Malcolm Lowry

Born Clarence Malcolm Lowry on July 28, 1909, in New Brighton, on the Wirral peninsula in England, the fourth son of a prosperous cotton broker, Lowry grew up in a mock Tudor estate with a tennis court, golf course, and servants, comforts he would spend his life fleeing. He began drinking at fourteen. At eighteen, he persuaded his father to let him work as a deckhand on a tramp steamer to the Far East; the five months at sea became the basis for his first novel, Ultramarine (1933). He enrolled at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where his tutor could teach him only in pubs, and where his roommate Paul Fitte killed himself, a death that haunted Lowry for life. He married Jan Gabrial in France in 1934; the marriage collapsed in Mexico, where they had arrived in Cuernavaca on the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1936. Alone in Oaxaca, sinking into alcoholic despair, he was eventually deported in 1938. He met his second wife, the actress Margerie Bonner, in Los Angeles, and they settled in a squatter's shack on the beach at Dollarton, near Vancouver, where he spent years rewriting Under the Volcano. The shack burned down in 1944, and Lowry was injured saving manuscripts from the flames. Under the Volcano was finally published in 1947, a hallucinatory account of the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in a Mexican town overshadowed by two volcanoes, set against the Day of the Dead. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Lowry spent the remaining decade of his life struggling with alcoholism and an inability to complete further work. He died on June 26, 1957, in Ripe, Sussex, aged forty-seven, from a combination of alcohol and barbiturates. The coroner recorded a verdict of "death by misadventure."