712
JOHN THOMPSON
much of it, he is too much of a personality for a first-person hero.
To be sure, he changes-is changed, rather-by a series of jolting
shock-treatments. Martin Lynch-Gibbon is a dilletante of business,
a dilletante of history, rich, intelligent, of average sensuality; he
has a beautiful wife in his beautiful house, a young mistress in
her grubby room; he is well satisfied with this. Suddenly his wife
. . . the plot. Is it a weakness in plot that giving it away seems
unfair, as if it were a detective story with nothing of its own but
its poor little secret? There are true surprises, one after another,
and the readers doubtless are as surprised as Lynch-Gibbon when
he sees who is in bed with whom now, in
this
chapter, and we
wonder, as he does, or only a little more than he does, seeing
through him as we do, who will be with whom in the next. The
maneuverings are ingenious and for a while even scary, but
the
meaning is all too clear. This civilized, sensual, satisfied man is
brought to the recognition of powers he never even dreamed about
before, and to acts which would have seemed
to
him
very bad
taste indeed, brought to these things by a "tawny-breasted witch,"
powerful, brutal, Jewish, Jewish, again Jewish, as he insists; she
talks about the dark powers. In the end, it seems, life lies before
him at last. I wish it had ended not quite so systematically, and
alas, it has even been suggested that his poor name shadows forth
some suggestion about the Enlightenment.... But it is entertain–
ing, sharp, intelligent, funny, and if you read very rapidly, if
you like enough the mystification and are sufficiently uninterested
in meanings, you should enjoy
A Severed Head.
The British still
make the best tweeds, tobaccos, and novels.
Malcolm Lowry was putting the finishing touches on the
manuscript of
Hear Us
0
Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place
when he died suddenly, at the age of forty-eight, in England
in the summer of 1957. Born in Merseyside, son of an English
cotton broker, mother's father a Norwegian sea captain who
went down with his ship; public school; at eighteen, before going
up to the university, went to sea; novel published, 1933; mid-
1930's, came to the United States, New York, Hollywood; 1938,
in Mexico, wrote the first draft of
Under the Volcano,'
1940, mar–
ried, went to live in British Columbia in a shack, rewrote
Und"
the Volcano,
published 1947 ; stayed on, mostly around Vancouver.
