Notorious for a misspent life full of binges, blackouts, and
unimaginable bad luck, Malcolm Lowry managed, against every
odd, to complete and publish two novels, one of them, Under
the Volcano, an indisputable masterpiece. At the time of his
death in 1957, Lowry also left behind a great deal of
uncollected and unpublished writing: stories, novellas,
drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels (Lowry
was a tireless revisiter and reviser—and interrupter—of his
work), long, impassioned, haunting, beautiful letters
overflowing with wordplay and lament, fraught short poems
that display a sozzled off-the-cuff inspiration all Lowry’s
own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various
volumes, all long out of print. Here, in The Voyage That
Never Ends, the poet, translator, and critic Michael Hofmann
has drawn on all this scattered and inaccessible material to
assemble the first book that reflects the full range of
Lowry’s extraordinary and singular achievement.
The result is a revelation. In the letters—acknowledged to
be among modern literature’s greatest—we encounter a
character who was, as contemporaries attested, as
spellbinding and lovable as he was self-destructive and
infuriating. In the late fiction—the long story “Through the
Panama,” sections of unfinished novels such as Dark as the
Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, and the little-known La
Mordida—we discover a writer who is blazing a path into the
unknown and, as he goes, improvising a whole new kind of
writing. Lowry had set out to produce a great novel,
something to top Under the Volcano, a multivolume epic and
intimate tale of purgatorial suffering and ultimate
redemption (called, among other things, “The Voyage That
Never Ends”). That book was never to be. What he produced
instead was an unprecedented and prophetic blend of fact and
fiction, confession and confusion, essay and free play, that
looks forward to the work of writers as different as Norman
Mailer and William Gass, but is like nothing else. Almost in
spite of himself, Lowry succeeded in transforming his
disastrous life into an exhilarating art of disaster. The
Voyage That Never Ends is a new and indispensable entry into
the world of one of the masters of modern literature.
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