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He moved north in 1939 to a beach colony of squatters at Dollarton, near Vancouver, B.C., and married again, this time an actress-turned-mystery-story writer, Margerie Bonner (The Last Twist of the Knife). The newly weds happily roughed it with coal-oil lamps, driftwood fuel and an outdoor privy. Lowry, a barrel-chested man with piercing blue eyes, drank, swam, drank, sang bawdy Spanish ditties to his own ukulele accompaniment, and drank. When the cottage caught fire, he was badly burned rescuing the entire manuscript of Under the Volcano, which came to be the one and only literary success of Lowry's life. At his death he was drafting a massive cycle of novels to be aptly titled The Voyage That Never Ends.
Writer's Lot. There is no chronology to Hear Us, and some of these episodes are merely hinted at. One piece, The Forest Path to the Spring, is masterly—a vibrant nature idyl that is in a direct spiritual descent from Thoreau's Walden. But the bulk of the book displays an occupational disease of 20th century writers : writing about writing and the writer's lot. In Elephant and Colosseum, Lowry tries the bulky device of symbolizing his work as an elephant, presumably patient, massive, mnemonic, with a final trumpeting of glory. In Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession, he links his premonitions of death and damnation with the fates of Keats, Poe and Kafka.
Nothing much happens in these stories, and nothing much is meant to happen. There is tension without release, motion without direction. As a mask dropper, Lowry keeps reappearing under names that are part symbol, part joke and part hoax: Sigbjørn Wilderness, Kennish Drumgold Cosnahan, Roderick McGregor Fairhaven. It would be easy to dismiss these characters as anxious bores if they were not also unholy ghosts, shadows of a perturbed spirit, "ghouls of past delirium, wounds to other souls, ghosts of actions approximating to murder, betrayals of self and I know not what, ready to leap out and destroy me." One always begins, in Lowry, by rejecting the self-pity and ends by respecting the suffering.
Born Circler. There are writers who shoot and there are writers who encircle their subject. Hemingway is an example of a writer who shoots and brings back the pelt. Lowry is a born circler. He scours the landscape—internally of his mind, externally of nature—hoping to surround and throttle the invisible demon that was both the subject and the object of his writing. His individual images are arresting, but what he did well, he overdid. There are page-long cascades of imagery, torrents of metaphors. The Wagnerian school of U.S. writing—Faulkner, Wolfe, Lowry—has apparently never heard of the pause that refreshes.
Apart from his personal demonology, what haunted Lowry and what was he driving at? He was a highly civilized man, but he was sick of civilization. "Creator of deathscapes," he called it. Like D. H. Lawrence, he was drawn to the "blood consciousness," and he felt that urban industrialized life cut man off from innocence, vitality and a piety before nature. On a brittle, sophisticated level, Lowry was weary of it all. On a more profound level, he felt the kind of metaphysical nausea that Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed in the lines:
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;