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extent we are now in a frozen period in which so many writers have so
many virtues-beautiful sentences, delicate emotions, literary integrity–
that we no longer notice anything except the common faults-narrow
emotional range, fear of the larger moral and intellectual issues, and
vagueness. Marianne Hauser's
Dark Dominion
is a perfect casualty in
that respect. Her style has a frenetic, overwrought quality that exhausts
the reader, but is never vulgar or awkward; when one has said that,
there is not much else to remark upon in her novel. It is a drab garment
whose main distinction is that it is handmade. The plot concerns an
unbalanced girl who marries her psychoanalyst. The story is heavy with
symbolic detail and carefully selected moments of psychic revelation,
but what the book lacks is precisely psychological interest. All the author's
coaxings failed to bring her characters alive and apparently no amount
of effort succeeded in giving her inventions the significance she in–
tended.
Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano
contains astonishing and often
brilliant images, marvels of description, and much evidence of the long
hesitation that results in the triumphant metaphor or adjective. It is
an ambitious and expansive novel and probably for that reason Lowry
has made his central character, the Consul, an alcoholic in whose mind
the past and present remain undifferentiated. The Consul recalls and
relives the past even as he is suffering the present. Drummond reported
that Ben Jonson had "consumed a whole night in lying looking at his
great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and
Carthaginians, fight in his imagination. . . . " The description fits the
Consul somewhat, though I should say that what we need here is the
Consul's great toe, a part of the essential man himself, which Lowry
does not quite succeed in giving us. This failure makes us less attentive
to the fights in his imagination, even though they are brilliant and
extensive.
The most interesting thing about
Under the Volcano
is that in it
one returns to the flavor and color of the bohemian Twenties, though
the actual date of the action is meant to
be,
so far as I can tell, 1938
or later. Here, and perhaps for the last time, are the
deracineJ
the lost
who wandered to Paris, Africa, and Mexico, who drank all day, quoted
poetry, and intended to write books or to make revolutionary films.
These people seem to be immediate in Lowry's mind, but to me they
have already become exotic and enticingly unreal. One asks himself a
thousand unpoetic questions about them: how did they get to be where
they are, what do they live on?
In style
Under the Volcano
recalls Djuna Barnes's
Nightwood
and
some of the characters, particularly Yvonne, the Consul's wife who was
a child star in western pictures, remind one of Fitzgerald. These echoes
are not mentioned to discredit Lowry. Indeed they are evidence of the
