The Voyage from Metropolitan Rationalism: Malcolm Lowry's Socialism and In Ballast to the White Sea

The Voyage from Metropolitan Rationalism:Malcolm Lowry's Socialism and In Ballast to the White Sea Mark Crawford Renewed interest in 1930s British fiction, literary criticism, and politics has been spurred not only by the distemper of our own time, but by the broadening and deepening of literary and historical research and the development of new perspectives across national and interdisciplinary boundaries. With respect to Malcolm Lowry, much has been revealed and expanded upon over the past three decades: two volumes of Collected Letters; a major biography by Gordon Bowker; several volumes of diverse Lowry scholarship; and (most notably) the publication of Lowry's "lost novel," In Ballast to the White Sea, in 2014. That he has still not been included in several important recent reconsiderations of the period1 is understandable, given his absence from England between 1933 and 1954, his dearth of interaction with leading English literary figures, and the simple fact that his one canonical work, Under the Volcano, while set in the 1930s, was not published until 1947. The aim of this article is to show how Lowry's modernist and romantic sensibilities evolved in response to the existential crises of capitalism and fascism in the mid-1930s and to the intellectual challenges of Marxism that accompanied them. Focusing on the extant draft of In Ballast, the article shows how Lowry uses his characters to interrogate each other's political and philosophical positions, particularly the limits of Marxist subjectivity, inclining the main protagonist toward an outlook that is sharply distinguished from the economic determinism of the Auden group. Although Lowry's 1930s politics converged in certain respects with the nascent anarchosocialism of Herbert Read and fellow members of what would become the New Romantic movement, they soon became obscured by his decision to abandon In Ballast and to de-emphasize political themes after the war. The rediscovery of the manuscript shows the lasting influence of this period upon Lowry as the confirmation of an organic and spiritual, as opposed to a mechanistic and materialist, view of [End Page 406] the world. George Orwell wryly observed in 1940 that while much "pure art was being thrown overboard" in the middle and late thirties in favour of "some rather ill-defined thing called Communism," the new Marxist movement had done less to cater to popular tastes than their High Modernist predecessors had done, while reasserting the intellectual authority of upper-class Englishmen in the process. For the young Malcolm Lowry, the Marxist critics may have seemed a step forward in their sensitivity to exploitation and their concern to combat fascism, but were more fundamentally a step backwards in their critique of modernism and their downgrading of its exploration of human consciousness. While privileging his own experience and the pursuit of his own identity, Lowry also exemplified modernism's aesthetic of unceasing motion, combined with an unsparing social scrutiny of every context in which he found himself. His voyage, which had begun in Liverpool, his birthplace, "that terrible city whose main street is the ocean," was influenced by mentors both American and Norwegian, by Russian film and literature, and by a formative trip to the Far East; it would lead eventually to both Mexico and Canada, the psychogeographies of which would help him to perfect his own visions of heaven and hell. Lowry's skepticism toward Marxism from the mid-1930s onwards had more in common with Orwell's prescient non-conformity than with the disillusionment of many others, such as Koestler, Kolakowski, Merleau-Ponty, or Hook, that followed revelations about the Show Trials and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Yet Lowry was also very unlike Orwell in expressing an ambivalence rooted more in his personal metaphysical attitude than in his knowledge of history or experience of communism. In one of the few comparisons made between Lowry and Orwell by a leading literary critic, Stephen Spender observes that Lowry's approach went well beyond that of the perceptive and determined loner, to the creative uses of solipsism: The central paradox of Under the Volcano is that it is a novel about action, that is, about action negated. At the centre, there is an impassioned cry that men should attain simplicity...

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