CHAPTER I

Epigraphs ~ Next Chapter

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3.1

I

Lowry confessed to Albert Erskine [UBC 2-5] that it might be childish, but he would like to see "good big sinister looking Roman numerals at the beginning of each chapter."

3.2 Two mountain chains traverse the republic.

Atlas of the World and Gazetteer

The Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental (mother ranges of the west and east) run north to south in Mexico, coming closer near Mexico City to cradle between them the altiplano, or high central tableland, traversed by deep barrancas, or ravines, and surrounded by the highest peaks in the country, forming a formidable barrier between the coastal plains and the interior. Materials in the Templeton Collection [UBC WT 1-8, 53 verso] confirm that the opening sentence of the novel, a late compilation, was taken from an unacknowledged source, which turns out to be The Literary Digest 1925 Atlas of the World and Gazetteer (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1925), 178:

The Country. Mexico has an area of 767,198 square miles. Two mountain chains traverse the republic, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus. The plateau of Anahuac, on which the capital is situated, is the largest and most important. The eastern edge of the plateau is formed by the Sierra Madre Oriental. On the western edge of the plateau, the Sierra Madre Occidental shows a steep front and narrow ridges broken by canyons; in both sierras the highest parts are about 10,000 feet.

The note offers other geographical and political details that Lowry recorded but did not use. Unaware of this borrowing, Gerald Noxon recounts [Lowry/Noxon Letters, 38-39] how in the summer of 1941 (Paul Tiessen suggests 1942) he and Lowry rewrote the opening "perhaps twenty times", Malcolm wanting a first sentence of "extraordinary and monumental nature"; but it became overloaded and was finally broken into three.

Mexico City
Mexico

William Gass points out [F & FL, 57]: "Lowry is constructing a place, not describing one; he is making Mexico for the mind where, strictly speaking, there are no menacing volcanoes, only menacing phrases, where complex chains of concepts traverse our consciousness." Throughout the novel, Lowry uses physical details of landscape to create an imaginative cosmos that exists in a complex relationship with the geographical one.

3.3 Quauhnahuac.

Cuauhnahuac glyph

The Nahuatl or Tlahuican name for Cuernavaca; the Indian word meaning, as Yvonne reflects [44], "near the wood" (Nah. cuáhuitl "a tree"). Unable to pronounce the Nahuatl name correctly, the Spaniards hispanicized it to Cuernavaca, or "Cow's horn" [see #59.3]. A favourite summering place for the Aztec nobility and celebrated for its beautiful gardens, it became the favoured retreat of Hernán Cortés, as later for Maximilian and Carlota [see #10.12 and #12.4].

The state capital of Morelos, some fifty miles south of Mexico City, Cuernavaca is usually described by guide books as the attractive resort town that it was in Lowry's time, but "the city of eternal spring" is now a bustling, dirty city of more than half a million, in which, however, many important features of the novel can still be discerned: although much of his terrain is imaginative or based on "Oaxaca and sus anexas" [DATG, 121], Lowry has by and large maintained a strict observance of actual place and distance.

Oaxaca
Cuernavaca

In Dark as the Grave, Lowry identified Cuernavaca as the town of his novel. He lived there with his first wife, Jan, from December 1936 to December 1937 and revisited it with his second wife, Margerie, in December 1945. Lowry noted to Albert Erskine [22 June 1946; CL 1, 581]: "The Quauhnahuac of the book is not Cuernavaca, however, so much as Cuernavaca a few feet in the air, with a bit of Oaxaca etc. thrown in."

3.4 the Tropic of Cancer.

An imaginary line around the earth, 23º 28' north of the equator (about 4º 30' north of Cuernavaca). It is called a ‘Tropic’ because it marks a "turning" and is the northernmost point of the sun's apparent movement in the sky; the detail anticipates the later allusion to the poor foundered soul "who once fled north" [331].

3.5 the Revillagigedo Islands ... Hawaii ... Tzucox ... Juggernaut.

The Revillagigedo Islands and Tzucox represent the western and eastern extremities of Mexico on the nineteenth parallel of latitude; the references to Hawaii and India anticipate respectively the childhood years of Yvonne and Geoffrey:

(a) the Revillagigedo Islands. An archipelago of volcanic origin in the Pacific, some 500 miles from the Mexican coast, forming part of the state of Colima. They compromise the large island Socorro (San Tomás) and the three islets of San Benedicto, Roca Partida and Clarión: total area, 320 square miles. The islands were named after Francisco de Guemes y Horcasitas, subsequently Count Revillagigedo, viceroy of Mexico, 1746-55.

(b) the southernmost tip of Hawaii. Ka Lae (or South Cape), latitude 18º 58' N; near the town of Hilo, where Yvonne grew up.

Donnelly and the Coxcox legend

(c) Tzucox. A tiny town in Quintana Roo, located where Lowry says in standard atlases in the early part of the twentieth century, after which it disappears from most maps. Lowry noted on an early typescript [UBC 28-33, 1], "SEE DIGEST MAP" (the Literary Digest Atlas of the World [see #3.2]; Lowry had access to the 1931 Rand McNally edition, which locates the town). He was aware of the echo of ‘Coxcox’, the Mexican Noah [see #86.4]. Hugh reflects [103] that his ship will head off from Tzucox after it leaves Vera Cruz.

 

The Car of Juggernaut

(d) Juggernaut. Skr. Jagannatha, "Lord of the World"; a title of Krishna, the eighth avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, whose idol is kept at Puri, in the state of Orissa on the Bay of Bengal. When the idol was hauled on a large car during religious festivals frenzied worshippers would throw themselves beneath the wheels and be crushed; hence the English sense of the word as anything that requires blind devotion or sacrifice, or of an implacable force that crushes everything in its way. The name anticipates the relentless blind destiny that will crush Geoffrey Firmin (and those in his way) or, alternatively, implies his determination to be so crushed.

3.6 the walls of the town ... a hill .... a goat track .... eighteen churches ... fifty-seven cantinas .... four hundred swimming-pools.

Details that anticipate thematic concerns, the significance of some not readily apparent:

(a) the walls of the town. Cuernavaca’s walls in 1939 were at best residual, but Lowry implies that his City of Eternal Spring is a type of the hortus conclusus, or walled Garden of Paradise, from which the Consul, like Adam, will be evicted. Lowry notes [UBC WT 1-10, 9] similarities between Quahnahuac [sic] in "The Volc", and places in Kashmir as recorded by the early Chinese traveller, Hiuen Tsang (AD 630): "The towns and villages have inner gates; the walls are wide and high; the streets & lanes are tortuous, & the roads winding: the thoroughfares are dirty & the stalls arranged on both sides of the road." This is from Sir Henry Rawlinson's India [113; Asals, Making, 434].

(b) built on a hill. Though it slopes north to south, Cuernavaca is not obviously "built on a hill”; the detail suggests "the city that is set on a hill" [Matthew 5:14], and anticipates the University City theme, both the Consul's ideal city in the snow [67] and Hugh's grimly realistic battle of the Spanish Civil War [101].

(c) a goat track. The Mexico City to Acapulco highway through Cuernavaca had been opened in 1927; local geography is again shaped to the book's needs [see #235.1]. Lowry comments [SL, 198] that Quauhnahuac's goat track has many meanings, among them suggestions of tragedy and cuckoldry [see #65.1]. The fine American-style highway that loses itself in tortuous broken streets and comes out a goat track is emblematic of the Consul's promising beginnings, his increasing confusion in the byways of the Cabbala, and the tragedy of his personal life.

(d) 18 churches. 1 + 8 = 9, a number not of special significance had not Lowry changed his original 366 churches [UBC 26-1, 9] to 306 (3 + 6 = 9), for esoteric reasons only partially clarified by Aleister Crowley's The Sword of Song [10]: "TRINITY OF TRIADS with MALKUTH pendant to them, manifesting their influence in the Material Universe" (that is, Nine is the number of Sephiroth, or emanations from the godhead, on the Cabbalistic tree of life above Malkuth, the kingdom or material universe). Asals notes [Making, 200] that there were first 37 churches; 366 (or 365) was reputedly the number in Cholula [see #11.4].

Cantinas
Conrad Aiken

(e) 57 cantinas. a remnant of a cross-reference later deleted: in the short story version [UBC 25-16, 19], the Consul intended to drown his remorse by having "fifty-seven drinks at the earliest opportunity." An everyday reminder of the 57 varieties of Heinz, this also formed for Lowry a private allusion to Aiken's Blue Voyage [91], of one who is a dabbler in black arts and all known perversions: "the fifty-seven varieties were child's play to me." Tomás Aguero, until trimmed in revision, weighed in at 67 kilos [UBC 27-7, 62].

Rabbits

(f) four hundred swimming-pools. Swimming pools and fountains are associated with the slaking of thirst ("Might a soul bathe there" [80]). As Lowry knew from Lewis Spence [400], in the phrase "four hundred rabbits", was among the Aztecs a figure of total drunkenness, an offence punishable by death [see #337.3].

3.7 The Hotel Casino de la Selva.

Later, an up-to-date 300-room hotel-restaurant, no longer near the wood and with no hint of the "desolate splendour" evoked here. Lowry notes [‘LJC’, 67] that "Selva means wood and this strikes the opening chord of the Inferno." He refers to the first part of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Compromising the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, Dante’s poem describes the poet’s journey (guided by Virgil) through these regions, culminating with his vision of the eternal. The Inferno, or hell, is conceived as successive circles to which various categories of sinners are consigned. It begins:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
     mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
     che la diritta via era smarrita.

("In the middle of the road of our life / I found myself in a dark wood, / for the right way was lost.")

Dante
Casino de le Selva

Lowry envisaged Under the Volcano as part of a greater whole, The Voyage That Never Ends, a kind of drunken Divine Comedy in which this was equivalent to the Inferno. His plans faltered, but analogies with the Inferno are important: "I am telling you something new about hell fire" [‘LJC’, 80]); and Lowry notes [‘LJC’, 67] echoes of the opening words of Chapter VI, the end of VII (El Bosque) and the dark wood of XI.

4.1 jai-alai.

Basque, "merry festival"; a game like pelota, played with a hard rubber ball on a court called a frontón, comprising a back wall, a long sidewall and a front wall of hard granite. The players, using a cesta (a crescent-shaped wicker basket attached to the arm to aid catching and throwing), throw the ball against the front wall (using the other walls if they wish) for an opponent to catch and return in one continuous motion; points being won when the opponent fails to return the ball. The side first reaching thirty is the winner.

4.2 the Day of the Dead.

In Mexico, the Day of the Dead, "el Día de los Difuntos", is strictly All Souls Day, 2 November, but as graveside vigils commonly begin the night before, the festival usually includes 1 November, All Saints Day, "el Día de Todos los Santos". On the Day of the Dead souls of those who have died may communicate with the living. The coincidence of an Aztec festival of offerings to the spirits of the dead with the Catholic All Souls Day, on which the living may pray for the souls of those in purgatory, gave rise to a colourful festival. In Morelos and elsewhere in Mexico the day is celebrated by candle-lit processions and all-night vigils at cemeteries, offerings of food and flowers for the departed ones, parades and dances with death-masks and skeletons and skulls, and ingeniously wrought chocolate and candy animals, skulls, skeletons and funeral wagons.

Day of the Dead

On this Day of the Dead in 1939 Laruelle and Vigil remember the Consul, but it is also the day in 1938 that Yvonne, having departed, came back for one day. There is a problem in this dating, as 2 November 1938 was a Wednesday, whereas the action of the book is on a Sunday; the novel was originally set on 1 November 1936, a Sunday, and in revising Lowry overlooked the discrepancy. The combination of sunset, the Day of the Dead and 1939 creates from the outset the atmosphere of a world about to plunge into darkness.

4.3 anís.

Anís

Sp. anisado or Fr. anisette, a clear licorice-flavoured liquor made by passing vapourised alcohol through seeds of the anís plant. ‘Anís del Mono’ (Sp. "anis of the monkey") is made in Badalona, Spain, by Vincente Bosch & Co., but neither the green (dry) nor red (sweet) variety has a label with a florid demon brandishing a pitchfork. The trademark of Anís del Mono since 1870 has been a diabolical greenish-brown monkey holding a bottle in one hand and clasping in the other a scroll on which is written, "Es el mejor, la ciencia lo dijo, y yo no miento" ("It is the best, science says so, and I do not lie"). Lowry has changed the label, also seen by the Consul in the Farolito [338] to underline from the outset the relationship of drinking and damnation.

4.4 the doctor's triangular, the other's quadrangular.

Anatomy of the Body of God

An unobtrusive instance of the number 7, reflecting the mystical union of the triad with the tetrad. Lowry would have read in Frater Achad's The Anatomy of the Body of God (1925) [4], that this conjunction represents "a perfectly proportioned Figure of the Tree of Life" [see #194.1]. In a marginal note [UBC TM Ch. 6, 21 verso], Lowry warned that this detail "seems outside the cognisance of the 'camera eye'." It was present, however, long before sustained Cabbalistic matters entered the text.

4.5 plangent.

Sad and melancholy; one of Lowry's favourite words, which he had picked up from Aiken’s Blue Voyage, where it is used several times.

4.6 Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil.

The doctor's surname suggests Virgil, Dante's guide through the Inferno, but also Walt Whitman's "Vigil Strange I kept on the Field One Night", in which the poet keeps "vigil wondrous" over the body of a dead comrade. Kilgallin comments [147]: "The poem's narrator recounts how he cared for and buried his comrade, just as Vigil does in the novel's opening pages ... Doctor, Laruelle and reader alike keep vigil for the remainder of the book's dark night of the soul." Vigil's attractively fractured English is based on that of Lowry's Zapotecan friend, Juan Fernando Márquez, who also served as the model of Juan Cerillo [see #106.1]; Lowry was unaware at the time of writing that his friend had died.

4.7 M. Jacques Laruelle.

A ruelle is a small street or lane, but in bedrooms of the French monarchs of the Golden Age, a narrow area between the royal bed and wall, where attendants kept vigil over their sleeping monarchs, and into which the royal mistresses might be introduced. The strong sexual connotations of the word are present in Baudelaire's "Tu mettrais l'univers entier dans ta ruelle / Femme impure!" ("You would put the entire universe into your alley, / impure woman" [Les Fleurs du Mal, XXV]). Given the circular structure of Under the Volcano and its de casibus theme, Laruelle's surname may evoke La Roue, the Wheel of Fortune [Kilgallin, 156], while his Christian name hints at his compatriot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau [see #310.16], whose sexual mores were no better than they should have been.

Lowry's short story, ‘Hotel Room in Chartres’, mentions the ‘Ruelle de la Demi-Lune’ and the ‘Café Jacques Restaurant Bar du Cinéma’ [P & S, 20]; a further hint of the cuckold's horn, despite the happy ending of the story. Laruelle [12], associates his "passion for Yvonne" with the sight of Chartres Cathedral. Jan Gabrial recalls Chartres: "Ah, Ruelle de la Demi-Lune, where love was everything and memory, like a muted string, is hushed and small" [Inside the Volcano, 63].

In an early draft [UBC 25-17] the name is Lacretelle, that of a contemporary French novelist (1888-1985), best known for Silberman (1922), which charts the influence of and betrayals by a gifted Jewish boy in the life of a lonely Protestant narrator. The name is (mostly) crossed out on the typescript. Kilgallin suggests [136] that ‘Jacques’ may derive from Jacques Feyder, French producer of Women of Atlantis (1921), who went to Hollywood in 1929. On the galleys Lowry cut Laruelle's past as a failed Hollywood film-maker, who (like the Consul) has stayed on to play the silver market, his only work in Mexico being some lectures on "La exposición sobrealista en Paris"; in the real world these had been given recently (1938) by André Breton in the Bellas Artes, Mexico City.

4.8 It seemed peaceful enough.

Popocatepetl
Ixtaccihuatl

Jan Gabrial invokes this scene [Inside the Volcano, 147]: "We conversed in low voices, gazing beyond the pool, beyond the slow slopes of the land to the barranca, beyond the gorge to the emerging lights of Amatitlán, and further still to Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, faint and lovely against the twilit skies. It was that time of evening which blends and magnifies distant sounds: a neighing horse with threads of music and the scraping noises of those insects to whom the night belongs."

4.9 the gigantic red evening ... bled away in the deserted swimming pools.

The sunset is like the "mercurochrome agony” [339] of the evening that the Consul's life bleeds away, but it also suggests other aspects of his death: his kinship with Lord Jim [see #33.1]; "unbandaging of great giants in agony" [35]; the dead man beside the pool [91]; and the agony of Faustus, who sees Christ's blood stream in the firmament. One manifestation of Lowry’s need to work from something whenever possible is the presence among his possessions in the UBC Special Collection of a wooden ruler with several scenes painted on it, one a reflection of a dying sun in a swimming-pool.

4.10 tintinnabulation.

An echo of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Bells’: "the tintinnabulation that so musically wells"; probably by way of Conrad Aiken ("the tintinnabulation of the toads" in Blue Voyage [91]). Hugh and Yvonne hear "a ghostly tintinnabulation" like windbells [324].

4.11 bangs and cries.

To Albert Erskine, Lowry claimed to have lifted this phrase "from a rather stupid story by J.C. Squire, chiefly about duck shooting, though also in relation to a fair" [SL, 115]. In Squire's ‘The Alibi’, in his collection of short stories Outside Eden [180], before Sir Henry Moorhouse discovers the body of his shooting companion, Henry Henderson: "A small foreboding gust of wind came over moor and marsh, and rattled the leaves of the forlorn trees on the high ridge behind him. It carried a sound with it, a dim sort of brazen music, faint bangs and cries. It was the fair." The detail first appeared in Chapter VII [UBC 30-6, 2], then Chapter VIII [UBC 30-9, 23]; it was going to be used, somewhere.

4.12 the fiesta.

Eisenstein

‘Fiesta’ was the proposed title of the first sequence (after the prologue) of Eisenstein's ill-fated ¡Que Viva Mexico!, set in part on the Day of the Dead [see #52.3 & #72.2]. ‘Fiesta’ tells how Boronito the picador steals from a bullfight to keep a clandestine rendezvous and is almost killed by a jealous husband. Compare Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta (1927), a tale of tangled passions set against the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona.

4.13 absinthe.

A licorice-flavoured liquor, derived from wormwood and other berries; it is often used (as in Zola's novels) as a sign of physical and moral degeneration.

4.14 déalcoholisé.

Detoxification, where the body is slowly and painfully freed of its accumulated alcohol.

4.15 we doctors must comport ourselves like apostles.

An anticipation of Vigil's "I must comport myself here like ... like an apostle" [142]. Such echoes abound in the opening chapter, forming a kind of overture to the following action, and showing how closely the present is tied up with the events of a year ago.

5.1 perfectamente borracho.

Sp. "totally drunk".

5.2 Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call: soul. ... Poor your friend, he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies.

In Dark as the Grave, these and similar sentiments are expressed by Sigbjørn's Zapotecan friend, Juan Fernando Martinez, the counterpart of Juan Cerillo.

5.3 the fountain ... where a cactus farmer had reined up his horse to drink.

Cacti may be farmed for tequila, mescal or pulque; some, such as the prickly pear and chollas, are cultivated for food. The innocent surroundings reflect Geoffrey's tragedy: here, the opposition of fountain and cactus serves as a reminder of his constant thirst.

5.4 ping-pong.

Finally innocent, but in an early revision [UBC 28-23, 5] Laruelle was to hear the state of the game, "once more, love all".

5.5 like a drop of water.

Close to death, Marlowe’s Faustus pleads:

O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found.
My God! my God! look not so fierce on me!

In Tempest Over Mexico [10], Rosa King describes the Mexican volcanoes: "Looking that morning on those high and tragic peaks, a feeling of the great spans in which time was measured here came over me, and my own troubles seemed like a drop of water falling in the vastness of space." This may have been equally Lowry’s source.

Alas cigarettes

5.6 He lit a cigarette.

The first of many examples in which the value of a human life is equated with that of a cigarette [see #47.4].

5.7 Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl.

Popocatepetl
Ixtaccihuatl

Snow-capped volcanoes on the border of Puebla and Mexico states (Popocatepetl also bordering upon Morelos); respectively, the second and third highest peaks in Mexico and dominating the Valley of Mexico "like two colossal sentinels to guard the entrance to the enchanted region" [Prescott, III.vi, 264]. Popocatepetl (from Nah. popoca, "that which smokes", and tepetl, "mountain"; hence “smoking mountain”), 17,887 feet, is still active;

Ixtaccihuatl (from Nah. iztac, "white", and cihuatl, "woman"; hence "white woman"), 17,342 feet, is dead. Visible from Cuernavaca, they are less clear than in Lowry’s day.

Popocatepetl is the dominant symbol of the novel, its snowy peak and burning heart epitomizing both man's aspiring and destructive capacities. At his death, the Consul imagines himself climbing towards its snows only to be tipped into the fiery furnace. Lowry had originally intended his volcanoes to be like Dante's Mount of Purgatory (in early drafts the Consul calls them ‘Dante’ and ‘Beatrice’ respectively), but no direct traces of this crude parallelism remain. For the tragic legend associated with the two volcanoes, see #318.2: the eternal vigilance of the princely Popocatepetl over the sleeping Ixtaccihuatl is here reflected in Laruelle's vigil over the dead Consul.

5.8 illegal smoke.

The sign of an illegal still, carbon a filter through which the crude mescal or tequila is passed to remove impurities, and the smoke from its burning the giveaway. This is confirmed by Lowry’s marginal note [UBC 22-17, 27].

5.9 a river.

The Amacuzac, a branch of the Río de las Balsas, angling north towards Cuernavaca.

5.10 a prison.

Penitenciara del Gobierno del Estado

The Penitenciaria del Gobierno del Estado, Atcapancingo; the official prison of Morelos. It was built in 1934 on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, but as the city expanded its suburbs engulfed the penitentiary. There is a tower at each of the four corners, but that mentioned here is the central tower that overlooks the prison yard. Jan Gabrial records a visit she and Lowry made, when their gardener, Pablo, was held there [Inside the Volcano, 153].

6.1 a Doré Paradise.

Paul Gustave Doré (1832-83), French illustrator, sculptor, and painter, whose works include a number of striking etchings of Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Divine Comedy, among them scenes from the Paradiso remarkable for their detailed effects of light and shade. Lowry is explicit about his intended image in the 1940 Volcano: "purple hills, which always reminded Laruelle of Doré's illustrations to Paradise Lost" [5].

6.2 No se puede vivir sin amar.

Sp. "One cannot live without loving" - not "without love"; the distinction is crucial. Lowry often got it wrong, but the error was corrected in the 1940 text, where the Consul calls the sentiment a "pretentious monument to his dead happiness". For the origin of the phrase (from Fray de León via Somerset Maugham), see #195.2. The words remind Laruelle of his complicity in the Consul's death, but also epitomize Geoffrey's tragic inability to accept the love and salvation apparently offered by Yvonne.

6.3 throw away your mind.

The philosophy of la vida impersonal [see #12.1]. Vigil's advice to Laruelle is similar to that given by Sra Gregorio to the Consul [227]: "If your mind is occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind." Laruelle, like Geoffrey, is too much preoccupied with his own great battle and the uniqueness of his misery.

Tehuacán mineral water

6.4 Tehuacan mineral water.

Tehuacan, in the southeast of Puebla State, is renowned for its hot springs and mineral spas and has been since 1575 the town where most of the mineral water ("Agua mineral Peñafiel de Tehuacan") bottled in Mexico originates. The Consul tells Quincey [133] that he scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan water the night before.

6.5 Salud y pesetas .... Y tiempo para gastarlas.

Sp. "Health and wealth .... And time to enjoy them"; a conventional salutation. Edmonds argues [94], that the omission of a third salutation "y amor" ("and love") is "of major significance". A fuller version is given in Joan Givner's biography of Katherine Anne Porter [485]: "Salud y pesetas / Y mas fuerza a las brazos / Y muchos amores esconditos / Y tiempo para gozarlos"; in KAP's "Texas translation": "Health and money / And more power to your elbow – / Many hidden love affairs / And time to enjoy them." "Health and wealth" is a toast in Ben Jonson's The Case Is Altered [II.iii.54].

6.6 Tehuantepec (that ideal spot where the women did the work).

Eisenstein

Tehuantepec is an area, town and river in the southeast of Oaxaca state, where the women are said to be the most beautiful in Mexico and the men the most hen-pecked. Lowry would have known of its reputation as a traditional matriarchy from Eisenstein’s The Film Sense [198]: "Like the queen-bee, the mother rules in Tehuantepec. The female tribal system has been miraculously preserved here for hundreds of years till our time.... Activity is on the side of the woman in Tehuantepec."

6.7 “Con permiso”.

Perhaps the permission should have been requested of William Faulkner, from whose Wild Palms much of this ritual has been taken [see #25.2].

6.8 the Virgin for those that have nobody with.

La Soledad

The Consul went to the church with Vigil (and the latter's revolver) on the night of the Red Cross ball, one year and a day ago, to pray for Yvonne's return [289]. The Iglesia de la Soledad, the Church of the Solitary, has been transposed to Quauhnahuac from Oaxaca; Lowry's favourite church, it figures significantly in Dark as the Grave as the place where Sigbjørn at last finds the peace and understanding which has eluded him (and, by implication, the Consul). ‘Soledad’ refers to the sufferings of Mary, alone at the foot of the Cross. A transcription in the Oaxaca Church tells how on “13 diciembre 1620” a piece of wood left there in honour of St Sebastian was transformed miraculously into "la venerable image de ntra sra en su Soledad al pie de la cruz". Graham Greene captures its feeling perfectly [The Lawless Roads, 252-53]:

But the most human church to my mind in Oaxaca, unweighted with magnificence, is La Soledad; standing on a little terraced plaza, it contains perhaps the second holiest image in Mexico-that of the Virgin of Soledad (the Lonely), who appeared miraculously. She is the patroness of the state of Oaxaca and of all sailors; the size of a large doll, in a crown and elaborate robes, with a flower in her hand, she stands on the altar above the Host. She is Spanish of the Spanish, a Velasquez Virgin – and the loneliness she solaced, one imagines, was a Spanish loneliness of men heartsick for Castile.

"The Virgin for those that have nobody with"

This composite image is also shaped by the church of San Salvador in Ocotepec, now a suburb of the larger city of Cuernavaca, but which was in 1939 a small village on its outskirts. The church, which traditionally remains open all night before the Day of the Dead, has perhaps the most beautiful Virgin in all Mexico, and is (in the “real” world) in precisely the right place for the Consul (or Lowry) to have visited.

7.1 and all the dogs to shark.

This, the hour of Geoffrey's death, is linked to Hugh's comment [304] about a Russian film he once saw in which a shark was netted with a shoal of other fish and killed. Hugh's point is that the shark, although dead, continued to swallow other living fish; the implication is that those living are still entangled with the Consul's death. In Dark as the Grave [222], Sigbjørn at sunset recalls Juan Fernando Martinez as saying these words.

7.2 Tomalín: Zócalo.

Cuernavaca's Zócalo

A zócalo is typically a paved central plaza with trees, benches, kiosks and a bandstand. The word zócalo, meaning "base" or "foundation" (as of a statue), was applied to an unfinished statue in the main square of Mexico City, La Plaza de la Constitución, then to the plaza itself, and thence to almost every town and village in Mexico. The destination of the bus is the Zócalo of Tomalín, that fictional town near Popocatepetl where the Consul, Yvonne and Hugh go to the bull-throwing. Lowry told Albert Erskine that while ‘Tomalin’ was made up, there was a town “spelt Tomellin” near Parián [UBC 2-6]; Jan Gabrial endorses this suggestion [Inside the Volcano, 115]. There is also a Tomalín bar in the Hotel Casino de la Selva. Yvonne says of the Tomalín bus [115]: "It's the easiest way to get to Parián"; and, like the stormy sky, the vultures and the word ‘downhill’, the bus is a reminder of the fatal journey taken one year ago. In an early draft [UBC 28-22, 29], Vigil explicitly reflects, "They must have taken that very bus"; and Laruelle likens the motion of the bus to "some strange world" (that of the asteroid Eros.)

7.3 this station.

Cuernavaca Station

In Lowry’s day, an attractive stone building, not far from the Casino de la Selva, marking the end of the line from Mexico City. In the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-4, 302], Sigbjørn recalls the little train that "came in to Cuernavaca station at exactly twenty past eight every night ... and went out at eleven: four hours it took to get to Mexico City ... this was the train Hugh was supposed to have taken to Vera Cruz." After much debate as to whether the station sign should have a border, Albert Erskine conceded the point.

8.1 Parián.

Parián

A fictional town, based on a village of that name in Oaxaca state and possessing many attributes of the town of Oaxaca itself; the scene of the Consul's death in Chapter XII. For further details of the name, see #75.3, #115.2 and #130.3.

8.2 a professional indoor Marxman.

Laruelle is echoing something Geoffrey said to him; in earlier drafts the Consul used the phrase to criticize the naivety of Hugh's politics, just as Conrad Aiken had used it to criticize Lowry's style: "I think the influence of the Complex Boys, these adolescent audens spenders with all their pretty little dexterities, their negative safety, their indoor marxmanship, has not been too good for you" [15 Dec. 1939; Aiken, Selected Letters, 239]. Lowry recycled the phrase immediately in ‘Where Did That One Go To, ’Erbert?’, a poem published in the Vancouver Daily Province, #235 (29 Dec. 1939, 4) [CP, #317]. The phrase is also used in Lowry's poem 'The Canadian Turned Back At The Border', dated between 1939 and 1940 [CP, #167].

8.3 a British Consul.

Calle Humboldt

There was in 1938-39 no British consulate in Cuernavaca, but the British diplomatic service in Mexico City maintained a property on the Calle Humboldt (Lowry's Calle Nicaragua) as a weekend residence, and this acted as a point of contact for the not inconsiderable British community then living in Cuernavaca.

9.1 Vera Cruz.

Vera Cruz (“True Cross”), in the state of that name, is the leading port on Mexico’s Gulf coast and hence the logical place for Hugh (or, one year later, Laruelle) to join his ship.  From here Cortés and his Spaniards set forth into the interior on their [un]holy mission.

9.2 he had made great films.

Eisenstein

Lowry comments [‘LJ C’, 71]: "if we like, we can look at the rest of the book through Laruelle's eyes, as if it were his creation." Following up this hint, Kilgallin [131-47] explores Laruelle's role as film-maker, emphasizing his controlling consciousness and discussing the various cinematic techniques brought to the novel: the internal allusions to other films; the close but unobtrusive parallels between Laruelle and Sergei Eisenstein, whose ¡Que Viva Mexico! [see #72.2] was to have been an epic representation of Mexico's history, with a trochal structure and an epilogue set on the Day of the Dead; and the particular relevance of the setting in the cinema, Chapter I, where the luminous wheel turning backward is, among other things, that of camera and projector as Laruelle prepares to shoot the film of his life. This offers a structural justification for what some have seen as the novel's central weakness, Lowry's "excessive" symbolism, whereby everything relates obsessively to everything else. If Chapters II to XII are essentially the product of Laruelle's controlling consciousness, then the very structure of the novel contains its own justification of why it is as it is and not otherwise.

9.3 The sun poured molten glass on the fields.

Anticipating the Consul's vision [279] of broken bottles; but an image grounded in fact, as the volcanic rocks north of Cuernavaca have a distinctly vitreous sheen [see #10.2(c)].

9.4 a wanderer on another planet.

Laruelle's "eccentric orbit” [23] imitates that of various wanderers of ancient legends who journey over the earth, the moon, and the universe. The most celebrated of these is the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, "Striker of Jesus" [October Ferry, 133], condemned for this to wander the universe without rest until Judgment Day. Laruelle was described in an early draft [UBC 22-17, 11] as desolately "wandering between two worlds”, and the barrenness of the stony landscape testifies to the change in his world that has taken place since the Consul's death. Conrad's Heart of Darkness invokes "Wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." Compare, too, Julian Green’s Le Voyageur sur la terre (1926): the account of the spiritual desolation of Daniel O'Donovan, to whom the world has become a place not quite in a dream, not quite in reality, and who, under the direction of his (self-created?) "other" puts an end to "une vie d'incertitude et de misere spirituelle" ("a life of incertitude and spiritual misery").

The 1940 Volcano [15] makes an alchemical connection with a field of stones through Laruelle's unlikely comment (citing Thomas Vaughan, Anima Magica Abscondita): "Transmutemini, he repeated to himself, transmutemine de lapidibus mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos." Lowry may have taken this from De Quincey, ‘Rosicrucians and Freemasons’ [Works XIII, 423], where it is attributed to Robert Fludd. This desire, that we might be transmuted from dead stones into living philosophical ones, indicates the alchemical transformation that was a theme more obvious in early versions of the novel.

9.5 one's own battle.

These words echo those of the Consul to Laruelle [217], and in terms of "la vida impersonal" [see #12.1] imply a similar limitation of consciousness. Lowry claimed [SL, 115] to have taken the phrase from D.H. Lawrence's letters, where Lawrence was discussing World War I and saying that the "personal battle" should be carried into the soul of every man in England. In a letter to Katherine Mansfield [12 Dec. 1915; Letters, 289], Lawrence, "weary of personality”, seeks instead some new non-personal activity which is at the same time "a genuine vital activity". Lowry may also have half-recalled Lawrence's words to Harriet Monroe [17 Nov. 1914; Letters, 211]: "The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters." Laruelle applies the phrase to World War II, which had broken out two months earlier.

Consider also the final words of Charlotte Haldane's Youth is a Crime (1934) [339]: "The battle would go on." This is the sentiment of Elizabeth Hermann, long uprooted, about to return to her country; a stranger. At one point ["E", UBC 27-6, 10] Lowry complicated Laruelle's emotions by making his grandmother German.

9.6 an abandoned plough.

Compare Isaiah 2:4: "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." The suggestion of the growing threat of war is present in the later reference to ploughshares [317].

10.1 the Tres Marías.

A small town north of Cuernavaca on the free road to Mexico City; also known as the Tres Cumbres, or Three Peaks. The three Marys were the three mourning women at the foot of the cross: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen and Mary mother of James and John. The town is associated [88] with the Via Dolorosa (or Way of the Cross), and its first mention anticipates other instances of tragedy associated with the name ‘María’.

10.2 the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire ... the Eure-et-Loire ... Cheshire.

(a) the Cotswolds. An area of England northeast of Bath, extending about 50 miles northwest of Cheltenham. Named after the low limestone hills, it is known for its picturesque thatched houses, a breed of sheep and archetypically English rural life.

(b) Windermere. The largest body of water in England, in the Lake District area of northwestern England; about ten miles long and one mile wide. The area was the picturesque home of Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Romantic writers.

(c) New Hampshire. A rural state in the northeastern USA. Lowry records in his Mexican ‘Pegaso’ notebook [UBC 12-14]: "The landscape like New Hampshire". In the drafts of DATG [9-1, 114-15] Sigbjørn recalls a little black notebook rescued by Primrose from "their holocaust", with such details as "driving along the crater of a volcano" and "The evening sun poured molten glass upon the fields".

(d) Eure-et-Loire. A department, or district, southwest of Paris. Its centre is Chartres, and its character largely defined by large farms and country villages.

(e) Cheshire. A shire in the northwest of England, adjacent to Wales. Lowry and the fictional Firmin brothers spent their adolescence in this area.

10.3 in the twinkling of an eye.

I Corinthians 15:52: "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."

10.4 three civilizations.

La Plaza de las Tres Culturas

The Place of the Three Civilizations at the ruins of Monte Alban, near Oaxaca, in a stone edifice (Building L), features aspects of the three main civilisations of the Oaxaca Valley: the Olmecs, Zapotecs and Mixtecs. There is also a hint of La Plaza de las Tres Culturas ("The Square of the Three Cultures") at Tlatelolco in Mexico City (off Reforma at Gonzalez). The site of the final battle between the Spaniards and Aztecs (13 Aug. 1521), it displays Aztec ruins, the Spanish colonial church of Santiago and modern high-rises. A monument near the church states: "No fue triunfo ni derota fue el dolorosa nacimiento del pueblo mestizo que es el México de hoy" ("It was neither a triumph nor a defeat; it was the painful birth of the mixed nation which is the Mexico of today").

10.5 the Earthly Paradise.

Ignatius Donnelly
Dante

The unfallen Eden of Genesis 1; or, the garden of Dante's Purgatorio [XXVIII], where Dante enters the sacred wood (the antithesis of the selva oscura, or dark wood) and comes to a brook, on the banks of which a lady is gathering flowers. She answers the poet's questions about the earthly paradise, intimating that the golden age of which poets dream is a lingering memory of its innocence they may hope to regain, as Geoffrey had hoped and Jacques now does, long after that innocence has been destroyed. There is a private reference to Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World [see #86.1]. Donnelly describes "a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness" [2], and comes to the “irresistible” conclusion that the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden and the lost Atlantis are one and the same.

Cuneiform idols

10.6 beautiful Mayan idols.

The idols are described [199] as "cuneiform stone idols" squatting "like bulbous infants", so as to represent the Consul's lost hopes. Laruelle is unable to take them out of the country because Mexican law prohibits the export of such national treasures and artifacts.

10.7 he had –.

That is, slept with Yvonne – the dash suggesting further unspoken thoughts.

10.8 A black storm breaking out of season!

The rainy season in Mexico lasts from May to October, but unseasonable storms are not infrequent (there was a similar storm at the hour of the Consul's death, one year ago). According to Prescott [VI.viii, 608-09], a tremendous thunderstorm broke on the night of the destruction of Tenochtitlán [see #27.3]. The black clouds suggest the darkness over all the earth at the hour of Christ's crucifixion, but also form a Swedenborgian image of a world denied God's love [see #12.5 & #37.3].

10.9 love which came too late.

In Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well [V.iii.57-60], the King of France castigates Bertram, count of Rousillon, for his reluctance in accepting Helena as his wife and for his belated admissions of love (Bertram believing her to be dead):

     But love that comes too late,
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,
To the great sender turns a sour offence,
Crying, "That's good that's gone."

Compare Lowry's poem, ‘Love which comes too late’ [CP, #51]. In terms of the original Atlantis theme, remnants of which remain, the black cloud signals the inundation to follow, as in Donnelly's Atlantis [Ch. 9], "The Deluge Legends of the Americas". Compare also St Augustine's Confessions [X.xxvii]: “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris et ibi te quaerebam” ("Too late I loved thee, beauty so ancient and so new, too late l loved thee! And behold thou wert in me and l without, and there I searched for thee.")

10.10 Tonnerre de dieu.

Fr. "Thunder of God"; a mild oath appropriate to the "black storm breaking". In Part V of The Waste Land, the voice of thunder promises relief for the parched land; Lowry's "warmth returned to the surprised land" closely echoes Eliot's "Summer surprised us". The passage foreshadows Geoffrey's wakening [125] from his thirsty vision of Himavat.

10.11 It slaked no thirst.

In ‘Clorinda and Damon’, a pastoral poem by Andrew Marvell (1621-78), Clorinda invites a reluctant Damon to her unfrequented cave, to “seize the short Joyes”:

D. That den?   C. Loves Shrine.   D. But Virtue's Grave.
C. In whose cool bosome we may lye
Safe from the Sun.   D. not Heaven's Eye.
C. Near this, a Fountaines liquid Bell
Tinkles within the concave Shell.
D. Might a soul bath there and be clean,
Or slake its Drought?   C. What is't you mean?
D. These once had been enticing things,
Clorinda, Pastures, Caves, and Springs.
C. And what late change?   D. The other day
Pan met me.

The Consul frequently alludes to these line [73, 79 & 207]. Marvell's poem touches on matters central to his psyche: his fear of the sun, his thirst for salvation, his determination not to be enticed by Yvonne's vision of Paradise, and his allegiance to other powers.

10.12 the dark castled shape of Cortez Palace.

Cortés Palace

The Palacio de Cortés, or Cortés Palace (the Penguin ‘Cortex’ is a misprint), is a solid but attractive stone stronghold in the centre of Cuernavaca, built for Hernán Cortés between 1526-29 to administer the vast domains granted him by the Spanish Crown. After the death of Cortés it fell into decay, but in 1767 was restored and used as the administrative centre of the town. In 1939 it was the municipal headquarters, and since 1965 has been an archaelogy museum, distinguished by Rivera's famous murals that depict the exploitation of the Indians by the Spaniards [see #211.4]. Strange legends of subterranean passages linking the castle to other parts of the city, though exaggerated, have some basis in fact, as excavations had revealed by 1937 [de Davila, 53]. Given Lowry's intense interest in the demonic realms, his failure to even mention these suggests that he did not know of their existence.

Ferris Wheel

10.13 gondolas.

The cars or seat baskets of the Ferris wheel.

11.1 the St Louis Blues.

A well-known jazz piece published in 1914 by "Father of the Blues", W.C. Handy (1873-1958), its theme of loneliness expressed in the opening lines:

I hate to see de evenin' sun go down,
'Cause my baby she done left this town.
Feeling tomorrow like I feel today,
Gonna pack my trunk and make my getaway.

'St. Louis Blues'

The best-known and most "authentic" version was that by Bessie Smith, with Louis Armstrong (1925); perhaps the least known and least authentic version is that used by the Ethiopians in their war against Italy [see #252.1], a detail noted in Gerald Hanley’s novel, The Consul at Sunset (1951 [intertextual coincidence noted, but not affirmed]).

11.2 the Alcapancingo road.

That taken by Hugh and Yvonne when they go riding in Chapter IV. Acapantzingo is now a tough district of Cuernavaca, a far cry from the “struggling suburb" [105] surrounded by open fields of 1939. It lies directly opposite the Calle Humboldt (Lowry's Calle Nicaragua [see #47.6]) but on the other side of the Amanalco barranca [see #15.3]. The Acapantzingo road, which existed in the 1930s [de Davila, 66], has long been swallowed up by a growing Cuernavaca, but was then the logical route south from the town, past the prison [see #5.10], towards Maximilian's casa [see #12.4]. To return, Laruelle takes the Calle Nicaragua (Humbolt), which in 1939 crossed the barranca but was later redirected [DATG, 133].

11.3 the Mexican lake-bed, itself once the crater of a huge volcano.

The Valley of Mexico

The Valley of Mexico, at an elevation of 7,500 feet, is a large oval valley some sixty miles by forty in size, surrounded by high volcanic hills that create the illusion of one gigantic crater (this is not the case). In Aztec times the valley contained extensive lakes, but these have been almost completely drained over the centuries, Mexico City spreading over the former lake-bed. Cholula is not within the Valley, but the easiest (if not the most direct) route from Cuernavaca to Cholula was via Mexico City and the valley whose tragic history so much reflects the Consul's own.

11.4 Cholula ... the ruined pyramid ... the original tower of Babel.

Cholula

Cholula, now on the outskirts of Puebla, was the holy city of the Toltecs and an important religious centre before and during the Aztec period. Tradition claims that 365 Christian chapels, one for each day of the year, were built upon the ruins of pagan temples; the actual number is about seventy (Lowry's 306 is unusual, given that the 1940 Volcano [16] reads "366 churches, each to replace a pagan temple" [see, however, #3.6(d)]). The centre of Cholula is dominated by a massive pyramid, begun in pre-Classic times, but now stripped of its outer layers and considerably reduced in size. It is, nevertheless, the largest man-made monument in pre-Columbian American, some 177 feet high, with a base 1,423 feet long and covering about 44 acres [Prescott, III.vi, 263].

The original Tower of Babel is described in Genesis 11:1-9: the descendants of Noah tried to build a tower to reach heaven, but God punished their presumption by causing their builders to speak in different languages so that they could not understand one another; hence, by popular etymology, the derivation of babble from ‘Babel’, as Laruelle assumes here and as the Consul notes [366]. The analogy between the pyramid at Cholula and the Tower of Babel is not original with the Consul. Prescott [Appendix I, 694] notes the coincidence of Hebrew and Indian legends about the building of these edifices, the subsequent dispersion and the confusion of tongues; but criticizes those who (like the Consul) build bold hypotheses on flimsy foundations. Donnelly [203] is less critical; he compares the story of Babel with the Toltec account of the pyramid of Cholula built by the giant Xlehua as a means of escaping from a second flood, should it come [see #29.3] and concludes that "Both legends were probably derived from Atlantis."

11.5 its two barber shops, the “Toilet” and the “Harem.

The detail is in the Mexican ‘Pegaso’ notebook [UBC 12-14)], and was briefly part of the opening scene of Quauhnahuac [UBC TM 6, 37 verso]. The names of the peluquerías will seem less delightful when the Consul later recalls the visit to Cholula [see #205.3], or other betrayals [see #286.8 & #302.2]; while the barber shops themselves anticipate the motif of "cuckold-shaven" [see #59.3 & #173.4]. Cholula was the scene of countless human sacrifices, and in 1519 of a barbaric massacre by Cortés of some 3,000 Cholulan Indians in pre-emptive retaliation for their planned betrayal of him. Cholula is associated with the Tower of Babel, Tarot card 16, described by Ouspensky [A New Model of the Universe, 235] as an emblem of deceit.

11.6 the Sorbonne.

The most prestigious college of the University of Paris, founded by Robert de Sorbon in 1257 AD, and celebrated for medicine, theology and law. In the 1940 Volcano [254-55; UBC 26-2, 2], two ragged "grandees" appear in Chapter IX, like "University professors" of Clare College, Cambridge. Omitted from the final typescript, they returned to Chapter I in a very late revision.

12.1 perfectamente borracho .... completamente fantástico .... Si, hombre, la vida impersonal .... Claro, hombre .... ¡Positavamente! .... Buenas noches ....

Sp. "Totally drunk . . . completely fanciful .... Yes, my friend, the impersonal life .... Positively! Good night .... Good night." Laruelle cannot but sense the relevance of these half-heard phrases to the Consul's life, and having previously responded to Vigil's "Come, amigo, throw away your mind” [6], probably understands the reference to "la vida impersonal", glossed in Dark as the Grave [251] as: "the philosophy of La Vida Impersonal, that of the 'throwing away of the mind,' where every man was his own Garden of Eden. Personal responsibility is complete, though the life is all interior." Andersen [438] suggests that the philosophy is a Western counterpoint of the Oriental view that the cause of suffering is action resulting from desire for a separate self. This is supported by Lowry in ‘Garden of Etla’ [46], where he recalls listening over mescal to his friend Fernando Atonalzin (Juan Cerillo in UTV, Fernando Martínez in DATG):

Time merely repeated itself; history likewise .... Why boast about that which has been done before? You could try to do better, you could succeed; but best keep silent about it. Life itself should strive, so far as possible, to be impersonal.

Man he likened to the valley of Etla. Perhaps I would understand this better if he said the Garden of Eden. Every man was, in a sense, his own Garden of Eden. To this extent others could be seen as spiritual modifications of oneself. This was evil, but not wholly an illusion.

What was not an illusion at all was that you found yourself either within this symbolic garden or, mysteriously – and here I had to accept the paradox that this did not mean that you were exiled from your own soul – you were made aware that you had been exiled from it. If not, one of the surest ways to become evicted was by boastfulness, though this had a deeper meaning than was contained in the mere word. Be impersonal as you may, the moment you attributed any formidable value to yourself for this, you went out.

Then, one of the most certain ways never to return was by excessive remorse, or sorrow for what you had lost. This to a Zapotecan was more of a sin than it was held to be by the Catholics of his upbringing; it was another form of boasting: the assumption of the uniqueness of your misery.

The Consul has violated this philosophy in many respects. He sees others as spiritual modifications of himself, he has placed a "formidable" value upon his sufferings and his own great battle, and he has shown excessive remorse for what he has lost. In terms of la vida impersonal, then, he is responsible for his eviction from his own Garden of Eden, and in his assumption of the uniqueness of his misery he has little hope of regaining it.

Carmen Vergili discovered a small book entitled La Vida impersonal, published anonymously in the USA in the 1930s, and espousing the "impersonal" life, with a distinct Rosicrucian flavour. One chapter (IX, #323-#353) is indeed entitled ‘El Jardín del Edén’; Lowry’s summary [above] fairly reflects its tone. The book seems to have been used by a small group in Oaxaca, of which Lowry’s Zapotecan friend, Juan Fernando Márquez (Juan Cerillo) was a member. Lowry was presumably unaware that it was written (in Spanish) by an American [Joseph S. Benner], and probably believed that it represented a genuine part of the Atlantean philosophy. In a note not sent to Albert Erskine [UBC 2-7] he comments on a religion called this in Oaxaca, of which the main thesis is Vigil's "throw away your mind". In Dark as the Grave Lowry attributes this and the phrase ‘perfectamente borracho’ to "Fernando".

12.2 pocket torch for scrip.

Laruelle's flashlight is likened to the bag or wallet of a medieval pilgrim, used to carry food and alms (as such, not particularly appropriate for a knight).

Lázaro Cárdenas

12.3 model farm.

After his election in 1934, President Lázaro Cárdenas pushed through many revolutionary programmes, including the expropriation of lands from private owners and their conversion into communal co-operatives and model farms [see #104.7 & #107.4]. If there was such a farm here (as seems likely), it has long been swallowed by urban blight.

12.4 the ruins of Maximilian's Palace.

Maximilian's Palace

For the tragic history of Maximilian and Carlota, see #14.3. During their brief reign in Mexico, 1864-67, the royal couple regarded Cuernavaca as a favourite summer retreat and spent much time there. They made their official residence at the Borda Gardens, but also acquired in the south of Acapantzingo a small casa named Olindo [Díez, 113]. The casa (scarcely a palace) is today a botanical centre and herbal museum, rescued from decades of weeds and neglect; but it bears little resemblance (apart from its location and historical significance) to the ruins described in the novel. Lowry has superimposed on Maximilian's casa the features of Cuernavaca's Borda Gardens, which he otherwise ignores: these, built in the late eighteenth century from the fortune of José de la Borda, silver king of Taxco [see #307.6], have most of the features described – broken pillars, the pool, crumbling walls. In Dark as the Grave [132-33], Lowry clearly distinguishes the Borda Gardens from Maximilian's palace, describing the former as if they were part of Under the Volcano:

the blackened dead branches and empty dead fountains of the gardens where the doomed Maximilian and Carlotta, pale royal ghosts of the Consul and Yvonne, had wandered, began to weave a pattern of mournful music through his consciousness ... the Borda Gardens appeared to him much as the House of Usher had appeared to Poe: gloomy, no flowers, grassless, even the trees were dark.

Borda Gardens

Now an attractive tourist centre (as indeed they were in 1939), the Borda Gardens still convey the sense of a place "where love had once brooded" [14]. For Laruelle, however, the dream has turned into the nightmare of history and a tragedy of blighted love.

12.5 an immense archangel, black as thunder.

The black archangel represents what Éliphas Lévi calls "that black phantom which presents itself when you do not look to God" [Transcendental Magic, 98]. This is an image also present in Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell [#549], which deals with spirits (both men and angels) who have chosen to cast themselves down to hell:

Evils and their falsities are like black clouds interposed between the sun and the human eye, which take away the brightness and serenity of its light .... In proportion as any one in that spiritual world is in falsities from evil, he is encompassed by such a cloud, and this is black and dense according to the degree of his evil.

Compare Milton's Satan of Paradise Lost [I.600]. Fallen angels, evil angels and the dark Angel of Death have been part of Christian and Hebraic traditions for centuries. Lowry may be aware of the familiars of Doctor Faustus; the Angel of the Abyss in Baudelaire's Fleurs de mal; the Terrible Angel of Rilke's Duino Elegies, and Donnelly's "Archangel of the Abyss" (spoken of in Chaldean tradition and hinting at floods about to be unleashed).

12.6 Saint Pres.

Correctly, Saint Prest, a village of about one thousand inhabitants northeast of Chartres. The village is also mentioned in Lowry's short story 'Hotel Room in Chartres'.

12.7 the twin spires of Chartres Cathedral.

Chartres Cathedral

A supreme example of Gothic architecture, the cathedral is some sixty miles southwest of Paris and dates from the early thirteenth century. It is celebrated for its stained glass, its magnificent sculpture and its lofty spires (which, built at different times, are not at all identical). The approach that Laruelle recalls is spectacular: as pilgrims cross a totally flat rural landscape, they see the spires rising into the heavens long before the village of Chartres is in sight. The towers symbolize man's lofty aspirations, but in the crypt of the church there is a deep well into which heretics were formerly hurled to their deaths.

13.1 secret mines of silver.

To Albert Erskine [SL, 115], Lowry admits the influence of D.H. Lawrence at this point. In a letter to Witter Bynner from Navojoa, Sonora [5 Oct. 1923; Letters, 581], Lawrence writes of the wild hopeless landscape pressing upon him, the "little towns that seem to slipping down an abyss" and "In the mountains, lost, motionless silver-mines." He even mentions a dead dog in the market place. There may also be a hint of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904): in an early draft [UBC 26-24, 10] Lowry described Laruelle as having "found the Consul here and stayed on and like him played the silver market": Nostromo, too, felt the secret burden of silver pressing upon his soul.

13.2 a faded blue Ford.

Possibly the Consul's Plymouth, mentioned in his letter [36], and described to Yvonne as "lost" [52]: for Laruelle, an emblem of his blue-eyed friend, and hence the immediate thought of the postcard, delivered [193], and slipped beneath his pillow [201], to be discovered at almost exactly the moment of Geoffrey's death. The Ford is an early image from Lowry's Mexican days, as attested by a scrappy note [UBC 28-21], torn from a Mexican notebook. There it stands in an open sheep pen, as recalled by Sigbjørn in the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-1, 115], where he regrets omitting the "Charlotte Bronte" touch and having "lost its beauty".

13.3 small, black, ugly birds .... within the fresno trees.

Uraccas
Fresno trees

The birds are urracas: slim, torpedo-shaped small crows, with long fan-like tails and a raucous cry, "apparently practicing to be vultures" [DATG, 130]. Fresnos (L. fraxinus, "an ash") are tall stately trees with grey trunks and small light-green leaves. Commonly found in Mexican zócalos, they were in 1939 a feature of Cuernavaca where the "unbelievable screeching" [DATG, 131] of the urracas still shatters the evening peace.

14.1 wrecked entablature, sad archivolt.

An entablature is the upper section of a wall or temple, often decorative, supported by columns or pillars; an archivolt is the ornamental moulding around an arch.

14.2 where love had once brooded.

Echoing the final lines of Hermann Lohr’s "Little Grey Home in the West" [see #353.6]:

It's a corner of heaven itself
     
Though it's only a tumble-down nest –
But with love brooding there, why, no place can compare
     
With my little grey home in the west.

14.3 France, even in Austrian guise, should not transfer itself to Mexico.

Maximilian and Carlota

After fifty years of independence from 1810, Mexico's confused internal politics and economics gave Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, a pretext for invasion. The French military achieved mixed success, but anti-democratic forces within Mexico pressed for a monarchy, and, backed by the French, invited the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph of Hapsburg to accept the throne. Genuinely believing he had the support of the Mexican people, Maximilian arrived in the New World in 1864 with his young wife Marie Charlotte (Carlota). They found Mexico idyllic at first, but the liberal forces led by Juárez continued guerrilla warfare, and with the withdrawal of the French in late 1866, Maximilian was in an impossible position. Carlota returned to Europe to seek aid, but Maximilian stayed on and was surrendered to the liberals on 15 May 1867. Despite international pleas for clemency, Juarez had Maximilian shot [see #123.3]; Carlota remained in Europe, where she died insane at an advanced age.

14.4 the Miramar.

Maximilian’s imperial castle, built 1854-56, on the Adriatic coast about four miles from Trieste; Carlota lived there after Maximilian's execution, until her death in 1927.

14.5 everyone who ever lived there.

The Hapsburg family was plagued by misfortune: Maximilian was shot by the Mexicans in 1867; his brother Franz Joseph lived to see the Austro-Hungarian Empire fall apart during World War I; Franz Joseph's eldest son Rudolph shot himself and his mistress, the Baroness Marie Vetsera, at the hunting lodge ‘Mayerling’ outside Vienna in 1889; and Rudolph's cousin, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was assassinated at Sarajevo.

Jan Gabrial recalls that she and Malcolm saw Anatol Litvak's Mayerling (1936) in Mexico City, a French film starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux; then returned to the Hotel Canada for a tender night [Inside the Volcano, 157 & 187]. The film was an emblem of their love. In his letter to Cape, Lowry states that "La Tragedia de Mayerling" was playing in the town just as it had been nine years ago (a different kind of Mad Love).

14.6  the Empress Elizabeth of Austria.

Elisabeth of Austria (1837-98), the beautiful and popular wife of Franz Joseph I, stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist on a steamer on Lake Geneva, 10 Sept. 1898.

14.7 the Archduke Ferdinand.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), nephew of Franz Joseph I and heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, whose assassination by the young Serbian revolutionary Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo precipitated World War I.

14.8 two lonely empurpled exiles.

From its first appearance [6] ("the purple hills of a Doré Paradise" [see #6.1]), to its last [317] ("low hills ... purple and sad"), ‘purple’ is associated with a lost paradise, an innocence that cannot be regained. Lowry's authority is W.H. Hudson's The Purple Land, originally titled The Purple Land That England Lost (1885), the theme of which is less England's loss of the Banda Oriental (Uruguay), than the narrator's memories of a girl he rendered unhappy and the happy days long gone.

14.9 Eden.

The Garden of Eden, in the first book of Genesis and in Milton's Paradise Lost (Bk. IV), symbolizes the innocence before the Fall of Man. Lowry comments [‘LJC’, 66]: "The allegory is that of the Garden of Eden, the Garden representing the world" [see #128.3].

Brewery and prison

14.10 beginning to turn ... into a prison and smell like a brewery.

The Alcapancingo Prison and the Cervercería Quauhnahuac [112] are both on the lands that were once part of Maximilian's gardens]

14.11 "It is our destiny to come here, Carlotta .... Let us be good and constructive and make ourselves worthy of it."

Juarez

This sentiment was typical of Maximilian in his more idealistic moods, but the tone, if not the actual dialogue, derives from the popular film, Juarez (1939), starring Brian Aherne and Bette Davis, which celebrated the lovers to the music of ‘La Paloma’, which in the film was Maximilian’s last request [see #123.3].

14.12 there were ghosts quarrelling.

Casa Olindo

The quarrelling voices materialise as those of the Consul and Yvonne, but they begin as Maximilian and Carlota, whose life together, despite a public veneer of well-bred civility, was not one of emotional tranquillity: it was rumoured that something had gone wrong on the young couple's honeymoon and that in Mexico they lived together without intimacy, Maximilian taking a mistress in Cuernavaca (one Concepción Sedano y Leguizano, a married woman of Spanish descent), by whom he had a natural son. The casa at Acapantzingo was built in part to facilitate discreet rendezvous [de Davila, 60-65]. Lowry probably knew these rumours [see #59.4], but may have suppressed them so as not to spoil his picture of tragic romance.

15.1 High Life.

High Life

A high-class men's clothing store in Mexico City, today owned by the Gruppo Covarra SA de CV; its headquarters at Gante 4 (corner Gante and 16 de Septiembre) is one of the city’s distinctive commercial buildings. Laruelle exaggerates the Mexican pronunciation.

15.2 getting too fat ... for taking up arms.

A blend of Hamlet V.ii.30l: "He's fat, and scant of breath", and III.i.59: "Or to take arms against a sea of troubles"; the two allusions underlining Laruelle's tragic inability to act.

15.3 the barranca.

Barranca

The town of Cuernavaca is flanked on either side by enormous barrancas, or deep steep ravines, which run for miles through the countryside, as if a giant Prometheus had unzipped his fly. The fearful drop is described in Aiken's A Heart for the Gods of Mexico [463-64], as he stands in precisely the spot where Laruelle is standing:

Twice he had stumbled down to the bridge ... which crossed that incredible tree-filled gorge. The fern-like trees were so interlaced across it that one thought of course it must be very shallow, only when one looked a second time did one glimpse-far below-and with a sudden contraction of the heart-tiny rocks and ripples in the filtered sunshine, knotted roots on the dark side of the narrow little canyon, and the sinister suckers of the creepers, venomous and dark, hanging down hundreds of feet in search of a foothold. The barranca.

Generally assumed to be the product of cataclysmic and volcanic forces in bygone ages, or attributed in legend to the black magician Tezcatlipoca (the inventor of pulque), the origin of the barrancas is more prosaic: underground rivers once ran through the largely limestone rock, eroding it until it collapsed along long fault lines [Diez, 3]. Now partially filled in and choked with rubbish, they nevertheless remain fearsome chasms, a perfect symbol of the demonic realm of Lowry's tripartite universe (heaven and hell, with the world precariously between), and of the abyss within the heart of man [see also #20.2].

15.4 Dormitory for vultures.

Laruelle's speculation anticipates that of the Consul [130], who looks down into the barranca and thinks of "the cloacal Prometheus who doubtless inhabited it."

15.5 city Moloch.

Nordahl Grieg

Moloch, god of the Ammonites (I Kings ll.7), a man with the face of a bull, whose bowels were a furnace into which children were cast as burnt offerings, is described in Milton's Paradise Lost [I.392-93]: "First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents tears." The "city Moloch" is Rabbah in the land of Gad (Jeremiah 49.1-3). More generally, Moloch represents any power or driving passion to which appalling sacrifices of great treasures are made. In Nordahl Greig's The Ship Sails On, the ship is described as "A Moloch that crushes the lives of men between its iron jaws" [2]; an image used both in Lowry's early poem, ‘For Nordahl Grieg Ship's Fireman,’ [CP, #12], first published in the St Catharine’s College Magazine [Dec. 1929, 26-27]: "They see an iron Moloch / Securely waiting to swallow the lives of men" and in Ultramarine [1933]: "the ship as a sort of Moloch, as a warehouse." [41]

15.6 the sea-borne, hieratic legend.

Prescott [VI.iii, 533] describes the barranca near Cuernavaca as "one of those frightful rents not unfrequent in the Mexican Andes, the result, no doubt, of some terrible convulsion in earlier ages." Matthew 27:51 describes the crucifixion: "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent." The legend of the earth opening up at the Crucifixion originates in Dante's Inferno [XII]: a shudder and convulsion at the greatest of crimes, committed against the Supreme Love, which broke the precipitous sides of the great pit into slopes of scree, whereby Dante descends. Lowry's "legend" of the earth opening through the country probably derives from these various sources imaginatively combined, since there is no legend of this kind in Cuernavaca (tales of Morelos mention the black magician Tezcatlipoca as opening the ravines, but with no hint of a Christianized version). His 'sea-borne’ and ‘hieratic’ (that is, "pertaining to the priestly office") obscurely anticipate the Consul's "intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic" [16], in a suitably Atlantean manner; but Lowry may simply mean that the legend arrived with the Spanish.

16.1 a film about Atlantis.

Ignatius Donnelly

Atlantis, the fabled island and civilization in the Timaeus and Critias of Plato, is reputed to have been somewhere west of the Pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic (though some Atlantologists equate it with Thera in the Aegean, destroyed by an immense volcanic eruption about 1500 BC, and others with the Atlas Mountains in North Africa). In Plato's account, its once virtuous and powerful inhabitants, having degenerated, were defeated by the Athenians, and the island sank beneath the ocean as the result of a terrible cataclysm. The “science" of Atlantology was boosted in 1882 by Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World [see #86.1], a book the Consul is trying to outdo, with the result that images of the destruction of Atlantis by fire and flood are ever-present in the patterns of his thought.

L'Atlantide

Laruelle, however, probably has in mind the film Women of Atlantis, or L'Atlantide, produced by Jacques Feyder in 1921 [Kilgallin, 136]; the silent movie was based upon the story by P. Benoît, and a soundtrack version was made by G.W. Pabst in 1932. The story tells how two soldiers serving in Africa discover the lost city of Atlantis, whose queen, Antinea, has the power to make all men fall in love with her; one of the soldiers resists, with disastrous consequences.

16.2 'huracán' ... intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The Consul's cryptic remark is almost a direct quotation from Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World [see #86.1], "The Deluge Legends of the Americas" [II.iii, 103], essentially a comparison of American versions of the flood with the Hebrew and Chaldean ones. Hurakán was a powerful god of the Quiche Mayas, who presided over the whirlwind and thunderstorm (hence ‘hurricane’) and who vented the anger of the gods on the first human beings, a deluge and thick resinous rain completing their destruction. Donnelly finds the similarities between this legend and those of Noah and Deucalion "very suggestive”; the Consul goes further by identifying Huracán with the Vedic storm god Vindra [see #257.3].

The passage from Donnelly reads:

And here may I note that this word hurakan – the spirit of the abyss, the god of storm, the hurricane – is very suggestive, and testifies to an early intercourse between the opposite sides of the Atlantic. We find in Spanish the word huracan; in Portuguese, furacan; in French, ouragan; in German, Danish, and Swedish, orcan – all of them signifying a storm; while in Latin furo, or furio, means to rage. And are not the old Swedish hurra, to be driven along; our own word hurried; the Icelandic word hurra, to be rattled over frozen ground, all derived from the same root which the god of the abyss, Hurakan, obtained his name.

Lowry's two wives were American, and early drafts toy with the sexual possibilities of the phrase (Ouragan suggesting to the Consul "Oregon"), before Lowry wisely desisted.

16.3 some obscure relation.

Hell Bunker

Laruelle's stumbling upon the Consul and Yvonne embracing in the ruins of Maximilian's palace [15] bears an "obscure relation" to the Hell Bunker episode [20], in that it exemplifies the eternal return [see #26.3], the recurrence at a different time and place of something that has already happened and will always happen. Just as Laruelle's earlier chance sighting of Geoffrey with a girl in the Hell Bunker created a sexual tension and sense of guilt between himself and the Consul, so this later duplication of the incident contains the seeds of its own destruction. Lowry's use of words like ‘obscure’, ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ seems deliberately designed to provoke this kind of speculation.

16.4 meaningless correspondences ... “favourite trick of the gods”.

Lowry would have read in Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell [#303] the doctrine that "there is a connection of the natural world with the spiritual world, and that hence there is a correspondence of all things which are in the natural world with all things which are in the spiritual world." To Lowry, such correspondences were not meaningless but indicative of a powerful a-causal force of coincidence operative in a serial universe (Jung called it synchronicity), often malignant, bringing together individuals and configurations in time and space and correlating by affinity and analogy. The "favourite trick of the gods" echoes Cocteau's "The gods exist, they are the devil" (Lowry’s mistranslation), which Geoffrey wrongly attributes to Baudelaire [see #209.4], while ‘correspondences’ itself suggests Baudelaire's "Correspondances", one of Lowry's favourite poems, an emphatic statement that such apparent coincidence is not meaningless:

La Nature est un temple où les vivants piliers
Laissant parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

["Nature is a temple where living pillars / sometimes allow confused words to escape; / man passes there through forests of symbols / that watch him with familiar glances."

16.5 Languion .... Courseulles... Calvados.

Towns and districts of northern France:

(a) Langion. Also Longuyon; a town in the Meurthe-et-Moselle Département in northeastern France, near Luxembourg; an area famous for its wines.

(b) Courseulles. Courseulles-sur-Mer. A resort on the English Channel at the mouth of the Seulles River; 10 miles north of Caen and 15 miles east of Bayeux.

(c) Calvados. A départment in Normandy on the English Channel; it includes Caen and Courseulles and is noted for its farming and its calvados (apple brandy).

16.6 Abraham Taskerson.

The Taskerson / Furniss house

A tasker is one who works, or is paid, by the task or piece; in particular, one who threshes corn with a flail (a fair description of the poet's efforts). Abraham, in Genesis 17:1-6 was made "exceedingly fruitful" by God; hence "at least six" young Taskersons. Day comments [336] that Taskerson was "very loosely modeled on Conrad Aiken", and  the Taskerson-Firmin relationship encapsulates several elements of the Aiken-Lowry symbiosis (for instance, the cats). Conrad Knickerbocker had suggested that the Taskerson family was based upon a family named Hepburn; but Gordon Bowker straightens the record by identifying Lowry’s friendship with the nearby Furniss family.

17.1 collateral relatives.

Of the same ancestral stock but not in the same line of descent.

17.2 Geoffrey Firmin.

S.S. Samaritan

Geoffrey, "God's peace" or "beloved of God" (the etymology is debated); Firmin, an obvious inversion of "infirm" but also [Kilgallin, 147] with a suggestion of St Firminus, martyred at Amiens, or St Fermin, patron saint of Pamplona, the Spanish bullfighting town celebrated by Hemingway (the two saints one and the same). The name Firmin is related to ‘fireman’ and to that extent it is a constant reminder to Geoffrey of the unfortunate incident with the furnaces of the S.S. Samaritan. There is a hint of ‘firmament’, beneath which the abyss is ever-present.

Jan Gabrial contends that Malcolm took the name from the main character, Jill Firmin, in her rejected novel called I'll See You in Paris [Inside the Volcano, 71]. However, links with ‘June the 30th, 1934’ (the night Hitler purged the S.A.) [P & S, 36-48] are more convincing, as that story introduces an old prospector and war veteran called Firmin who is caught up with metals (the later Consul speculates in silver and is obsessed by the "elements"), and questions "a sort of determinism about the fate of nations", as the Consul will in Chapter X. The 1940 Consul was William Ames; in the 1941 retake Jeffrey Ames; but post-1941 the more British Geoffrey Firmin, with an Indian childhood.

17.3 cleeks … gutta percha.

Du. cleek, "a hook"; antiquated wooden golf clubs, iron headed with narrow sloping faces (as used in The Clicking of Cuthbert [see #175.16]. The gutta-percha balls, made of a single lump of rubber latex, are equally antiquated; they were introduced in the 1840s, replacing the "featheries" (leather spheres stuffed with feathers), but were in turn replaced by the rubber cored ball (a rubber thread wound tightly about a solid core) about 1902.

17.4 "Old Bean".

A sobriquet used in the opening pages of P.C. Wren's Beau Geste (1924) by the Frenchman Henri de Beaujolais ("Jolly") of his English friend George Lawrence.

17.5 erect manly carriage.

Particularly at moments of total inebriation, the Consul is conscious of the need to maintain this admirable carriage. Lowry admits that the Taskerson episode may be unsound "if considered seriously in the light of a psychological etiology for the Consul's drinking or downfall" [‘LJC’, 68], but he points out how often the episode is alluded to, and how, at the end, the Consul is still trying to walk in the same erect manly manner.

Leasowe

17.6 Leasowe.

In the early 1900s, a tiny village and railway station on the Wirral, between Hoylake and Birkenhead. The Taskerson home is modelled on Lowry’s at Inglewood, Caldy (a little south of Hoylake), but with some imaginative compression between Caldy (its nine-hole golf course), Hoylake (the Royal Liverpool Links), West Kirby (the hydropathic hotel and marine lake), Leasowe (the lighthouse) and Meols (the petrified forest).

Hilbre

17.7 an island in the estuary:

Hilbre, off which Edward King (Milton’s Lycidas) was drowned in 1637; the largest (47,000 square metres) of three small islands in the Dee estuary, accessible by foot (or donkey) from West Kirby when the tide is out. There is no evidence of a windmill there [see #17.10], but there are a few buildings, including an old telegraph station (part of a network mentioned in In Ballast to the White Sea).

Estuary of the River Dee

17.8 white horses .... Welsh mountains.

The Royal Liverpool Links is adjacent to the estuary of the River Dee; from it may be seen the white caps of the waves where the river meets the sea and the Clwydian range of mountains in northern Wales, on the other side of the estuary.

17.9 an antediluvian forest.

The petrified forest

Intimating the Atlantis theme [see #86.1]; but specifically an ancient petrified forest (“the Meols stocks”), no longer visible, close to Meols and Leasowe. The forest, when it was visible, was characterised by the blackened “stumps” that Lowry mentions.

 

17.10  an old stubby lighthouse ... a windmill .... a curious black flower ... a donkey.

Farolito
Leasowe

Carefully unobtrusive intimations of the Farolito [#199.7]; Don Quixote [#39.7 & #248.1]; the song ‘Black Flowers’ and its theme of betrayal [#306.1]; and the final Christ-like sacrifice [#373.5]. Bradbrook comments [153] that the description of the scene is "literally precise" (this is not quite true), but the Consul's future is presaged even in his childhood years. Lowry may have in mind the well-known Leasowe lighthouse, but there are various others in the wider area (though not on Hilbre itself; the "stubby" building on Hilbre is the telegraph station mentioned in In Ballast).

17.11 hydropathic hotels.

Hydropathic implies the treatment of disease by the use of water; here used, with mild irony, of the kind of seaside hotel still found on the Wirral. There was in Lowry’s day a large Hydropathic Hotel near the artificial lake in West Kirby.

18.1 Pierrot shows.

A popular form of seaside entertainment, particularly in the early years of the century. The character of Pierrot derives through French pantomime from the Pedrolino of the Italian comiedia dell'arte, a booby in an ill-fitted suit and large soft-brimmed hat, with a whitened face, a ruff, loose white pantaloons, and a jacket with large buttons.

18.2 the marine lake.

Marine lake

The artificial lake at West Kirby, a town just north of Caldy; a popular venue for small sailing boats as a barrier retains sufficient water for sailing even when the tide is out and extensive mud-flats are elsewhere exposed.

18.3 unprecedented, portentous walkers.

The adjectives are unusual (one might expect ‘prodigious’), so may anticipate the manner of the Consul's walk in Chapter VI [see #189.1].

18.4 a strict Wesleyan school.

The Leys

One run by the Methodist Church, which was founded by John Wesley (1703-91) as a non-conformist and de-ritualized breakaway from the Anglican Church. The connotations are of joyless discipline and fear of God; hence the guilt the Consul feels [74] when he hears the church bell and imagines its "hellish Wesleyan breath". 'The Leys', Lowry's public school in Cambridge, and presumably intimated here, was Methodist.

19.1 Srinagar.

Younghusband's Kashmir

Srinagar, on Lake Dal in the Vale of Kashmir, is the chief city of Kashmir and celebrated for the beauty of its waterways and surrounding mountains. The Valley of Kashmir, in the basin of the upper Jhelum river and surrounded by some of the world's highest peaks, is described in Francis Younghusband's Kashmir as: "the world-renowned Vale of Kashmir, a saucer-shaped valley with a length of 84 miles, a breadth of 20 to 25 miles, and a mean height of 5600 feet above sea-level, set in the very heart of the Himalaya" [2]. Often called "the Happy Valley" or "Paradise on Earth", it was a favourite resort for the Mogul emperors (as Cuernavaca was for Maximilian and Carlota), inspiring countless songs and romances, among them Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh [see #83.2]. Srinagar is a point of departure for many Himalayan expeditions, and the disappearance of Geoffrey's father into the mountains in search of the sacred mountain Himivat [#125.2] anticipates the William Blackstone theme [#51.1] and the Consul's desire for similar oblivion. The Kashmiri element of the novel, despite its late appearance in the manuscripts (the details derive almost totally from Younghusband), is of considerable importance in defining not only the Consul's metaphysical aspirations but also his desire to complete the circle of his existence by going back to its beginnings.

20.1 ze wibberlee wobberlee walk.

The Wibberlee-Wobberlee Song'

A copy of the ‘Wibberlee-Wobberlee Song’ with lyrics by Lowry and music by Bernhard Rooenstrunck and dating from Lowry's Cambridge days is to be found in the UBC Special Collections [UBC 6-57]. As Bradbrook notes [153], Malcolm learnt the song from his brothers, who had in turn picked it up from a minstrel troupe, and the Lowry boys used it at The Leys when obliged as new boys to entertain their fellows with a song. Graham Collier says [MLN 13: 6-7] that the song was first published in 1912, by Star Music, 138-140 Charing Cross Road (EMI); then included in Feldman's Album of Famous Old Songs, #17; music by Mark Sheridan, lyrics by J.R. Lang. However, various other versions may be found, such as that currently in the UBC Special Collections.

20.2 The Abyss yawned.

Hell Bunker

The Hell Bunker is misleadingly described as "a well known hazard" [Bradbrook, 153] of the short par 5 eighth hole of the Royal Liverpool Links at Hoylake, but though a fairly deep bunker protects the right hand side of the green the name is not in general usage and time has filled or imagination deepened the actual hole. Russell Lowry states ["Clearing up Some Problems", 101] that there was "definitely" a bunker so-called at Hoylake, at the eighth hole, apparently filled in before WWII. The name is familiar from the 14th hole at St. Andrews (Royal and Ancient), 567 yards, par 5, the bunker to the left of the green; Lowry has presumably transferred this bunker from the home of golf to his local course. The hyperbole links it to the barranca, and to the dark bunkers of the Farolito in Chapter XII (as well as those of the S.S. Samaritan). The choice of "yawned" is not accidental: as Eric Partridge says [Origins, 9l]: "Intimately akin to Gr khaos is Gr khasma, a gaping abyss, a vast cleft in the earth: whence L chasma, adopted by Med for excessive yawning: whence E chasm." The word ‘abyss’ has numerous connotations within Under the Volcano:

(a) the Bible. In Genesis 1:2, the darkness is upon the face of the deep (in the Vulgate, "super faciem abyssi"); in Genesis 7:11, all the fountains of the great deep are broken up ("rupti sunt omnes fontes abyssi magnae"), and the waters of the abyss cover the entire face of the earth.

(b) St Augustine. The Confessions make frequent allusion to the human heart as an abyss or in an abyss. Books XII and XIII form a sustained meditation on the opening verses of Genesis, and Augustine likens the "tenebrae super abyssum" ("the darkness over the abyss") to the human heart that lacks the light of God.

Dante

(c) Dante. Markson comments [20-21]:

Hell in quotation marks, an abyss that yawns in the middle of a field, the field numbered as the eighth of a sequence. Whereas in Dante's description of the eighth circle of his own hell: "Right in the middle of the malignant field yawns a well." Some few lines later, as Dante peers into that other "bunker," we discover what Laruelle saw: "In the bottom," Dante writes, "the sinners were naked."

The precise reference is to the Inferno [XVIII, l-25]; the "well" is the Malbolge, into which Hugh and Yvonne peer [100].

(d) Milton. Throughout Paradise Lost, in accordance with the opening verses of Genesis, Milton consistently differentiates the "dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss" (I.405) from the pit or gulf in which the fallen angels lie, but unlike Burnet he does not equate the abyss or deep specifically with the waters beneath the firmament.

Thomas Burnet

(e) Thomas Burnet. In his Sacred Theory of the Earth [see #189.8], Burnet uses the word ‘abyss’ consistently to mean the waters of the deep within the orb of the earth; when the shell of the earth cracked open, those waters were released upon the earth, causing thereby the universal deluge and the end of our first world.

(f) Edgar Allan Poe. In that catalogue of horrors, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the abyss (as a pit) figures prominently in the final pages, and in Chapter 24 the narrator feels an almost irresistible urge to lean over and fall in.

(g) Henry James. The 1940 Volcano has for one of its epigraphs a quotation from Henry James, written within a day of Britain's entry into World War I [The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2:384]:

The plunge of civilisation into this abyss of blood and darkness ... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

In a letter to Whit Burnett [22 June 1940; CL 1, 335], Lowry claimed that his using James as an epigraph to the 1940 Volcano is "both a comment on the bridge between the treacherous years ... and upon the Atlantis theme, and how it illumines the whole book". That illumination persisted but became in revision less obvious.

Conrad Aiken

(h) Conrad Aiken. From King Coffin [329]: "But remember, if thou gazest into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. The abyss will gaze into thee."

(i) Julien Green. Personal Record [26 May 1934, 171]: “dread of an abyss whose jaws may open at any moment”; a phrase used directly of Green’s reading of Donnelly’s Atlantis [see #86.1]. To Albert Erskine [30 June 1946; SL, 116], Lowry tried to downplay the various “echoes”, but admitted of his abyss that “a similar thought” occurs in Julien Green’s Personal Record, and suggested that Laruelle might have read this.

Other references noted by the Consul include: the "awful unbridgeable void" between Chesed and Binah [39]; Marston's "mighty gulf" [130]; Coleridge's deep romantic chasm [200]; and the crag "in Shelley or Calderon or both" [338].

21.1 Peeping Tom.

When Lady Godiva, wife of Leofric, the cruel lord of Coventry, rode naked through the town to gain relief for the citizens from the burdensome taxes imposed by her husband, the citizens kept closely indoors, but one wretch, known thereafter as ‘Peeping Tom’, looked out and was stricken blind for his curiosity. The story is an ancient one, but the Peeping Tom detail dates from only the 17th century.

21.2 Leasow Drive.

Leasowe

The main road running by the Royal Liverpool Links is Meols Drive; Leasowe Road [sic] runs in a similar way alongside the Leasowe golf course, a little to the north-east. As there seems to be no Leasowe Drive in Hoylake, it is likely that Lowry is in part creating his imaginative geography, to “place” the Taskerson home closer to Leasowe.

21.3 the bizarre scene.

Jennifer Webb contends [85] that this is the crucial psychological moment of the novel, its impact largely determining what happens thereafter: made to see his self from the outside, observing it through Laruelle's eyes, his unity of self is shattered (the irreverent might think of Humpty Dumpty [see #39.4], or perhaps Thomas Burnet [see #20.2e]), and the guilt thus freed becomes a dominant part of his consciousness. Nor does Laruelle remain unaffected by the scene; from this moment he is linked to the Consul in a role that combines voyeurism with shared sexual guilt (a moment repeated when he sees the Consul and Yvonne embracing in the ruins of Maximilian's casa). For both men the case is indeed altered.

21.4 The Case is Altered.

The Case is Altered

A work by Ben Jonson, not unfairly dismissed by Markson [109] as "a forgettable Jonson play, based on changed identities, disguises, etc.," whose relevance to the novel seems peripheral: a general named Maximilian, a moderately villainous beggar named Jaques, and the refrain ‘The Case Is Altered’ reiterated each time a turgid complexity unfolds. The name of the tavern is not as queer as it seems, since several public houses by this name exist. One explanation of its origin is that Edmund Plowden (1518-85), the great lawyer, was defending a gentleman accused of hearing mass, but having established that the service was performed by a layman in priestly vestures (for the purpose of informing against those of the papist persuasion) won his acquittal on the grounds that: “The case is altered: no priest, no mass.”  

Another story is offered in The Case Is Altered (1932) [25], a novel by William Plomer (by obscure coincidence, the reader for Cape who rejected Under the Volcano):

The pub had a funny name when you came to think of it. It was called ‘The Case is Altered’ though everyone simply called it ‘The Case.’ Inside the bar there was a framed notice which told the story of how the place had got its name. It was originally called ‘The Three Cranes,’ but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!’

Plomer's novel is a badly written account of a jealous husband, who, suspecting his wife of numerous infidelities, finally murders her, after which life for the other tenants of the boarding house can never be quite the same.

Johnnie Walker

21.5 Johnny Walkers.

Whiskies, anticipating the Consul's beloved bottle [70 & 91], just as the "providential" eviction from the tavern anticipates that from the garden [see #128.3].

21.6 equinoctial.

About the time of the autumn equinox (22 September).

22.1 Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher.

‘The House of Usher’ (1839) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) about a night of Gothic horrors in an isolated mansion at the end of which the House of Usher suddenly splits asunder and sinks into the dank tarn. Poe's story was the basis for the 1928 film by Jean Epstein (1897-1953), La Chute de la maison Usher, which Laruelle clearly has in mind [Kilgallin, 138], and which, unexpectedly, has a happy and hopeful ending imposed on it. Lowry comments in Dark as the Grave [260]:

What was the theme of The House of Usher? It was, or so it seemed to him at the moment, of the degradation of the idea of resurrection. But in the film, when the entombed was Usher's wife and not his sister, she came back in time, as it were with the doctor's help, to save him: they went out into the thunderstorm, but into new life.

In ‘Through the Panama’ [90], Martin Trumbaugh marvels at the “unspeakably happy ending of the film … Usher reconciled with his wife in this life yet on another plane”. But here, having set up a possible reference to Epstein's film, Usher reconciled with his wife in this life, Lowry belies this by reverting to Poe's ending.

22.2 The horse reared wildly.

Statue of Zapata

This horse foreshadows the frequent appearances throughout the novel of the horse with No. 7 branded on its rump, while its drunken rider epitomises Geoffrey Firmin: "this too, obscurely, was the Consul." The horse has many meanings (in a marginal note [UBC 28-23, 5], Lowry advises himself, "Get Faulkner out of the machinery"): it suggests the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, especially the pale horse of Death [Revelation 6:8]; the equestrian statue of the turbulent Huerta [44], that turns into the giant horse of the screen [266], to pursue Yvonne Griffaton down the dark streets; and, in a Lawrentian sense, the psychological forces of destruction within the soul of man that unleashed lead to his death (hence the trampling of Yvonne in Chapter XI). The Cabbalistic significance of the horse is stated in Éliphas Lévi's Transcendental Magic [98; cited by Kilgallin, 187]: “Jehovah is He Who dominates Nature like a magnificent horse and makes it go where He wills; but CHAVAJOH – otherwise, the demon – is an unbridled horse which overthrows its rider and precipitates him into the abyss.” In her memoir, Jan Gabrial tells of an encounter between herself and a lurching horseman in the Calle Humboldt one dark night [Inside the Volcano, 116].

22.3 the light in Adam's house burned on.

The first identification of the Consul as Adam, now evicted from the Garden of Eden [see #128.3], but whose light, like a votive candle brought to the graveside on the Day of the Dead, is a constant reminder of his past presence there.

23.1 obscurely.

With the usual sense of the interpenetration of the spiritual and material worlds.

23.2 he had taken a cut to the left.

Like Don Quixote avoiding a town invested with his abhorrence because of his excesses there [see #79.6] , Laruelle, "a knight of old" [12], still armed with his tennis racket, avoids his own house by taking the same sideroad that Yvonne was so anxious to take [see #190.2] to avoid him on that day one year earlier. This lane does not exist in Cuernavaca (as opposed to Quauhnahuac); Lowry’s creation of it conforms with the general impulse in Dante’s Inferno for characters to turn almost invariably to the left. For the Calle Nicaragua and the Calle Tierra del Fuego, see #47.6 and #55.3.

23.3 the Avenida de la Revolucíon.

Described [232] as "the main highway" when the Tomalín bus takes the same route, but there is no street by this name leading out of the zócalo in Cuernavaca: Lowry has in mind the Avenida Geurrero [DATG, 208], which goes north from the zócalo [224], but he has invested the street with features such as the barracks and cinema that more properly belong to Morelos, the main street of Cuernavaca. The name of the street puns on Laruelle's circular route, completed by the camión in Chapter VIII.

23.4 Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, Facultad de México, de la Escuela Médico Militar, Enfermedades de Niños, Indisposiciones nerviosas ... consultas de 12 a 2 y 4 a 7.

Sp. "Dr Arthur Díaz Vigil, Physician, Surgeon and Obstetrician, Faculty of Mexico [and] the Military Medical School, Childhood Illnesses, nervous Complaints ... Consultations from 12 to 2 and 4 to 7." Such signs are a common feature of Mexican street windows.

23.5 the notices one encountered in the mingitorios.

Dr. Vigil also treats venereal diseases, as indicated by his notices in the public toilets, one of which the Consul reads in the mingitorio of the Farolito [see #352.1].

23.6 Quauhnahuac Nuevo.

In context, a small broadsheet put out by the paramilitary and fascist Unión Militar [see #183.3]. The paper is pro-Almazán, i.e., supporting Juan Andreu Almazán, conservative candidate for the 1940 presidential election [see #29.8]; and pro-Axis, i.e., supporting the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan (and by implication Franco's Spain). Mexico at this stage had by no means committed itself to entering the war, as it eventually did, on the side of the Allies, particularly since relations with the USA and Britain were still strained as a result of Cárdenas's policies of nationalisation [see #30.1].

A marginal aside [UBC 28-23, 2] indicates that the original was the Oaxaca Nuevo. Compare the "Diario de Información" (Director A.C. Guillermo Sanchez) of 23 diciembre de 1937, mentioned in a draft of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-21, 602]; Sigbjørn recalls that he had it in gaol in Oaxaca, using it to smuggle out a letter to Antonio Cerillo, written in Spanglais: "Yo presa, por absolutamente nada. Es impossible dormer" ("I am in gaol for absolutely nothing. It is impossible to sleep").

23.7 Un avión de combate Francés derribado por un caza Alemán. Los[t] trabajadores de Australia abogan por la paz. ¿Quiere Vd? ... vestirse con elegancia y a la última moda de Europa y los Estados Unidos?

Sp. "A French combat plane brought down by a German fighter. The workers of Australia plead for peace. Do you wish ... to dress with elegance and in the latest style of Europe and the United States?" ‘Lost’ (in the US edition) is an instance of strange type.

23.8 ¿Quiere Vd?

The notices in the mingitoro [352], and the deliberate break in the sentence, might for the crude gringo turn "Do you wish" [Vd = Usted, the 2nd-person plural] into a grisly graphic of venereal disease.

Maximilian

23.9 French army helmets and grey faded purple uniforms.

Although a fair description of the Mexican military uniform at the time, Lowry's words (‘French’, ‘faded’, ‘purple’) evoke the ghost of Maximilian [see #12.4 & #14.3].

23.10 Approaching the cinema.

Ciné Morelos

In the fictional world, the location of "Quauhnahuac's one cinema" [6] is distinct: it stands out on an incline some distance up the main street, the Avenida de la Revolución, which leads directly north from the zócalo, and it is opposite the Borda Gardens [307]. A difficulty arises when one tries to relate the fictional world of Quauhnahuac to the real world of Cuernavaca: the Ciné Morelos (at Morelos and Rayón) is roughly opposite the Borda Gardens, but not on a street leading out of the zócalo, nor sufficiently far north to allow Jacques (or the bus in Chapter VIII) to cover the distance. This is one of the more striking instances of Lowry violating the actual topography of Cuernavaca.

24.1 the arcature.

A small arcade or covered passageway in front of a row of shops. The Ciné Morelos in Cuernavaca had such a feature.

24.2 the Washington Post March.

A stirring march, hopelessly out of place here, by the American bandmaster and composer, John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), originally written for a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the newspaper, The Washington Post, in 1889.

24.3 tortilla stands.

Curb-side hot-plates on which tortillas (thin corn-meal pancakes) are cooked to be filled with chicken, meat, and vegetables for a tasty if not always hygienic snack. Naptha is a coal derivative used for lighting purposes since the late eighteenth century.

24.4 Las Manos de Orlac ... 6 y 8.30. Las Manos de Orlac.

Sp. "The Hands of Orlac ... 6 and 8.30. The Hands of Orlac, with Peter Lorre." This is the same film coincidentally, that was playing this day one year earlier. Originally Orlacs Hände, Austria, 1925, directed by Robert Wiene, with Conrad Veidt in the title role; it was remade in 1935 with Peter Lorre as Orlac (entitled Mad Love in the USA), under the direction of Karl Freund (who had done a classic Dracula in 1931). As Hugh says [110], "He's a great actor but it's a lousy picture .... It's all about a pianist who has a sense of guilt because he thinks his hands are a murderer's or something and keeps washing the blood off them. Perhaps they really are a murderer's, but I forget."

Las Manos de Orlac

In the 1935 Hollywood version Colin Clive (who had played the scientist in the classic Frankenstein of 1931) was cast as Steve Orlac, a famous concert pianist. Peter Lorre plays Dr Gogol, who is in love with Orlac's wife, Yvonne, an actress in Grand Guignol theatre (Lowry may have taken his heroine's name from this movie). Gogol forces his attentions on the young wife, who rejects him and faints at his grotesque behaviour. Orlac loses his hands in a railroad accident, and Yvonne reluctantly turns to Gogol, the world's greatest surgeon, for assistance. A murderer named Rollo has been guillotined that day, and Gogol grafts Rollo's hands onto Orlac. Gogol then initiates a plan by which Orlac, Yvonne and the police will come to believe that Orlac – or Rollo's hands – is guilty of several crimes; he hopes that Orlac will be driven mad so that he will be able to win Yvonne. Eventually, Gogol is revealed as the murderer; Stephen kills him in a struggle, and the two are reunited. The bloody hands, like those of the pelado [251], symbolise the collective guilt of mankind [‘LJC’, 69].

24.5 Peter Lorre.

Peter Lorre (1904-64) was a Hungarian-born actor introduced to Hollywood audiences with The Hands of Orlac. Among his other major films were Spring Awakening (1928); Fritz Lang's M (1931); Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934); and Sternberg's Crime and Punishment (1935).

24.6 the Student of Prague.

Der Student von Prag

The film, Der Student von Prag, of which there were three versions: 1913, directed by Stellan Rye, with Paul Wegener; 1926, directed by Henrik Galeen, with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss (the one Laruelle has in mind); and 1936, directed by Arthur Robison. Based on the Faust legend and Poe's ‘William Wilson’, the film concerns a student named Baldwin, who has sold his reflection to a sorcerer, Scapinelli, and who becomes a social outcast when his mirror image slays in a duel a man whose life Baldwin had promised to spare. Baldwin buys back his soul at the cost of his own life and shoots his mirror image, thereby killing himself in a displaced form of suicide.

24.7 Wiene.

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Robert Wiene (1881-1938), a German film director who achieved international recognition with Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919). His other films include Raskolnikov (1923), based on Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment; Orlacs Hände (1925); and Ultimatum (1938).

24.8 Werner Krauss.

Werner Krauss (1884-1959), a German actor whose major roles include the insane doctor in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919); Pontius Pilate in INRI (1924); Jack the Ripper in Waxworks (1924); and the butcher in Joyless Street (1925). Unfortunately, he is remembered more for his support of Hitler and his starring role in the viciously anti-Semitic film Jud Suss in the war years.

24.9 Karl Grüne.

Die Strasse

Karl Grüne (1885-1962), a minor German film director of Czech-Austrian origin, who "dealt with pacifist and patriotic themes and experimented with naturalism and other new forms" [Andersen, 206]. His major film was Die Strasse (1923), but others include Arabella (1925); Königin Louisa (1928); and Waterloo (1929). Lowry asked Gerald Noxon if he had heard of Karl Grune [sic], "a German Jew who years and years ago in Germany made The Street, and a few years back made Abdul the Damned in England, with Nils Asther? Neither of these films are good looked at as a whole: both had genius, I thought" [Lowry / Noxon Letters, 34]. To David Markson [31 Oct. 1951; CL 2, 445], Lowry ranked the first and last shots of The Street, a film about an attempted escape from marriage, with Murnau's Sunrise [see #200.7] as a lasting influence on his work.

24.10 the Ufa days.

‘Ufa’ stands for Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, a German production company founded in 1917 to promote German culture and improve Germany's image abroad. The Ufa Film Palast am Zoo was a big cinema in Berlin, opened in 1919. The Ufa in effect controlled the German film industry and produced most of the important expressionist films in the 1920s, but later it lost most of its best actors and directors to Hollywood. With the rise of Nazism, the Ufa was brought increasingly under state control, and it had ceased to exist by the end of World War Il.

24.11 Conrad Veidt.

Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), a famous German character actor, equally impressive as hero or villain. His major roles were in such early German films as Das Cabinett der Dr Caligari (1919); Der Janus Kopf (1920); Waxworks (1924); Orlacs Hände (1925); and Der Student von Prag (1926), but he went on to make films in Britain: The Wandering Jew (1933); King of the Damned (1935); Dark Journey (1937), and in the USA: A Woman's Face (1941); and Casablanca (1942).

24.12 that particular film.

Orlacs Hände

The 1924 Orlacs Hände was more subtle than the 1935 Mad Love, stressing the pianist's sense of guilt rather than the melodrama. In the 1940 Volcano [30], Laruelle distinguishes between Orlacs Hände and Mad Love: "Where Orlac had been created before as a Prometheus, as all that is finest in humanity crippled by the blind forces of life around him, he was now a feeble-minded lout giggling limericks." Lowry repeated this opinion to David Markson [25 Aug. 1951; CL 2, 414]: "a remake of truly awe inspiring badness" (saving five minutes of "surgical sequences"). In a marginal note [UBC 28-23, 7], Lowry commented of the wider film references: "This should be honest, should bring back the Ufa days, Student of Prague, Zilka, & at the same time give him a renewed sense of ambition to pursue his own work."

25.1 the hieroglyphic of the times.

In the 1940 Volcano [347], the Consul "remembered Sir Thomas Browne having said of tavern music, a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world." The reference is ironic, since Sir Thomas Browne [Religio Medici, Pt. 2, #9] sees in even such vulgar music a sign of the greater harmony that perfectly orders all things, whereas here it delineates only a world plummeting to its bloody destruction. The reference was originally in Chapter XII, but after Lowry had moved it to Chapter I he presumably saw the incongruity of a Frenchman quoting Sir Thomas Browne, so obscured the source.

25.2 a match for his cigarette.

Alas cigarettes

By protesting too much at the proof stage [28 Oct. 1946; CL 1, 647], Lowry unwittingly acknowledged that Sr Bustamente's courteous way of lighting a cigarette (as well as his stiff brilliantined hair and the black hair on Vigil's wrists) owes much to Faulkner's The Wild Palms. Albert Erskine assured him that his fears were unnecessary, but Lowry was being evasive: the borrowing relates equally to the opening of the novel where Dr Vigil offers a light to Laruelle [see #6.7]. Lowry was (perhaps rightly) uneasy about "phrases in Wild Palms adhering to [his] subconscious like flies to flypaper". The novel portrays an adulterous love ending in tragedy; the man who "fumbled a match" is Rittenmeyer, the abandoned husband (trim, with "impeccable" hair).

25.3 Cervecería XX.

Dos Equis

Sp. "Brewery Dos Equis"; that is, two Xs. Dos Equis, a dark beer, is offered by Cervantes in the Salón Ofélia [291], but the name of the cantina also suggests the Cervecería Quauhnahuac of Chapter IV, visited by Hugh and Yvonne, mounted on two horses.

25.4 Chingar ... chingado.

The verb chingar means "to fuck" or "to rape", and its various forms can be used in a variety of ways as expletives or terms of abuse. Sr Bustamente's use of the words anticipates that of one part of the crowd about the dying Indian [244].

25.5 the wires have decomposed.

Sr Bustamente's odd anglicization of Sp. descompuesto, "out of order," anticipates Dr Vigil's comment [144]: "But after much tequila the eclectic systemë is perhaps un poco descmpuesto, comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: claro?" In early revisions Bustamente defined the Consul's tragedy in terms that anticipate the end of Chapter X: "That is the tragedia of your amigo. For so long as he is in evils he desire them. And as man cannot shun the evils in his own strength he must be looking to God. But as your friend had no strength to be looking to God I think he look to hell instead. I think he liked it" [UBC 28-22, 11]. In another statement: "But best of all he liked the death and mescal. When he haved death and mescal then he is flying. But he is flying like an angel, not like an eagle, but like a devil" [UBC 28-22, 15]. As Asals notes [Making, 101], Lowry later dismissed this as "Swedenborg stuff", but it gives weight to "flying" [see #34.1] and forms such as "Alas!" [#47.4].

26.1 "Tequila .... No, anís – anís, por favor, señor .... Y una – ah – gaseosa.

Tehuacán mineral water

Sp. "Tequila .... No, anís – anís, please .... And a – ah – soda water." A gaseosa is not any fizzy soft-drink, but rather Tehuacán water [see #6.4] "con gas"; that is, carbonated, its salts and carbonates supposedly beneficial in a way that tequila and anís are not. M. Laruelle hesitates, possibly because he subconsciously recalls his words of one year ago: "If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for" [see #216.2].

26.2 compañero.

Sp. “companion”, or “comrade”; the word is that uttered by the dying Indian [see #247.2] and by the old fiddler to the dying Consul [see #373.6]. All three instances of this highly significant word were surprisingly late additions to the manuscripts.

26.3 we have not revived it. It has only returned.

In earlier drafts, Sr Bustamente was even more philosophical: "they return, they begin all over again. It is the return eternal." Lowry had found in Ouspensky and Dunne a philosophical confirmation of his own feelings about the unreality of time and its possible displacement in a serial universe; and in Nietzsche the idea of the eternal return, which Dunne explicitly dismisses [An Experiment with Time, 214]. All these ideas for Lowry were exemplified by the cinema, as Paul Tiessen suggests [Woodcock, 140]:

That the present cannot escape the past, that the impotence of man's present merges with the guilt of his past, is symbolically best expressed in a cinematic style where the circularity of the form, imitating the circular motion of the reel, can manipulate the overlapping and merging of time.

26.4 the Spanish War.

The Spanish Civil War began with the landing of Foreign Legion troops in Spain on 19 July 1936 and ensuing revolts of sympathy by army garrisons in Seville and Andalusia. It had ended early in 1939; the newsreels which Sr Bustamente is showing are out of date.

26.5 the autoridades box.

A box seat reserved for the theatre manager and his guests.

26.6 a garish threesheet.

A one-sheet is a single advertising poster, 28" by 42"; a three-sheet is a poster equivalent to three one-sheets so-called because it is folded twice, dividing the sheet into three parts.

26.7 La simpatiquísima y encantadora María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en sensacional Film.

Maria Landrock

Sp. “The entrancing and charming María Landrock, the noted German artiste whom we will soon be seeing in a sensational film.” Maria Landrock was a minor German actress, born 1922, who became well known as a young skater (taking part in the 1936 Olympics) before turning to the cinema. Her brief film career lasted from 1940 to 1944 (her first film was Aus erster Ehe, 1940), which makes the mention of her here slightly anachronistic. Her presence, Lowry suggests [‘LJC’, 70], sounds an ominous political note, being one more reminder of the constant German presence, while the "garish" display of her features suggests the sexual temptation embodied in the other María [347].

26.8 frijoles.

Beans, usually of the pinto variety, dried or boiled with onion, pepper, garlic and chili; a very basic dish.

Alas cigarettes

26.9 three cigarettes were lit on one match.

An allusion to the old belief that this is bad luck; Laruelle is sensitive to the sinister qualities of the scene [see #306.3].

27.1 It was already seven o'clock.

The precise hour of the Consul's death, one year earlier. Ominous shades of that are present in the shape of pariah dogs; the torch-lit shadows hinting at a spiritually inverted world; the reference to autoridades, or officials; and the salida, or exit sign at the rear.

27.2 the Gambrinus or Charley's Place.

Restaurants in Cuernavaca. The Gambrinus (named after the mighty German brewery, itself named for the patron saint of brewers) at Morelos 405 has long disappeared (the building now houses the Bellas Artes Institute). Charley's Place (later flourishing as ‘Pepe's Moustache’ beside ‘Malinche's Grill and Bar’) was in 1938 "unmistakable – you could see the sign a mile off, a little corner cafe with open stone arches and red-covered tables, facing the palace square" [Aiken, A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, 464]. It was once the scene of a violent quarrel between Lowry and Aiken, described in the latter's Ushant [352], concerning the son's need to devour his spiritual father.

27.3 the meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlán.

The most significant single moment in Mexico's history. Lowry was working from an actual calendar, which has not been located, for marginal notes [UBC 25-17, 14] urge "check by original", and the text says the calendar is "in the form of a chromos":

Cortés

(a) Cortez. Hernando, or Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), Spanish conquistador and conqueror of Mexico, who set sail in 1519 from Cuba with a small band of adventurers, landing at and founding the city of Vera Cruz before marching 200 miles inland to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. After initial skirmishing with the Tlaxcalans, traditional enemies of the Aztecs, Cortés won them to his cause and advanced via Cholula [see #11.4] towards the capital. Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor, half believing that Cortés was the god Quetzalcóatl [see #299.7], received the Spaniards with guarded but generous hospitality, but Cortés, seeing how precarious his position was, resolved to take the emperor hostage. Eventually, the Aztecs rose up against the Spaniards, and, on the "Noche Triste", or Sad Night, 1 July 1520, Cortés lost most of his men trying to break out of the city [see #287.8(c)]. Cortés immediately made plans to return, and with the help of Spanish and Indian reinforcements, a fleet of ships [see #300.1], and a smallpox plague that carried off tens of thousands of Aztecs, he laid siege to Tenochtitlán. After months of fierce fighting, the city fell on 21 August 1521. Cortés consolidated his success so well that within 20 years Mexico was completely controlled by Spain. He was rewarded with the title of Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, but not with that of viceroy, which he believed he deserved After an abortive expedition to Honduras he returned to his palace and hacienda in Cuernavaca, spending his last two decades in Mexico and Spain in largely frustrating civil disputes.

Moctezuma

(b) Moctezuma. Moctezuma II (1466-1520), was Aztec emperor from 1502 and undisputed ruler over wide territories in Central Mexico and some thirty million subjects. Venerated as semi-divine and respected for his proven prowess, he lived in the shadow of historical inevitability since he knew that Quetzalcóatl would return to reclaim his rightful throne. Unable to resist the seemingly invincible Spaniards, Moctezuma welcomed them to Tenochtitlán, but was taken hostage and later killed, probably by a stone thrown by the Aztecs as he urged them not to resist the Spaniards. His death signalled outright hostilities between the Spaniards and the Aztecs, culminating in the total destruction of the latter's civilization.

Tenochtitlán

(c) Tenochtitlán. The Aztec capital on an island in Lake Texcoco, founded about 1325 [see #44.8]. From humble beginnings among the swamps and reeds it rose to become a magnificent city of some sixty thousand houses, with gleaming white stucco buildings, canals and dikes, clean wide streets, busy market places, fountains, palaces, pyramids and temples, floating gardens (chinampas) to sustain a population of perhaps 300,000, and long causeways and aqueducts linking the island to the mainland: a civilization easily the equal of anything in Europe at the time, despite its emphasis upon militarism and human sacrifice. The final Spaniard assault on the city reduced it literally to rubble, and after the Aztec defeat the Spaniards completed the destruction, creating a new Mexico City from its ruins.

Meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma

(d) The Meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma. On 8 November 1519 a Spanish force of about four hundred, with six thousand Tlaxcalan allies, crossed the causeway from the south to enter Tenochtitlán where they were met by a splendid retinue of Aztec warriors and the royal palanquin of Moctezuma, who descended in gorgeous finery to greet Cortés, who was dressed in shining armour and mounted on his great war horse. The two saluted each other, gifts were exchanged, and Moctezuma welcomed the Spaniards into his capital, which they were to destroy within two years. The place of the meeting (the corner of Salvador and Pino Suarez) is now marked by the sixteenth-century Hospital of Jesus of Nazareth.

27.4 El último Emperador Azteca … de nuestra nacionalidad actual.

The interpenetration of two cultures

Sp. "The last Aztec Emperor ... Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés, representative of the Spanish race, meet face to face: two races and two civilizations which had attained a high degree of perfection unite to form the nucleus of our present national character." Apart from the misleading hyperbole, the calendar makes at least one error of fact: Moctezuma was not the last Aztec emperor, since he was followed by Cuitláhuac and Cuauhtémoc before the fall of Tenochtitlán. As Walker suggests [250], the "relatively innocuous bit of nationalistic bravado" becomes in relation to the far-reaching Conquest motif of Under the Volcano "an ironic portent of considerable magnitude." Some of the early manuscripts reveal that Lowry was also trying to draw parallels between the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma and that of Hitler and Chamberlain, and even Franco and Sir Samuel Hoare [UBC 28-22, 7 & 61], but the obvious attempt to do so was dropped.

27.5 the thumbed maroon volume of Elizabethan plays.

The thumbed maroon volume

Geoffrey's copy of Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays, edited by E.C. Dunn (New York, Random House, Modern Library College Edition, 1932). The book had been lent to Laruelle some eighteen months earlier to help him research a film based on the Faustus story, and was never returned. The eight plays are The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe; The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker; A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood; Volpone, or The Fox, A Comedy, by Ben Jonson; The Maid's Tragedy, by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher; A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger; and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, by John Ford. Lowry’s copy of the book, a gift from his second wife, is in the Special Collection at UBC; it is addressed on the flyleaf "To my husband – Christmas, 1940, with all my love. Margie."

27.6 the roses and the plumbago and the waxplants “like dilapidated préservatifs”.

The plants seem innocent in themselves, but, as the Consul's "diabolical look" implies, each possesses additional alchemical or mystical significance:

(a) roses. The flower of Venus, but with the cross (the rose upon the rood of time) the symbol of the Rosicrucians, the mystical order founded in the 15th century by Christian Rosenkreuz and introduced to England by Robert Fludd and Thomas Vaughan. W.B. Yeats's ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (1897) tells of the initiation into the Order of the Alchemical Rose, whose secrets are revealed in ‘The Tables of the Law’ (1897) to be "not of this earth".

(b) plumbago. Pliny's molybdaena, or leadwort; so-called because of the bluish lead-like colour of its spikes of flowers. Lead is the metal of Saturn, the softest and lowliest of metals, the base metal for attempted transmutations to a higher form.

(c) waxplants. Otherwise Hoya, a genus of tropical climbing plants of the milkweed family, with shiny green leaves and a large waxy white flower (which the Consul rather unfairly describes in terms of a used condom). Ceration (Gk. keros, ‘wax’) is a standard process in alchemy, implying the changing of a substance into a soft wax-like condition as a prelude to further activity.

The Consul's "dilapidated préservatifs" underlines the alchemical references, since dilapidated (L. lapis, ‘a stone’) hints at the philosopher's stone and préservatif (despite its meaning of ‘condom’) at the elixir of life. The alchemical readings might seem excessive, as the Consul’s "diabolical look" may simply refer to condoms and hence adultery; yet an earlier draft of this [UBC 28-22, 63] offered roses and sunflowers in a deliberate Blakean sense ("O Rose thou art sick"). Compare, too, the cargo of the S.S. Samaritan [#32.3].

28.1 A modern film version of the Faustus story.

Faustus

The original Faust seems to have been a wandering conjurer living in Germany about 1488-1541, who has come to symbolize man's aspiring quest for forbidden knowledge. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1691), by Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), is a drama in blank verse and prose taking the legend for its subject matter. Faustus, weary of the sciences and master of permitted knowledge, turns to magic and summons up the figure of Mephistophilis with whom he makes a pact to sell his soul in return for twenty-four years of unlimited pleasure and power. This is granted him, and Faustus indulges himself, but as time runs out, he begins to despair. Torn between good and evil, his familiars offering the choice of salvation or despair, Faustus agonizes, unable to turn to the salvation apparently held out to him. At the crucial moment, Mephistophilis sends him a vision of Helen of Troy ("the face that launched a thousand ships"), and Faustus succumbs. In a final hour of intense despair, he contemplates his fate before being dragged off, screaming, to hell. Doctor Faustus is Lowry's single most important source for Under the Volcano. Parallels between Faustus and the Consul are frequently iterated; the action of the novel closely imitates that of the play; the dilemma of the choice between salvation and despair is central to both dramas; and both work within the bounds of a tightly moralistic structure only to penetrate disturbingly into the complexities of human motivation. For the suggestion that Chapters II to XII represent Laruelle's "modern film version of the Faustus story", see #9.2.

In the 1940 Volcano [8-9] Laruelle was more explicit about his intentions:

"My God," said Laruelle, "If only I had the time to put a character like the Consul into a film! Yes, supposing Doctor, that all the suffering and chaos and conflict of the present were suddenly to take human form. And to become conscious of itself! That is the impression I would want to give of my man: a man to whom, like Jesus, the great betrayal of the human spirit would appear in the guise of a private, anguishing betrayal. And you would realize somehow too that this character of mine was yet aware of all the agonies with which the human lot would become presently involved. And now that I think of it, Doctor, it does almost seem possible that it already happened! Supposing that all these horrors of today before they became a part of our lives had suddenly convulsed upon themselves to create a soul, and then that soul had sought a body, and the only body it had found sufficiently photophobic for its purposes was the Consul's." He was looking intently at Vigil, his eyes excited. "If I could only convey the effect of a man who was the very shape and motion of the world's doom," he went on, "But at the same time the living prophecy of its hope!"

"You would need a screen as big as the world to show it on," said the doctor.

To answer Asals as to why one might privilege Marlowe's damned Faust over Goethe's spared figure [Making, 368]: not only does Marlowe's "morality play" inform and shape Lowry’s theme, but that deeper structure may be seen explicitly as Laruelle's creation.

28.2 Trotsky.

Trotsky

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the name assumed by Lev Davidovich Bronstein, the Russian politician of Jewish origin second only to Lenin as the outstanding architect of the Russian Revolution. Despite some differences of opinion with Lenin, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, taking an active part in the Revolution and then as Commissar for war directing the Red Army in the ensuing civil war. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was defeated in the struggle for leadership by Stalin, dismissed from office in 1925, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, finally entering Mexico in 1937 and taking up residence at Coyoacán in Mexico City. He remained in Mexico until 20 August 1940, when he was assassinated with a pick-axe by a Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, whom he knew and trusted. This murder, which Lowry would have been aware of when writing but which had not in 1939 yet come to pass, casts a shadow of tragic inevitability over the novel, particularly in the final chapter when the Consul is "identified" as Trotsky.

28.3 the one jalousie door.

A typical cantina might have a heavy metal door that can be rolled up when the cantina is open and affords security when it is shut; and within that a much lighter and shorter door to screen drinkers from the street. A jalousie door is one made of overlapping slats which keep out the sun while letting in light and air (rather like a Venetian blind) or, as seems likely in the Cervecería XX, a wooden door into which such slats are set.

28.4 an appoggiatura.

From It. appoggiare, ‘to lean’; in music, an embellishing note or tone preceding the key melodic tone or note and usually written as a note of smaller size.

28.5 the bicho.

Sr Bustamente means bicho viviente, literally, ‘living soul’; a common cliché, but one particularly relevant on this Day of the Dead. In Mexican Spanish the phrase has the connotation of one who is a little odd, a screwball. In one draft [UBC 28-22, 67], Sr Bustamente adds: "Barbé too – a beard like Maximiliano."

28.6 The Americano.

At various points in the early drafts the Consul had been conceived of as American.

28.7 a solid frieze carved into the wall.

Warning Shadows
Rivera murals

The waiting men resemble the Tlahuican warriors of the Rivera murals on the Cortés Palace [see #212.2], while the reference to "the murderer's hands" suggests the bloody hands of the conquistador [see #234.2]. There may be a suggestion of Arthur Robison's 1923 film, Warning Shadows, subtitled "A Nocturnal Hallucination". Remarkable for its use of light and shadows, the film depicts six persons in a trance, watching their shadows act out their passions, before they awake from their collective nightmare [Kracauer, 113].

29.1 the poor guy, he have no socks.

Nor does the Consul have socks on [46], when Yvonne first sees him. Although there are physical and medical reasons for the Consul's painfully swollen feet, this disorder in his dress reflects his psychic state, as Kilgallin suggests [185], citing W.J. Turner's The Duchess of Popocatepetl (1939): "Education ... is entirely a matter of adjusting the proper expression and repression of the human psyche according to circumstances and needs. In other words it is simply a question of when to take off and put on your socks" [114].

29.2 drinking so heavily.

The Consul comments [62] on Jacques's weak stomach for drink; this change in his drinking habits is one small indication that Laruelle is being depicted as a miniature Consul figure [see #210.1], one who shares Geoffrey's guilt as he too becomes aware of a love that has come too late. This identification is made by the Consul himself in such a way as to suggest that something of himself "for obscure purposes of his own" is passing into Jacques. This suggestion is here reinforced by Laruelle's vision of himself lying in the bath; an intimation very similar to the Consul's recurrent hallucination [91] of the dead man beside the swimming-pool, the ‘other’ who is in part himself.

29.3 his own zacuali.

Jacques' zacuali

The coming storm reminds Laruelle not only of his own zacuali, the strange tower on his house in the Calle Nicaragua [see #194.3] , but also of the Aztec creation myth about the Deluge. The myth exists in many variants, but Lowry's direct source is Donnelly's Atlantis [103-04], which cites Ixtilxochitl’s Toltec legend of the flood:

It is found in the histories of the Toltecs that this age and first world, as they call it, lasted 1716 years; that men were destroyed by tremendous rains and lightning from the sky, and even all the land, without the exception of anything, and the highest mountains, were covered up and submerged in water fifteen cubits (caxtolmolati); and here they added other fables of how men came to multiply from the few who escaped from this destruction in a "toplipetlocali;" that this word nearly signifies a close chest; and how, after men had multiplied, they erected a very high "zacuali," which is today a tower of great height, in order to take refuge in it should the second world (age) be destroyed. Presently their languages were confused, and, not being able to understand each other, they went to different parts of the earth.

Cholula

According to Prescott [Appendix I, 693], two persons survived this deluge: Coxcox and his wife [see #86.4], who built a boat. Their many children remained dumb until a dove gave them the gift of languages, but these differed so much that the children could not understand one another (hence the associations with Noah and Deucalion, but also with the Tower of Babel [see #11.4]. Lewis Spence doubts the validity of interpretations of the Codices giving exactly what the Christian interpreters wanted to find and recounts an alternative tradition of the giant Xlehua building the pyramid at Cholula as a tower to escape the second deluge should it come [M of M & P, 120-21]. This is remarkably like the widespread vulgar error, "That the Tower of Babel was erected against a second deluge" (Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, VII, Ch. 6). In the 1940 Volcano [17], Laruelle was more explicit about the zacuali, which he claimed was built after the Deluge to prevent the destruction of the "second world"; he linked the tower explicitly to his own house, expressing more clearly his fears that with the outbreak of war the world might be on its way to destruction and his house, an inadequate refuge.

Albert Erskine queried this word [28 Aug. 1946; UBC 1-20]: "damned if we can find it in any language." Laruelle at first intended his film to have "everything" in it: "Not only would Hue Hue Tlapalan, the Mexican promised land, which was in Ce Tecpatl, be in it but the fall of Zontonque, who was after all only Satan, and the Toltec legend effected by Coxcox, the Mexican Noah, in the ark, the toplipetlocali, and the high tower, the zacuali, which had been built should the second world be destroyed ... And as for his film, it would probably never be made at all" [UBC 7-2, 10-11; Volcano, 17]. The process of revision moved from this grand design to out-do Eisenstein, to Laruelle's dreadful dream in the first chapter of the 1940 Volcano, then to a more complex sense of the novel as a film unfolding in the dark cinema of his mind.

29.4 Night of the Culmination of the Pleiades!

Pleiades

The Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, turned into doves after their deaths, then placed by Zeus among the stars, where they form part of the constellation of Taurus. There is a traditional association of the Pleiades with beneficent spring showers and autumn storms (in Mexico, more or less coinciding with the beginning and end of the rainy season), but, in addition, as R.H. Allen notes, the Pleiades "are intimately connected with the tradition of the flood found among so many and widely separated nations" [Stars and their Names, 398]. The culmination of a constellation is simply the moment at which it reaches its highest point in the sky, but Lowry's capitals and the general sense of threat which Laruelle expresses point to something more than a vague fear of flooding. Lewis Spence notes that the movement of the Pleiades was closely associated among the Aztecs with the fear of the world coming to an end every fifty-two years [M of M & P, 41], and his meaning is further clarified by Prescott [I.iv, 73], who discusses the Aztec tradition of the destruction of the world and describes how they would sacrifice a victim and kindle a new fire by the friction of sticks placed in his wounded breast to ensure the beginning of a new cycle at the end of every fifty-two year "century" [see #82.1]. Prescott says that this was done when the Pleiades approached the zenith, that is, in late December during the five unlucky days of Uayeb (the month the Consul likes best [see #82.3], but he also quotes two previous authorities (Sagahun and Torquemada) who say that such sacrifices took place at the actual moment of the culmination of the Pleiades, at midnight in mid-November. This seems to be what Laruelle is referring to, yet Lowry has used Prescott to get the best of both worlds: to suggest the "sacrifice" of Geoffrey during the unlucky month of Uayeb, while retaining the consistency of his action in November. Above all, he is anticipating the death of Yvonne [336], who senses herself like one of the daughter of Atlas being gathered up towards the Pleiades.

29.5 What, after all, was a Consul that one was mindful of him?

An allusion to Psalm 8:3-5:

     When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
     
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the
son of man, that thou visitest him?
     
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,
and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

The psalm is one of total faith, jubilation, and exaltation, praising the excellence of the Lord, who has set his glory above the heavens; the reference here is magnificently ironic in the context of the second flood and the Night of the culmination of the Pleiades. The allusion is used with similar irony in Aiken’s Blue Voyage.

29.6 the days of Porfirio Díaz.

Díaz was President of Mexico, 1877-80 and 1884-1911, his regime commonly considered one of total corruption even though it brought Mexico forcibly into the 20th century as well as to the point of revolution [see #108.5]. Lowry quotes almost directly from John Kenneth Turner's bitter indictment of that era, Barbarous Mexico [277-78]:

Barbarous Mexico

Nearly every small town along the Mexican border harbors a personage who enjoys the title of Mexican consul. Consuls are found in villages hundreds of miles from the Mexican border. Consuls are supposed to be for the purpose of looking after the interests of trade between countries, but towns in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas which do not do a hundred dollars worth of trade a year with Mexico have consuls who are maintained by Díaz at the expense of tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Such consuls are not consuls at all. They are spies, persecutors, bribers.

Turner notes [275], that Douglas, Arizona, was a major centre for Mexican liberals living in the United States and tells how in 1906 the machinations of such "consuls" resulted in large groups of Mexican liberals being arrested and many returned to Mexico on the flimsiest of pretexts. Details from Turner are the product of later (1943-44) revisions [UBC 28-24, 6ff], and hint at what might be a plausible mystery, Geoffrey's role as a spy.

29.7 the Ponciano Arriaga.

A liberal political organization formed in San Luis Potosí in the early 1900s. On 24 January 1902 it was bold enough to hold a public meeting, but the audience was infiltrated by soldiers and police, who, on a given signal, rose up in protest, disrupted the meeting, and arrested the organizers for disturbing the peace [Turner, Barbarous Mexico, 166-67]. The club is named after Ponciano Arriaga (1811-63), an orator and liberal idealist from San Luis Potosí, whose opposition to Santa Anna led to his own removal from office and imprisonment. He distinguished himself in the war against the United States, 1847, bitterly opposing the peace treaty and the ceding of territory; but when Santa Anna was restored he went to New Orleans, where he was closely associated with liberal groups led by Juárez and Melchor Ocampo. For his work in the reform movement and his ideas upon federation, Arriaga is known as "the Father of the Constitution". He is sometimes confused with another of the same name, a general who had supported Juárez against Maximilian and died in 1892.

29.8 Almazán.

Juan Almazán

Juan Andreu Almazán (1891-1965), general and politician, the right-wing conservative candidate (representing the PRUN, or Partido Revolucionarío de Unificanión Nacional) for the 1940 presidential elections and who was destined to lose to Avila Camacho (this outcome forced Lowry to make changes in his political predictions). His career to 1939 had been a mixture of brilliance and opportunism; he had supported in turn Madero, Huerta, Zapata, and Carranza, switching sides at precisely the right moment to save his skin and further his career. He was reputedly one of the richest men in Mexico.

30.1 England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico.

Lázaro Cárdenas

Perhaps the most significant event of the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) took place on 18 March 1938, when the Mexican government signed a decree nationalizing the holdings of seventeen foreign oil companies, including a number of British interests, and resisted demands for compensation on the grounds that the original investments had been regained many times. The nationalization decree became something of an international cause célèbre, evoking the patriotic support of other Latin American heads of state and the majority of Mexicans, but American and British retaliation caused serious political and economic difficulties: embargoes were imposed upon Mexican oil, production fell, the value of the peso dropped, and Cárdenas, though a committed socialist, was forced to turn to the Axis powers for sales and machinery. Compromise was eventually achieved, but one immediate effect was that diplomatic relationships between Mexico and England worsened until in April 1938 they were severed, remaining so for three years. Geoffrey Firmin's consulate is therefore closed, and he has been technically out of a job for some months, which raises the question of why he has stayed on in Quauhnahuac. Given the confused political situation existing in Mexico at the end of 1938, the charges of spying made against him are not altogether ridiculous, and even if they are unfounded, a deliberate ambiguity clouds the Consul's motives for staying on in Mexico (for Lowry's original intentions in this matter, see #76.3). In an important sense, the severing of relations is also a metaphor for the Consul's broken marriage; as Geoffrey makes clear in his letter [36], both publicly and privately he is adrift.

30.2 a sort of spy, or, as he put it, spider.

The pun arises from the similarity of Sp. espía, ‘spy’, and E. spider (Lowry apparently believed that the Spanish word for spy was really espidero). How real the Consul's fears of being "around the town pursued by other spiders" are is an open question [see #52.1], but the man in dark glasses makes a number of appearances throughout the novel, and the bald boy with earrings is seen swinging madly on his hammock [243].

30.3 desconsolado.

Sp. "disconsolate"; with possibly a pun on ‘dis-Consulate’, since the Consul (like a peri outside the gates of Paradise [see #321.1] has just been described as "dispossessed."

30.4 a man in dark glasses.

Telegrams from the 'espiders'

Asals [Making, 433-34] picks up a further reference to Barbarous Mexico [149], taking the hint, "166.149 Turner" [UBC WT 1-8, 42 verso]: "leaning against the wall of that alley entrance is a man whom you take to be a loafer; over on the other side lounges a man whom you think is a peon. Just start something and then try to get away ... There is no getting away in Mexico; every alley is guarded as well as every street ... When you cross the border they take your name and business and address, and before you've reached the capital they know whether you've told the truth or not. They know what you're here for and have decided what they're going to do about it." Lowry added to Turner's spies the bald boy with ear-rings [see #240.3], and the belief he had been shadowed constantly in Oaxaca. Any impulse the reader might have to dismiss such speculations as fantasy is belied in Chapter XII by the fact that "they" seem to know quite a bit about Hugh Firmin, and may have decided what "they" are going to do about it. Further, evidence has more recently turned up in the form of telegrams sent back to Liverpool from Mexico and Los Angeles to prove that the “Old Man”, Arthur Lowry, had hired agents to keep an eye on his wayward son. Lowry "resolved" the question of the Consul as both a spy and one spied upon by placing it at the edge of paranoia – neither proving nor disproving it but rather accentuating the ambiguity [see #52.1].

30.5 could not cross the border in a cattle truck.

As Hugh had done [96], for the kind of dubious political reasons that would be of great interest to right-wing sympathizers.

30.6 the Cantina El Bosque.

El Bosque

The "terminal cantina", which the Consul visits before leaving for Tomalín [225-30]. The Spanish word bosque means “wood” or “forest”, thereby echoing the dark wood theme sounded by Selva on the first page. In Dark as the Grave [247], Lowry says the original El Bosque was in Oaxaca, by 1946 converted into "an innocent lonchería of some kind."

31.1 Sanctuario.

Santuario y Colegiata de Ocotlán

More correctly, Sp. santuario, "sanctuary". In fleeing to Señora Gregorio this way, the Consul is observing the old tradition of seeking a place of refuge in order to escape punishment for his offences; in the Middle Ages such protection was afforded by the Church to those evading the law. The word is an important motif throughout the novel, the Consul ultimately finding the paradise of his despair in the dark sanctuary of the Farolito [338]. Lowry told Albert Erskine that he wanted ‘Sanctuario’: "Do not correct unless you very much disagree – though Santuario is right, without the c" [UBC, 2-6]. In the typescript of DATG [UBC 9-16, 548], the incident is attributed to "Fernando" (Juan Fernando Marquez), taking refuge in the little cantina of José Cervantes.

31.2 simpático.

Sp. "sympathetic"; but possessing a much deeper sense of empathy than the English word implies. It is the quality displayed [341] by the one-legged beggar who puts a coin into the legless beggar's hand, and by the potter, the old woman and the fiddler to the poor Consul at the end of the novel, when he in his turn is taken by the police.

31.3 to enter the Indian Civil Service.

As Lowry had probably intended on going up to Cambridge; but his Third precluded him from Open Competition for the Foreign and Consular services [Bradbrook, 127 & 130].

32.1 Guillaume Apollinaire.

Guillaume Apollinaire

The name assumed by Wilhelm Apollinaris Kostrowitzky (1880-1918), French poet of Polish extraction born in Rome, who joined up in 1914 and fought bravely at the Front, revelling in the military life. His best work is contained in the two volumes Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), the cubist and surrealist qualities of which placed him at the head of the avant-garde movement. Laruelle has in mind, however, poems such as ‘L'adieu du Cavalier’ (“The Horseman's Farewell”), with lines such as "Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie" ("Ah God! how beautiful war is"), which glorify war as a marvellous adventure – a fact belied by Apollinaire's own war wounds and death shortly before the armistice. Kilgallin finds it "noteworthy" [10] that Laruelle has served under one who not only wrote a volume called Alcools but was notorious as the cataloguer of l'Enfer, the collection of erotica and sexology in the Bibliothéque Nationale.

32.2 the S.S. Samaritan.

The ship's name (grimly incongruous, considering its mission) suggests the parable of the good Samaritan [see #62.4] and anticipates the dying Indian of Chapter VIII, the Consul's guilt about his involvement or lack thereof an important psychological force driving him to his destruction. It has been argued [Dodson, 25] that the Consul is of "an impossibly tender age to have been commander of a gunboat" (on page 16 he is described as aged fifteen in 1911, which would make him about twenty-one at the presumed time of the incident). Manuscript notes [TM VI, 45] show that Lowry was aware of the problem, which he again has resolved by deliberately creating a mystery: on the one hand, with the accelerated promotion and appointment possible by privilege in the British wartime navy (to say nothing of Geoffrey's undoubted abilities), Geoffrey's rank is not impossible; on the other, especially since the incident is seen only from the point of view of Laruelle, whose knowledge is equally limited, there remains a strong possibility that the Consul has fabricated or exaggerated his involvement or responsibility. We can never know, but the curiosity aroused by the desire to find out gives the incident great emotional intensity and ensures the reader's engagement with the Consul's guilt from the outset.

Samaritan incident
Q-ships

Ronald Binns [MLN 8, 6] has tracked down the probable historical source of the Samaritan incident: the so-called "Baralong incident" of 19 August 1915, after the capture of the British ship, the Nicosian, by the German submarine U-27. A British Q-ship, the Baralong, appeared flying the American flag, let fall its false sides, and sank the submarine. The master, Lieutenant-Commander Godfrey Herbert (whose name and rank is similar to Geoffrey's), ordered his crew to give no quarter, and twelve German sailors were shot. There was no court-martial, nor any suggestion of officers being put in the furnace, but the incident aroused great resentment among the Germans. As well as tracing the historical source of Lowry’s Q-ship episode, Binns has suggested [MLN 7, 20] a cinematic source, the movie Dark Journey (1937), produced by Alexander Korda and starring Conrad Veidt with Vivien Leigh. Russell Lowry [MLN 8, 7] dates Lowry's visit to a Q-ship in Liverpool docks as 1919 or 1920; the Lowry brothers saw a dummy run of the Q-ship drill, dropping the false bulkheads, exposing a gun, and firing a blank round.

32.3 steering a rather odd course.

The location is historically impossible, since German U-boats did not operate so far afield and the range of British Q-ships was restricted to a circle from Archangel to New York to Gibraltar [Gordon Campbell, My Mystery Ships, 5]. The Bungo Strait separates Kyushu from Shikoku, and the "various interesting islands" are scattered over an area south of Japan, their interest for Lowry as much a function of their names as their location:

Bonin Islands

(a) Lot's Wife. Also known as Sofu-gan, or Rica de Oro, or Black Rock; in the Izu-shichito group; a remarkable pillar of black rock sticking some 326 feet out of the water and said to resemble from a distance a ship in full sail. The pillar was discovered, and so named, by Captain John Meares on 9 April, 1788. In Genesis 19:26, as Lot and his wife flee Sodom and Gomorrah, the wife disobeys God's instructions not to look back and is turned into a pillar of salt.

(b) Arzobispo. Sp. “archbishop”; the name given by early Spanish explorers to Chichijima, the largest of the Bonin Islands (also known as the Ogasawara Gunto), 550 miles south of Tokyo. The name Arzobispo was often applied to the group as a whole.

(c) Rosario. Sp. "Rosary"; also Nishino Shima or Disappointment Island; a rocky barren island in dangerous waters, about 100 miles west of the Bonin group.

(d) Sulphur Island. A former name of Iwo-jima, the largest of the Volcano Islands, known for its large volcano and extensive sulphur mines. In March 1945 it would be the scene of a bloody and decisive battle between American marines and Japanese forces.

(e) Volcano Island. The Volcano Islands (Kazan-retto) are an 86-mile chain of volcanic islands some 200 miles southwest of the Bonin Islands, named by Bernard de Torres in 1543 for the large volcano on the central island. Lowry may have used the name of the group for one island, but he may have been aware (from the Admiralty Pilots) that between 1872 and 1906 many ships had reported sighting a mysterious Volcano Island. It is possible that an island or islands had emerged as a result of volcanic activity, only to disappear again.William Rosser identifies in North Pacific Pilot (1870) Otra and Volcano Islands as two islands found on old Spanish charts, in the vicinity of lat. 23ºN, long. 160ºE; "nothing is known of them beyond being thus indicated in the positions given above" (166).

(f) St. Augustine. More correctly, San Augustino, now known as Minami Iwo Jima; south of Sulphur Island and San Alessandro; a mile in extent, with a conical peak some 3,000 feet high.

(g) Guy Rock. Otherwise, Farallon de Pajaros, a small island at 20º 32' N, 144º 54' E.

(h) the Euphrosyne Reef. The Euphrosyne, in 1851, reported a rock, "looking like a ship under sail," at lat. 21º 42' N, long. 140º 55' E (North Pacific Pilot, 167). Euphrosyne was one of the Charites, the Three Graces of Greek mythology, and the ship’s name in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out.

The cargo carried by the S.S. Samaritan, though valuable to the British wartime economy, possesses undefined alchemical significance: quicksilver, or mercury, is a vital element in all alchemical practice; Wolfram, or tungsten, is linked with antimony through the well-known Currus Triumphalis Antimonii of Basil Valentine (Leipzig, 1604), in which antimony is described as the lupus metallorum, the wolf of metals (also known as the grey wolf), because it "devours" (that is, unites with) all metals except gold. The unstated emphasis on mercury, sulphur and salt suggests what the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony calls the three great principles of health, corresponding to the Three Principles of Paracelsus, whose secret purpose "was to analyse, rectify, integrate, the human spirit; and to produce the perfect man" [A.E. Waite, The Secret Tradition in Alchemy, 3].

32.4 a lieutenant-commander.

Q-ships

A marginal note [UBC TM, Ch. 6, 43] reveals Lowry's anxieties about the Consul's impossibly young age: "What on earth was the Consul in Q Boats ... I must get it clear ... get a book out of the library, if necessary ... was he a naval lieutenant or merchant captain, or what. Does it matter? I mustn't be too far from the facts & he wouldn't have spoken like this had he been the skipper." Lowry found the ideal solution, to make the problem Laruelle's, the mystery finally part of the point. Yet he remained unconcerned as to what a Q-boat was doing off Japan.

32.5 British Distinguished Service Order or Cross.

The D.S.C. is a cross of silver awarded to officers in the Royal Navy below the rank of lieutenant-commander for distinguished combat performance. The D.S.O., a different decoration, is also awarded for distinguished wartime service.

33.1 Lord Jim.

A novel (1900) by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), telling of a young Englishman, Jim, who signs on as chief mate of the Patna, an old steamer "eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank" carrying a load of pilgrims to Mecca. In mid-ocean, on a still night, the Patna hits something, and in the ensuing moment of crisis Jim jumps overboard and abandons ship along with two or three others. The Patna somehow staggers into port, and in the following enquiry Jim loses both his certificate and his personal sense of honour. Thereafter he wanders the ports of the East trying to escape both his past and his guilt. He finally settles in Patusan, a remote district of Borneo, where his courage and integrity earn him the title of Tuan Jim, or Lord Jim, and at last he finds the chance to die bravely and expiate his guilt and sense of shame. Although the Consul denies that any stigma is attached to him over the Samaritan affair, his sense of guilt is remarkably like Jim's; the mystery at the beginning of each novel is similar (what did the Patna hit, what happened to the German officers?), deliberately enigmatic, and a source of brooding concern for both characters; and the manner of their deaths, by an almost willed shooting, suggests that Lowry had Conrad's novel in mind at many points of his own.

33.2 the Paris-Soir.

Founded in 1923 as a daily, the Paris-Soir was in the 1930s the leading evening paper of Paris, with a circulation of some two million. Brash and sensationalist, it thrived on the kind of scandal implicit in the Consul's court-martial. The paper would be suppressed by the Vichy government in 1943 following its refusal to submit to censorship.

33.3 People simply did not go round … putting Germans in furnaces.

Lowry's oblique way of reminding the reader, Markson suggests [16-17], that the Germans were shortly to go round doing precisely that to others.

33.4 mescal.

An alcoholic liquor distilled from the juice of the agave cactus [see #216.2].

Faustus

34.1 Then will I headlong fly into the earth: / Earth, gape! it will not harbour me!

From Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, during Faustus's long last speech before the clock strikes twelve. Laruelle, shaken, senses the immediate relation of the lines to Geoffrey's fatal descent into the barranca. As he realizes, the text should read ‘run’ rather than ‘fly’, but the mistake serves to foreground a number of subsequent references to flying and running, culminating at the end of Chapter X when the Consul, chosing hell, runs from the Salón Ofélia towards the Farolito and his own death. See also Sr Bustamente’s words [#25.5]: “When he haved death and mescal then he is flying.”

The thumbed maroon volume

34.2 a golden faceless figurine.

The figure of Prometheus, bringer of light; the emblem set into the cover of Modern Library editions such as the Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays [see #27.5] that Laruelle is holding. Intaglio is the process in printing (as in die stamping and gravure) in which a plate is used to incise an image below the surface.

34.3 the sacred ibis.

Thoth

The Egyptian god Thoth, the god of learning, inventor of hieroglyphics and scribe of the gods, often depicted with the head of an ibis: he was the universal demiurge, "the divine ibis who hatched the world-egg at Hermopolis Magna" [Larousse Mythology, 27]. In Cabbalistic and hermetic tradition he was regarded as the first of magicians. Donnelly [125] equates him with Hermes, whose books of magic and sacred writings (the meaning of ‘hieroglyphics’) commanded all the forces of nature and gave power over even the gods themselves. In Under the Volcano he is further manifested in the figure of the public scribe [53] and the corporal inscribing something in copperplate handwriting [340].

34.4 correspondence ... between the subnormal world and the abnormally suspicious.

Although unidentified, this phrase is present from the outset, as it was in the typescript of In Ballast to the White Sea, and clearly derives from something Lowry was reading before he went to Mexico (Ouspensky and Charles Fort are likely sources). The exact phrase is used by Geoffrey at a moment of crisis [355], when the world about him seems very much a projection of his abnormal inner self. Like his creator, the Consul fully accepts the Swedenborgian notion that every phenomenon in the natural world has its counterpart in the spiritual one and that "the rhyming of the natural with the spiritual enables man to communicate with the heavenly mysteries, the celestial machinery" [Kilgallin, 46]; or, as here, the infernal machinery. See also #16.4.

34.5 sortes Shakespeareanae.

Sortes (plural of L. sors, ‘lot’) is the art of divination or prophecy by chance selection from the writings of a book or author. The words of Shakespeare, like the books of the Bible, are commonly used in such prediction. The game was a favourite with Aiken and Lowry, and the phrase ‘sortes Shakespeareanae’ appears in Blue Voyage [86].

34.6 And what wonders I have done all Germany can witness. Enter Wagner, solus.

Faustus

Laruelle opens the book at random, but his first two selections are from Doctor Faustus: the first from the beginning of Sc. xiv, where Faustus is despairing that his offence can never be pardoned and that he must remain in hell forever; the second from the end of Sc. vi, where Wagner, Faustus's servant and magician manqué, is envying (as Laruelle envies Geoffrey) what Faustus has achieved while he has done nothing.

34.7 Ick sal you wat suggen .... towsand, towsand ding.

Quoted a little inaccurately from The Shoemaker's Holiday [III.i.1-4], by Thomas Dekker (1572-1632). The Dutch-English pidgin may be translated: "I'll tell you what, Hans; this ship that is come from Candia, is quite full, by God's sacrament, of sugar, civet, almonds, cambric, and all things, a thousand, thousand, things." Candia was and is a major port in Crete. The speech is that of a Dutch skipper who plays a minor role in the play.

34.8 Cut is the branch .... regard his hellish fall.

Laruelle could not have chosen a more resonant passage. The lines form part of the Epilogue to Doctor Faustus, spoken by the Chorus after Faustus has been dragged off to hell. They shake Laruelle because they seem so directly appropriate to the Consul: another cruelly cut down before his great gifts have been realized and who had dared to practise "more than heavenly power permits"; that is, one who had travelled beyond the realms of most men, but whose knowledge and learning had been directed ultimately towards self-destruction. The moral is clear – "regard his hellish fall" – but in both Marlowe's play and Lowry's novel this is a patently inadequate response to the hero's aspirations. Sr Bustamente had earlier said [UBC 28-22, 69]: "Your amigo dice it is sad when you think how poor your friend might have flourished like a tree in the springtime."

35.1 Hotel Bella Vista.

Hotel Bella Vista

Sp. ‘Belle View Hotel’; ironically, the place where Yvonne sees the dishevelled figure of the Consul in Chapter 2 [see #43.2]. No longer a hotel but a sophisticated commercial complex on the north of the zócalo, it was in 1938-39 the best-known hotel of Cuernavaca. The name has a private irony for Lowry, since it is equivalent to Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where Lowry underwent extensive treatment for alcoholism in 1935, his experiences there giving him the substance of his short novella, ‘Swinging the Maelstrom’ (earlier published as Lunar Caustic).

35.2 marginless writing.

The British text reads, incorrectly, "meaningless writing".

35.3 the t's like the lonely wayside crosses.

The Consul's handwriting forms an image of his very soul, while his t's foreshadow the encounter at the lonely wayside cross with the dying Indian in Chapter VIII, where the word ‘downhill’ marks the beginning of the final descent that he will be unable to resist.

35.4 Night.

At a critical moment in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, the advent of a night of horror is introduced simply by the one word: ‘Nacht’.

35.5 the dark's spinets.

A spinet (from Giovanni Spinetti, its inventor) is a small kind of harpsicord with a single keyboard. The Consul thinks [342] of a similar dreadful night awaiting him, again with demonic orchestras, snatches of fearful sleep, imaginary parties arriving, and the terrible music of the dark's spinets. The phrase was recorded early, in the ‘Pegaso’ notebook.

35.6 the unbandaging of great giants in agony.

Farolito

Lowry points out [SL, 116] an echo of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which he said he had not then read, but whose central symbol, the Lighthouse, seems related to his own Farolito. The lines, from the lyrical ‘Time Passes’ section, describe noises at night in a deserted house: "Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too."

35.7 howling pariah dogs, the Cocks ... the drumming, the moaning .... sad faced potters and legless beggars.

Parián

This letter, written in the Farolito, is full of anticipations of the final scene: the pariah dog [375]; the cock [372]; the ceaseless drumming from Parián [see #75.3]; the groans of love so like those of dying [349]; the sympathetic potter [367]; and the legless beggar [341]. The effect of such echoes is to bind the first chapter tightly to the last, asserting not only the continuity of the experience but also the cyclic form of the novel.

35.8 the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas.

The basic sense of ‘misericorde’ is that of compassion or pity, but as Markson points out [63], it also denotes the medieval dagger used to apply the so-called ‘mercy-stroke.’

35.9 the cocks that herald dawn all night.

In Hamlet [I.i.150], "the cock, that is the trumpet to the morn" puts an end to the ghostly wanderings of Hamlet's father, and Marcellus says [I.i.60-64], as if in deliberate contradiction to the Consul, that:

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm;
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

35.10 a cold jonquil beauty.

Lowry admitted, obscurely, to borrowing from Faulkner [UBC WT 1-20], suggesting the phrase was from Sartoris ("Why not? Mine too?"). In fact, it is from The Unvanquished. After the family mules are stolen, Bayard Sartoris and Ringo trail the Yankee thieves, and sleep beneath a bridge. Awakening, they stare at each other "in the pale jonquil-colored light". In ‘Sestina in a Cantina’ [CP, #127], Lowry uses ‘jonquil-colored’ of the dawn. In the language of flowers, the jonquil asks, "return my affection".

35.11 I went to Oaxaca.

Oaxaca, capital of the state of the same name, some three hundred miles south of Cuernavaca, was Lowry's private City of Dreadful Night, to which he returned after his first wife had left him. His experiences there imbued it with a sense of horror, as he indicated to James Stern in 1940 [SL, 29]:

Oaxaca

I was thrown, for a time, in Mexico, as a spy, into durance vile, by some fascistas in Oaxaca (by mistake; they were after another man. How it arose was: he was a friend of mine, very sober and a communist, and they could not believe, because he was sober, that he was an agitator and therefore thought he must be me, who was not sober, but, nevertheless, not an agitator, not a communist). I subsequently found it difficult to explain why I had absolutely had to be drawing a map of the Sierra Madre in tequila on the bar counter (sole reason was, I liked the shape of them). Jan left me some months before, so I had no alibi. On Christmas Day they let out all the prisoners except me. Myself, I had the Oaxaquenian third degree for turkey. Hissed they (as Time would say), "You say you a wrider but we read all your wridings and dey don't make sense. You no wrider, you an espider and we shoota de espiders in Mejico." But it was an improving experience.

Many of Lowry's personal experiences were transferred from Oaxaca to Parián, as is clear from Dark as the Grave where such details as the vulture in the wash-basin, the fawns being slaughtered, and the Farolito itself are discussed in graphic particularity. It was in one sense a relief but in another a disappointment when Lowry returned in 1946 to find that Oaxaca had lost all its sinister horror.

35.12 the narrow-gauge railway.

In her memoir, Jan Gabrial recalls the first trip to Oaxaca (21 April 1937), travelling from Mexico City “via narrow-gauge railway by night, in a third-class carriage with sharp wooden benches” [Inside the Volcano, 123].

36.1 the child whose life its mother and I saved.

Ramsey suggests [46] that this incident shows the beneficial effects of alcohol, which if rightly directed rather than abused may possess the power to save life. Lowry may have derived the incident from a similar one involving an asphyxiated baby in Aiken's Blue Voyage [49], where a dream suddenly turns into a nightmare.

36.2 the hotel where we once were happy.

Hotel Francia

The Hotel Francia, Calle 20 de Noviembre, Oaxaca (thinly disguised as El Infierno [349]). D.H. Lawrence had spent much of his time in Mexico here ("excoriating Murry", Lowry claimed [SL, 116]). In Dark as the Grave the Francia is called La Luna, as if to underline the mutability of such happiness.

36.3 Horrors portioned to a giant nerve.

From Keats's ‘Hyperion’ fragment (1818-19), wherein Hyperion, sun god and last of the Titans, is o'erthrown by Apollo. Part 1 [171-76] describes Hyperion's suffering as he interprets the omens about him, shuddering:

Not at dog's howl, or gloom-bird's hated screech,
Or the familiar visiting of one
Upon the first toll of his passing bell,
Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
But horrors, portion'd to a giant nerve,
Oft made Hyperion ache.

Lowry was obscurely intrigued that Keats had mentioned a vulture in the opening of this poem. In the Francia, Lowry really did see a vulture on his washbasin, and heard the "noise of slaughtering" of two little fawns dragged through the barroom into the kitchen.

36.4 my secrets are of the grave.

Echoing Walter Pater’s famous words in his essay on da Vinci (1869) about the Mona Lisa: “she is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave”.

36.5 some extraordinary land from which he can never return.

The obvious echo here is of Hamlet [III.i.79-80], as Hamlet contemplates suicide: "The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns"; but the Consul's further comment that the name of this land is hell also suggests the opening of T.S. Eliot's ‘Prufrock’, which cites the passage from Dante's Inferno [XXVII 61-66], where Dante is addressed by one who assumes that the poet can never return to the world:

Dante

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
     a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
     
questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
     
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
     
Senza tema d'infamia ti respondo.

("If I thought that my answer were / to one who might ever return to the world, / this flame would shake no more; / but since from this depth / none ever returned alive, if what I hear is true, / I answer you without fear of infamy.")

36.6 England is breaking off diplomatic relations.

This detail dates the letter as having been written in March 1938 [see #30.1].

36.7 my Tlaxcaltecan friend Cervantes ... at the Salón Ofélia.

Cervantes, innkeeper and cockfighter, whose name incongruously echoes that of the author of Don Quixote, comes from Tlaxcala, Mexico's smallest state [see #297.1]; and his restaurant-cantina in Tomalín, the Salón Ofélia, suggests the tragic heroine of Shakespeare's Hamlet [see #281.2]. There was a Salón Ofélia in Cuernavaca, near the Portel Morelos; but Lowry notes in Dark as the Grave [237] that "Cervantes' old joint, The Salón Ofélia" in Oaxaca had been "turned into a drugstore called the Farmacia de la Soledad"; it still exists as such, at Independencia and Díaz Ordaz, just two blocks from the Church of the Virgin for those that have nobody with. Like the "obscene concourse" of birds [see #13.3], the word ‘Tlaxcaltecan’ was added in the very late revisions, as part of the darkening of Laruelle's vision [Asals, Making, 310-11]. The proprietor of the little Cantina was José Cervantes.

36.8 the Farolito in Parián.

El Farolito

The word ‘farolito’ means, strictly, “little lantern” rather than, as it is usually translated and as Lowry believed, “lighthouse”. The cantina acts as a beacon to the Consul throughout the novel [see #199.7]; like El Infierno [349], it opens at 4 a.m. The Consul's later journey to Parián duplicates closely what is described here.

36.9 ochas.

Described [368] as "raw alcohol in steaming herb tea". Lowry comments in Dark as the Grave [76]: "Ochas is boiled orange leaves and should be drunk hot with raw alcohol put into it. But mescal put into it is still more exciting."

36.10 through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew.

William Blake (1757-1827), poet, engraver, artist, and mystic, best known for his Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), but also writer of a number of more obscure prophetic books, the best known of which is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), to which the Consul is alluding. In the opening ‘Argument’ Blake writes:

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.

The path is that taken by Dante through hell, as described in the Inferno (which Blake illustrated). For both Dante and Blake the path to a higher innocence lay through hell.

36.11 some northern country.

Dollarton

The northern paradise, a direct antithesis of and possible alternative to the inferno of Mexico, is based directly upon Lowry's life at Dollarton, British Columbia, where most of the novel was written. The Consul's longing anticipates Yvonne's hopes for a new life in Canada, and is important as a dream that they once shared, an innocence they both wish to regain. Even the train rolling eastward is the direct antithesis of the Freudian death-train that roars on its metalled ways through the opening pages of Chapters II and X, transporting the Consul to hell.

37.1 an oil refinery.

Shellburn Refinery

The Shellburn refinery was highly visible across the inlet from the Lowrys' Dollarton home, clouds of dark smoke often hovering above it. It would feature in the later writing (‘SHELL’ at one point losing the letter ‘S’) as a reminder of the dark forces assailling the human soul, and the threat of eviction from this Northern Paradise. See October Ferry [159], and Sheryl Salloum, Vancouver Days [14-15].

37.2 Venus burning hard in daylight.

In northern latitudes, the planet Venus is sometimes conspicuous in daylight hours, but its presence here in the Consul's mind is an emphatic reminder of Yvonne's absence (Yvonne is constantly to be identified with Venus, as in Chapter II).

37.3 like Swedenborg's angels.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1689-1772), Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic, who claimed divine authority to explain natural and spiritual evidences after a mystical revelation in 1745 and said that his soul had been permitted to travel into hell, purgatory, and heaven. His visions and communications with spirits and angels, proclaimed in his Heaven and Hell (1758), set forth the teachings and scriptures of what he called the New Church, summarised in the OCEL:

According to his theosophic system God, as Divine Man, is infinite love and infinite wisdom, from whom emanate the two worlds of nature and spirit, distinct but closely related. The end of creation is the approximation of man to God. This end having been endangered by evil spirits, Jehovah descended into nature, restored the Connexion between God and man, and left the Scriptures as His testimony, of which Swedenborg was the appointed interpreter.

In the very first paragraph of Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg claimed emphatically: "it has been permitted me to associate with angels, and to talk with them as man with man"; and later in the treatise he discusses the various ranks and attributes of angels in great detail. They are here described as facing east, because in Swedenborgian terms east is the source of God's love and light [#141]:

Thus in heaven it is the east which determines all the other quarters. That quarter where the Lord appears as the Sun is called the east or orient because all life has its origin from Him as the Sun; and also because in proportion as heat and light, or love and intelligence, are received from Him by the angels, the Lord is said to arise upon them. Hence also it is that the Lord in the Word is called the East.

Swedenborg influenced William Blake, whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell drew heavily (though sometimes satirically) upon Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, the work which most influenced Lowry, who assumes with enthusiasm its tripartite universe –heaven, earth, and hell – and who is constantly trying to sense the interpenetration of the natural and the spiritual worlds. Swedenborg's other major works (which Lowry did not use) are Arcana Coelestia (1749-58); Four Preliminary Doctrines (1763); The Apocalypse Revealed (1766); and The True Christian Religion (1771).

37.4 a fishing-boat ... like a white giraffe.

The Caileag Gheal

The Caileag Gheal (‘White Lady’), a boat belonging to a Manx boat-builder named Jimmy Craige, a good friend of the Lowrys at Dollarton. It is featured in Salloum's Vancouver Days [18]. To Sybil Hutchinson [March 1947; CL 2, 25], Lowry quoted John Woodburn in the Saturday Review [22 Feb. 1947, 9-10]: "On page 37 there is a sentence which is 32 lines long and does not falter in its music and can be read aloud without burdening the breath". Lowry said he was very proud of this sentence.

38.1 a great wheel.

Although the wheel is a common motif in Under the Volcano, this reference to the unseen ship deliberately anticipates Hugh's similar sense of himself standing at the wheel [103], steering the world out of the western ocean of its misery. Compare ‘A Picture’ [CP, #269], first entitled ‘Study in Green’, which describes this exact scene, and ends: "then the wash of a ship like a great wheel / the vast spokes of the wheel / whirling across the bay!" To Gerald Noxon [Lowry / Noxon Letters, 19 July 1942], Lowry wrote of the "mill wheel reflections of the sun on water".

38.2 December, 1937.

Hotel Canada

Although Bowker says that Jan left Lowry and Mexico for Los Angeles on 1 December 1937 [Pursued by Furies, 229], Jan recalls the fateful day as 28 November [Inside the Volcano, 169], following their troubled farewell from the Hotel Canada as recalled in Chapter II of Under the Volcano [see #88.2]. Lowry went to Oaxaca the same afternoon.

38.3 Wells Fargo.

The Wells Fargo Company was organized in 1852 as a shipping and banking company for miners, and by 1856 was the leading express company in California. As a mail service, it lasted there till 1895, but was still operating in Mexico in 1938, and its offices (Avenida Madero 14, México DF) were commonly used for poste restante purposes.

38.4 sent me a postcard even.

Ironically, she has done so. It will arrive / has arrived on 2 November 1938.

38.5 these letters .... I have some of them on me.

The Consul will leave them behind in the Farolito, where he is writing, but will pick them up and read them six months later, in Chapter XII. Although he claims not to have read the letters, he has obviously glanced over them, since phrases from them emerge accusingly from time to time. After having left Mexico, Jan wrote a steady stream of letters to Malcolm in December 1937 and early 1938, to which she had virtually no response, and, believing that they had not reached him, was the more surprised when fragments of them appeared in the published novel [see #346.2].

The original telegram

39.1 the Compañía Telegráfica Mexicana.

The Mexican Telegraph Company, in 1938 at San Juan de Letrán and Independencia in Mexico City, from whence Hugh sends the fatally incriminating telegram [94].

39.2 to die in Mexico.

Echoing the wish of Ambrose Bierce (the ‘Old Gringo’), who chose to die in Mexico during the Revolution of 1912, rather than to live in America.

39.3 between Mercy and Understanding, between Chesed and Binah.

Cabbala

Although the Consul frequently sees the universe in Cabbalistic terms, the degree to which Under the Volcano is informed by the Cabbala is much debated. Lowry was evasive on the matter. In the ‘Letter to Jonathan Cape’ he stressed Cabbalistic elements and hinted at others, as if to prove "there are depths"; but to David Markson [20 June 1951; Woodcock, 114], he admitted to going on about the Cabbala in a way "quite misleading and probably not a little juvenile." Nevertheless, he stated quite definitely that he met a Cabbalist at a "critical and coincidental moment in the writing of the book." While the novel existed in substantially its present form before Lowry met Charles Stansfeld-Jones (Frater Achad) and before Cabbalistic details were inserted, it can be argued that such details are not superficial and that this element of the book (like the sign in the garden and the Spanish Civil War references), though late, retrospectively focused and clarified many previous details of Lowry's design.

Frater Achad

As Frater Achad admits [QBL, xi], "Philosophically speaking a great deal of rubbish has accumulated around the roots of The Tree of Life", and it is not always easy to see the tree for the wood. The roots of the Cabbala go back to Old Testament times: Cabbalists claim that the word ‘Cabbala’ derives from the Hebrew root QBL, ‘to receive’, and that its mysteries were first taught by God to a select company of angels; after the Fall it was graciously communicated to Adam, to furnish the means of his posterity returning to their pristine nobility and felicity; and thence imparted to Noah and to Abraham, who revealed some of the mysterious doctrine to other men [MacGregor-Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled, 5]. The written Cabbala has two main sources:

(i) the Sephor Yetzirczh, the ‘Book of Formation’, probably written in Babylonia between the third and fourth centuries A.D.

(ii) the Zohar, or ‘Book of Splendour’, written about 1280 in Spain and attributed to Moses de Leon. In addition, there are many commentaries and explications, as well as esoteric matters rumoured to be too secret to be committed to print.

Andersen [64-66] describes the Cabbalistic principles that have most influenced Lowry:

The Cabala posits a universe unified and organized into a complex pattern of correspondences culminating in the idea that man is a microcosm of the universe and of God. The basic correspondences are expressed by a system of symbols based on the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the numbers from one to ten. In addition, there are, at each stage of the basic system, a corresponding color, divine name, angel, virtue, vice, Tarot card, body organ, heavenly body, jewel, and so on. Many cabalistic symbols are shared with the Tarot and alchemy, as well as with various forms of magic, Jungian psychology, and oriental religions and philosophies.

The cabalistic universe is expressed visually by a diagram ... called the Tree of Life. This diagram consists of ten spheres (Sephiroth) connected by twenty-two lines (paths). The Sephiroth are arranged in three vertical rows (pillars), the two outside ones consisting of pairs of opposites which are "reconciled," given balance or equilibrium, by the spheres in the middle column. At the top of the diagram is the sphere named Kether (light), which represents God (Ain Soph), the sum of all things, limitless, infinite, eternal, by definition unknowable. God makes himself known and in fact makes man and the universe possible by a succession of ten emanations, of which the spheres are the symbols. In one sense, these symbols are God and therefore constitute his sacred Name. The emanations progress in succession down the Tree of Life in a zigzag path resembling lightning. The Tree of Life is simultaneously visualized as a series of three triangles, arranged vertically, with a single sphere, Malkuth, at the bottom.

The aim of the serious cabalist is to develop from a spiritual neophyte into an adept by proceeding from Malkuth to Kether, retracing the "Path of God's Lightning" .... The first step is to tread the twenty-second path, to project his astral body into the lower of the three triangles, which has Yesod as its base .... Once the initial projection has been achieved, the signs and symbols of each sphere are mystically projected upward as the aspirant threads the paths by means of thoughts of wisdom, deeds of kindness, and meditation on the infinite. To a special few may be granted the ultimate, the crossing of the great Abyss which separates the two bottom triangles from the supernal triangle. "To walk in light"... is, in effect, to achieve union with God, an achievement equal in rarity and importance to achieving the Philosopher's Stone by an alchemist or to the breaking from the Cycle of Necessity by an oriental mystic. Those who fail even to start the journey or who backslide too far are said to be in the realm of evil, of "husks" and “shells," called the Qliphoth, which some say, is ruled by Beelzebub.

(a) between Chesed and Binah.

Chesed and Binah (Mercy and Understanding) are respectively the fourth and third emanations (Sephiroth) from Kether on the tree of life, and the movement from the fourth to the third Sephira as one progresses towards the light is fraught with spiritual danger, as Frater Achad makes clear in QBL [66-67; Kilgallin, 155]:

for there is indeed a Great Gulf Fixed between Chesed and Binah and this is called THE ABYSS. Strange as it may seem he must give up all he has attained, including himself, before he can pass this Abyss and be re-born of the Spirit into BINAH where he becomes known as NEMO or No-Man. He is now MASTER of THE TEMPLE for having given up "self" he is able to comprehend and Understand ALL.

In his Anatomy of the Body of God [42], Frater Achad talks of the "Horrors of 'the Abyss' between Chesed and Binah", but he states quite definitely that it is "bridgeable by Wisdom and Understanding". As Kilgallin notes [155-56], citing Achad's The Chalice of Ecstasy, man is given freedom of will to ally himself with the divine will, and should he make the mistake (as the Consul seems to have done) of attempting to turn the divine will to merely personal ends, he must fail, cut himself off from the universal current, and slowly and surely be lost in the abyss. The Consul’s point is that, according to the arcane wisdom, one ascending the Cabbalistic tree will find no direct "pathway" between the fourth and third Sephiroth, that is, between Chesed and Binah. The crossing of this abyss is reflected in Cortés’s crossing the barranca using a fallen tree [see #100.2], and at the moment of Yvonne's death as she clambers over a fallen log in the "pathway".

(b) equilibrium is all.

As Frater Achad says in QBL [2], "Equilibrium is the basis of this work." The principle of equilibrium is absolutely central to Cabbalistic thinking. It is defined by MacGregor-Mathers [The Kabbalah Unveiled, 16] as "that harmony which results from the analogy of contraries" and by Swedenborg [Heaven and Hell, #293] as the precarious freedom man must hold between the influence of good and evil forces acting upon him. It is the great law of nature, which, if abused, may react terribly and inevitably against man: as Captain Nemo says in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea [Pt.II, Ch.15], "we cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." Having offended against the principle of equilibrium by abusing the mystical powers of alcohol, the Consul must pay the penalty; the Cabbalistic statement of precarious balance which is reflected in Yvonne's death, losing her balance, falling from a tree [Markson, 23], is closely related to the way that the Consul here sees himself falling from the tree of life into the abyss. The Consul's "equilibrium is all" echoes King Lear's "ripeness is all" [V.ii.11] and Hamlet's "the readiness is all" [V.ii.236], both phrases uttered shortly before their deaths.

(c) the all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning.

The path of lightning

As Frater Achad notes [QBL, Appendix 5], "The Qabalists tell us that the SEPHIROTH were emanated by means of the FLAMING SWORD, or LIGHTNING FLASH, which descended from Kether unto Malkuth." The lightning flash that connects the ten Sephira thus marks the path the adept must seek to retrace to achieve his spiritual ends. At the moment of his death [373], the Consul senses the presence of this lightning.

(d) the Qliphoth.

This term is not to be found in Frater Achad's writings, nor is it commonly used by other Cabbalistic writers, but Lowry discovered this word for "the world of shells and demons" [‘LJC’, 65] in MacGregor-Mathers's The Kabbalah Unveiled [30], where the world of matter, made up from the grosser elements of the other three worlds, is said to be the abode of evil spirits called Shells, Qliphoth. As Epstein says [25]: "the world of rinds and shells, being farthest from the creative force, is subject to the grossest impurities of matter. For matter is the utmost limit of spirit."

39.4 the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty.

Lowry enlightened Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 376-77]: "Humpty Dumpty is an egg, hence the quasi-mystical significance"; adding that his intention was "to universalise the Consul as Man himself". He also defines the Qliphoth [see #39.3(d)] as the world of shells and demons [my italics], presided over by Beelzebub.

The Cosmic Egg

More simply, the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty, applied to the Consul, would be to put his shattered self together again. To Conrad Aiken [SL, 50], Lowry tells the story of his life being "almost as poignant as the 'Triumph of the Egg'"; as Doyen notes [196], this refers to Sherwood Anderson's short story ‘The Egg’ in The Triumph of the Egg (1921) [47-48]:

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal brought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex.

Though there is no fine place without chicken farms, where life can be a happy eggless affair, the triumph of the egg is to persist in futility, creating hens to lay more eggs.

39.5 the Nose with the Luminous Dong.

A mildly obscene inversion of ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’, from the nonsense poem of that name by Edward Lear (1812-88). It has been suggested (the author may remain anonymous) that the shattered Humpty Dumpty (the Consul) can only be made whole again in successful union with the archetypal woman through the agency of the luminous dong. In the letter to Clemens ten Holder [see #39.4], Lowry explains the reference to the "tragi-comic, though mostly tragic, poem of genius by Edward Lear", adding: "since Nose is a very obscene slang term for spy and Dong I regret to report is, as a noun, another obscene word – it means something like this illuminating picture: The Spy with a luminous penis." Nor did he exclude Gogol (The Nose) from the mix. The detail was earlier placed in Chapter VII, as the Consul's jibe at Laruelle, who reddened.

39.6 like Clare, “weaving fearful vision”.

John Clare (1793-1864), poet and madman, who suffered throughout his life from fits of melancholy; he was declared insane and committed to Northampton County Asylum in 1837. He is best known as a poet of rural and pastoral verse, with volumes such as Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820); The Village Minstrel (1821); The Shepherds Calendar (1827); and The Rural Muse (1835). The phrase "weaving fearful vision" is from ‘Summer Images’, one of the Poems Written at Helpstone (1824-32), lines 106-12:

And note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent,
     
The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn,
With earnest heed and tremulous intent,
     
Frail brother of the morn,
That from the tiny bents and misted leaves
     
Withdraws his timid horn,
And fearful vision weaves.

The phrase was a favourite of Lowry's, who used it in his poem ‘Autopsy’ – a poor piece of verse, wildly exaggerating the traumas of his childhood, but concluding effectively: "But turned, to discover Clare in the poor snail, / And weave a fearful vision of his own."

39.7 the Knight of Sorry Aspect.

A reference to Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605-15), the great satirical romance by Miguel Saavedra Cervantes (1547-1616): the story of the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha whose wits are turned by his compulsive devotion to works of chivalry and who roams the country as knight-errant, dressed in rusty armour, mounted on his sorry steed Rosinante and accompanied by his squire, Sancho Panza, on a donkey. To his disordered imagination commonplace objects assume fearful proportions [see #248.1], and he is consequently involved in absurd adventures with distressing consequences to himself. He is finally prevailed upon to abstain from chivalrous exploits, resolves to turn shepherd, and, returning to his village, recovers his sanity before dying. The title, ‘Knight of Sorry Aspect’, translates the Spanish ‘El Caballero de la Triste Figura’ (more commonly, "Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance"), the phrase given to himself by Don Quixote after an adventure which costs him several teeth [Pt.I, III.xix]. Because the knights of old assumed such names as "the Knight of the Burning Sword" or "the Knight of the Griffin" by which they would be known throughout the world, Don Quixote resolves to have a sorrowful figure painted on his shield and to be known henceforth by that title.

39.8 the Strauss song.

Allerseelen

Allerseelen’ (‘All-Souls’), 1882; the eighth and final song of Opus 10 by Richard Strauss (1864-1949), German composer and writer of Lieder. The song, set to the words of the Austrian poet Hermann von Gilm (1812-64), makes reference to the belief that on All Souls Day (2 November) the souls of the dead will communicate with the living. It depicts one trying to use this to revive an old love affair, which, it seems, has died:

Stell' auf den Tisch die duftenden Reseden,
die letzten roten Astern trag' herbei,
und lass uns wieder von der Liebe reden,
wie einst im Mai.

Gib mir die Hand, dass ich sie heimlich drücke,
und wenn man's sieht, mir ist es einerlei,
gib mir nur einen deiner stissen Blicke,
wie einst im Mai.

Es bluht und duftet heut' auf jedem Grabe,
ein Tag im Jahr ist ja den Toten frei,
komm an mein Herz, dass ich dich wieder habe
wie einst im Mai.

["Set on the table the fragrant mignonettes, / bring in the last red asters, / and let us talk of love again, / as once in May.

Give me your hand, so I may secretly press it / and if anybody sees, it's all one to me / give me just one of your sweet glances / as once in May.

Flowers bloom and spread their fragrance today on every grave. / One day in the year is sacred to the dead. / Come to my heart, that I may have you again / as once in May."]

39.9 the Generalife.

Generalife Gardens

With the Alhambra [#39.10], two Moorish palaces in Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain. From Ar. Gennat-al-Arif, "the Place of the Builders". The Generalife, known for its magnificent gardens, is separated from the Alhambra by a ravine and is slightly above it, it was originally an outwork of the fortress and then the summer palace of the Sultans of Granada: "a fairy palace full of storied recollections" [Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra,123].

39.10  the Alhambra.

The Alhambra

An ancient fortress on a hill to the north of Granada overlooking the city, and residence of the Moorish monarchs, as described in Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra [29]: “It was the royal abode of the Moorish kings, where, surrounded with the splendors and refinements of Asiatic luxury, they held dominion over what they vaunted as a terrestial paradise, and made their last stand for the empire in Spain.” Most of the Alhambra was built between 1248 and 1354, though Charles V extended it in the mid-sixteenth century. The name signifies in Arabic "the Red", from the tapia or red bricks of which its outer walls were built. Although some of its decoration was destroyed after the expulsion of the Moors in 1492, the Alhambra is celebrated for the intricate splendour of its architecture: towers, galleries, courts, rooms, fountains and a magnificent wooded garden.

Jan Gabrial met Lowry in Granada, she said, on 19 May 1933 [Inside the Volcano, 3-4]. She had arrived at the Villa Carmona pension the previous night from Ronda to meet a young Syrian called Calef, but was instead distracted by Lowry. They later met again in the Alhambra Palace in Leicester Square, London [Day, 182].

39.11 shadows of our fate at our meeting in Spain.

Jan Gabrial
Margerie Bonner Lowry

Although Hollywood and Los Angeles suggest Yvonne's past life as a starlet, and the Pensión México their present existence, the intimations of fate implicit in these names seem more applicable to Lowry's own life than that of his characters. Granada was where he met his first wife, Jan; Mexico was where he separated from her; Los Angeles, where he met his second wife, Margerie. Both women contribute to the character of Yvonne: Jan, without whom Lowry could not have got into his creative mess; and Margerie, without whom he could not have got out of it.

40.1 Hollywood … Los Angeles.

The Hollywood Café [sic] in the Granada of Lowry’s day is identified by Clarissa Lorenz [Lorelei Two, 157] and by Bowker [Pursued by Furies, 155]; ‘Los Angeles’ refers not to the Granada hotel of that name, but to the nunnery, founded in the 17th century, of San Miguel de los Angeles.

40.2 Malaga.

Málaga is a Spanish city and popular tourist destination on the Costa del Sol, Andalusia; there is no record of Jan and Malcolm being there together, and the Pensión México remains unidentified (there was, however, a Pensión America in Granada, which may have acted as its model).

40.3 Paris – before Hugh came.

A reference to Hugh's "betrayal" of Geoffrey with Yvonne, which the Consul cannot quite forgive and which during the day increasingly gives him an excuse for refusing to take the positive steps necessary to be reconciled with Yvonne. It has been argued [Dodson, 33], that the betrayal was never quite a physical one, but this seems unlikely; the reticence each displays about the affair is more naturally to be seen as a reluctance to admit it really happened, despite the darkening presence of its shadow.

40.4 several mescalitos later.

In the Oaxaca region, mescalito differs from mescal [see #216.2] in being the straight distillation from the juice of the agave cactus without the addition of the more usual sugars. It is a potent, colourless liquid, usually drunk straight. The Consul sometimes (though probably not here) uses the word as a diminutive, as if to convince himself that he is drinking only little mescals. See also #53.1.

40.5 Love is the only thing ... I am afraid.

Compare Julien Green, Personal Record [30 Dec. 1931; 70]: "Love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a very dark abyss. And we are afraid."

40.6 in this dingy fashion.

A foreshadowing of the Consul's last words [373]: "Christ … this is a dingy way to die", as he at last discovers the love that comes too late.

40.7 Lift up your eyes unto the hills.

From Psalm 121, which expresses confidence in the power of the Lord to preserve men and the soul from all evil. Ironically, the little red plane flying in over the hills from Acapulco is described as a "winged emissary of Lucifer" [see #44.13]. The psalm begins:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

41.1 come back to me, Yvonne, if only for a day.

This plea, so poignantly echoing Richard Strauss's ‘Allerseelen’ [see #39.8], is answered, to the letter, by Yvonne's return in Chapter II, on the day the dead come back to life.

41.2 he held it into the candle flame.

Faustus

Lowry comments [‘LJC’, 763], that Laruelle’s action is poetically balanced by the flight of vultures ("like burnt papers floating from a fire") at the end of Chapter III and by the burning of the Consul's manuscript in Yvonne's dying dream, in Chapter IX. The description culminates in images of demonic flames and husks, suggestive of the ending of Doctor Faustus as hell opens to reveal the awaiting fires, but its essence is the intense elegaic beauty of the transition from life to death.

42.1 crepitant.

L. crepitare, "to crackle"; to make a crackling sound.

42.2 dolente … dolore!

Dante

The words ‘dolente … dolore’ are from the inscription above the entrance into Hell, in Dante's Inferno [III.I-2]: "Per me si va nella città dolente / Per me si va nell'etterna dolore" ("Through me you enter the woeful city, / through me you enter eternal grief .")

A distinct echo of the bell that rings out at the moment of the Consul's death [374]. On the one hand, it asserts damnation, for as Kilgallin has noted [‘Faust’, 28), the Consul, like Faustus, has been cursed by bell, book, and candle; on the other hand, it rings out for all mankind as does the passing bell in John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII (1623):

No Man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were.… Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

The Execution of Emperor Maximilian

By a curious coincidence that would have intrigued Lowry, Father Hidalgo, who first rang the bell for Mexican independence in 1810, came from the parish of Dolores in the state of Querétaro; the famous ‘Grito de Dolores’ is repeated every 16 September, and the bell is ceremoniously rung. Another coincidence saw Maximilian shot in 1867 outside the town of Querétaro, on the Cerro de las Campañas, or "Hill of the Bells" [see #123.3]. The Consul's death truly involves all mankind.

42.3 backwards revolved the luminous wheel.

The luminous wheel

Literally, the big wheel in the zócalo; symbolically, many other things, as Lowry points out [‘LJC’, 70-71]:

it is Buddha's wheel of the law (see VII), it is eternity, it is the instrument of eternal recurrence, the eternal return, and it is the form of the book; or superficially it can be seen simply in an obvious movie sense as the wheel of time whirling backwards until we have reached the year before and Chapter II and in this sense, if we like, we can look at the rest of the book through Laruelle's eyes, as if it were his creation.

The image of the wheel thus integrates the novel's thematic concerns and its trochal structure within Laruelle’s mind, as again he turns back to relive the events of the past.

Epigraphs ~ Next Chapter (II)
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