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VII
Described by Lowry as "the fateful, the magic, the lucky good-bad number" ['LJC', 77; Lowry would have approved the pagination]. Lowry speaks of "the passion for order even in the smallest things that exist in the universe: 7 too is the number on the horse that will kill Yvonne and 7 the hour when the Consul will die." The number is discussed in Chapter 7 of Éliphas Lévi's Transcendental Magic [80]:
The septenary is the sacred number in all theogonies and in all symbols, because it is composed of the triad and the tetrad. The number seven represents magical power in all its fulness; it is the mind reinforced by all elementary potencies; it is the soul served by Nature.
Lévi cites the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues, the seven planets, the seven seals of the Apocalypse, the seven genii of ancient mythologies, the seventh day of rest, the seven sacraments, the seven musical notes, the seven magical animals and the seven great archangels, concluding [82] that "The virtue of the septenary is absolute in Magic, for this number is decisive in all things." Lévi adds: "unity of the monad / antagonism of the duad / perfection of the triad / completion of the tetrad / power of the pentagram / equilibrium of the hexad / absolute virtue of the septuary."
Lowry's novel, which begins and ends at seven, accepts this judgment, and seven appears throughout: the tennis rackets [4], the Pleiades [29], the white horse at box seven [181], the Consul's reflections [202], Eriksen 43 and 34 [76 & 208]. In this chapter (as a similar list in Blue Voyage puts it [51]), the Consul, his equilibrium upset, finds everything "at sixes and sevens".
194.2 the drunken, madly revolving world.
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Lowry noted [UBC WT 1-20]: “This is the only chapter in which – though it was virtually written long before – I have been influenced by The Lost Weekend. Influence only shows in delirium passage, which was added after reading it in order to beat it at its own game.” Lowry read Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend shortly after its publication in April 1944, and was haunted by parallels between it and his own writing: a writer who believes in the inspirational power of alcohol, whose “lost weekend” is spent in Bellevue Hospital, and who, “to give the coil of coincidence one final turn” [Bowker, Pursued by Furies, 323], has a son called Malcolm.
Hercules is a summer constellation of the northern hemisphere, its brightest star Ras Algethi [see #50.1]. Although none of the stars is outstandingly brilliant, the pattern outlined by six of the brightest makes a figure something like a great butterfly flying westward. Lowry's sense is explained in Lunar Caustic [20-21]:
The constellations might have been monstrosities in the delirium of God. Disaster seemed smeared over the whole universe. It was as if he were living in the pre-existence of some unimaginable catastrophe, and he steadied himself a moment against the sill, feeling the doomed earth itself stagger in its heaving spastic flight towards the Hercules Butterfly.
194.3 zacualis .... crenellated miradors ... a bartizan .... merlons .... degenerate machicolations ... a chevron .... the flying balcony.
The description is deliberately reminiscent of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari [see #191.1], which abounds in jagged gothic forms, oblique chimneys and crazy roofs, windows in the form of arrows and kites, painted shadows and zig-zags designed to confound all rules of perspective. The "madhouse" is described by Sigbjørn in Dark as the Grave [153], when he returns to Cuernavaca in 1945 to find:
two towers with a sort of catwalk between, joining them on the roof, and on the one that seemed to be used as a mirador, there were all kinds of angels, and other round objects, carved out of red stand-stone. The funny chevron-shaped windows are still there, but there used to be some writing in gold leaf below them that you read from the road. And they seem to have knocked down one of the towers.
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(a) zacualis. The two towers, Jacques' inadequate refuge against the coming of the second flood [see #29.3].
(b) crenellated miradors. A mirador (Sp. mirar, "to behold") is a roof-top look-out (a feature of many Cuernavaca houses); crenellated (from L. crena, "a notch") describes a series of regular tooth-like identations (crenels) on a battlement or wall.
(c) a bartizan. Sir Walter Scott's erroneous rendition of O.Fr. bretesche, "a battlement parapet"; an overhanging turret projecting from the top of a tower.
(d) merlons. L. mergae, "a pitch-fork"; the solid teeth of a battlement or parapet lying between the crenels.
(e) machicolations. M.L. machiocolare, "to crush"; openings in a gallery floor or parapet through which hot liquids and heavy stones could be dropped on attackers.
(f) a chevron. L. capra, "she-goat" and O.Fr. chevre; in heraldry and the military, an inverted V shape. Old photographs of the house confirm Lowry's description.
(g) the flying balcony [196]. Here, the catwalk connecting the two towers; ‘flying’ in the sense of a flying buttress rather than a flyover.
194.4 marzipan.
A confection made of ground almonds, sugar, and whites of eggs; Jacques' tower is as fantastical as a wedding cake.
195.1 bas relief
Literally, low relief; A sculpturing of little depth into a flat surface, such as the frieze on the Parthenon in Athens.
195.2 that phrase of Frey Luis de León's.
The words are "No se puede vivir sin amar" ("one cannot live without loving"). Lowry's 1940 explanation [Volcano 196; UBC 25-23, 8-9] of how the words got there is unlikely: "I suggest whoever built the house got the quotation from Somerset Maugham." He had noted in the 1941 revision of Chapter I [UBC 26-18, 19] the need to "Give Somerset Maugham some credit" [see #6.2]. He almost struck out the phrase in Chapter XII [375] because it was too "thematic", but Albert Erskine left it in. As Lowry noted in the 1940 Volcano [196; UBC 22-19, 9], the words are from Fray Luis de León (1527-91), Spanish friar and writer, who is discussed by Maugham in Don Fernando; or, Variations on Some Spanish Themes (1935) [246], in terms that suggest a close affinity with the Consul:
He sought for happiness and tranquillity of spirit, but his temperament made it impossible for him to achieve them. They count him among the mystics. He never experienced the supernatural blessings which solace those who pursue the mystic way. He never acquired that aloofness from the things of the world that characterises them. He had an anxious longing for a rapture his uneasy nature prevented him from ever enjoying. He was a mystic only in so far as he was a poet. He looked at those snowcapped mountains and yearned to explore their mysteries, but he was held back by the busy affairs of the city. I always think that the phrase of his, no se puede vivir sin amar, one cannot live without loving, had for him an intimate, tragic meaning. It was not just a commonplace.
Fray Luis Ponce de León (?1528-91) was an Augustinian monk; a mystic, a poet, a humanist and a theologian. Representing a traditional scholasticism, he was tormented and imprisoned by his Dominican opponents, who advocated a Hebraic tradition. His works include La perfecta casada (1533), Vita retirado (1557), Noche serena (1571), and De los nombres de Cristo (1583), from which "no se puede vivir sin amar" is taken, a chapter entitled 'Principe de Paz' ('The Prince Of Peace'):
Dos cosas infiero: la una, que todos aman, los buenos y los malos, los felices y los infelices, y que no se puede bivir [sic] sin amar; la otra, que como el amor en los unos es causa des su buena andanca, assi en los otros es la fuente de su miseria, y siendo en todos amor, haze en los unos y en los otros effectos muy differentes.
("Two things may be inferred: the first, that all men love, both the good and the bad, the happy and the unhappy, and that one cannot live without loving; the other, that just as love for some men is the cause of their good fortune, so for others it is the fountain of their misery, and so love has very different effects in one group as opposed to the other.")
196.1 flying machines .... Golfing Scorpions. The Consul, who has "overshot" the drinks [195], translates everything into golfing terms: the limbs and baskets of the ferris wheel and octopus of the fairground turn into clubs that belabour him [196], and the little figures of players become scorpions of his mind. As the eagle flies, the Las Palmas Golf Club in Cuernavaca would be in sight from a mirador in the Calle Humboldt, but across town, on the far bank of the Tlaltenango barranca, which flanks the other side of the city.
196.2 unknown moons hurtling backwards.
Epstein [133] suggests a debt to Chapter 7 of Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe, dealing with sleep and dreams, where, she claims, the sensation of hurling or flying backwards is regarded by occultists as a phenomenon of black magic; Ouspensky adds [280] that the sensation is caused by an inconvenient position of the head or slightly deranged circulation of the blood. Havelock Ellis, in Chapter 6 of The World of Dreams (1911) discusses such phenomena. The Consul's sensation is similar to Hugh's [176], "the world hurling from all havens astern", which in turn is like that of Demarest in Aiken’s Blue Voyage [139], who feels under the ship and under the sea "the half-cold planet, which rushes through freezing space to destruction, carrying with it continents of worthless history, the sea, this ship."
198.1 counterpoised drawbridge.
A bridge in two halves, each of which may be raised (to let ships pass by) or lowered (to let traffic pass over) by a weight or counterpoise. The action is described by Sir Walter Scott in The Monastery [Ch. 5]:
Two strong abutments were built on either side of the river, at a part where the stream was peculiarly contracted. Upon a rock in the centre of the current was built a solid piece of masonry, constructed like the pier of a bridge, and presenting, like a pier an angle to the current of the stream. The masonry continued solid until the pier rose to a level with the two abutments upon either side, and from thence the building rose in the form of a tower. The lower story of this tower consisted only of an archway or passage through the building, over either entrance to which hung a drawbridge with counterpoises, either of which, when dropped, connected the archway with the opposite abutment, where the farther end of the drawbridge rested. When both bridges were thus lowered, the passage over the river was complete.
The unspoken words after “Only my heart –” are probably “can't stretch” [see #176.3].
198.2 Tarquin's ravishing strides.
See Macbeth [II.i.49-56], where Macbeth steels himself to murder Duncan:
Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd murder
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his design
Moves like a ghost.
Shakespeare’s poem, 'The Rape of Lucrece', tells how Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin, King of Rome, is inflamed with the beauty of Lucretia, the faithful wife of Collatinus, steals into her chamber at night, rapes her, and flees. Lucretia sends for her father and husband, dresses in mourning, tells her story, and stabs herself. The resulting outcry moves the populace to rise up against the Tarquins and overthrow their rule.
198.4 Orozco charcoal drawings.
José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), one of the greatest Mexican painters and muralists, whose sympathy for the poor and oppressed manifested itself in an expressionist form of protest. Criticism of his anticlerical and political cartoons forced him to leave the country in 1916, but he returned to paint murals and a famous series of ink and wash drawings known as ‘Mexico in Revolution’. His work is characterised by a strong element of caricature and by an explicit concern for social justice and revolution.
198.5 two ruddy Riveras.
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Diego Rivera (1886-1957), born in Guanajuato, is the most celebrated of the Mexican muralists. His work reflects the political implications of the Mexican Revolution. His style was formed in Mexico and Europe under the influence of Cézanne, Renoir and the cubists, but his goal was to transform art in Mexico into a popular national movement. At times he demonstrates greater concern with political message than aesthetic quality (hence the Consul's reservations: people with ideas), but his bold use of colour and contrast has created some enduring if controversial masterpieces, including the murals on the wall of the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca (1927), depicting a series of incidents from the Conquest through to the Revolution [see #211.4], and the vast murals in the National Palace (begun in 1929), depicting the history of Mexico from pre-Columbian times to the Revolution. The Consul's uncomplimentary "Amazons with legs like mutton" is not, however, an altogether unfair description of many of Rivera's stolid figures.
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The difference between a borrachón, one who is like a drunk, and borracho, a drunk, is not entirely clear, even when sober. The picture, which depicts perfectly the conflict within the Consul's mind, probably owes more to Lowry's imagination than to any painter, but the manuscript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-3, 232] has a line not in the published version: "Los Borrachones of course could not be there [ie, in Cuernavaca], because it was in Taxco." There are, in two separate paintings in the churrigueresque cathedral of Santa Prisca at Taxco (a part model for Lowry's style ['LJC', 85]), elements that may have contributed to Los Borrachones: in the side chapel to the left, one painting shows demons pushing lost souls down to hell, while opposite it, on the right of the church, another lack-lustre picture depicts souls ascending, two of which (male sheltering female) look back with the sublime selfless expression described here. However, in that same draft of Dark as the Grave [580] Lowry also notes: "Posada is the name of the artist of Los Borrachones"; this complicates the attribution, as José Guadelupe Posada (1851-1913) was an engraver and artist celebrated for his satirical caricatures and his pictures of the Day of the Dead (one of his most celebrated skeletons is called ‘El borracho’). Lowry had difficulties with the title of the painting, telling Albert Erskine [22 June 1946; UBC 2-5] that he could have sworn the original was called 'Los Borracheros' (as in the 1940 Volcano), but he had not been able to verify this. In a 1940 typescript [UBC 25-23, 9] it is likened to "something between a Goya and a prohibitionist poster"; the choice of ‘Michelangelo’ finally echoes Hugh in Chapter IV [see #118.2], and adds his ‘The Last Judgement’ (1537-41), in the Sistine Chapel, to an already cluttered composition.
199.2 Medusae.
Medusa was one of the three Gorgons, the only one who was mortal. By granting her favours to Poseidon she incurred the wrath of Athena, who changed her locks into serpents. She had the power of turning into stone all on whom she fixed her eyes, but Perseus, using his buckler as a mirror, escaped her glance and cut off her head.
199.3 abnegating.
Refusing or renouncing; the angels have rejected the pleasures of alcohol and the company of drunkards. Ironically, Goethe's Mephistopheles is "Der Geist, der stets verneint" (usually translated as "the spirit of negation").
199.4 cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants.
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Though the idols are described as Mayan [10], their appearance suggests the stone Aztec images of Las Cihuateteo (there are some in the National Museum of Anthropology). These squat bulbous figures represent mothers who died in childbirth and who cry and call out into the night, frightful beings of ill-omen. This gives added horror to the Consul's vision of "a whole row of fettered babies". There was once a chain of similar idols on the balcony of the Cortés Palace in front of the Rivera murals; since removed, they may well have been the immediate source of Lowry's inspiration.
199.5 lost wild talents.
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An allusion to Charles Fort (1874-1932), American writer and eccentric, whom Lowry admired because he made "the inexplicable seem more dramatic" [SL, 26]. His specialty was "the analysis of peculiar coincidences for which there exists no scientific explanation" [SL, 26]: frogs and fishes falling from the skies, strange lights on the moon and in the air, reports of strange animals, inexplicable disappearances, spontaneous combustion, stones and meteors falling from space. He spent much of his life collecting and collating such reports, and generalising from them "something of cosmic order or law" [xviii]. His findings were published in The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). By "wild talents" Fort meant the gift, uncontrolled in many but harnessed by adepts and magicians, of spiritual and psychic powers affecting material phenomena; the power, for instance, to make cars crash, to divine water, to cause explosions, or to make fires burst forth spontaneously. This last “talent” Lowry believed he possessed in a self-destructive way (he lost his home and manuscripts through fire), and is the basis of his short story, 'The Element Follows You Around, Sir', later used as chapter 18 of October Ferry.
199.6 he was in hell himself.
An echo of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus [iii]:
Faust: Where are you damned?
Mephistopheles: In hell.
Faust: How comes it then that thou are out of hell?
Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Marlowe's lines are echoed in Milton's Paradise Lost [I.254-55]: "The mind is its own place, and in itself, / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
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Sp. "the little lighthouse" (or, since a diminutive of farol rather than faro, "the little lantern"). Originally a cantina in Oaxaca, within stumbling distance of the Hotel Francia, it became for Lowry the lighthouse that invites the storm, sanctuary and paradise of his despair. The "other terrible Cantina in Oaxaca" [200] is El Infierno, later described [349], and clearly based on the same original.
In the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-4, 286] Lowry lists as "In Reality": "Farolito [in Cuemavaca] plus Farolito in City of Oaxaca plus La Universal [Cuernavaca] plus El Bosque in Oaxaca". In the 1940 Volcano [265-66], this appears virtually in its final form, a poetic "mosaic", but in Chapter IX. In revision Lowry removed it to Chapter VII, as inappropriate to Yvonne's consciousness.
200.1 the lighthouse that invites the storm.
Lowry used this as the opening line of one poem [CP, #87], and proposed using it as the title of an unpublished collection of poetry [CP, 382ff]. The image sums up perfectly the Consul's self-destructive qualities.
200.2 when Saturn was in Capricorn.
A heavenly body is said to be "in" a zodiacal sign when it appears between the viewer and the part of the sky in which that constellation is to be found. Saturn has distinct connotations of evil: it is the planet farthest from the sun and the figure of time, the devourer of life, under whose patronage occur "works of malediction and death" [Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 252]. Capricorn, the Goat, suggests the cabrón with whom the Consul has frequently identified himself [see #65.1]. In Frater Achad's The Egyptian Revival [34], the path from Binah to Tiphereth is said to be "represented by 'The Devil' and the sign of Capricorn which is Ruled by Saturn from whose Sphere it springs." As Andersen says [33], "The exact significance of Saturn in Capricorn may not be clear, but it is certain that this situation promises no good."
Alluding, not entirely appropriately, to Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan':
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething.
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced.
200.4 Ramón Diosdado.
‘Diosdado’ suggests "God-given"; ‘Ramón’, added later, may intimate the murderer (Ramón Mercader) of Trotsky; as befits one reputed to have killed his wife.
200.5 neurasthenia.
Gk. astheneia, "weakness"; weakness or exhaustion of the nervous system, with symptoms of fatigue, depression, and pains without apparent physical cause.
200.6 the Virgin of Guadalupe.
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In 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac just north of Mexico City, a newly converted Indian named Juan Diego beheld a vision of a dark-skinned Virgin, who commanded him to build a shrine in her honour. When the bishops refused to do so without proof of the visitation, the Virgin again appeared before Juan Diego and told him to gather roses from the previously barren hill. He did so, returned to the bishops, and on opening his cloak found that the roses had gone, but a painting of the Virgin covered the garment. The shrine was built, and during the wars of Independence (1810) Hidalgo's forces carried the banner of the Virgin as the emblem of their crusade. As Patroness of Mexico, her shrine becomes an object of pilgrimage on 12 December.
Writing to Aiken [Jan. 1938; CL 1, 187], Lowry invokes as his only friend "a tertiary who pins a medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe on my coat, follows me in the street ... & who thinks I am Jesus Christ” (a "tertiary" implies one in the final stages of syphilis).
Ger. "Sunrise!"; the 1927 movie by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931), Ufa director celebrated for his innovative qualities; best known for Der Januskopf (1920), Der letzte Mann (1924), Tartüff (1925) and Faust (1926). He left Germany in 1926 for Hollywood where, apart from Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931), his success was limited. Sunrise, Murnau's first Hollywood film, was a striking combination of German and Hollywood styles. Based on Hermann Sudermann's Die Reise nach Tilsit, produced by Fox, with screenplay by Carl Mayer, it starred George O'Brien as the man and Janet Gaynor as the wife. Murnau created a poetic tragedy from the archetypal theme of infidelity, attempted murder and remorse: the man, attempting to kill his unwanted wife, fails (to his relief), and the couple is reconciled, in a way that Yvonne and Geoffrey can hope for but cannot achieve. The film is justly famous for its visual qualities: close-ups showing the forces battling for possession of the man's soul; long, fluid landscape scenes; and a celebrated sequence on a trolley car. The film claimed to be:
the song of two humans: This story of a man and his wife is of nowhere and everywhere. You might hear it anywhere and at any time. For everywhere the sun rises and sets – in the city's turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, tears and laughter, sin and forgiveness.
In a letter to Clemens ten Holder, his German translator [SL, 239], Lowry wrote:
It was in Bonn I saw Murnau's Sonnenaufgang; 70 minutes of this wonderful film – though it falls to pieces later, doubtless due to the exigencies of Hollywood – have influenced me almost as much as any book I ever read.
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201.1 Start Point.
Known to sailors as "the Start"; a headland on the coast of Devon, with a low, fixed light; the last (or first) sight of land, it thus marked the “start” (or the end) of an ocean voyage.
201.2 Sutherland ... gaunt lowland uncles chumbling shortbread.
Sutherland is a mountainous and sparsely populated county in the northern highlands of Scotland. To chumble is to nibble, to gnaw, or to chew into little pieces; the word is usually spelt chimble, but Lowry may be following John Clare's 'Solitude': "And the little chumbling mouse / Gnarls the dead weed for her house." Shortbread is a typically Scots biscuit, made from butter, sugar and oatmeal flour.
201.3 the Café Chagrin.
The Consul's regrets enact a Bunyan-like allegory, but his use of French suggests Paris, "before Hugh came". In an early draft of Chapter III [UBC 29-8, 9], Geoffrey when thinking of Hugh's arrival in Paris recalls "the green wormwood depths of pernod bottles [and] the well-named Café Chagrin in the Boulevard Raspail." The ‘Pegaso’ notebook [UBC 12-14] records of In Ballast to the White Sea, "In Café Chagrin section he meets the Norwegian in the john." There is no such “section” in the In Ballast typescript, but here the memory will infiltrate the Consul’s waking vision at the outset of Chapter X.
201.4 Christ, oh pharos of the world.
Lowry's emblem of Christ as the light of the world. The lighthouse of Alexandria, on the island of Pharos just outside the harbour of Alexandria, dates from 270 AD, and is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
201.5 one of the little Mayan idols seemed to be weeping.
Markson suggests unconvincingly [103] that the idol is a reminder of Niobe, who was turned to stone, yet weeps for the loss of her children [see #199.4].
201.6 cocktails, despicable repast.
The well-bred Englishman might abominate cocktails (and canapés) as offences to the palate and a breach of social decorum, but this American custom, dating from the 1920s, was catching on, especially in diplomatic circles.
201.7 he took the postcard ... and slipped it under Jacques's pillow.
To be discovered [see #13.2] at the precise moment that Hugh will call from Parián with news of the deaths of the Consul and Yvonne.
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202.1 the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave.
From Shelley's 'Alastor' [lines 681-88]; with the change of ‘lovely’ to ‘lousy’. See #147.6.
202.2 spoon shot.
A spoon is a ancient golf club used for the middle game, typically in situations where the ball is in a bad spot, such as in a bunker, and needs to be lofted out sharply.
202.3 the Golgotha Hole.
Golgotha, from Heb. gulgoleth, "a skull", is the hill of Calvary, the scene of Christ's crucifixion, as described in Matthew 27:33-34:
And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha,
that is to say, a place of a skull,
They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink.
202.4 an eagle.
In golf, two strokes better than par; heralding Prometheus as saviour, retrieving lost balls.
As Kilgallin notes [186], the reasoning is based on Hopkins' Early Diaries (1864) [25]:
Gulf, golf. If this game has its name from the holes into which the ball is put, they may be connected, both being from the root meaning hollow. Gulp, gula, hollow, hilt, koilos, caelare (to make hollow, to make grooves in, to grave) caelum, which is therefore same as though it were what it were once supposed to be a translation of koilon, hole, hell, ('The hollow hell') skull, shell, hull (of ships and beans).
The etymology is faulty, since ‘golf’ probably derives from D. kolf, "a club", which has nothing to do with Fr. gouffre, "gulf"; but Hopkins' note suggests why Geoffrey should connect golf and Golgotha, "the place of a skull". Gouffre is a key word in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal; it is often aligned with souffre, "suffer", as in 'L'Aube spirituelle':
Des Cieux Spirituels l'inaccessible azur,
Pour l'homme terrassé qui rêve encore et souffre,
S'ouvre et s'enfonce avec l'attirance du gouffre.
("From the Spiritual Heavens the inaccessible blue / reveals itself and mingles with the attraction of the gulf / for the earth-bound man who still dreams and suffers.")
Lowry noted to himself [UBC 27-8, 2]: “Mem: Somewhere golf = gouffre = que foi — point I made in Ballast; a very good one”. Chapter VIII of In Ballast to the White Sea is set upon a golf course and replicates many of the minor details mentioned here.
202.6 the Farolito, the nineteenth hole ... The Case is Altered.
The "nineteenth hole" is the bar or tavern at the end of the round, as in Frank Crumit's popular song of 1922, 'Oh, How I Love the 19th Hole When the 18th Hole is Over'. But the Consul is reminded of the Hell Bunker, and how “the case is altered” [see #21.4].
202.7 the film he made out of Alastor.
Jacques's film, made before he went to Hollywood, seems "hoiked out of" (pulled roughly from) the Ufa tradition of German expressionism, and the Consul's description burlesques some of the cinematic advances taking place during the 1920s. In the 1940 Volcano [199] the film was described as "a sort of avant-garde picture, a forerunner to Cocteau's Sang d'un poète": it featured a poet standing on the shore, a sequence of ruins, gargoyles, gothic subtitles, "inevitable" scenes of Indus and Oxus, the sea again, a swan flying into the sunset, the poet still on the shore, the swan still flying over an ever rougher sea, the moon rising upon the Caucasus, the boat rushing into a whirlpool and tossing in the sea, an orchestra playing the Sacre du Printemps, the poet escaping through a jungle taken from In Darkest Africa, the effect somehow conveyed of his being carried back through his life to the same starting place, "also the end of the world": all in all, fragments unlikely to remove the Alas! from Alastor. The sequence in the 1940 Volcano was related to Laruelle's cinema dream in Chapter I, but this gave way to the conception of the entire book to follow as his construction.
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Many of these details, only slightly modified, appear in Shelley's 'Alastor' [see #147.6]: the poet's "wandering step" takes him not only to "awful ruins of the days of old", but past Indus and Oxus to wild exotic places such as Persia and Cashmire, and to the "lone Chorasmian shore", where, his soul elevated by the flight of a swan, he embarks on the sea to meet Death, passes the ethereal cliffs of Caucasus, is driven into whirlpool and cavern, finally to rest his languid head and die in that obscurest chasm, the vision fled.
203.1 In dunkelste Afrika.
More accurately, Im dunkelsten Afrika, German for In Darkest Africa. Although Henry Morton Stanley (of Livingstone fame) had written a popular book of that name about his 1890 expedition into the heart of the Congo to rescue the Emir Pasha, this reference is probably to Through Darkest Africa: In Search of White Rhinoceros, a travelogue (1927) by Harry K. Eustace, featuring himself, his wife, various animals - and the white rhinoceros.
203.2 a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith.
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Corinne Griffith (?1899-1979), "the Orchid Lady", was first a professional dancer, then a leading lady in the 1920s. Her films include Divorce Coupons (1922), Lilies of the Field (1924), Love's Wilderness (1924), and The Garden of Eden (1928). Her productions are invariably love-romances, with entanglements and happy endings. ‘Corinne Griffith’ anticipates the ‘Yvonne Griffaton’ of Chapter IX. The film with a swan has not been identified, although one of Griffith's first films (1916) was titled La Paloma [see #123.3], and could be a likely candidate. (Manuscript variants suggest the "last shot" or a "fade out" at the end of an "ancient" or "early" film.) In Shelley's 'Alastor' [272-95], the poet, "upon the lone Chorasmian shore", sees the swan rise high at his approach and, watching it fly, sees its flight home as an emblem of his soul's desire for its true rest.
203.3 Sarah Bernhardt.
Sarah Bernhardt (1845-1923), French actress and the most celebrated tragedienne of her time. She was a member of the Comédie Francaise before turning to England and the London stage in 1879. She took part in a number of early films: Hamlet (1900), La Dame aux Camelias (1912), La Reine Elisabeth (1912), Jeanne Dore (1915) and Mothers of France (1917). Her performances in these do scant justice to her reputation as an actress.
203.4 the Sacre du Printemps.
The Rite of Spring, a revolutionary ballet written for Diaghilev by Igor Stravinsky (1832-1971), the first production of which caused a furore in Paris in 1913 (the narrator's father in 'Forest Path' [270] played the French horn in that performance). A primeval account of the death and rebirth of nature in a tremendously immediate and emphatic manner, it is marked by rhythmical energy, strikingly fierce thematic material and sheer virtuosity of orchestration. Ironically, it is best-known in the movies from Walt Disney's Fantasia.
203.5 Silver king .... Zodiac Zone.
Brand names of golf balls: the Zodiac Zone, described in October Ferry [115] as "an antique long-lost golf ball of forgotten make", was one of the first rubber-cored balls to become available in 1902; the Silver King, used in The Clicking of Cuthbert [see #175.16], was a popular make between the wars. A blind hole is where the approach to the green is obstructed, so that the flag cannot be seen.
203.6 Ozone.
Gk. ozein, "to smell"; literally, a blue gas, O3, formed by a silent electrical discharge in the air; more commonly used, as here, in the metaphorical sense of "pure air", which Lowry attributes to Gide [SL, 190].
203.7 a sort of Donne of the fairways.
Echoing John Donne's 'A Hymn to God the Father', as does Lowry’s poem, ‘Though I Have More’ [CP, #306], which uses many details found here:
Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sinne; through which I runne,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
And when thou hast done, thou has not done,
For, I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sinne which I have wonne
Others to sinne? and, made my sinne their doore?
Wilt thou forgive that sinne which I did shunne
A year, or two; but wallowed in, a score?
When thou has done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
But sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou hast done,
I fear no more.
203.8 Poet of the unreplaced turf.
Lowry told Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 380] that "Unreplaced turf is almost equivalent to an unexpiated sin." This sequence was a late revision [UBC 30-7, note after ts. 10)].
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), poet and composer of numerous lyrics, odes, and poetic dramas, among which the Consul refers to 'Alastor' [see #147.6 & #202.7]; The Cenci [see #338.12]; and Julian and Maddalo [see #216.4]. His Prometheus Unbound (1820) represents for the Consul his own great battle. The story of Shelley's attempt to swim is perhaps apocryphal, but it is told in Edward Trelawney's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author [Ch. 7]:
I was bathing one day in a deep pool in the Arno, and astonished the Poet by performing a series of aquatic gymnastics, which I had learnt from the natives of the South Seas. On my coming out, while dressing, Shelley said mournfully, "Why can't I swim? It seems so very easy."
I answered, "Because you think you can't. If you determine, you will; take a header off this bank, and when you rise turn on your back, you will float like a duck; but you must reverse the arch in your spine, for it's now bent the wrong way."
He doffed his jacket and trousers, kicked off his shoes and socks, and plunged in; and there he lay stretched out on the bottom like a conger eel not making the least effort or struggle to save himself. He would have been drowned if I had not instantly fished him out. When he recovered his breath, he said,
"I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body."
This episode took place not in the sea but in a pool of the river Arno, and there is no mention of the books. The Consul has associated the scene (which as Trelawney points out, reflects Shelley's strong death-wish) with Shelley's actual death by drowning a little later. After Shelley's boat, the Don Juan was swamped (perhaps rammed) in a storm after leaving Leghorn 8 July 1822, Trelawney identified Shelley's corpse by the volumes of Aeschylus (some say Sophocles) in one pocket and Keats's poems in the other.
205.1 Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face.
Behind the Swedenborgian image of God as truth and sun lies an allusion to Shelley's perverse pride in sinking to the bottom: immediately following Trelawney's rescue of Shelley [see #204.1], the two enter into a detailed philosophical about the nature of Truth:
Shelley: If we had known the great truths, they would have laid bare the great lies.
Tre: What do they mean by the great truths?
Shelley: They cannot calculate time, measure distance and say what is above or what is below us.
205.2 the will of man is unconquerable.
A phrase previously associated with Milton's Satan and self-delusion [see #93.1]; the Consul will no more be able to resist the drinks than he was earlier able to refrain from falling asleep.
205.3 when we went to Cholula.
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Laruelle recalls the trip to the pyramid [11]. Left unstated is the awareness both men now share of Yvonne's presence between them at the time. It seems likely that the Consul, now so conscious of the truth, did not then know he had been deceived; hence his reference to the dust.
205.4 this unanswerable and staggering injustice.
In the drafts [UBC 30-7, ts. 14], Lowry showed the Consul drinking everything in sight (as he does on page 208) before Jacques' return. In the final version, in the Consul's mind at least, the injustice of Jacques' remark is therefore heavily accentuated. Art Hill [‘The Alcoholic on Alcoholism’133] offers a stunning analysis of the alcoholic state of mind that senses "injustice" in what is patently the direct and brutal truth:
For it is one more affliction of the alcoholic that he is always ashamed of his drinking. This is why, drunk or sober, he maintains the fiction that he could drink moderately, and surely will next time .... Drinks are poured. He does not touch his, but instead scans the countryside through binoculars from a balcony, commenting lightly on random topics. The implication is plain: he is so indifferent to liquor that he has forgotten the drink is there. He has not forgotten.
As Hill says, the Consul is playing the "game" to the limit. Laruelle's attack is unfair because, as the Consul understands the rules, he has been holding off the drink, winning the game – so to be accused like this, unjustly, gives precisely the excuse he is seeking to drink everything in sight. Earlier, the Consuls justification of his drinking was to "save Jacques the trouble of throwing it away"; his "great battle" is very much a product of later revisions. See #194.2, for Lowry’s admitted awareness of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, the novel to which he (rightly) feared that his own work would be compared.
206.1 a hawser did not give.
A hawser is a cable fastening a ship to a pier; the Consul resists the temptation to drink.
206.2 Médico. Cirujano.
Sp. "Doctor. Surgeon" (the words in Dr Vigil's windows [23]). The Consul replies "guardedly" because of his fears of being followed around; a moment later he is shaken by the revelation that Vigil knows he is with Laruelle: it all seems part of the "plot".
206.3 cucumiform.
As Jakobsen notes [87], cucumiform, "cucumber-shaped", has probably been suggested by cuneiform, "wedge-shaped" (from L. cuneus, "a wedge," the ancestor of the four-letter word that underlies the Consul's association of the two terms). The Consul's sudden insight into "unaccommodated man" is crucially important to his final choice of hell.
207.1 Les Joyeuses bourgeoises de Windsor.
A verse play by French dramatist Ernest Prarond (1821-1909), based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. It deals with the amorous flirtations of the wives of Windsor, but its light-hearted tone is scarcely in keeping with the Consul’s present mood.
One draft noted [UBC WT 1-9, A]: "Shakespear, Traduction de M. Guizot"; and listed several titles of other plays and poems. The British edition [incorrectly, but following Lowry] uses excessive capitalisation. "Beaucoup de bruit pour rien", italicised in the American text, but not the British, is listed from M. Guizot's "traduction". The "Shelley" text mentioned was 'Odes, Poemes et Fragments lyriques choisis', traduction et introduction par A. Fontainas. The manuscript ["A"] lists literally dozens of French authors [including one "Foé (D. de)"], but Lowry noted "too many books". However, the next page ["B"] lists even more, until they topple one upon another, as if heaped up by poltergeists, which, Lowry notes, "is the theme, but do not overdo". Marvel's "Might a soul bathe there" is noted (twice) on the manuscript ["A"].
207.2 Agrippa d'Aubigné.
Theodore Agrippa d'Aubign ´(1552-1630), French Huguenot fighter, historian, poet, and tragedian, whose vigorous Calvinism made him the object of considerable persecution. After the death of Henry IV, he settled in Geneva where he wrote most of his works, the best known of which are his Histoire universelle of the period 1550-1601, centring on Henry IV and the Huguenots, and his long poem, 'Les Tragiques' (1616), a strongly anti-papal epic about the religious wars of his day.
207.3 Collin d'Harleville.
Jean Francois Collin d'Harleville (1755-1806), a minor French writer of light comedies in verse; notably Le vieux celibataire (produced during the Revolution in 1792), but also L'Inconstant (1786), L'Optimiste (1788), Les Châteaux en Espagne (1788) and Malice pour malice (1803).
207.4 Touchard–Lafosse [sic].
Georges Touchard-Lafosse (1780-1847; the long dash is for some reason, or perhaps not, common to all editions), French writer of the histories of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, and of Charles XIV, King of Sweden. He is best known for his Chroniques de l'Oeil de Boeuf published in 1830 under the pseudonym of Madame la Comtesse Douairiere de B–. This was a witty and irreverent look through the keyholes at the court and society gossip and scandal of the age of Louis XIV to Louis XVI, the author's intention being to present a tableau at once historically accurate and of literary value, sparing nobody nor anything, but always scrupulously true; the result is a delightful insight into the foibles and intrigues of another age.
207.5 Tristan l'Hermite.
The pseudonym of François l'Hermite (1602-55), French poet and dramatist, at one time a member of the retinue of the Duke of Orleans. He is the author of four notable tragedies: La Mariane (1636), about the jealous love of Herod for Marianne, whom he puts to death; La mort de Senèque (1644), La mort de Crispe (1645) and Osman (1656). He also wrote a tragi-comedy called La Folie du sage (1745) and a comedy called Le Parasite (1654) as well as a number of poems.
207.6 Beaucoup de bruit pour rien.
Fr. "Much Ado About Nothing"; the title of another Shakespearean play, presumably suggested to the Consul by Les Joyeuses Bourgeoises de Windsor, and dismissing Laruelle's intellectually light-weight volumes as offering nothing to relieve his suffering.
207.7 how to look at an ox-eye daisy.
The ox-eye daisy, Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum, a common flower of the meadows, resembles the common daisy but is much larger. The Consul's odd reflection, so like his reaction to the sunflower [see #144.1] reflects his sense of being watched constantly. The daisy (the "eye of day") is a popular symbol of fidelity ("she loves me, she loves me not"), and the question of Yvonne's loyalty is very much to the fore.
207.8 Medullary compression of the gibbus.
The gibbus (or gibbous) is a hump; usually the dorsal convexity seen in tuberculosis of the spine (Pott's disease) or caused by fracture. Medullary means pertaining to the medulla oblongata, the caudal part of the brain contiguous with the upper part of the spinal cord; the Consul's pun, "Our agreements were more or less bilateral", takes its point from the medulla oblongata being the point of crossing of the neural "eclectic systemës" to the opposite hemispheres of the brain.
207.9 erections of guns … disseminating death.
An ingenious conceit arising from the bilateral agreement of the medical and the sexual.
208.1 Erikson 34.
Dr. Guzmán's number, on the Erikson exchange, reverses the Consul's 43 [see #76.4]; the doctor is mentioned several times but never appears (this may or may not be meaningful). The Consul, flicking through the phone-book (“A.B.C.G.”), meets advertisements for Cafeaspirina and 666, and the names of his eventual destroyers, Zuzugoitea [see #358.3] and Sanabría [see #359.2].
208.2 ¿Que quieres?
Sp. "What do you want?"; misunderstood by the Consul as "Who do you want?", to which he answers "God!"
208.3 frozen stiff in the postures of the living.
A similar phrase is used in In Ballast to the White Sea [Ch. III], where the reference (not appropriate here) is to bodies exhumed from Pompeii.
209.1 Jean Cocteau's La Machine infernale.
Jean Cocteau (1891-1963), French playwright and film-maker, was part of the artistic avant-garde from an early age (collaborating with Satie on a ballet by Diaghilev with sets by Picasso). He was acclaimed for his Orphée (1926), Sang d'un poete (1930) and La Machine infernale, written in 1932 and produced in Paris in 1934. Lowry saw the latter twice (he said that Cocteau had given him the ticket), and it made an indelible impression upon him. Bradbrook notes [‘Cambridge Literary Friends’, 5] that La Machine infernale played at Cambridge’s Festival Theatre before it appeared in Paris; Lowry possibly saw it there. Cocteau's play is a retelling of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrranus [see #165.1], keeping closely to the story-line but imbuing it with a marked cynicism and a strongly deterministic philosophy. Day [323] outlines the play's relevance to Under the Volcano:
This was Cocteau"s version of the Oedipus tragedy. Before the play itself begins, a "Fantome" speaks to the audience of what is about to take place. At the conclusion of this preamble, the Fantome says:
Spectator, this machine you see here wound up to the full in such a way that the spring will slowly unwind the whole length of human life, is one of the most perfect constructed by the infernal gods for the mathematical destruction of a human life.
This infernal machine is the universe itself: an ingeniously contrived clock-like mechanism in which every part, every minute, has its function in the machine's diabolical purpose – "the mathematical destruction of a human life." When Lowry wrote to Cape that Under the Volcano "can even be regarded as a sort of machine: it works, too, believe me, as I have found out," it was surely of Cocteau's clockwork instrument of execution that he was thinking: which means, among other things, that his novel would be the representation of the destruction, beautifully and horribly worked out, of a human life – that of Geoffrey Firmin, His Majesty's Consul in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. The spring of the machine has been unwinding the whole length of the Consul's life, bringing him inexorably to the morning of November 1, 1938: The Day of the Dead, when the living visit the cemeteries to commune with their departed loved ones.
The spring of the Infernal Machine is, of course, Time. It has taken the Consul forty-two years to prepare himself for his last twelve hours.
Sherrill Grace notes ['Lowry and Freud, Cocteau and Barthes', 235] that the stunning Comédie des Champs Elysées production by the Théâtre Louis Jouvet in April 1934, which ran for 64 performances with Cocteau as narrator, established Cocteau's reputation as an important French playwright. Grace analyses the Oedipal theme in Lowry's writing in such a way as to identify the childhood trauma that is fundamental to his poetics, and to the vexed problem of his plagiarism with respect to his "mother" language.
209.2 les choses qui paraissent abominable aux humains … peu d’importance.
Fr, "Yes, my child, my little child ... things that appear abominable to humans, if you but knew, from the place where I dwell, they have little importance." From Cocteau's La machine infernale: the words, not quite accurately quoted, are from near the end of the play when the ghost of Jocasta returns as the mother of Oedipus to help him on his way to Colonus. The context is ominous: Oedipus says, "Je suis encore sur la terre" ("I am still on earth"), to which his mother replies "à peine" ("only just").
209.3 sortes Shakespeareanae.
Divination by chance selection from Shakespeare's works; the Consul's action is duplicated by Laruelle one year later [see #34.5].
209.4 The gods exist, they are the devil.
This quotation prefaces Cocteau's La machine infernale: "Les dieux existent: c'est le diable" (which should be translated: "The gods exist, that is the devil of it"). The erroneous attribution to Baudelaire arises because Baudelaire is the author of the two other quotations above this one in Cocteau's play. An earlier draft read: "it informed him" [UBC 25-23, 17] rather than: "Baudelaire informed him", but the error supports other references to Les Fleurs du Mal worked into the final drafts.
The mistake may be the Consul's, but the mistranslation was certainly Lowry's [UBC 30-7, 17]. The full epigraph is cited in the 1940 Volcano [205] and includes: "Mais un système est un espèce de damnation" ["But a system is a mode of damnation"]. Lowry commented to Albert Erskine [UBC 2-7]: "Quotation from Cocteau's Infernal Machine is comfort supplied from the other world to Oedipus after he's blinded himself." The phrase is also cited in October Ferry [95].
In the 1940 Volcano [205] the Consul is fascinated by Cocteau having written something called 'Popomak', and is reminded of the play by W.J. Turner [see #64.3] called The Man Who Ate the Popomack (1922), which he had thought of earlier, when peering into the barranca, "In connection with some smells." This man was "a cithernhead who ate some kind of forbidden fruit and stank so badly ever after nobody wanted to come near him" [206]. This is the myth of the durian fruit, which has indeed a pungent smell; but the connection with the Dead Sea fruit, which tastes of ashes, and the attempt to relate it to Popocatepetl, is Lowry's own. The reference acts as an index of alienation, but the changing stature of the Consul, and (perhaps) Lowry's belated realisation that Cocteau's poetic novel was called Le Potomac (1919) led to its deletion.
From Edward Lear's nonsense poem, 'The Owl and the Pussycat':
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon,
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon.
A runcible spoon (named after the poem) is, as Lowry tried to explain to Clemens ten Holder [14 June 1950; UBC 2-14], a utensil with “two broad prongs” (like a fork) and a sharp edge for cutting (like a knife), and another curved prong (like a spoon); it may be used to serve hors d'oeuvres.
210.1 white trousers of twenty-one inches breadth.
White flannel trousers were fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s, the "slim silhouette" persisting until "Oxford bags" came into vogue. They were sometimes as wide as 24 inches at the bottom. Laruelle adopts the current English fashion, and, for "obscure purposes" of Lowry's own, assumes increasingly aspects of the Consul's character.
210.2 a half-blue at the Sorbonne.
In Oxbridge parlance, a "blue" (from the light and dark blues of Oxford and Cambridge) is given to one who represents his university in a major sport or activity such as cricket, rugby or rowing; a "half-blue" is awarded for lesser sports such as archery. Aleister Crowley won his Cambridge half-blue at chess. The Sorbonne does not give such awards.
210.3 on just such afternoons as this.
An echo of Shakespeare's "In such a night as this," from The Merchant of Venice [V.i.1], where Lorenzo and Jessica delight in the memories of their love; like 'The Owl and the Pussycat' [#209.5], it celebrates a relationship that is the direct antithesis of the Consul's.
210.4 a scarab, of simple design, cut into a chalcedony.
A chalcedony is a semi-precious stone, a variety of quartz, usually translucent, commonly used in jewellery. It was called by Pliny the Arabian stone and is the gemstone of Capricorn. A scarab is a beetle sacred to the ancient Egyptians. The male scarab was believed to be without a female counterpart and to lay eggs in a ball of dung or mud which it then rolled to the fertile waters of the Nile for hatching. It is thus an emblem of a self-engendering deity and of the paradox of regeneration through dung and death.
211.1 Eggs .... Mescalito.
As the Consul walks down the street he earlier walked up, he hears in his mind, in reversed order, the insults directed at him that morning [see #56.3 and #53.1]. In like manner, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment [Pt. 3, Ch. 6] is accused of his crime by an unknown figure in the street.
211.2 an improvised whirligig ... the Great Carrousel.
A whirligig is (here) a pole with a seat on the end that revolves round an axis – a crude, one-seat merry-go-round. A carrousel (the spelling is French rather than Spanish) is a much larger merry-go-round.
211.3 the ayuntamiento.
In Mexico, the ayuntamiento is the city chambers, the municipal offices, or town hall. In 1938 the Cortés Palace was the centre of civic administration in Cuernavaca, containing offices for police, traffic, ambulance and library services; since 1965, these have been relocated in the Palacio Municipal.
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A celebrated set of murals painted in 1927 by Diego Rivera (1886-1957) on the upper balcony of the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca. The murals depict the history of Mexico from Conquest to Revolution, with emphasis upon the history of Morelos. The smaller north wall depicts the life of the Indians at the time of the conquest, then merges with battle-scenes between Indians and Spaniards on the longer west wall. These lead to the Spaniard's tree-crossing of the Amanalco barranca to capture Quauhnahuac [see #100.4]; and then to a series of scenes depicting life for the Indians under Spanish rule: the branding of slaves; women at a native tianguis, or market, and men forced into heavy labour; life on the sugar haciendas, with cruelty, abuse and whipping. On the south wall, directly opposite the Aztec sacrifice, is the Inquistion and a conflagration (Rivera believed that the Catholic church had equally oppressed the Indians), and in the lower left corner a picture of Emiliano Zapata, revolutionary hero of Morelos, on his white horse. As Laruelle says, looked at from the north to south there is a slow darkening which symbolises the gradual imposition of the Spaniard's conquering will on the Indians, before the striking relief of Zapata's horse.
212.1 the gradual imposition of the Americans' conquering friendship.
The Rivera murals on the Cortés Palace were commissioned and paid for by Dwight Morrow, American ambassador to Mexico, who made his home for many years in Cuernavaca, a gift to the people and city. Diego Rivera says in My Art and My Life, that he was called on in 1930 by Morrow to paint a wall of the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca: "I was given complete freedom of choice as to subject matter and a fee of 30,000 pesos from which, however, I had to pay my assistants and buy my own materials and equipment." He adds that he spent $8,000 of his own money on the restoration of the outer colonnade, whose walls he decorated, and ended up flat broke.
One of the seven Nahuatl tribes who, according to legend, set out from the fabled Chicomostoc in 830 AD, and settled in the valley of Cuernavaca, which they soon dominated. They established the state of Tlalnahuac, whose borders were roughly those of Morelos, and founded their capital at Quauhnahuac in 1197 [Aguirre, 75; Díez, 48]. The Tlahuicans retained their independence until 1436, when they were brought under Aztec sway by the angry lord, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina. They were obliged to pay tribute, but retained some autonomy, and a combined force of Aztecs and Tlahuicans resisted Cortés when he attacked Quauhnahuac in 1521 [see #100.4]. Their battledress consisted of padded and quilted cotton, topped by head-dresses or helmets, often in the form of grotesque animal heads.
Lowry's source for this passage may have been Rosa E. King's Tempest Over Mexico [319]: "On the stone walls of Cortez's palace are painted now the heroic dark-skinned Tlahuicas in their war masks of wolves and tigres, who died defending this valley." The Consul's guilt was originally related to the themes of conquest and exploitation; in the 1940 Volcano (but then in Chapter XII) [341], he had imagined himself hunted down by the Tlahuicans disguised as animals, and as pursued by a torrent of blood:
the blood of Zapata, sweeping down on him, the landed proprietor, who had amassed half a million pesos out of Mexican oil, out of Mexican silver, the gringo, who, for his own ends had tapped Mexico's very veins … there was going to be a reckoning or two…
Mrs Rosa King was for many years the owner of the Bella Vista Hotel in Cuernavaca, and her book, which Lowry had read, is an invaluable record of the times (it is referred to in Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads).
212.3 the formidable couple.
As Laruelle's "malicious smile" half-implies, the words echo those of Anubis at the end of Act II of La Machine infernale, when the "heroism" of Oedipus is mocked. The word possesses an echo of la vida impersonal [see #12.1].
212.4 the Banco de Crédito y Ejidal.
The Bank of Ejidal Credit, set up to finance the ejidos or communal lands of the villages [see #107.4]. The fine-featured Indian, like Juan Cerillo in Oaxaca, delivers money to the villages, and the risks involved in this undertaking are demonstrated when he is next seen dying on the roadside in Chapter VIII. The Banco de Crédito y Ejidal, no longer operative, was in Lowry’s day in the Calle Leyva directly behind the Cortés Palace.
213.1 surcingle.
L. cingulum, "a girdle"; a wide belt beneath the belly of the horse to keep its load in place; the Consul's jingle draws attention to the bags. Lowry pencilled into a later revision [UBC 30-7, ts. 20]: "The Consul momentarily thought he saw inside the horse, a kind of machinery, something like the revolving cutting blades of a mowing machine."
213.2 What is it Goethe says about the horse?
The Consul's reference is to Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), a novel in two parts, published in 1774. In the form of letters written by Werther to his friend Wilhelm, it tells of the hopeless passion Werther has conceived for Lotte, who is, alas, promised to another. At this point in the novel, near the end of Part I, Werther is miserable, his active powers are dulled, and, citing La Fontaine's fable about the horse (which, to avenge itself upon a stag, surrendered itself to man, but was not restored its liberty), he expresses his longing for a change of state, a desire for freedom:
hernach, wenn ich so wieder dran denke, und mir die Fabel vom Pferde einfällt, das seiner Freiheit ungedultig, sich Sattel und Zeug auflegen lässt, und zu Schanden geritten wird. lch weiss nicht, was ich soll –
("After that, when I again think of it, there comes to me the fable of the horse that, weary of its liberty, allows itself to be saddled and bridled, and is ridden to death [or, "in disgrace"]. I don't know what I shall do").
Werther tears himself away, but finally unable to resist his passion he returns to Lotte's town, takes his farewell and shoots himself. The intense sensibility and passion made Goethe famous overnight and generated a tide of feeling throughout Europe, young men adopting Werther's blue coat and yellow breeches to indulge their hopeless passions, even to the point of suicide.
213.3 Sangriento Combate en Mora de Ebro. Los Aviones de los Rebeldes Bombardean Barcelona. Es inevitable la muerte del Papa.
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Sp. "Bloody combat at Mora del Ebro. Rebel planes bombard Barcelona. The death of the Pope is inevitable." Mora del Ebro (“Mouth of the Ebro”) was a small village involved in the heavy fighting between 1 and 8 November which resulted in some ten thousand casualties. For the inevitable death of the Pope, see #230.2].
Lowry's notes from Buckley read: "The government had virtually been cut off save for a railway bridge at Mora de Ebro" [UBC WT 1-11, 4]. The 1940 typescript [UBC 25-23, 22] refers to "la Garcel Modelo" and states "Los Aviones del Gobierno Bombardean Salamanca." Lowry updated the original several times (from the Cárcel Modelo, or model prison [Madrid] to Mora de Ebro; from Salamanca to San Sebastian, then Valencia and finally Barcelona) to accord with the actual conditions of November 1938; this being part of the process whereby a vague leftist sympathy assumed precise definition.
213.4 a man was climbing a slippery flagpole.
The Consul has entered a world that is in part Hades, a madhouse and the fairground of Dr Caligari [see #191.1]. As Lowry points out ['LJC', 78], this man, like the one with the bicycle tyre [224], is a projection of the Consul and of the futility of his life.
213.5 'Barcelona' and 'Valencia'.
Spanish lovesongs, telling of roses and moonlight and nights of romance in the cities of their names; they became ('Valencia' especially) popular in England during the 1920s:
(a) Barcelona. The Catalan capital and Republican stronghold; the song is particularly incongruous given that rebel planes have just bombed the city. A popular English version ran:
Back in Barcelona, dreamy Barcelona,
Memories will come of one who bid you adieu.
Spanish music playing, senoritas swaying,
Flashing eyes that stare, are there, just daring you.
Tender lips will kiss your cares away,
Tender lips you'll miss will make you stay.
Back in Barcelona, dreamy Barcelona,
Paradise that lies 'neath skies of mystery.
(b) Valencia. The Mediterranean province and city, south of Barcelona; also the scene of heavy fighting during the war, the dream of "Valencia mía, jardín de España" and "las aromas de tus jazmineros" ("my garden of Spain" and "the smell of your jasmins") being now totally incongruous. A popular English version began:
Valencia ... land of orange grove and sweet content,
you called me from afar.
Valencia ... where a lover croons his sentiment
upon a light guitar.
Valencia ... let me hold a rose between my lips
while romance croons a lay.
Valencia ... where a troubadour beneath the moon
once stole my heart away.
213.14 a five-funnelled battleship.
H.M.S. Woodbine, celebrated for its five funnels, helped promote "Woodbine" cigarettes, their trademark an open packet with five cigarettes extended; this may be a cigarette advertisement. Or it may be just a picture of a mermaid and a boat.
214.1 Medea sacrificing her children.
Medea, daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis, was (in Euripides) a magician whose art helped Jason obtain the golden fleece. She returned with Jason to Iolcus and thence to Corinth, where Jason deserted her for Glauce, daughter of the king. Medea avenged herself terribly by destroying Glauce and killing the two children she had had by Jason.
214.2 Five jovial-looking stags.
Lowry is punning on a cliché of Victoriana, Sir Edwin Landseer's 'Monarch of the Glen' (1851), an impressive painting of a large stag.
214.3 Pancho Villa.
Francisco Villa (1877-1923), Mexican revolutionary leader called "the Centaur of the North". In 1913 he assumed leadership of the anti-Huerta movement in Chihuahua, and by a series of dashing raids he was in large measure responsible for Huerta's overthrow in 1914. His attack on Ciudad Juárez (watched from the rooftops by bemused Americans in neighbouring El Paso) was one of the first great triumphs of the revolutionary forces. Villa gained notoriety by crossing the U.S. border in 1916 in a series of raids, at least once inviting punitive retaliation from the USA. In 1917 he was given a hacienda on condition that he would not again break the peace, but he was assassinated for complex political reasons in 1923. In appearance, Pancho Villa was tall and dark, with a bristling dark moustache. His name evokes not only that moustache, but a sense of brainless dashing impulsiveness, "more a force of nature than of politics" [Womack, 192].
214.4 a somnambulistic quality.
The 1940 Volcano owed a considerable debt to Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers (1932), most obviously in Chapter XI, where Hugh and Yvonne make their way through the dark wood as in a trance, but more widely through the entire novel, with its theme of moral responsibility and psychic disintegration. Laruelle, in that version, fell asleep in the cinema, and entered "in some mysterious way" into the consciousness of the Consul. This element remained, even as obvious allusions to Broch were revised out, but the Consul's refusal to assume moral responsibility has led him inevitably to this world of ghosts and shadows. Dieter Salmaan ['The Metaphysics of Somnambulism'] has analysed Lowry's debt to Broch, stipulating that sleepwalking is the expression of a condition in which the individual finds himself bereft of meaningful criteria for conducting his life, and so (in words directly applicable to the rest of this chapter) existing in "a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world" [31, Broch 373]. This is a condition, he notes, invoked in Lowry's short story, 'June the 30th, 1934'. To which one might add that Lowry takes up Broch's "great question" of how an individual accommodates himself to dying, for as the deliberate references to Broch were phased out Lowry nevertheless retained a sense of Schlafwandeln as both "wandering" and "change", and the Consul curiously resists the total disintegration of values which his life has implied (Lowry's "hint of redemption" in his death, perhaps).
214.5 at dusk among gold stars.
In the 1940 Volcano [209; UBC 25-23, 23 ('Chagell')], Laruelle comments: "[Just like] Chagall's Love Among the Lilacs." Marc Chagall's 'Lovers in the Lilacs', oil on canvas (1930), is in the Richard S. Zeisler Collection, New York. One hopes that Yvonne is not quite as Chagall paints his lover.
215.1 Una tequila y una gaseosa.
Sp. "A tequila and a mineral water"; almost the order given one year later by Laruelle and Sr. Bustamente, but with Laruelle then ordering the stronger drink [see #26.1].
215.2 El Nilo.
Sp. "The Nile"; apparently, a brand of mineral water, but a mystery surrounds this simple name for there is no such gaseosa in Mexico, and the words were a late addition to the manuscripts. There is, it seems, a private allusion here to a book in Lowry's library, The Nile: The Life Story of a River, by Emil Ludwig, translated into English in 1937 (Lowry's copy is dated 1943). The opening paragraph of the foreword [vii] seems pertinent:
Every time I have written the life of a man, there has moved before my eyes the image, physical and spiritual, of a river, but only once have I beheld in a river the image of man and his fate .... The thought of the end of Faust as it stood embodied before my eyes in Aswan, fired me with the thought of writing the epic of the Nile as I had written the story of great men – as a parable.
The allusion seems to be deliberate, though not of great thematic importance unless to add to the Egyptian mysteries already suggested by Laruelle's scarab ring [see #210.4].
215.3 like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.
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In microcosmic man, the spine is equivalent to the tree of life, and, as the Consul is undoubtedly aware, his image is a deliberate inversion of "the all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning" [see #39.3(c)], which, in Cabbalistic thought, represents the emanation of the Sephiroth, from Kether to Malkuth. In the 1940 Volcano [211] Laruelle replies, with reference to William James: "I know that some people have claimed drinking releases the mystical in man; that it provides him with a sense of continuity."
Absinthe Oxygenée, otherwise la Fée verte (“the Green Fairy”), which, according to Flaubert’s dictionary of received ideas, has killed more Frenchmen than the Bedouins.
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Within the novel, a contrast between tequila and mescal is maintained, with a strong imputation that mescal is the more fatal drink: "if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end." In reality, tequila is simply a special variant of mescal: it derives its name from one of the towns of its manufacture, Tequila, in Jalisco, and is more properly known as mezcal de Tequila [de Barrios, 7]. Only one species of the maguey cactus, the agave tequilana (also known as the mezcal azul), produces tequila, and though the plant will grow elsewhere, true tequila with its distinctive flavour can be produced only in the vicinity of Guadalajara, Jalisco. Tequila is derived from the piña or heart of the tequila maguey. The piña, which weighs about 80 pounds, is cooked then shredded, and the juice pressed out. Sugars are added to the juice, and fermentation takes place before distillation. After a second distillation the colourless liquid is aged in wooden casks for a period of a few months to seven years, the quality and colour largely dependent on the length of aging [de Barrios, 47].
Mescals (from Nah. metl, "maguey"), are produced more widely than tequila throughout Mexico, the major areas being the central highlands from Durango to San Luis Potosi, Chiapas and Oaxaca, the latter the best known. They too are made from the piñas of the agave, a variety of which will yield different high-proof mescals. The process is similar to that of distilling tequila (mescal is not distilled from pulque), but the liquor is usually made in small distilleries and consumed locally. In 'LJ C' [71], Lowry wrongly associates mescal with mescaline, the hallucinatory drug obtained from buttons of the mescal cactus. The confusion is of some importance to Under the Volcano, because the Consul associates drunkenness with the abuse of his transcendent powers as a white magician.
216.3 Name of a name of God.
A direct transliteration of the mild French oath, "Nom d'un nom de Dieu", but Lowry would have doubtless seen in the invisible battle of demonic powers Laruelle calling for protection from the forces of darkness that have besieged the Consul's soul.
216.4 as Shelley says, the cold world shall not know.
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The final line of Shelley's 'Julian and Maddalo', written on his visit to Venice in 1818. The poem is a conversation between Julian (the author) and Maddalo (Lord Byron) about the power of man over his mind, as to whether one can achieve the ideal in this world through one’s own efforts, or whether one must accept the depravity of mankind and the hopelessness of life in this world, with perhaps some reward or vision of the ideal in an afterlife. The argument is unresolved. The two poets meet a maniac, a man driven to madness by unrequited love, but he is unable to resolve their question. Years later Julian returns alone and meets Maddalo's daughter, who reveals that the maniac's fickle lady had returned but abandoned him again. She says [lines 613-17]:
'Ask me no more but let the silent years
Be closed and cered over their memory
As yon mute marble where their corpses lie.'
I urged and questioned still, she told me how
All happened, but the cold world shall not know.
217.1 camarones .... Cabrones .... Venus is a horned star.
By willfully confusing shrimps (camarones) with goats and cuckolds (cabrones) and by alluding to the infidelity of Venus with Mars, the Consul is invoking Laruelle's affair with Yvonne and the fact that Laruelle, too, has been cuckolded. In an early revision [UBC 30-6, l4], the Consul was much cruder: "the thought of your damned dong with a luminous nose doesn't help."
217.2 Ben Jonson.
Ben Jonson (1572-1637), poet and playwright, known (among many other works) for The Alchemist and The Case Is Altered. In 1619, the Scottish writer William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Jonson during the latter's tour of the north and made a record of his table-talk, entitled Conversations with Ben Jonson, in which [section xiii] he records that Jonson: "hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen tartars & turks Romans and Carthaginians, feight in his imagination." Laruelle's analogy was clearer in the 1940 Volcano [212], when the nail was the thumbnail: "And it gets clearer and clearer. A universe perhaps. Precisely. But the point is, you forget what you've excluded. The whole hand, shall we say." The Consul, concentrating upon his private battle, does not indulge in "clear seeing" and excludes too much of the universe.
218.1 Meccano.
A toy building set, comprising metal plates, nuts, bolts, wheels and other items of mechanical engineering; similar to the "Erector" sets in the USA.
In an earlier draft [UBC 10-29, 26] Lowry made an explicit connection between the ferris wheel and Buddhist wheel of the law, which he also mentioned in his 'Letter to Jonathan Cape' [70]. This image of the universal law was derived from the sun, which moves inevitably each day in its progress across the sky; but it gradually evolved into the figure of a wheel, in Buddhism called "the Dharma-chakra", the chain of cause and effect. This is the subject of Buddha's first discourse, "The setting in Motion Onwards of the Wheel of the Law." Lowry copied from Rawlinson's India [46; UBC WT 1-10, 4]: "In Benares Buddha preached his first sermon and ‘set the Wheel of the Law rolling’." The Law is defined: "All existence is sorrow. This sorrow is caused by the thirst of the individual for existence, which leads from birth to birth."
The concept is reflected in the irresistible movement of the chariot of Juggernaut, the wheeled chariot in which Krishna rides, scouring the world of evil [see #3.5(d)]. For the Consul, the inevitable working of cause and effect, of his own fate or doom, is observable in such circular movements as the passage of the sun overhead, the ferris wheel or the movement of the stars in the night sky. According to Joseph Campbell, the wheel of the law is not to be considered either bad or good; rather, it is both positive or negative, is and not-is. From an Oriental or Hindu viewpoint (one with which the Consul is partially attuned to), his personal doom simply does not matter, and there are many moments in the book when he seems to realise, indeed welcome, such universal indifference.
218.3 Samaritana mía, alma pía, bebe en tu boca linda.
Sp. "My Samaritan woman, pious soul, drink in your beautiful mouth." The sentiment is typical of roundels taught by the nuns to small children in Catholic schools in Mexico. The reference is to John 4:6-42, where Christ comes to the well and asks the lowly Samaritan woman for a drink, offering in return the living water of God. The Consul, however, hears the echo of the S.S. Samaritan, with no suggestion of forgiveness. Lowry comments in a draft of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-21, 608-09]: "Samaritana mia, alma pie, bebe en tu boca linda, sangre guinda, letre y musica de Chucho Morge. The Consul's Q ship is named Samaritan: significance – or better still, forget it."
218.4 meteora.
The Consul's expression refers, in a general kind of way, to the translucent spots before the eyes that may occur under many conditions. The word (Gk. Meta, “across”, plus eoros, "lifted into the air') applies to various atmospheric phenomena such as falling stars, bolidos, parhelia and St. Elmo's fire. The Consul, with the full support of Charles Fort, senses in such effects the presence of malignant agencies.
218.5 the Qliphoth.
The world of matter, said to be the abode of evil spirits called shells [see #39.3(d)].
218.6 the God of Flies.
Beelzebub: in Milton's Paradise Lost, the demon second only to Satan; in occult tradition, one of the eight sub-princes of darkness, whose name is described in MacGregor-Mathers's The Sacred Magic [110]:
Belzebud: – Also written frequently "Beezebub," "Baalzebub," "Beelze-buth," and "Beelzeboul." From Hebrew, BOL, = Lord, and ZBVB, = Fly or Flies; Lord of Flies. Some derive the name from the Syriac "Beel d'Bobo," = Master of Calumny, or nearly the same signification as the Greek word Diabolos, whence are derived the modern French "Diable" and "Devil."
218.7 why do people see rats .... all those rodents in the etymology.
The words cited by the Consul all possess the common sense of "biting":
(a) Remors. O.Fr. "remorse", deriving from L. remordere, "to vex" or "to torment"; the direct ancestor of the English word ‘remorse’.
(b) Mordeo. L. "I bite," from mordere, "to bite."
(c) La Mordida. Sp. "the bite"; the sum of money paid under the table to the autoridades; Lowry's failure to appreciate this caused problems on his return visit to Mexico in 1946. La Mordida is the name of Lowry's unfinished manuscript based upon that experience.
(d) Agenbite. The Agenbite of Inwit, or Prick of Conscience (1340), is the title of Michael of Northgate's prose translation of a French moral treatise, Le somme des vices et des virtues, by Friar Lorens, dealing with the seven deadly sins. Lowry probably picked up the word from Joyce's Ulysses [Ch. 1], where Stephen Dedalus feels the bite of conscience from his failure to heed his mother's dying wish.
(e) rongeur. Fr. "rodent"; from ronger, "to gnaw" or "to eat into" (the verb is used with the sense of feeling remorse).
The Consul's question, "Why do people see rats?," is answered, obscurely, by Éliphas Lévi in the Transcendental Magic [Ch. 12, 114]:
The word ART when reversed, or read after the manner of sacred and primitive characters from right to left, gives three initials which express the different grades of the Great Work. T signifies triad, theory and travail; R, realisation; A, adaptation.
The Consul's imperfect Themurah (the transposition of letters in a word) constitutes or reflects his consistent abuse of the powers Lévi describes.
In one early draft [UBC 25-21, 2], the Consul told a story: on board the Samaritan, during a banquet, a rat walked the length of the mess-room unmolested, no officer daring to suggest that it might actually be there. "La Mordida" was a very late addition to the text [UBC ‘F’, 304], in July 1946, after Lowry had returned from his second trip to Mexico, where he had experienced the miseries that would constitute the novel of that name. He asked Erskine to add the word to this passage about remorse. As Asals notes [Making, 379-81], the element of remorse became increasingly the focus of Lowry's great battle for the survival of the human consciousness.
219.1 Facilis est descensus Averno.
L. "easy is the descent to Avernus"; From Virgil's Aeneid [VI.126-29]:
facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.
("The descent to Avernus is easy: / night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; / but to recall the step and go forth upwards to the light of day, / this is the task, this the toil").
The Aeneid recounts the adventures of Aeneas, son of Anchises, from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome. Book VI describes a visit to the underworld, under the guidance of the Sibyl and the protection of the Golden Bough, where Aeneas discovers the fate of his posterity. Avernus, a lake in northern Italy, was reputed to be an entrance to the underworld because of its great depth and the gloomy woods about it; its vapours were believed to kill any birds that flew over it. The passage is cited in Thomas Taylor's 'Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries' as a neo-Platonic image of the descent of the soul into the world of matter and of the difficulty of reuniting with its true nature. Laruelle's challenge to the Consul is unequivocal: he may be able to enter hell, but is he, like Aeneas, man enough to return.
In a letter of 12 April 1947 [UBC 1-17], John Davenport inquired: "pedantic footnote: why 'Facilis est descendus Avernus'? It's verse, not prose, & won't scan that way." In a letter to Alan Crawley [26 June 1947; CL 2, 77], Lowry admitted: "I don't know where the 'est' crept in from – what would Mr Chips have said? Or Virgil for that matter." Compare Flann O'Brien: "Q. Facilis est quod? A. descensus Averno."
219.2 Je crois que le vautour est doux à Promethée et que les Ixion se plaisent en Enfer.
A marginal note [UBC 30-7, ts 31], onto which the line is pencilled, says "Jean Ogier"; this is Jean Ogier de Gombauld (1576-1666), playwright and poet, and one of the original members of the Académie française, in a sonnet which in turn stimulated André Gide’s ideas about Prometheus (see his Le Prométhée mal enchaîné [1899]). The sonnet reads:
Que les grands beautés causent de grandes peines!
Quoiqu’on nomme l’Amour un mal délicieux!
Que leurs premiers attraits sont doux et gracieux!
Mais qu’on trouve à la fin leurs douceurs inhumaines!
Que d’aveugles desires, de craintes incertaines,
De pensers criminels, de soins ambitieux,
Font sentir aux amants la colère des Cieux,
Et le malheureux sort des espérances vaines!
Je doute cependant si je voudrais guérir
De l’extrême Bonheur dont je muers sans mourir:
Tant l’objet est puissant qui m’a l’âme enchantée.
Je crois qu’enfin l’esclave est jaloux de ses fers,
Je crois que le vautour est doux à Prométhée,
Et que les Ixions se plaisent aux Enfers
(“How great beauties cause great sorrows! That called love a delicious ill! How gentle and delicious their first attractions! But how clear in the end their inhuman sweetnesses! How blind desires, uncertain fears, criminal thoughts, ambitious cares, make lovers feel the anger of the Heavens, and the unhappy fate of vain hopes. However, I doubt that I would wish to be cured of the extreme Happiness of which I die without dying; the object that has enchanted my soul is so powerful. I believe that in the end the slave is jealous of his irons, I believe that the vulture to Prometheus is sweet, and that the Ixions enjoy being in Hell” [my bolding]).
For Prometheus, see #131.3; Ixion (the plural form is unexpected), as a punishment for murdering his kin and attempting the Chastity of Hera, was bound in Hades upon a wheel of fire that turned perpetually. The Consul's answer to Laruelle is implicit in these words: he chooses hell because he likes it. Lowry's line was earlier [UBC 27-7, 22] inserted as the Consul put the postcard beneath Jacques' pillow, reflecting that the arrival of the card proved the lonely torment unnecessary. "Or that he must have wanted it."
219.3 M. Laruelle wasn't there at all.
In the 1940 Volcano [214] there is a formal "Au revoir"; but Lowry noted twice in the margin [UBC WT 1-9, F; UBC 27-6, 17]: "Get sense that after Laruelle has gone, his last contact with life has gone & there are only the ghosts awaiting him." This is supported by a phrase deleted from one of the earliest ("Lacretelle") drafts [UBC 25-23, 4], "walking through a hollow ghost world". Lowry drew attention, obliquely [UBC 2-6], to Kenneth Fearing's Dagger of the Mind (1941), in which a drunk suddenly realises that he is talking to himself [171]: "I put down my charcoal and looked around. It was the damnedest thing. I could have sworn I'd been talking to Steve Wessex ... but he'd simply vanished, as people do in dreams. Just as I'd begun to grow fond of the guy, too. But no doubt he'd crop up again in some other [dream]." Lowry at one point [UBC 15-1] proposed prefacing Lunar Caustic with an epigraph from a poem by Kenneth Fearing.
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219.4 the Bus Terminal.
In the 1930s, the terminal (with its associated cantina) was located close to the Cortès Palace [see #225.1].
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219.5 the little dark cantina.
El Bosque, "the wood", which the Consul reaches later [225]. His steps teeter to the left (ominously); he walks the "wibberley wobberley" walk rather than with the erect manly Taskerson carriage [20], and, like the Samaritan [32], he cannot steer a straight course.
220.1 Dies Faustus.
L. "happy day"; the pun on "Faustus dies" accentuated by the Consul's looking at his watch. There may be a hint of Dies Irae, the medieval Latin hymn about the Day of Judgment attributed to Thomas de Celano (c. 1225) and often included in the requiem mass for the repose of the souls of the dead.
220.2 the angel of night.
In Jewish lore, the Angel of Night, Lailah, rules over the dominion of conception and birth, charged with guarding the newborn spirit.
220.3 the longest day.
In this context, almost innocent; but In Ballast to the White Sea is shaped at many points by a novel by Johannes V. Jensen, translated by A.G. Chater as The Longest Day (1923-24), and it is not impossible that the pure Nordic spirit exemplified therein implies an equally strong censure of the Consul’s drunkenness.
220.4 Dieu et mon droit.
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Fr. "God and my right"; the motto of the British crown (originally "God and my right shall me defend"), set beneath the coat of arms held between the heraldic animals, the lion and the unicorn. Lowry toyed with the idea [UBC 30-7, ts.1] of having as an extended motif the lion fighting with the unicorn for the crown.
220.5 the final frontiers.
The Consul has earlier [135] mentioned the “final frontier of consciousness”; the landscape, perhaps soul-scape, increasingly assumes qualities of the spirit world.
221.1 ¡BRAVO ATRACCIÓN! 10 c. MÁQUINA INFERNAL.
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Sp. "Great attraction! 10 centavos. Infernal Machine." The coincidence that strikes the Consul is the echo of Cocteau's La machine infernale on Laruelle's table [see #209.1]. The machine is not the ferris wheel (indeed, both literally and morally it is “far from the Great Wheel” [see #218.2]), but the kind of machine known as an octopus, with its "little confession box" at the end of each long tentacle. As Sherrill Grace notes, the fairground scene here, like that in Das Cabinett der Dr. Caligari, "symbolizes not only a madly revolving world perceived by the protagonist, but the helplessness of the individual soul caught up in superior whirling forces" ['Expressionist Vision', 103]. The presence of the Chinese hunchback with his retiform, or net-like cap, adds to the horror with its suggestion of inscrutable demonic forces.
222.1 The Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light to the world, was hung upside down over it.
The "poor fool bringing light to the world" is both Christ [see #201.4] and Prometheus, whose punishment was to be chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle tore continually at his liver. The one "hung upside down" is on the Tarot card 12 the Hanged Man (who has seen the truth and must therefore suffer), usually depicted as hanging by his feet from a tau-shaped bar. The link between the two is found in Éliphas Lévi's Transcendental Magic [116], where the Hanged Man is likened not only to the adept but also to Prometheus, "expiating by everlasting torture the penalty of his glorious theft."
In The Varieties of Religious Experience [417], William James offers an insight, one Lowry was aware of, into the Consul's self-deceptions:
In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and word coming in with new meaning, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is known. That region contains every kind of matter: "seraph and snake" abide there side by side.
The implications are twofold: the Consul has reached a position of enlightenment, a point where he must "let everything go" (his stick, his passport, his pipe, his notecase) before breaking from the wheel of the law and reaching nirvana; on the other hand, his abuse of his mystical powers precludes his attaining such enlightenment – the wheel of fortune will turn, and the tree of life will be inverted to plunge him into the abyss.
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222.2 999.
The Consul, inverted, sees an advertisement for insecticide [see #188.2], but 999 in England is the number to be phoned in emergencies.
223.1 The child who had his notecase withdrew it from him playfully.
Lowry inquired of Albert Erskine [UBC WT 1-20]: "I seem to have met a similar little girl holding things behind her back in Julien Green's Personal Record. Does this matter?" The 1940 Volcano [218] has "withdrew it from him playfully, hiding it behind her, before handing it back"; Lowry's defence against plagiarism was to remove the offending phrase. The incident does not appear in Green's Personal Record, but in his Dark Journey [85] the "little girl" Fernande picks up a ball of wool and hands it to Madame Londe, and in Midnight Elizabeth (also referred to as "the little girl") defiantly holds a pair of scissors behind her back. Fatefully, this little girl returns a crumpled paper, “Some telegram of Hugh’s”; but no passport: this will have fatal repercussions in Chapter XII.
223.2 the Luxembourg Gardens.
The gardens of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, once those of the royal family, now the house of the senate. The gardens, dating from the early 17th century, are of a formal design, with beautiful flowerbeds and many statues depicting mythological themes and famous women. Lowry claimed once to have encountered James Joyce there [SL, 250].
Ebenezer Scrooge, the tight-fisted old miser of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), is visited by the ghost of his former partner Marley and has a series of visions, including one of his own death, as a result of which he wakes up next morning a changed man. What follows constitutes a remnant of the earliest drafts of Under the Volcano, Lowry having recorded this in the ‘Pegaso’ Mexican notebook [UBC 12-14], including the final Beckett-like words: "Alone. World. On." It may have been intended for a short story. Mr Carruthers, a lonely man who speaks no Spanish, ends up in a bar with a woman who speaks no English, but sets before him a child's exercise book with the story of Scrooge (as recounted here) in simple English, crude "phonetics", then Spanish. Lowry refers to the passage in a letter to Gerald Noxon [Lowry / Noxon Letters, 37], prefacing it with another question: "Is your aunt in the garden with her strong stout stick?"
224.1 the Avenida Guerrero.
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The street in Cuernavaca leading directly north from the zócalo, in 1938 going past the Piggly Wiggly store and the old market. Lowry says in Dark as the Grave [208] that this is the route taken by the Tomalín bus in Chapter VIII of his book, but in Under the Volcano the road is called the Avenida de la Revolución [see #23.3].
The madman, eternally committed to a process of irreducible logic, is like Sisyphus, once King of Corinth, whose avarice and deceit condemned him to roll forever a heavy stone to the top of a hill, on reaching which it always rolled back again. In a manner not dissimilar to that of the ‘Hades’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Lowry inserts unobtrustive parallels with the denizens of the afterworld.
225.1 the Terminal Cantina El Bosque.
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The "Terminal" was in Cuernavaca, but the real-life "El Bosque", Lowry notes in his ‘Letter to Jonathan Cape’, was in Oaxaca; the fictional setting is thus a conflation of the two. ‘El Bosque’ means "the Wood", and hence echoes the dark wood theme sounded on the first page of the novel. In an earlier draft [UBC 30-8, 5], Lowry had noted that "the terminal Cantina was so dark etc" was out of Julian Green; the reference appears to be to the opening of Leviathan (1925), translated into English as The Dark Journey (1929). At the outset of the novel Paul Guéret enters a little deserted café where a heavy curtain screens off the interior; the name of the waiter there is ‘Gregoire’. The Terminal is literally the bus stop, in 1938 on the Avenida Juárez just south of the Cortés Palace, but the pun is a reminder that the Consul's dark journey is also one to death. When Lowry returned to Cuernavaca in 1945 (taking Green's novel with him), the bus stop had been moved to behind the palace and the Terminal Cantina was no more [DATG, 121].
225.2 'The Boskage'.
A boskage is a thicket, grove, or cluster of trees. The word appears in Rupert Brooke's 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', to which Lowry later alludes [232].
225.3 the English 'Jug and Bottle'.
That part of a public house (usually separate where alcohol is sold for consumption off the premises; so-called because patrons might fill their “jugs” or buy by the bottle.
226.1 big green barrels.
Señora Gregorio has a large variety of cheap potent drinks:
(a) jerez. Sherry, originally named from the town of Jerez (or Xeres) in Andalusia, Spain.
(b) habanero. From Habanero, "Havana"; a rum-like liquor originating in Cuba, but later produced in Tabasco; usually prepared from grape wines and Mexican brandy.
(c) catalán. From Catalonia, a province of northern Spain; a strong liquor distilled from sugar and imported from Spain.
(d) parras. A strong alcohol produced from grapes and associated with the Parras area of Coahuila, the best wine-producing area in Mexico. The vineyard at Parras de la Fuente was the earliest winery in Mexico.
(e) zarzamora. From Sp. zarza, "brambleberry"; a fortified blackberry wine.
(f) málaga. From Malaga, a province of southern Spain. Again, a fortified fruit liquor rather than the quality wines for which the region is renowned.
(g) durazno. A durazno (named after the town in Jalisco) is like a peach (Sp. melocotón), but slightly smaller; hence, a peach brandy.
(h) membrillo. An aguardiente made from quinces (Sp. membrillo, "a quince").
(i) rumpope. A yellow drink, very like Advocaat, made from milk, sugar, alcohol, almond essence, vanilla, and egg-yolk.
226.2 an awakening from a dream in a dark place.
The sense of death as an awakening from a dream might have been suggested by Claude Houghton's Julian Grant Loses His Way [see #300.5]. This is supported by a comment [UBC 30-6, ts. 30]: "It was as though he were passing from one consciousness and entering a no-man's land between that and another."
226.3 a Psyche knot.
A style in which the hair is brushed back and twisted into a conical coil above the nape; named for Psyche [see #44.1], who is traditionally depicted this way; hence a reminder that Señora Gregorio too has lost her husband. Señora Gregorio may be loosely modelled on Rosa E. King, author of Tempest over Mexico (1935), for many years owner of the Bella Vista Hotel; she was both English and widowed.
226.4 No, tequila, por favor .... Un obsequio.
Sp. "No, tequila, please .... A gift." The Consul's concern to repay Señora Gregorio her 50 centavos and the free drink given him are in marked contrast with his devious scheming to get his change and outwit the barboy in Chapter XII. The immediate reference to cincuenta dos, "fifty-two" (his number on the Calle Humboldt), should remind the Consul that Yvonne had earlier [47] given a tostón to the dark god who took her bags.
In the 1940 Volcano [221; UBC 25-23, 34], the Consul drinks mescal, "Por buen favor"; only in revision was the diabolical scale affirmed, with mescal as the index of damnation and so withheld until Chapter X.
227.1 Lo mismo.
Sp. "the same”; but in Chapter XII the Consul gravely replies to the similar question, "What's your names?" with the words "Blackstone ... William Blackstone" [358].
228.1 noseless.
A symptom of advanced syphilis, a disease which haunted Lowry's imagination.
228.2 a strange ticking like that of some beetle.
The death-watch beetle, of the family Anobiidae, makes a ticking sound as it bores through wood and is considered an omen of death [see #337.2]. In Aiken's Great Circle [249] Andrew Cather reflects that this beetle will "precede him on his march to the frontiers of consciousness."
228.3 Dispense usted, por Díos.
Sp. "Go away, for God's sake”; the words (literally, "excuse yourself ") are compassionate in tone.
228.4 thoughts of hope that go with you like little white birds.
The phrase "read or heard in youth or childhood" suggests a distant recollection of J.M. Barrie's The Little White Bird (1902) where children’s souls are likened to birds, and in Chapter 20 of which souls of a child and a dog are compared. In neo-Platonic thought, the journey of the soul is represented as the flight of a bird. Lowry's poem, 'Thunder Beyond Popocatepetl', suggests an awareness of Chekhov's The Sea-gull. The poem concludes:
Reason remains although your mind forsakes
It; and white birds fly higher against the thunder
Than ever flew yours; where Chekov said was peace,
When the heart changes and the thunder breaks.
The desire for such peace is also expressed in Yeats' 'The White Birds', but the willed destruction of a living creature makes the Chekovian reference seem more fitting.
229.1 Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in –.
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In Luke 23:43, Jesus says to one of the thieves crucified beside him: "Verily, I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise" (the unfinished nature of the Consul's quotation leaves his designation more ambiguous). The direct allusion, however, is to Nordahl Grieg's The Ship Sails On [217]: as Benjamin Hall is contemplating suicide, he picks up the diseased ship's dog, Santos, and says before slowly climbing over the rail with the dog, "Santos ... this day shalt thou be with me in paradise." Benjamin, unlike the Consul (or Jesus), changes his mind, and climbs back onto the deck.
The word ‘pichicho’ was added to the manuscripts [UBC 30-6, 23] some time after the rest of the paragraph had been composed. Lowry derived this term of endearment from W.H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago [Ch. 1], where a lame dog suddenly appears:
One of his hind legs had been broken or otherwise injured so that he limped and shuffled along in a peculiar lop-sided fashion; he had no tail, and his ears had been cropped close to his head ....
No name to fit this singular canine visitor could be found, although he responded readily enough to the word pichicho, which is used to call any unnamed pup by, like pussy for cat. So it came to pass that the word pichicho – equivalent to "doggie" in English-stuck to him for only name until the end of the chapter, and the end was that, after spending some years with us, he mysteriously disappeared.
229.2 To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast?
An echo of John Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' [lines 31-34]:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
Keats' poem, a profound and moving meditation upon the power of art to transfix time, is neatly parodied by the Consul as he sees the pictures of wolves and sleigh caught forever in a frozen moment of eternity. The original line from Keats is quoted in Blue Voyage [82], but in a context emphasising slaughter rather than transcendence.
229.3 Rostov's wolf hunt in War and Peace.
In Book VII of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Nicholas Rostov returns home on leave to settle the family's financial affairs, but finding them too confused he goes wolf-hunting instead. Chapters 3 to 5 tell of the preparations for the hunt, the pursuit of the wolf by the dogs, and its eventual capture, alive. As the word ‘incongruously’ implies, there are no direct parallels between the two scenes (there is no sleigh in Tolstoy's account, for instance). After the hunt, the party accepts the invitation of "Uncle" (in fact, a distant relative and neighbour of the Rostovs) to spend the evening at his house. They are offered warm hospitality, food, and music, and a night of happiness and cheer unfolds.
229.4 wolves never hunted in packs at all.
A perennial pseudo-question, given that wolves do occasionally hunt in packs, to bring down the weak animals in herds of elk and reindeer.
229.5 while our real enemies go in sheepskin by.
An image based on Matthew 7:15, at the conclusion of Christ's Sermon on the Mount: "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing; but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Compare Henry Vaughan, 'The King Disguised': "Wolves did pursue him, and to fly the ill / He wanders (Royal Saint!) in sheep-skin still."
229.6 Adios.
Sp. “Goodbye”, but with a suggestion of finality.
229.7 In some kernice place where all those troubles you har now will har –.
The Consul starts, for he hears an echo of "Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in –" [see #229.1]. Señora Gregorio's words combine two popular songs: 'All My Trials Lord, Soon be Over', and 'Some Place Green', which has the refrain:
To some place green,
To some place nice,
Some place that men
Call Paradise.
230.1 I have no house only a shadow.
Based on the Mexican expression of hospitality, "a donde cae mi sombra, alla se encuentra tu casa" ("wherever my shadow falls, there will be found your house").
230.2 Es inevitable la muerte del Papa.
Sp. "The death of the Pope is inevitable"; the headline which the Consul had earlier read [213] as referring to himself. The illness of Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) stemmed from a variety of causes: arterio-sclerosis in 1936 had led to gangrene, cardiac asthma, and high blood pressure. He finally succumbed to influenza and a third heart attack. Lowry suggested that this reference was "quite possibly just an anachronism" ['LJC', 78], but that it had to stand since it was such a fine ending: he is probably drawing indirect attention to his own cleverness, because although Pius XI died on 10 February 1939, the Mexican papers throughout 1937 and 1938 had been full of reports of his likely death and his frequent relapses and recoveries.