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As Sherrill Grace suggests ['Expressionist Vision', 106], this cryptic direction forms a conscious inversion of Murnau's Sunrise [see #200.7], with the unstated implication that no reconciliation will take place between the Consul and Yvonne. A reference to Murnau's Sunrise is pencilled in on the "E" version [UBC 27-16, 1].
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'Sunset' is the title of Chapter XXXVII of Moby Dick, Ahab in his cabin alone, "damned in the midst of Paradise". Much of the detail of Chapter XI (eddies of green and yellow birds, the woman walking, the tethered anteater) was rescued from the shipwreck of Chapter II of the 1940 Volcano. The “ever widening circlings like rings on water” is repeated verbatim at the very end of the chapter.
316.2 with the grace of a Rebecca.
Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel, "very fair to look upon", was chosen as the wife of Isaac as she drew water in the evening from the well outside the city of Nahor [Genesis 24].
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To Albert Erskine [15 July 1946; CL 1, 610] Lowry claimed to have cut five of the better lines because they echoed Katherine Anne Porter ("..." in the published text indicates the omission). In a 1941 draft [UBC WT 1-5, 341] he comments: "See Maria Concepçion for possible plagiarism at the beginning." He refers to the third paragraph: "She walked with the free, natural, guarded ease of the primitive women carrying an unborn child"; but that draft had included such give-aways as "jacals". The theme of the story is sexual betrayal. Another esoteric echo is the village women as if "walking in their sleep": the theme of somnambulism, with particular reference to Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, was explicit in the early revisions and underlies much of this chapter.
316.3 The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders.
"Out-riders" are armed attendants on horseback accompanying a carriage or stage-coach. In Hindu mythology these clouds are the Maruts, the storm winds, companions in battle with Indra. The storm [10] is described as "dark swift horses surging up the sky" and that in the Consul's mind [145] as a darkness "that will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind." The reference thus anticipates the sudden violence that will strike Yvonne down at the end of the chapter.
317.1 white handbells, tongue downwards.
The detail recalls Goethe's churchbell with its giant protruding tongue [see #73.1]. The themes of abnegated responsibility and retribution to the fore in this chapter.
317.2 worn-out ploughshares ... abandoned American cars.
One year from now Laruelle will see an abandoned plough, its arms raised to heaven in mute supplication [9], and a faded blue Ford, an emblem of the Consul [see #13.2].
317.3 Infernal bird of Prometheus!
The vulture, which every day would tear at the liver of Prometheus as he lay chained upon the Caucasus [see #131.3]. The vultures, vile and ugly, nevertheless symbolise for Lowry the human spirit that blossoms in the shadow of the abbatoir.
There is a marginal note, "Nuttall" [UBC WT 1-22], with the ubiquitous instruction, "Insert somewhere"; and Lowry admitted to Albert Erskine [15 July 1946; CL 1, 609] that the vultures "have in part flapped vaguely out of Nuttall's Ornithology". Thomas Nuttall's Manual of Ornithology of the United States and Canada, first published in 1832, was a standard authority. Professor Nuttall was a passenger in R.H. Dana's Two Years before the Mast [Ch. XXX]. Lowry sought out the book "to imagine from" [UBC 27-17, 16 verso] in the little library of Niagara on the Lake, called it "that best of all books", and exploited it in Chapter XI. The passage reads [318; in Lowry's transcription]:
these sable scavengers, who may often be seen jealously contending with each other, both in and out of the carcass, defiled with blood and filth, holding on with their feet, hissing and clawing each other, or tearing morsels so as to till their throats nearly to choking, & occasionally joined by dogs with whom they would quarrel as in unison, infernal bird of Prometheus, & once first of birds, are you not even as man, predator of the sun, & the skies, are you not even as he capable of sublime flights, of rising before the wind & storms, above the war of the elements, afloat at ease in the ethereal space, of rising too, even with the condor in his highest flights, rising above the summit of the Andes.
317.4 the condor.
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A large vulture (Cathartes gryphus) found in the highest parts of the Andes and capable of ascending to great heights. Nuttall's Ornithology comments [104]: "Indeed the Condor frequents and nests upon the summit of the Andes, above which they are seen to soar in the boundless ocean of space, enjoying the invigorating and rarified atmosphere."
317.5 low hills ... purple and sad.
A last reminder of the earthly paradise about to be lost [see #14.8]. The last of Frater Achad's 'Hymns to the Star Goddess' concludes: "I, too, would ascend as a delicate purple mist that steams up from the hills."
318.1 Chimborazo, Popocatepetl.
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From W.J. Turner's 'Romance' [see #64.3]; Popocatepetl has stolen the Consul's soul away. Chimborazo is an extinct volcano in Ecuador; at 20,660 feet one of the highest peaks of the Andes (it was once thought to be the highest mountain on earth).
318.2 the tragic Indian legend.
Yvonne alludes to the story of the love of Popocatepetl, prince of the lowly Chichimecas, for Ixtaccihuatl, princess of the great Toltecs. Ixtaccihuatl’s father forbade the match, but seeing his daughter's grief he relented and imposed upon the prince a number of duties to perform. Before they could be carried out, Ixtaccihuatl died, but holding in his heart the hope that she might come back to life the prince took her body up into the hills, where he built a fire at sunset and knelt beside her to watch for signs of life. At last Quetzalcóatl took pity on them and changed them into volcanoes, the princess sleeping but the prince glowing in eternal vigilance over his beloved.
318.3 the two paths ... like the arms ... of a man being crucified.
The paths stretch out like the arms of the dying Indian [241], but Lowry's sense is more esoteric: "On the surface Hugh and Yvonne are simply searching for the Consul, but such a search would have added meaning to anyone who knows anything of the Eleusinian mysteries" [‘LJC’, 83]. The Eleusinian mysteries, which date back to the nineteenth century BC, are among the most ancient Greek rites and festivals. They originally associated the seasonal cycle of crops and vegetation and that of the sun with human death and resurrection. According to Thomas Taylor's 'Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries' (1790), myths and legends associated with the mysteries symbolise the descent of the soul into the world of matter (represented by the dark wood) and the search for spiritual enlightenment. In many treatments of the rites a ritual bathing (as in Chapter X) is followed by a long wandering search through a labyrinth in search of truth, or the lost Word, or a lost child. This enacts the torchlight search of the grief-stricken Demeter (Ceres, or the earth) for Persephone (Prosperine, or the sun), snatched to the underworld by gloomy Dis (or Pluto, or the darkness). The search has overtones of fertility, of the blessings withheld until the lost one is restored; and initiation into the higher mysteries.
Lowry continues ['LJC', 83]: "the same esoteric idea of this kind of search also appears in Shakespeare's Tempest"; he repeats the idea in October Ferry [137]. Andersen suggests [144] that Lowry is referring to Colin Still's books on The Tempest and the Eleusinian mysteries (Shakespeare's Mystery Play, 1921, and The Timeless Theme, 1936). In the latter [135], Still argues that The Tempest must be seen "as a dramatic representation of the Mystery of Redemption, conceived as a psychological experience and expressed in mythological form." Lowry's depiction of Yvonne's last hour has the same intention. In the dark wood, as things shimmer between their realistic and symbolic meanings, the choice of paths revealed in the form of the crucified Christ and the Hanged Man (the soul asleep, awaiting its awakening) becomes the first decision that must be confronted, the first step that must be taken upon the next stage of the soul's journey.
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Like Dante and Virgil in Hell, Hugh and Yvonne have been keeping the stream "always to their left" [318]; but Lowry has altered the bald statement of earlier versions, "They took the path to the left" [1940 Volcano, 325], to play off, obliquely, "the path to their right" against "the main path". The unstated implications – the broad path to hell, something "sinister" about Parián (earlier [115], the railway sweeps left) – are more threatening. Asals suggests [Making, 81] that the divided paths, which in the 1940 Volcano served as a choice between life and death, gain in revision a narrative function (the wrong choice predicated on the location of two other cantinas); but that function becomes symbolically more subtle (Dante's Inferno, Robert Frost's the road not taken).
318.4 the Rum-Popo.
A Freudian slip: the restaurant-cantina is El Popo, named for the volcano, and rumpope is a yellowish, egg-based alcoholic drink [see #226.1(i)].
318.5 five thousand bobolinks.
The bobolink, so-called from its rollicking musical song, is a common black and white North American song-bird which migrates in huge flocks each winter to South America. It is described in October Ferry [115], as: "the blithe bobolink, friend of hay and clover: the merry bobolink that was also called (ex post facto knowledge too) skunk blackbird, le goglu, Dolichonyz oryzivorus, the bobolink that said clink." In Nuttall’s Ornithology [198], bobolinks fix their abode "in the savannahs of Ohio and Michigan" and [201] "their awakening and faultering voices" is "like the noise of a distant torrent."
319.1 El Petate.
Sp. “the mat”; the Penguin ‘Pelate’ is erroneous. The El Popo menu, later in this chapter, was in Lowry’s life from the El Petate restaurant [see #329.1].
319.2 Their mouths opened and shut soundlessly.
Compare Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) [Gallimard edition, 29]:
Men also secrete something inhuman. In certain lucid hours, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their dumb show deprived of meaning makes all that surrounds them foolish. A man speaks on the telephone behind a glass partition; one does not hear him, but one sees his mime without hearing or understanding why he lives. This uneasiness in front of the inhumanity of man himself, this incalculable fall before the image of what we are, this "nausea" as it is called by a contemporary author, this is also absurdity. Likewise the stranger who, in certain seconds, meets us in the mirror, the familiar and yet disturbing brother whom we find in our own photographs, this also is absurdity.
319.3 Moctezuma, Criollo, Cafeaspirina, Mentholatum – no se rasque las picaduras de los insectos!
Advertisements for beer, a brand of cigar, aspirin, and a menthol-based ointment – "Don't scratch insect bites!"
319.4 the formerly prosperous village of Anochtitlán, which had burned.
The model for this village is the town of Nochixtlán, more properly Asunción Nochixtlán, some eighty miles northwest of Oaxaca on the road to Cuernavaca. The largest town of its district, it was of strategic importance during the 1910-20 Revolution. In December 1916 it was captured and pillaged by the forces of General Cordova. As punishment for its "disaffection" [Iturribarria, 381], the suburb of Chocuno was put to the torch and burnt to the ground. Lowry calls the town Anochtitlán partly because his friend Juan Fernando Marquez always pronounced the "a" [DATG, 220], presumably as an abbreviation of Asunción, and because the extra "a" and "t" extends the name Nochixtlán to rhyme with Tenochtitlán, the Aztec city destroyed and pillaged by Cortés [see #27.3].
319.5 a small eagle.
The eagle was originally a hawk [UBC 31-9, 2], and Lowry was concerned lest his debt to Yeats ('The Second Coming' and A Vision) be too obvious; the concerns are expressed in a later revision [UBC 31-10, 6]. He refers (in various drafts and letters) to parallels between this bird and others: to hawks and eagles described in Nuttall's Ornithology, which he used as a source; to Walter van Tilburg Clark's 'Hook', the story of a hawk, once magnificently supreme, wounded by a shotgun blast and unable to fly; to Chaucer's The Maunciple's Tale ("Taak any byrd and put it in a cage"), which he had used to preface Ultramarine; and to James Stephens' poem, 'The Lark', about a small bird cowering in the dark, its wings broken, its song gone, its mate far away. Lowry was haunted by the refrain of a similar poem by James Stephens about a rabbit in a snare, invoking it in the 1940 Volcano [322]: "Little one, Oh little one, I am searching everywhere." None of these references is obvious, but the eagle symbolises the neo-Platonic notion of the soul escaping from the dark wood.
320.1 an amate and a Sabina.
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The amate (Nah. amatl, "paper," so called because its bark was used by the Indians for this purpose) is a kind of fig-tree which abounds in the warmer areas of Mexico; the Sabina (L. sapinus, "a sabine") is a tree of the cypress family, evergreen with extended branches (also known as the ahuehuetl). The two trees are often found together, and a celebrated pair, undoubtedly those that Lowry has in mind, was to be found at Chapultepec park in Cuernavaca, as described in de Davila [77]:
Along this path you will encounter some interesting specimens of Amates and Sabinos. The amate is a persistent and tenacious tree. Its roots will break huge rocks in order to find their way to moisture, and the strangest freak of all is that the roots do not mind crawling great distances over or around obstacles in their downward course.
Do not fail to see the amate, the roots of which form the shape of an octopus and a giraffe over the gigantic boulders of which it grows. Then note the strange embracing of a sabino and an amate. I have seen other examples of the amate and the sabino intertwined, but this is by far the best example which I have seen.
In an earlier draft [UBC 25-17, 24] the amate and sabino formed part of Laruelle's jungle-scene [203]; this is Laruelle's dream in Chapter I of the 1940 Volcano. Lowry noted how the roots of the sabino "broke the rocks to get near the life-giving water."
The British ‘sabina’ is erroneous. In an early revision of the 1940 text [UBC 31-9, 6] the sabino was located near the El Petadi [sic] cantina, with an ad for "a vegetable compound for female ill: La Sra. Jekyll y La Sra. Hyde" (a detail previously in Chapter X).
320.2 cordage.
A ship's rigging. Booms are the wooden spars to which sails are attached.
320.3 it was free ... at that moment appeared one star.
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Yvonne's freeing of the eagle anticipates the release of her soul at the end of the chapter when she is taken up into the heavens. The star that suddenly appears is Venus, with which Yvonne has already been identified [see #44.11], and into which Quetzalcóatl was transformed [see #299.7]. Her act of releasing the eagle corresponds to the Consul's first attempt to free the horse in Chapter XII. Frater Achad proclaims in Psychomania [25] that "Every man and every woman is a star"; in the astral sense of attaining the Light.
321.1 whip-poor-will, whip-peri-will.
The whip-poor-will, named for its haunting plaintive cry, is a nocturnal bird of the caprimulgidae (goatsucker) family, described by Peterson [93] as: "ample-tailed nocturnal birds with small bills and weak, tiny feet. During the day they rest horizontally on some limb, or on the ground, where their mottled brown pattern blends with the surroundings." Lewis Spence comments that the "mournful chant" of this bird relayed to the Aztec priests messages from the dead [M of M & P, 97-98]. The word ‘perl’ in the second part of the cry is taken directly from Thomas Nuttall's Ornithology [743], but also suggests a reference to Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, the second part of which is called 'Paradise and the Peri'. A peri, in Persian mythology, is a being like an elf or genie, but formed of fire and descended from fallen angels, and hence excluded from Paradise until its penance is complete. Moore's poem begins:
One morn a Peri at the gate
Of Eden stood, disconsolate;
And as she listen'd to the Springs
Of life within, like music flowing,
And caught the light upon her wings
Through the half-open portal glowing
She wept to think her recreant race
Should e'er have lost that glorious place.
Asals notes [Making, 448] that in one early revision, in a marginal comment [UBC 27-17, 8 verso], ‘Blue Heaven’, Lowry suggested where ‘home’ might be: "When whip-poor-wills call / And evening is nigh / I hurry to / My blue heaven."
321.2 Cayenne.
A city, river and island in French Guiana; mentioned in Nuttall's Ornithology [746], as a wintering place of the whip-poor-will from September to March. Nuttall comments [745] that the bird has no nest, and [743] that it is sometimes dreaded as an omen of misfortune.
321.3 the stars.
Lowry's sources of the astrological detail in Chapter XI remain evasive [but see #321.4 and #336.3] yet much was taken from somewhere. A marginal comment [UBC 31-10, 8] increases the mystery: "STARS – A terrific passage, yet somehow not too purple, to be made out of Margenius [??] and the following rough notes." In a letter to Aiken [3 March 1940; CL 1, 297], Lowry says that Margerie has "inveigled" him into reading astronomy, and he quotes extensively a passage about Venus, material that was used in the poem beginning "And, when you go – much as a meteor" [CP, #98.3], with images of how its brightness varies according to the planet's changing phases and distance from the sun.
As Lowry noted [SL, 188], the novel's action takes place in Scorpio. The Consul has by identified himself with the scorpion [see #338.10], and the setting of the constellation is emblematic of his own fall. Consider, for relations between Yvonne, the Consul and Hugh, MacGregor-Mathers' The Kabbalah Unveiled [24]: "Scorpio, as a good emblem, being symbolized by the eagle, as an evil emblem by the scorpion, and as of a mixed nature by the snake."
Chapter XII of the 1940 Volcano begins: "As Scorpio rises in the eastern sky, Orion vanishes in the west." Then, "not to be forgotten also were the Scorpii b, d and p, of the Tree of Life, phase of the cherubim set in the Garden of Eden!" This is from Olcott's Star Lore [326, 330 & 331]: "As Scorpion rises in the eastern sky, Orion, as if in fear, disappears from view in the west ... The three stars in a line, b, d and p Scorpii, seem to have attracted attention in all ages ... associated with the idea of the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden of Eden, which has a special significance when it is recalled that Scorpio may be considered as representing one phase of the Cherubim which was set in the Garden of Eden." Other 1940 details, such as "the sign of the death god", "the tribe of Dan", "an adder in the path", "the reign of Typhon" and "sullen" Antares [340], or "Shaula" and "Lesuth" [337], also derive from Olcott.
322.1 they would rise and set.
(a) Fomalhaut. Ar. Fum al Hut, "the mouth of the fish"; a star of first magnitude in the constellation of Piscis Australis, the Southern Fish; "lonely" because it occupies a position in the sky otherwise barren of large-magnitude stars.
(b) Aldebaran. Ar. Al Dabaran, "the follower" (that is, of the Pleiades); a star of the first magnitude in the constellation of Taurus, forming the bull's eye.
(c) the Pleiades. A group of stars in the constellation of Taurus, six of which are readily visible, while a seventh, Merope (to be linked with Yvonne), shines less brightly, since in legend she fell in love with the mortal Sisyphus. The sentence "As Scorpio sets in the southwest, the Pleiades are rising in the northeast" reads as if from an astronomy text and underlines the opposition of the Consul and Yvonne.
(d) Orion. An equatorial constellation near Taurus, containing the first-magnitude stars Rigel and Betelgeuse. In legend, the huntsman Orion loved Diana, and on his death was placed in the heavens near her as a constellation. Kilgallin [198] suggests that Orion, who died of the sting of Scorpio, is an emblem of the Consul.
(e) Cetus. The Whale, an equatorial constellation south of Pisces and Aries; in legend sometimes identified with the fabled creature sent to devour Andromeda and turned to stone by the Medusa's head.
(f) Mira. A star, Omicron Ceti, in the constellation Cetus; remarkable for its varying brightness.
322.2 careen.
At sea, the sudden sideways movement of a ship. Lowry is punning on the constellation Carina, "the Keel", often considered part of the constellation Argo, "the Ship".
322.3 giant Antares raging to its end.
Antares, "the scorpion’s heart" [see #50.2]; a star of first magnitude in the constellation Scorpio. In the 1940 Volcano [336-37], Yvonne says: "'That's Antares … It's nearly five hundred times as big as our sun. And it's dying. A dying sun, just an ember.'"
322.4 Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab, Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries.
The signs of the Zodiac, named in their traditional order eastward from the vernal equinox. The Zodiac itself is the zone centred on the ecliptic and extending for 8º on either side of it, the zone in which the moon and all the planets are always found, whatever their orbital position may be. The ‘Zodiac Zone’ (this underlies the Consul's pun [203]) is divided into twelve equal sections, the signs named for the constellations that were in them at the time of Hipparchus of Nicaea (190-120 BC), the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece. A marginal note reads [UBC 31-10, 9]: "continue the precession of the constellations, perhaps using the stuff that might have conceivably been mine too, but get the thing now as a GIGANTIC WHEEL."
(a) Aries. The Ram; first constellation in the Zodiac, the ram on which Phrixus and Helle rode through the air to escape their stepmother, Ino. Helle fell off and drowned in the Hellespont, but Phrixus rode to Colchis where he sacrificed the ram and hung its golden fleece upon a tree, whence Jason captured it. Aries is considered the first sign even though the vernal equinox is now in Pisces.
(b) Taurus. The Bull; A V-shaped figure of five stars marks the face of the bull and represents the animal into which Jupiter changed himself when he carried the princess Europa across the Mediterranean. The eye of the bull is the giant red star, Aldebaran, and the Pleiades form its shoulder.
(c) Gemini. The Twins; a large bright group of stars northeast of Orion, representing the Greek twins Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda and Zeus, the tutelary deities of soldiers and sailors.
(d) the Crab. Cancer; the least conspicuous constellation of the Zodiac, containing no bright stars; the giant crab that seized the foot of Hercules when he was fighting the Hydra. It gives its name to the Tropic of Cancer since the sun is in this sign at the summer solstice, when it begins to move backwards.
(e) Leo. The Lion; a large constellation in the spring evening sky representing the Nemean Lion slain by Hercules as the first of his twelve labours.
(f) Virgo. The Virgin; a large group of stars representing Ceres, goddess of the harvest, with a few heads of wheat in her hand (the sun is in this sign in August, the time of the harvest).
(g) the Scales. Libra; representing the balancing of night and day because the autumn equinox was in this sign when first described in ancient Mesopotamia. Lowry links it with Scorpio, as among the ancient Greeks these stars were the claws of the Scorpion, which in their Zodiac covered the space of two signs.
(h) Scorpio. The Scorpion; a conspicuous constellation representing the scorpion that killed Orion when he boasted that no living creature could harm him; placed by Zeus on the opposite side of the sky so it could not do so again (as it rises Orion sets, as if in fear). The most brilliant of the constellations, it contains the giant red star Antares.
(i) Sagittarius. The Archer; inexplicably missing from Lowry's list. It represents the centaur Chiron, aiming an arrow at the Scorpion, and was also known as the "Bull-killer", since Taurus sets when it rises. In a letter to Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 381], Lowry responded to the omission: "Sagittarius? H'm. Where? Nowhere. On the previous page? Yes, but I don't see old Sagittarius here, alas. Guess he must have been left out by mistake. Please put him in again quickly for god's sake." The omission occurred between a late revision between [UBC 31-10, 8] and the "Insert 7-8 B" which is a rewrite of the passage in question.
(j) Capricorn the sea-goat. An inconspicuous constellation, south of the equator, containing no bright stars. It represents Pan, who, frightened by the monster Typhon, plunged into the Nile; the part of him under water was changed into a fish and that above into a goat. The constellation gave its name to the Tropic of Capricorn because the sun at the winter solstice was formerly in the sign. In the same letter [above] Lowry added: "But dear old Capricornus was a sea goat, with a tail instead of hind legs. I warned you that that goat would keep turning up."
(k) Aquarius the Water Bearer. A large but inconspicuous constellation south of Pegasus, representing Zeus pouring rain upon the earth.
(l) Pisces. The Fish; a long irregular group of stars representing Venus and Cupid, who, frightened by the giant Typhon, jumped into the Euphrates and changed themselves into fishes.
(m) and once more, triumphantly, Aries. The reappearance of the sun in Aries is a triumphant attestation of continuity and renewed life, as spring takes over from winter, and the Voyage That Never Ends continues its pattern of death and rebirth.
323.1 the beneficent Pleiades.
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A cluster of stars in Taurus and one of the most important constellations in the northern heavens. The daughters of Atlas, they grieved at the burden heaven imposed on their father who had to support the weight of the firmament on his shoulders; because of their sympathy, they were rewarded with a place in heaven. In another version of the myth, Orion saw them in the forest and pursued them; they appealed to Zeus, who turned them into doves, whereupon they flew up into the sky. Orion and his dogs followed them in the heavens, continuing the passionate chase.
The Pleiades have been frequently associated with unpleasant omens. As an autumn sign, they are in many cultures considered the bringers of death. They reach their zenith on November the first; hence they are "high overhead" here, on the evening of 2 November. In some cultures, prayers of the dead were recited on this day. The Aztecs believed that the end of the world would occur in the month of the Pleiades, our November, when the Pleiades would be the guiding spirits [see #29.4].
The Pleiades have a dual role in Under the Volcano: they stand for death and doom, and they dominate the events of Chapters XI and XII; yet Yvonne considers them beneficent, as standing, somehow, for rebirth and regeneration. Her calm acceptance at the end of this chapter may reflect the older tradition of the interceding influence of the Pleiades.
323.2 the dead child of the earth.
Yvonne is alluding to the theory that the moon was once part of the earth, but as a result of cataclysmic gravitational pulls it was torn from its parent to become a dead, barren satellite. She may have in mind her own dead child [72].
(a) The Sea of Fecundity. The Mare Foecunditatis, a large dark area near the western limits of the moon, covering more than 150,000 square miles. Roughly diamond-shaped, its boundaries are irregular and not well-defined.
(b) the sea of Nectar. The Mare Nectaris, a circular (not pentagonal) plain in the southwest quadrant of the moon, adjoining the southern end of the Mare Tranquillitatus.
(c) Frascatorius. A huge ring plain some sixty miles in diameter, its wall at the southern end broken down by an overflow of the Mare Nectaris. The north wall is not observable.
(d) Endymion. A great crater, seventy-eight miles in diameter, between the Mare Humboldtianum and Mare Frigoris. Its dark floor is prominent, and its broken walls rise some 10,000 to 15,000 feet above the surface of the moon.
(e) the Leibnitz mountains. A range of mountains near the south lunar pole; named for the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), logician and inventor of the calculus.
(f) Proclus. A crater, some eighteen miles in diameter, about fifty miles east of the Mare Crisium with very steep walls rising to 8,000 feet.
(g) the Marsh of a Dream. The Palus Somnii, the Marsh of Sleep, in the northwest quadrant of the moon, adjoining the Mare Tranquillitatus.
(h) Hercules and Atlas. Two large craters, each about fifty miles in diameter, in the northwest limb near Endymion, forming a double crater the walls of which rise to 11,000 feet in the north.
Lowry's source for the topography of the moon is William Tyler Olcott's Field Book of the Skies, from which certain phrases were copied almost word for word. Olcott gives, for example [322]: "The diamond-shaped Sea of Fecundity and the Sea of Nectar, pentagonal in form, are now visible."
323.3 in the midst of cataclysm.
The violent crashes of meteorites on the surface of the moon and modern notions of entropy; but also the disturbance caused to the planetary system by the Fall of Man.
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323.4 The cemetery was swarming with people.
The celebrations of the Day of the Dead [see #4.2] include all-night vigils at the gravesides of the departed.
323.5 a heliograph of lightning.
A heliograph is a device for sending messages by flashing the rays of the sun from a mirror; compare the end of Chapter I when Laruelle burns the letter.
324.1 A sound like windbells.
Windbells are clusters of small bells or chimes hung so as to strike each other when blown by the wind; the "ghostly tintinnabulation" (with its echo of Poe's 'The Bells') will be heard by Vigil and Laruelle a year later [4].
324.2 Euzkadi.
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In Mexico, a common make of automobile tyre (an affiliate of Goodrich); also, as Hugh is only too well aware, the name of the short-lived Republic of the free Basque provinces, which under the leadership of José Antonio Aguirre declared a provisional government on 7 October 1936 but which shortly afterwards came under attack from the Nationalist forces. The Republicans could not or would not come to the aid of this separatist movement, and on 26 April 1937 Guernica was bombed and strafed. On 19 June 1937, after much shelling and bombing, Bilbao was taken; subsequently every effort was made to extinguish Basque separatist feeling. In an early version of the novel, in chapter II, Yvonne and Hugh flew with Weber into Quauhnahuac [UBC 25-18, 20]:
They made a neat three-point landing in a field, coming to rest under an enormous advertisement for motor tires: Euzkadi.
"Isn't that the old name of the Basque country? " inquired Hugh, as he picked up the two little bags. "It confuses me why it should be the name of a make of motor tires. Damn it, you can't get away from the thought of Spain at all."
Lowry may also have had in mind a couple of private allusions: in Dark as the Grave, [111], Sigbjørn drives past "the familiar sign, Euzkadi, another Vulcanización," hence a reminder of the Volcanoes; while in the 1940 Volcano [320] he had the Consul reflect: "Euzkadi ... was the country of the Atlanteans" (a detail derived from Donnelly [172-73]). Neither detail is made anything of in the final version, but the sign makes an unspoken criticism of Hugh's dallying. Hugh tells Yvonne of having been imprisoned on ship in the Azores. Yvonne says, "And you can always tell your grandchildren you've been jugged in Atlantis"; to which Hugh replies, "Which brings us back to Bilbao and Euzkadi and your father."
The town of Amecameca, in part the model for Parián, is at the foot of Ixtaccihuatl, in Mexico State but near the Morelos-Mexico State boundaries. Lowry was conscious of Parián's location on the "border", in a threshold chapter set between life and death.
324.4 But only Yvonne had seen him.
As Éliphas Lévi points out, in relation to the existence of the sidereal body: "Apparitions of persons dear to us coincidentally with the moment of their death are phenomena of the same order and attributable to the same cause" [Transcendental Magic, 127].
324.5 an unusually tall Japanese.
In an early revision [UBC 31-9, 17] this figure gave a sudden cry, "I hatee you" (there "explained" as yuga hoga ii, or "we ought to leave now"), which Hugh and Yvonne felt as a curse from the dark powers (the Axis alliance) soon to be released upon the world. This is the Hitler-as-Black-Magician theme, which Lowry later downplayed, but also an attempt, not seriously pursued, to widen the scope of the novel to the Pacific. Asals notes [Making, 167] that Lowry tried to rescue Chapter XI from the literary gauchness of the 1940 version by accentuating the theme of love and hate, the love of Hugh and Yvonne to counterpoint the sterility of the Consul's life and death in Chapter XII.
325.1 macaws.
Large brightly coloured and harsh-voiced parrots found throughout Central and South America. The question "Quo Vadis?" [232], goes unheard.
325.2 crepitated.
From L. crepitare, "to crackle"; rattled, crackled. Compare the end of Chapter I.
326.1 Comment? ... Mescal, por favor .... ¿Como no?
Fr. and Sp. "What? ... Mescal, please .... Why not?" The delay now constitutes an alcohol-related abnegation of responsibility; in earlier drafts it was a deliberate (if misguided) decision to pause and give the Consul time to get over his rage.
326.2 lay like swine on her soul.
To Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 381], Lowry analyses this simile: as a physical phenomenon, when too few drinks have had too little effect; as "Bacchus" revenge on those who insult him with too conscious moderation"; and "as a nastiness", Yvonne's sense of her soul "degraded to the point it felt a bit like a pigstye".
326.3 La Paloma.
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A traditional Mexican love song, very popular, in which a love-lorn sailor envies the dove its wings, that he may fly to his beloved. The best-known version is that by Sebastian Yradier (1809-65), the chorus of which goes:
Si a tu ventana llega una paloma
tra-la-la con carino que es mi persona
cuenta-la tus amores bien de mi vida
corona-la de flores que es cosa mia.
("If a dove, which is me in disguise, / comes to your window singing with affection, / tell her how much you love me, / and crown my little bird with flowers.")
As the manuscripts indicate [UBC WT 1-5, 16], this was the version Lowry had in mind, but another version, popular in Mexico, begins:
Paloma blanca, blanca paloma
quién tuviera tus alas, tus alas quién tuviera,
para volar y volar para
donde estan mis amores, mis amores donde estan.
("White dove, white dove / ... who would have your wings ... / to fly ... / to where my love is").
The song hints at the Consul's white birds [228] and anticipates Yvonne’s transformation at the end of the chapter. The lines are cited with the marginal comment: "Ah God, the eternal la Paloma. Mention here that it was Maximilian's favourite song & that it was in the film." Maximilian, facing the firing squad, reputedly asked as his final request for a band to play 'La Paloma' [see #123.3].
326.4 It was the house of her spirit.
Yvonne's dream is both created and dissolved by the mescal she is drinking, as was the Consul's "phantom dance of souls" [see #286.5].
327.1 ocho pesos cincuenta.
Sp. "Eight pesos fifty (centavos)". In terms of Phillipson’s picture [178], Hugh’s purchase of the guitar represents a regression to the infantile.
327.2 the Internationale.
The revolutionary socialist hymn, written in 1871 by Eugene Pottier (1816-87), with music by Pierre Degeyter (with a deplorable lack of solidarity, this was disputed by his brother Adolphe). First performed in 1888 in Lille, and after the First Congress of the Second International in Paris (1889), it was accepted as the international hymn for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and was adopted in 1918 as the state anthem of the Soviet Union.
327.3 Como tu quieras.
Sp. "As you wish."
328.1 The kind of lie Sir Walter Raleigh meditates.
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Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), Elizabethan poet, historian, statesman, and courtier, whose glittering career at court ended in his long confinement in the Tower, a final disastrous voyage to South America, and his execution. The reference, as Hugh explains, is to Raleigh's poem, 'The Lie', printed in 1611, in which the poet addresses his soul and tells of the falsity of worldly institutions and fortune. It begins:
Go, soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless arrant.
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Say to the Court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the Church, it shows get
What's good, and doth no good:
If Church and Court reply,
Then give them both the lie.
328.2 Salud y pesetas.
Sp. "Health and wealth." This time, unlike the salutation between Laruelle and Vigil [6], the stock reply is not forthcoming: "y tiempo para gastarlas" ("and time to enjoy them").
328.3 men like Gandhi, or Nehru.
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, architects of Indian independence, are mentioned by Hugh [153] among the few public figures he secretly respects.
328.4 Throw the bloody little man in the river.
To Albert Erskine ['Correspondance', 184-85], Lowry attributes his remark to Tom Harrisson's 'Letter to Oxford' and suggests that it makes reference to what the world does to "poetic" young men. Harrisson's 'Letter' (1933) is a belligerent attack on the Oxbridge bovine mentality. Lowry compressed two phrases from it: on page 47, Harrisson talks of the "bloody people" who think one is (at 21) too young to write; and on pages 67-68, describing the physical oxes who beat up anyone different from themselves, he writes:
But I am for intolerance. I am for beat-ups. I am for good red hate. Put the miserable little man in the river. Put everyone in the river .... No cause is destroyed by intolerance or violent persecution. Lenin, Socrates, Lawrence, Darwin, Jesus Christ – every great movement of to-day started from one man who was crucified, in body or mind, to save the whole world.
Hugh [176 & 179] earlier used the phrases "Genius thrown into the river" and "Bloody little man."
328.5 set Barabbas free.
The cry of the multitude before Pontius Pilate when, having found no fault in Christ, he offered in accordance with the customs of the Passover to set one prisoner free; given the choice of Christ or Barabbas, the crowd cried for Christ and Pilate washed his hands of the affair. To Albert Erskine ['Correspondance', 185], Lowry claims that his phrase is based on "Gi os Barrabas frei" (more correctly, ‘Gi os Barrabas fri’), the final words of Nordahl Grieg's play Barrabas (1927), performed (Lowry says) for one night only in the National Theatre of Oslo, in 1929. Lowry commented to Albert Erskine [15 July 1946; CL 1, 609] of the Oslo performance: "It was indeed hooted off the stage by schnappes-drinking Lutherans who objected to seeing Christ where Oswald was wont to roam."
328.6 O'Dwyer for ever.
An atrocity in the Punjab area of India in 1919 is still called "the Amritsar massacre." When the Indians rebelled against the imprisonment of two nationalist leaders and rioted in the streets, the military, under the leadership of Brigadier-General Dyer, rode into a dense crowd and began firing. There were 379 dead and 1,200 wounded in the incident. The Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab was Sir Michael O'Dwyer, and the similarity of the last names has plagued historians ever since, as it does Lowry here.
Hugh is referring to the hearing and trial that followed the massacre. General Dyer defended himself with the aplomb of a seasoned colonialist, admitting that he had attempted to set a "ferocious" example for the rest of India. The government condemned his action with the phrases "unfortunate" and "injudicious", and he was removed from his position. Much of Parliament, the press and the public continued to support Dyer, and a testimonial sum of £26,000 was collected in his honour. The event convinced Gandhi and other Indian leaders that negotiation with Britain was impossible.
328.7 And if Russia should prove.
I.e., false: an ironic echo of Othello's "If she be false, O! then heaven mocks itself" [III.iii.278]. Hugh is uncomfortably aware that Russia had withdrawn the International Brigades [see #153.1] and may have a foreboding of the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, personally initiated by his hero, Stalin, by which Poland was divided between the two great powers and each recognised the other's "legitimate" sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. This agreement, a total betrayal of all that international socialism stood for, was the final blow to the already shattered faith of many intellectuals and liberals who had fought for the party throughout the 1930s.
329.1 'El Popo': Servicio a la carte.
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Sp. "El Popo: à la carte service" (that is, items chosen and paid for separately, rather than the equally common "comida corrida" or fixed price meal). The El Popo offers:
(a) Sopa de ajo. Garlic soup.
(b) Enchiladas de salsa verde. Large tortas wrapped about chicken, meat, or vegetable, in green sauce (a hot chile sauce made with Mexican green tomatoes).
(c) Chiles rellenos. Large poblana chiles stuffed with cheese, chopped meat, and vegetables, and dipped in flour and egg before being fried in deep fat.
(d) Rajas a la 'Popo'. Sliced peppers, Popo style.
(e) Machitos en salsa verde. Fried morsels of tripe or offal (especially pork), with green sauce (though machitos may also mean "ducklings").
(f) Menudo estilo soñora. Giblets, sonora style (Lowry probably means "Sonora," a northern state of Mexico; soñar means "to dream").
(g) Pierna de ternera al horno. Leg of roast veal.
(h) Cabrito al horno. Roast kid.
(i) Asado de Pollo. Roast chicken.
(j) Chuletas de cerdo. Port cutlets.
(k) Filete con papas o al gusto. Steak with potatoes, or as you like it.
(l) Sandwiches. Sandwiches, usually with hot sauce or pepper added to the filling.
(m) Frijoles refritos. Re-fried beans; that is, boiled beans (frijoles) placed in a vessel of very hot fat and mashed; often served with sour cream and tacos.
(n) Chocolate a la espanola. Spanish chocolate: hot, sweet, drinking chocolate, made with milk and spices, with a lot of chocolate.
(o) Chocolate a la francesa. French chocolate: hot, sweet, drinking chocolate, made with milk, but not as thick as the Spanish.
(p) Café solo o con leche. Coffee, black or with milk.
The original menu is preserved in the UBC Special Collection [UBC WT 1-24]. Lowry, as a note on the menu instructs, has reprinted it (almost) in full, but there are several minor differences between the original and that published in the novel: the first item, Consomé ($0.30) is omitted in the novel; the Sopa de ajo should cost $0.40 (Lowry has mispriced the first two items because he has omitted the consomé); the original offers Enchiladas suizas at $0.75, which is what those in salsa verde ought to have cost; rajas a la "Popo" reads Rajas a la "Petate"; after the machitos, the menu offers Chicharrón en salsa verde ($0.75); there is no tilde on "soñora"; as well as Chuletas de cerdo, or pork cutlets there are Chuletas de carnero ($1.25); before Sandwiches there are Tacos y torillas de todas estilos ($0.30); and between Chocolate and Café a sweet is offered, Dulce de arroz con leche ($0.30).
The menu offers an insight into how Lowry works from a precise original, yet does not get the details right; as published some make no sense. On the back of the menu, more or less as in the novel (if anything, a little more coherent), is both the ‘Recknung’ and the poem which begins "Some years ago ... " [CP, #108]. The El Petate, from which Lowry presumably filched the menu, was in the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City. In Dark as the Grave [101], Sigbjørn recalls writing the poem there, "at about five a.m., with ‘Tipitipitin’ playing and Stanford [Bousfield] and a lot of drunks milling around."
329.2 Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pública.
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Sp. "National Lottery for the Public Benefit." The National Lottery of Mexico was inaugurated several centuries ago by Spanish noblemen wishing to establish a charitable foundation. Draws are frequent, tickets cheap, possible returns high, and the state-regulated lottery is completely honest, its net profit going to support public hospitals and other charitable institutions. Lowry notes [DATG, 101] that he had this particular menu with him in Niagara when he completed the manuscript of UTV; it has subsequently turned up in the William Temple collection at the University of British Columbia.
In a late draft [UBC 28-10, F], Lowry wrote of the "block of ten lottery tickets, the number of which – Yvonne distinguished – was 21312, and on each of which a cowgirl ... ". In fact, the number on the tickets is 12261, but 21312 is the number of Hugh's passport, recalled by the Consul lying in the street [see #77.8]. Yvonne describes two features of the lottery, and relates them to herself: a small circular hallmark representing a happy mother and child; then, on the tickets, a cowgirl riding a bucking horse (on the original [UBC WT 1-24] the rider's sex is uncertain). Her life, as the cliché goes, and fate will determine, is a lottery.
329.3 Hotel Restaurant El Popo se observa la más estricta moralidad, siendo esta disposición de su proprietario una garantía para el pasajero, que llegue en compañía.
Sp. "The Hotel Restaurant El Popo observes the highest standards, this on the part of its proprietor being a guarantee for the visitor who arrives accompanied (by a lady)." The words do not appear on the real-life Petate menu, but in a marginal note [UBC 25-18, 4A], Lowry says they derived from a hotel in Acapulco (in the 1940 Volcano [48] they are attributed to the Hotel y Restaurante Tropical).
330.1 Recknung.
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More accurately, Rechnung; Ger. "bill". Some have "corrected" the error, but the original menu states "Recknung"; compare October Ferry [48]. The Consul consumes one rum and anis, one Salon Brasse rum, and a double tequila. The cheapness of the drinks (about $0.46 for the total), even by 1938 standards, shows why Mexico was a drinker's paradise. The word "Rechnung" has ominous suggestions of the "reckoning" due from the earlier incident involving the German officers [see #32.2]. In Robert Service's 'The Reckoning', in The Spell of the Yukon (to which the Consul has alluded [294]), the same pun is made, and the word "reckless" [316] seems equally loaded.
330.2 dearth ... filth ... rope ... cope ... grope ... of a cold cell.
Although the Consul's method of composition resembles that of Hopkins [see #202.5], the poem is like Francis Thompson's 'The Hound of Heaven' (1893), describing the poet's flight from God, the pursuit, and the overtaking. It begins:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
The Consul's use of ‘preterite’, in its theological sense of "those passed over", the non-elect, accentuates this sense of one who is running from the light. In the "E" draft of Under the Volcano, Lowry used, then crossed out, another quotation from 'The Hound of Heaven' as the third of four epigraphs to the novel:
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist.
331.1 man's public inquiry of the hour!
The hoarding, with the giant blue clock and great pendulum, which Yvonne had earlier recalled seeing in Los Angeles [264].
331.2 the stars to the north and east.
(a) Pegasus. A northern constellation; named after the winged horse of Greek mythology who sprung from the blood of Medusa slain by Perseus, whose hooves struck out the spring of poetic inspiration on Mount Helicon, and who was ridden by Bellerophon when he slew the Chimera. When Bellerophon tried to fly to heaven, Pegasus was stung by a fly sent by Jupiter; he threw off his rider and took his place in the skies alone.
(b) Vega. The Harp-Star; a blue-white star of the first magnitude in the northern constellation of Lyra.
(c) Deneb. Ar. "Al Dhanab al Dajajah, " "the hen"s tail"; an apparently fixed star of the first magnitude in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan.
(d) Altair. A pale-yellow star of the first magnitude in the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle (at the junction of the right wing with the body).
(e) Hercules. Also called "The Kneeler"; a northern constellation, near Lyra, named after the greatest hero of Greek mythology [see #159.7].
331.3 a ruined Grecian temple.
In the Eleusinian mysteries [see #318.3], the candidate making the ritual search for the lost Persephone passes from the darkness of the wood or labyrinth into the vestibule of a temple, where further tests and initiations take place before the final transmission.
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Candelabros, giant organ cacti whose spreading barrel-like stems here suggest the torches of the Eleusinian searches [see #318.3].
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332.1 the mobile trees.
To Albert Erskine [July 1953; CL 2, 673], Lowry acknowledged having plotted out the place where Yvonne is killed in the local "bosca oscura", the "forest path" at Dollarton near his shack; Gerald Noxon recalled "the big log that lies across the path" [Lowry / Noxon Letters (19 July 1942), 41].
332.2 En los talleres y arsenales / a guerra! todos, tocan ya; ... todas, tocan ya; / morir ¿quién quiere por la gloria / o por vendedores de cañones?
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Sp. "In the workshops and the arsenals, to war, everybody, move now, / everybody, move now. Who would want to die for glory, / or for the sellers of guns?" A verse from Luis de Tapia's 'En el crisol del Acero' ('In the crucible of steel'), the song of the Fifth Regiment of the International Brigade at the defence of Madrid, which begins:
En el crisol del Acero
se funden en un afán,
el campesino, el obrero,
el arisco guerrillero
y el invicto capitán.
("In the crucible of steel, / forged by a single passion, / are the peasant, the worker, / the fierce guerrilla fighter / and the invincible captain.")
333.1 Adelante, la juventud, / al asalto, vamos ya, /y contra los imperialismos, / para un nuevo mundo hacer.
Sp. "Forward, youth, to the assault, let's go. And against the imperialists create a new world." A song associated with the FIJL, the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes, an anarchist youth party, whose slogan was "Adelante por la nueva sociedad." Lowry’s source for these songs has not been identified.
333.2 A PARIÁN.
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Lowry told Clemens ten Holder [21 March 1951;CL 2, 358] that he was very proud of this hand, having stolen it from Hardy "from Jude the Obscure, to be precise, the only other place where I have seen such a hand" (it is taken from Part 1, Chapter 11). He had earlier written to Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6]: "My hand! My hand! Very important, very original ... I haven't got it in my version, but what I refer to is a little drawing of a human hand, pointing, (as inexpensive as possible) which should be placed before A Parian. I swear this is not frivolous and to get it in I will sacrifice the box round Quauhnahuac and anything else you like. While prepared to admit it may be slightly childish, it nonetheless – possibly for that reason – has a positive sinister emotive effect, and if you don't believe me take a look at the one in Jude, it's somewhere in the first 100 pages, and is followed by the words To Christminster." Lowry is not precisely correct; the sign reads "Thither J.F." (Jude Fawley, Jeffrey Firmin?).
334.1 Hijos del pueblo que oprimen cadenas / esa injusticia no debe existir / si tu existencia es un mundo de penas / antes que esclavo, prefiere morir prefiere morir.
Sp. "Sons of the people whom chains oppress, this injustice must not exist. If your existence is a world of grief, rather than be a slave, choose to die, choose to die." An anarchist song, 'Hijos del Peublo', described by Hugh Thomas [196] as: "A song in can-can rhythm, despite its words, which was selected as the anthem of the anarchist movement at the Second Literary Competition, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Barcelona (1890)." The ironies are obvious.
334.2 a wind like an express train.
An explicit suggestion of the Freudian death-train [see #281.6].
334.3 doors open for Jesus to walk in.
Lowry may have had in mind Holman Hunt's painting, The Light of the World (1854), which depicts Christ holding a lantern and waiting outside a door. It is also used of a thunderstorm in October Ferry [121]. Though the words are not exact, the phrasing suggests an echo of Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' (1898), Part 5:
Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
335.1 the riderless horse.
According to Lowry ['LJC', 84], the horse is the evil force the Consul has released; he intends Éliphas Lévi's image of the devil as "an unbridled horse which overthrows its rider and precipitates him into the abyss" [see #22.2]. Yvonne's dying vision integrates the riderless horse with the statue of Huerta [44], and her memories of being trapped in the ravine [260]. Her fall is in one sense from the tree of life, which, according to A.E. Waite, is capable of "preserving all who are attached to it from death forever" [The Holy Kabbalah, VII.i, 269].
Chapter XI of Under the Volcano engages in an inter-textual dialogue with Margerie Bonner's Horse in the Sky, which was composed in the mid-1940s, and which climaxes in the death of a young woman thrown from a horse. To Clemens ten Holder [6 Aug. 1951; CL 2, 404], Lowry points out the "fate and revenge motif" that pursues the protagonists in Margerie's novel, linking it explicitly to his own [406]: "she lent me the forepart of her horse to add on to the stern end of my horse already there in the Volcano when I was finishing it." Grace notes from that letter [407] Lowry's allusion to Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, where the horse represents the life of the body, animal life seeking to destroy itself, "a meaning that coincides nicely with the function of the horse in Under the Volcano and Horse in the Sky."
335.2 constellations, in the hub of which ... burned Polaris.
As the planets, in concentric order around the sun, whirl about, they transform themselves into a cosmic carousel swinging around the axle-tree of the universe:
(a) Polaris. The North Star is a star of second magnitude standing alone at the extremity of Ursa Minor; it marks almost exactly the position of the north celestial pole, and hence of the world's imagined axle-tree.
(b) Cassiopeia. The constellation between Andromeda and Orpheus; in Greek legend, Cassiopeia was the wife of Orpheus and mother of Andromeda.
(c) Cepheus. The constellation surrounded by Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Draco, and Cygnus; in Greek legend, Cepheus was the husband of Cassiopeia.
(d) the Lynx. The northern constellation between Auriga and Ursa Major covering a large area of the sky but with few bright stars.
(e) Ursa Major. The Great Bear, the most conspicuous of northern constellations, near the pole; of its fifty-three visible stars, seven form the Big Dipper.
(f) Ursa Minor. The Little Bear; the northernmost constellation; containing twenty-three visible stars, including those which form the Little Dipper, the most important of which is Polaris.
(g) the Dragon. The constellation Draco, lying between the Big Dipper and Little Dipper; the snake snatched by Minerva from the giants and whirled into the sky.
336.1 the house was on fire.
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Lowry's personal recollections of the destruction by fire of his house at Dollarton, and the loss of his own manuscripts [Day, 300], becomes a cosmic image of a world heading towards its final conflagration [see #189.8]. The passage re-enacts the burning of the Consul's letter by Laruelle at the end of Chapter I.
336.2 the dark waters of Eridanus.
Eridanus is a southern constellation, the River, described by Lowry in 'The Forest Path to the Spring' [227]:
the starry constellation Eridanus, known both as the River of Death and the River of Life, and placed there by Jupiter in remembrance of Phaethon, who once had the splendid illusion that he could guide the fiery steeds of the sun as well as his father Phoebus.
Legend merely states that Jupiter, sensing the danger to the world, shot a thunderbolt which, striking Phaethon, hurled him, his hair on fire, into the River Po.
In the same story, Lowry tells how Eridanus, his name for the small community in which he lived, "perpetually under the shadow of eviction" [226], had taken its name from a wrecked steamer of the defunct Astra line, which had been driven ashore and on whose stern could be made out the words: "Eridanus, Liverpool." It was beside the Eridanus, or Po, that Dante supposedly began composing the Paradiso.
336.3 borne towards the stars.
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After their deaths, the daughters of Atlas were transformed, first into doves, then into the Pleiades [see #323.1]. Lowry was concerned that this chapter, in contrast with the final one, should end with an upward movement and with a sense of cosmic purpose. He comments ['LJC', 84]: "a not dissimilar idea appears at the end of one of Julian Green's books, but my notion came obviously from Faust, where Marguerite is hauled up to heaven on pulleys, while the devil hauls Faust down to hell."
The finale was one of the last passages composed for the novel. Asals notes [Making, 289-92] how the rhythm and sentiment of one of the weakest parts was turned into a poetical masterpiece. In a letter to Albert Erskine [15 July 1946; CL 1, 609-10], Lowry refers to Julien Green's Personal Record, to the effect that "he would like to end a book with his heroine soaring straight aloft, and in one of his perhaps more cheery works some female does just that, though not without some assistance from an admirer, and not toward the Pleiades." The allusion is to Green's Midnight (1936) [352]: "she felt herself lifted from the earth by an irresistible force." That ending is preceded by a paragraph which closely links the end of Lowry's Chapter XI to his Chapter 12: Elizabeth, before she falls to her death, feels the abyss calling to her, the sky collapsing, and her sense as she falls is of the earth rising to meet her, "as though the whole world were drunk."
The reference to Faust is (somewhat vaguely) to the end of Gounod's opera (1859) rather than to Goethe's dramatic poem. The ending of the chapter transforms elements from its beginning: the "diamond brightness" of the volcano [322] shapes itself into diamond birds (an Australian species with sparkling plumage); the "eddies of green and orange birds" [316] become eddies of stars; and the Pleiades rise as Scorpio sets [322]. In a pun that is not altogether flippant, Yvonne (Merope) has at last become a star.
336.4 like a flock of diamond birds.
Olcott's Field Book of the Stars (1929) comments [302]: "the stars in the Pleiades are moving together like a flock of birds." A late revision [UBC 31-10, 9; & Insert C] records the change from ‘like birds’ to ‘like a flock of birds’; ‘diamond’ was an even later addition [UBC 27-17, 7 verso]: "like a flock of [beautiful] diamond birds". The phrase is repeated, with ‘diamond’, from page 323.