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From Oaxaca and the middle of what he called with desperate facetiousness his "last tooloose-Lowrytrek," he wrote a British friend: "I have, since being here, been in prison three times. Everywhere I go I am pursued and even now, as I write, no less than five policemen are watching me. This is the perfect Kafka situation but you will pardon me if I do not consider it any longer funny . . . There is a church here for those who are solitary and the comfort you obtain from it is non-existent though I have wept many times there . . . Incidentally I smell."
No Man's Land. But his burly rugger player's build survived both external abuse and the internal erosion of mescal; booze left unbleared a blazing eye. A woman turned up who would (he wrote) "share conditions which make Gorki's Lower Depths look like a drawing-room comedy," and who loved him, tidied his papers, married him, and cosseted his hangovers until he died. She was Margerie Bonner, an actress turned writer, to whose own person and work Lowry remained steadfastly protective (even when she was clearly protecting him). His father's money got him out of Mexico into Canada, where he found one of the few legal no man's lands left in a modern society—a strip between low and high tide in wilderness land near Vancouver. He built a cabin on stilts and sent letters out into the world like pigeons from the ark. The Lowrys were often close to starvation; the cabin burned down, and Lowry was badly burned himself saving his manuscript.
The theme of his work, said Lowry, quoting Critic Edmund Wilson, was "the forces in man which cause him to be terrified of himself." The theme of his letters could be the well-grounded fears that man has of other men. They are witty, light, profound and erudite. The tone is that of an infinitely gentle man whose capacity for pity was not—as in the case of most drunks—squandered on himself.