Between a Fiesta and a Wake: a reading of ‘Under the Volcano’ by Malcolm Lowry

When I realised that I would be in Mexico during the syncretic festival of Miquixtli, which in Spanish is called Día de los muertos (the Day of the Dead), I knew I had to spend it in the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca. Not because of anything particular or special about the way that the festival is celebrated in Cuernavaca, but because I had recently finished a novel set in precisely that place on precisely that day. I planned to retrace the novel’s steps and see if being in the same place on the same day, albeit 84 years later than the fictional events, might reveal to me more about the novel and what if anything it has to say about Mexico.

The alcoholic British novelist Malcolm Lowry came to live in Mexico with his first wife, Jan Gabriel, in 1936 and on the Day of the Dead they arrived in the town of Cuernavaca (called Quauhnahuac in Nahuatl), which sits beneath the two volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. The marriage fell apart and not long after, Lowry was, after a dispute with a local fascist militia in Oaxaca, arrested, imprisoned and deported to Canada. Yet, in his drunkenness and despair Lowry had conceived the idea for a novel that would be the great achievement of his short, unhappy life and recognised over 70 years later as a masterpiece of British modernist literature. He spent much of the next seven years writing and rewriting Under the Volcano while imploring Jonathan Cape to publish the work, which they finally did in 1947.

The novel tells the story of one day (the last) in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a decorated war hero, frustrated literary talent, ex-British consul to Mexico and complete drunken wreck, wandering around Cuernavaca resisting, or remaining impassive in the face of the attempts of, those that would save him (namely his ex-wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh). The main events are set on the Day of the Dead in 1938, though an opening chapter set on that day in 1939 serves as a kind of epilogue and coda to understand the hints and allusions of the rest of the novel. Over the course of 12 hours, the Consul, as Firmin is ironically referred to in the novel, drinks a fantastic amount of alcohol, sticking almost exclusively to whisky, tequila and most of all mescal, as he battles with the terrifying effects of delirium tremens and the irresistible attraction of the abyss.

Malcolm Lowry did not publish another book in his lifetime.

As a study of how two people can be sat side by side and yet fail to connect, fail to act to save themselves and others, Under the Volcano is a tragedy, the slow-motion car crash precipitated by rampant, untreated alcoholism. Set against the backdrop of the Spanish Republicans’ defeat at the Battle of the Ebro and the Munich agreement, the inertia of Firmin and his friends reflects the moral inertia of the time. At the same time the novel is an incredibly dense collection of images layered and interposed; passing thoughts, snippets of conversation from next door rooms, hallucinations, film posters, radio announcements, strange noises all intrude on the consciousness to create a sort of tapestry of hell.

As the narrator jumps between the different characters’ perspectives, all of whom are drunk, in a state of turmoil, or both, the fairly straightforward narrative becomes secondary to a terrifying phantasmagoria of intoxication. I found it hard to go on but, after navigating the difficult opening chapter at the second attempt, impossible to stop ploughing forward through his gruesome underworld to the inevitable end.

And yet, Lowry sets this bleak tale in an earthly paradise. Lowry’s Quauhnahuac, “there was no denying its beauty,” is a small town on a hill surrounded by gardens and terraces “that command a spacious view in every direction,” is surrounded by forest on all sides, overlooked by a volcano and “filled with the water that ceaselessly pours down from the mountains.” When we arrive at the Consul’s house, we find that the garden has gone to seed but it hardly seems the less gorgeous: “between floribunda and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight.” However, for the Consul everything is poisoned by his misery and he observes “the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death.” He has been cast out of Eden and the richness and mystery of this forest town only entails a fecundity of nightmarish visions.

***

The earthly paradise, “whether fatal or cleansing,” Lowry describes in Under the Volcano is not the place I find when I get down from bus on the highway into Cuernavaca on a hot, breezy Sunday morning. From what I can gather, the town expanded significantly in the 1970s subsuming the nearby villages of Acapatzingo, Ocotepec and Ahuatepec. The small town that Lowry lived in is now a city of 350,000 people. The colonial centre remains unspoilt, and since Lowry’s time they have uncovered some charming 17th Century murals under the plaster of the cathedral. Cortes' Palace remains squatted on the foundations of the Tlahuican temple, with Diego Rivera's mural inside, but I couldn't get within 10 metres due to maintenance work. One of the novel’s key locations still remains, and has been turned into a hotel named Bajo el Volcán, but the manager has never read the book and says the watch tower is not safe to climb.

The Hotel Bajo El Volcán on Calle Humboldt.

The street on which our heroes live has been renamed and rerouted; the decaying splendour of the Hotel Casino de la Selva now lies beneath a bus terminal; and the hillside on which the Consul's bungalow ought to have stood, then on the outskirts of town and almost ready to be swallowed by the forest, is crisscrossed with fume-choked roads and a large, paved market that is speckled with spoilt market dogs flopped on the floor like great furry enchiladas. The grackles that Lowry describes – “black, ugly birds, yet too long, something like monstrous insects” – are still hopping about, though it is hard to see how they will roost in the fresno trees of the zócalo (the central square) with a ska band entertaining Day of the Dead revellers.

Lowry’s vision of Quauhnahuac is of course imbued with his own alcoholic torment. Thus, it seems fortuitous that I have arrived with a mescal-induced hangover in order to be in the right frame of mind. I do now know from experience “the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside my window, … the dark spinnets.” I wander up and down the steep streets, cross the bridge over the barranca (ravine) and peer into its depths looking for a familiar, but nothing peers back at me. Certainly Lowry made the volcanoes more towering (I can barely see them through the haze of smog), and the barranca deeper and more alarming than they are. He may have made the forest closer and denser, the vultures more menacing. In other words, Lowry made the most out of his setting to create the novel’s atmosphere of a fallen Eden, or an Eden in free fall.

Quauhnahuac means ‘place near the woods’ and Lowry makes much use of the imagery of the forest, but the forest has receded. I suspect this may be why the city has never become a major site of literary pilgrimage - the lush, diabolical atmosphere of the novel has been lost with the forest. To get some sense of what Cuernavaca might have felt like for Lowry/Firmin in the 1930s, I took a trip to the nearby town of Tepoztlán. Here the forest still encroaches at the edges, trogons and butterflies still swoop down cobbled side streets, and the mountains sneak up and peer over your shoulder when you least expect it. Here you might not be surprised to find a caged vulture in the forest, see an old woman playing dominoes with her chicken on a leash, or have a small girl try to sell you an armadillo.

Great-tailed grackle.

There may be something inherently problematic about a British author during the time of empire representing Mexico as a sort of Eden after the fall. Lowry’s imperial worldview (his racism) has certainly contributed to the strange and sinister atmosphere of Under the Volcano. The indigenous Mexicans in the novel are hardly fully rounded characters: whether noble, menacing, or just ridiculous, they are always obscure and unknowable. We could adapt Chinua Achebe’s famous complaint of Heart of Darkness – and insist Mexico and Mexicans are more than just a prop “for the break-up of one petty European mind.” It is true that Lowry does not explicitly seek to interpret for us the meaning of the Mexicans’ pagan-catholic festival that is the setting for his novel, but there is reason to believe that Lowry had gained some (horrified) insight into Mexico that makes the novel’s setting particularly apposite.

Only three years after Lowry’s book was published, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz produced a series of essays (Labyrinth of Solitude) about Mexico and the Mexican national character, one of which treats the custom of the fiesta and specifically the Day of the Dead and suggests that Lowry might have been getting quite close to the beating heart of the matter.

According to Paz, Mexicans are inherently gloomy and closed off from one another. He claims that because something “impedes us from being” and since we “cannot or dare not confront our own selves, we resort to the fiesta. It fires us into the void.” The fiesta allows them to “leap over the wall of solitude” and embrace their brother, but sometimes “to prove that they are brothers they kill one another.”

In this sense, the Consul is a kind of Mexican. Like them, he drinks to confess and is “seduced by death” finding both life and death “strange and remote.”

During a fiesta, Paz explains, Mexicans “form a living community in which the individual is at once dissolved and redeemed.” The Consul, however, does not quite want to be redeemed. Or, the more he drinks, the more he likes the sound of hell. Whereas Paz’s Mexicans “oscillate […] between a shout and a silence, between a fiesta and a wake,” the Consul seeks continual “delirium, song, outcry, monologue.” 

***

Back in Cuernavaca on the eve of Día de muertos, I go out to try and witness some of the “chaos,” “self-immolation,” and “impeded being” rending itself open that Paz describes. The streets of the old town are decked out in bright, paper decorations, garlands of orange marigolds hang from every conceivable place, and the locals and tourists are having a grand time. My taxi driver proudly tells me that he has been drunk for six days straight. At dusk, hundreds of costumed motorcyclists, two or sometimes three to a bike, begin dragging around the zócalo, one trailing a very realistic corpse wrapped in black bin liner. I decide that I had better find a cantina, the hole-in-the-wall bars with roll down metal shutters that are the Consul’s home from home and beacon of light in the dark.

Bikers passing el Palacio Cortés.

The first cantina I sit down in, a group of locals - Natalia, Alberto and Oscar - ask me to join their table. Before long, they are confessing, calling me brother, insisting that I should come to their weddings. However, so they say, Mexicans are good liars and life is cheap in Mexico so I should not trust anyone and should never leave my drink unattended to. Though apparently not particularly drunk, they are giddy, almost childlike in their frenzy. Despite myself, I can't help but wonder if at some point, to prove that we are brothers they will kill me, whether, as Paz suggests, their outburst of joy might end in violence.

Of course I am trying to avoid making generalisations about Mexicans or Mexican character, a right which Paz has earned by being Mexico's most venerated national poet. Even then, I'm taking him with a big pinch of salt. I push the thought aside.

Nevertheless, we all laugh and dance (we even jump around with flowerpots on our heads), and then at a certain point I feel a silence creeping in, a raising of masks recklessly thrown aside only a couple of hours before. I take my leave and go to bed.

When we meet again the following evening my new friends are polite and generous, but somewhat glum and withdrawn. Their infectious warmth has gone. We are going visit the ofrendas (literally ‘offerings,’ altars for the dead decked out in bright colours) for which the families of the deceased open their doors to their neighbours. As we queue up in dark streets with candles to pay our respects to the dead, they are happy to joke, but not to talk about themselves or the fiancées they were so keen to tell me about before, and always falling away into gloomy silence after a few moments.

Miquitxli celebrations in Ocotepec, Cuernavaca