The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  After Lowry’s death, Margerie sold his papers to the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. The “Volcano” manuscripts reveal the process of refinement that took place in Dollarton. The two rewrote many sentences over and over, as Margerie kept an eye out for Lowry’s tics. On one page, she writes, “‘Terrifying’—watch this word Malc!,” and crosses it out in the two places where it appears. On another page, Yvonne states, “We won’t have the moon tonight.” Margerie writes, “Watch this moon—you’ve got one in Chapter xii.” In the margin of one version of the consul’s last monologue, Lowry asks, “Is all this a bit muddled?” Margerie’s response is not recorded, but the next draft is tighter. “A good, thorough agonizing cut,” Lowry writes after Margerie has deleted a hokey moment in which a character imagines that he hears the consul lamenting his failure to reconcile with his wife: “If only I had not been so sure I were the stronger.” In a 1950 letter to a fan, Lowry said of the revising process, “After a while it began to make a noise like music.”

  To the novel’s tremendous benefit, Margerie helped Lowry reconsider its dismissive portrait of his first wife. Originally, Yvonne was the consul’s daughter, a trifling character fixated on the needs of her equally callow boyfriend. “She looked at herself in the mirror,” Lowry writes, soon after she arrives in Mexico to see her father. “She was a white satin nightgown. She was a robe, but where was the person?” In subsequent manuscripts, Margerie’s handwriting can be seen changing Yvonne from daughter to wife; Margerie also helps shape the character, refining Yvonne’s feelings about a past lover and amplifying her background, which is similar to her own—Yvonne is an actress who has appeared in “Western pictures.” In the published version, Yvonne is closer to how Margerie saw herself: more woman than girl, more giving and forgiving. She is also able to think independently—parts of the novel are written from her point of view. Significantly, she is perhaps the only Lowry character who doesn’t drink to excess.

  The archive also indicates that Lowry and Margerie borrowed freely from each other’s work. After they agreed that Yvonne should die, Margerie later recalled to biographers, she suggested that Yvonne could be trampled by a runaway horse. She was at work on a third novel, “Horse in the Sky,” which contained such a death: “The horse suddenly…screamed in terror. He reared, reared again, then plunged wildly, in uncontrollable panic.” Lowry liked the idea; near the end of “Volcano,” Yvonne now “saw, by a brilliant flash of lightning, the riderless horse…. She heard herself scream as the animal turned towards her and upon her.” Lowry, in a letter to his friend the novelist David Markson, explained, “We swop horses and archetypes to each other all the time.”

  At the end of 1944, Lowry finished the novel. In February, 1946, while he and Margerie were in Mexico, revisiting some of the locales of the book, he received acceptance letters from Jonathan Cape, a publisher in England, and from Reynal & Hitchcock, an American publisher, on the same day. To Jonathan Cape, he wrote, “We are wallowing in success, feeling in fact like starving men whose eyes are being stuffed with potatoes.”

  IN FEBRUARY OF 1947, as “Volcano” began receiving excellent reviews, Lowry and Margerie made a celebratory visit to New York. (“The city buzzes with your name,” a friend wrote.) But for Lowry the trip was a horror. He had begun drinking again, and, when literary celebrities crowded to congratulate him at a party in his honor, he was too inebriated to respond. Dawn Powell, who was there, noted his distress in her diary. “He is the original Consul in the book,” she wrote, “a curious kind of person—handsome, vigorous, drunk—with an aura of genius about him and a personal electricity almost dangerous, sense of demon-possessed.” In another entry, she noted of Lowry, “Wife Marjorie [sic] in control.”

  For many of Lowry’s literary friends, the publication rounds were their introduction to Margerie, and though they applauded her effect on him, they found her pretentious and overly invested in her association with an English genius. David Markson, one of Lowry’s last surviving friends, told me, “She had a strange manner of speech. She was always saying things like ‘May I have a little more milk in my Scotch, duckie?’ Aiken came over one evening and afterward wrote me, ‘Please don’t invite me when she is here.’”

  Already Lowry was worrying that he might never write another book as good as “Volcano.” After the New York trip, he and Margerie briefly returned to Dollarton, where they worked on a story about a couple looking for a new home, based on a visit they had made in 1946 to an island in British Columbia called Gabriola. They submitted the story, “October Ferry to Gabriola,” to their agent under a double byline; it did not sell, however. In November, 1947, they began a yearlong grand tour of Europe. Margerie had wanted the trip—she craved a larger stage than Dollarton provided. Lowry knew that abandoning his austere life was not good for him. “The French have enormous vitality,” he wrote to Margerie’s sister after visiting Paris. “But it’s a quality I don’t always admire. I like things rather sleepy.”

  A friend, spotting him drunk in London, asked him what was next, and Lowry joked that he was writing “Under Under the Volcano.” He and Margerie began to quarrel. Lowry was by turns depressed and threatening: one night in the South of France, during a fight, he grabbed her by the neck; later, she found him a sanitarium outside Rome and took an adjoining room. Sneaking past a guard, he tried to strangle her again. At one point, he boasted in a letter to his French translator, he capped off nine whiskeys—six of them doubles—with the sedative Soneryl. During their European tour, Margerie wrote a letter to Albert Erskine, Lowry’s American editor, claiming that Lowry was “becoming actively dangerous: first to himself & me but now more savage towards everyone who crosses him in any way.” She got into the habit of giving him phenobarbital at night, to calm him.

  Her journal entries, which are also at the University of British Columbia, reveal her anger. In an entry from December, 1947, she writes, “Altho he makes a great pretense of working…& of exercising & tries to fool me it is too obvious he is drinking all afternoon…. I had thought when I adored him as tho he were a god that love could survive anything but I begin to think that there are certain insults to human dignity that one should not survive.” She had also begun wondering about the effect of their folie à deux on her own creativity: “I have stopped thinking of myself as an artist because the last years my whole consciousness has been so completely absorbed by Malc & his immediate desires & storms.” Around the same time, she asked in her journal, “Is it conceivable that a man’s weakness can be so strong, that such evil can overpower me & exhaust me to the point that I become evil too?”

  They came back to Dollarton in January, 1949, and Lowry sobered up. He took up several projects, including “Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid,” a fictionalized account of his 1946 trip to Mexico with Margerie. For a time, the collaboration between Lowry and Margerie grew more harmonious. They cowrote a screenplay of Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” which M-G-M expressed interest in. It was never produced, but Christopher Isherwood wrote Lowry to praise it. “It ought to be printed as well as played,” he said.

  In 1950, Lowry returned to the “October Ferry” manuscript that he and Margerie had written. Around this time, the city government of Vancouver intensified an effort to evict the squatters of Dollarton, and Lowry’s mood darkened. He expanded the draft of “October Ferry” into a short novel, and folded in an eviction motif. He wrote quickly, without the false starts that were typical of his writing. He thought that he had a clear vision for a novel. “I have completely rewritten it by myself and finally I’m extremely pleased with it,” he wrote to Matson.

  It was the last positive thing he would write about the book for seven years. In April, 1952, Erskine, who had moved to Random House, put him on retainer; but by August Lowry had become, as he wrote to Erskine, “half dead with discouragement.” In the summer of 1953, in a letter to Erskine, he said that the challenge of writing the book was “a matter of life or death, or r
ebirth, as it were, for its author, not to say sanity or otherwise.” The story kept rocking to and fro; the voyage to Gabriola went from real to metaphorical, then back again. “At my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot changing gear,” Lowry joked to Erskine.

  Lowry and Margerie kept up their routine of swimming, eating crabs, and working on the book. They exchanged comments first in written form, then in conversation. But Lowry couldn’t stop drinking, and the book’s focus was changing daily—each new event in their lives was crammed into its pages. After Margerie gave him the omnibus edition of a writer named Charles Fort, whose work charted inexplicable coincidences, Lowry added to his book a chapter called “The Elements Follow You Around Sir,” in which his alter ego stumbles upon Fort’s book in a library. And, after they moved to a hotel in Vancouver during a cold winter, the hotel showed up in the draft. Between drafts three and seven, two time schemes emerged, and Lowry had trouble keeping them straight. The birth date of the couple’s child, Tommy, fluctuates by four years. Lowry scribbled in the margin, “How old is Tommy? Check.”

  The collaborators began to despair. “The work has suffered,” Lowry wrote to Erskine. “And so has she. And so, by God, have I…. This damned thing…has cost me more pains than all the ‘Volcano’ put together.” As the Lowry archive reveals, his output had become a torrent of words flowing nowhere. Deletions grew more frequent. He was now rewriting sentences almost spastically. Vik Doyen, a Belgian academic who has made a definitive study of the “October Ferry” drafts, told me, “You feel sadness, the waste of possibilities and of genius.”

  At one point in the text of “October Ferry,” the husband sees a prostitute at a newsstand. Lowry tries to capture her: “A woman seemingly out of the blue…with beautiful legs, eyed him, swaying her hips with aimless lust.” He crosses this out, and substitutes, “A heavily painted young woman, evidently a premature noctambulist, wearing clothes & shoes so new they seemed just to have been stolen, eyed him, half humming.” He crosses this out, too. Above such pages, Lowry often writes invocations, in small lettering, to the patron saint of lost causes: “St. Jude S.O.S.”; “St. Jude Help me to think through this impossibility.” At other times, he pleads to Turgenev, God, and “E. A. Poe.”

  Margerie could not be as helpful to Lowry as she had been with “Volcano.” The portrayal of Jacqueline, the wife, in “October Ferry” was two-dimensional, just as the initial conception of Yvonne in “Volcano” had been, but, this time, Margerie could not offer an outsider’s perspective—Jacqueline was based on her. As Lowry grew angrier with himself, his protagonist grew angrier at his wife. In one draft, the wife complains about the “goddam shack” that is obsessing her husband, and pettily points out that, “for a woman,” its primitive stove was terribly inconvenient. In the back-and-forth notes that accompany the passage, Margerie reminded Lowry that her initial response to Dollarton was more complicated. She proposes adding this nuance: “He recalled the tumble-down dirt & disorder of the ‘Goddam shack’ when they’d first seen it, & how under her hands it had become…beautiful; he recalled the vision, the enthusiasm, the love with which she had labored.” Lowry ignored her; above this suggestion he writes, “phony, sentimental, bourgeois.”

  Around the same time, Lowry and Margerie were working on another autobiographical novel, “La Mordida.” In one editorial exchange, their marital tension becomes overt. “I absolutely refuse to be made out such a fool,” Margerie writes in a comment. “This is not true; why not tell the truth?” And, in a testy exchange over “October Ferry,” Lowry writes to Margerie, “Try to imagine yourself reading the story in bed etc. etc.—occasionally at least as a reader rather than a writer.” To which Margerie replies, with underscoring, “SEE MY NOTES.” Lowry begins to respond to her criticisms with posturing. Of one scene from “October Ferry,” in which a character dreams that he is venturing inside a dark cave, he writes, “With a little discipline, one of the high spots in English literature.”

  These disputes found no resolution in print or in life. Even in the relative calm of Dollarton, Margerie was worn out. She wrote to David Markson, Lowry’s friend, that “October Ferry” had become a “blood sucking monster.” (These words, which are in the archive, appear on a letter begun by Lowry that describes his struggle with “October Ferry,” but he was apparently too drunk to finish it; Margerie did.) Soon, Dollarton would be gone, too. Bulldozers had knocked down most of the shacks. Albert Erskine had cancelled Lowry’s contract with Random House, because, as he told the biographer Gordon Bowker, the draft of “October Ferry” sent to him by Lowry was “just about as tedious as anything I’d ever read.” Margerie was growing tired of living twenty-five hundred miles away from New York—having published three novels, she felt that she and Lowry ought to have a more normal life, one that might help her career. (Her books had not sold especially well.) She felt that her health was also suffering in the damp and cold of Dollarton. And Lowry’s drinking made him entirely dependent on her.

  In 1954, Margerie persuaded Lowry that they had to leave Dollarton. They decided to move to Taormina, in Sicily—in the shadow of Mt. Etna, an idea that gave Lowry pleasure. On the way to Europe, they passed through New York and stayed with David Markson. Margerie and Markson left Lowry for a time in Markson’s apartment, in Morningside Heights, with just a six-pack of beer. Upon their return, Lowry met them with what Markson remembers as a “sheepish” look: Lowry had drunk Markson’s aftershave. Markson noticed that Margerie, in an attempt to take the edge off Lowry’s hangovers, shoved vitamins down his throat before sending him to bed.

  Margerie and Lowry sailed for Sicily. Lowry disliked Taormina and missed Dollarton. In Italy, he did not write a word of fiction; he barely wrote a letter. Margerie toured the sights, while Lowry drank and menaced her. At night, Margerie locked up the liquor in her room while Lowry begged for a drink outside. Sometimes she gave him Cognac and pentobarbital tablets to get to sleep. And she continued giving him vitamin pills when he got drunk. Their friends thought that the couple should break up—no one could understand how Margerie tolerated the relationship. Eventually, Italy proved too much even for Margerie. She complained of gallbladder problems. After eight months, they went to London. Margerie, suffering from nervous exhaustion, checked herself in to a hospital.

  Lowry, in turn, was persuaded by friends to see a doctor for his alcoholism. At a hospital in Wimbledon, in November, 1955, he met a psychiatrist named Michael Raymond, whom he grew to trust. Raymond gave Lowry a course of “aversion therapy,” which consisted of an injection of apomorphine followed by heavy drinking. The goal was for the patient to associate alcohol with the nausea brought on by the medicine. Raymond wanted Lowry to be near him after he was discharged, and in 1956 Margerie rented a house, known as the White Cottage, in the village of Ripe. After a relapse—caused, in part, by Margerie’s continued drinking in front of her husband—and another, more intense course of aversion therapy that summer, Lowry returned to the cottage, determined to give up liquor for good.

  In Ripe, Lowry sustained himself on Cydrax, a non-alcoholic cider that Raymond had recommended. He was able to work in earnest on “October Ferry” for the first time in three years, and soon boasted to Markson that he was back in the “Sacred or Budding Groove.” In a genial mood, he described his rebirth to Dr. Raymond with some doggerel:

  When to your brothel-monastery I came

  I could not dress myself or open my own mail…

  When you suggested I should live at Ripe

  I thought it very funny, it appealed to me

  Recalling the initials R.I.P.

  Requiescat in pace if you choose

  Or rise if possible you challenged me.

  Well I have risen, I am high and dry.

  High on achievement, and as we rehearsed

  Dry cider’s little sibling slakes my thirst.

  Its family resemblance keeps it near

  Yet free from all the menaces accursed….

  I rise
quite early and as you advised

  I work to schedule and to my relief

  I find Phrases will still come tumbling through my mind

  Though man’s predicaments engage my thoughts.

  To Lowry’s surprise, his improvement did not thrill Margerie. She began drinking more heavily, and spent most days sitting in the house, shaking and crying. In October of 1956, she checked herself back in to a hospital for a long course of heavy sedation meant to calm her nerves. Lowry called her therapy “her Rip Van Winkle snooze.”

  Before entering the hospital, Margerie had told their friend Dorothy Templeton that she’d had enough: she was putting aside all the money she could for the day she would leave Lowry. “She is absolutely callous towards ML,” Templeton wrote her companion, Harvey Burt, in July, 1956. “Her idea of love is not mine or the average woman’s.”

  During Margerie’s hospital stay, Lowry wrote her letters about how happy he was in Ripe now; of working steadily again; of being the object of competition between their landlady and the vicar’s housekeeper, who gave him his meals. He knew that his words did not make Margerie smile. He writes in his poem to Raymond, “As with the see-saw in the childhood rhyme/Now I am riding high poor Margerie is low.” Lowry speculated to Markson that Margerie felt “robbed of the potential in-a-sense nurseable object.” He did not know what to do about the change, and as a novelist part of him wanted simply to observe it. He wrote Markson, “The trouble is it is part of the plot of the book.”

  THE VILLAGE OF RIPE has changed little in fifty years. A dozen houses, a roundabout, and a pub named the Lamb Inn remain its center. The narrow lanes out of the village still give way to the farmland of Sussex. At Lowry’s grave, a terracotta marker bearing the last lines of “Volcano” now rests in front of his weathered headstone. The White Cottage, where Lowry died, is down a short pebble lane from the pub; a few months after the Lowrys arrived, in 1956, the proprietor banned them because Lowry was unruly.