Mexican Mosaic: Hart Crane, Malcom Lowry


As I was riding the bus to Mitla and gazing at the graded, layered mountain ranges, and the peasant plowing the field with two white oxen next to a disused trac­tor, I thought of how few works of art really stayed with me. And I remembered the injunction of Malcolm Lowry’s contemporary Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, that an artist's sole responsibility was to cre­ate a masterpiece and that nothing else was worth­while.

The way to go about writing a masterpiece is not nec­essarily by fixing the locus of the pressure on each line of a poem or each sentence of a novel. But Hart Crane and Malcolm Lowry consumed and tormented themselves daily with this task and considered them­selves to be failures: not failures in comparison to their contemporaries, but in relation to the work which they had planned but could not execute. This would not be such a delicate and difficult matter had they not each produced masterpieces, works head and heels above those of their less ambitious, somewhat “saner,” more tractable contemporaries, like Graham Greene and Archibald MacLeish. These works were masterpieces which they knew they could never exceed, only equal. (Yes, Crane might write a long poem that bettered The Bridge, but could he better, on their own terms, his best short and shorter poems, like “Legend,” “Black Tambourine,” “Repose of Rivers,” “My Grandmother's Love Letters,” “Praise for an Urn,” and “0 Carib Isle”?) Perhaps it was this sense of failure they were trying to assuage which took the form of a thirst-a thirst alcohol only magnified.

*

The conflicts of a life show up on the litmus of form. I pose the question: did the “problems” of Hart Crane and Malcolm Lowry result more from accumulated des­peration, or from a failure to find, in the long run (and for W, significant forms as artists? Or, to put it an­other way, did Crane and Lowry drink as they did because they were mysteriously tormented, battered inwardly by sexual confusions and unremitting longings for something more than “existence as sold” to them (Lowry's phrase, my emphasis), or because, as artists, or poets and novelists, they failed to find forms that allowed them to go on without extended blockage, hia­tus?

*

Hart Crane went to Mexico in 1932 on a Guggenheim Fellowship ostensibly to write a history of Mexico in verse: a spectacularly unrealistic project. He barely had time to get settled and write letters and a few poems before the year was out.

Malcolm Lowry (following in Crane's footsteps and aware of Ambrose Bierce’s mysterious disappearance) wrote most of Under the Volcano in Mexico and conceived a trilogy (The Voyage that Never Ends) to rival Proust, Joyce, Mann and Musil in its architectonic complexity.

*

What drew Lowry and Crane to Mexico? Certainly one reason was that it was possible to live more cheaply on a modest income there than in the United States or Europe: Crane could stretch his fellowship and Lowry small allowance from his father.

Mexico offered “a collective desolate fecundity,” which Lowrysought and Crane evoked in his last and perhaps greatest poem, “The Broken Tower.”

Mexico was a kind of solution to the problem Henri Lefebvre sets forth in Everyday Life in the Modern World: “our aim is to prove that a system of everyday life (in America and Europe) does not exist, notwithstanding all the endeavours to establish and settle it for good and all, and that there are only sub-systems separated by irreducible gaps, yet situated on one plane and related to it.”

~

I have been walking for days in Oaxaca, the valley of the acacias. As you go higher, the town thins out and the air gets clearer. Each day I climb a little farther into the hills. I watch the clouds darken over the mountains. There’s the sense of a city in flotation, of a place not fully of the world, a presence bordering on the magi­cal, the marginal. The architecture is not so different from what it was 500 years before. Steep streets sweep downward toward the zócalo and upward toward t­he mountains, mountains that hold the valley gently, mountains that build up the wall of the sky. There’s mystery in the play of light-shadow over the landscape.

In the evening, we go to a Spanish restaurant whose balcony overlooks the zócalo. A demonstration which had been going on in the streets all day, on the Av­enues Juarez and Constitution, has moved to the cen­ter of town. They are demonstrating for more money for teachers and freedom of expression: jViva La Libertad de Expresi6n! As we watch the demonstrators congre­gate, the sky turns black, lightning begins to flicker in the hills above the city and thunder rumbles. It is as dark and ominous a sky as I have ever seen. It would have needed an El Greco or Albert Pinkham Ryder to do it justice. But the demonstrators seem oblivious to the symbolism of the weather and in spite of the im­minent deluge, continue to shout through megaphones.

*

Outside the bus depot of the Hotel Meson del Angel a dark-eyed child is bottle-feeding an infant. She looks up as if to say, do you think I was born to do this? The woman beside her on the street has set out half a dozen straw baskets brimful with dark roots and branches.

*

How advanced the Mayans and the Olmecs and the Zapotecs were. The mounds are still under excavation as we walk over them.
Each instant another minute layer is uncovered as if these vast tumuli were metaphors for the process of knowing-always partially-our own minds.

The myriad maize and rain-gods seated like Buddhas; the mad, wild, expressive faces; the decorated skulls drilled all the way through.

Do the images on the stele arise from where the Indi­ans settled? In the valley, on the mountain?
The beautiful place-names of the ruins: the ones with the soft x-sounds, like Uxmal; the ones with the drawn out ch- and tz-sounds, like Chichen-Itza. Ruins are re­plete with steps that lead nowhere. Dusty side streets veer off into the blinding light; stretch through roofless houses and houses that are only roofs.

The poppy-red blossoms on the jacaranda trees.

*

Mexico is exotic; it's a culture that still has celebrat­ions, outlets for the inner, darker self; it offers release from the fixity of worldly identity-the name attached !to the face. Everyday life is at times a celebration, a festival, even a festival for the dead.
Travel in Mexico is like the fiesta: while it opens you up it also wounds.

Mexico provides a perverse twist on traditional val­ues. When a plan to share a house with friends in Cuernavaca fell through in the spring of 1970, I decided to go to Mexico anyway.

I went with a woman I scarcely knew, but was fiercely attracted to. We were en route to Mexico City, from where we'd catch a bus to Cuernavaca, when I changed my mind in midair, changed the destination of our tickets when we stopped to change planes in Austin, and went on to Puerto Vallarta instead, to begin the summer in some proximity to the sea after the year in the city.

Why Puerto Vallarta? Once, returning from Mazatlan to Los Angeles with my father, we changed planes at a small airport with a single runway. I had no sooner walked a few steps past the "terminal" hut than I was in the jungle. Vines from the nearby trees choked the gutters under the eaves. A brash, arrogant film-crew stomped through, en route to "Puerto V allarta" -the place-name hung in the air like a song named after a town, "Cordoba," or "Laredo." I asked my father where it was, what it was like. "Now that was a paradise," he said, and I trusted his judgment though I knew he'd never been there, "but now it's ruined." He thought I was slow, and I was: I just couldn't grasp how a para­dise could be ruined overnight because some movie had been shot there. The movie took it off the map for him, and the name of the town remained in the back of my mind as a place I would have to see for myself some day, just to see it.

In Puerto Vallarta the sea blazed. In one torrential summer rain, I huddled in a doorway and saw some children cutting the tail off an iguana. And one afternoon, while I was walking aimlessly on the sun-baked main street, two barely disguised plain-clothes cops, dressed in a Hawaiian shirts and light-colored polyester slacks with pockets bulging just below their shirttails, requested to see my passport which I'd left back at the top-floor villa apartment we'd rented dirt cheap.

This gave the cops an excuse to inspect the apartment. One of them unearthed, in the top drawer of the dresser, unhidden, a penis-shaped wooden hash pipe, from which he dislodged a few specks of tar. I decided on this story, which, as it turned out, was neither a good nor a bad tactic and which mayor may not have been the full truth: "I had hoped to score some hash in Mexico, but once I discovered it was illegal, I decided not to."

His silent, reactive, mime-like partner carne across a copy of the Bible, a new translation of the Old Testa­ment my stepfather had given me and which I'd brought along to study Ezekiel-to help myself better under­stand Blake and Eliot.
They exchanged solemn, sincere glances. "Do you read this?" "Yes." They looked at me now with no uncer­tain respect. I could sense our fortunes were turning, but still feared incarceration in a Mexican jail. From the way the first cop squinched his features and gri­maced, I thought they might take the pipe, issue me a warning, and split. But no, they decided to leave my fate up to the Captain.

It seemed wet as a cave inside the Captain's office in the jail where I was seated in a straight-backed chair facing his desk. I sat up very straight. In his blues, the Captain at least looked like a cop. There was no ex­cess flesh on his bones. Everything about him said: no nonsense.

"Des ees hash," he said, tapping out another tarred speck from the pipe. "It's just tar," I said, "and it's been there for a long time. Someone gave me that pipe in New York." "No. I say ees hash. I could throw you in jail right now."

He looked up at the first cop to corroborate his find­ings. The first cop leaned over and whispered some­thing in the Captain's ear.

"My man tells me you read the Bible." "All the time, sir, all the time." "All right, since this is all we found ... youcangothistime," he said, running the words together as he rose to shake my hand.

*

It is always tempting to look at the crises of writers in light of their personal histories. The lives concern me here only as they intersect with the art. Crane and Lowry were both deeply estranged from their families, off­spring of wealthy businessmen who were unreachable.

Crane was moving toward a reconciliation with his fa­ther who died when he was in Mexico. This manufac­turer of the "Life Saver" was no fool-he wrote Hart that "The River" was the best thing he had done. Hart's relationship with his mother was an emotional catas­trophe.

Lowry abandoned any hope of intimacy with his fa­ther as a teenager and, before consenting to go to Cambridge, shipped out as a deck hand on a tramp steamer. At 19 he wrote and asked Conrad Aiken to serve in loco parentis. His first letter to his literary hero ("I know you are a great man in your own country") has the feel of "Apres Ie Deluge" and shows what Lowry could do right from the start when he wasn't pressing:

I have lived only nineteen years and all of them more or less badly. [He quotes from Aiken's ''The House of Dust."] I sat opposite the Bureau-de-change. The great gray tea urn perspired. But as I read, I became conscious only of a blur of faces: I let the tea that had mysteriously appeared grow clammy and milk-starred, the half veal and ham pie remain in its crinkly paper; vaguely, as though she had been speaking upon another continent, I heard the girl opposite me order some more Dundee cake. My pipe went out.
. . . The sunlight roared above me like a vast in­visible sea. The crowd of faces wavered and broke and flowed .... Sometime when you come to Lon­don, Conrad Aiken, wilst hog it over the way some­where with me? You will forgive my presumption, I think, in asking you this.

*

Disaster dogged Lowry's heels every step of the way. He lost the suitcase that contained the manuscript for his first novel, Ultramarine, and had to reconstitute the book from notes. To write Lunar Caustic he checked himself into Bellevue and then was "mistaken" (like the Pulitzer hungry journalist in Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor) for one of the mad. It was fifteen years be­fore his second novel, Under the Volcano, appeared. His squatter's shack in Canada went up in flames, con­suming his magnum opus in progress, The Voyage that Never Ends.

The contradictions, the inevitable failure of Crane's verse epic already lay in the tortured history of Mexico it­self, in the heart of the very problem he intended to wrestle with: the conquest. Unable to reconcile him­self to his project, unable to ply contradiction as "a lever of transcendence" (Simone Weil) Crane leapt into the sea, into oneness.

As silent as a mirror is believed

Realities plunge in silence by . . .

Lowry's suicide was more ambiguous. He didn't exactly intend to kill himself, and his death was labeled Death by Misadventure. While on a walking tour of England (always dangerous inflammatory ground for him), he and his wife had a fight, and he swallowed booze and pills, perhaps not enough to kill him in themselves,· but a bad enough combination to make him choke on his own vomit. This eruption seemed all the more cruel in that it followed the healing years in Canada with Margerie, all the work he had done on himself toward a fresh start-for which no one had ever been more willing.

One evening on the way back from the spring for some reason I suddenly thought of a break by Bix in Frankie Trumbauer's record of Singing the Blues that had always seemed to me to express a moment of the most pure spontaneous happiness. I could never hear this break without feeling happy myself and wanting to do something good. Could one translate this kind of happiness into one's life? Since this was only a moment of happiness I seemed involved with irreconcilable impulses. One could not make a mo­ment permanent and perhaps the attempt to try was some form of evil. But was there not some means of suggesting at least the existence of such happiness, that was like what is really meant by freedom, which was like the spring, which was like our love, which was like the desire to be truly good.
                                         ("The Forest Path to the Spring")


~

Crane and Lowry were unwilling to make any conces­sion to what Frost praised in Wordsworth-"necessary dullness." Everything had to be a monumental under-taking or it wasn't worth doing. (Monumental and co­herent, like [theoretically] Ulysses.)

Though drawn to grandiose schemes with cosmic im­plications, they were both writers of consciousness, not of history. Crane's imagination was synthetic, not dia­lectical. Lowry said that any defect in Under the Vol­cano sprang from "something irremediable in the author's equipment" that was-he confessed with remarkable candor in his letter of appeal to his publisher, Jonathan Cape––

subjective rather than objective, a better equipment, in short, for a certain kind of poet than a novelist.
*

Crane was the kind of man who would allow himself to become converted by a book, and more fierce in his defense of an idea that bloodied him than the author might have been. The most nervous moment in Crane's letters is when he undertakes to read Spengler.
Eliot may have written, exploded and secreted actu­ally, at different times, The Waste Land, because it was a poem he had to write, but Crane interpreted the act as another of Eliot's definitive demonstrations of how the individual talent should incorporate tradition: one had to mix the symbolic and the real, the modern and the ancient, in such and such away. Crane is at his most Eliot-like in "General Aims and Theories" when he writes of what he set out to do in "For the Mar­riage of Faustus and Helen,"

to embody in modern terms (words, symbols, meta­phors) a contemporary approximation to an ancient human culture or mythology . . . build . . . a bridge between the so-called classic experience and many divergent realities of our seething, confused cosmos of today, which has no formulated mythology yet for classic poetic reference or for religious exploita­tion . . .
Some passages in the poem accomplish this desired synthesis, ("1 found 'Helen' in a street car"):
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall,-lost yet poised in traffic. Then I might find your eyes across an aisle, Still flickering with those prefigurations­Prodigal, yet uncontested now,
Half-riant before the jerky window frame.
But later, in the midst of struggling with The Bridge, Crane would pay the price for having taken Eliot straight .

*

Crane and Lowry created the myths by which they are judged. Their great works are not failures: they are great works.

Crane and Lowry found apt objectifications in the bridge, the bell tower, and the two volcanoes, Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl. But in their respective use of Brooklyn Bridge and the volcanoes they came dangerously close to placing the symbol OVER the real:
O harp and alter, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

. . .

Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, that image of the per­fect marriage, lay now clear and beautiful on the ho­rizon under an almost pure morning sky. Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!
*

What are the artistic consequences of employing an aesthetic that goes against the grain of one's gifts? Structure becomes external. Technique becomes an overriding concern. Joyce and Eliot and Kafka rarely mention adopting techniques (the latter had contempt for Apollinaire's "pyrotech­nics" in "Zone"). But Crane and Lowry obsessed about structure and technique all the time. They were both eclectic, consciously cadging montage from John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams. This from Crane's "The River":
Stick your patent name on a signboard
brother-all over-going west-young man
Tintex-]apalac-Certain-teed Overalls ads
and lands sakes! under the new playbill ripped
in the guaranteed corner-see Bert Williams what?
These passages from Under the Volcano:
     DAILY GLOBE intelube londres presse collect follow­ing yesterdays headcoming antisemitic campaign mexpress propefition see tee emma mexworkers confederation proexpulsion exmexico quote small jewish textile manufacturers unquote twas learned today per-reliable source that german lega­tion mexcity actively behind ...

    The dehydrated onion factory by the sidings awoke, then the coal companies. It's a black business but we use you white: Daemon's Coal ... A delicious smell of onion soup in sidestreets of Vavin impregnated the early morning.
Lowry found new uses for montage in a literary work, as when the poster for the film Las Manos de arlac (The Hands of Orlac), playing in Quahnahuac on the day in which the novel takes place, reappears at strategic moments in the book, and it becomes, by extension, (as every such repeated image does in Under the Volcano), a symbol of the book itself. arlac symbolizes the Consul's mis­use of his powers; he becomes a kind of black magi­cian, another double within the book's plethora of doubles.

Yet what a complicated endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer's hands; that was the ticket, the hiero­glyphic of the times. For really it was Germany it­self that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad car­toon, stood over him.-Or was it, by some uncom­fortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle him­self?
In Las Manos de arlac, a pianist, whose hands are somehow (I have never seen it) ruined by a train accident has a murderer's hands sewn on by an evil doctor Gogol. And so the pianist, in good doppelganger fashion, be­comes a murderer against his conscious will. I think Lowry was drawn to this tale because he liked the idea of an external agent being the cause.
For a more immediate sense of what The Hands of arlac was really like, I must look to another of Lowry's doubles, Graham Greene, who reviewed arlac (as Mad Luve) during his sojourn as a film critic while he was writing The Power and the Glory.

Guiltily I admit to liking Hands of Orlac because it did make me shudder a little when Dr. Gogol grafted the hands of a guillotined murderer onto the smashed stumps of Orlac, the great pianist whose hands had been destroyed in a railway accident, and because Herr Karl Freund's romantic direction did 'put across' the agreeable little tale of how the dead murderer's fingers retained a life of their own, the gift of knife­throwing, an inclination to murder. . . .
Even better is his praise of Peter Lorre:

Those marbly pupils in the pasty spherical face are like the eye-pieces of a microscope through which you can see laid flat on the slide the entangled mind of a man: love and lust, nobility and perversity, ha­tred of itself and despair jumping out at you from the jelly.

*

The Consul, a shell of a man, must become no-man, like Odysseus in the cave of the Cyclops, in order to become himself again, and see things shorn of an al­coholic haze and heightening. Wandering through a plaza with wooly nerves the Consul is drawn toward a Ferris Wheel, a "little Popocatepetl":

¡BRA V A A TRACCI6N!
10 c MÁQUINA INFERNAL
 Again Lowry is throwing a little wink toward his own life. He asked his French translator, Mlle. Oarisse Francillon, if she could smuggle a copy of her translation to

Jean Cocteau, and tell him I have never forgotten his kindness in giving me a seat for La Machine Infernale at the Champs Elysees in May, 1934 .... And so you see his infernal machine comes back to torment the Consul in Chapter VII.

His worldly identity is wrested away from him as he is flung about and then hangs upside down in the grip of this "infernal machine," the sensation of falling "unlike­anything, beyond experience."

Everything was falling out of his pockets, was being wrested from him, torn away, a fresh article at each whirling, sickening, plunging, retreating, unspeak­able circuit, his notecase, pipe, keys, his dark glasses he had taken off, his small change he did not have time to imagine being pounced on by the children after all, he was being emptied out, returned empty, his stick, his passport-had that been his passport?
Lowry was a Cambridge educated Englishman living unmoored in the Third World. (He could not, like Graham Greene, change locales with each book.)

*

Both Crane and Lowry felt orphaned before they ar­rived in Mexico with its cult of orphans, "orphanos."

I remember walking, in the summer of 1970, across the courtyard of the orphanage in Guadalajara where Jose Clemente Orozco's great mural is housed. Walking, from the silence of that space into the maniacally kinetic howl of his work. (Better for it to be housed in an orphanage than in a church.) No one has rendered force more viscerally than Orozco, who harnessed the erotic shapes of surrealism and merged them with a cubist rigor. And fragmentation here provides its own quota of torque. My footsteps echoed. Where were the orphans?

Orozco shows not only the horrors of war, but the his­torical process through which the use of force becomes preeminent. Force permeates the living: the fuselage in the horse's belly makes him reel with agony. Orozco knew in his bones that the attempt to force Mexico into a European mold left a howl at the center, the cry of the orphaned, those whom, as Lowry would have said, "have nobody them with."

I was not prepared for what I had seen and longed to rest in the shadows under the colonnades.

*

The Third World/the desert-these are like a chemi­cal mixture that magnifies and highlights the core of certain frustrations.

Nowhere is this anguish more apparent than in Antonioni's The Passenger when Jack Nicholson's character "Locke" falls to his knees in the sand beside his broken down Land Rover-it is a moment of ultimate, pure frustra­tion, which mirrors his spiritual crisis. The desert, with its codes the reporter (Locke) cannot understand, can­not process, becomes a source of terror in which the mind can only break itself. The values of Western civilization are thrown into question by this world of silence, of eternal waiting. A man passes on a camel in a kind of final comment. Locke realizes that what he thought was true is only a partial truth, that what he took for reality is only part of reality, Le.-a man in a Land Rover is essentially superior to a man on a camel. But in the desert this is not so.

*

Crane and Lowry were spiritually exiled from a liter­ary community that had put aside the verbal rhetoric, the richness, and the grandeur they sought. They re­sented the limitation and constraints imposed upon them by the ethos of the time.
Though tragedy was in the process of becoming un­real and meaningless it seemed one was still permit­ted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué.
(Under the Volcano)
*

Most modernists were able to take for granted a vast storehouse of meaning and symbol which allowed them to stray, digress, and play, without evident strain. Their work is playful and confident and almost serene in spite of its "dark" themes.
Lowry and Crane tried to do with premeditation what Joyce and Eliot did with irony, panache, and nerve, and neither trusted the spontaneity, the pulsing elec­tric responsiveness which William Carlos Williams and D.H. Lawrence employed-that submission to the process of working itself.

Here's the catch. It could be argued that neither Wil­liams nor Lawrence ever wrote a single poem or nov­els as great, as finished, as any of a dozen poems by Crane or Under the Volcano, but nor were they "fin­ished" by the writing of a work. One work cleared the ground for the next work.

Even Proust "had not gone in search of the two un­even paving-stones upon which [he] stumbled." It was the "fortuitous and inevitable fashion" in which this occurred that showed him the truth of the past, and how lost time could be retrieved, brought back to life. His discovery has the force of a revelation which owes everything to chance. "What we have not had to deci­pher," he writes, "to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it [plans, strategems, symbols] is not ours."

*

Robert Lowell, whose work represents a bizarre fu­sion of elements in Crane and William Carlos Williams, called Crane "the Shelley of our age." To enter the realm of pure possibility for a moment, it seems to me that Shelley has a poem, "Julian and Maddalo: A Con­versation," that might have served as a model for Crane's Mexican project. Formal discoveries are contextual as well as metrical, and the graceful movement of Shelley's poem has as much to do with the situation he creates for his "characters" to engage in dialogue in their movement through physical space as it does with his deft heroic couplets: a conversation between Julian and Maddalo is conducted-in an almost electrical sense-as they ride along the Venetian shores at dusk.
So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought,
Winging itself with laughter, lingered not,
But flew from brain to brain-such glee was ours,
Charged with light memories of remembered hours,
None slow enough for sadness: till we came
Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.
The movement through imagined space draws our at­tention away from the closure of rhyme. "Julian and Maddalo" is as provisional as it is unwilled; it feels as if it wrote itself; it has the ballast-the gravity-most of Shelley's poems lack. But nothing has been lost in terms of aspiration-he has his eye on a moving ob­ject-from the "hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand" in the

                                   waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

to the endearing moment when Maddalo's child "after her first shyness was worn out" can be seen "rolling billiard balls about." And I like to fantasize that just as Shelley projects his affectionate "quarrel" with Byron onto Maddalo, Crane might have dramatized his own conflicts and fashioned a Cortez out of his more se­vere arguments with Tate, Winters, and others. And had a good time doing it.

*

The bias in American modernism, in Pound, Williams, Moore, even Eliot, was toward a hard, sinewy, anti­poetic (non-Romantic/Victorian) style. It was an at­tempt to purge themselves of the afflatus of the late 19th century and make it possible for poetry to renew itself by taking on some of the materials and textures of prose.

Crane and Lowry wouldn't settle for a flattened idiom. They wanted to pull out all the stops, and didn't see why their language shouldn't be as rich and supple as that of the Elizabethans. They wouldn't acceed to the implicit guidelines as to what writing at that time should be: Pound's "direct treatment of the thing"; Hemingway's "iceberg," with nine-tenths underwater.

Lowry's gesture is closer to that of Wolfe and Faulkner than his countrymen born at the same time as he­Waugh, Orwell, Auden, Spender, Day Lewis. He com­ments wryly on his remoteness from the world of let­ters in "Through the Panama."

I am capable of conceiving of a writer today, even intrinsically a first-rate writer, who simply cannot understand, and never has been able to understand, what his fellow writers are driving at, and have been driving at, and who has always been too shy to ask. This writer feels this deficiency in himself to the point of anguish. Essentially a humble fellow, he has tried his hardest all his life to understand (though maybe still not hard enough) so that his room is full of Par­tisan Reviews, Kenyon Reviews, Minotaurs, Poetry mags, Horizons, even old Dials, of whose contents he is able to make out precisely nothing, save where an occa­sional contribution of his own, years and years ago, rings a faint bell in his mind, a bell that is growing ever fainter, because to tell the truth he can no longer understand his own early work either. . . .
    Despite this, he still heroically reads a few pages of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity each night before going to sleep just to keep his hand in, as it were, and to keep up with the times.

*

Lowry wrote to Jacques Barzun that he had never read all of Ulysses. But he knew how it worked: that every word in the novel referred to something else, that nothing had been left to chance. So Joyce's 7 Eccles Street be­comes Lowry's magical cabalistic 7 in Under the Vol­cano.

"Here we come to seven," Lowry writes to Jonathan Cape,
the fateful, the magical, the lucky good-bad number and the scene in the tower, where I write this letter. By a coincidence I moved to the tower on January 7 .... My house burned down on June 7j when I returned to the burned site someone had branded, for some reason, the number 7 on a burned treej why was I not a philoso­pher? ... Philosophy has been dying since the days of Duns Scotus, though it continues underground, if quacking slightly. Boehme would support me when I speak of the passion for order even in the smallest things in the uni­verse: 7 too is the number on the horse that will kill Yvonne and 7 the hour when the Consul will die ...

And since everything in the book is doubled, trebled and quadrupled, the Consul, whose sexual shyness is telegraphed when he's caught fucking in a sand-trap on a golf course by Jacques Laruelle in the flashback in chapter one, is hurled into the ravine in chapter twelve. Every page of Under the Volcano expresses this tension, like the real but also symbolic rider who al­ways seems to be losing control, drunk, "sprawling all over his mount, his stirrups lost, a feat in itself con­sidering their size, and barely managing to hold on by the reins, though not once did he grasp the pommel to steady himself." This tension finally explodes when Yvonne is trampled to death in a dark wood by a rearing horse, as the Pleiades wheel like a transmogrified white whale. The "sharp pistol-like report, from somewhere ahead, as of a backfiring car," which she hears, is from the bullet that kills the Consul; it spooks the "riderless horse," "with number seven branded on its rump" who runs off into the forest and causes her to meet a real death in a "forest of symbols."

*

There is a dryness which draws one to Mexico. (Heraclitus says, "A dry soul is wisest and best.") All this week I built up a great thirst-how blessed a Coke seems with its heady mixture of water and sugar and caffeine. And yet, seeking relief from the blinding light in MilIa in a cavernous cantina which sells everything under the sun, I look at the bottles of Mescal, where a slice of carrot's been inserted to replace the glorious horrific worm, with a kind of longing, a thirst that's been instilled by the very maguey plant, which looks like an octopus on its back, that mescal comes from.

My disappointment in mescal did not originally stem from its smelling like ether or the hideous taste-only that the high is merely alcoholic, not hallucinatory, like mescaline.

*

Lowry's thirst found its form in what he called its “chur­rigueresque" -florid-architecture which paralleled­and satirized-his book's "overloaded style." He was driven to anthropomorphize Mexico's "tall exotic plants ... perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, stag­gering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to main­tain some final attitude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity. . . ."

In Mexico, Lowry found the landscape and culture mirrored his aesthetic concerns. His practice is congruent with this culture where everything stands for something else­where the full moon is the lopped head of a goddess. Lowry interpreted events in his life as signs and por­tents and wanted them to assume symbolic significance in his work, like the shifting shapes of the volcanoes that reveal the mind's cliffs and falls.

Popocatepetl loomed, pyramidal, to their right, one side beautifully curved as a woman's breast, the other precipitous, jagged, ferocious. Cloud drifts were massing again, high-piled, behind it. Ixtaccihautl appeared . . .
Even the serpentine ravine where the Consul is hurled to a "dingy" death was waiting for Lowry in the "real" Cuernavaca.
*

Spain did not transplant to Mexico. And Indian Mexico lies like a ruin under Spanish architecture.
Ruin as final form.

All that remains of the sacred is the silence.

The value of a ruin is inseparable from how much grandeur it has lost. How pure and fabulous the projections of lost magnificence! Loss is somehow at the heart of it, loss of what was never possessed except communally

*

I take as germane to current aesthetic practice Godard's statement that his films have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that orde .

*

Strange as it may seem now, Lowry was always in danger of being compared to writers as different as Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory "takes place" in Mexico and Greene's whisky priest is not so far re­moved from Lowry's drunken Consul) and Charles Jackson (whose Lost Weekend Lowry nicknamed The Drunkard's Rigadoon).



Archibald MacLeish made a stab at a verse epic about the conquest, but I can't see that his tepid Conquista­dor ("This is Cortes that took the famous land") is anywhere within range of the tension Crane wanted to explore.

*

Once in Mexico, Crane knew he could not escape his demons. He'd ingested, metaphorically, the worm, in­ternalized the other, the criticism of The Bridge by his onetime friends and supporters (by then young old men) Yvor Winters and Allen Tate who took Crane to task for his Whitmanian optimism, his-in Tate's words­romantic "rejection of a rational and qualitative will." Tate's "will" of intentions is a far cry from that wild conflux of energy and desire that altered the course of Western philosophy. Tate may have felt betrayed when Crane, the potential hero of the New Criticism, had blasted open the poem as self-contained object.

Crane was an optimist but not a shallow one: his opti­mism had nothing to do with an idealistic notion of history-it came from his ecstatic core. He sought an undivided wholeness. And drink helped him envision "new thresholds, new anatomies!" Ecstasy was the only solution he would entertain. He warred against the fallibility that might have been his own "lever of transcendence." He acted as if he owned his suffering and he refused to scrutinize it.

Paradoxically, Crane might have listened less to Whitman's vision and learned more from how Whitman expanded the self, his liberating and fictitious trope of the cos­mic "!." Instead of plotting a grandiose epic, 'he might have paid attention to "the world dimensional," which he saw, in a Blakean sense, through, not merely with, his eyes.

Crane was never one to play his cards close to his chest. He once began a letter to Yvor Winters: "You need a good drubbing for all your talk about the whole man." He must have sensed the finality of his estrangement from Tate when he adopted a somewhat formal tone in a late letter to him: "The fact that you posit the Bridge at the end of a tradition of romanticism may prove to have been an accurate prophecy, but I don't yet feel that such a statement can be taken as a fore­gone conclusion. A great deal of romanticism may persist­of the sort that deserve serious consideration, I mean."

And now he recognized that his connection to God was broken, that his image of a continuous span of generations in resounding harmony was a fantasy, broken, like his sundered parentage, like the broken tower, like the tragic and abrupt breaking of Indian Mexico, when so many secrets were lost, or went underground.

The history of the conquest is a history that cannot be healed.

To write his verse epic he would have had to recon­cile Mexican history and heal the quaking rift between the Spanish and the Aztec, the Catholic and the pa­gan, given his temperament and design. This could not be done. A broken tower is the perfect expression of this rift-as well as of themes indigenous to Crane. "The Broken Tower" is an apter image of Crane's in­ner life than The Bridge which Crane willed into trium­phal completion.

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals ... And I, their sexton slave!

In a sense, Crane's Mexican project was doomed because he planned it in advance. And so it was with immense sadness that I read of Crane's desire to write the history of the conquest in verse because the project put him at a remove from his own life, while his letters from Mexico are steeped in the spirit of the place. They show how intensely Crane, always the symbolist in his poems, was present in everyday life--and a creature of enthusiasms.

I rushed from the bar where I was drinking tequila­up the dark corridors and stairways of the church and on to the roof, expecting to be thrown over when I got there, but still too excited to resist .... Can you imagine the strange, strange mixture, the musi­cians standing with their faces toward the high dark cliff surmounted by the temple of the old barbaric god that they were propitiating, and stopping every 15 minutes while the sextons rang out the call of the Cross over the same dark valley!

When the fit was not upon him Crane had a strangely amicable relationship to his environment. And the ef­fect of his poetry is inseparable from its unforced exu­berance, sweetness and charm, as when, in "Repose of Rivers," "the singular nestings in the hills/Where beavers learn stitch and tooth."

"Be reconciled with your world," Williams urged his fellow poets: and, in many ways, Crane was-but he never found a way to consistently bridge his percep­tions, to join the grand and the commonplace, aspira­tion and actuality, in a sort of mystical fusion. Crane's problem was how to recover from that moment of ec­stasy, that moment of pure duration-how to get through the rest of the day or night without seeking to recap­ture that state whose precise nature it is not to be in time.
Crane is the man who rose before dawn to meet the bell ringer; who rode the wild bell ropes before writ­ing:

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day-to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

His metaphysical lines had a root in physical life, in the life of the body, which, Donne reminds us, "makes the minde." That is why when Crane failed to make the imaginative leap he needed, a leap which would have demanded Houdini-like mental resources, his next leap was from the prow of the Orizaba into the sea, which welcomed him, where he could be whole again. He'd already noted in "Voyages" that "The bottom of the sea is cruel." He'd already written his underwater epitaph in "At Melville's Tomb":

The dice of drowned men's bones bequeath
An embassy .

Crane set his acoustical register at the highest pitch, as in the layered sonics in the opening passage of "The Harbor Dawn":

Insistently through sleep-a tide of voices
­They meet you listening midway in your dream,
The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises:
Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog horns ... signals dispersed in veils.

And when a truck will lumber past the wharves
As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck;
Or a drunken stevedor's howl and thud below
Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow.

But where could Crane go from this exhausted gor­geousness, this plenitude of impressions? Crane ideal­ized poetry. He resisted taking the next step into fur­ther impuri ty. He denied himself access to the errors that might have comprised the work. The highest note is not the only note (any more than we would like to listen to an opera in which only a coloratura soprano sings), and Crane had the heart and mind to expand, to harden and see the world through a crueler eye, without sacrificing the rising swell of the ecstasy he strove to recapture as in "Voyages":

––And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moon ward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

*

Bind us in time, 0 Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise .
*

Lowry was a novelist in search of a new form and he saw man-as in his letters he frequently quoted Ortega y Gasset saying-as like a novelist, making up his life as he goes along, trying to find his vocation.
Lowry, in adopting the Flaubertian ideal of language, applied it to the writing of essentially romantic works. But Lowry had a special problem. He was a novelist who, as he admitted, could not create characters apart from himself, one who had no access to the idea of other people. His was an inward gaze.

His fatal defect as a novelist was that he was only interested, finally, in himself. Everyone in Under the Volcano is another facet of the Consul's personality. By creating a character with whom he didn't share any external occupational hazards, Lowry adapted the for­mal principles of the "objective" novel, and then put himself, in the guise of the romantic figure of the Consul (or later, Sigbjern Wilderness), at the center of the novel.

(It is as though Flaubert had tried to write a bildungsroman in which the author would "identify" with a "positive hero": the artist in him would have been at war with the lyricism of his work-in-progress.)

*

But writing Under the Volcano closed the door to Lowry for future work that had the possibility within itself to be completed within a finite stretch of time. In the ten years in which he lived after the publication of Under the Volcano he wrote voluminously and finished (much less published) almost nothing. This sense of failure was not appeased by having created a masterpiece be­cause the essential project wasn't working. (Lowry's ''blocks'' took the form of loggorhea.) "Do I contradict myself?" I hope so. Because this is dangerous ground. It verges on arrogance to say that in writing Under the Volcano in the way he did, as evidenced in his letters, Lowry cut himself off from his future.

*

Lowry might have taken the success of his marvelous novella, "Through the Panama," with its judicious merger of journal and journey-its carefully delineated voy­age-as a sign that he was onto something; he might have found a form that would have allowed him to write the books he had to write, which would be without some of the strain and forced quality of his unfinished epic attempts. He was even partially sympathetic with an argument in which Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was flawed because there was not enough differ­entiation between Joyce and Daedalus.

In certain passages of Crane's poetry and many of his letters, and in Lowry's prose, especially "Through the Panama," you sense an opening, a manner of expres­sion that seems native, if not natural, to the writer. Yet the writing I'm referring to has little to do really with the aesthetic and the drive behind the modernist masterpieces with which Crane and Lowry were com­peting-the works that set the standard for contempo­rary practice. Both men wrote elaborate descriptions and defenses of their work ("At Melville's Tomb," The Bridge, Under the Volcano), that stand among the great literary letters of all time. In fact, the descriptions in these letters are almost too schematic to be entirely believable: they almost go so far as if to say no one can tell me anything about my work which I haven't put in there. I am aware of the contexts in which they wrote these letters: they were trying to convince patrons and publishers of the unassailable rightness of their works. These letters indicate that the process of writing these works left little to chance. And if you abolish chance you abolish possibility, and the next work, still perco­lating in the unconscious, becomes an endangered species .

*.

"I shall . . . give my brush rein," says Kenko, a 14th century Japanese poet and essayist who worked in a form called the Zuihitsu, (which means-"follow your brush"-). I like to imagine Crane and Lowry taking nourishment and courage from his example, as say, Philip Guston could from Fra Angelico. ''Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth."

*

The writer must create the form anew in order to work in it .

*

"One reaches certain truths," Natalie Sarra ute says,
"but truths that are already known. At a level that's already known. One can describe the Soviet reality in Tolstoy's manner, but one will never manage to penetrate it further than Tolstoy did with the aristo­cratic society that he described. It will remain at the same level of the psyche as Anna Karenina or Prince Bolkonsky if you use the form that Tolsoy used. If you employ the form of Dostoyevsky, you will ar­rive at another level, which will always be Dostoyevsky's level, whatever the society you describe. That's my idea. If you want to penetrate further, you must abandon both of them and go look for something else. Form and content are the same thing. If you take a certain form, you attain a certain content with that form, not any other .... Each time has to find its form. It's the sensation that impels the form" (my emphasis).

*

Because of its relative wholeness, Teotihuacan is the least ruined and least interesting of the ruins I have seen in Mexico. I had no burning desire to go back to it after twenty years but my wife wanted to go and I had nothing better to do, and a restless curiosity im­pelled me. Besides, it would be nice to see it unescorted by a guide and without time constrictions. Years be­fore, I had made the mistake of taking a guide, an impatient man dressed in a black suit as if for a fu­neral, who insisted that we visit the gift shop at the godawful shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, wasting valuable time we could have spent at the pyramids. I saw women crawling on bloody knees toward the shrine­at least they wore scarves in their hair to keep off the sun. And the sun in Mexico is direct and ubiquitous. Everything, even the canary yellow walls of cemeter­ies, reflects the ferocity of the sun.

*

Mexico encourages ecstatic negation. I had the sense, once, at Chichen Itza, that when you reached the top steps of the pyramid you were meant to hurtle into space, into the nowhere-that endless space was the next date on the Aztec calendar. In the Mexican "uni­verse of time" (Paz) there is no duration. The only time is eternal time.

*

I don't need my son's erect painted reptile, the up­sweep of his tail, to remember Mexico, or where we bought it-on a high hill in Oaxaca as the sun still swept across the valley in broad, swift strokes; and the police eyed us as we fondled serapes and beheld well-wrought pottery, and that pinkish glow-Oaxacan­was on the stones: everything was imprisoned in light. I stood looking down the steep street toward the zocalo and up into the hills-past the market's vats of fly­infested pulque, past the barrels of fried pork rind, past the wicker baskets brimful with dark, gnarled, roots and branches, past tatters of the word "Olmec" on crumbling walls, past ragged gates, and scorched, disfigured streets drenched in the smell of garlic and cayenne, past the ordered and chaotic light in the late Rufino Tamayo's small, pristine museum where tor­rents pour down throught the open roof and soak the courtyard. The light curved space-yet there was something sinister and menacing about it too, this lost light, lashing the streets, articulating shadows and creases, as an­other day was coming to an end in Oaxaca.

I tried to imagine what the body of Lowry's work might have been and it is at that moment I am most aware of the lack of a social matrix. His character(s) are al­ways adrift and far from their native land. Lowry, a novelist of the self and of consciousness, would have needed to thicken the broth of The Voyage that Never Ends by attempting to explore his own childhood. His friends talk about how his face clouded over when­ever the subject of his family arose. Childhood may have been too painful for him to reenter, but could it have been any worse than what he afterward endured, and the repercussions of his romance with the bottle?

*

It is difficult to sustain an orotund note, an elevated, hieratic tone, "in the bleak time," when, as Ammons puts it in his nonchalant way in "Doubling the Nerve," you can:

   look for no cooperation
from the birds: crows show up, black blatant
clarions in the gawky branches, to dominate
the rain's dark
They both felt artistically bankrupt, bereft when they died. Crane wrote one of his greatest shorter poems in Mexico but it wasn't what he set out to do. The Con­sul, like Casaubon, is unable to complete his secret work: his definitive tome becomes his tomb. When Lowry quotes-intentionally misquotes-Marlowe's Faustus when Jacques Laruelle, remembering the Consul as he looks into a book of Elizabethan plays, reads: "Then will I headlong
fly into the earth.
Earth, gape! it will not harbor me.

Only Faustus had not quite said that. He looked more closely at the passage. Faustus had said. 'Then will I headlong run into the earth,' and '0, no, it will not-'. That was not so bad. Under the circumstances it was not so bad as to fly." Lowry hacks a few consoling syllables-signifying delay-out of Marlowe's mighty line, and makes the pain more acute than–
Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Gape earth! O no, it will not harbor me.



*

Mexico supplied Crane and Lowry with the symbols they needed, but it did not leave them with a way out. Lowry, in moving from Cuernavaca to Dollartan, Canada, imagined he could substitute a heaven for a hell, cutting himself off, with strange psychic delib­eration, from the purgatory of his past. Where Beckett chose the inevitability of "failure" as the condition of the artist in mid-century and used it (plying contra­diction!) as a goad and challenge to "go on" both Crane and Lowry were condemned to chronicle a Dantean­upward movement of the soul-"toward paradise."

*

I knew that Crane and Lowry were troubled men, but when I was first reading them, when still in my teens, I had no sense that their crises might have had any­thing to do with their lives as artists-I couldn't see through the rosy tints of my esteem for what they had done.

The same is true of my idealization of a couple whom I saw playa variety of classic roles in repertory at the same time I had first discovered Under the Volcano and The Bridge.

Back in Manhattan, looking up from my table at a sidewalk cafe on Broadway, I notice the actor walk by. When I first saw him in the lead role of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, he was almost too pretty for the part of Giovanni, his then sandy hair parted Prince ~aliant style down the middle, but he was very good, and I remember now the scene where he cuts out his sister Annabella's heart and holds it out to the audience-a bloody gory pulpy heart-very real.
Cio.             The glory of my deed
Darkened the mid-day sun, made noon as night.
You came to feast, my lords, with dainty fair:
I came to feast too; but I digged for food
In a much richer mine than gold or stone
Of any value balanced; 'tis a heart,
A heart, my lords, in which mine is entombed:
The actor has since perfected degenerate roles, white trash killers, sinister businessmen, etc. And at this moment I think of him holding out the heart with an Aztec innocence-it is already set within the context of a feast.
Ann. Be not deceived, my brother;
This banquet is an harbinger of death
To you and me; resolve yourself it is,
And be prepared to welcome it.
In other words, in his pre-conquest, "Aztec," phase he played Ford and Shakespeare and Chekhov and Pirandello and when he "grew up," that is, metaphorically speaking, after the conquest, he played villains in mediocre movies and made a lot of money.

It is as if the actor's lines predicted his life. Once he cut out his sister's heart, his heart, "entombed" in it, no longer retained its purity of ambition. His act, in the play, put him in the role of Mexico after the con­quest. Before that Giovanni heartily and willfully vio­lates the incest taboo.

In the mid-nineteen seventies, when I lived in Green­wich Village, I used to see the actor's wife, herself a well-known stage actress, pushing a baby carriage on West 4th Street or in Abington Square Park on Hudson Street from where you could glimpse the river, or having tea, with her baby in tow, at Arnold's Turtle.

She seemed absolutely at home on stage. Her gentle and quiet and understated demeanor placed her at the center of the audience's attention, like the eye of a hurricane.

The play I saw the couple in that year had such a deep effect on my life I had to speak to her. One day I over­took her and the stroller and told her the theater never had such magic for me before or since as when I saw her and her husband in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

"But I hated it," she said. "It was a terrible year, the worst year of my life, I'd never do repertory again. The conditions were terrible, the pay was terrible, we'd no sooner mastered one thing and we were off onto another."

.*.

The conversation caused a rupture in reality for me. I had misjudged everything, I had projected my then 18/19-year-old consciousness and innocence and ex­perience onto her 28/29-year-old consciousness. It had never occurred to me that the circumstance could matter, that the pay (give or take a few hundred a month) could matter when you were performing Shakespeare and Ford and Chekhov and Pirandello to rapt audi­ences. I could never have predicted that the actor would switch physically from being an Adonis to a Magwitch in so short a time, from a perhaps too ethereal pres­ence to an ugly, brutal, distorted one, the quintessen­tial evil scum like those portrayed by Strother Martin in Westerns like The Wild Bunch.
The actress stuck to her guns, performing mainly great classical roles and remained known to few outside that sphere. She did not utter her words in anger. She was a gentle, serene presence, even as she quietly excori­ated her repertory year. I realize now that she was probably in a fury at having been abandoned by her husband. So it was in essence her heart the actor gouged out of her chest in a play written only some 70 years after Cortez arrived in Tenochtitlan.
The actor, Artaud says, is an athlete of the heart.

The actor crosses over the boundary between the liv­ing and the dead.

CRUELTY. Without an element of cruelty at the foundation of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In the state of degeneracy, in which we live, it is through the skin that metaphysics will be made to reenter our minds.

*

From Ford's The Broken Heart:

Armostes:          Quiet
These vain unruly passions, which will render ye
Into a madness.
Orgilus:             Griefs will have their vent.

*

The cutting out of human hearts was also a Provencal practice. Pound deftly adapted the story of Guilhem De Cabestan in Canto IV.

"It is Cabestan's heart in the dish."
"It is Cabestan's heart in the dish."
"No other taste shall change this."
Then the Spanish came and put a stop to Aztec sacri­fices. Yet it is this direct savage reality of the Aztecs and Jacobeans that drew Crane and Lowry to Mexico. But they had it in their mind to become something better.

Both Crane and Lowry tried for Elizabethan grandeur within a decadent Jacobean frame. That is one reason for the strain you feel in their work, a strain that seems to say-if the world were different the work would be dif­ferent. The "fallen world" would not accept the bur­den of their praise-beyond a certain point.

Wer immer strebend sich bemuht, den klSnnen wir erlosen.
Whoever unceasingly strives upward . . . him we can save.
        (Goethe, Faust)
The irony of Lowry's epigraph is that he and Crane, in the verticality of their striving, lost sight of the ad­vantages of being where they were in reality-"in the last bloody ditch where," as Beckett once put it, "there is no choice but to sing."