The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry's Fiction

Bruce Whiteman is Head of Rare Books at the McGill University Libraries
and author of The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books II to IV.

Malcolm Lowry has undoubtedly attracted more critical attention than any other non-Canadian Canadian author. The almost mythological events of his private and public life — the alcoholism, the extraordinary accidents that befell his manuscripts, and the intriguing paradox of Under the Volcano, one of the finest novels of this century but Lowry’s only finished mature fiction — have provoked a certain amount of second-rate sociological and psychoanalytic verbiage about his work. To these approaches another has been added more recently — i.e., the critic who is determined to save Lowry’s apparently unfinished or failed books by seeing them as anti-fictions or metafictions. Any critic has a vested interest in rescuing the texts from neglect and/or misunderstanding, of course, as otherwise his involvement in detailed textual or interpretative work on them may be seen as time poorly spent. Lowry’s case is a perplexing one, and an irritating one for critics, because his masterpiece is so much a masterpiece that the rest of his work, interesting though it is in parts, is inevitably disappointing by comparison.

Sherrill Grace, an English professor at the University of British Columbia, wrote her doctoral dissertation on Lowry, and undoubtedly a good deal of it has found its way into The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction. Her thesis is that all of Lowry’s writing revolves around a theme of the lifelong voyage, an idea which she bases largely on a note that Lowry wrote in 1951 about his “Work in Progress.” That this theme plays an important metaphorical role in Ultramarine and October Ferry to Gabriota is obvious from their titles; its centrality to Lowry’s other work is less readily apparent. Always with Lowry one comes up against the fact that so much of his work is unfinished. In spite of that, however, the voyage theme is sufficiently general and all-encompassing as not to seem too false a form into which to push Lowry’s various books.

The Voyage That Never Ends is neither better nor worse than most critical writing of today. Its style is undistinguished and its insights are for the most part not so acute as to make one wholly revise his understanding of Lowry’s books. Grace is occasionally guilty of the kind of name-dropping in which critics like to indulge. A statement like “For Lowry the universe was in a constant process of change akin to the Nictzschean state of becoming that underlies romanticism and expressionism” (p. 2) is irritatingly glib, and her footnote on serial music (p. 140) makes it apparent that she doesn’t really know anything about serial music, but feels compelled to pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, she is a competent if uninspired Virgil to accompany us on a tour through Lowry’s Dantean world. She deserves credit for the fact that her study is based not merely on the published texts, but on Lowry’s manuscripts. The latter now reside in the library of the University of British Columbia.