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125.1 Behind them walked the only living thing that shared their pilgrimage.
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Behind the first five lines of the Consul's nightmare is a specific reference to the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata [see #175.5]. The Mahaprasthanika Parva and the Svargarohana Parva, the short seventeenth and eighteenth books of the Mahabharata, tell of the journey of Yudhishthira, eldest of the Pandavas, beyond Himavat towards the light of heaven, a journey in which he is accompanied at the outset by his four brothers, Draupadi their wife, and a dog which is finally his only companion when his brothers and wife have gone, leaving him alone. The Consul's spiritual journey bears ironic similarities to Yudhishthira's; he has abdicated responsibility, he has shared his wife with others, and he has embarked upon a journey that will take him beyond death [Jakobsen, 15]. At the moment of his death, however, he will not climb his holy mountain but rather plunge into its bowels, and instead of his virtuously refusing to abandon the dog, his constant companion, it will be thrown after him, contemptuously, to the bottom of the abyss.
Lowry's source of the Consul's nightmare is H.G. Rawlinson's India: A Short Cultural History [33-34], from which Lowry noted of the Mahabharata [UBC WT 1-10, 3]:
In the end the Kauravas are all slain & Yudishthira is installed as King of Hastinapura. In the final scene the five brothers give up their regal state, and accompanied by their co-wife Draupadi & their faithful dog, set out for the Himalayas. Reaching Mount Meru, the Indian Olympus, they are admitted into Indra's heaven. The great epic reaches its sublimest heights in the description of the little band setting out on its final [last] quest: 'Behind them walked the only living thing that shared their pilgrimage, / The dog. And by degrees they reached the briny sea. Then, with souls well disciplined / they reached the northern region, & beheld with heaven-aspiring hearts / the mighty mountain Himavant'.
To David Markson [10 Sept. 1953; CL 2, 433], Lowry wrote: "Himavat business at start of Chapter V. Only God knows … And by degrees they reached the briny sea etc is quotation from some Vedantic thing or other. But the dog is a thematic note – dogs pursue the Consul. Himavat is dream transposition of Popo but also relates to Consul's childhood ... Cruel idea was to make the poor old bird have an almost ecstatic dream when actually he has the heeby-jeebies – also to point contrast with, yet continuance from, Chapter IV, where likewise there are dogs."
In Hindu mythology, Himavat is the personification of the Himalayas, to be distinguished from Meru, the abode of the gods and centre of the universe, whence the sacred Ganges flows. In the Mahaprasthanika Parva, or seventeenth book of the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira and his companions, leaving behind the “briny” sea, proceed north and behold mighty Himavat, which they must cross on their way to Mount Meru and heaven.
125.3 chenars.
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The Plantanus orientalis or oriental plane tree, the "Royal Tree" of the Mogul emperors, characterised by its great height and girth and the massiveness of its branches and foliage. Francis Younghusband comments [Kashmir, 208]: "Of the trees which grow in the level portions of the valley the chenar is by far the most striking. As it grows in Kashmir it is a king among trees, and in its autumn foliage is one of the many attractions which go to make Kashmir one of the supremely beautiful spots in the world." The addition of ‘purple’ is Lowry’s own, to link it to the theme of exile elsewhere [see #14.8 & #317.5].
To David Markson [10 Sept. 1953; CL 2, 433], Lowry wrote: "whole scene of dream is Kashmir. Scenery of Quanhuahuac [sic] is a bit like Kashmir. Source of scenery was doubtless "some little book" out of the public library, for I've never been to Kashmir." The "little book" was Francis Younghusband's Kashmir (1911), and Lowry's notes from it are in the Templeton Collection [UBC WT 1- 12].
125.4 and he was still thirsty.
Part V of Eliot's The Waste Land sets images of the parched land, thirst, and spiritual questing against a background largely derived from Indian epic, the Voice of Thunder proceeding from "over Himavant" (line 397).
125.5 ponies, knee-deep … the cool marshes .... a village nestling among the mulberries.
The Consul's vision derives from Francis Younghusband's Kashmir [35]:
But early in September the valley renews its charms and visitors return. The atmosphere has been freshened and cooled by the rains which, though they fall lightly in the valley itself, are often heavy on the surrounding mountains. The ripe rice-fields show an expanse of green and yellow often two or three miles in extent. The villages, dirty and untidy at close quarters, it is true, but nestling among the chenars, willows, poplars, walnuts, and mulberries, show as entrancing islands amidst the sea of emerald rice. Ponies browse among the marshes up to their knees in water; and groups of cattle graze along the grassy edge of the stream.
126.1 light, light, light, light, light.
In the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira's quest for the heavenly light is crowned with success (he is the first to reach heaven with his human body); here, the Consul's search for the heart of light becomes a rude awakening into the light of earthly day. There may also be an echo of "Lights, lights, lights!" [Hamlet, III.ii.286], when Claudius, "Frighted with false fire", rises from the play and rushes away.
126.2 horripilating.
L. horripilare, "to bristle with hairs"; used in the popular sense of "bristling with horror". One of Conrad Aiken's favourite words, ‘horripilation’ is defined in Blue Voyage [121], as "when your hair walks backward on cold feet".
126.3 thunderclapping.
In his Christmas Greetings to Jimmy Stern [21 Dec. 1946; UBC 2-9], Lowry comments: "you will perhaps recognise the phrase ‘hangover thunderclapping about his skull’ Chap. V, the opening: it comes out of a letter from you to me some years back, in which kittens were also boxing."
126.4 gnattering.
Chattering; or gnashing of teeth. See "like gnats" [218] for the sense of baleful influence (meteora) behind the lights and flashes in the Consul's mind and ears.
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126.5 running.
A word designed to echo Laruelle’s confusion of ‘run’ and ‘fly’ in Chapter I [see #34.1].
126.6 the impatient buskin of a William Blackstone.
A buskin is a half-boot or high shoe worn by the Indians as a protection against mud and thorns; the Consul's "more dramatic purpose", however, suggests the buskin of tragic actors (as opposed to the socks of comedy). For William Blackstone, see #51.1.
126.7 the desperate mien of his friend Wilson.
The Consul's friend Wilson, who so magnificently disappears into the jungles of darkest Oceania, corresponds, as the Consul obscurely recognises, "to some faction of his being" [362]. The 1940 Volcano [128] shows Lowry setting up the parallel between this disappearance, that of the Consul's father, the William Blackstone myth and the Consul's projected death: "there was always his poor, but magnificent, ornithologist friend who had once strolled off, and in his dress trousers too, into the wilds of New Guinea. What of the books he had lent him, before he had set out upon the fateful expedition." The Consul's Christian name was at this point William, and underlying the mystery is Edgar Allen Poe's short story, 'William Wilson' (1839), the classic treatment of the doppelganger effect (Lowry alludes to it in 'LJC' [75]): William Wilson, student at Eton and Oxford, has a double of the same name and nativity, whose moral superiority and persistent interference (noticed only by Wilson) finally infuriates the narrator to the point where he murders him, only to realize how utterly he has murdered himself.
The "University Expedition" is based the 1932 Oxford expedition to Sarawak, which included (as ornithologist) Lowry's Cambridge friend, Tom Harrisson, whose record of the trip (Borneo Jungle) was published in 1938. Harrisson was also a member of the university expedition to the New Hebrides in 1933-34. The ‘Pegaso’ Notebook [UBC 12-14] confirms the identification of Wilson with Tom Harrisson: "when he thinks of Harrisson he thinks also of Blackstone."
126.8 like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind.
An image Lowry may have derived from J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time [5th ed., 205], where Dunne suggests that the soldier in battle often does not know he has been wounded because his intensity of bodily feeling depends largely upon the degree of his concentration of attention.
127.1 It was a real snake all right.
Whatever its reality, the snake is a reminder of the serpent in the Garden of Eden and one that will insinuate itself into the Consul's mind throughout the rest of the chapter. Like the sailor in Chapter 5 of Conrad's Lord Jim, who traditionally "ought to see snakes" but does not, the Consul is obscurely proud of the fact that he is not much bothered "by anything so simple as snakes".
In earlier drafts the snake had been a twig on the pathway, and Lowry had used the phrase "this little twig of suspicion", noting on the manuscript that it was "a pinch from a poem in Poetry" [Pottinger, 77]. In the 1940 Volcano [130], the Consul half-admits that his confusion about the twig was based on "something he'd read in a Literary Digest one day", adding "it was a regular pouncing sarpint". The reference appears to be to a poem by M. Jean Prussing called 'September 2, 1939' [Poetry 55 (1939-40): 67].
What we have feared
assumes dimension and a name;
the long shadow emerges from the wall;
the smoke is flame.
So wind we heard in elm tree branches
is a voice after all;
so corners wake,
and stairways speak,
and the twisted stick becomes the snake.
127.2 disturbingly familiar.
Accentuating the sense of the dog as the Consul’s familiar, or evil spirit [see #64.5]; hence Geoffrey’s comment, “Strange”, which obscurely hints at this.
127.3 Tequila Añejo de Jalisco.
Sp. "aged tequila of Jalisco". Jalisco, northwest of Mexico City, is the state celebrated for its production of tequila (the town of Tequila is in this state). Compare the poem that begins: "Most nauseous of all drinks, what is your spell?" [CP, #23], also addressed to "Tequila of Jalisco". The brand was originally Tequila Añejo de Tlacolula, now modified to attune with the poem. There are various grades of tequila añejo, depending upon how long it has been aged in casks before bottling (the time varies from a few months to seven years, the varieties being proportionately more expensive). Regardless of its quality, the bottle in his garden (“fortunate” in the sense that he had been wise enough to plant it there before Hugh arrived) offers the Consul a choice directly like that of Adam.
127.4 it did not strike him as being nearly so 'ruined'.
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Were the Consul aware of Nature's correspondences he might be more apprehensive. The "superb plantains" [#65.9] and "splendid trumpet vines" [#66.9] would appear obtrusively phallic; the "brave and stubborn pear trees" might hide a snake [#140.2]; the papayas seem grotesque (as in earlier drafts); and the treacherous bougainvillea could conceal spikes and spiders [#142.3]. The garden also has a "murderous machete" and an "oddly shaped fork", the latter undoubtedly similar to the one on the bottle of anís [see #4.3].
128.1 a little vision of order ... blended ... into a strangely sub-aqueous view.
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Joseph Conrad's favourite image of the ordered life is a well-found ship, controlled and directed on a voyage of discovery; in the Consul's mind such a vision of order is swamped by the rising waters of catastrophe, which, as in Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth [see #189.8], threaten to engulf his world.
128.2 multitudinously blazing south-south-east. Or was it north-north-west.
Two Shakespearean references blend to suggest a state of mind not quite normal:
(a) multitudinously. Incongruously used of the indigo sun, the word suggests the equally extreme image in Macbeth [II.ii.6l-64]:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
(b) north-north-west. In Hamlet [II.ii.405-07], Hamlet, feigning madness, cryptically comments to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."
128.3 ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN? ¿QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!
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Translated by the Consul as: "You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!" but, as he appreciates [128], the words on the sign seem to have more question marks than they should have. The correct version is given later [232]: ¿Le gusta este jardín, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan! – "Do you like this garden that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!" As Lowry says ['LJC', 74], "the real translation can be in a certain sense even more horrifying." Lowry was concerned not only that the reader should be aware of the correct version of the sign [see #232.9], but also that he should have some hint of the occult implications of eviction, as outlined in his preface to the French translation of his novel [Woodcock, 13]:
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In the Jewish Cabbala the abuse of magic powers is compared to drunkenness or the abuse of wine, and is expressed, if I remember rightly, by the Hebrew word sod. Another attribution of the word sod signifies garden, or neglected garden, and the Cabbala itself is sometimes considered a garden (naturally similar to that where grew the tree of forbidden fruit which gave us the Knowledge of Good and Evil), with the Tree of Life planted in the middle.
The novel, Lowry claimed, is concerned primarily with the forces in man which cause him to be terrified of himself; its allegory "that of the Garden Of Eden, the Garden representing the world, from which we ourselves run Perhaps slightly more danger of being evicted than when I wrote the book" ['LJC', 66]. The theme of eviction is implicit everywhere: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise; exclusion from one's personal Garden of Etla [see #12.1]; the failure to attain Yudhishthira's heaven [see #125.1]; the fall from the Cabbalistic tree of life [see #39.3]; the betrayal and loss of the mysteries [see #289.2]; the failure to observe Voltaire's final dictum in Candide, "il faut cultiver notre jardin"; the lost innocence of William Blake; even Peter Rabbit: "everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit" [UTV, 175]. The Garden of Eden held both the tree of life and the forbidden fruit, with the contingent responsibility to exercise choice freely and to act responsibly or else to suffer for abuse of that freedom. Lowry was aware of the terrible forces within man that force him to choose, freely, his own destruction.
Lowry's sense that the Consul's reading of the sign was wrong came very late, which meant some fancy footwork to make the correction work. To Albert Erskine [22 June 1946; CL 1, 586], Lowry said he had copied it down in 1938 from a little public garden in Oaxaca, but, reading between his evasions, had mangled the punctuation and so the sense (also the spelling, with ‘esta’ and ‘los destruyen’), He first resisted Erskine's insistence that these be corrected, saying that he could not sacrifice the erroneous question mark nor translate the second line otherwise than "Why is it yours?", since having lived with it so long that is what it meant to him [UBC 2-5]. Eventually, by attributing the error to the Consul he was able both to cover his tracks and to create a more dramatic scenario. As he said to David Markson [23 Jan. 1953; CL 2, 509], the sign means "nothing more than don't pick the flowers", but now renders itself as "a far more serious injunction". It has since appeared in the Borda Gardens in Cuernavaca, a nice example of life imitating art, but no trace of any “little new public” garden remains.
129.1 the subtle bouquet of pitch and teredos.
The Consul associates the taste of tequila with the hulls of sailing ships, caulked with pitch yet infested with teredos or "shipworms" – a kind of worm-like mollusc that bores into and infests submerged wood. The connection arises because he has just been thinking of mescal, closely akin to tequila, and the best bottles of mescal invariably include "Gusano", the worm from the maguey plant, considered by regular drinkers of mescal an essential ingredient of each bottle.
The words ‘pitch and teredos’ have further connotations of damnation. In Dante's Inferno [XXI], pitch is used to punish sinners in hell, while teredos are like the worms that devour body and soul. The OED offers an early instance of teredos: "the body's infirmities ... are few and scant, if compared to the soul's which being a better piece of timber, hath the more teredines breeding in it" [T. Adams, Soul's Sickness, 1616]. There is a further allusion to the devil's pitchfork [see #4.3]; the “subtle bouquet” is that of hell.
129.2 Mr Quincey.
The Consul's American neighbour, a retired walnut grower, whose name inappropriately evokes that of Thomas de Quincey, English essayist and opium eater [see #101.4]. Jan Gabrial mentions in her memoir [Inside the Volcano, 122] that an American vice-consul lived next door, implying that this suggested Geoffrey Firmin's profession. She describes him [161] as "a lofty gentleman, thoroughly fed up with what he considered a drunken hooligan next door and most punctilious about avoiding us both."
129.3 by some Aztec.
The Aztec civilization dominated central Mexico before the invasion by Spaniards led by Cortés reduced their city of Tenochtitlán to rubble [see #27.3]. The Jefe de Jardineros, or head gardener, who condemns the Consul in Chapter XII, embodies on one level the demands of the old Aztec gods for human sacrifice as retribution for the agonies inflicted upon the native peoples by the conquistadors and those of European blood [see #76.3 & #212.2]. The phrase was a late addition, engendered by Lowry's need to correct the reading of the sign [see #128.3]; but it accords with the Consul's sense, at some level of his private mythology, of himself as that sacrificial victim.
130.1 my old and good friend, Abraham Taskerson.
Since Abraham Taskerson is clearly modelled on Conrad Aiken [see #16.6] and since many details of the following pages were borrowed quite shamelessly by Lowry from Aiken, this tribute forms an appoggiatura for what is to follow.
130.2 a figure ... in some kind of mourning.
The figure is both that of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before the Crucifixion and the recurrence of that "other" [see #91.5] whose presence the Consul has by now begun to take almost for granted.
130.3 Parián! ... a name suggestive of old marble and the gale-swept Cyclades.
The OED (which Lowry has clearly used) defines ‘parian’ as "Belonging to the island of Paros, one of the Cyclades, famed for a white marble highly valued among the ancients for statuary." Previous notes so far have indicated: #8.1, that the frequent mention of Parián in Chapter I looks ahead ominously to the Consul's death in Chapter XII; #75.3, that the name ‘Parián’ is closely associated with the Tamil paraiyan, "a drummer," and with the word ‘pariah’ (hence there are ominous associations between the recurrent sound of drumming and the frequent apparition of the pariah dog throughout the day); #115.2, that Lowry has built up his fictional Parián from recognisable elements of other places – Chapultepec, Cuautla, Amecameca, Tepotzlán and (above all) Oaxaca.
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The "real" town of Parián is in Oaxaca State, some twenty miles north-east of Nochixtlán, a village so tiny as to be non-existent on most maps, though during the Revolution of 1910-20 it had some strategic significance as a railway centre. Parián was personally significant to Lowry because it was at that railway station he waved farewell, for the last time, to Juan Fernando Marquez [DATG, 208]. The name unwittingly commemorates his dead Zapotecan friend, who, like the Consul, was shot in a drunken barroom quarrel.
Another meaning of ‘Parián’, more correctly, El Parián, is "the market-place". The name was associated with a market in the Philippines (from whence an annual galleon was sent to Mexico) and adopted in the eighteenth century by the wealthy Mexican Philippine traders as the name of their palacio or headquarters in Mexico City. The Parián was sacked in an uprising in 1828 and finally destroyed by orders of Santa Anna in 1843. Lowry would have known of its existence because in the lobby of the Hotel Canada, Mexico City, there was a huge picture of the city centre at the end of the eighteenth century, inscribed underneath as being "del Palacio Nacional; de la Cathedral, del Parián, y estatua de Carlos IV" ("of the National Palace, the Cathedral, the Parián, and statue of Charles IV").
130.4 a tiny fifth side to his estate.
Markson suggests [76] that in much early architecture the apex of a four-faced pyramid or spire was considered a fifth "side", the one closest to God.
130.5 the eternal horror of opposites.
The Consul's reflection encapsulates such notions as: the Taoist Yin and Yang (when these are properly balanced, tranquillity prevails); Ouspensky's world as the world of the unity of opposites [Tertium Organum, Ch. 21, 242]; Blake's contraries, without which there is no progression (particularly his marriage of heaven and hell); the eternal opposition of the male and female principles; Coleridge's reconciliation of opposites in the Biographia Literaria; and, above all, Jakob Boehme's assumption of antithesis as the basic law of being: "that all manifestation involves opposition, notably of God and Nature, that existence emerges from a process of conflict between pairs of contrasted principles (light and darkness, love and anger, good and evil, and so forth) and that in this way the universe is to be seen as the revelation of God" [OCEL]. In occult thought, a theory of opposites is required to account for such matters as suffering, chaos, and evil; the "eternal horror" is largely the agony caused by the attempt to reconcile opposites. In Lunar Caustic [11], Bill Plantagenet agonises: "I am sent to save my father, to find my son, to heal the eternal horror of three, to resolve the immedicable horror of opposites." The inability to reconcile opposites prevents the Consul's salvation through love.
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The principle of opposites is essential to the Cabbalistic notion of equilibrium [see #39.3(b)], here demonstrated by the Consul almost falling into the barranca. As Epstein notes [12], it is a basic premise of occultism that "the world of opposites merges into equilibrium", but that equilibrium is so delicately balanced that a slight tilt may invert the tree of life and send one plunging into the abyss; this also constitutes the "eternal horror". Sherrill Grace comments [36-37]: "If the tree were telescoped, Kether (the spiritual world) would coincide with Malkuth (the material world), thereby symbolizing the mystical unity of the two. The doctrine that Heaven and Hell are the same place or that the way up is the way down, ideas that tormented and fascinated Lowry, are basic to Achad's organic Tree."
130.6 Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant.
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The Consul is quoting from John Marston's 'To euerlasting Obliuion', the final poem appended to The Scourge of Villanie (1598), a set of eleven satirical satires (dedicated "To his most esteemed, and best beloved Selfe") in which Marston sets out to castigate the follies and vices of his age. Having done so, he concludes with a wish for peace:
Thou mighty gulfe, insatiate cormorant,
Deride me not, though I seeme petulant
To fall into thy chops. Let others pray
For euer their faire Poems flourish may.
But as for mee, hungry Obliuion
Deuoure me quick, accept my orizon:
Marston's image is itself derived from Shakespeare's Richard II [II.i.38-39]: "Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, / Consuming means, soon preys upon itself." The speech, by John of Gaunt, ends with the line: "How happy then were my ensuing death."
Writing to Nordahl Grieg [8 Sept. 1931; CL 1, 103-04], Lowry cited Rupert Brooke to the effect that Marston (1575-1634) was one of the most sinister, least understood figures in Elizabethan literature, and that "more than anyone else" he had determined the channels in which the great flood of revenge literature would flow. He told Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6] that he had not italicised the quotation, "since it is, as it were, de profundis."
130.7 this immense intricate donga.
A donga is a native South African word meaning a channel or gully formed by the action of water; a ravine or watercourse with steep sides. At the Caldy golf course, the first and ninth fairways were crossed by a small tangled ditch, known locally as “the Donga”.
131.1 general Tartarus and gigantic jakes.
Tartarus is often loosely equated with Hades but may refer to the infernal abyss beneath Hades, home of the monster Typhoes [see #339.2], into which Zeus threw the rebel Titans who had revolted against his authority. The barrancas surrounding Cuernavaca are used all the time for rubbish disposal and are hence full of unsightly and unsanitary piles of waste that receive an inadequate flushing only in the rainy season. Jakes is common Elizabethan slang for "toilets". The word is used by Conrad Aiken (Kilgallin, 147, detects a privy pun on Aiken's home, Jeakes House) in Ushant [296], where he describes: "the vipers and dead dogs, and the human corpses, and human filth, or jakes, of the hideous barranca that cleft the town of Cuernavaca like a hairy and festering wound."
131.2 cloacal.
Referring to toilets or sewers. Compare the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer of Rome, supposedly presided over by the goddess Cloacina.
One of the Titans, who benefited mankind by stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to men. By so doing he incurred the wrath of Zeus, who chained him to a rock in the Caucasus, where all day long an eagle (or vulture) tore at his liver, which grew whole again during the night. Only after many generations did Hercules, with the consent of Zeus, shoot the eagle and free the heroic rebel. As the Consul is surely aware, the role of Prometheus as bringer of light and saviour (he is imagined [202] as retrieving lost golf balls from the ravine) is at odds with his description here as "cloacal".
131.4 Chester-le-Street.
A coal and iron-mining centre in north Durham, in the heart of the northern industrial region; described in the 1976 Shell Guide to England [793], as "very old, and not much to show for it."
131.5 that mighty Johnsonian prospect.
The allusion is to Boswell's Life of Johnson [Wed. 6 July 1763], when, among the guests dining with Boswell and Johnson at the Mitre, was the Rev. John Ogilvie, who was unlucky enough to choose for the topic of his conversation the praises of his native country, and made the unfortunate observation that Scotland had "a great many noble wild prospects": "JOHNSON. 'I believe, Sir, you have a great many. Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!'"
131.6 Liverpool, the Liver building.
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Liverpool, the great port on the Mersey, with seven miles of docks and countless shipping offices, was the outward destination of Melville's Redburn and the home port of Lowry's Dana Hilliot in Ultramarine. The waterfront is dominated by the Royal Liver Building, the offices of an insurance company; a seventeen-story building designed by Walter Thomas and built in 1908. The etymology of ‘liver’ is obscure –it supposedly referred to the bulrushes growing along the river bank – but the citizens of Liverpool invented a legendary "liver bird" to explain the name. Melville writes in Redburn [Ch. XXX]: "The bird forms part of the city arms, and is an imaginary representation of a now extinct fowl called the ‘Liver’, said to have inhabited a ‘pool’, which antiquarians assert once covered a good part of the ground where Liverpool now stands; and from that bird, and this pool, Liverpool derives its name." The 295-foot towers of the Royal Liver Building are topped by these birds, and one is placed in the city's coat of arms.
131.7 Caegwyrle Ale.
More correctly, Caergwyrle Ale; until 1948 brewed by the firm of Lassal & Sharman in the town of Caergwyrle, Flint County, North Wales (the brewery became a paint factory and then a graphite plant). The ale was popular in Flint and Cheshire (rather than Liverpool) between the wars, and in Lowry's short story 'Enter One in Sumptuous Armour' [P & S, 232], the schoolboy hero thinks longingly of it.
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More usually, ‘Q-Ships’; also known as ‘Mystery Ships’ or ‘Hush-hush Ships’. These were gunboats disguised as merchantmen used by the Royal Navy in World War I to tempt submarines to the attack in an effort to curb the increasingly heavy losses sustained at the hands of German U-boats. Guns were concealed beneath false hatches, and when a U-boat signalled the ship to stop, a boat with a "panic party" would leave the Q-ship and row off to a safe distance, leaving a gun crew on board, waiting for the submarine to present a suitable target [see #32.2]. Lowry was taken by his brother Wilfrid to see a Q-Ship in the Liverpool Docks; Bradbrook dates this as 1918 [xi], but it was almost certainly a few years later, after the war, when such a vessel was on public display.
131.9 Dr Livingstone, I presume.
The phrase made famous by Henry Morton Stanley on meeting David Livingstone at Ujiji, Central Africa, 10 November 1871. David Livingstone (1813-73) was a Scottish minister and explorer in darkest Africa whose long disappearance had caused concern. An expedition led by Stanley and financed by the New York Herald set out to find him, and on 2 July 1872 the Herald printed a "special from Central Africa" describing the crucial moment [Stevenson's Quotations, 2283]:
Preserving a calmness of exterior before the Arabs which was hard to simulate as he reached the group, Mr Stanley said: –
"Doctor Livingstone, I presume?"
A smile lit up the features of the hale white man as he answered: –
"Yes, that is my name."
132.1 Soda Springs.
A small town in southeast Idaho, named for its carbonic springs. The town, like Mr Quincey, epitomises the values of Middle America, by which the Consul is found distinctly wanting.
132.2 I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger.
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Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), the French painter known as le douanier, "the customs officer" (though his rank in that service was much lower). He is known for his "jungle" scenes, at least two of which ('Tropical Storm with Tiger' (1891) and 'Tiger Attacking a Buffalo' (1908) feature tigers. Rousseau's style, dismissed by his contemporaries as "le style concièrge", is deliberately childlike and artless. A legend developed, quite without foundation, that Rousseau as a young man had gone to Mexico and served under Maximilian to get the background for his jungles. The ‘Pegaso’ Notebook [UBC 12-14] records, as one of the earliest phrases for the novel: "I expect to see Rousseau riding out of there on a tiger." Also recorded is "He thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it" [see #134.8].
133.1 Tehuacan water .... And a little gaseosa.
Mineral waters with supposedly beneficial effects [see #6.4 & #26.1]. The Consul's nervous giggle, ‘tee-hee’ (deriving directly from Aiken's Blue Voyage [78]), suggests a cross-reference to that later invocation of intoxicating libations of soma [307].
133.2 the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust.
The seven-year locust is mentioned in Blue Voyage [65]; more correctly, it should be the ‘seventeen-years' locust’, the cicada septemdecim, a North American species so called because it is said to appear only at intervals of seventeen years. A carapace is the hard upper shell of a tortoise and various other animals, but the word is not usually applied to insects. In Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning [Ch. 2, 42], the process of the word taking the place of the thought is likened to the shedding of the carapace.
133.3 What if Adam wasn't really banished from the place at all?
In the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden [Genesis 3], Adam's disobedience is punished by his eviction from the Garden. The Consul suggests that this is to be understood metaphorically, that the loss of Eden is equivalent to the loss of God's grace and that Adam's real punishment was to have to go on living in the Garden, which he loathed (an idea, Kilgallin suggests [171] that Lowry may have found in Shaw's Back to Methuselah). Walker [256] sees a parallel here with Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940), where the whisky-priest is convinced that his punishment is having to stay on in Tabasco. A marginal gloss [UBC 29-16, 6]: "Pangloss, Voltaire, Adam" suggests Voltaire's Candide, with its conclusion, "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."
133.4 God, the first agrarian, a kind of Cárdenas.
The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) was notable for his policy of agrarian reform, by which many large estates and haciendas were broken up and the land redistributed to those who worked it [see #107.4]. The "existing historical circumstances" reinforce the parallel between the Consul and Adam made by Laruelle [22]; as an owner of property and a foreigner, the Consul is now in danger of being evicted from Mexico.
134.1 realpolitik.
Ger. "real politics"; politics based on pragmatism, as distinguished from those based on theoretical, ethical, or moralistic considerations; often, a euphemism for power politics.
134.2 licentia vatum.
More correctly, licentia vatium, "poetic licence"; the right of an author to manipulate his materials without strict regard for the literal truth.
134.3 j'adoube.
Fr. "I adjust"; in chess, said by a player who wishes to adjust a piece without committing himself to moving it as the rules normally require (the open fly here "verifying" the Consul's failure to make a move towards Yvonne recently). Until the galleys Lowry elaborated this point, despite his principle that one must represent, not tell: "J'adoube, he said, hastily, using strangely a phrase that Taskerson used in chess, meaning I adjust, without however meaning to make a move." Erskine rightly advised its excision.
134.4 the Old Man.
Naval slang for a ship’s captain; here applied to God, as an Old Testament Nobodaddy. Lowry and Conrad Aiken usually referred to Malcolm's father in this way.
134.5 scorpions and leafcutter ants.
Traditional conceptions of Paradise would preclude such pests, but Mr Quincey's patient questioning about the Consul's wife has quickly turned heaven into hell.
134.6 my-little-snake-in-the-grass-my-little-anguish-in-herba.
A reference to Virgil's Eclogue III [l92-93], words of the Shepherd Damoetas in contention with Menalcas: "Qui legitis flores et humi nascentia fraga, / frigidus, o pueri, fugite hinc, latet anguis in herba" ("Ye who cull flowers and low-growing strawberries, away from here, lads; a chill snake lurks in the grass"). The Consul's words respond indirectly to Mr Quincey's "I think he went out with your wife", and they inform his later greeting to Hugh [141]: "Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass."
134.7 Mr Quincey's cat.
The Consul's playful puns have an edge to them:
(a) Priapusspuss. Priapus, son of Dionysus and Aphrodite and god of procreation, was usually depicted with an enormous phallus (the reference thus extending the latent sexuality of ‘snake in the grass’).
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(b) Oedipusspusspuss. Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother and blinded himself when he saw what he had done; also the cat whose fate has already anticipated that of the Consul [see #89.1].
(c) Xicotancatl. Xicohtencatl the Younger, commander of the Tlaxcalans who opposed Cortés as the Spaniards passed through Tlaxcala [see #301.3]; any hint of Tlaxcala inevitably suggests betrayal.
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Lowry is paying tribute to Conrad Aiken, who liked both cats and puns (he had a cat called ‘Oedipus Simplex’). In Blue Voyage [83[, Demarest reflects: "The cat's prayer. Give us this day our daily mouse. And forgive us our trespusses as we forgive those who trespuss against us .... I really ought to give up this awful habit of punning." Writing to Seymour Lawrence [28 Nov. 1951; CL 2, 465], Lowry confirmed Aiken as the source of the cat puns. In the 1940 Volcano the cat was called ‘Nurmahal’ ["Light of the Palace"], after the favourite of Shah Jehan for whom the Taj Mahal was built.
134.8 She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it.
An observation originally made in Cuernavaca by Conrad Aiken, but claimed by Lowry for his own, as Aiken notes in Ushant [356-57]:
And after all, in that so-long-elaborated symbiosis, who was to say just what was whose, and just which properties, of perception or invention, belonged to either? "He thinks I'm a bird in a tree" – so D. [Aiken] had observed of the little eat, at his feet, in the garden, who, hearing D.'s low whistle, had looked up at him with startled inquiry; and Hambo [Lowry], chuckling at the empathy, and empathizing with it himself (at one remove), could already be seen in the very act of entering that note, that bird-note, amongst the pile of other notes, in that creative nest of his on the verandah, where the new book was taking shape.
135.1 Or was that another William Blackstone?
The "other" is Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), English jurist, King's Counsel, and MP, best known for his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) in which [II.25, 393] 'On the Rights of Things', is considered the status of animals ferae naturae:
For if the pheasants escape from the mew, or the fishes from the trunk, and are seen wandering at large in their proper element, they become ferae naturae again; and are free and open to the first occupant that has ability to seize them. But while they thus continue my qualified or defeasible property, they are as much under the protection of the law, as if they were absolutely and indefeasibly mine: and an action will lie against any man that detains them from me, or unlawfully destroys them. It is also as much felony by common law to steal such of them as are fit for food, as it is to steal tame animals: but not so, if they are only kept for pleasure, curiosity, or whim, as dogs, bears, cats, apes, parrots, and singing birds; because their value is not intrinsic, but depending only on the caprice of the owner.
The 1940 Volcano [136] foregrounded the comment about cats being animals not fit for food by having Mr Quincey reply, "Right here, in this town, during the Revolution, they barbecued 'em in the market place." As Quincey became more morose and taciturn in subsequent versions, that remark was deleted from the drafts.
In a 1937 essay, 'Literature in Massachussetts' [Collected Criticism, 85], where he discusses William Blackstone as a prototype of New England individualism, Conrad Aiken uses the phrase ‘Another William Blackstone’ of Roger Williams, author of a philosophical treatise on freedom of the will and one who acted similarly, "the most extreme and outcast soul in America".
135.2 Or so Abraham.
This half-acknowledges Lowry's indebtedness to Aiken for the William Blackstone story [see #51.1], if not for such details as Rousseau riding out of the jungle on a tiger, or the cat thinking of the Consul as a tree with a bird in it. The Consul's decisiveness is equally "borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the genius and his interest in cats."
135.3 the Indians are in here.
An image extended [287] by that of the soul with her savage and traitorous Tlaxcalans, her noches tristes, her pale Moctezuma; deriving, Markson suggests [82], from William Blake's "All deities reside in the human breast" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).
135.4 the final frontier of consciousness.
In the essay 'Literature in Massachussetts' [Collected Criticism, 91], Aiken described Melville as "the writer who carried fatherest and deepest that perilous frontier of mystic consciousness which had always been the Puritan's fiercest concern." In terms suggestive of the Consul's Great Battle to be fought in Chapter VII, Aiken adds that the white whale within must be faced and fought "on the frontier of awareness" with the last shred of one's moral courage and despair. The sentiment is echoed in his Great Circle [249], whence Lowry presumably drew the phrase, when Andrew Cather considers the death-watch beetle that will precede him "on his march to the frontiers of consciousness".
136.1 a clock was striking.
Throughout the day the Consul's sense of time is out of joint, but there is already a suggestion of the fears of Faustus, who has "but one bare hour to live". In earlier drafts the clock was identified as that of the San Francisco Church, the largest in Cuernavaca (near the Borda Gardens). The sound of the bells was originally hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, then in revision sorrow, sorrow, or alas, alas, the dolente … dolore coming much later. Compare the “doom, doom, doom” of the Cambridge bells of In Ballast.
136.2 Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth.
The paragraph combines a number of references to Thomas De Quincey's essay, 'On the Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' (1823), one of the first important critical articles on English literature. De Quincey tries to analyse why this particular passage of Macbeth [II.iii] should create such "a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity" and concludes that it is the moment when the goings on of human life are suddenly resumed that makes us so intensely aware "of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them." Or, in the words cited by the Consul, from near the end of the essay:
Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is "unsexed"; Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder must be insulated – cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relations to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.
With the world of devils suddenly revealed to him by the striking clock and whispering wings, the Consul stands between the two realms of human and fiendish nature; he too experiences the feeling of vertigo as he steps back into the world of human affairs, made sensible that the world of ordinary life has been suddenly arrested.
136.3 knock, knock, knock, who's there?
The childish game (popular on radio music-hall shows during the 1930s) initiates a complex of interrelated puns:
(a) Catastrophe. From Gk. katastrephein, "to overturn"; a sudden denouement or violent change, especially a disastrous one. The term has particular reference to Greek tragedy.
(b) Catastrophysicist. One who believes in catastrophism, the theory that geological changes are the result of sudden and violent physical causes rather than continuous and uniform processes (a forerunner of modern catastrophe theory); also, one who believes that the millennium will be initiated by a sudden catastrophic event.
(c) Katabasis to cat abysses. Katabasis, from Gk. katabainein, "to go down," is literally a going down; in particular, a military retreat such as that of the Greeks described in Xenophon's Anabasis. The word leads naturally to ‘cat abysses’, recapitulating the fate of poor Oedipuss [89], and anticipating that of the Consul [375].
(d) Cathartes atratus. A kind of vulture (the Penguin ‘cat hartes’ is an error). From Gk. kathairein, "to clean", and L. atratus; "clothed in black." The Cathartidae are a New World sub-order of Falconiformes (or vulture). There is strictly no Cathartes atratus; there is, however, the Coragyps atratus, or American Black Vulture, of a different sub-order. Lowry's term derives from W.H. Hudson's Idle Days in Patagonia [47]: "on the higher branches innumerable black vultures (Cathartes atratus) were perched, waiting all the dreary day long for fair weather to fly abroad in search of food."
136.4 murdering sleep.
Macbeth [II.i.36-41], where Macbeth, having murdered Duncan, is tormented by guilt:
Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
136.5 as if by magic.
Dr Vigil exemplifies to the Consul what a white magician should be: one who uses his magical powers over nature for the betterment of humanity and life. Nevertheless, the Consul is instinctively suspicious of the doctor's "secretive prowling", and his sense of a conspiracy leads him [147] to reject the proposed journey to Guanajuato and "life".
137.1 Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders.
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Recalling the Samaritan affair [see #32.2], the Consul aligns himself with Christ, who carried the cross as an emblem of the sins of the world, and Atlas, who shouldered its weight. The headline, ‘Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker’, is a Freudian compression of all the Consul's subconscious fears of drink, death, the Hell Bunker and the abyss.
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137.2 ectoplasm.
In spiritualism, a luminous vapour supposedly emanating from a medium's body during a trance. The scene suggests Rembrandt's 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp' (1632).
137.3 Qué t– .... Por favor.
Sp. "Hello .... Please." Qué tal is a common greeting, and Vigil's hoarse request, as the Consul loudly and loyally acknowledges, is that there be no indication to Mr Quincey that the doctor is in no fit shape himself; and hence the irony of Vigil magnificently giving away the Consul's "whole show" [143].
138.1 katzenjammer.
From Ger. Katz, "cat" and Jammer, "noise"; a word popularised by the comic strip, The Katzenjammer Kids, created by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 and starring Hans and Fritz, whose attacks upon authority and the English language ("Society iss nix") were nothing short of devastating. The word was a late riposte [UBC 29-17, 15] to Vigil's "cat’s pyjamas", which had long been present. Jan Gabrial describes a hangover thus [Inside the Volcano, 3l], testifying to Lowry's use of the word in this way.
138.2 I must comport myself here like ... like an apostle.
A phrase used one year later by Dr Vigil [4], as he reflects on his failure to save the Consul. The oddity is explained by Sp. comportarse, "to behave".
138.3 maguey.
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A general name for the agave cactus, from which pulque, tequila and mescal are derived [see #109.3 & #216.2]. There are several varieties of maguey, common throughout the highland; not all produce alcohol, but each is characterised by spiky, splaying greyish-green leaves. It is sometimes known in English as the century plant because of its infrequent blooming (eight to twenty-five years).
138.4 delirium tremens.
The DTs; from L. delirare, "to rave" and tremere, "to tremble"; induced by excessive use of alcohol that leads to sweating, anxiety and hallucinations. Lord Jim [Ch. 5] offers a classic case of DTs "of the worst kind", the patient seeing millions of huge pink toads.
138.5 the Pope's illness.
The prolonged and finally fatal decline of Pius XI [see #230.2].
138.6 progresión .... a ratos.
Sp. "progression ... from time to time"; that is, intermittently, with a pun on Sp. ratas, "rats" (made explicit in the drafts [UBC 26-16, 10-12]: "You mean, not cats ... but rather rats"). The pun anticipates the Consul's great question [218]: "Why do people see rats?"
Lowry attributes this phrase to his friend Antonio [Dec.1937; CL 1, 186], in a letter that makes the same pun and associates it with both mescal and spying. Grace identifies Antonio Cerillo as the manager of the Hotel Francia, but in the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-16, 549] Lowry writes "Zomilla (Cerillo)", as if to suggest the former is the real name (this may be the ‘Antonio’ who had a brief encounter with Jan). The address of Juan Fernando Márquez (in fact, that of the Banco Ejidal) is given [619] as Independencia #25, Oaxaca.
139.1 the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol.
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A parody of the kind of title used by adepts of Masonic or Cabbalistic societies, yet not altogether facetious, since Lowry genuinely believed the agonies of the alcoholic were similar to those of the mystic ['LJC', 71], and since Vigil, if he is (in the Consul’s mind) a white magician, is an "adept". The parody was further marked in an earlier draft [UBC 26-19, A]: "the Giant Institutional Brotherhood of Alcohol"; compare Frater Achad's QBL [63], "the Great Brotherhood of Adepts".
139.2 dreaming lions.
To David Markson [3 Oct. 1952; CL 2, 604], Lowry related this phrase to Hemingway. Grace [605] identifies the final words of The Old Man and the Sea, the old man's dream of lions coming down to the beach. The connection is Lowry's later speculation, as Hemingway's novel first appeared in 1952.
140.1 huge butterflies ... blouses.
Yvonne [97] was wearing such a blouse (for Geoff) when Hugh saw her and felt in his heart a pain conspicuously absent from the Consul's image of torn-up multi-coloured love letters, these in turn (for the reader) suggesting Yvonne’s earlier vision of butterflies.
Although the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden is popularly supposed to be an apple tree (because of the similarity of L. malum, "evil", and malum, "apple"), there is a tradition in English, dating from at least Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, associating pear trees with sexual infidelity and deception. The age gap between the Consul and Yvonne is hinted at in Chaucer's figures of Januarie and May.
The Consul's mind moves from the image of a snake up a tree dropping rings round its prey to the ancient game of horse-shoe-pitching, to the good-luck symbols on a wedding cake that are thrown after newly-weds, to the Horsehoe Falls at Niagara, and finally to his wife's infidelities, "with heels flying" [see #46.5].
140.4 local horticultural college.
An Escuela de Agricultura was established in Cuernavaca in 1913, but no longer exists. Projects of this kind were part of President Cardenas' plans for ejido reform [see #107.4].
140.5 the insect ... flew out as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death.
In the 1940 Volcano [142] and in earlier drafts of this passage [UBC 26-26, 14], the insect's miraculous escape led to curious speculation: "Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies." ... "Perhaps he thought it was a flying mouse." ... "Perhaps the soul does leave the body behind when we die, like a locust leaves the carapace. Or do you think perhaps ... that the body is like the cat, and wants to devour us, soul and all." In medieval and renaissance art the human soul was often painted as a butterfly or bird leaving the corpse through the mouth and winging its way to heaven. In a letter to the TLS [16 Feb. 1967, 127], Conrad Aiken discussed the background to this passage:
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It was not an insect the little cat had caught, but a wide-winged dragon-fly, and it was not Malcolm who observed this astonishing scene, or drew the conclusion from it, but my wife and myself. My report to Malcolm is again repeated almost word for word. Except that some of the humour has escaped. For it was exceedingly funny: I've never in my life seen a cat look so utterly astounded – clearly, it thought it was flying. And then, when it opened its mouth, nonplussed by the whirring of the wings against its whiskers, and saw the lovely creature whizz into the sky, never was there such humiliation. The little cat – a stray whom we had befriended – slunk off round the villa as if it had been guilty of the ultimate of crimes, or uncatliness, and quite obviously still wondering.
141.1 but suppose he's absolutely adamant.
This snatch of over-heard conversation reinforces all the Consul's paranoid fears of a web being spun around him and makes him the more determined not to be a party to any plot requiring him to leave Mexico. He too expects to see "spiders" everywhere.
141.2 Suchiquetal.
Xochiquetzal, the Aztec goddess of flowers, whose name means "flower-feather"; the wife of Cintcotl, god of Maize, and companion of Piltzintecutl, the sun-god. She is often considered the first woman, from whom all mankind descended, but at some stage she was translated into the patron goddess of prostitutes. In the 1940 Volcano [144], Lowry was more explicit: in reply to Yvonne's question, "Who is she?" the Consul said: "The Mexican Eve. Only she disgraced her posterity by gathering roses with spikes on them." Lowry found this story in Donnelly [199-200], who, pointing to parallels of Eve in Indian legend, records: "a legend of Suchiquecal, who disobediently gathered roses from a tree, and thereby disgraced and injured herself and all her posterity." In Lewis Spence, The Gods of Mexico [190], the goddess is named Suchiquezal, and the further detail is given that, having sinned by plucking the roses (Yvonne's arms are full of bougainvillea) she was unable to look up to heaven.
141.3 you old snake in the grass.
Underlying the cheery familiarity is considerable venom: the Consul cannot forget or forgive Hugh's betrayal of him, a betrayal which even now he feels might have been repeated [see #134.6]. It may even be that the apparently coincidental arrival of Hugh and Yvonne is part of a wider plot to get him out of the way, or at least out of the country.
141.4 Why then should he be sitting in the bathroom?
From here to the end of the chapter, scenes alternate between the specious present of 12:15, when the Consul awakes with a glass of flat beer in his hand, to various moments of the past hour when he has been virtually a somnambulist. Lowry comments ['LJC', 74]: “it should be clear that the Consul has a blackout and that the second part in the bathroom is concerned with what he remembers half deliriously of the missing hour.” The episode as a whole illustrates Dunne's "concussion" of the brain which "appears to destroy all memory of the events which immediately preceded the accident", and may parody his notion of "large blocks of otherwise perfectly normal personal experience displaced from their proper positions in Time" [An Experiment with Time, 20 & 55].
Asals argues [Making, 228, 326] that the major structural change to this chapter was the "flashback" scenario, the intercutting of the anguished present with bits of the recovered past, to achieve a discontinuous set of fragments full of ellipses and uncertainties. In earlier revisions, Hugh had wanted to return to Mexico City, and a long debate followed, of which remains only the fragment beginning "Nonsense" [142]. The passage on the Bougainvillea, earlier a literary embarrassment, generated intensity as Lowry dramatised not only the Consul's imperfect recall of events but the process of their partial recovery.
141.5 A procession of thought like little elderly animals filed through the Consul's mind.
Compare Claude Houghton, Julian Grant Loses His Way [41]: "A succession of dreary thoughts began to lumber across his mind like a train of camels crossing a desert."
141.6 the new moon with the old one in its arms.
A phenomenon sometimes seen just after New Moon, when not only is the crescent visible but also too, in faint outline, the rest of the moon's disc; this is because of "earthshine" or "earthlight", or sunlight reflected from the earth back onto the moon. The literary reference is to the anonymous thirteenth century ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, who, dispatched to sea, has justified forebodings of disaster:
Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone,
Wi'the auld moone in hir arme;
And I feir, I feir, my deir master,
That we will com to harme.
These lines, slightly changed, were used by Coleridge to preface his 'Dejection: An Ode' (1802), a poem mourning the loss of the visionary gleam.
142.1 Tarsius spectres.
The Tarsius spectrum, or malmag, is a small mammal of nocturnal habits, which resembles a lemur. They are described in Tom Harrisson's Borneo Jungle [7]:
Tarsiers have huge round eyes and tiny heads, long prehensile toes and tail, move like an aged negus or a foetus that has never been born. No one knows if the queer querulous squeakings heard at night are made by tarsiers: it is very difficult to find one at all. No one had so far succeeded in keeping one alive in captivity. They simply stare out and slowly die.
In the margin of the galleys [UBC 28-13] an interesting exchange took place between Albert Erskine and Lowry:
Qu: Is this reference to Tarsus? Saint Paul etc. Or is it right? See copy p. 196
AE.
No ref. to St Paul: Some kind of nocturnal E. Indian mammal related to the lemurs.
142.2 Carta Blanca beer.
The top-selling beer in Mexico; light, clear, of moderate strength, brewed (for "el momento dorado") by the Cerveceria Cuauhtémoc of Monterrey. The name suggests "carte blanche", the freedom to do whatever one wishes.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811), French navigator and explorer; after whom is named Bougainville Island in the Solomons, Cape Bougainville in North Australia, and Bougainvillea, of the family Nyctaginaceae, a genus of tropical climbing shrub whose small bright flowers are seen everywhere in Cuernavaca, but which is now associated in the Consul's mind with the spikes and spiders of betrayal. Yvonne's arms [141] were full of bougainvillea, which acts throughout the novel as an emblem of deceit.
142.4 the botica ... favor de servir una toma de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vómica, pero–.
Sp. "the chemist's shop ... please be so kind as to give a glass of medicinal wine [quinine] or failing that a glass of strychnine, but–."
143.1 Thou art the grave where buried love doth live.
From Shakespeare's Sonnet 31:
Thy bosome is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reignes Love and all Love's loving parts.
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye
As interest of the dead, which now appear,
But things remov'd that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give,
That due of many, now is thine alone.
Their images I lov'd, I view in thee,
And thou –all they – hast all the all of me.
The Consul seems to have ignored the force of the final couplet and looks on Yvonne only as the graveyard (hung with trophies of her lovers) of all his hopes of love.
144.1 another enemy .... a sunflower.
A heliotrope turns to follow the sun, and in both Christian and occult symbolism the sunflower is an emblem of the way all created things should turn to the divine light (on Tarot card 19, it represents the sun). The Consul tells Hugh that the sunflower "stares into my room all day .... Like God" [179]. It is the Consul's enemy because, having given his allegiance to darker powers, he is reminded by it that he too can turn to the light.
144.2 unless we contain with ourselves never to drink no more.
Sp. se contender, "to fight with oneself" or "to struggle"; suggesting a pun in English on the notion of continence.
144.3 un poco descompuesto, comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: Claro?
A mélange of Spanish, French and English: "A little out of order, you understand, as sometimes in the cinema, you see." A year later, in the cinema, Sr Bustamente will remark that "the wires have decomposed" [25]. Lowry's sustained metaphor of man's soul as a town and the nervous system as its electrical wiring leads naturally into the Swedenborgian notion of the ruined city as a metaphor for hell [Markson, 83], which may explain a cryptic marginal note in the manuscript [UBC 29-17, ts 24], "Why couldn't it have been a white path?" (one, like God's lightning, leading back to God). The ‘white path’ reflects Lowry's growing interest during the late revisions in Cabbalistic matters.
144.4 eclampsia.
From Gk. eklampein, "to shine forth"; usually convulsions caused by any of the toxic conditions of the body and associated particularly with the later stages of pregnancy and miscarriage. The word is here used primarily in the rarer sense of an imaginary perception of light flashing in front of the eyes (in which sense it is particularly associated with epilepsy, an electric storm of the mind).
145.1 a town ravaged and stricken.
Lowry's magnificently sustained image may derive in part from Ouspensky's Tertium Organum [Ch. 17]:
the mind of man has often been compared to a dark sleeping city in the midst of which watchmen's lanterns slowly move about, each throwing light on a small circle round itself .... At each moment there comes into focus a few of these circles illumined by the flickering light while the rest is plunged into darkness.
145.2 cataplasms.
Simply poultices, but in the context of the coming storm within the soul, evocative of the previous wordplay on ‘catastrophe’ and ‘katabasis’.
145.3 hierophants.
Gk. hieros, "sacred" and phaiein, "to show"; in ancient Greece, priests who expounded the Elusinian mysteries [see #318.3]; hence, interpreters of sacred mysteries and esoteric principles. The word is a commonplace of occult discussion, and the figure of the great master, "speaking in a voice only for those who have ears to hear", is represented on Tarot card 5, the Hierophant [Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, 232].
145.4 a mene-Tekel-Peres for the world.
The expression, ‘the writing on the wall’, with its implications of nemesis, derives from the sudden appearance on the wall at Belshazzar's Feast of the mysterious words MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN, which, being interpreted, meant thus [Daniel 5:25-28]:
And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
Consider (and heed) MacGregor-Mathers, The Sacred Magic [xxi]: "The writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, their manifestation in the political and historical arena is like the warning of a Mene, Mene Tekel, Upharsin, to a foolish and undiscerning world."
146.1 a child innocent as that infant sleeping in the coffin.
Lowry comments ['LJC', 74] that the Consul at one point in this chapter identifies himself with the infant Horus, "about which or whom the less said the better." Disregarding this sensible advice, Andersen suggests [220] that the key to this obscure reference is the Consul's identification of himself with the dead child seen earlier that morning, based on the analogy between Horus, stung to death by a scorpion, and the funeral of the child, to the accompaniment of 'La Cucaracha' (“The Cockroach”). It gets worse: in 1904 Aleister Crowley was summoned (in Cairo) by Horus, and informed that a new aeon, that of the child Horus, was about to begin, in which the emphasis will be on the true self, or will (hence his motto, "Do what thou wilt"). Horus dictated to Crowley The Book of the Law.
146.2 The uncontrollable mystery on the bathroom floor.
A reference to W. B. Yeats, 'The Magi':
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
The allusion anticipates the Taylor Holmes song, 'The Face on the Barroom Floor' [see #370.2].
146.3 circus of steepy hills.
Guanajuato is ringed with attractive rounded hills perfectly described by Dr Vigil's "steepy"; which adjective, however, derives from Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd':
Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
147.1 Guanajuato ... the streets.
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Guanajuato, capital of the state of the same name, is perhaps the most attractive city in Mexico. Its corkscrew streets, beautiful plazas, flower-pot balconies and attractive buildings are a delight. The opposition of Guanajuato-Parián is an opposition of life and death, and though there are practical reasons for not going (Cuernavaca to Guanajuato is a two-hundred-mile drive which neither the Consul nor Yvonne is up to), the Consul's rejection of Guanajuato in favour of Parián is a clear preference for death ['LJC', 74]. The names of the twisting streets, inscribed on ceramic tiles, are strikingly unusual (Dr Vigil's examples are typical of many), yet behind their enchantment there are hints of tragedy:
(a) Street of Kisses. The Callejon del Beso, a tiny narrow street of steps a block or two south up the hill from the centre of town. Characterised by overhanging balconies which almost touch, it was the scene many years ago of Guanajuato's version of Romeo and Juliet: Carlos loved Anna, and Anna loved Carlos, but Carlos was poor and Anna's family was rich, her father did not approve and arranged another match. However, the closeness of the balconies separating the two lovers allowed the exchanging of kisses and other intimacies, until Anna's father, discovering the affair, brought it to an end by stabbing his daughter in the spine with a dagger. Mentioned by Jan Gabrial [Inside the Volcano, 129].
(b) Street of Singing Frogs. The Calle de Cantarranas, running east to west off the Plaza de Baratillo. An enchanting name, but one given in derision by the Spaniards to describe the speech of the Indians they despised.
(c) Street of the Little Head. The Callejon de la Cabesita, a tiny stone-paved lane twisting north uphill from the Plaza de Baratillo. Many years ago, the story goes, two amigos quarrelled, and one killed and decapitated the other. The Callejon de la Cabesita traces the route down which the head rolled.
As Dr Vigil says, it is revolting, yet the awareness of the background to the street names does not so much detract from the quaint charm and appeal which the streets possess as add to them an element of romance and fancy. Guanajuato remains, for both Lowry and the Consul, a symbol of life and beauty.
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As Jan Gabrial's memoir makes clear, Lowry did not visit Guanajuato, but Jan, determined to get away from Conrad Aiken, went there for several days (not, she insisted, to rendezvous with a stable of lovers, although she admits to an affair with a mining engineer named Antonio Luna (an unwitting irony to he evocation of the ‘Ruelle de la Demi-Lune’ [Inside the Volcano, 131; see also #4.7]. She was enchanted with the town, and wrote back to Malcolm to describe its mysterious streets, music and mummies, taking notes that she could pass on to him, and which he used. However, in notes for 'Portrait of a Conquistador' [UBC 22-21], Lowry expressed his sense of betrayal: "His wife goes away. She comes back with pictures of corpses from Guanajuato."
147.2 the place they bury everybody standing up.
One of the unique tourist attractions of Guanajuato is its collection of mummies ("Las Momias") from the local cemetery. Fodor comments [395-96]:
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In Guanajuato, as in many other Mexican cities, the dead are buried for a minimum of five years. Unless a perpetual resting place has been purchased, the remains are then dug up to make room for fresher corpses. In the case of Guanajuato, coffins often are entombed in the walls surrounding the cemetery. For some reason, the dead in the walls some-times do not decompose ("There are no worms," explains one guide). They bloat and shrivel into leathery statues – mummies.
A rather thriving business has resulted. The naked corpses stand free, lining the walls of a rather narrow passageway, mouths agape, dead eyes looking nowhere. A guide will point out the oldest mummy (dead over a century), the body of a woman who died in childbirth, her baby at her side, and the remains of an epileptic who was buried alive. For sheer ghoulishness, the exhibit is unsurpassed.
147.3 Wheee, es un infierno.
Sp. "Whee, it's an inferno"; Vigil inadvertently punning on El Infierno, "that other Farolito" [349]. In an earlier draft Lowry had written, "Es un paraiso" ("It's a paradise").
Otherwise, jaripeo, a term later used to indicate ‘rodeo’ or ‘bronco busting’ as well. The cowboys would do tricks with a cow or bull, throw it on the ground in order to mount it, get on its back singly or in pairs, ride the animal as long as they could, and avoid being thrown off. The Consul, of course, wants to go to Tomalín because it is close to Parián.
147.5 a clock was striking nineteen: Twelve o'clock.
The time, out of joint, reconciles Faustus’s hour of death (12) with that of the Consul (7).
147.6 the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave.
From Shelley's 'Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude' (1816) [lines 681-88]:
O, that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled
Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams, – ah! thou hast fled.
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Shelley's poem is based on the poet's contemplation of his certain death. It shows the idealist, happy in his pursuit of beauty, seeking in reality the counterpart of his dreams; meeting with frustration, he plunges into despair and dies; his final sentiments epitomised in the lines cited by the Consul. The motto of 'Alastor' is striking: "I loved not yet – I loved to love – I sought something to love – for I loved to love" [see #202.1 & #202.7]. The poem was in the earlier drafts pencilled into Chapter I, to be found in the book of Elizabethan plays read by Laruelle. The sub-title of Aleister Crowley's Autohagiography (an understated title, as he had reached the level of Ipssisimus, or deification) is 'The Spirit of Solitude'.
147.7 compañero.
The key word of human companionship and Samaritan charity [see #247.2].
148.1 the frightful "poulps". Meropis of Theopompus ... And the ignivome mountains.
As note on the galleys explicitly acknowledges [UBC 28-14, 204], Lowry's "scholarly source" is Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In part II, Chapter 9, 'A Vanished Continent', Captain Nemo invites M. Aronnax, the narrator, to accompany him on "a curious excursion", which turns out to be a visit to the lost continent of Atlantis, "the ancient Meropis of Theopompus, the Atlantis of Plato." En route they encounter "frightful looking poulps" and "a large crater ... vomiting forth torrents of lava." The "frightful poulps" are enormous devil-fish or octopi, some of which later attack the Nautilus and impede her progress. The theory of Theopompus of Chios (?376-305 B.C.), Greek historian and writer of the Meropidae, was that the Atlanteans were descendants of the Meropes, inhabitants of a region called Merou (itself named after the hero of a deluge). The theory was enthusiastically taken up in Donnelly's Atlantis.
The ignivome mountains (from L. ignis, "fire," and vomere, "to vomit") are the volcanoes reputedly responsible for the destruction of Atlantis; the little shower of plaster that rains down [148] is another intimation that similar destruction for the Consul is not far off.
148.2 hombre, un poco de cerveza, un poeo de vino.
Sp. "My friend, a little beer, a little wine". The dichotomy is clear: tequila and mescal will be the beginning of the end [see #216.2]. The sentiment was recorded in Lowry's 1937 letter to "Antonio", manager of the Hotel Francia in Oaxaca [Dec. 1937; CL 1, 187]: "A little wine; a little beer; but no mezcal used to be the watchword–" [see #138.6].
148.3 watching the insects.
As Jakobsen puts it [36], the Consul, having vainly awaited beneath the shower for the coming of the second flood, now experiences amidst the booming buzzing confusion a presentiment of his own death as he sees the insect world closing in upon him, a hallucination recalled later [228].
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149.1 the persistent rolling of drums.
This, with the recurrent image of the dead man [see #91.5], is Parián calling, the drums demanding sacrifice [see #75.3]. In Conrad Aiken's Blue Voyage [90], Demarest reflects that redrum is an anagram of murder.
149.2 a half-recognizable voice.
The voices can be identified as: the Consul's Good Angel; Dr. Vigil; Abraham Taskerson; the Bad Angel (adopting the tone of Weber); the Consul's father, calling from beyond Himavat (in the voice of David lamenting Absalom – II Samuel 18:33 and 1914); and Yvonne, calling her lover in the words of the Strauss song they used to sing [see #39.8].
In the 1940 Volcano [158], the voice of the Consul's father, calling from beyond Himavat, is that of his dead mother. This survived an early revision [UBC 29-16, 30], but was crossed out in the next one [UBC 29-17, 21], and the passage rewritten [22].