« Still polarized... | Main | Ancient astronaut? » The volcanoIf you'd met me in the late 60s, I would've convinced you by my passionate dedication to the proposition that I had only one calling, and that was to write fiction. At some point thereafter I concluded that I wasn't much of a storyteller, and started writing nonfiction instead. The real truth behind my decision was that I was undisciplined and couldn't grasp the importance of revision, then revision of revision. My curse as a writer for years, whether with fiction or nonfiction, has been that I wouldn't take time to revise (a problem I'm correcting, finally getting back to writing and taking it seriously again). The three writers of fiction that most influenced me were James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and Malcolm Lowry. (Philip Dick's in there somewhere, as well). Of the three I spent less time with Lowry, who'd only written one book, Under the Volcano “Under the Volcano”—his “ultima thule of the spirit,” as he called it—contains a remarkable death scene, and some of the language evokes Lowry’s own. The Mexican paramilitaries close in on the consul. One pulls out a pistol and shoots him, then shoots him twice more, and the world becomes a giant symbol of despair: “Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echo returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying.” This is pure Baudelaire. But, at the moment when the consul sees the gun firing, Lowry sees things more plainly: “At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. ‘Christ,’ he remarked, puzzled, ‘this is a dingy way to die.’ ” jon posted this at 8:52 AM |
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. Lowry was a powerful author, but the story he told was more personal and bleak than anything I'd read by the others. He was drunk, crazy, and ultimately suicidal – I've been reading a piece in The New Yorker about Lowry's life and death, and there appears to be some evidence that his wife, Margerie, did him in, with good cause (he was an abusive drunk). 
