Word: graved
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Finally, this year Margerie Lowry and Douglas Day collaborated to edit and publish Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, Lowry's most baldly autobiographical novel...
Dark As the Grave is much less polished. The editors carved the "novel" out of seven hundred pages of garbled and unfinished work. Intent on not adding a line that Malcolm didn't write they simply lined up the incidents of the book in chronological order and then shaved off any narrative duplication. The resulting document is occasionally rich enough to stand alone, but often outrageously thin and even tinny. The ending is particularly disheartening--a page and a half of a kind of maudlin twaddle suggesting a facile and most un-Lowrylike redemption...
Dark As the Grave is perhaps most useful as a new guide to Under the Volcano, more personal data for the cultists, more evidence with which to locate Lowry's favorite cantinas. The novel traces Lowry's return to Mexico with Margerie, just before Under the Volcano was finally accepted for publication. In Dark As the Grave, we meet some of the characters who appeared in different form in Under the Volcano, and we discover the often mundane source of what had seemed brilliant invention in the earlier novel. The Consul's mistranslation of the sign "Evite que sus hijos...
Some of the dialogue in Dark As the Grave is miserably stiff, more declamation than discussion. Much of it seems not even remotely directed towards the particular characters who are victimized by Lowry's alter-ego in these moments of prolixity...
Still, there are a few scenes in Dark As the Grave that recall the control of Under the Volcano and Lunar Caustic, the humor and self-mockery that save Lowry's protagonists in spite of themselves. When the imagery gets a little too mucky even for Lowry's strong-backed readers to bear, he pushes his always tenuous symbolism gently over the edge, and it tumbles to the bottom with the almost comic relief of self-parody...