Malcolm Lowry

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Clarence Malcolm Lowry (born July 28, 1909 in Birkenhead , † June 27, 1957 in Ripe, East Sussex ) was a British writer .

Life

Malcolm Lowry was the fourth son of the cotton merchant Arthur Osborn Lowry (1870-1945) and his wife Evelyn Lowry, b. Boden (1873-1950). Due to a chronic inflammation of the eyes, the child had to live in isolation until the age of fourteen; it was not allowed to play, read or write. It was not until 1923 that Lowry attended the Leys School in Cambridge . During school, Lowry was a youth champion in golf and was introduced by his brother Stuart Lowry to the works of the authors Honoré de Balzac , Eugene O'Neill and James Joyce . From May to October 1927 Lowry was hired as a chamber steward on the SS Pyrrhus , which went to the Far East . In 1928 he had eight weeks of classes at Weber's School of Modern German in Bonn , Koblenzer Straße 100 (renamed Adenauerallee), where Karlheinz Schmidthüs was one of his teachers. In the summer of 1929 Lowry was in Cambridge, America, a student of the writer Conrad Aiken, who was twenty years his senior . Together they worked on Lowry's manuscript on Ultramarine . From this encounter a fatherly role developed for Aiken, about which he writes: I became his father . In October 1929 Lowry began studying at St Catharine's College in Cambridge, England . From July to September 1930 he went on a boat trip to Norway, where he met the writer Nordahl Grieg . In May 1932, Lowry took his final exam.

After graduating, Malcolm Lowry stayed in France and Spain. In the summer of 1933 he met the Spaniard Jan Gabrial in Granada . On January 6, 1934, Malcolm Lowry and Jan Gabrial were married in Paris. A few weeks later his wife was traveling alone in the USA. The couple only met again in New York in the fall of 1934. In June 1935, Lowry stayed in the mental health department of the Bellevue Hospital Center for ten days . In September 1936 the couple first went to Los Angeles , from October to December 1936 by ship from San Diego to Acapulco and then to Cuernavaca (Mexico). It was here that Malcolm Lowry wrote the first version of his novel Unter dem Vulkan until 1937 . The couple finally separated in December; the marriage was divorced on November 1, 1940.

Satellite photo of Vancouver with Burrard Inlet at the top

In July 1938, Malcom Lowry left Mexico and traveled back to Los Angeles via Nogales . It was in this city that he began the second version of Unter dem Vulkan . On June 7, 1939, he met Margerie Bonner. A month later, Lowry drove to Vancouver , in southwest British Columbia on the west coast of Canada . Margerie Bonner followed him in August 1939. Lowry was working on the third version of the novel Unter dem Vulkan . In August 1940 the couple moved into a squatter hut in Dollarton on the Burrard Inlet fjord . On December 2, 1940, Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner married. The writer sent the third version of the novel to his agent Harold Matson. Despite this, Lowry began a fourth version in 1941, which he finished on Christmas Eve 1944. The hut burned down on June 7, 1944 and was rebuilt in the spring of 1945. Two weeks after the fire, the couple drove to Oakville, Ontario and Niagara-on-the-Lake . In the years from late 1945 to late 1947, it made many trips to the American continent. In the winter of 1947 the couple traveled to Europe together, where they stayed until January 1949. From 1949 to mid-1955, the Lowrys lived again in Canada and the United States. In June 1955 they returned to England. A few days after a trip to the Lake District , Lowry died of a sleeping pill overdose .

Malcolm Lowry's main work is Under the Volcano . Topics that are expressed in Lowry's novels are the search for identity, the allure of the distance, especially the seafaring life , his interest in the Kabbalah , the symbolism of which permeates the books, and alcohol as a passion of his life. The author became known to the German-speaking public through Wolfgang Rohner-Radegast as editor at Ernst Klett Verlag.

bibliography

Works
  • Ultramarine . Cape, London 1933; rev. Barrel. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1962
  • Under the volcano . Reynal and Hitchcook, New York 1947
  • Selected Poems . City Light Books, San Francisco 1961.
    • Übers. Joachim Sartorius: Thirty-five mezcals in Cuautla . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1983
  • Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1961
    • Übers. Susanna Rademacher: Hear us, Lord, who live in heaven. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1965 ISBN 978-3-499-25121-4
      • Single story from it: The bravest boat, in: Canada told. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1992
  • Lunar Caustic . The Paris Review , 29, winter / spring 1963. As a monograph: Penguin Classic ISBN 978-0141196114 .
  • Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid . New American Library, New York 1968.
    • Übers. Werner Schmitz: As dark as the tomb in which my friend is buried . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1985 ISBN 3-499-25178-7
  • October Ferry to Gabriola . World, New York 1970
Secondary literature
  • Gordon Bowker: Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry . St. Martin's Press, New York 1997 ISBN 0-312-16356-8
  • Douglas Day: Lowry: A Biography . Oxford University Press , New York 1984 ISBN 0-19-503523-2
  • Nigel H. Foxcroft: The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry: Souls and Shamans . Lexington Books , Lanham, MD 2019 ISBN 978-1-4985-1657-0
  • Jan Gabrial: Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry . St. Martin's, New York 2000 ISBN 0-312-23277-2
  • Andreas Höfele: Malcolm Lowry. "But the name of this country is hell". Piper, Munich 1988 ISBN 3-492-10893-8
  • Heribert Hoven: Malcolm Lowry. With testimonials and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1988 ISBN 3-499-50414-6
  • Alexander Kupfer: "Something New about Hell Fire." Intoxication and knowledge in Malcolm Lowry's work . In: dsb., The artificial paradises. Intoxication and reality since romanticism. A manual. Metzler, Stuttgart 2006 (first 1996; also Diss. Phil. University of Düsseldorf 1994) ISBN 3-476-02178-5 pp. 593–625
  • Joachim Sartorius (ed.): Spinets of darkness. About Malcolm Lowry . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984 ISBN 3-499-25177-9
  • J. Howard Woolmer: Malcom Lowry: A Bibliography . Brotherson, Revere, Pa. 1983 ISBN 0-913506-12-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Chronicle. In: Joachim Sartorius (Hrsg.): Spinette of the darkness. About Malcolm Lowry . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, pp. 277-279
  2. ^ Wolfgang Koeppen : Malcolm Lowry. A portrait of a writer . In: Joachim Sartorius (Hrsg.): Spinette of the darkness. About Malcolm Lowry . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, pp. 192-197.
  3. ↑ Norbert Wehr (ed.): Malcolm Lowry / Clemens ten Holder. Correspondence . Special print no.1 from writing booklet 23, 1984, Rigodon, Essen 1985, pp. 31, 36
  4. ^ Conrad Aiken: Malcolm Lowry: One note . In: Joachim Sartorius (Hrsg.): Spinette of the darkness. About Malcolm Lowry . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, p. 13f.
personal data
SURNAME Lowry, Malcolm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lowry, Clarence Malcolm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Birkenhead
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1957
Place of death Ripe, East Sussex