Under the Volcano

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Malcolm Lowry, a writer who really only wrote one book of note, but it was a doozy: Under the Volcano, considered by many to be one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. I recently read the book, as well as watched the John Huston film version from 1984, which I hadn't seen since it first came out. It was a Criterion Collection DVD, so it had a multitude of extras, including a feature-length documentary on Lowry.

The novel concerns the last twenty-four hours of the life of Geoffrey Firmin, referred to in the book as "the Consul." He's a British diplomat, the ex-consul to the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, Lowry's stand-in for Cuernavaca (in the film there is no obfuscation, and the town is called by its actual name). The town sits in the shadow of two looming volcanoes, and we are told "possesses eighteen churches and fifty-seven cantinas." The action takes place on the Day of the Dead--November 2, 1938. Of course this holiday holds special meaning in Mexico, and is celebrated with much fanfare, with lots of skeleton imagery.

Firmin is a stand-in for the author, a man from England who has found himself in Mexico and is a hopeless alcoholic. He is rarely sober, but still a vigorous man, with a sharp wit and a sense of himself. He has recently been divorced from his wife, Yvonne, but she arrives unexpectedly, because despite herself she is still in love with him. The third character in the triad is Hugh, the Consul's half-brother, a journalist who has recently been in Spain and seems to have once been intimate with Yvonne.

There is a hell of a lot going on in this book. It really requires at least two reads to get all of it. It's told in something of a stream of consciousness, and is somewhat Joycean. At times my mind wandered and I had to go back and reread a few paragraphs to establish what was going on. After finishing it I read a summary and found, to my surprise, that one of the characters had died. I went back and reread that portion, feeling stupid. Some of his sentences contain multiple clauses that go on for pages, with a virtuosic use of punctuation.

I can see why it's a big hit in academia as it is a gold mine of metaphor and allusion. Let me just elucidate a few. Of course it deals with politics--Hugh feels guilty about being unable to do more to help the Loyalist cause in Spain, and the lurking shadow of World War II hovers over everything (Lowry wrote the book during the War, and it was published in 1947). The Consul refers to an incident in World War I when he captured a German U-Boat, but was tried for court martial, accused of incinerating German officers. Surely Lowry knew what he was doing in describing Germans being thrown into furnaces. In the last chapter of the book, when the Consul is faced down by bureaucratic Mexican thugs, he is accused of being a Jew.

The central chapter of the book, and the basis of the short story which prefigures it, is when the Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh are on a bus headed to a bullfight. They stop when they see a wounded man lying by the road. He is an Indian, and it appears he has fallen from his horse. Hugh is told not to help him, as Mexican law forbids such interference, lest he be seen as an accessory to whatever happened, but a Spaniard, whom Hugh has identified as a fascist, steals the Indian's money.

Then there's the animal imagery. A whole dissertation could be written on this. Several animals are mentioned, including a dog (the Consul calls him a "pariah") which follows him around, a little girl playing with an armadillo, a rabbit eating an ear of corn, a cat which holds a butterfly in its mouth, an eagle that Yvonne frees from its cage, and the horse that belonged to the dead Indian, which will reappear at the end of the book as a harbinger of doom. The most poignant is the eagle, which perhaps represents Yvonne's feelings about the Consul--she has to let him go. I liked this interpretation of the armadillo, from the New Yorker Book Club's Ligaya Mishan, who equates the armadillo to Firmin--Yvonne sees him as a pet, something to play with and control, but if let loose will drag her down below ground. The last line, after the Consul has been murdered, again rings with zoology: "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down a ravine."

And what are we to make of the cinematic imagery? Throughout the book we are told that the film playing in town is The Hands of Orlac, starring Peter Lorre (it was released in the U.S. under the name Mad Love). It is about a pianist whose hands are amputated after an accident, and grafted onto his arms are the hands of a murderer. Of course he is compelled by these hands to murder. Once again we see a metaphor for the Consul--a man who can only do what nature, however cruel it is, dictates. Also, Yvonne's character was a movie actress as a child, so we hear Lowry's take on evils of Hollywood, something that was evermore becoming common in literature.

Though the writing is often just too much, it is also frequently brilliant. The book is often funny, even about the Consul's alcoholism. He drinks almost everything: beer, whiskey, tequila, even strychnine, which at the time was considered a curative for dipsomania (in small doses, of course). At the end he is drinking mescal, the drink of the desperate, with its worm at the bottom of the bottle. This of course leads to his doom. But there are many instances of a winking nature about funny drunks. Consider this passage about him taking a stroll (to a cantina in the morning, of course): "But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him. The Consul lay face downward in the deserted street." Or the conversation he has with an American who lives next door, and is disgusted by the Consul's boozing. The Consul says he's on the wagon, but his neighbor says, "The funeral wagon, I'd say." Yvonne's take on drink is different, as she describes mescal as "like ten yards of barbed wire fence. It nearly took the top of my head off." Even as he lay dying, the Consul maintains his drollery: "this is a dingy way to die."

Lowry was also an alcoholic--it would be hard to imagine a teetotaler writing this book. He died of his illness in 1957 at the age of 48. Knowing this some of the passages go down hard, like this one: "The Consul dropped his eyes at last. How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anis, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygénée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the aperitifs, the digestifs, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal…The Consul sat very still. His conscience sounded muffled with the roar of water. It whacked and whined round the wooden frame house with the spasmodic breeze, massed, with the thunderclouds over the trees, seen through the windows, its factions. How indeed could he hope to find himself, to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back and look now, scrabble among the broken glass, under the eternal bars, under the oceans?"

John Huston made a film version in 1984. He had hoped to use Richard Burton as the Consul, but he was shortly to die and was perhaps too sick to play the character. Albert Finney was a more than capable replacement, and received an Academy Award nomination (as did Alex North for his fine music score). Jacqueline Bisset played Yvonne and Anthony Andrews was Hugh.

The screenplay by Guy Gallo is faithful but a distillation, as there is just too much to cram into one film (the book takes multiple points of view, ranging from the Consul to Yvonne to Hugh to a French film director, LaRuelle, who is cut out of the movie). I saw the film when it first came out but remembered almost none of it. I then read the book and watched the film. Had I done it the other way around I might have understood more what I was reading, but I don't like to do that, because it makes things too easy (and I don't like picturing famous actors as the characters, despite how they may be described).

The film is very good, primarily resting on the back of Finney and the magic of the Mexican location, which is also vividly rendered in Lowry's prose--you can practically smell the bougainvillea. It was interesting to learn, however, in an interview Huston gave, that he didn't the book was a great one, though. He thought it seemed as if Lowry were putting everything he had ever experienced in this one book, which turned out, tragically, to be correct.