Ultramarine

Malcolm Lowry

Description

Malcolm Lowry, who would permanently stake his claim to literary immortality with the masterpieceA Under the Volcano, wroteA Ultramarine, his debut, as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Displaying the linguistic virtuosity and haunting imagery that became signatures of Lowry's mature style,A Ultramarine, a novel he continually rewrote and revised from publication until his death, is one of his central works, and this new edition offers the opportunity for a fuller assessment of his place in the modern canon.UltramarineA is the story of Dana Hilliot's first voyage, as mess-boy on the freighterA Oedipus TyrannusA bound for Bombay and Singapore: of his struggle to win the approval of his shipmates, trying to match their example in the bars and bordellos of the Chinese ports while at the same time remaining faithful to his first love, Janet, back home in England. Alternating between Dana's own narrative and the ribald humor and colorful language of the seamen's conversation,A UltramarineA depicts a boy's initiation into the company of men.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468302240
• Langue: English

Extrait

The phrase “it’s a classic” is much abused. Still there may be some appeal in the slant of the cap Overlook sets in publishing a list of books the editors at Overlook feel have continuing value, books usually dropped by other publishers because of “the realities of the marketplace.” Overlook’s Tusk Ivories aim to give these books a new life, recognizing that tastes, even in the area of so-called classics, are often time-bound and variable. The wheel comes around. Tusk Ivories begin with the hope that modest printings together with caring booksellers and reviewers will reestablish the books’ presence and engender new interest.
As, almost certainly, American publishing has not been generous in offering readers books from the rest of the world, for the most part, Tusk Ivories will more than just a little represent fiction from European, Asian, and Latin American sources, but there will be of course some “lost” books from our own shores, too, books we think deserve new recognition and, with it, readers.
Copyright
This Tusk Ivories edition first published in the United States in 2005 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York
www.overlookpress.com
NEW YORK :
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 1962 by Margerie Bonner Lowry
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote briefpassages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
9781468302240
Contents
Copyright

Introductory Note

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Ultramarine was written following a sea voyage Malcolm Lowry made at eighteen, as a deck hand, cabin boy and ultimately a fireman’s helper on a tramp steamer. The voyage provided him with the background for the novel, but its real theme is the necessity of the boy, Dana Hilliot, to prove himself as a man among other men.
Malcolm was graduated from The Leys, a public school in Cambridge, England, in 1927 and had been entered for Christ’s College, Cambridge. But the sea was in his blood; he had read O’Neill and Joseph Conrad, and his home in Caldy, Cheshire, was near the great seaport of Liverpool. He finally persuaded his father to allow him to go to sea for a year before going to the University. His father, in what proved to be nearly a disastrous excess of good will, not only procured him the job on a freighter out of Liverpool, bound for the Far East, but even had him driven to the dock in the family limousine. This obviously did nothing to help Malcolm’s standing among the crew, to whom he was already a green Outsider.
When he returned from this voyage, which had taken him through the Suez Canal to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Singapore and Vladivostock, he went up to St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1929. He had kept notes during the voyage (as he always did: I have his notes made on our walking tour of the Lake District in 1957, just prior to his death); from these notes he wrote first two short stories which were printed in the Cambridge magazine Experiment , edited by Gerald Noxon. This was Malcolm’s first published work. One of the stories, “Seductio Ad Absurdum,” was chosen by E. J. O’Brien for the Best British Short Stories of 1931 , and the second was given honorable mention for 1933. These stories were later incorporated in part into Ultramarine .
While he was working on the novel, he read Blue Voyage , by Conrad Aiken, and The Ship Sails On , by Nordahl Grieg. Both of these made a deep impression on him and their influence can be seen plainly in Ultramarine . Malcolm was very young; but while there are certainly traces of imitativeness in the novel, it is also highly original and, for its time, experimental. Malcolm had sought out Aiken in Boston, in 1929, working his way over on a freighter; they returned to England and, at Malcolm’s request, Aiken took him for a time as a pupil. They became fast friends and after Malcolm went up to Cambridge, he spent nearly all of his vacations with Aiken at Jeake’s House, Rye, Sussex. In the long vacation of 1930, however, he made another sea voyage, working his way as a coal trimmer on a Norwegian freighter to Norway, to meet Nordahl Grieg, with whom he also established a friendship that lasted until Grieg’s death.
Ultramarine was finished, I believe, during Malcolm’s last term at Cambridge, and was accepted by a London publisher. Then followed the first of a long series of calamities which pursued his work relentlessly. ( In Ballast to the White Sea , a novel, was completely destroyed when our house burned down in 1944; the manuscript of Under the Volcano was lost, and recovered.) One of the directors of the publishing firm had his briefcase stolen from his car: he was apparently away only a few moments, but when he returned, the briefcase was gone and with it the only typescript of Ultramarine .
There seem to be conflicting versions of what followed, and I can only report what has been said. Malcolm had written much of Ultramarine at Aiken’s home, but he had completed the final draft at the home of a friend, Martin Case. Malcolm later told me he had thought the novel completely lost, since he had destroyed or thrown away all previous drafts and had not kept a copy of the final version, or even his notes taken on the voyage. But Martin Case, he said, had retrieved the cast-aside material and now came forward with it. When I met Case in London many years later, almost his first words to me were, “Did you know I was the man who saved Ultramarine from my waste-basket?” Conrad Aiken, however, says that he had a version of the novel in his house in Rye, and that Malcolm knew it. But who can sort out what actually happened, after thirty years?
In any case, the novel was rewritten and first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1933. To the best of my knowledge it has been out of print since 1934 or 1935, and is now published for the first time in America. Readers of Under the Volcano and Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place will find in Ultramarine many of the themes which were developed and deepened in the later books. The most important thing about this book, to me, is not its partially autobiographical content, but the fact that at this early period Malcolm was already so completely the self-conscious artist, in control of his material and his style.
This new edition of Ultramarine reproduces the changes Malcolm had made, over the years since 1933, in his own copy of the original edition. During the years we spent together he was always working on two or three projects simultaneously, and there was, too, a spasmodic running commentary on Ultramarine . I would come upon him with the battered copy in his hands staring at it angrily and making notes on the pages, or sometimes just holding it and gazing out of the window; he would turn to me and say, “You know I must rewrite this someday.” I cannot remember exactly when he decided it was to be, in its rewritten form, the first volume in a group of six or seven novels, to be called collectively The Voyage That Never Ends . But it was at this time that he changed the name of the ship from Nawab to Oedipus Tyrannus , to conform with Hugh’s ship in Under the Volcano . He had also intended changing the viewpoint in Chapter III from first person to third person, and had projected a much more extensive revision than that contained in the marginal notations I later transcribed.
One of his additions, the recurrent joke about Pat Murphy’s goat, came about in this way: while we were living on the beach at Dollarton, British Columbia, we had as a neighbor and very dear friend an old man from the Isle of Man, Jimmy, a boat-builder. One stormy late afternoon in autumn, when Malcolm had stopped work and was having his tea, Jimmy dropped in. I have no recollection of what brought this to his mind, but at some point he began to chuckle and in his lilting Celtic voice came forth with this expression. Malcolm was simply delighted by it, he had the old man repeat it and he wrote it down. Then he jumped up from the table, took Ultramarine from the bookcase, and immediately made notations as to where he would use it, laughing all the while.
M ARGERIE L OWRY
Los Angeles, California
June 1962
Take any brid and put it in a cage
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tenderly with mete and drinke
Of alle deyntees that thou canst bithinke
And keep it al-so clenly as thou may
And be his cage of gold never so gay
Yet hath this brid by twenty thousand fold
Lever in a forest that is rude and cold
Gon ete wormes and swich wrecchedness.
G EOFFREY C HAUCER , Maunciples Tale
Let who will speak against Sailors; they are the Glory and Safeguard of the Land. And what would have become of Old England long ago but for them?
S AMUEL R ICHARDSON
I

“What is your name?”
“Dana Hilliot, ordinary seaman.”
“Where were you born?”
“Oslo.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Where do you live?”
“Sea Road, Port Sunlight.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes—”
“Next please! What is your name?”
“Andersen Marthon Bredahl, cook.”
“Where were you born?”
“Tvedestrand.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Where do you live?”
“Great Homer Street, Liverpool.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes—”
“Next please. What is your name?”
“Norman Leif, galley boy.”
“Where were you born?”
“Tvedestrand.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Where do you live?”
“Great Homer Street, Liverpool.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes.”
“Next please—”
… Had he arrived anywhere, having been blown through this six weeks’ engulfing darkness of interminable ritual spelt out by bells and jobs,