Under the volcano. - movie reviews

National Review, July 27, 1984 by John Simon

SELDOM HAVE I found a famous novel so distasteful--so overwritten and underrealized--as Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. (Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is a close competitor.) One part ravings and rantings of an obnoxious drunkard buttonholing you in a bar with his imaginary greatness hanging like an albatross round his neck; one part sweatily subaltern emulation of Ulysses meant to exhibit greater erudition, vocabulary, literary bravura; and one part staining to ennoble a loathsome yet arrogant case of dipsomania and concomitant destructiveness and self-destructiveness, Under the Volcano is as ponderous, precious, and pretentious as a piece of writing can be. It is a masterpiece for the semi- or pseudo-literate, a cult novel for precocious ephebes, and an agglomeration of every conceivable literary device from symbol to abstruse allusion, from crisscrossing interior monologues to elaborate refrains and incremental repetition, from flashbacks to foreshadowings and grandiose parallels, from cinematic montage to Joycean punning--all, all to no avail.

Well, not quite all. There are some good evocations of Mexican land- and townscapes, of the flora and fauna (including some bestial specimens of the human animal), an authoritative portrayal of every stage of intoxication, and some effective similes and metaphors among many that fail. The book is anything but slapdash: Written first as a short story--which it probably should have remained--it was rewritten several times as a novel with the obsessive tenacity of a megalomaniacal sot who was going to spawn a masterwork if it killed him and all those who cared for and about him. Like many a drunkard, Lowry was an expert deceiver--was already so as a boy at the Leys School, Cambridge, England, where he had the same French master, S. C. Gillard, whom I had some 15 years later. As his biographer, Douglas Day, puts it, "He was . . . somewhat less than brilliant at modern languages--though he did learn enough in Gillard's French class to deceive those who knew even less into believing that he was a natural and accomplished linguist." His French, like his English and other languages in Under the Volcano, is indeed full of holes, but can fool people just as his writing does. Near the beginning of his biography, Day says of Lowry's death from alcohol and barbiturates that it was the suicide of "one of the century's greatest novelists, a man of such awesome talent that the word genius must be used to describe him." Between Lowry and genius, the difference is as between night and Day.

Under the Volcano is, like Ulysses, the chronicle of a day, in this case the last one in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, British ex-consul in Quanhnahuac (the Indian name for Cuernavaca), a confirmed alcoholic with the added excuse that his wife, Yvonne, has left and divorced him. He is being tended by his younger half-brother, Hugh, a journalist fresh from the Spanish Civil War and a mysterious sojourn in Texas, and, once again, by Yvonne, who suddenly, worriedly, lovingly, comes back near the beginning of the novel. The day is November 1, 1938, the Day of the Dead, which, in the Mexico of that era, was celebrated with much boozy revelry and effigies of death cheerfully proliferating. Firmin is overwhelmed by his wife's return, but, for reasons that, like anything else of any importance in this novel, are left unclear, cannot even try to give up the bottle for her. At the end of a day of ever more frantic drunkenness--though the Consul (as he is generally and portentously referred to) supposedly drinks to achieve a drunken lucidity and even clairvoyance--he manages to get himself not undeliberately killed by the fascistic para-police, and to drag Yvonne down with him. Hugh, who had a brief fling with Yvonne, and who loves both her and the Consul with a devotion neither of them deserves, will probably be shattered, too, if he survives a near-suicidal gesture he plans on behalf of the already doomed Spanish Loyalists.

The problem, aside from bad writing, is that the novel sheds no light on why the Consul drinks, why his beautiful and not unintelligent wife adores him despite the odd infidelity she is driven to by his stuporous neglect of her, why Hugh is so full of loving-kindness for this abominable, frequently hostile drunk, and why we should find Firmin worth caring about for 375 attitudinizing pages. All of these difficulties are inherited and faithfully passed on to us by the movie version scripted by young Guy Gallo (a condignly vinous name) and directed by old John Huston. The filmmakers have tried to extract a more followable story line from the novel's tortuous meanderings, and have omitted one major character (the ex-cineaste Jacques Laruelle, a friend and fellow expatriate of Geoff's and former lover of Yvonne's) and conflated some minor ones. They have slightly underplayed the sympathies with Communist Spain and over-elaborated the presence of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Mexico, along with Hugh and Geoff's anti-Nazi stand. They have cut out all the (not uninteresting) flashbacks to the characters' younger years, and they have eliminated nearly all the (quite uninteresting) references to Geoff's vast learning and the book about the cabala and related mystical and mythological matters he fancies himself to be working on.