Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (101 page)

He made his permanent residence in Paris in 1953, as had Richard Wright, James Baldwin and a number of distinguished black jazz musicians. In France he could sleep with whomever he liked, irrespective of pigmentation (or, in Baldwin’s case, sexual preference) and he could use drugs (like the tenor saxophonist, Don Byas). You could also be a communist, like Wright, if you liked and no one like Joe McCarthy would hassle you. Moreover, your talent would be encouraged: it was expatriate liberty hall. In the 1950s, Himes also met Lesley Packard, a journalist at the
Herald Tribune
, and spent the rest of his life with her. She nursed him when he had a stroke in 1959 and they eventually married in 1978.

A friend, Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard’s
Série Noire
, who had translated Himes’s early fiction, suggested the author might try his hand at detective stories in the mode of Dashiell Hammett – much admired in France at the time. The suggestion, and the $1,000 Duhamel advanced him inspired Himes’s ‘Harlem domestic stories’, as he called them. There is, on the face of it, little ‘domestic’ in Himes’s black Manhattan – a ghettoised world of pimps, drugs, gambling, religious mania, all laced with zany humour. Himes never knew Harlem as intimately as his novels suggest. But there was no market for crime
noir
by a black man about Cleveland (or Los Angeles, come to that, until Walter Mosley, Himes’s most eminent disciple, came along). The first of the series,
A Rage in Harlem
(1957) has a typically complicated plot: Slim and his girl Imabelle steal a trunkful of gold in Natchez. She runs off and attempts, unsuccessfully, to fence the loot in Harlem via a numbers racketeer, Easy Money. Imabelle teams up with an incredibly guileless undertaker’s assistant, Jackson. Re-enter Slim, looking for his gold – violently.
A Rage in Harlem
introduced the bantering detective team of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, whose burly, ‘hog-farmer’ demeanour and brutal way with suspects (Coffin Ed is paying off
a flask of acid thrown in his face) would feature in six subsequent novels.

In Himes’s contrarian analysis, it is the black criminal – and policeman – who preys most ruthlessly on black folk. In
Cotton Comes to Harlem
(1965) a preacher milks vast sums from his congregation for a phoney back-to-Africa movement. At the period of the civil rights revolution, when white institutional racism was perceived as the black community’s historical problem, Himes’s scenarios were regarded as cynical, defeatist and a confirmer of ingrained prejudices about his people. Himes’s defenders align him with the European absurdists, as did Himes himself. The Harlem stories made Himes ‘the most celebrated writer in France who couldn’t speak French’. He won prizes and (in France, at least) critical acclaim. He wrote one work of interracial pornography,
Pinktoes
(1961) for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press: joining the ranks of Nabokov, Lawrence and Henry Miller in the notorious ‘DB’ (dirty book) list.

Himes, now very well off, and at last in a stable marriage, moved to Spain in 1969.
Cotton Comes to Harlem
(1965) was filmed in 1970 (directed by Ossie Davis) and inspired a series of so-called ‘blaxploitation’ films and a new vogue for Himes’s work. Himes wrote a two-part autobiography towards the end of his life (
The Quality of Hurt
, 1972, and
My Life of Absurdity
, 1976). His best novel is judged by admirers of his work to be
Blind Man with a Pistol
(1969). I prefer the early ‘domestic’ stuff.

Frankly I think I have no gift for writing.
Lowry, in a notebook

Gordon Bowker’s authoritative biography opens: ‘Trying to follow Malcolm Lowry’s life is like venturing without a map into a maze inside a labyrinth lost in a wilderness.’ There follow 672 pages of ‘trying’. Devotional websites record that
Under the Volcano
(1947) once came eleventh in an ‘all-time greatest novel’ competition. It would certainly come top (or, by a nose, second – see the following postscript) in any such competition for the greatest novel about alcoholism. Lowry’s life and fiction goes further than any on record into the mysterious heart of booze. More specifically, he defines the essential paradox: is alcoholism the mark of some inadequacy in the face of life – or a voyage of discovery into the meaning of life?

There are smaller questions. Gordon Bowker, in his 672 pages, lays repeated stress on the ‘tiny size of his penis’, which at school earned Lowry the nickname ‘lobster’. In later life also, comrades mocked his lack of ‘endowment’. On the face of it, the size of the novelist’s tool should be of no more literary significance than Virginia Woolf’s anything but tiny nose, but in Lowry’s case it links – or so it is speculated – to his dipsomania. Switch to the alternative theory. There is a striking episode in the second chapter of
Volcano
in which the hero and his recently divorced wife are sitting in a
cantina
, drinking. It is morning. ‘Must you’, Yvonne asks, ‘go on and on for ever into this stupid darkness? … Oh Geoffrey, why do you do it!’ But it’s not darkness, Geoffrey replies: ‘Look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you’ll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a
cantina
in the early morning.’ And suddenly, ‘uncannily’, Yvonne sees that it is beautiful: light, not darkness. Geoffrey is searching, as he thinks, for that moment of drunkenness when he alone in the world is sober. Of course his life is a catalogue of disaster: he has failed as a consul, a husband and a brother. But somehow, when his body is tossed into the ravine (that grotesque womb) at the end of the narrative, along with a dead dog, it is exaltation. ‘He had reached the summit.’

Lowry was the youngest of four sons of a prosperous cotton broker in Cheshire. His siblings pursued eminently respectable careers while Malcolm went to the bad – and created literature. He was sent to the best boarding school in Cambridge, and a good college in the same city, St Catharine’s College. In between, aged sixteen, he ran away to sea for a brief period as a cabin boy on a Conradian voyage to the Far East. His fellow crew-members hated and humiliated him.

At university, Lowry – already manifestly alcoholic – infuriated his teachers. He apprenticed himself, instead, to an American writer – his Mephistopheles – Conrad Aiken. Aiken was the first to perceive Lowry’s genius, and fused it with his own artistic experiments in self-destruction. Drunken, divorced, fired from Harvard for ‘moral turpitude’, his life forecast that of his protégé. Aiken was a tutor from hell, but his
Blue Voyage
(1927), chronicling a phantasmagoric Atlantic crossing, was influential on Lowry’s first published novel
Ultramarine
(1933), based on the sixteen-year-old author’s maiden sea voyage. He scraped out of Cambridge with a third (only by virtue of his submitting scraps of his novel-in-progress, one of his examiners said), in 1932. For the next thirty years, he would live on a monthly pension from his father. Like that supplied to William S. Burroughs, part of the deal was that he should stay out of his family’s way – and, ideally, out of England. Calamity, as Aiken’s wife Clarissa observed, followed Lowry like a shadow. It took him five years to write
Ultramarine
, and two years to get it accepted. The
manuscript was promptly lost by the publisher who took it on, Jonathan Cape. Luckily a carbon copy survived from the wastepaper basket into which the author had thrown it.

Lowry married his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in Paris in 1934. She was American, cultured and an actress. Lowry wooed her with the typescript of
Ultramarine
and she fell, as she said, ‘totally in love with the writer’. About the man she was never so sure. She confessed herself unimpressed by his lack of (penile) ‘inches’ and his
ejaculatio praecox
. He learned, however, to control his prematurity by singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ to himself during sex. The only child Lowry is known to have engendered was terminated by abortion, soon after his marriage.

In New York, in 1935, Lowry spent his first spell of several in a lunatic asylum, New York’s Bellevue – this was the raw material for Lowry’s incomplete novel,
Lunar Caustic
(1963). The couple moved on to Mexico, it pleased him to observe, on the Day of the Dead, 1936. It was a place where an expatriate could live cheaply on the £150 a month the ‘old man’ forked out. The Lowrys settled for two years in Cuernavaca (‘Quauhnahuac’ in
Volcano
) but during this period, as with ‘Geoffrey Firmin’, Lowry’s marriage broke up and, with the expropriation of foreign oil companies, Britain’s diplomatic representation in Mexico was withdrawn. The Fascists had won Spain and looked likely to take over the rest of Europe, and, over the same period, Lowry spiralled into drinking excessively, even by his heroic levels of intake: ‘Once he consumed a whole bottle of olive oil thinking it was hair tonic with a high alcoholic content. Finally he got the shakes so bad that he improvised a pulley system to hoist the glass to his lips.’ Destructive to his liver, it was grist for
Under the Volcano
. Having gathered his material, Lowry went off to the west coast of Canada to live, relatively abstemiously, and write it up. In this monastic exile he was supported by his second wife, Margerie Bonner, another American, former actress, divorcée and herself a novelist.

From 1940 onwards, Lowry wrote and rewrote his great work. It took nine years in all: ‘time enough to fight three world wars’, he sardonically noted: although he left warfare to others, doing everything he could to avoid conscription. His brothers, meanwhile, kept the Lowry name honourable by fighting for their country. After a huge number of rejections, the novel was published in 1947 and enjoyed immediate success. Lowry sketched out various ambitious sequels, but they came to nothing, leaving only a scatter of brilliant short stories.

Now well off, he and Margerie returned to England in 1955, to live in a cottage in Ripe, East Sussex. After a spectacularly drunken evening, Lowry died – whether it was suicide (he habitually swallowed barbiturates like ‘lemon drops’) or accidentally inhaled vomit which killed him has never been established. He died, as he lived,
leaving questions, and one great novel. The novel’s greatness was not much augmented by a John Huston-directed, Albert Finney-starring film in 1984.

There isn’t any cure.
From
The Lost Weekend

During the long composition and revision of
Under the Volcano
, Lowry – who had been repeatedly, and plausibly, accused of plagiarism during his career – was appalled by the publication in 1944 of Charles R. Jackson’s
The Lost Weekend
. His own novel, complete but still unaccepted, would not be published until 1947. Jackson’s account of Don Birnam’s terminal, five-day binge in 1936 Manhattan has striking similarities with Geoffrey Firmin’s final bender. In both novels there is a trio of principal characters – two brothers and a dithery girlfriend. Sections of the novels, notably the description of hallucinatory DTs, are eerily similar. In
The Lost Weekend
, a tiny mouse emerges from a crack in the wall, opposite the sodden Birnam. A bat swoops, there is a crunch, and a stream of blood streaks down the wall. Birnam screams. In
Under the Volcano
the Consul is sitting ‘helpless’ in the bathroom, while the wall in front of him is swarming with insects:

A caterpillar started to wriggle toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae. A large cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its head … the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm.

When he read the novel in April 1944, Lowry wrote nervously to a friend: ‘Have you read a novel
The Lost Weekend
by one Charles Jackson, a radioman from New York? It is perhaps not a very fine novel but admirably written about a drunkard and hangovers and alcoholic wards as they have never been done (save by me of course).’ He later wrote to Jackson, who seems not to have been worried (he had, after all, got his boozeiad out first). It compounded Lowry’s nervousness that the novel was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1945.

Jackson’s life was quite as chaotic as Lowry’s. He was born in Summit, New Jersey, one of five children. His father walked out when he was ten; a younger sister and brother were killed in an automobile accident a couple of years later. Charles had no education beyond school, leaving Syracuse University shortly after enrolling. Presumably as with his clearly autobiographical hero, Don Birnam, who is kicked out of Dartmouth for homosexual overtures to fraternity brothers, there was some ugly, hushed-up, scandal. Jackson worked in a New York bookstore and contracted TB in 1927. It was four years before he was pronounced cured, after treatment in various sanatoriums, including two years in Switzerland (inspired to go there by Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
). He came through his ordeal with the loss of one lung. It was during these years that he acquired his catastrophic drinking habits. He returned to New York at the depth of the Depression, and in the period of universal alcoholic excess following the repeal of Prohibition. He finally cleaned up in 1936, with the help of the newly founded AA fellowship and the woman who became his wife, Rhoda Booth, a
Fortune
magazine editor (the original of ‘Helen’ in the novel). He landed a job with CBS, doing drama scripts.