Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  Yet he felt trapped. The more completely for the realization that in no essential sense had he escaped from his past life. It was all here, though in another form: the same conflicts, faces, same people, he could imagine, as at school, the same spurious popularity with his guitar, the same kind of unpopularity because he made friends with the stewards, or worse, with the Chinese firemen. Even the ship looked like a fantastic mobile football field. Anti-Semitism, it is true, he had left behind, for Jews on the whole had more sense than to go to sea. But if he had expected to leave British snobbery astern with his public school he was sadly mistaken. In fact, the degree of snobbery prevailing on the Philoctetes was fantastic, of a kind Hugh had never imagined possible. The chief cook regarded the tireless second cook as a creature of completely inferior station. The bosun despised the carpenter and would not speak to him for three months, though they messed in the same small room, because he was a tradesman, while the carpenter despised the bosun since he, Chips, was the senior petty officer. The chief steward, who affected striped shirts off duty, was clearly contemptuous of the cheerful second, who, refusing to take his calling seriously, was content with a singlet and a sweat-rag. When the youngest apprentice went ashore for a swim with a towel round his neck he was solemnly rebuked by a quartermaster wearing a tie without a collar for being a disgrace to the ship. And the captain himself nearly turned black in the face each time he saw Hugh because, intending a compliment, Hugh had described the Philoctetes in an interview as a tramp. Tramp or no, the whole ship rolled and weltered in bourgeois prejudices and taboos the like of which Hugh had not known even existed. Or so it seemed to him. It is wrong, though, to say she rolled. Hugh, far from aspiring to be a Conrad, as the papers suggested, had not then read a word of him. But he was vaguely aware Conrad hinted somewhere that in certain seasons typhoons were to be expected along the China coast. This was such a season; here, eventually, was the China coast. Yet there seemed no typhoons. Or if there were the Philoctetes was careful to avoid them. From the time she emerged from the Bitter Lakes till she lay in the roads at Yokohama a dead monotonous calm prevailed. Hugh chipped rust through the bitter watches. Only they were not really bitter; nothing happened. And they were not watches; he was a day worker. Still, he had to pretend to himself, poor fellow, there was something romantic in what he had done. As was there not! He might easily have consoled himself by looking at a map. Unfortunately maps also too vividly suggested school. So that going through the Suez he was not conscious of sphinxes, Ismailia, nor Mt Sinai; nor through the Red Sea, of Hejaz, Asir, Yemen. Because Perim belonged to India while so remote from it, that island had always fascinated him. Yet they stood off the terrible place a whole forenoon without his grasping the fact. An Italian Somaliland stamp with wild herdsmen on it was once his most treasured possession. They passed Guardafui without his realizing this any more than when as a child of three he’d sailed by in the opposite direction. Later he did not think of Cape Comorin, or Nicobar. Nor, in the Gulf of Siam, of Pnom-Penh. Maybe he did not know himself what he thought about; bells struck, the engine thrummed; videre; videre; and far above was perhaps another sea, where the soul ploughed its high invisible wake —

  Certainly Sokotra only became a symbol to him much later, and that in Karachi homeward bound he might have passed within figurative hailing distance of his birthplace never occurred to him… Hong Kong, Shanghai; but the opportunities to get ashore were few and far between, the little money there was they could never touch, and after having lain at Yokohama a full month without one shore leave Hugh’s cup of bitterness was full. Yet where permission had been granted instead of roaring in bars the men merely sat on board sewing and telling the dirty jokes Hugh had heard at the age of eleven. Or they engaged in loutish neuter compensations. Hugh had not escaped the Pharisaism of his English elders either. There was a good library on board, however, and under the tutelage of the lamp-trimmer Hugh began the education with which an expensive public school had failed to provide him. He read the Forsyte Saga and Peer Gynt. It was largely owing to the lamp-trimmer too, a kindly quasi-Communist, who normally spent his watch below studying a pamphlet named the Red Hand, that Hugh gave up his notion of dodging Cambridge. ‘If I were you I’d go to the poxing place. Get what you bloody can out of the set-up.’

  Meanwhile his reputation had followed him relentlessly down the China coast. Though the headlines of the Singapore Free Press might read ‘Murder of Brother-in-Law’s Concubine’ it would be surprising if shortly one did not stumble upon some such passage as: ‘A curly-headed boy stood on the fo’c‘sle head of the Philoctetes as she docked in Penang strumming his latest composition on the ukelele.’ News which any day now would turn up in Japan. Nevertheless the guitar itself had come to the rescue. And now at least Hugh knew what he was thinking about. It was of England, and the homeward voyage! England, that he had so longed to get away from, now became the sole object of his yearning, the promised land to him; through the monotony of eternally riding at anchor, beyond the Yokohama sunsets like breaks from Singing the Blues, he dreamed of her as a lover of his mistress. He certainly didn’t think of any other mistresses he might have had at home. His one or two brief affairs, if serious at the time, had been forgotten long ago. A tender smile of Mrs Bolowski’s, flashed in dark New Compton Street, had haunted him longer. No: he thought of the double-decker buses in London, the advertisements for music halls up north. Birkenhead Hippodrome: twice nightly 6.30, 8.30. And of green tennis courts, the thud of tennis balls on crisp turf, and their swift passage across the net, the people in deck chairs drinking tea (despite the fact he was well able to emulate them on the Philoctetes), the recently acquired taste for good English ale and old cheese…

  But above all there were his songs, which would now be published. What did anything matter when back home at that very Birkenhead Hippodrome perhaps, they were being played and sung, twice nightly, to crowded houses? And what were those people humming to themselves by those tennis courts if not his tunes? Or if not humming them they were talking of him. For fame awaited him in England, not the false kind he had already brought on himself, not cheap notoriety, but real fame, fame he could now feel, having gone through hell, through ‘fire’ — and Hugh persuaded himself such really was the case — he had earned as his right and reward.

  But the time came when Hugh did go through fire. One day a poor sister ship of a different century, the Oedipus Tyrannus, whose namesake the lamp-trimmer of the Philoctetes might have informed him was another Greek in trouble, lay in Yokohama roads, remote, yet too near, for that night the two great ships ceaselessly turning with the tide gradually swung so close together they almost collided, one moment this seemed about to happen, on the Philoctetes’s poop all was excitement, then as the vessels barely slid by one another the first mate shouted through a megaphone:

  ‘Give Captain Telson Captain Sanderson’s compliments, and tell him he’s been given a foul berth!’

  The Oedipus Tyrannus, which, unlike the Philoctetes, carried white firemen, had been away from home the incredible period of fourteen months. For this reason her ill-used skipper was by no means so anxious as Hugh’s to deny his ship was a tramp. Twice now the Rock of Gibraltar had loomed on his starboard bow only to presage not Thames, or Mersey, but the Western Ocean, the long trip to New York. And then Vera Cruz and Colón, Vancouver and the long voyage over the Pacific back to the Far East. And now, just as everyone was feeling certain this time at last they were to go home, he had been ordered to New York once more. Her crew, especially the firemen, were weary to death of this state of affairs. The next morning, as the two ships rode again at a gracious distance, a notice appeared in the Philoctetes’s after messroom calling for volunteers to replace three seamen and four firemen of the Oedipus Tyrannus. These men would thus be enabled to return to England with the Philoctetes, which had been at sea only three months, but within the week on leaving Yokohama would be homeward bound.

  Now at sea more days are more dollars,
however few. And at sea likewise three months is a terribly long while. But fourteen months (Hugh had not yet read Melville either) is an eternity. It was not likely that the Oedipus Tyrannus would face more than another six of vagrancy: then one never knew; it might be the idea gradually to transfer her more long-suffering hands to homegoing vessels when she contacted them and keep her wandering two more years. At the end of two days there were only two volunteers, a wireless watcher and an ordinary seaman.

  Hugh looked at the Oedipus Tyrannus in her new berth, but swinging again rebelliously close, as to the tether of his mind, the old steamer appearing now on one quarter, now on another, one moment near the breakwater, the next running out to sea. She was, unlike the Philoctetes, everything in his eyes a ship should be. First she was not in rig a football boat, a mass of low goalposts and trankums. Her masts and derricks were of the lofty coffee-pot variety. These former were black, of iron. Her funnel too was tall, and needed paint. She was foul and rusty, red lead showed along her side. She had a marked list to port, and, who knows, one to starboard as well. The condition of her bridge suggested recent contact — could it be possible? — with a typhoon. If not, she possessed the air of one who would soon attract them. She was battered, ancient, and, happy thought, perhaps even about to sink. And yet there was something youthful and beautiful about her, like an illusion that will never the, but always remains hull-down on the horizon. It was said she was capable of seven knots. And she was going to New York ! On the other hand should he sign on her, what became of England? He was not so absurdly sanguine about his songs as to imagine his fame so bright there after two years… Besides, it would mean a terrible readjustment, starting all over again. Still, there could not be the same stigma attaching to him on board. His name would scarcely have reached Colón. Ah, his brother Geoff, too, knew these seas, these pastures of experience, what would he have done?

  But he couldn’t do it. Galled as he was lying a month at Yokohama without shore leave it was still asking too much. It was as if at school, just as the end of term beautifully came in sight, he had been told there would be no summer holidays, he must go on working as usual through August and September. Save that no one was telling him anything. Some inner self, merely, was urging him to volunteer so that another sea-weary man, homesick longer than he, might take his place. Hugh signed on board the Oedipus Tyrannus.

  When he returned to the Philoctetes a month later in Singapore he was a different man. He had dysentery. The Oedipus Tyrannus ‘had not disappointed him. Her food was poor. No refrigeration, simply an icebox. And a chief steward (the dirty ‘og) who sat all day in his cabin smoking cigarettes. The fo’c‘sle was forward too. He left her against his will however, due to an agential confusion, and with nothing in his mind of Lord Jim, about to pick up pilgrims going to Mecca. New York had been shelved, his shipmates, if not all the pilgrims would probably reach home after all. Alone with his pain off duty Hugh felt a sorry fellow. Yet every now and then he rose on his elbow: my God what a life ! No conditions could be too good for the men tough enough to endure it. Not even the ancient Egyptians knew what slavery was. Though what did he know about it? Not much. The bunkers, loaded at Miki — a black coaling port calculated to fulfil any landsman’s conception of a sailor’s dreams, since every house in it was a brothel, every woman a prostitute, including even an old hag who did tattoos — were soon full: the coal was near the stokehold floor. He had seen only the bright side of a trimmer’s job, if it could be said to have one. But was it much better on deck? Not really. No pity there either. To the sailor life at sea was no senseless publicity stunt. It was dead serious. Hugh was horribly ashamed of ever having so exploited it. Years of crashing dullness, of exposure to every kind of obscure peril and disease, your destiny at the mercy of a company interested in your health only because it might have to pay your insurance, your home-life reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen mat every eighteen months, that was the sea. That, and a secret longing to be buried in it. And an enormous unquenchable pride. Hugh now thought he realized dimly what the lamp-trimmer had tried to explain, why he had been alternately abused and toadied to on the Philoctetes. It was largely because he had foolishly advertised himself as the representative of a heartless system both distrusted and feared. Yet to seamen this system offers far greater inducement than to firemen, who rarely emerge through the hawsehole into the bourgeois upper air. Nevertheless, it remains suspect. Its ways are devious. Its spies are everywhere. It will wheedle to you, who can tell, even on a guitar. For this reason its diary must be read. One must check up, keep abreast of its deviltries. One must, if necessary, flatter it, ape it, seem to collaborate with it. And it, in turn, flatters you. It yields a point here and there, in matters such as food, better living conditions, even though it has first destroyed the peace of mind necessary to benefit by them, libraries. For in this manner it keeps a stranglehold on your soul. And because of this it sometimes happens you grow obsequious and find yourself saying: ‘Do you know, you are working for us, when we should be working for you?’ That is right too. The system is working for you, as you will shortly discover, when the next war comes, bringing jobs for all. ‘But don’t imagine you can get away with these tricks for ever,’ you are repeating all the time in your heart; ‘Actually we have you in our grip. Without us in peace or war Christendom must collapse like a heap of ashes I’. Hugh saw holes in the logic of this thought. Nevertheless, on board the Oedipus Tyrannus, almost without taint of that symbol, Hugh had been neither abused nor toadied to. He had been treated as a comrade. And generously helped, when unequal to his task. Only four weeks. Yet those weeks with the Oedipus Tyrannus had reconciled him to the Philoctetes. Thus he became bitterly concerned that so long as he stayed sick someone else must do his job. When he turned to again before he was well he still dreamed of England and fame. But he was mainly occupied with finishing his work in style. During these last hard weeks he played his guitar seldom. It seemed he was getting along splendidly. So splendidly that, before docking, his shipmates insisted on packing his bag for him. As it turned out, with stale bread.

  They lay at Gravesend waiting for the tide. Around them in the misty dawn sheep were already bleating softly. The Thames, in the half-light, seemed not unlike the Yangtze-Kiang. Then, suddenly, someone knocked out his pipe on a garden wall…

  Hugh hadn’t waited to discover whether the journalist who came aboard at Silvertown liked to play his songs in his spare time. He’d almost thrown him bodily off the ship.

  Whatever prompted the ungenerous act did not prevent his somehow finding his way that night to New Compton Street and Bolowski’s shabby little shop. Closed now and dark: but Hugh could almost be certain those were his songs in the window. How strange it all was I Almost he fancied he heard familiar chords from above — Mrs Bolowski practising them softly in an upper room. And later, seeking a hotel, that all around him people were humming them. That night too, in the Astoria, this humming persisted in his dreams; he rose at dawn to investigate once more the wonderful window. Neither of his songs was there. Hugh was only disappointed an instant. Probably his songs were so popular no copies could be spared for display. Nine o’clock brought him again to Bolowski’s. The little man was delighted to see him. Yes, indeed, both his songs had been published a considerable time. Bolowski would go and get them. Hugh waited breathlessly. Why was he away so long? After all, Bolowski was his publisher. It could not be, surely, he was having any difficulty finding them. At last Bolowski and an assistant returned with two enormous packages. ‘Here’, he said, ‘are your songs. What would you like us to do with them? Would you like to take them? Or would you like us to keep them a while longer?’