Either way, I took my Polaroid, the house teeming with skeletal scaffolding, and seeing again my teenage self stumbling past Lowry’s birthplace unaware, happy and aptly intoxicated. The strangeness of the historical and personal clashing will never cease to provoke unusual feelings on visits. “Yet at the same time he retained always in his mind,” they write, “the psychogeography of his early years by the Mersey: the topography both accurately real and thoroughly symbolic, of his Wirral ‘Eden’ and its dark twin, Liverpool, ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean.’”Ĭontrary to the lavish images portrayed throughout his work, the house on North Drive is a modest one, and it was only on revisiting that it brought back memories of a messy 18th birthday party held at a house on the other side of the road. In spite of his wanderlust (or perhaps that should be fernweh), as Biggs and Tookey suggest, Lowry carried The Wirral’s geography within, even when far from its moody shores. The shadowy ghost of Welsh mountains haunting the horizon is embedded into many a Wirral childhood. Lowry, however, dominates in that his ascendance into the canonical feels undisputed, and distinctly at odds with a place that is so regularly forgotten, even when drawing maps of Britain. Alongside Lowry, it produced the noted philosophical science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, one of Stephen King’s favorite horror writers Ramsey Campbell, and the popular Pelican edition historian Roger Lancellyn Green, among others. The Wirral itself is not without its own potted literary history either. This is, however, not the point of Lowry’s work, and what unfolds over twelve chapters is a kaleidoscope of memories, places, politics, people and booze. His ex-wife Yvonne visits in the naïve hope of rekindling their love. He’s an alcoholic drifting further and further into a stewed malaise as the hours drift by.
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Under the Volcano follows a Day of the Dead unfolding in the Mexican town of Cuernavaca, and consul for the government Geoffrey Firmin as he drinks and reminisces his way through it. It is Liverpool, however, that stands in his writing as the symbolic ‘point of departure’ and archetypical port.” As Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey footnote in their introduction to the volume Malcolm Lowry: from the Mersey to the World (2009), “To be strictly accurate, Lowry sailed from the Birkenhead docks. The irony is that his wandering was deeply driven by his original locality and its role as a port. The son of a broker at the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, the urge to journey was embedded from an early age.
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It has a far stronger cultural pull than the peninsula on the other side. But, almost three quarters of a century on, one aspect sticks out: its brief but regular glimpses into Lowry’s childhood on the peninsula of The Wirral, England.Īs with most artists, filmmakers and writers of all sorts, Lowry’s heritage for a long while was falsely attributed as Liverpool, the city overlooking the river Mersey. It’s a dizzying, heady piece of work, soaked in sweat and cheap spirits. Though writing across a number of forms, in particular poetry, Lowry is still most famous for his novel Under the Volcano, published originally by Reynal & Hitchcock in 1957. An urgent need to move pervades his writing, giving rise to the feeling that he was trying to escape something within, the likely culprit being alcohol.