Backlisted - Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

Episode Date: September 4, 2017

John and Andy are joined by poet, radio presenter, playwright and genuine Tyke Ian McMillan to discuss Malcolm Lowry's unique work Under the Volcano. Also; The Factory of Light by Michael Jacobs, and more Rosemary Tonks. Do you have a problem with that?Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)3'57 - The Factory of Light by Michael Jacobs8'54 - The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks15'20 - Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. My last book, I wrote quite a lot about Julian Cope, as you know. He was a great hero of mine. I think a very inspiring figure in terms of the different ways he's gone in his career

and the brilliant things that he's done and the crazy stuff that he's done as well. It was a big life moment for me. You will have seen, anyone who follows me on Twitter will have seen my silly beaming face at being so happy at being next to Julian Cope and his wife Dorian, ever so nice, ever so enthusiastic. And we had a conversation about enthusiasm

and Cope said a really brilliant thing that I want to pass on in the knowledge that this will be listened to by people. He said the thing is, everyone's going on at the moment about what a terrible state the world's in, what a tight spot the world is in at the moment. And that's true. We are in a tight spot. But at the same time, if you're an enthusiast, and we, Andy, are enthusiasts.

I thought, oh, my God. We, you and I, Judy, yes, we are enthusiasts. He said if you're an enthusiast about music or books or film or whatever you care passionately about, you have ways of getting that out to people that we didn't have 10 years ago. And people want that. So we have to embrace this moment.

This is a great moment because what people need and what we all need is passion for the things that we believe in, the positive things that we believe in, and that we can get out there that we were never able to get out there in the way that we could do in the old days. So we should seize this moment. I thought, wow, this is so genuinely inspiring. So it's brought me back here to talk about old books,

the new ideological fervour. And enthusiasm, which is great, of which there will be so much today. Masses, I can feel it. I can feel the coiled up kind of spring of enthusiasm. Our guest has remained utterly silent throughout this chat. I remember talking to Julian Cope about Tamworth. He thinks Tamworth, because he was from Tamworth, I interviewed him on The Verb and we just said,

I said, don't you think Tamworth's a kind of, isn't it a sort of vortex of the strange? And he said, yes it is. And we talked forever about Tamworth and he said, I'm sorry I've got to go. He said, I'd love to stay in gas. Nobody's ever said that to me before. I'd love to stay in gas. I said, let's gas.

With which, shall we start? I feel it incumbent on somebody to take the scruff of the neck and say, hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that brings new life to old books. A rather special episode of the show today, as thanks to our sponsor Unbound, the website that brings authors and readers together to create something special, we've managed to fly all the way to Mexico, where you'll find us in a run-down cantina, surrounded by three-legged pariah dogs and fending off the insufferable heat with round after round of mezcal. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of, on this occasion, the appropriately named The Year of Reading Dangerously, because there are few books more dangerous to either read or write than our book today, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.

And joining us on this trip is poet, presenter, and after a certain painter, Yorkshire's greatest living artist, Ian McMillan. Hello, Ian. Hello. Thank you so much for asking me to talk about Under the Volcano. One of those great books that you talk about and people go, Under the what?

Malcolm who? And it's just so great to be in a room with four people who've heard of him and have read past the first chapter and have seen the film and didn't like it. And it's just so... Talk about that later. So, John, before we get on to the main events, what have you been reading on your holiday? Well, the best book I read on my holidays,

other than Under the Volcano, which I reread in Spain, which wasn't a bad place. Southern Spain stands in pretty well for Mexico. I read a wonderful book called The Factory of Light by Michael Jacobs in 2003. Michael Jacobs is a very, very interesting man. Died in 2014, quite young. He was only 62, I think, when he died.

One of the foremost kind of scholars and travel writers to deal with Spain, particularly southern Spain, but also he's written books about the Andes, about travelling the Columbia. He was once kidnapped by the FARC and managed to charm his way out of that. I think he's a really interesting, again, sort of underrated writer because he doesn't do the obvious thing. The book is about moving to Spain and becoming part of a community,

Friars in Andalusia, but he does it without any of the cliches he doesn't find an old farmhouse he doesn't find an old woman next door he doesn't do it up he doesn't try and fail to farm he's much more knowledgeable and he resists all the cliches but it is still a kind of weird and wonderful story

about finding this village by chance and being led there because he was interested in the sort of mystical there was a mystical sort of tradition of local saints because he was interested in the sort of mystical, there was a mystical sort of tradition of local saints that he became interested in and was researching. But they were so overwhelmed by the kind of the, it's not a particularly attractive looking village, it's one of those villages where you wouldn't notice if you drove through it. But he became fascinated by the community there. And there is an amazing kind of pre-epic, very, very kind of compelling character

called El Sereno, the Serene, who is sort of an elderly... He has the world's smallest oil press in his... which makes the most incredible olive oil, which apparently has massive aphrodisiac properties and can cure all diseases. I mean, Jacob's... They become kind of friends and their friendship and how that develops is beautifully done, they become kind of friends. And their friendship and how that

develops is beautifully done. And he's kind of resistant. He's, you know, he's a scholar. He was an extraordinary man, Jacobs. He was Anthony Blunt's star pupil. And when Blunt was uncovered as an art historian, you know, and as a spy, he remained loyal to him. So he kind of did in his chances as a sort of academic scholar. But in a way, the world benefits from the fact that he's such a good writer and his knowledge of Spain and culture. He was also, and that's one of the reasons I thought it would be appropriate, he was, you know, Jacobs was well known as a massive man of food, drink, would party all hours and be the first person up in the morning, always wanting to explore a real life force.

He's a great friend of the Hay Festival, particularly the ones in Latin America. So if you're interested in a kind of a different... The experience... We're all kind of fascinated by going in exile, by going and living in another culture and becoming part of another culture and how you do that without being inauthentic

and how you do that without just feeling like another bloody tourist. There's a very good piece on this by Suzanne Moore this week in The Guardian you know, you are the problem. Then I think Factory of Light the brilliant thing that he does is he finds an old cinema and he manages to with the help of the villagers

they reinvent this cinema and they get the most important film star of the 1940s in Spain to come and visit and open the cinema. It's fabulous. The final scene of the book is one of those. And it's wonderfully written and full of, if you're interested in Spanish history and Spanish culture, it's as good a place to start as any.

Published by John Murray in 2003 and, I'm sad to say, out of print. This being backlisted, I am of course obliged to say that Michael Jacobs must have, if he was a pupil of Anthony Blunt, he must have been a contemporary of Anita Brookness. Anita Brookness. Who was also at one stage a pupil of Blunt and who also stood by Blunt.

And now we'll never know. Maybe they knew each other. Maybe they talked to one another. Indeed. That sounds very, very good. Jacob's, when he was growing up, apparently a very serious kind of academic household. His father insisted that they only spoke Latin.

So his widow, Jackie Ray, I think, still lives in the house. In his sort of late 30s, early 40s, he suddenly discovered this whole... Spain unlocked, you know, staying up late, drinking late into the night, and he became... I mean, I think his travel book, his literary travel book to Andalusia, published by the excellent Pallas Atheni,

is the best single-volume guide to Andalusia, I think, out there. That is still just clinging by its fingernails to being in print. But Factory of Light, really, really superior travel book. I'm just pleased that given that we're doing Under the Volcano in Mexico, there must be some similarity between Mexican and Spanish pronunciation, which you're going to be far better than I am at pulling off. We shall see, Andy. And you, Andy, What have you been reading?

So I've been reading several things. There's a book called The Lucky Ones by Julian Pacheco, which I'm going to talk about on the next episode. Good. But because we have Ian with us today, I want to talk about a different book that I read over the last six weeks or so. I booked a day at the British Library,

regular listeners to Backlisted may recall, after I read some of the poetry published by Bloodaxe of Rosemary Tonks which blew me away I read a couple of the poems out here on Backlisted and we got an amazing response from listeners which is fantastic

and rightly so I mean wonderful so I booked today at the British Library to read one of her novels because she wrote half a dozen novels. They're all out of print. They go for big sums of money secondhand. And I read one called The Bloater, which I mentioned last time.

The Bloater is a novel set in and around the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, where Rosemary Tonks collaborated with the composer Delia Derbyshire during the 19th century, in the mid-60s, on a setting of Orestes. And you can, in fact, go to the British Library also and listen to that setting. It's not commercially available, but the half-hour piece of work of Rosemary Tonks reading this version of Orestes over Delia Derbyshire's electronic compositions

is available there at the British Library to listen to. Anyway, so I read this novel called The Bloater, and it's fascinating. It really reminded me of something by Bridget Brophy, Brophy who we did on Backlisted about six months ago. So it's very 60s. it's very of its time. I'm not sure it quite comes off and yet it's full of fantastic little passages of writing.

And I'll just read a very short one here. This is a paragraph from about halfway through the book with the protagonist, who I think we can assume is Rosemary Tonks by any other name. And she's just got a new boyfriend, who she's trying not to fall head over heels in love with. And she says, I need new clothes, something in PVC with a visor.

I want to change the shape of my face, it should be absolutely round. Yes, I need a circular chin and a rosebud mouth to cope with Billy, and ten hours sleep every night, and a complete don't-care kit of cigarettes, records, hairdressing appointments, films and so on. Once I've decided on that, I realise it isn't enough. Even if I cram every hour of the day with phony pleasures, I can't get rid of the smell of Billy's face, or of the authority and care of his arms when they grip me. 2,000 cucumber sandwiches, a Ferrari, a summer, raspberry jelly, ping pong, a naked picnic in long grass might possibly take my mind off him.

One has to admit he knows how to woo. Oh God, why doesn't he make a few mistakes? He's bound to sooner or later. You bet he's got some dancing routine hidden away, some David in front of the arch caper that will really let him down, and I shall pounce on it without mercy.

At all costs, I must go on being spoilt and petted. I need presents. Isn't that just... Fantastic, right? It's like a poem. Well, the list, because I remember, was it Rosemary Tonks that Brian Patton did a programme about on Radio 4

when he was rediscovering people? And there's a definite link there, I think, in the list. The listic quality of that is like some of Brian Patton's stuff, some of Adrian Henry's work. You could probably tell in a time capsule when that was written. And what I liked about it was just the way it did leap out at you and it did feel like it was written for the voice, didn't it? It felt like that.

Tonks says, or said, that she... We won't go again into what happened to her, but when she was writing and when she was speaking about her work, what she was trying to do was be specific to the era, but also try to say, well, people have been reading Verlaine and Rambo and Baudelaire for over 100 years and have learnt none of the

lessons of those poets of the derangement of the senses in the urban environment, so what you have is these incredible, as you say specific lists of PVC visors who would want a PVC visor other than in 1965, And yet

these incredible flashing chains of images, to use the Lane phrase. It's interesting you say that you feel that novels are bit dated, because the poetry, reading the poetry after your fulsome recommendation, I found it

incredibly precise and contemporary. I mean, there were bits, I guess, but it's interesting whether prose is... I mean, the idea that prose dates quicker than poetry, I don't know. I wonder. Ian, were you familiar with her poetry from...

I mean, I have no sense of how well-known she was in, like, the 70s or 1980s. In the 70s, she was one of those names that you'd see in a magazine and you'd think, oh, there's Rosemary Tonks. But there were so many names, so many writers around at the time that when she disappeared from the scene, it made no ripple in a way

because you thought, well, there's not a Rosemary Tonks poem in that magazine or in that magazine. And I had totally and utterly forgotten about her until Brian Patton and then Bloodhound revived her. And it just makes you think, as you talk about on this podcast a lot, of those massive queues of writers that are yet to be rediscovered,

that have disappeared, that have gone, that had their names in the magazines and names in pamphlets and small books. And where are they? And they were good, that's the thing. They haven't disappeared because they were rubbish. That's the thing. Some do disappear because they're not very good, but a lot of them

hang on and she deserves to be revived in a huge way, I think. Well, I hope somebody will, I mean, there may well be issues with the estate and there may be, well, the issues with copyright and things, but those books totally deserve to be available in print and

available for people to read easily. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. And now we're back in the room. Malcolm Lowry. Andy, do you want to start the interrogation? There's so much to say. So, Ian, you said that you would come in today and make total and perfect sense of Under the Volcano for us and for all our listeners.

Did you? Oh, no way you didn't say that. So Under the Volcano, how many times have you read Under the Volcano? I probably read it once a year since 1977. Because I first came across it when I was a student at North Staffordshire Polytechnic. In fact, I brought along my actual North Staffordshire Polytechnic copy. Because what happened was, my mate Dave Thorpe from Newark, he'd lived with his mum and dad, worked in a factory, did his A-levels late, went to college,

and he'd never done anything. He's kind of proud of that, never done a thing. And he went out and he bought in this bookshop in Stafford some books that included Under the Volcano. And I went to his house on Newport Road. And he was sitting there and he went, have this, it's rubbish. He passed it to me. Have this, he said, have that, it's rubbish. And he passed it to me. And the first thing you see was the cover, that amazing cover. The fellow with the trilby hat, glugging. And you think, gosh, that's the thing. Meanwhile, in the background, I've got to say that we were doing this degree called Modern Studies.

And I thought Modern Studies, because this is 1974, I thought Modern Studies meant we'd be looking at Rosemary Tonks, we'd be looking at living writers. And on the first lecture, Dr Daniel Lamont stood up and said, you do know there's a difference between modern and contemporary? Oh, God, there is. It's not Rosemary Thompson. So I think we'll start with Herman Melville.

So I like Herman Melville, but he wasn't contemporary. So I got this book. I got it from Dave Thorpe. I sat there. As you can see, this is the copy that was lost for years. It says here, from Mac, May 1978. Because I lent it to a girl from Bolton. And then she left. We both left. girl from Bolton, and then she left.

We both left. I had another copy, but we both left. And then 10 years later, she came along to a writing workshop I did. Yeah. In 1988. I said, here, here's your book back. I thought, goodness me. So because, and it's full of strange tequila-induced things.

So here on the inside cover, it says 2-1-2-1-2-P-E-P-E-P. Ooh. You see, but so... Is that your handwriting? It is my handwriting, and underneath it, there's 2-1-3-2-1-3. Very strange. 2-1-2 to 2-1-2. 2-1-2 to 2-1-3.

And do you have any idea what those things mean? I think, embarrassingly, they might refer to hand bell ringing. Because at the time, I was a hand bell ringer, and I was also a church bell ringer. And as you know, with church bells, with three bells you can't ring very much. You can only ring 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 3, 3, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2. So this is me trying to devise

a Malcolm Lowry-esque piece. So I just got hold of the book and it was one of those books where I, at the time I'd been reading, I'd been trying to read a lot of modernism. I was defiant with this course. I thought, well, I'm going to read much. So I read things like, I read Ulysses,

and I read forgotten writers like Tom Mallon. Remember Tom Mallon? His son is Rupert Mallon, who was a poet, and he was writing big slabs of modernist prose, and I was reading that kind of thing. And then I started reading this, and at the same time, stupidly, I think, as well as reading about it, I read the book,

but I read about Lowry. Yeah. So I became involved in the biography of Lowry at the same time. Just the way that this was his, I think, he'd had several goes at writing this book. And of course, he left it on the train and he set fire to it and he did all that.

And so as a young man from a small town in another small town, this became the Ur text. You thought, gosh, this is what writers do. This is how writers live. This is what writers are. And also the prose was just astonishing, that opening bit. Two mountain chains traverse the Republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateau.

Overlooking one of the valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies 6,000 feet above sea level, the town of and of course I couldn't pronounce it. I call it, in my head, I call it Frenerdy. I didn't say the word. I went frantically. I was waiting for you to get there, Ian. Everybody was. So these days, I call it

Kwaaha. I still, because I don't like to say it, because if I say it. It makes it, it changes it. Yeah, so at the time I would go, I just do it, it't like to say it, because if I say it... It changes it. Yeah, so at the time I would go... It was like a door closing. Because it is such a gorgeous set of consonants, lots of consonants to get all together. And later on in the book, he talks about Oaxaca,

which is the other place, and he talks about it sounding like a muffled bell. He said the town of Oaxaca sounds like a muffled bell, which I thought was the same in a sense. Look at my hat. I thought it was exactly the same. So I started reading the book, and of course, Jeffrey Furman, the book is not about very much, to be honest.

It's about the last 12 hours in the life of the alcoholic, ex-British counselling, Jeffrey Furman. And at the start of the book, they find him in this El Farolito, the little lighthouse, and he's reading from the of the book, they find him in this little El Farolito, the little lighthouse. And he's reading from the post office book and he goes, a corpse will be transported by express. And there's a tiny woman who looks a bit like Mrs Cranky. Yeah.

In the car. That's right. Playing dumb. Playing dumb. Double O's with a chicken. She is. And you think, I said, John, Fandabi Boozy. Very good.

Very good. Oh, sorry. Very good, Andy. But imagine, sorry. But at the time... Very good, Andy. But imagine reading this as a young man and going, goodness me, this is what the world should be. This is what writing is. This is somebody who's a bit like me,

a kind of hopelessly romantic figure because his wife comes back to see him, his brother-in-law turns up. It just gets... And to be honest with you, I'm not that big a fan of plot. Plot escapes me. I've written plays where people have gone,

that's all right, there's no plot. He can't come in through that door because he's just gone out through that door. And what I like about this book is, in a sense, it's more of a prose poem than a book that relies on plot. Although, amazingly, I'm always amazed. I read it when I was a student for the first time, and it blew me away then.

And it's one of those great things, you come back to it, I suppose the third time I've read it, it's even better. And one of the things you notice, there are little details, like the fact that he was wearing Hugh's jacket, so the piece of paper that incriminates him, I don't think we would care about spoilers in this. He dies at the end of the book, everybody. He's shot.

But just in case you're reading it for plot, we've scuppered that. Sorry, Matt. Sorry, Matt. But you think actually that's quite plotty, the fact that he's actually thought through the details, because you read it for this incredible swirling. I didn't think anybody could write anything as good as Ulysses ever,

and I was one of those kind of joyous obsessives as a student. And I read Malcolm Lowry, and I thought, this is even better in lots of ways, this is even better. A little later on, I want to talk about Lowry's intentions for the book, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the letter that he wrote to his publisher. But Ian, one of the things about Under the Volcano, I've read Under the Volcano three times. Every reading is a preparation for the next reading. Yes.

Which is what Lowry intended. But certainly the first reading can be quite challenging, I think. And I was looking, I remembered that when you were on Desert Island Discs, you chose a track from Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. And it struck me that there are parallels between Under the Volcano and Trout Mask Replica. For instance, they are unique. You heard it here first. There is no other album like Trout Mask Replica. There is no other book like Under the Volcano.

other album like trout mask replica there is no other book like under the volcano similarly the first listen to trout mask replica any normal human being will go whoa what's going on what's going on but then the more you listen to it kind of grows fins and it becomes this amazing complex piece of music but the third way in which they are similar to one another is the awful psychic trauma visited upon all those involved in making the Trout Mask replica and Under the Volcano. That Malcolm Lowry effectively destroys himself through the writing of the book. Beefheart famously locks up the members of the Magic Band for six months in a house,

making them play the songs over and over and over again. But there's Lowry's friends and Lowry's wives and these awful vortex of booze and art together fueling one another.

We have a little clip here now of Malcolm Lowry's self-penned obituary, followed by one of his friends, Hugh Sykes Davis, one of his contemporaries at Cambridge, reminiscing about Malk, as they called him. Malcolm Lowry, late of the barry, his prose was flowery and often glarry. he lived nightly and drank daily and died playing the ukulele he told me he was doomed I believed him but the suffering he had to go through in order to produce the volcano that's the thing that simply as a human being makes one wonder whether the game's worth the candle. I'd rather have the game and the candle.

So far I managed it. But Malcolm was one of these people doomed, as he said. He had to choose the one or the other. He chose, he was completely consistent in a certain sense. He knew what he was about. And he chose to live as he did and he produced the volcano. I chose to live in a different way and I didn't produce anything much. Well, that's not true. You produced a volcano.

Well, yes, but I'm still alive. That's a big difference. He's dead. I think Hugh Sykes-Davies is a fantastic poet. Yeah, right. He's one of the great British surrealists. But what's interesting about Malcolm Lowry's voice is it's not quite what you expect. I wanted him,

I've heard his voice a few times, and I want him to have a bit more of a, it's got a boom more, but also it's got to be a bit more ragged round the edges. It's got to be a little bit like, not a stage drunk, but you've got to be able to hear the voice fading away at the edge, but that was him, yeah. I think you're right when you talk about

the difficulty of it. When I introduce people to it, I say, look, the first chapter is really hard. Please just, if you don't like the first chapter, just go on to the second chapter. I don't think Malcolm Lowry would mind, because the first... I'm not sure about that. Yeah, he would, he would mind. I've given the book to people, they've gone,

I can't get past page eight. The aforementioned Dave Thorpe from Newark. When I messed up with him in 2006, I said, go on, have another go, Dave, have another go. He rang me up, he said, I've got to have another go. That first chapter was rubbish. I said, look, because the first chapter is more difficult. After the first chapter, it starts to get into more of a trot.

So read the first chapter like you might do your warm-ups before you go running, or like you might do your press-ups before you do your exercising do your proper exercising, because the first chapter's not easy, to be honest with you. When he submitted the book to publishers, it was, of course, rejected by most publishers because it was, first of all, too difficult on first reading.

But also, I've got a little bit here. I mentioned earlier, he submitted the book to Jonathan Cape. Jonathan Cape wrote back saying... It was William Plumer, wasn't it? It was. Thank you for your letter, Mr Lowry. Our reader has responded to your book and made a few notes. We are willing to take the book on.

He spent years trying to get this book published. But we need you to make a few amendments. And as Tom Mashler, the clip we just heard is from a film called volcano which was recommended to me by our friend andrew male which is wonderful it's on youtube it's a documentary as andrew said it's like an episode of arena in the last stages of tertiary syphilis it's like a hallucinogenic documentary, but it's wonderful, right? And the then Cape publisher in 1976 said of this letter... Tom Mashley. Tom Mashley wrote... Lowry wrote to Cape,

this is one of the greatest letters, probably the greatest letter ever from an author to their publisher, but one of the great letters of the century. 40 pages long, isn't it? 40 pages long. I'll just read a couple of little bits about... And Lowry subsequently said to friends about this letter, God, that letter sounded good.

I don't know if it's all true, but he talks about the book and about the difficulty of the book. He says, I venture to suggest that the book is a good deal thicker, deeper, better, and a great deal more carefully planned and executed than your reader suspects, and that if your reader is not at fault in not spotting some of its deeper meanings or in dismissing them as pretentious or irrelevant or uninteresting where they erupt onto the surface of the book,

that is at least partly because of what may be a virtue and not a fault on my side. Namely, that the top level of the book, for all its longueur, has been, by and large, so compellingly designed that the reader does not want to take time off to stop and plunge beneath the surface. If this is in fact true, of how many books can you say it? And how many books of which you can say also that you were not

somewhere along the line the first time you read it, bored because you wanted to get on? I do not want to make a childish comparison, but to go to the obvious classics... Isn't that one? That's segue from one to the other. To go to the obvious classics, what about the idiot? The possessed? What about the beginning of Moby Dick?

To say nothing of Wuthering Heights. E.M. Forster, I think, says somewhere that it is more of a feat to get by with the end. And in the volcano, at least I claim I have done this. But without the beginning, or rather the first chapter which as it were answers it echoes back to it over the bridge of the intervening chapters the end

and without it the book would lose much of its meaning and one of the things that he says in the reader's report said this book is quite like a book called the lost weekend and he said the thing about the Lost Weekend is that's something telling you you already know about Hellfire. I am telling you something new about Hellfire. Which is a great line. He was obsessed with that book, In Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid,

which is his return to Mexico, a novel, a half-written novel where he returns to Mexico. It's a bit like Under the Volcano, The Return, but as I said this morning, it's a bit straight to DVD, to be honest. What does he call himself in that? He has a fantastic name. He calls himself, his surname is Wilderness. Sigbjorn Wilderness.

Sigbjorn Wilderness. In the excellent Michael Schmidt introduction to the latest Penguin modern classic, he says, Larry's critics, the letter is often taken as gospel by Larry's critics, his views are so clearly stated that we are freed from having to read with independent eyes. This is Larry. It can be regarded as a kind of symphony, he remarks, then catches fire, or in another way as a kind of opera, or even a horse opera. It is hot music a poem, a song, a tragedy a comedy, a farce and so forth

So Schmidt says fortunately in the teeth of such nonsense it can be regarded as a novel unique in its characterisations and in the stylistic objects it sets itself which is a funny thing because actually there's a brilliantly funny

review of a biography of of larry by gordon balker by martin amos and amos says something he says many many funny things in the review including including calling uh larry a world class liar but he also says um you know when he's kind of coming back to the work, he says something I think really good about that under the volcano, he remembered it as chaotically confessional, as a torrent of consciousness. But rereading it, he says, now it feels formal, literary, even Mandarin in its intonations. The word pub is daintily sequestered by inverted commas.

It is what Lowry could never be. It is lucid and logical. It is well behaved. Quite interesting. It's a really interesting thought. I sort of know what he means. It's when you go back to it, it's always a better, more structured, less kind of...

It always strikes me that there's more going on in the book. That's why you keep going back to it, I think, because there's the layer upon layer. And he worked really hard at burnishing it, didn't he? He worked really hard at trying to bring out the coming, because there's all the symbolic schemes and the cabalism. You don't really need to know that to enjoy the novel, I don't think. But it's there if you're interested in it.

I point my learned colleagues back to Captain Beefheart, because you think you're hearing chaos, but of course you're not. You're hearing a minut but of course you're not. You're hearing a minutely arranged version of chaos. In fact, I would have been listening to Beefheart whilst reading this. This is great. So there's the thing. So Beefheart and Lowry at the same time.

My dad thought they were both rubbish. So I was listening to Captain Beefheart. My dad would turn that rubbish off. What are you reading? I don't know. It sounds like it's Scottish German, doesn't it? But then, you look at it and you go, well, that seems to be saying, everybody I talk about, who talks about this book

has told me it's rubbish. Maybe that made me want to read it more. So Dave Thorpe handed it to me, saying it was rubbish. My dad told me it was rubbish. But you're right, the more you read it, isn't that the fact with all these books that the person you are now reading it is not the person you were then reading it. So this young man who read it in Isn't that the fact with all these books that the person you are now reading it is not the person you were then reading it.

This young man who read it in 1974 thought it was a young man's book. Absolutely couldn't agree more. He's 61, he didn't want a 61 year old's book. If you've got a passage there, Ian, that is a favourite passage you might like to share with us. I love the ending. We talked about it, I mean, he's not just thrown down a ravine.

Possibly the best ending, I think, of any novel. Are you going to the final line? I think I am the ending. We talked about it. I mean, he's not just thrown down a ravine. Possibly the best ending, I think, of any novel. Are you going to the final line? I think I am, yes. Yeah, I think this is the greatest final line of any novel. Wouldn't it be a great Captain Beefat song? We could imagine him singing it. We should write the song. We should write the song.

I'll do it from just a little bit before the end. Nor was this summit a summit exactly. It had no substance, no firm base. It was crumbling to whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano. He must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly. It was an eruption. Yes, no, it wasn't the volcano.

The world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages, catapulted into space. What a great sentence. With himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of 10 million burning bodies falling into a forest, falling. Suddenly he screamed and it was as though the scream were being tossed from one tree to another as its echoes returned then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, prying. Somebody

threw a dead dog after him down the ravine. Brilliant. Then he goes, Lagusta, este jadan que es sujo, evite que sus hijos lo destruyan. So what does it mean? This is your garden. And it's interesting because earlier in the novel, he mistranslates it. Yes. Do you like this garden that is yours? Yes. It means make sure that your children don't destroy it.

But what he says earlier in the book is the consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? He gets that wrong. So it's not a question. We evict those who destroy. Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one's being, words which perhaps a final

judgment on one were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mezcal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne's departure. God, that was so beautiful. Isn't that great? I've got goosebumps, actually.

That's great. In a way, that's the book in a... He sees something. He notices something. It makes a string of synaptic connections fire off in his alcoholic brain. It's also what Ian was saying about it being a prose poem. You know, what holds the book together

is imagery, not narrative. Despite Lowry claiming narrative, you can read my book as a thriller if you want. Well, you can. I like the idea of it being a horse. I like it being that we're saying it was a horse opera. Because it's horses and trees and gardens and vegetation and chasms and all that Dantean kind of, you know, the town becomes hell.

Originally, he intended it as one of a trilogy. He was trying to rewrite Dante's Inferno and this was going to be the Inferno part of it. But he didn't really... I mean, that's the other thing about the book, which is that ending is dark. I mean, it's hard. I mean, that's the other thing about the book, which is that ending is dark. I mean, it's hard. I mean, knowing anything about, we'll obviously have to talk a bit more about his terrible life,

but it's a dark vision, but shot through with things of such beauty. I was down in Sussex a couple of weeks ago. We were visiting, here's the contrast, we were visiting Charleston near Lewis, the seat of the Bloomsbury set and while we were there we detoured to a nearby village called Ripe which is where Lowry died and where he is buried

Do you think he chose it for the name? He's buried in a small plot at the corner of the churchyard if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see that I tweeted a photograph of the grave, which is very plain, to which somebody has physically attached a ceramic plate

that has that message you just read, Ian, printed on it. We evict those who destroy. And actually it's rather beautiful that somebody's done that. But the other thing we should say about the relationship between death and Lowry and under the volcano, the book is set on November 2nd, the day of the dead in Mexico. It prefigures, and this is one of the reasons it's perceived it was so successful when it was published in 1947.

It prefigures the Attenborough in several ways. The bit that you just read, written prior to the Second World War, was perceived after the war as having a relationship to the war. We also talked, didn't we, about the divisive

nature. You were talking. What was the guy who you were urging to read it several times? Dave Thorpe. Dave Thorpe was not alone. We have a clip here of the writer and no, the drinker and occasional writer Charles Bukowski. Did you ever read

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano? Yeah, I did and I yonned myself to shit. Why? Why? Because, like any other writer, there's no pace, there's no quickness in his lines. There's no life, there's no sunlight. When you write, your words must go like this.

Bim, bim, bim. Bim, bim, bim. Bim, bim, bim. Bim, bim, bim. Each line must be full of a delicious little juice flavor. They must be full of power. They must make you like to turn a page. Bim, bim, bim. What these guys do, they say, well, in blah, blah, blah, da, da, da,

there was a porch chair. The flies were walking around. You see, they're too leisurely. They're setting up the scene for the grand emotion. And when they get to the grand emotion, there isn't any. This is a different age. It's the atomic age. So you want bim, bim, bim, not da, da, da.

See, I've only just known that. No, it's so simple. Thanks, Charles. But the point is, can you see what he means while at the same time I could disagree with every little bit of what he says? He also goes on to say rather ungenerously that he was a crap drinker

because he choked to death on his own vomit and then goes to demonstrate the Bukowski method for hanging your head over the side of the bed so you don't do that. He was an amateur. The guy was an amateur. Can I just make a point? It's a kind of a book of one man's descent

into kind of hell and whatever, but there's bits that are very funny. Hugely funny. The bits where his brother, his younger brother Hugh, signs on to what his captain of the ship is affronted that Hugh calls a tramp steamer and how he's treated by his colleagues,

by his shipmates on the boat, it's just had me kind of laughing out loud. It's really, really funny writing. That felt to me like a hangover, as it were, from Ultramarine. That felt like that came from an early... That was his first novel and that felt like a hangover. I didn't like those bits as much. I didn't want him to make me laugh.

I thought he'd make me laugh. Please stop making me laugh, Malcolm Mowry. What, then, when you read it? Yeah, because I thought, I didn't like those bits as much I didn't want him to make me laugh I thought he'd make me laugh Please stop making me laugh What then when you read it? I don't want to laugh I want more tragedy Doesn't it work as a relief Between the first bit where he's got the DTs I prefer those bits What about does the bit make you laugh

Where he's talking to his neighbour And he flies over him And he goes I think I'm a bird in a tree And then he falls down. That makes me laugh, but then I think, I wish he hadn't made me laugh, Malcolm, because it's like when you've got a serious uncle and a daft uncle and you always want the serious

uncle to be the serious uncle and he tells Joan it doesn't work and the daft uncle says something profound. It's that kind of thing. I always want Malcolm Lowry to be my serious uncle. But Mr Quincy, this is the neighbour. Mr Quincy. He's a warm-up magnet. He's wandered into the garden because he's hidden a bottle of mescal

somewhere in the garden. He can't remember where. Tequila. Tequila. And the next thing, this brilliant Lowry technique of the next thing, literally the next paragraph, he's got it in his hand and he can't remember how it got there. And he thinks his neighbor he

thinks his neighbor isn't watching him so i think i better go and say hello good morning to the neighbor the neighbor's totally mr quincy stared at him evenly then began to refill his watering can from a hydrant nearby that ought to take you back said the consul to the dear old Soda Springs, eh? Hee-hee! Yes, I've cut liquor right out these days. The other resumed his watering, sternly moving on down the fence, and the consul, not sorry to leave the fruit tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust,

followed him step by step. Yes! Another great insect. I'm on the wagon now, he commented, in case you didn't know. The funeral wagon, I'd say, Furman. Mr Quincy muttered testily. And so on and so forth. I think you were right, Matt.

It is funny, but I enjoyed it. It made me laugh at the time, but I thought I wish... It's the serious adolescent that I was. Wanted to be serious. The restaurant towards the end with the spectral chicken of the house and Onans in garlic soup on egg, that's also humorous. But you can feel the gathering kind of horror of that scene,

which sort of the humour lightens it. But there's not a lot of laughs in the last 80 pages of the book. No. So we've talked about things that this novel is about, right? So it's about World War II, perhaps, or a sense that civilisation is beginning to unwind. It's about Lowry, because that's all Lowry wrote about, fundamentally. All these books that he didn't finish, all part of one great work, which he called The Bolas,

where he would draw things out. And he wrote and rewrote and weaved in and out and recycled. But it's also, of course, it is a book about booze, and as a book about booze, it's perhaps the greatest book about booze, in terms of capturing the shifting of perspectives. I think the thing about the drinking was, it was, again, at the time when I read it,

you thought, gosh, this is romantic. The drinking that he was doing was romantic. At North Staffordshire Polytechnic we had 15 pence whiskey nights and we thought and we pretended to be Malcolm Lowry, me and Dave Thorpe and Dave Venazza and the girl Karen that I lent the book to.

You thought, well, we weren't being like him, but then you read about the end of his life. The terrible ending. There was a fantastic about the end of his life, the terrible ending. There was a fantastic bit in one of the books about him where it said that he spent several hours trying to get some pieces of bread and cheese into his mouth because he'd lost, he'd got, he trembled, he couldn't. And you thought, well, that is a terrible ending to the whole thing.

So maybe you want to believe in him as somebody who wrote about it but then not actually take on the consequences of it as a reader, I guess. The book is about, it's brilliant, it's brilliant among many things, but it's about as good a portrait of addictive behaviour, of addiction, of what the drink does. And I'll read just a little bit, because this is the kind of the optimistic calculus of the serious drinker, which he gets better than anybody.

Stop. Look. Listen. How drunk or how drunkly sober or undrunk can you calculate you are now, at any rate? There had been those drinks at Signora Gregorio's, no more than two, certainly, and before. Ah, before. But later, in the bus, he'd only had that sip of Hughes Habanero, then at the bull-throwing, almost finished it.

It was this that made him tight again, but tight in a way he didn't like, in a worse way than in the square, even, the tightness of impending unconsciousness, of seasickness. And it was from this sort of tightness, was it? He'd tried to sober up by taking those mescalitos on the sly, but the mezcal, the consul had realised, had succeeded in a manner somewhat outside his calculations.

The strange truth was, he had another hangover. There was something, in fact, almost beautiful about the frightful extremity of that condition the consul now found himself in. It was a hangover like a great dark ocean swell, finally rolled up against a foundering steamer by countless gales to windward that have long since blown themselves out. And from all this, it was not so much necessary to sober up again, as once more to wake, yes, as to wake, as so much as to... And then he's back into the narrative again. Isn't that beautiful?

That's a beautiful poem, a recipe, a map. The thing in the book that is impossible, which is, why doesn't he just... She's come back to him. Why doesn't he just go with it? She wanted to come back with him. They could make a go of it.

The beautiful sort of vision of the life, which in fact the life he did lead, Barry led with Marjorie up in his little squat in Vancouver. But he can't do it, can he? He can't. He's in love with this sort of vision of his own damnation. He can't let it go. But it reminded me of the thing that a lot of people, you know, alcoholics say, that you have to want to give up.

You have to want to stop drinking. And he doesn't really want to stop drinking. He loves the amazing, towards the end, Farolito, the vision of the bar in the early morning and the beauty, you know, the beauty of that first glass of mezcal and then that thing about negotiating your way through the day. So there are moments when he falls asleep,

moments when he wakes up again. Well, that bit there, the Farolito in the early morning was the thing that, as a young man reading that, you thought, this is what a jewel of a couple of pages that is. We have one last clip which seems appropriate at this juncture, which is the documentary I was talking about earlier, which is called Volcano, an inquiry into the life and death of Malcolm Lowry.

You will have heard his voice on the first clip. There has readings from Under the Volcano by Richard Burton, who himself knew a thing or two about drink. He reads it beautifully. And we have a clip here of Richard Burton reading an extended passage from one of those scenes in Under the Volcano, which, as you will hear, the resonances of it

with the lives of everyone involved come through pretty strong. Oozing alcohol from every pore, the consul stood at the open door of the Salon Ophelia. How sensible to have had a mescal, how sensible, for it was the right, the sole drink to have under the circumstances. Moreover, he had not only proved to himself he was not afraid of it, he was now fully awake, fully sober again, and well able to cope with anything that might come his way.

But for this slight continual twitching and hopping within his field of vision as of innumerable sand fleas, he might have told himself he hadn't had a drink for months. The only thing wrong with him, he was too hot. But look here, hang it all It is not altogether darkness You misunderstand me If you think it is altogether darkness, I see And if you insist on thinking so

How can I tell you why I do it? But if you look at that sunlight there Then perhaps you'll get the answer See, look Look at the way it falls through the window. What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning? Not even the gates of heaven opening wide to receive me could fill me with such celestial, complicated and hopeless joy

as the iron screen that rose up with a crash. I never saw him without a tape, Mr. Goodenow, as he wrote in his book. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster is here beyond those swinging doors. And by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco's sitting in the corner? How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco

who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning? Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard's life. Wow, that is something, isn't it? Unbelievable. Can you imagine the audio book that could have been? Oh, I know.

I mean, that's a long clip for us to play here. We don't normally play clips that long, but I really felt that was worth hearing. The extraordinary... Perfectly. It's perfect. It is, exactly. It's perfect. The man reading the words that must speak to him loud and clear. In the background we heard the fair, didn't we?

Yeah. The turning wheel. Turning wheel, which the whole book is, isn't it? The whole book is a wheel that turns around the spokes of the 12 hours and the whole thing. And it is a bit like you could think you get to the end and you start again because it is the bit like you could think you get to the end and you start again. Because it is the endless thing of the drunk,

the waking up, the sobering up, the back again down the ravine. And again, it's patterned isn't it? So patterned is that scene where he's looking at the horse at the end and he tells the joke to the guy who's saying, what are you doing looking at my horse? And he says, you know, I hear the world goes round and I'm just waiting for my house to arrive.

That's cyclical. And that joke is the beginning of the end, where he's too drunk to realise that he's in danger and in trouble. I don't think there are very many novels that are as great as this. I can't think... It's hard. I mean, you'll see, there are very few, I think. The best Tolstoy, I think it's right in the very top league. I agree with think, it's hard, I mean, you know, there are very few, I think, the best told story. I think it's right in the very top league.

I agree with you, John. I mean, for me, I read this book for the first time about 12 years ago, and I've read it three times. And I would be hard-pressed to, and it has become one of my favourite novels, books. I'm hard-pressed to think of a book that so successfully marries as Ian was saying, not just poetry and fiction and philosophy and religious writing, all those things but humour

and pain and artistry the layers upon layers of symbolism that he puts into the book that you can't apprehend first time. You might begin to get second time. But on third time, you begin to see that actually what sounds like bravado, that idea that my book is a wheel. You could pick it up at any point.

Actually, he's come to believe it. He's convinced himself of his own brilliance, which is one of the reasons why subsequently he becomes so unhappy and so distraught because he can't find his way back. I guess the thing to say to people is if you don't want to read the whole book, just omit it at random and read a page. And you'll get magnificent sentences, you'll get images that will stay with you forever,

you'll get paragraphs. And it might lead you to the next one, but it might not. Just keep going through it, just find your way through it like he might have staggered through a street. Find your way through it in that way. You don't have to read it from start to finish, I would say. That's a lovely way, because as you say, the plot is so not the point. I love that it was, Marquez said it was the book he read more than any other.

And it's interesting, you find writers who you wouldn't think of. Richard Ford, a huge admirer of it and then you think well of course Frank Bascom a weekend there's a lovely thing that the underrated writer Dawn Powell said in Under the Volcano

you love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding which is I really like that the that the the thing about larry you feel he understood everything he couldn't control his life he couldn't but he could control his book and there's not the insight that the sense of i mean his his the fine-grained quality of his psychological understanding of that the the relationships at the heart of the book you know that the unfaithfulness that the pay i mean he it's it's it's as you say i think i can't imagine a time in my life when i'm not going to go back and get more from it and there are very very few books

you can say that about you may have heard listeners that we have in the backlisting tradition uh wherever possible uh we we like to uh respond to the book and we have just uncorked a fine bottle of... What is this, John? It's a single village mezcal. Mezcal has gone hip now. But it was strongly recommended by people who I know who... I brought a far cheaper bottle of mezcal, but mine does have a little worm in it.

Larry would be much more likely to go for that. So shall we send Malc on his way? Salut. Salut. Salut. Salut. Into the ravine. Dog to follow.

I don't drink, but that is really nice. Uh-oh. At least we caught this historic moment on tape. What are you doing after the recording? Who cares? My goodness. It's quite something, isn't it? There's some smoke in that.

It's amazing, isn't it? They make it and it's still made in the same way they made it 400 years ago. It's actually straight back to North Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1970. Reverie. We should say there's a very good website if people want to, is it called The World of Malcolm Marriott? It's an incredible website. I'm going to give the address out.

It's run by two academics, Chris Ackley. Weirdly, in the University of Otago in New Zealand. www.otago.ac.nz, which is a hypertext annotated under the volcano. And there's also a blog called Gutted Arcades of the Past. Is that the 19th hole? It's by the guy who does the 19th hole as well. It's sort of an encyclopedia of Lowry's early life which is sort of lots of

interesting stuff about before he gets to Mexico. It's a great picture. Which scales both these websites and the people who've written about the books, you know, like Lowry, scale the heights and plumb the depths of the book. The layer upon layer upon layer

of referencing and mirroring that goes on in the book. And I always say to people, like you were saying, Ian, about when you recommend it to people, I always say, you know what, there's no shame if you're serious about reading it, like with Ulysses, about reading it with a crib. Oh, yes.

And then read it again with the stabilisers off. And I love Ian's idea the stabilisers off. Mm-hmm. And I love Ian's idea of just pick it up. Just pick it up and do it at random. I don't know why there isn't... It's odd, isn't it, why November 2nd

hasn't become Lowry Day? Well, I was just wondering... But you couldn't do what you do for Bloomsday in this book... with this book, could you? I mean, if you recreated the day... Not the streets littered

with the corpses of readers. Not unless you'd booked a liver transplant first. It seems a shame to leave this behind, but I guess we all can. I would like to write an opera about it. Yes, you were saying that. And I thought, what an operatic subject this is. I've been talking to various composers about it, and you've got to be a fan of the book.

But if I can find a composer who's a fan of the book, then we'll write an opera about it, and we'll have the premiere at the Ilkley Literature Festival. Brilliant. That's what we'll do. You heard it here first. And the shades of Lowry and Collier and Thackery and Don Van Vliet will gather together to celebrate.

And the captain himself, let's be honest. I think an opera would be an amazing idea because it sure as hell didn't make a good film. We don't need to go on about that. That's a good point to end. Thanks to Ian McMillan,

to our producer Matt Hall, to Spiritland in King's Cross, fabulous venue, and to Richard Andrews, our engineer. And thanks once again to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, on Facebook, Backlisted, and on our page at the Unbound site at unbound.com, Backlisted. Thanks for listening.

We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. Bim, bim, bim, everyone. Bim, bim, bim, everyone. Bim, bim, bim. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes

of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.