Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  And there, indeed, were Hugh’s songs. They had been published, a thousand sheets of each, as Bolowski said: that was all. No effort had been made to distribute them. Nobody was humming them. No comedian was singing them at the Birken-head Hippodrome. No one had ever heard a word more of the songs ‘the schoolboy undergraduate’ had written. And so far as Bolowski was concerned it was a matter of complete indifference whether anyone heard a word more in the future. He had printed them, thus fulfilling his part of the contract. It had cost him perhaps a third of the premium. The rest was clear profit. If Bolowski published a thousand such songs a year by the unsuspecting half-wits willing to pay why go to the expense of pushing them? The premiums alone were his justification. And after all, Hugh had his songs. Hadn’t he known, Bolowski gently explained, there was no market for songs by English composers? That most of the songs published were American? Hugh in spite of himself felt flattered at being initiated into the mysteries of the song-writing business.’ But all the publicity,’ he stammered, ‘wasn’t all that good advertising for you?’ And Bolowski gently shook his head. That story had gone dead before the songs were published. ‘Yet it would be easy to revive it? — Hugh muttered, swallowing all his complicated good intentions as he remembered the reporter he’d kicked off the ship the day before: then, ashamed, he tried another tack… Maybe, after all, one might stand more chance in America as a song-writer? And he thought, remotely of the Oedipus Tyrannus. But Bolowski quietly scoffed at one’s chances in America; there, where every waiter was a song-writer —

  All this while, though, Hugh had been half-hopefully glancing over his songs. At least his name was on the covers. And on one was actually the photograph of a dance-band. Featured with enormous success by Izzy Smigalkin and his orchestra! Taking several copies of each he returned to the Astoria. Izzy Smigalkin was playing at the Elephant and Castle and thither he bent his steps, why he could not have said, since Bolowski had already implied the truth, that even had Izzy Smigalkin been playing at the Kilburn Empire itself he was still not the fellow to prove interested in any songs for which band parts had not been issued, be he featuring them by obscure arrangement through Bolowski with never so much success. Hugh became aware of the world.

  He passed his exam to Cambridge but scarcely left his old haunts. Eighteen months must elapse before he went up. The reporter he’d thrown off the Philoctetes had said to him, whatever his point: ‘You’re a fool. You could have every editor in town running after you.’ Chastened, Hugh found through this same man a job on a newspaper pasting cuttings in a scrap book. So it had come to this! However he soon acquired some sense of independence — though his board was paid by his aunt. And his rise was rapid. His notoriety had helped, albeit he wrote nothing so far of the sea. At bottom he desired honesty, art, and his story of a brothel burning in Wapping Old Stairs was said to embrace both. But at the back of his mind other fires were smouldering. No longer did he grub around nom shady publisher to publisher with his guitar and his manuscripts in Geoff’s Gladstone bag. Yet his life once more began to bear a certain resemblance to Adolf Hitler’s. He had not lost touch with Bolowski, and in his heart he imagined himself plotting revenge. A form of private anti-Semitism became part of his life. He sweated racial hatred in the night. If it still sometimes struck him that in the stokehold he had fallen down the spout of the capitalist system, that feeling was now inseparable from his loathing of the Jews. It was somehow the fault of the poor old Jews, not merely Bolowski, but all Jews, that he’d found himself down the stokehold in the first place on a wild-goose chase. It was even due to the Jews that such economic excrescences as the British Mercantile Marine existed. In his day dreams he became the instigator of enormous pogroms — all-inclusive, and hence, bloodless. And daily he moved nearer his design. True, between it and him, from time to time rose up the shadow of the Philoctetes’s lamp-trimmer. Or flickered the shadows of the trimmers in the Oedipus Tyrannus. Were not Bolowski and his ilk the enemies of their own race and the Jews themselves the cast-out, exploited, and wandering of the earth, even as they, even, once, as he? But what was the brotherhood of man when your brothers put stale bread in your sea-bag? Still, where else to turn for some decent and clear values? Had his father or mother not died perhaps? His aunt? Geoff? But Geoff, like some ghostly other self, was always in Rabat or Timbuctoo. Besides he’d deprived him once already of the dignity of being a rebel. Hugh smiled as he lay on the daybed… For there had been someone, he now saw, to whose memory at least he might have turned. It reminded him moreover that he’d been an ardent revolutionary for a while at the age of thirteen. And, odd to recall, was it not this same Headmaster of his former prep school, and Scoutmaster, Dr Gotelby, fabulous stalking totem pole of Privilege, the Church, the English gentleman — God save the King and sheet anchor of parents, who’d been responsible for his heresy? Goat old boy I With admirable independence the fiery old fellow, who preached the virtues each Sunday in Chapel, had illustrated to his goggling history class how the Bolshevists, far from being the child murderers in the Daily Mail, followed a way of life only less splendid than that current throughout his own community of Pangbourne Garden City. But Hugh had forgotten his ancient mentor then. Just as he had long since forgotten to do his good turn every day. That a Christian smiles and whistles under all difficulties and that once a scout you were always a Communist. Hugh only remembered to be prepared. So Hugh seduced Bolowski’s wife.

  This was perhaps a matter of opinion… But unfortunately it hadn’t changed Bolowski’s decision to file suit for divorce, naming Hugh as co-respondent. Almost worse was to follow. Bolowski suddenly charged Hugh with attempting to deceive him in other respects, that the songs he’d published were nothing less than plagiarisms of two obscure American numbers. Hugh was staggered. Could this be? Had he been living in a world of illusion so absolute he’d looked forward passionately to the publication of someone else’s songs, paid for by himself, or rather by his aunt, that, involvedly, even his disillusionment on their account was false? It was not, it proved, quite so bad as that. Yet there was all too solid ground for the accusation so far as one song was concerned…

  On the daybed Hugh wrestled with his cigar. God almighty. Good God all blistering mighty. He must have known all the time. He knew he had known. On the other hand, caring only for the rendering, it looked as if he could be persuaded by his guitar that almost any song was his. The fact that the American number was infallibly a plagiarism too didn’t help the slightest. Hugh was in anguish. At this point he was living in Blackheath and one day, the threat of exposure dogging every footstep, he walked fifteen miles to the city, through the slums of Lewisham, Catford, New Cross, down the Old Kent Road, past, ah, the Elephant and Castle, into the heart of London. His poor songs pursued him in a minor key now, macabre. He wished he could be lost in these poverty-stricken hopeless districts romanticized by Longfellow. He wished the world would swallow him and his disgrace. For disgrace there would be. The publicity he had once evoked on his own behalf assured it. How was his aunt going to feel now? And Geoff? The few people who believed in him? Hugh conceived a last gigantic pogrom; in vain. It seemed, finally, almost a comfort that his mother and father were dead. As for the senior tutor of his college, it wasn’t likely he would care to welcome a freshman just dragged through the divorce courts; dread words. The prospect seemed horrible, life at an end, the only hope to sign on another ship immediately it was all over, or if possible, before it all began.

  Then, suddenly, a miracle occurred, something fantastic, unimaginable, and for which to this day Hugh could find no logical explanation. All at once Bolowski dropped the whole thing. He forgave his wife. He sent for Hugh and, with the utmost dignity, forgave him. The divorce suit was withdrawn. So were the plagiarism charges. It was all a mistake, Bolowski said. At worst the songs had never been distributed, so what damage had been done? The sooner it was all forgotten the better. Hugh could not believe his ears: nor in memory believe them now, nor that, so soon
after everything had seemed so completely lost, and one’s life irretrievably ruined, one should, as though nothing had happened, have calmly gone up to —

  ‘Help.’

  Geoffrey, his face half covered with lather, was standing in the doorway of his room, beckoning tremulously with a shaving brush and Hugh, throwing his ravaged cigar into the garden, rose and followed him in. He normally had to pass through this interesting room to reach his own (the door of which stood open opposite, revealing the mowing-machine) and at the moment, Yvonne’s being occupied, to reach the bathroom. This was a delightful place, and extremely large for the size of the house; its windows, through which sunlight was pouring, looked down the drive towards the Calle Nicaragua. The room was pervaded by some sweet heavy scent of Yvonne’s, while the odours of the garden filtered in through Geoff’s open bedroom window.

  ‘The shakes are awful, did you never have the shakes?’ the Consul was saying, shivering all over: Hugh took the shaving brush from him and began to relather it on a tablet of fragrant asses’-milk soap lying in the basin. ‘Yes, you did, I remember. But not the rajah shakes.’

  ‘No — no newspaperman ever had the shakes.’ Hugh arranged a towel about the Consul’s neck. ‘You mean the wheels.’

  ‘The wheels within wheels this is.’

  ‘I deeply sympathize. Now then, we’re all set. Stand still.’

  ‘How on earth can I stand still?’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better sit down.’

  But the Consul could not sit down either.

  ‘Jesus, Hugh, I’m sorry. I can’t stop bouncing about. It’s like being in a tank — did I say tank? Christ, I need a drink. What have we here?’ The Consul grasped, from the window-sill, an uncorked bottle of bay rum. ‘What’s this like, do you suppose, eh? For the scalp.’ Before Hugh could stop him the Consul took a large drink. ‘Not bad. Not at all bad,’ he added triumphantly, smacking his lips. ‘If slightly underproof… Like pernod, a little. A charm against galloping cockroaches anyway. And the polygonous proustian stare of imaginary scorpions. Wait a minute, I’m going to be –’

  Hugh let the taps run loudly. Next door he heard Yvonne moving about, getting ready to go to Tomalín. But he’d left the radio playing on the porch; probably she could hear no more man the usual bathroom babel.

  ‘Tit for tat,’ the Consul, still trembling, commented, when Hugh had assisted him back to his chair. ‘I did that for you once.’

  ‘S’, hombre.’ Hugh, lathering the brush again on the asses’-milk soap, raised his eyebrows. ‘Quite so. Better now, old fellow?’

  ‘When you were an infant,’ the Consul’s teeth chattered. ‘On the P.’ O. boat coming back from India… The old Cocanada.’

  Hugh resettled the towel around his brother’s neck, then, as if absent-mindedly obeying the other’s wordless instructions, went out, humming, through the bedroom back to the porch, where the radio was now stupidly playing Beethoven in the wind, blowing hard again on this side of the house. On his return with the whisky bottle he rightly deduced the Consul to have hidden in the cupboard, his eyes ranged the Consul’s books disposed quite neatly — in the tidy room where there was not otherwise the slightest sign its occupant did any work or contemplated any for the future, unless it was the somewhat crumpled bed on which the Consul had evidently been lying — on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection: Gogol, the Mahabharata, Blake, Tolstoy, Pontoppidan, the Upanishads, a Mermaid Marston, Bishop Berkeley, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Vice Versa, Shakespeare, a complete Taskerson, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Clicking of Cuthbert, the Rig Veda — God knows, Peter Rabbit; ‘Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,’ the Consul liked to say — Hugh returned, smiling, and with a flourish like a Spanish waiter poured himself a stiff drink into a toothmug.

  ‘Wherever did you find that? — ah I… You’ve saved my life!’

  ‘That’s nothing. I did the same for Carruthers’once.’ Hugh now set about shaving the Consul who had become much steadier almost immediately.

  ‘Carruthers — the Old Crow?… Did what for Carruthers?’

  ‘Held his head.’

  ‘He wasn’t tight of course, though.’

  ‘Not tight… Submerged. In a supervision too.’ Hugh flourished the cut-throat razor. ‘Try and sit still like that; you’re doing fine. He had a great respect for you — he had an enormous number of stories about you, mostly variations on the same one… however… The one about your riding into college on a horse –’

  ‘Oh no… I wouldn’t have ridden it in. Anything bigger than a sheep frightens me.’

  ‘Anyway there the horse was, tied up in the buttery. A pretty ferocious horse too. Apparently it took about thirty-seven gyps and the college porter to get it out.’

  ‘Good lord… But I can’t imagine Carruthers ever getting so tight he’d pass out at a supervision. Let me see, he was only praelector in my time. I believe he was really more interested in his first editions than in us. Of course it was at the beginning of the war, a rather trying period… But he was a wonderful old chap.’

  ‘He was still praelector in mine.’

  (In my time?… But what, exactly, does that mean? What, if anything, did one do at Cambridge, that would show the soul worthy of Siegebert of East Anglia — Or, John Cornford! Did one dodge lectures, cut halls, fail to row for the college, fool one’s supervisor, finally, oneself? Read economics, then history, Italian, barely passing one’s exams? Climb the gateway against which one had an unseaman-like aversion, to visit Bill Plantagenet in Sherlock Court, and, clutching the wheel of St Catherine, feel, for a moment asleep, like Melville, the world hurling from all havens astern? Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me. While oneself lived in a disgusting smell of marmalade and old boots, kept by a cripple, in a hovel near the station yard. Cambridge was the sea reversed; at the same time a horrible regression; in the strictest sense — despite one’s avowed popularity, the godsent opportunity — the most appalling of nightmares, as if a grown man should suddenly wake up, like the ill-fated Mr Bultitude in Vice Versa, to be confronted, not by the hazards of business, but by the geometry lesson he had failed to prepare thirty years before, and the torments of puberty. Digs and forecastles are where they are in the heart. Yet the heart sickened at running once more full tilt into the past, into its very school-close faces, bloated now like those of the drowned, on gangling overgrown bodies, into everything all over again one had been at such pains to escape from before, but in grossly inflated form. And indeed had it not been so, one must still have been aware of cliques, snobberies, genius thrown into the river, justice declined a recommendation by the appointments board, earnestness debagged — giant oafs in pepper-and-salt, mincing like old women, their only meaning in another war. It was as though that experience of the sea, also, exaggerated by time, had invested one with the profound inner maladjustment of the sailor who can never be happy on land. One had begun, however, to play the guitar more seriously. And once again one’s best friends were often Jews, often the same Jews who had been at school with one. It must be admitted they were there first, having been there off and
on since A.D. 1106. But now they seemed almost the only people old as oneself: only they had any generous, independent sense of beauty. Only a Jew did not deface the monk’s dream. And somehow only a Jew, with his rich endowment of premature suffering, could understand one’s own suffering, one’s isolation, essentially, one’s poor music. So that in my time and with my aunt’s aid I bought a University weekly. Avoiding college functions, I became a staunch supporter of Zionism. As a leader of a band composed largely of Jews, playing at local dances, and of my own private outfit Three Able Seamen, I amassed a considerable sum. The beautiful Jewish wife of a visiting American lecturer became my mistress. I had seduced her too with my guitar. Like Philoctetes’s bow or Oedipus’s daughter it was my guide and prop. I played it without bashfulness wherever I went. Nor did it strike me as any less than an unexpected and useful compliment that Phillipson, the artist, should have troubled to represent me, in a rival paper, as an immense guitar, inside which an oddly familiar infant was hiding, curled up, as in a womb –)

  ‘Of course he was always a great connoisseur of wines.’

  ‘He was beginning to get the wines and the first editions slightly mixed up in my day.’ Hugh shaved adroitly along the edge of his brother’s beard, past the jugular vein and the carotid artery. ‘Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers?… You know, some of the genuine old 1611.’

  ‘God how funny… Or isn’t it? The poor Old Crow.’

  ‘He was a marvellous fellow.’

  ‘The best.’

  (… I have played the guitar before the Prince of Wales, begged in the streets with one for ex-servicemen on Armistice Day, performed at a reception given by the Amundsen society, and to a caucus of the French Chamber of Deputies as they arranged the approaching years. The Three Able Seamen achieved meteoric fame, Metronome compared us to Venuti’s Blue Four. Once the worst possible thing that could befall me seemed some hand injury. Nevertheless one dreamed frequently of dying, bitten by lions, in the desert, at the last calling for the guitar, strumming to the end… Yet I stopped of my own accord. Suddenly, less than a year after going down from Cambridge, stopped, first in bands, then playing it intimately, stopped so completely that Yvonne, despite the tenuous bond of being born in Hawaii, doubtless doesn’t know I ever played, so emphatically no one says any longer: Hugh, where’s your guitar? Come on and give us a tune –)