Malcom Lowry’s Dark Night
"When you lack the time to stop and think", Malcom Lowry once said, "the only hope is the next drink".
Malcom Lowry has always been a figure admired in Mexican literary circles for his warm attachment to Mexico. Lowry spent 3 years living here, between 1936 and 1939, first in Cuernavaca and later in Oxaca, preparing and writing his masterpiece, Under the Volcano, considered one of the great novels of the 20th century. The book depicts a series of complex and unwillingly destructive relationships set against a rich evocation of Mexico.
The brilliant English novelist would have turned 100 on July 28, and his love of the the country made it a special occasion for the Mexican cultural elite. According to El Economista, the writer viewed the universe as an unchangable mystery similar to a long dark night, a riddle full of tragic messages and coincidences.
In his first drafts, Mr. Lowry started his work with the line “It was the day of the dead”, a clear reference to the famous Mexican celebration. Later versions of these drafts cost the author years of arduous work, the break-up of his marriage and an inexorable decline as a result of alcoholism. He died deeply suspicious of his own talent, convinced that fame, like drunkenness itself, was a destructive force.
But something about Mexico, about the Day of the Dead, about Mexican's happy-go-lucky acceptance of the past (and future) clearly fascinated this man. Perhaps he saw something here he'dnever imagined before: a profound acceptance by its inhabitants of life (simply) as it is.
The author seemed to be a man torn from within looking without, intent on finding complex and allusive layers of symbolism in his daily life. In Mexico he found something that resonated powerfully. What? Perhaps his own "dark night" paralleled Mexico’s birth as a nation: conquest, disease, destruction, imposition over the ruins of an old civilization. A place born of dislocation - just as Lowry emerged, as a child, from dislocation and sickness.
In sum, a place that paralleled the author's own identity.
I can visualize him opening his eyes after spending a restful night in one of the many villages that inspired his work, seeing the shocking green of the mountain forests, inhaling the strong herbal-scented air and observing simple people working and laughing and doing what they always did as though things were exactly as they should be.
A curious light thrown upon darkness, rich in human spectacle and sentiment... in a word, medicine for this brilliant man’s embattled soul.
