Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver Days

Jenifer Lepiano was a writer and drama teacher in Toronto.

It wasn’t the city of Vancouver with its “sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere” that Lowry loved; it was life in his squatter’s shack near Dollarton on the Burrard Inlet where, between the years of 1940 and 1954 he found the right combination of freedom, friendliness, and privacy. Along with Margery Bonner, his second wife, he swam and boated and picnicked and observed the plentiful marine life in his refuge from a troubled world. He read, entertained a few close friends, drank, and sometimes went for weeks without a single drink. He also completed Under the Volcano.

Sheryl Salloum’s study of these most happy years when Lowry found an equilibrium out of which he could work draws on new interviews and correspondence with people who knew Lowry in his Dollarton days, providing fresh insight into the man and his writing. The Lowry who emerges from the chapter “Vancouver Remembrances” is complex and contradictory. Norman Newton describes an evening with Lowry as one of “high intellectual delight interspersed with moments of Falstaffian (though not indecent) humour and sheer incoherence.” Brilliant, childish, and incoherent, Lowry was almost incapacitated by his gift for seeing “half a dozen meanings” in “an ordinary instance of daily life.” For fourteen years in his shack at Dollarton, Lowry wrestled with his angel. Then, when along with the other squatters he was forced to leave to make way for a park, he collapsed into alcoholism and three years later, died.

Vancouver Days is a fascinating study of an enigmatic man and his work.