Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...novel recounts the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the British Consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (Cuernavaca). The Consul, a dipsomaniac, has hardly been sober since his wife left him a year before. On the Day of the Dead, 1938, she suddenly returns, but it becomes increasingly clear that there is no way that he can respond to her, no way that he can free himself even for a day from the lure of the quasi-hallucinogenic Mexican drink, mescal. Near the end of the day, the consul stumbles away from his wife into...
...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...
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...