Swinging the Maelstrom : A Critical Edition

Malcolm Lowry

Description

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry.

This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic vision of the world as a madhouse (The Last Address, 1936), via the apocalyptic metaphors of a world on the brink of Armageddon (The Last Address, 1939), to a world that, in spite of all its troubles, leaves room for self-irony and humanistic concern (Swinging the Maelstrom,1942–1944).

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Canadian

Informations

• Publié par: University of Ottawa Press
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780776620879
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Swinging the Maelstrom

illustration1. Malcolm Lowry in the early 1940’s: the beach at Dollarton (near Vancouver) and the cabin in which he rewroteUnder the Volcano,In Ballast to the White Sea and Swinging the Maelstrom.

Swinging the Maelstrom

—

by malcolm lowry

Edited by vik doyen

Introduction by vik doyen& miguel mota

Explanatory Notes by chris ackerley

Foreword by patrick a. mccarthy & paul tiessen

University of Ottawa Press| OTTAWA

The University of Ottawa Press acknowledges with gratitude the support extended to its publishing list by Heritage Canada through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program and by the University of Ottawa.

Copy editing: Trish O’Reilly-Brennan Proofreading: Steph VanderMeulen Typesetting: Llama Communications Cover design: Robert Tombs eBook development: WildElement.ca

Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Peter Matson

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lowry, Malcolm, 1909-1957, author  Swinging the maelstrom : a critical edition / by Malcolm Lowry ; edited by Vik Doyen ; introduction by Vik Doyen & Miguel Mota ; explanatory notes by Chris Ackerley ; foreword by Patrick A. McCarthy & Paul Tiessen. (Canadian literature collection) Includes bibliographical references. Contents: List of illustrations -- General editor’s note -- Foreword --  Introduction -- Swinging the maelstrom -- Textual notes --  Explanatory notes -- Appendix 1: The last address -- Textual notes --  Appendix 2: The manuscript record -- Works cited. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7766-0802-0 (bound).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2087-9 (pdf ). -- ISBN 978-0-7766-2088-6 (epub)  I. Doyen, Vik, 1942-, writer of introduction, editor II. Mota, Miguel, writer of introduction III. Ackerley, Chris, 1947-, writer of explanatory notes IV. McCarthy, Patrick A., 1945-, writer of added commentary V. Tiessen, Paul, 1944-, writer of added commentary VI. Lowry, Malcolm, 1909-1957. Last address. VII. Title. VIII. Series: Canadian literature collection PR6023.O96S94 2013 813’.54 C2013-906182-7  C2013-906183-5

Printed in Canada

© University of Ottawa Press, 2013

Contents

list of illustrations vi general editor’s note vii foreword ix introduction xv . Swinging the Maelstorm 1 textual notes 45

explanatory notes 55 . appendix 1: the last address 103

textual notes 183

appendix 2: the manuscript record 191

works cited 197

contributors 201

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.. 13.

List of Illustrations

Malcolm Lowry at the time ofSwinging the Maelstrom LA15-4:91, chapter X (last page) LA15-4:10, chapter III (last page) LA15-4:16, chapter V (first page) SM15-8:1, chapter I (first page) LA15-4:29, chapter VII (first page) LA15-3:[1], chapter IX (revision of first page, draft 1) LA15-3, title (insert on verso of illustration 6) LA15-3, chapter IX (holograph insert) LA15-3, chapter X (revision of first page) LA15-3, chapter IX (revision of first page, draft 2) LA15-4:88, chapter X (typescript of revised first page) The Manuscript Record

LA:The Last Address(1939 version)

SM:Swinging the Maelstrom

vi

ii viii xiii xiv 2 43 44 102 147 176 182 190 191

General Editor’s Note

This edition of Malcolm Lowry’s novellaSwinging the Maelstromthe first in a is trilogy of Lowry works from the 1930s and early 1940s that will include fully annotated editions ofIn Ballast to the White Sea, Lowry’s long-thought-lost 1930s novel, and the 1940Under the Volcano, the earlier, complete, but radically different, version of Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece. For their invaluable assistance, support, guidance, and advice, the editors would like to thank the following: Ralph Stanton, George Brandak, and the late Anne Yandle at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections; Colin Dilnot; David Large; and Kim Duff. For his support of this edition and, for many years, Lowry scholarship in general, we are grateful to Peter Matson. For permission to publish this edition, we are grateful to the Estate of Malcolm Lowry and to the University of British Columbia.

vii

miguel mota University of British Columbia

viii

Swinging the Maelstrom

illustration2. Final page of the 1939 typescript ofThe Last Address(15-4:91), with pencil inserts for the new version,Swinging the Maelstrom(see page xxvi below). The protagonist, now called Bill Plantagenet, is no longer a failed writer, but a frustrated musician: “True his hands were small, but they were not weak .... Then he staggered to the piano and tore the world to pieces” (cf. end of ch. vi, page 25 below). Unless other- wise indicated, all quotations from unpublished manuscripts refer to the Malcolm Lowry Papers in the Malcolm Lowry Collections at the University of British Columbia Library, cited as (Box-Folder: Page).

Foreword

In January 1946, Malcolm Lowry wrote a long letter to the English publisher Jonathan Cape to defend his unpublished novelUnder the Volcano against numerous criticisms by a reader for the press. Responding to the reader’s note on affinities between Lowry’s manuscript and Charles Jackson’sThe Lost Weekend, a 1944 novel and already a successful film, Lowry argued that “it was the Lost Weekend that should have inevitably recalled the Volcano,” for he “began the Volcano in 1936, the same year having written, in New York, a novelette . . . about an alcoholic entitled The Last Address, which takes place mostly in the same hospital ward where [Jackson’s protagonist] Don Birnam spends an interesting afternoon” (CL1:502–503). Lowry had based the “novelette,” which he initially planned to call “Delirium on the East River” (Bowker,Pursued198, 199), on his own experience in the psychiatric ward at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where he spent considerably more than “an interesting afternoon” (actually at least ten days and possibly as much as two weeks) in May 1936. Changing the title toThe Last Address, Lowry produced a complete draft soon after his release from Bellevue and revised the story repeatedly over the next eight years, first in New York and later in British Columbia. Meanwhile, his life changed fundamentally. When he began writingThe Last Addresshe lived with Jan Gabrial, his first wife, whom he had married in Paris in January 1934, but Jan left him in 1937, during the turbulent trip to Mexico that led him to writeUnder the Volcano. In 1939, in Los Angeles, he met Margerie Bonner, who would follow him to Canada and become his second wife. Ultimately the Lowrys moved to a fisherman’s shack near Dollarton, across Burrard Inlet from Vancouver, where he found a more harmonious life than he had ever known. As Vik Doyen and Miguel Mota observe in their Introduction to this edition, that life seems to be reflected in the very different later form ofThe Last AddressLowry called that Swinging the Maelstrom. In his last years he meant to revise the text again, incorporating elements ofThe Last Addressinto a back new version ofSwinging the Maelstrombe entitled to Lunar Caustic. Like many of Lowry’s plans, however, that one remained only an intriguing, though potentially brilliant, possibility.

ix