Malcolm Lowry

The Lowry Lounge, 2025 The fifteenth annual Lounge focused on Lowry’s childhood years and the significance of the Wirral to his writing.

Malcolm Lowry fans: Last year's Lowry Lounge
'I am pleased to let you know that documentation of and material from last year's Lounge is now available on the Bluecoat website':
www.thebluecoat.org.uk/library/the-.... Lots of pictures of Lowry on the Wirral that have not been seen before.

I seem to see us living in some northern country, of mountains and hills and blue water; our house is built on an inlet and one evening we are standing, happy in one another, on the balcony of this house, looking over the water.

"JUST THE NECESSARY, THE THERAPEUTIC DRINK”: MALCOLM LOWRY’S UNDER THE VOLCANO by Chad Parkhill — The Lifted Brow

"Under the Volcano is therefore a profound meditation on alcohol as pharmakon—the remedy that is also a poison."

www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2...

To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool ... You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering ... Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary.

1) He stopped after a awhile: all was calm. No one had come after him. Was that good? Yes, it was good, he thought, his heart pounding. And since it was so good, he would take the path to Parián, to the Farolito.

2) Before him the volcanoes, precipitous, seemed to have drawn nearer. They towered up over the jungle, into the lowering sky--massive interests moving up in the background.

1) The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head.

2) The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare.

But the stars by their very being consoled her.

It has been pointed out to me that Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (Donald Brittain and John Kramer, 1976) is a perfect example of both 3 and 4.

Passage taken from Under The Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry- "The platform slept. The tracks were vacant, the signals up. There was little to suggest that any train ever arrived at this station, let alone left it: QUAUHNAHUAC"

Happy November 3rd to all who celebrate, and to all who celebrate- mind how you go.

Today is a special one for us, the "lunatic admirers" of Lowry (Firminists). I ask that you pause for a moment today, and reflect on that most special book, whose "quality is too rare to be successful".

A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past.

1) “Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part,

2) less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead,

3) whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me."

Editor's note: These are amazing.

Lowry Lounge returns this weekend, book your tickets today! 📖

Since 2009 we've been celebrating the life and work of local writer Malcolm Lowry, and this year's celebration will explore his early years spent in the Wirral.

"Besides after a while one begins to feel, if the man can hold his liquor as well as that why shouldn't he drink?"

[F]or some reason this simple fact appeared to make these two good people-for nearly all people are good who walk in parks-very happy again.

Windy shadows swept the pavement.

19 September (1931): Malcolm Lowry to Conrad Aiken | The American Reader

"I have discovered one first rate author, an American, Julian Green, who writes in French, which is translated back again into English."

theamericanreader.com/19-september...

...but still the old bandstand stands where no band stands.

But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink.

Taken at "Lieben", Bowen Island. Left to right are Reg Watters (Canadian editor and anthologist), Malcolm, Margerie, and Earle Birney. July 1947.

Special Collections Library, UBC - BC 1614/25.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Plato, The Republic

How could he have thought so evil of the world when succor was at hand the whole time?

Rain - rain - rain here, Vancouver's Jubilee, and the city full of wild Indians.

Yours sincerely, Malcolm Lowry

Some words on David Markson.

themillions.com/2016/03/this...

A documentary on Lowry that is not for the faint of spirit. Regardless, a must watch.

www.nfb.ca/film/volcano/