Lawrence in his essay on Moby Dick comments: "that great horror of ours: It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern" [Kilgallin, 63].

176.6 Eight hundred years dead.

If the reference is to Siegebert of East Anglia [see #176.1], then Hugh is out by some 500 years, but his date better suits the founding of the university: although the first college, Peterhouse, was formally founded in 1284, Cambridge had long been a centre of learning, and many of the colleges were founded on previous hospitals or monastic centres.

176.7 Fens.

Marshes. Cambridge is located in "the Fen Country" of England, and much of the nearby farmland was once swampy marsh. Bradbrook suggests ['Lowry's Cambridge', 133] that the "piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground" have particular reference to the underpinning of the new University Library, which opened in 1933; and that Lowry's description of Cambridge owes something to Virginia Woolf and Jacob's Room.

176.8 Keep off the Grass.

It is a tradition jealously guarded in the various colleges of Cambridge that only members or fellows of a college may walk upon its lawns.

176.9 the ill-fated Mr Bultitude in Vice Versa.

See #175.14: Mr Bultitude discovers, when he goes to Dr Grimstone's school at Crichton House, that his aptitude for business is not the least bit useful when it comes to preparing his lessons. He is not so much confronted by the torments of puberty himself, but his son and Dulcie Grimstone were sweet on one another, and he finds himself unable to cope.

176.10 Digs .... debagged ...  pepper-and-salt.

176.11 genius thrown into the river.

An image reflecting the rowing and rugger mentality, but drawn explicitly from Tom Harrisson’s ‘Letter to Oxford’ [see #328.4].

177.1 A.D. 1106.

Hugh's date has no particular significance (the first Jewish settlement in Cambridge is dated at 1073), but his general point is valid: after William of Normandy had conquered England in 1066, he invited (or at least allowed) the Jews of Normandy to cross the Channel, and for the next hundred years or so they were favourably received in England. Henry I issued a charter regulating their status and insisting upon their allegiance and subservience to the Crown, but protecting their rights concerning property, religious expression, and other matters (including moneylending). This favourable treatment encouraged many European Jews to come to England, but conditions later worsened and persecutions began, and in 1290 there was a general expulsion of all Jews from England.

177.2 I bought a University weekly.

Lowry has in mind the magazine Experiment, edited by his friend Gerald Noxon, to which he was a contributor; but as Muriel Bradbrook notes [124], the rather outstanding literary circle of Lowry's time at Cambridge "kept up a flow of publications, ran exhibitions and even some private printing presses."

177.3 Zionism.

Named after Mount Zion, citadel in Jerusalem, Zionism was the term popularised by Nathan Birnbaum and Theodor Herzl in the 1890s to identify the movement whose goal was to establish a Jewish national state in Palestine, a dream that came into being after World War II. Less precisely, it means the support of all things Jewish. Albert Einstein, whom Hugh will soon recall having met [182], was a passionate Zionist.

177.4 Like Philoctetes' bow or Oedipus' daughter.

177.5 to represent me, in a rival paper, as an immense guitar.

Muriel Bradbrook states [7] that Lowry was depicted this way by a student magazine in his undergraduate days, but neither artist nor magazine has been identified (however, an A.T. Phillipson matriculated at St Catharine's a year before Lowry). The "cruel truth" that Hugh belatedly comes to see, is the picture's "striking elements of infantilism", his absorption in his music preventing his proper development beyond that stage.

177.6 the jugular vein and the carotid artery.

Two major blood supply channels to and from the head, lying side by side in the neck. Hugh's role as a potential killer of his brother has been hinted at ever since the razor was called "cut-throat" [175], that is, with an open blade.

177.8 John Donne.

English poet (1573-1631). The Consul has picked the date more or less randomly; Donne’s first collected poems appeared in 1633, two years after his death. 1611, however, was the date of the King James Authorised Version of the bible, and the esoteric might note that the figures add up to 9, a trinity of trinities at Trinity.

177.9 the Prince of Wales.

David Edward (1894-1972), later Duke of Windsor, Prince of Wales from 1911 to 1936. He succeeded to the throne as Edward VIII on 20 January 1936 following the death of George V, but with intense pressure on him because he wished to marry Mrs Simpson, an American divorcee, he abdicated on 10 December that year. Hugh's reflections may echo the popular song, "I danced with the man who danced with the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales."

177.10 Armistice Day.

November 11th, anniversary of the day in 1918 on which a general armistice was declared between the Allies and the Central Powers preliminary to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles which concluded World War I.

178.1 the Amundsen society.

There is no such society. Hugh's audience seems to be a composite of the Royal Geographic Society, before which Amundsen read some of his papers, and the Oxford University Exploration Club, of which Tom Harrisson was a member [see #126.7]. Captain Roald Engebregt Amundsen (1872-1928), Norwegian explorer, navigated the Northwest Passage in 1903; was the first to reach the South Pole in December 1911 (one month ahead of Scott); and the first to fly over the North Pole, from Spitzbergen to Alaska, in 1926. He was lost at sea trying to rescue a fellow explorer.

178.2 the French Chamber of Deputies.

During the Third Republic, 1871-1940, the French parliament, as provided for by the constitution of 1875, was a bicameral one, consisting of a senate, or upper house, and a chamber of deputies, whose members were elected directly (approximately equivalent to the British House of Commons). Hugh is being sarcastic about the optimism reigning in European circles despite the unmistakable signs of coming war.

178.3 Metronome.

An influential New York magazine, begun in 1885 and, during the 1920s and 1930s dedicated to "Modern Music and its Makers". From January 1925 to January 1932 there were two editions, one for orchestras and one for bands. Metronome became a sounding board for musicians, composers and jazz fanatics, and its reviews of records and dance bands could make or break careers. A London periodical of the same name (Metronome: Mainly about Music) began in October 1924 but lasted only eight issues.

178.4 bitten by lions, in the desert, at the last calling for the guitar.

Rousseau

The dream is reminiscent of the painting 'The Sleeping Gypsy' (1897) by Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau [see #132.2]. The painting depicts a gypsy asleep in a moonlit desert expanse, his guitar lying beside him, while a curious lion stands brooding over him.

178.5 Thalavethiparothiam.

A term derived from Sir James Frazer's monumental study The Golden Bough (1912), originally published in twelve volumes but more commonly (as in Lowry's personal copy) in a more readable condensed version. Chapter 24 is entitled 'The Killing of the Divine King', #3 of which discusses kings killed at the end of a fixed term and describes an expedient resorted to in Malabar:

In Lowry’s short story, 'Bulls of the Resurrection', Sam mentions to Rysdale, "thalavettiparothiam [sic] or the authority obtained by decapitation, of course" [UBC 8-1, 7]. The story recounts an obscure (but thematically related) dream of beheading, and includes the phrase, ‘Et tu Brute’.

The Golden Bough begins with the dramatic image of the king of the sacred grove of Nemi, restlessly prowling about his domain, awaiting the inevitable appearance of the one who is to supplant him:

The Consul understands Hugh's allusion, since in the 1940 Volcano [175] he mutters, "The Golden Bough, eh?" and immediately draws attention to the maple tree outside.

178.6 Now then, don't be careful, as the Mexicans say.

Hugh unwittingly accentuates the hidden menace of his previous allusion to The Golden Bough: the Mexican proverb "Qué no te dé cuidado" literally means "don't be careful"; that is, "don't worry"; but it can be used in the sense of "Look out". In Dark as the Grave [223], the phrase is attributed to a certain Oaxaqueñan named Coco, an unreliable drinking companion, very quick with the knife. The threat was accentuated in the early drafts [UBC 27-1, 13 and 22-22, 18] by the Consul and Hugh uttering such pleasantries as: "Well, I think you've made a very fine job of preparing the corpse"; "The embalment seems complete. All that remains is the laying out"; and (referring to some French hair-cream) "I think we might finish you off with some of this." These "pleasantries" are the outcome of the first revisions [UBC 30-1, 13], and were soon discarded.

178.7 wild Beethoven.

In an early draft [UBC 30-3, 26], Beethoven's 9th played in the wind outside, perhaps for the sake of its finale: 'Alle Menschen werden Brüder' [“All men shall be brothers”].

178.8 abaft the beam.

On one of the quarters, that is, toward the rear [see #166.1].

179.1 the News of the World.

An English newspaper, founded in 1843 and widely circulated; it was (and is) notorious for its muck-raking sensationalism and blatant sexual exploitation (it was known at sea as the Red Lamp Gazette). Its specialty was divorce scandals (“News of the Screws”), which adds irony to Hugh's writing for it.

179.2 eternal troubadour, jongleur, interested only in married women.

Hugh's wandering has something in common with that of the troubadour, and the essence of troubadour poetry was the theme of unrequited love for an inaccessible lady.

179.3 Bloody little man.

Hugh should be thrown in the river [see #176.11 & #328.4].

179.4 a childish thing to be put away.

St Paul's advice in I Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." It is both ironic, then, that Hugh in Chapter XI should pick up the guitar again.

179.5 Is that right?

Until the galleys this was repeated as a moment of unity (compare "Is that so?" between Hugh and Yvonne [108-09]); but the response was rephrased by the printers as "Is what right"?", and Lowry let it go without protest.

179.6 that poor exiled maple tree.

Exiled from its Canadian homeland, the Consul's paradise, the maple tree (like the Consul) in danger of collapsing. In an earlier draft [UBC 22-22, 16], the Consul drew an explicit parallel between the maple and the tree in the opening chapter of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough [see #178.5] and elsewhere imagined himself [UBC 23-2, 25]: "hanging head downward from the crippled maple tree in the front garden, upside down like the clown in the tarot pack, in the branches condors brooding like bishops."

179.7 that sunflower .... stares. Fiercely. All day. Like God.

For the image of one turning away from the divine light, see #144.1. As the Consul admits of the sun [205], "Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face."

179.8 the King of Bohemia.

The King of Bohemia

A pub in Rosslyn, London. Echoes of "Dark Roslyn" [sic], a housing development near Dollarton, haunt the later works. Benskin's Ales and Stouts are popular in the south, and a group of Cambridge topers of the 1930s called themselves the Benskin Club.

179.9 John.

John Sommerfield, Hugh's "English friend fighting in Spain" [see #101.1]; rather than John Cornford, mentioned by Hugh a little earlier [see #176.2].

179.10 the balgine run.

From an old Navy song, "Clear the track and let the bulgines run." Bulgines [sic] are naval slang for engines. The word appears in the 'Eumaeus' chapter of Ulysses.

179.11 I Ain't Got Nobody.

A plaintive blues melody, first recorded in New York, 9 August 1916 by Marion Harris, a popular vaudeville and night club singer. Another version of the song, December 1922, featured the 'St. Louis Blues' on the same record [Rust, 333 and 335].

179.12 The One That I Love Loves Me.

More probably, 'The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else', recorded by Joe Schenk, 28 February 1924, and made popular by Al Jolson, March 1924 [Rust, 649 and 375].

180.1 the English page.

El Universal

The Consul is reading from El Universal, in 1938 the foremost newspaper of Mexico City, which then featured a page in English called "News of the World": a mixture of news, personal items, golf hints, and social gossip, frequently interspersed (especially when hard news was short) with short whimsical paragraphs of useless information under snappy incongruous headings ("Meat-eating Moose", "Dog Stages Sitdown", "Thief chases Policeman", "Husband eats raw meat, wife wins divorce suit"). For example:

Town count dog noses

Independence, Mo. August 7

This instance, from El Universal [8 August 1937], shows that Lowry took his examples from a variety of sources rather than one specific newspaper and that he was prepared to improve upon his source (the apostrophe of dog’s, with its faint hint of Cerberus, is not in the original). The other examples cited by the Consul have not yet been found (they are not necessarily all from El Universal). One can only guess, unfortunately, why the clink of coins irritates in Fort Worth (a city in west Texas, thirty miles from Dallas); why Alfonso XIII was unhappy in his exile; or what was significant about the eggs found in the tree at the lumbering town of Klamanth Falls, Oregon.

180.2 Japanese astride all roads from Shanghai. Americans evacuate.

A pun was intended, as the manuscripts make clear [UBC 25-22, 23]: "It sounds vaguely cloacal to me," remarked the Consul. Though Lowry was able to resist the obvious crudity, he could not omit it altogether, and as a result a distinct anachronism remains in the text: the Japanese armies had taken Shanghai by November 1937, and by November 1938 they were consolidating their hold on Canton. That Lowry was conscious of the anachronism is revealed by other manuscript jottings [UBC 30-1, 15], where the paper is described as "Near1y two years old", with this crossed out and "a year" pencilled in. Finally unable to resist the privy pun, he left the headline in without comment.

180.3 A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Hugh is echoing Alexander Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' (1711) [lines 215-19]:

180.4 the British Coasting Trade.

As Muriel Bradbrook pointed out [MLR 16: 28], this refers to inshore or coastal shipping, as distinct from the deep-sea or ocean-going trade.

180.5 Saltcaked smoke-stacks.

From John Masefield's 'Cargoes':

180.6 Britannia rules the waves.

A jingoist anthem, words by James Thompson (1710-78) to an air by Thomas Arne, first composed for the masque Alfred (1840), by Thompson and David Mallet. The refrain is: "O rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves! / Britons never never never will be slaves!"

181.1 a Cadillac for 500 pesos ... a white horse... anti-alcoholic fish.

El Universal

More details from the English page of El Universal [see #180.1]; the first five details from the regular personal column, "What you ought to know"; the other two more general snippets of news. The actual details have not been found. The list was originally much longer [UBC 22-22, 12-13], including such details as "for 3 pesos 3 yards of well-rotted cow" [used in October Ferry, 34]. As the Consul's ‘Strange’ suggests, he senses the ominous implications of the white horse: the number 7, the Seventh Seal, the pale horse of Revelation 6:8, and the white horse used in Hindu sacrifice [see #307.8(d)]. The anti-alcoholic fish is, presumably, a fiche or pamphlet.

181.2 Juan Ramírez.

A Spaniard, born in ancient Egypt, immortal, but changing his guise every few centuries (the original of "The Highlander" in the Fox Studios TV series). The detail of the wandering remains of a famous singer is recorded in the ‘Pegaso’ notebook [UBC 12-14]: "continuan en triste peregrination de un lugar a otro, los restos de la [illegible] cantante Angela Peralta." Angela Peralta (1845-83) was a popular singer and composer; in Lowry’s revisions she became Angelo Peralto before disappearing from the text.

181.3 the Parson's Nose.

A prominent spur on one approach to Mount Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales; its Welsh name Clogwyn-y-person literally meaning "Parson's Crag". In September 1933, Lowry and Jan Gabrial, with Tom Forman, stayed at the Gorphwysfa Hotel at Pen-y-Pas, North Wales, the two men doing some rock-climbing [Inside the Volcano, 27]. According to a manuscript note [UBC 30-10, ts 22], the detail in Chapter VIII about pity and terror [see #248.4] derived from "the same man responsible for the classic about finding the rocks of the Parson's Nose very hard", i.e., I.A. Richards. The parson's nose, like the pope's nose, is the inelegant end of a chicken or goose, traditionally offered to the reverend visitor by those of the other persuasion.

181.4 one had written, in the visitors' book.

This was a favourite story of Lowry's according to William McConnell, who says that Lowry had seen the exchange in the visitors' book when he was a youth.

181.5 the actor in the Passion Play.

The Oberammergau Passion Play, given once every ten years in the upper Bavarian village of Oberammergau, forty-five miles southwest of Munich, was first performed in 1634, to fulfill a vow made by the villagers during an outbreak of plague the previous year. The format has been revised many times (recently, to eliminate the notorious anti-Semitic references), but in eighteen acts, with numerous tableaux and musical embellishments, it tells the story from Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem until the Resurrection. The image occurs in Dark as the Grave [94]:

182.1 a Pilsener.

A light Bohemian beer with a distinctive flavour of hops; named after the Czechoslovakian town of Pilsen.

182.2 the slippery belay.

A belay is the anchorage gained by securing a rope to a rock or crag.

182.3 a simple gate, and climbing wind masts in port.

Hugh recalls his unseamanlike aversion to climbing over the gates of St Catharine's [176]. The "first voyage" suggests Redburn [Ch. 24]; Redburn, afraid of climbing the masts in port, discovers to his amazement:

Nordahl Grieg

182.4 the pure Norwegian sea.

If Hugh intends a reference here to Nordahl Grieg's The Ship Sails On [see #163.12], it is undercut by Benjamin Hall's intense loathing of that element.

182.5 a pose.

For Hugh’s sense of inauthenticity, see #102.5.

182.6 Tufthunter.

In University slang, ‘tuft’ has the sense of a titled undergraduate (one who formerly wore a tuft or tassel at Oxford or Cambridge) hence, a tufthunter is one who deliberately tries to become acquainted with such people, a social climber or snob.

The King of Bohemia

182.7 that pub.

The King of Bohemia [179], where Hugh’s leftist friends were singing songs which Hugh had considered "bogus bolshy". His friends subsequently acted out their beliefs in Spain leaving Hugh to now regret his failure to enter into the spirit of the moment.

182.8 Einstein.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Jewish physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1921), whose Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1916) were his outstanding achievements in a life of genius. Although the incident described here is probably apocryphal, the jest simply too good to resist, the “timing” is possible, since Einstein visited Cambridge for a week early in 1930 to receive an honorary degree.

182.9 the tumultuous kitchen of St. John's.

St. John's Court

St John's College, founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, in 1511. Inside its famous noisy kitchens, in the upper window on the left of the south wall, is a memorial inscription to Wordsworth, who wrote of the rooms he occupied while an undergraduate in The Prelude [III.46-52]:

There is not, incidentally, any college clock visible from within the gothic courts of St John's, but the next three lines of The Prelude contributed to Hugh's story:

182.10 his hammock strung between Aries and the Circlet of the Western Fish.

An image used by Lowry in a letter to Seymour Lawrence [SL, 275] to symbolise the "transcendent beauty" of the great mind; there Conrad Aiken, here Einstein. Aries, the ram, is the first of the constellations; Pisces, the fish, is the last. Pisces is sliced into northern, southern and western fish, the latter being the circlet of stars at the end of the longer "leg" of the V-shaped constellation. The hammock strung between Aries and the Circlet of Western Fish, linking the last to the first, symbolises the beauty of an old order that was to be upset by Einstein's ideas of relativity, time, and space.

183.1 the Jefe de Jardineros.

Sp. "The Chief of Gardeners"; in Chapter XII to be associated in the Consul's mind with God (and perhaps Mr McGregor), and responsible for the final irrevocable decision about the Consul's fate. His name, almost improbably, is Fructuoso Sanabria.

183.2 a new statue to Díaz in Oaxaca.

Oaxaca

Although Oaxaca was the natal state of Porfirio Díaz [see #108.5], there is not in Oaxaca, let alone the rest of Mexico, a public statue to his memory, so widely is it detested (though one small street in Oaxaca is named after him). However, statues of Benito Juárez, also a native of Oaxaca [see #108.2], are to be found everywhere in Mexico.

183.3 this Union Militar, sinarquistas, whatever they're called.

Asals states ['Spanish Civil War', 24] that this reference is entirely indebted to Buckley [204-06], as there was no such Mexican party of this name. The Union is described by Buckley [204]: "a secret military organisation which was violently Fascist in character, and to which apparently a considerable number of officers belonged". He adds that the police knew better than most people just who was behind the Unión Militar.

The name Unión Militar, as Hugh's "prewar thingmetight, in Spain" suggests, was taken by Lowry from the Unión Militar Española, a group of young officers under Colonel Bartolomé Barba who plotted within the army against the republic, 1931-32, and who became closely associated with the fascist Falange when the Civil War broke out. In early drafts of the novel Lowry called them "vigilantes", but as Civil War references became important, the Unión Militar found its way into the text. Edmonds notes [71]:

In John Gunther's Inside Latin America [UBC WT 1-21, 6], ‘sinarquista’ is defined as "an offshoot of the old Cristero movement" [see #107.6]. In 1934, young extremists (Catholic fanatics, sons of hacienda owners, businessmen) met secretly, and on 23 May 1937 was born la Unión Nacional Sinarquista, a paramilitary organisation which quickly grew into an effective force of many thousands, who adopted fascist uniforms and salutes and opposed the anti-catholic and pro-agrarian reforms of Cárdenas. Their aim was counter-revolution, summed up in the slogan ‘¡Abajo el agarismo!’ ("Down with land-reform"). The movement faded after the 1940 elections, but generated great feeling while it lasted, its impetus likened by Benitez [199] to "una pagina arrancada de la serpiente enplumada de Lawrence" ("a page torn from Lawrence's Plumed Serpent").

183.4 the policía de Séguridad.

Sp. "the security-police (headquarters)." El policía means "the policeman"; la policía, "the police force."

183.5 his socks .... the jacket.

The Consul has to avoid irritation when putting on his socks. The jacket Hugh borrowed, mentioned so casually, ultimately determines the Consul's fate, since Hugh's telegram is still in the pocket. The reference was not always casual, for the Consul commented in one draft [UBC 30-1, 13]: "I don't seem to find the jacket that goes with these trousers."

183.6 he was only twelve years older than Hugh.

The Consul was born in 1896, so Hugh was presumably born in 1908. In a late draft [UBC TM 6, 44], ‘decade’ is crossed out, to reconcile the change of Geoffrey's birth from 1898 to 1896, to prevent his being impossibly young to command the Samaritan.

184.1 anti-aircraft gun.

An unlikely detail. The science of anti-aircraft weaponry was virtually non-existent, at best primitive, during World War I, and did not exist on ships in the Pacific, where German air forces were not deployed. In response to Albert Erskine's query as to whether they had such guns in WWI, Lowry confidently replied [22 June 1946; CL 1, 584], "Yes, they did: some kind anyhow, even if just Lewis or Maxim."

184.2 Coclogenus paca Mexico.

Coelgenus paca

The mundane meaning of this apparent grimoire has been sensed by Andersen [94]: "Probably either a punning or erroneous reference to Coelgenus paca, a tailless rodent found in South and Central America whose skin is used for leather." Earlier the manuscript read at this point, "before you could say Jack Robinson" [UBC 30-1, 15], and the reference to the Coclogenus paca Mexico (the error persists throughout all the notes and manuscripts) came a few pages later; the Consul, looking at his neighbour's Scotty dog, Angus, who is in turn looking adoringly at Yvonne, remarks, "We could go to the zoo and see the tepezcuintle." Hugh asks in return, "What's a tepezcuintal?" (Lowry uses both spellings), to which the Consul mutters, "A dog .... Coclogenus paca Mexico. Well, a sort of high class scavenger, a groomed hyaena" [UBC 26-23, 19 insert (to 194)]; this is the 1941 annotation of the 1940 carbon, the intention here being to clarify the earlier obscurities. The tepezcuintle did not survive the later revisions.

In another version [UBC 30-1, 17], Lowry adds, "A pariah with a university education"; this is not the original reference, but the mention of the tepezcuintle in the 1940 Volcano [183-84; UBC 25-22, 25] is even more confusing. In the earlier drafts the Consul was considerably more bloody-minded towards Yvonne and Hugh, originally his daughter and her boyfriend, and his remarks were more obviously directed at them, but as the relationship between the three characters changed, the tepezcuintle episode became increasingly redundant and was eliminated almost completely.

184.3 Der englishe Dampfer trägt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-boote.

Seeteufel

Ger. "The English steamer carries camouflage against German U-boats." The American text corrects Lowry's error, ‘tragt’, which is perpetuated in the British text. In a letter to Albert Erskine [16 July 1946; CL 1, 611], Lowry says that he has lost the original, but that it depicted two photographs, the first a British Q-ship, and the second the Emden, as shown to him in a German restaurant in Mexico City, the captions in Gothic print. Despite this camouflage, his actual source was Felix Graf von Luckner's Seeteufel: Abenteuer aus meinem Leben [Sea Devil: adventures from my life] (K. F. Koehler, 1921), which, however, makes no mention of the Emden (von Luckner was in the South Pacific, the Emden in the Indian Ocean).

In the Texas manuscript [TM VI, 45], Lowry is explicit about the connection between “Everything about the Samaritan was a fake” and Hugh’s like sense of himself; but in a marginal note wondered if it were not better to abandon the idea of fake altogether.

184.4 the Emden.

The Emden

The Emden reminds the Consul of the Samaritan. Named after the Westphalian seaport, the Emden was the flagship of the German naval forces in the southern hemisphere in World War I. She was a light cruiser (with light armour and artillery) under the command of Karl von Müller. When the German navy left the Pacific early in the war, the Emden was left behind to threaten British, Australian and Japanese shipping. She wrought havoc in the Indian Ocean during the first few months of the war, capturing some 22 merchantmen, 16 of which were sunk. She was renowned for daring attacks in enemy harbours, once sailing under false colours and a false funnel into Penang. Engaged by the Australian cruiser Sydney off the Cocos Islands in November 1914, her loss effectively ended the German threat in the Antipodes.

184.5 So verliess ich den Weltteil unserer Antipoden.

Ger. "Thus I abandoned the world of our Antipodes" (Weltteil having the sense of "part of the globe"; 'verlies' in British editions should read 'verliess'). Lowry's direct source for this, as with the German quotation detailed in #184.3, which it immediately precedes, is von Luckner's Seeteufel, which on page 306 features the image of an unnamed vessel (not obviously a Q-ship) with this caption, though in context von Luckner's words represent his farewell to the South Seas.

Before World War I, the Germans laid claim to Samoa, part of New Guinea and island groups such as the Marianas and Carolines; these they lost during the war. As he repeats "Our Antipodes", the Consul gives Hugh a sharp glance to see if he is aware of the esoteric significance of the phrase: Antipodes, a Greek word meaning "having the feet apposite", referred to those dwelling directly opposite one other on the globe, their feet as it were planted against each other; but it also meant (as in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici #26: "the case of Antipodes"; or Thomas Burnet's preface to his Sacred Theory of the Earth: "there are Antipodes" believing in the existence of "another world" (Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg, was condemned in 780 for proclaiming the existence of the Antipodes). To the Consul it means, quite simply, the coexistence of the world of spirits with his own, a doctrine of opposites that leads him, inevitably, to thoughts of Boehme.

184.6 Boehme.

Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), German shoemaker and mystic who was greatly influenced by Paracelsus. Claiming divine revelation and convinced that he had been allowed to see into the heart of things, he produced between 1612 and 1624 several treatises about the central mystical experience, the best known of which are De tribus principiis (1619); the Mysterium Magnum (1621) and, above all, De Signatura rerum (1621), which asserts both the doctrine of opposites [see #130.5] and the belief that all nature manifests or is a signature of God, by the proper reading of which man draws closer to the Godhead. Boehme died in 1624, having foretold, it is said, the exact hour of his death.

Lowry owned a copy of Boehme's 'Signatura Rerum' and Other Discourses, given to him by Rubina Stansfeld-Jones. Until the final drafts the first book cited was A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature's Marvels by Benedictus Figulus (trans. A.E. Waite, 1893). Lowry's notes for some of the books that follow, roughly corresponding to the published titles, are in the Templeton Collection [UBC WT 1-l l].

185.1 A Treatise of Sulphur.

Originally published (about 1610) in a volume entitled: "Nouum lumen chymicum. E naturae fonte manuali experienta depromptum. Cui accessit Tractatus de sulphure. Authoris ana-gramma Diui Leschi genus amo." ("A New Light of Alchymie: taken out of the fountain of Nature, and manual experience. To which is added a Treatise of Sulphur. Anagram of the author Divi Leschi genus amo.") Michael Sendivogius (1566-1646) was a Moravian chemist who worked as a pupil and assistant to the famous alchemist Alexander Seton, one of the few who reportedly succeeded in transmuting metals into gold. Since the anagram (meaning "I love the Divine Race of Leschi") is a fair approximation of his name, the work was generally assumed to be that of Sendivogius, but it was Seton's, whose widow Sendivogius had married. The Treatise of Sulphur, generally agreed to be his own, was published separately in 1616 under the anagram Angelus doce mihi jus ("Angel, Teach Me Right"); it was translated into English by John French as part of the New Light (London, 1650); and included in the Musaeum Hermeticum of 1678 [see #185.4], where it may be found in A.E. Waite's translation [127-58]. The treatise is basically a defence of the value of sulphur to the alchemist, asking first, "Friend, why dost thou curse Sulphur", and answering in part that "A Prince without a people is unhappy; so is an Alchymist without Sulphur and Mercury."

185.2 The Hermetical Triumph.

The full title reads:

The English edition (London, P. Hanet, 1723) was translated from the 1689 French version by Alexander Toussaint Limojon de Saint-Didier, who used as his anagram "Dives sicut Ardens S". The basis of the work is the short treatise, The Ancient War of the Knights, by an unknown German, concerning a discourse between the stone of the philosophers, and gold and mercury, cast as a dispute between these elements and ending with the triumph of the stone. This is followed by a longer discourse between Pyrophilus and Eudoxus, concerning the implications of the treatise, to which is appended another version of The Ancient War and a discursive comparison of the French and German versions. The whole may be compleat, but it is not particularly intelligible.

185.3 The Secrets Revealed.

The full title reads:

The book was printed in London in 1669, as a translation of a Latin original of uncertain date. Described by its author as "a small but worthy Treatise of great Learning," the Secrets Reveal'd recounts the various operations by which the sophic mercury and the stone itself may be prepared. The title refers to the legend that King Solomon was an adept in alchemy and other occult arts, and that his palace contained much secret knowledge. The treatise was included in the Musaeum Hermeticum of 1678 and in Waite's Hermetic Museum [159-98], under the title An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King [see #185.4]. The anonymous alchemist, "Truth loving Citizen of the World," has sometimes been identified as Thomas Vaughan, brother of the poet Henry, because the claim that by inspiration and reading he attained the philosopher's stone at the age of twenty three, in 1645, suits Vaughan's birthdate and because Thomas Vaughan sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Eugenius Philalethes. A.E Waite in The Holy Kabbalah [X.xi, 473] distinguishes the two (as far as this is possible), as the Consul in earlier drafts was about to do to Hugh [189] before being interrupted by Laruelle:

185.4 The Musaeum Hermeticum. Originally published (Lucan Jennis, Frankfurt, 1625) in nine tracts of 483 pages then reissued in 1678 in a restored and enlarged form of twenty-one tracts and 867 pages. This version, with almost exactly the title Lowry cites, was edited and translated into English by A.E. Waite in 1839, under the title:

Lowry's Latin citation includes a sentence Waite omits: "by means of which all things suffering any sort of defect may be restored, is to be found and possessed, containing 21 Chemical Tractati, at Frankfurt at the house of Hermann à Sande." The tracts include A Treatise of Sulphur and An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King [see #185.1 and #185.3], as well as other treatises upon the Stone, the Golden Age Restored, the Sophic Hydrolith, the Janitor Pansophus, and other medico-chemical matters. The "Sopho-Spagyricae" arts mentioned in the title refer to those practiced by the followers of Paracelsus. The "CIC" is 1000; the "ICC" is 600. Hence: 1678.

185.5 Sub-Mundanes.

The full title reads:

As the inner title page explains, the edition (of a 1680 version) was "Done into English" by one P.A., Gent. of London; and printed for "B.M., Printer to the Royal Society of the Sage, at the Signe of the Rosy-Crusian." It takes the form of "Five Pleasant Discourses as the Secret Sciences", cast as a dialogue between Count Gabalis and one of his neophytes, reluctant and sceptical, who is to be made worthy of receiving the Cabbalistical illuminations and of forming an alliance with the elementary powers. Its chief concern is to demonstrate the existence and nature of elementary spirits (sylphs, nymphs, gnomes, and salamanders) and to dispel the vulgar opinion that such beings are legions of devils. The Abbé Nicholas de Montfaucon de Villars (1635?-73?) was a French mystic, also known as the Comte de Gabalis, who was rumoured to have died of apoplexy for having betrayed the secret sciences. Notwithstanding, his discussion of elementary spirits became a widely read text of occult and Rosicrucian thought and was the source of Alexander Pope's "machinery" in The Rape of the Lock.

185.6 Erekia ... Illirikim; Apelki ... Dresop ... Arekesoli ... Burasin ... Glesi ... Effrigis ... the Mames ... Ramisen.

As Epstein first noted [127], Lowry took this list directly from MacGregor-Mathers' The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, published in London, 1898 [122], listed among the servitors of Amaymon (Lowry cites about half the list):

The Consul's "the flesh unclothed" and "the evil questioners" describe Labisi and Nilima respectively, two others from the list; while his comment, "Perhaps you would not call them precisely rational", goes back to MacGregor-Mathers's preface [xxxiii], where he describes such elementals as not so much acting irrationally but with intent.

186.1 the friendliest of humours.

Lowry had written "the best of spirits", but in a marginal note [UBC TM 6, 47] queried this: "Perhaps spirits is a bad word after so many evil ones: what about humours?"

186.2 Hitler wished to annihilate the Jews in order to obtain just such arcane.

Lowry clarifies this statement ['LJC', 76]:

It has been claimed by some occultists that Hitler was an adept, a black magician or even a front man for an occult group controlling the Nazi Party, and that his otherwise inexplicable power over the German people was owing to his command of dark powers. Links between the Nazis and some occult groups have been affirmed and it can be shown that the swastika, traditionally an emblem of light when reversed like the Nazi one has been an emblem of the powers of darkness. For details, see Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny (1973). But much of Lowry's arcana, such as this, is less the expression of deep knowledge than "the muddy stream of popular occultism" [Norman Newton], the kind of trivial gossip to be picked up in any 1930s Bohemian pub. In a sentence deleted from a draft of the letter to Jonathan Cape [UBC 2-3] Lowry commented: "This is Jewish knowledge, but what of our knowledge and means of aspiration is not, at bottom?"

186.3 the telephone rang.

A last warning from the benevolent powers, perhaps, but rejected by the Consul.

186.4 why don't we go to the zoo.

Chapultepec Park

Yvonne means the tiny zoo in Cuernavaca's Chapultepec Park, the only one that could be closer than the fictional Tomalín (there is a hint here of the original destination of Chapultepec, on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, described in Dark as the Grave [164]). In the manuscripts, the suggestion was the Consul's, leading up to the deleted tepezcuintle episode [see #184.2], here retained to lead up to Moctezuma's infernal regions [187].

Rousseau

187.1 like a detail in a Rousseau.

The paintings of Henri Rousseau [see #132.2] have a childlike simplicity, and often contain one strikingly incongruous detail, such as a fly in a fruit bowl, or a kitten with a ball of wool in a portrait.

187.2 her red shoes.

In the Consul's mind, but not Hugh's, the association between the clicking red heels and the scarlet woman of Revelation 17:4 is to the fore [see #46.5]. Aiken comments in Ushant [30-31]: "steel-shod little high heels especially invented for the perforation of hearts. The tiny streamlined Nita [Jan] who would go through life as murderously as a bullet."

187.3 slim brown hands that do not rock the cradle.

"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", in the popular verse 'The Hand that Rules the World' by William Ross Wallace (1819-81).

187.4 Job's warhorse.

Job 39:19-25, where the horse, hearing the sound of trumpets and smelling the battle far-off, rejoices in its strength and mocks at fear. These verses are preceded by two which show the inability of the woman to understand the impulse or to admire the horse, thus neatly combining Hugh's anxiety about the Battle of the Ebro with Yvonne's unconcern.

187.5 zoos in Mexico .... The poor chap thought he was in the infernal regions.

Among the splendours of Tenochtitlán revealed to the astounded Spaniards shortly after their arrival in Moctezuma's capital was the Aztec emperor's immense aviary and his menagerie of wild animals. The Spaniards were impressed by the reptiles and serpents [Prescott, IV.i, 320]: "They gazed on the spectacle with a vague curiosity not unmixed with awe; and, as they listened to the wild cries of the ferocious animals and the hissing of the serpents, they almost fancied themselves in the infernal regions."

187.6 Stout Cortez.

As in Keats, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' [see #273.3].

187.7 A curious bird is the scorpion.

Compare the popular limerick (described in Baring-Gould's Lure of the Limerick as one of the few good clean ones), written by Dixon Lanier Merritt, a Florida newspaperman:

In an early revision Yvonne accentuated the identification between the scorpion and the Consul: "Kill it, someone" [UBC 30-1, 17]. A pencilled insert notes: "Mastigoproctus gigantens or the rigadoon of the vinegaroon", combining the names of different scorpions with Zola's dance of death (as in 'Drunkard's Rigadoon', Lowry's name for Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend).

188.1 He'll only sting himself to death anyway.

A reference to the popular belief that the scorpion ringed with fire will sting itself to death [see #338.10].

188.2 666.

666 advertisements

666

The Consul's "quiet delight" stems from his recognition that ‘666’ is the number of the Beast in Revelation 13:18: "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." The number 666, adopted by Aleister Crowley as his personal occult signature, was (by gematria) also the number of l'Empereur Napoléon in Tolstoy's War and Peace, IX.xix [see #82.6]. The "obscure yellow plates" could long be found on ancient walls in Cuernavaca; however, they advertise not an insecticide but a medicinal cure-all (still obtainable), effective against coughs, colds, flu, and nasal congestion (the change from ‘a cough mixture’ to ‘insecticide’ was made only in the proofs).

188.3 had worked wonders.

Compare the novel's first epitaph: "Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man"; but with still the unspoken implication "only against Death shall he call for aid in vain." The Consul's "air of infallibility" will be as unavailing as the Pope's.

188.4 old Chagfordian tie.

Chagford, south Devon, is a market town on the edge of Dartmoor. Lowry's Cambridge friend James Travers, had a silver-fox farm nearby, where Lowry visited him upon one disastrous occasion [Day, 181]. The Consul had originally donned a blue "naval" tie (there was no public school in the town). John Davenport to Lowry, listing the private echoes, confirms the suggestion of James Travers, who had died in the western desert: "poor James Travers' Chagford" [UBC 1-17].

188.5 A slight nutation.

A slight nodding. The Penguin "mutation" is a distinct error (one made by Reynal and Hitchcock in the original American setting, but firmly corrected by Lowry on the galley proofs). Nutation is the "wobbling" of the earth's axis owing to the gravitational attraction of the moon. Once in 18.61 years the celestial pole completes a small ellipse about its average position, and the irregular wavy motion tracing this path is called nutation. Any further reference to Nut, the mother goddess of Ancient Egypt who was unfaithful to her husband, Ra, would seem rather remote.

188.6 an old brush with Pathans.

Magnificently Anglo-Indian. The Pathans are a Moslem people of the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, fiercely independent, who gave the British Raj considerable trouble on the northwest frontier, not far from Kashmir. But if the limp is "of nautical origin", it would suggest Captain Ahab's loss of his leg in his previous brush with Moby Dick.

189.1 Plingen, plangen, aufgefangen.

An unknown rhyme, which flicks out only fragments of sense: Ger. aufgefangen, "captured"; Bootle, a dockside district in the north of Liverpool; Nemesis, the abstract force of retributive justice among the Greeks. The Consul's day does not promise to be an extraordinarily nice one. The original began, "Klingen, klangen" (recast for ukulele?), and continued "Zwingen, zwangen"; one version adds, "walking stalking death plus me".

189.2 no se permite fijar anuncios.

Sp. "It is not permitted to post advertisements"; a politer version of the more usual No anunciar ("Post No Bills").

189.3 as in a dream of a dying Hindu.

The boy steering the cattle by the tail had long been present; the "dying Hindu" came later. Rawlinson's India states [129]: "The pious Hindu, when he feels himself to be dying, grasps the tail of a cow, as this will ensure a safe passage to heaven." This may refer to the Brahman doctrine that the destiny of the soul in the afterlife depends on the mental attitude of the dying person, particularly the last thing that he thinks of.

189.4 Father is waiting for you .... Father has not forgotten.

On one level, the voice of Geoffrey's father, calling as in a dream from beyond Himavat; on another, that of Geoffrey (Papa), earlier seen as the billy-goat [see #99.8] and now threatening retribution for the violated past.

189.5 Guelphs.

In the Italian city states, one of the two great parties, supporting the authority of the Pope in opposition to the aristocratic party of the Ghibellines, who supported the emperor. Dante was a Guelph and fought for Florence against the Ghibellines of Arezzo in 1289.

189.6 that no angel with six wings is ever transformed.

A characteristic of the seraphim, the highest order of angel. This is Number XXX of the cabbalistic conclusions (Conclusiones Philosophicae, Cabalisticae et Theologicae) of Picus de Mirandula, published in Rome in 1486 [Jakobsen, 84]. The conclusion is cited in Éliphas Lévi's La Science des Esprits (1865), and in A.E. Waite's The Holy Kabbalah [X.iii, 449]. Waite dismisses as "mere ingenuity" Lévi's contention that it means "there is no change for the mind which is equilibrated perfectly"; Lowry's direct source is clearly Waite, but the phrase precedes a violent change in the Consul's psychic equilibrium.

189.7 no bird ever flew with one –.

Lowry's short story 'June the 30th, 1934' offers a pertinent context: two men (one named Firmin) meet on a train, talk, and have one drink before deciding to have another on the grounds that "No bird ever flew with one wing" [P & S, 42].

189.8 Thomas Burnet, author of the Telluris Theoria Sacra.

Thomas Burnet

Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), theologian and philosopher, student and fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, took his MA in 1658, was Proctor, 1667, and later became clerk of the closet to William III. He had to resign the post in 1692 because of controversy caused by his Archaeologiae Philosophicae, which treated the Mosaic account of the Fall as allegory. Burnet's account of the creation is expressed in his Telluris Theoria Sacra (Part I, 1680; Part II, 1689]; translated from the original Latin into English (1684 and 1690):

Burnet maintained that the earth resembled a gigantic egg, its face smooth and uniform, without mountains and without a sea, but the action of the sun making volatile the waters of the deep within, caused the shell to be crushed, and the internal waters to burst forth in a deluge, fragments of shell forming the mountains; at the same time and as a result of the catastrophe the equator was diverted from its original coincidence with the ecliptic. Burnet's notions, if not accepted literally, gave Lowry a cosmology to frame his tragic action: an original paradise, an abyss, the deluge, and the vain attempt in a world heading towards its final conflagration to put together the broken materials of that first world.

189.9 entered Christs in –.

The Consul is about to say 1654, as he had in an earlier draft [UBC 30-3, 42]: "Thomas Burnet, author of the Telluris Theoria Sacra, entered Christ's in 1654, when Ralph Cudworth was master. Henry More must have been about my age then. Who were all these fogies anyway." He is quoting almost directly from A.E. Waite's The Holy Kabbalah [X.xiv, 485], where this information is given [see #185.3], based in turn on Waite's reading of Burnet's Archaeologiae Philosophicae. The Cambridge records show that Burnet entered Christ's on 28 September 1655.

In that early draft, other questions are asked: "Who was Eirenaeus Philalethes? Who said that Malkuth was the invisible, archetypal man, & if so, why? You have heard, doubtless, of the Cambridge Platonists? But what of the Cambridge Cabbalists? In Christ's College you have seen a statue of Milton? But did you know that Thomas Burnet... [etc]." Eirenaeus Philalethes, according to Waite's Preface to The Hermetical Museum [x-xi], "equally revered and unknown by all devout Spagyrites, is supposed to have been the most lucid of hierophants"; otherwise, Thomas Vaughan.

189.10 Cáscaras! Caracoles! Virgen Santísima! Ave María! Fuego, fuego! Ay, qué me matan .... Acabóse.

Sp. "Great Heavens! Hey! Virgin most Holy! Hail Mary! Well, I'll be damned .... That''s the limit." More literally, cáscaras are "shells" or "husks” (a touch of the Qliphoth); caracoles are "snails" (the word used like its cognate, caramba); fuego is short for "fuego de Díos", or "fire of God"; qué me matan is short for "Qué me maten si no es verdad!", or "May I die if it's not true!"; and acabose, "finished", has the sense of "the last straw". The unearthly screeching heralds the arrival of malignant forces (perhaps another emissary of Lucifer), and the Consul's equilibrium [see #39.3(b)] is violently upset.

190.1 Acabose.

Although acabose means "finished" in the sense of "that's the limit," Lowry may intend a reference to Christ's last words, consummatum est, "it is finished" [John 19:30].

190.2 the sideroad Yvonne had seemed anxious they should take.

Yvonne is anxious to avoid Laruelle's house, just as Jacques is himself [23], but by a "favourite trick of the gods" her very efforts to avoid him contribute to their meeting. The infernal machine is relentless: Jacques comes forward, "as it were impelled by clockwork". The sideroad, if it ever existed, is not there in present-day Cuernavaca.

191.1 my "madhouse".

In an earlier manuscript [UBC 29-3, 10], Jacques's house was like "a still from the Cabinet of Dr Caligari and the frontispiece to a cheap edition of Omar Khyyam." The comparison is that with the German expressionist film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), based on screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, directed by Robert Wiene, and starring Werner Krauss as the mad doctor and Conrad Veidt as Cesare, his somnambulist. The supposedly rational narrator of the film is telling someone of the beautiful woman just consigned to a lunatic asylum because of an attempted rape by a somnambulist, who has just murdered her lover. Yet, at the end of the film it appears that everything has been a figment of the narrator’s imagination. Dr. Caligari, seen previously as the mad magician who controls the somnambulist, turns out to be the doctor in charge of the asylum; thus, he who was shown to be mad and to need restraining is the restrainer of the mad. To the Consul, feeling like the somnambulist, the figure of Jacques assumes the features of the mad doctor and the changing levels of perspective and reality leave his mind confused. In this state, then, he enters the madhouse and fairground of Chapter VII.

Gerald Noxon was invited to visit "the Cabinet of Dr. Caliglowry" [2 Nov. 1943; Lowry / Noxon Letters, 34]. Lowry found in Broch's The Sleepwalkers an image of the world as a madhouse [269], and the paradox that those who have not gone mad must be insane.

In the typescript of Dark as the Grave [9-5, 308-09], Sigbjørn says the house belonged to an artist. He assumes the bottom to be a studio as it is glassed in; he is told that when her brother (who built the house) died, Senora Blanco ["Señora Trigo"] turned the tower into the two flats of the Quinta María, in one of which Lowry stayed during his 1946 visit.

191.2 Hugues.

"Hugh" as a Frenchman might pronounce the word, the "g" presumably hard. The Penguin "Hughes" is an error.

191.3 It was a great coincidence our meeting here.

Hugh and Jacques "have something in common", that is, a past affair with Yvonne (according to Conrad Aiken, Selected Letters [208], Lowry had used this phrase to one of Jan's lovers). Either way, the Consul's "changed even tone" suggests that it is not so much "an unusual bloody miracle" as part of an inexorable force of destiny closing around him.

191.4 the cartero.

Sp. "the postman." Lowry mentions in Dark as the Grave [142] that the same postman was still at work in 1945. Lowry told David Markson [29 June 1951; CL 2, 400] that news of the acceptance of Under the Volcano was delivered by a character in the book. The 1940 Volcano [192] refers to the postman's grandfather who had been a cartero in the time of Maximilian I, "when Quahnahuac [sic] possessed its own stamp – magenta, very rare"; then relates this to a major motif of the early version, carrier pigeons.

192.1 Señor Calígula.

Caius Caesar (12-41 AD), Roman emperor from 37-41 AD, whose reign was marked by excesses of cruelties and vice which were largely the product of his growing madness. He considered himself a god and proposed raising his horse Incitatus (already a senator) to the rank of Consul (something Lowry could have found in Aiken's Blue Voyage [49]).

192.2 Badrona, Diosdado.

Diosdado, the "God-given", appears behind the bar of the Farolito in Chapter XII; Dr Figueroa is mentioned in Chapter IX, as one who might aid the dying Indian; ‘Sandovah’ was until the galley stages ‘Sanabria’, as listed in the phonebook [208]. Various names merge into the Jefe de Jardineros of Chapter XII, "Fructuosa Sanabria" ["fruitful health"], in earlier revisions "Fructuosa Badrona".

192.3 Bright stamps of archers.

Those affixed to the previous express delivery from Juan Cerillo [see #107.8]. The place names stamped on the card are all significant in the life of Geoffrey and Yvonne.

193.1 written at least a year ago.

Not really, as Yvonne did not leave until December 1937. The Consul's reaction, "Strange –", is (for him) an intimation of the occult, and as such different from the earlier "Cheery little matter" [UBC 30-1, (26)], which as Asals notes [Making, 115] echoes Yvonne's comment on the death of the cats.

193.2 the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway.

Signal Peak / El Capitán

El Paso is the border city in the western corner of Texas, linked to the Mexican Ciudad Juárez by the International Bridge, the most frequently used route in and out of Mexico.  "El Paso" is the name of the pass through the mountains north of the city (El Paso del Norte). Signal Peak, or El Capitán (8,750 feet), is in the Guadalupe Mountains, just off Route 62 (the Carlsbad Highway), a few miles northeast of the city and pass. Lowry's ‘on El Paso’ is confusing, since Signal Peak is some miles from the pass. Signal Peak is distinctly leonine in appearance and derives its name from the fact that Indians (and later U.S. cavalrymen) used it as a signalling point. The Carlsbad Caverns, across the state line in New Mexico, some miles east and north of El Paso, are perhaps the largest complex of underground caverns in the world, famous for the immensity of their "rooms" and "corridors", and still largely unexplored.  

193.3 The road turned a little corner in the distance and vanished. 

Dante

Lowry contrived that the chapter should end "with a dying fall" and with the theme of Dante's path through the dark wood struck out by the vanishing road ['LJC', 76]; the suggestion is that from this point on the Consul's path will become increasingly obscure as he enters the dark caverns within himself.

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