Word: causticity
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...after the breakup of his first marriage, Lowry traveled to New York, began drinking heavily, and committed himself to a mental hospital, the scene of his novella, Lunar Caustic. The next year, he journeyed to Mexico hopeful of rejoining his wife, but instead plunged into the Maleboge of drinking and respair that "inspired" Under the Volcano. After languishing in Southern Mexico for two years Lowry left for the United States where he met Margerie Bonner, his second wife. In their squatter's shack on Vancouver Island, she nursed him through another seventeen years of alcoholism, depression and relentless bad luck...
...some cases finished, under the title, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. The stories varied from very good to sloppy, roughly in accord with their state of completion at the time of Lowry's death. Then, in 1963, the Paris Review published his novella, Lunar Caustic which he had first written in 1936. Published in hardback for the first time this year, Lunar Caustic was to be the germ for Lowry's second major novel, the Purgatorio in his trilogy, The Voyage That Never Ends, for which Under the Volcano was to be his Inferno...
...published this year, Lunar Caustic is easily the better work. Reminiscent of both The Enormous Room and Naked Lunch, it easily surpasses both of these novels in control and precision of detail...
...Lunar Caustic, Lowry uses his secondary characters effectively to expand upon and control the main autobiographical figure, William Plantagenet, a young Englishman and a drunk, who is committed temporarily to Bellevue Hospital in New York. In the central conversation between Plantagenet and the Doctor, Lowry plays the Doctor's practical, mindlessly psychologistic comments against Plantagenet's solipsism. At the same time, however, the Doctor's words serve as a kind of objective warning against the distortions implicit in Lowry's habit of creating only autobiographical characters...
SWEET EROS and WITNESS. Nudity is the theatrical vogue at the moment, and in the first of these two one-acters. Playwright Terrence McNally has his psychopathic hero strip Sally Kirkland to the buff and keep her that way. The second and better play is a caustic, comic look at a U.S. where feelings of impotence and venomous frustration translate themselves into the assassination of Presidents...