HEAR US O LORD FROM HEAVEN THY DWELLING PLACE (283 pp.)—Malcolm Lowry—Lippincott ($4.95).
The late Malcolm Lowry was the Dylan Thomas of modern fiction. Like Thomas, he was a hypnotic user and abuser of language. Like Thomas, the author of Under the Volcano erupted in lava flows of talk and lapsed into broody silences. Like Thomas, Lowry was a compulsively heavy drinker. At 47, he died an alcoholic's dreadful death: lying on his back in a drunken stupor, he began to vomit and choked to death. Finally, like Thomas, he spawned the kind of cult that makes a writer seem worth more dead than alive.
The Lowry cultists have had only one big book to stand on. In Under the Volcano, Author Lowry compressed fiery emotional thrust within a Joycean time scheme to record the one-day odyssey of a dipsomaniacal British ex-consul living in Mexico. The hero is at war with his half brother, his estranged wife, himself and, perhaps most pertinently, with modern civilization. The theme is what Lowry himself has dubbed "the migraine of alienation." Lush as a tropical jungle, the book alternates between fierce introspection and a hallucinatory evocation of the Mexican scene. When it was published in 1947, it received rave notices from serious critics but also made the lower rungs of bestsellerdom. Recently, it was brought out in Italy by Feltrinelli, the first publisher of Doctor Zhivago.
It now appears that the worldwide Lowry vogue is to face its sternest test, a spate of posthumous manuscripts. There is a novella, Lunar Caustic, set in the psychiatric wards of New York City's Bellevue Hospital, and a full-length novel, October Ferry to Gabriola, about a guilt-haunted alcoholic, the latter work to be published in 1962. A couple of years ago, a longtime Lowry friend, Canadian Teacher Downie Kirk, salvaged a 3-ft. stack of manuscripts (poems, letters, stories, drafts of novels) from Lowry's British Columbia home, a squatter's cottage. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place is a collection of short stories that are not really stories but anarchic fragments of autobiography.
From the Wastebasket. Sometimes in passages, sometimes in no more than a phrase, the book contains the entire Lowry life and legend. He was the rebel son of a prosperous English cotton-broker father, and he shipped to the Far East as a deck hand at 17 after reading O'Neill's Moon of the Caribbees. The publisher lost the sea novel, Ultramarine, that Lowry wrote about his voyage, and Lowry rewrote the book from notes fished out of a Cambridge roommate's wastebasket. After graduating with honors in English, he drifted to Hollywood, New York and Cuernavaca, and from country to country, was married to and divorced from an "actress-secretary," and began the nine-year ordeal of getting Under the Volcano on paper.