Word: volcano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SELECTED LETTERS OF MALCOLM LOWRY, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry. A tragic novelist shows in his letters the courage and dedication to his craft that enabled him to produce his single masterpiece, Under the Volcano, a modern version of Dante's Inferno...
SELECTED LETTERS OF MALCOLM LOWRY, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry. A tragic novelist shows in his letters the courage and dedication to his craft that enabled him to produce his single masterpiece, Under the Volcano, a modern version of Dante's Inferno...
...geography of Dante's inferno was fixed. As a 14th century Florentine, he knew it was somewhere under Tuscany. For Malcolm Lowry, a 20th century mystic, it lay under the volcano that looks down on Cuernavaca in Mexico and inside a bottle of mescal, a drink as hallucinatory, it seems, as mescaline, a drug which is also derived from the maguey cactus...
...Lowry died of drink (which the coroner called "misadventure") in his native England in 1957. He also lived by it; it was his Vergil, guide to those infernal regions from which he returned a man possessed by demons. He exorcised them by the masterpiece called Under the Volcano, which can be read as a novel but understood only as a parable of the pit. "William James if not Freud," he wrote in a letter to his British publisher, "would certainly agree with me when I say that the agonies of the drunkard find their most accurate poetic analogue...
...Forest. Under the Volcano was rejected by twelve New York publishers before it finally appeared in 1947. On the surface, it tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic and almost derelict British consul in a town strongly resembling Cuernavaca, where Lowry himself lived for two years. However, its subterranean reputation continued to grow until it is now taught in college courses on the modern novel...