Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

To most readers, the name Malcolm Lowry brings to mind one book: Under
the Volcano (1947), the tragic story of British consul Geoffrey
Firmin’s descent into hell in a surreal Mexico bent on celebrating
“the day of the dead.” None of Lowry’s other books, including
Ultramarine and October Ferry to Gabriola, make the extraordinary impact
of this powerful novel, with its metaphysical web of images and portents
and its startling resemblance to the author’s own life.

Gordon Bowker, born in Birmingham near Lowry’s home, has shaped a
long, detailed portrait whose massive research is carried by a strong
story line and the inherent fascination of Lowry’s larger-than-life
personality and obsessions. His six-page preface sums up the life and
his task as “venturing without a map into a maze inside a labyrinth
lost in the wilderness.” Lowry (1909–1957) saw himself as a uniquely
gifted man fated to suffer for the sake of producing great literature.

In Bowker’s dry summary, the bony reality was a twice-married man, an
“eternally constipated, accident-prone, self-exiled syphilophobe who
sustained a marginal existence as an alcoholic in London, Paris, New
York and Mexico, and who lived in the remote obscurity of British
Columbia for fourteen years at his father’s expense.” Bowker traces
Lowry’s childhood years in Liverpool as the fourth son of a wealthy
Methodist family whose gloomy and censorious religiosity bred early
rebellion in the boy some saw as “the runt of the litter.”

Startling new material supports Bowker’s dark guess that Margerie
Bonner, Lowry’s second wife, may have been implicated in the
writer’s death in a Sussex cottage. Lowry died from a mixture of
barbiturates and alcohol. The death certificate reads
“misadventure.” His last years are a sorry tale of near-poverty and
alcoholic stupors that must have made life with him nearly intolerable.

Pursued by Furies is a sensitive and brilliant portrait of a rare
talent and a restless soul who saw himself as the explorer of hell.