Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

In 1987, an International Malcolm Lowry Symposium was held at the
University of British Columbia, whose library houses the most extensive
collection of Lowry manuscripts in existence. Twenty papers were
delivered on that occasion, selected from more than forty submissions;
of these, thirteen are reproduced in this book along with a number of
other items. It is a collection that aims to celebrate and discuss the
extraordinary range of Lowry’s talents.

In my view, the most important parts of the book are to be found in the
informative rather than the interpretive contributions. A particularly
fascinating item is “Not with a Bang,” a short story by Jan Gabrial,
Lowry’s first wife, based on the breakup of their relationship. It is
a poorly written piece, but ironically all the more valuable for that,
since it shows dramatically, by contrast, how a major
writer—Lowry—could transform such material into the stuff of art. A
newly discovered letter by Lowry himself also appears. Other informative
items include Frederick Asals’s sensitive discussion of revisions in
Under the Volcano, Victor Doyen’s unravelling of the different stages
in the writing of October Ferry to Gabriola, jazz composer Graham
Collier’s authoritative comments on Lowry’s devotion to jazz, and
Christine Pagnoulle’s report on the problems of translating Under the
Volcano (a digest of a panel discussion).

The critics are decidedly less interesting, though Grace offers an
excellent, comprehensive introduction. Many try to argue for Lowry as a
postmodernist—as if the label mattered a damn—and produce either
heavy renditions of the obvious or impersonal abstractions inappropriate
to Lowry, that most personal and (for all his imaginative and
intellectual flights) most concrete of writers. The book ends with
Robert Kroetsch rewriting Lowry in his own image, thus creating only a
pale shadow of the really real. But this sort of thing, alas, is what we
have come to expect.

Swinging the Maelstrom, then, is a specialized collection. It does not
cater to beginners, but the Lowry aficionado will find here a varied but
often rich feast.