‘Brother Albert’: Albert Erskine, Malcolm Lowry, and the Editing of Under the Volcano

Abstract

When Malcolm Lowry signed his contract with the American firm of Reynal and Hitchcock to publish his long-gestating second novel Under the Volcano in the spring of 1946, he made contact with an editor who would not only play a critical role in shaping his masterwork but who would go on to be a key literary ally for the rest of his life, the man he would come to refer to in all his correspondence as ‘Brother Albert’.¹ For Albert Russell Erskine, then a staff editor who had been with Reynal and Hitchcock for less than three years, Lowry’s arrival provided an opportunity to work on a text that his New Critical training told him to be a true masterpiece. Focussing on the intense period of work on Under the Volcano’s manuscript between its acceptance by Reynal and Hitchcock in April 1946 and its publication in February 1947, in this essay I seek to answer two questions: firstly, how did Erskine’s approach to literary editing, underpinned as it was by a devotion to textual unity drawn from the American New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks, bring to completion a complex, polyvocal novel that had already taken Lowry more than 10 years to write? Secondly, what can an examination of Erskine’s New Critically informed work with Lowry on Under the Volcano tell us about the practice and impact of literary editing on twentieth-century literature?

On the surface, Erskine and Lowry appeared to be nothing alike. The American Albert Erskine, 34 years old when the two first corresponded in 1946, was the son of respectably middle-class fine jewellers from Memphis, Tennessee, and had fallen in love with literature during his undergraduate studies at Southwestern University in the 1930s. After his time at Southwestern, Erskine abandoned his family’s plans for him to go into the cotton business and headed to Louisiana State University in 1934 to serve as editor and business manager of the Southern Review before moving to New York in 1940 to pursue a career in publishing, first at Doubleday and then from 1943 at Reynal and Hitchcock where he would encounter Malcolm Lowry.²

Lowry, the older of the two men at 37 in 1946, was the black sheep of a wealthy Liverpudlian cotton broker. He worked as a deckhand aboard the tramp steamer Pyrrhus at 17 for six months before suffering a series of personal tragedies and professional setbacks that were to have a lasting impact on him. First, during his time as an undergraduate at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, his close friend Paul Fitte committed suicide, a tragedy which left Lowry with lasting feelings of guilt.³ Second, Lowry’s sense of himself as a writer was badly shaken by accusations of plagiarism levelled at his first novel, Ultramarine (1933), by the more established novelist Burton Rascoe, an experience which gave Lowry life-long insecurities.⁴ Finally, Lowry felt abandoned when his first wife Jan Gabriel divorced him in 1937, an event which was followed by a terrible period of drinking in Mexico. Lowry, who relied on a series of literary allies to recognize when the manuscript of Under the Volcano was finally in a fit state to be sent out to publishers, arrived at Reynal and Hitchcock a fragile and alcoholic writer chronically plagued by doubts over his own talent even as he remained convinced of the quality of his work.

The work with which Lowry confronted Erskine was a long, committedly modernist, and highly experimental text. Under the Volcano follows the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the ruined and alcoholic former British Consul to Mexico resident in the town of Quauhnahuac, located within sight of the twin volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Taking place largely on the Mexican Day of the Dead 1938, Lowry’s novel examines the Consul’s deteriorating mental state following the return to Quauhnahuac of his beloved but seemingly irrevocably estranged wife Yvonne and his brother Hugh. A tragic series of events results in the deaths of not only Geoffrey Firmin, who is shot and thrown into a ravine after an altercation in the bar Farolito, but also that of Yvonne, who is trampled by a horse frightened by the shooting of the Consul. These events are framed as the recollection or imagining of one of the Consul’s closest friends, the French filmmaker Jacques Laruelle, who literally evokes the dead in the novel’s first chapter from his vantage point on the Day of the Dead 1939.

Lowry’s style posed serious editorial challenges. In his introduction to the 1965 edition of Under the Volcano, Stephen Spender directs readers’ attention to a passage early in the novel, written from Laruelle’s perspective, which runs:

Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone then! It was on this bridge the Consul had once suggested to him he make a film about Atlantis. Yes, leaning over just like this, drunk but collected, coherent, a little mad, a little impatient—it was one of those occasions when the Consul had drunk himself sober—he had spoken to him about the spirit of the abyss, the god of storm, “huracán,” that “testified so suggestively to intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic.” Whatever he had meant.⁵

Spender describes this passage as a typical example of Lowry’s treatment of symbolic myth—‘as metaphor, as analogy’—as opposed to the direct invocation employed by other modernists like Pound and Eliot.⁶ It is also, on a sentence level, typical of Lowry’s style: long, complex sentences full of digression and amplification fill the work, interspersed with exclamations as well as reported and remembered speech in several languages and from several speakers. The result is a complex, polyvocal, and polyrhythmic text filled with precise allusions and displaying an exacting use of language. One of Erskine’s chief tasks as Lowry’s editor would be to make sure that these long sentences retained their richness while remaining at least mostly accessible to their readers.

For my consideration of Erskine’s editing, a section which appears a few pages later is equally illustrative. Here, Laruelle’s musings on the fate of the Consul are suddenly interrupted:

M. Laruelle had opened the book of Elizabethan plays at random and for a moment he sat oblivious of his surroundings, gazing at the words that seemed to have the power of carrying his own mind downward into a gulf, as in fulfilment on his own spirit of the threat Marlowe’s Faustus had cast at his despair. Only Faustus had not said quite that. He looked more closely at the passage. Faustus had said: “Then will I headlong run into the earth,” and “O, no, it will not —” That was not so bad. Under the circumstances to run was not so bad as to fly.⁷

As in Spender’s example, mythology is used here as metaphor and analogy—Faustus’s headlong flight into the earth clearly foreshadowing the Consul plummeting to his death at the novel’s climax. However, the passage also shows one of the other major editorial challenges facing Erskine: that of deciding to allow certain mistakes, misreadings, and malapropisms to stand, as it were, stet in the text. Laruelle’s misreading was, in fact, originally Lowry’s own misremembering. It was only after Erskine pointed it out that Lowry decided to keep the misreading and added Laruelle’s own correction of the passage, keeping the symbolic loading and foreshadowing of ‘fly’ while enriching it with the thought that perhaps ‘“under the circumstances to run [rather than fly] was not so bad”’.⁸ There are numerous other examples of this kind of productive mistake-making in Lowry’s work: the mistranslation in another speaker’s stated love for the time when ‘the sun coming down, when all the men began to sing and all the dogs to shark –’ or the repeated motif of the ungrammatical naming of ‘the Virgin for those who have nobody with’ and, perhaps most famously, the mistranslated sign reading, ultimately, ‘¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN? ¿QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!’ which is translated and mistranslated several times over the course of the novel, the ambiguity around which sprang from Lowry’s initial mistranscription.⁹

‘BECOMING LITERATE’: ALBERT ERSKINE AND AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM

Despite his personal commitment to grammatical convention and a meticulous approach to line-editing, Erskine’s acceptance of the purposeful errors in Lowry’s work can be explained by his training in a particularly American form of New Criticism. Joseph Blotner points to the significance of Erskine’s encounter with one of the founders of American New Criticism, the novelist and critic Robert Penn Warren, at Southwestern in 1929. Initially bonding over a mutual love of chess, Erskine and Warren became close friends, with Erskine later reflecting that he ‘became literate with [Warren]’.¹⁰ Through Warren, Erskine also met other founders of American New Criticism, including Cleanth Brooks, who became one of his lifelong friends. Erskine also got his break into literary editing through Warren. In 1934, the then-president of Louisiana State University, James Monroe Smith, commissioned Warren as the first editor of the newly formed Southern Review. When asked if he had someone in mind as a business manager, Warren had no hesitation in bringing in Erskine. Initially hired to handle the financial side of the operation, when copy started coming in Erskine increasingly adopted a literary role, choosing and editing submissions for the first issue, published in 1935.

The kind of literacy that Erskine gained from Warren and Brooks informed not only his ideas of good literature but also his approach to editing. Joseph North has written incisively about the differences between the American and British forms of New Criticism, and especially the differences between New Criticism as practiced by the British founder I. A. Richards and that practiced by the influential American critics John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks. North draws particular attention to the fact that although the American ‘New Critics happily took up many of Richards’s practical innovations and made them into core components of literary study in the United States […] they did so in a way that split them off from their theoretical foundations in an incipiently materialist aesthetics’, due in part to the Americans’ suspicion of Richards’s use of psychological concepts when examining how literature worked on its readers.¹¹ The result of this shift in emphasis, North argues, was that for the American New Critics, ‘[f]rom this point onwards, “aesthetic value” was to be thought of as residing, not in anything the text could be used to achieve in the mind of the reader, but somehow solely in the text itself’, marking a shift of emphasis away from Richards’s interest in readerly responses to texts.¹²

North’s point can clearly be seen in New Critical writing from the era of Erskine’s literary training. John Crowe Ransom, in his work The New Criticism (1941), argues against what he sees as the ‘errors of [Richards’s] theory’, and particularly ‘the idea of using psychological affective vocabulary in the hope of making a literary judgement in terms of the feelings, emotions, and attitudes of poems instead of in terms of their objects’.¹³ Ransom’s statement neatly encapsulates both American New Criticism’s resistance to Richards’s materialist and psychological understanding of the effects of literature on its readers and the core of what the American critics saw themselves as attempting to achieve: privileging the text above all else.

Similar sentiments can be seen in Cleanth Brooks’s work. Reflecting on Richards’s influence, Brooks wrote that, despite Richards’s many insights, it was his ‘psychological machinery that got in the way for me and for many other theorists’.¹⁴ Brooks’s objection runs entirely contrary to Richards’s claim that ‘a book is a machine to think with’ and his key argument that ‘criticism […] is the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them’ rather than between texts.¹⁵ Put another way, where Richards was interested in evaluating what a text did to and in the mind of a reader, what Ransom, Brooks, and other American New Critics were interested in was, instead, a method of ranking one text against another.

Brooks is clear about this hierarchical use of New Criticism. Following his dismissal of Richards’s ‘psychological machinery’ he writes that the ‘critical concept of Richards’s that appealed particularly to me was his notion of tension in poetry’ and especially what he read as a:

distinction between what [Richards] called the poetry of exclusion and the finer and more demanding poetry of […] inclusion. In the first type the poet wins his unity by excluding elements that are disparate and recalcitrant; in the second type he is able to secure unity without having to leave such elements out of his poem.¹⁶

To Brooks, this was the kind of evaluative hierarchy for which he and the other American New Critics had been searching—a method by which they could justify setting up or maintaining certain hierarchies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature in ways that relied on what looked like external, objective criteria rather than individual judgements of taste.

Brooks elaborates on his perspective in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947). Here Brooks argues that the ‘net effect’ of Richards’s work ‘has been to emphasize the need for a more careful reader of poetry and regard for poetry as an organic thing’.¹⁷ It would be the work that rewarded this kind of close, careful, and repeated reading that Brooks’s New Criticism would seek to privilege, and in particular the ability of a text to combine many different strands, voices, and ideas—or ‘tensions’, as Brooks has it—into a governing unity. Brooks argues that this ‘unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony’.¹⁸ In particular, Brooks sought to privilege work that achieved what he considered the ‘characteristic unity of a poem’, one which brought its disparate materials together into a ‘hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude’ shown in its use of form, motif, and symbol.¹⁹ As he would reflect later, what Brooks and the other American New Critics were attempting to do was ‘to set up a kind of scale: at the bottom, poems that relied heavily on the principle of exclusion, left out too much of human experience, and so were thin and oversimple. […] Toward the top of the scale were poems that used successfully a high degree of inclusion’—the kind of work, in other words, that rewarded the sort of unpacking that repeated close reading demanded.²⁰ Seeing this as common ground, Brooks felt able to claim that he and Richards ‘were still in basic agreement in holding that the greatest and most enduring poetry, including tragic poetry, was poetry that manifested to a high degree Coleridge’s synthesizing imagination’, that is to say, the best poetry was that which brought together the widest range of ideas, voices, and subject matter into a coherent unity.²¹

The impact of this critical training for Erskine’s editorial practice as he sought to apply Brooks’s and Ransom’s ideas on the analysis of poetry to the production of prose was an internalizing of Brooks’s privileging of those texts that bring together the widest range of strands, voices, tensions and ideas within their ‘governing attitude’ through a unity of form, motif, and symbol. Erskine’s excitement about Under the Volcano can therefore be partly explained by his immersion in the American New Criticism of Warren and Brooks. Filled as it is with all manner of voices, allusions, symbols, as well as all sorts of extra-textual artefacts, Lowry’s novel presented Erskine with the best example of Brooks’s ‘high degree of inclusion’ he had yet encountered in his career, even as it strained against the unity of its form when it arrived on Erskine’s desk in 1946.

INTO THE INFERNO: THE EDITING OF UNDER THE VOLCANO

At this point, I should note that the full history of the writing and re-writing of Lowry’s Under the Volcano prior to Erskine’s involvement with the project has been reconstructed in much more depth elsewhere than I could hope to cover here.²² What I am thinking of as the ‘pre-history’ of Under the Volcano—that period of time between the rejection of Lowry’s first version of the manuscript in 1940 by a host of publishers (including Harcourt, Brace; Duell, Sloane and Pearce; and even Lowry’s ally Whit Burnett at Story Press) and the arrival of the typescript at Erskine’s Reynal and Hitchcock in 1945—is best summed up in Gordon Bowker’s biography of Lowry. There, he states that:

The completion of Under the Volcano was the greatest achievement of Lowry’s life, yet at times various other people collaborated in its writing. [Conrad] Aiken and [Arthur] Calder-Marshall read it and commented on it in its early form, and [Lowry’s first wife] Jan Gabriel was his first model for Yvonne. The more telling involvement of Margerie [Lowry] and [Gerald] Noxon were clearly crucial to its final shape. And yet, even after the book had been sent off, Lowry would probably have been perfectly content to continue revising it.²³

For my work here, the key point from Bowker’s account is that by the time Lowry sent his revised version of Under the Volcano to the literary agent Harold Matson for forwarding to his British publishers Jonathan Cape and his prospective American publisher Reynal and Hitchcock, he had already revised his manuscript over many years and with the help of a range of trusted literary allies.

Indeed, I would argue, it was this long gestation and the backing of so many supporters that gave the otherwise habitually self-doubting Lowry the confidence required to send a letter defending Under the Volcano to Jonathan Cape in early 1946.²⁴ The background to this well-known letter is significant. In November 1945, Harold Matson sent the manuscript of Under the Volcano to Jonathan Cape, who had published Ultramarine in 1933. Lowry and his second wife Margerie then left the squatter’s shack in Dollarton, British Columbia, that they had inhabited since 1939 for a holiday in Mexico, where they rented the same house in Cuernavaca that Lowry turned into Laruelle’s home in Quauhnahuac. It was there, on New Year’s Eve 1945, that Lowry received a reader’s report from William Plomer at Cape that, as Sherrill Grace reports, ‘critized the lack of action, the weak character drawing, the initial “tedium” and several other features of the text’.²⁵ Initially devastated, Lowry responded on 2 January 1946 with a letter running to more than 22 pages. Written very much in a style that recalls Under the Volcano itself, Lowry begins by arguing that Cape’s ‘reader […] could not have been […] as sympathetic’ as Cape claimed them to be, before moving to defend Under the Volcano chapter-by-chapter and almost line-by-line. For my purposes, the most significant claim comes at the end of the letter, where Lowry claims that:

the book was so designed, counterdesigned, and interwelded that it could be read an indefinite number of times and still not have yielded up all its meanings or its drama or its poetry; and it is upon this fact that I base my hope in it, and in the hope that, with all its faults, and now with all the redundancies of my letter, I have offered it to you.²⁶

The central point of the letter is that Lowry felt he was in full control of the novel’s form, its range of voices, references, and appropriations—that everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. Cape was not wrong in suggesting that changes needed to be made to Lowry’s text—so did Lowry’s American publishers—but it was the terms of Cape’s report, which was too forceful in demanding rather than suggesting changes, that threatened Lowry’s feeling of ownership over the text he had laboured to create. The challenge for Albert Erskine, therefore, was to find a way to suggest the changes that he felt Lowry’s text required in order to bring its disparate voices and tensions into a coherent unity without robbing Lowry of this sense of authority.

This sense of control over his text was for Lowry one of the most important, and the most fragile, aspects of his identity as an author. As other critics of Lowry’s work, most notably Patrick A McCarthy, have pointed out, ‘Lowry resembled Yeats [and other late Romantics] in his concern with the complex ways in which poems and fictions both reflect, and in turn shape, their creators’ identities’.²⁷ Lowry was compelled to try to make sense of the world around him by reinterpreting it through his art—to ‘read the world’, as McCarthy has it.²⁸ However, this compulsion was always accompanied by an anxiety that this reading would engender an endless ‘multitude of meaning’ that would threaten the very sense-making function of art through incoherence, resulting in a degeneration of a clear-sighted reinterpretation of the real world into a paranoid alternative world of his own creation. McCarthy argues that Lowry ‘could never decide whether we create, or merely apprehend, the reality we find about us: analogy might be a sign of our connection to the universe, as Lowry hoped, or of paranoia, as he feared’.²⁹ Essentially, for Lowry, world, text, and self were intricately, potentially inextricably, intertwined, leading to a fear, in the absence of full control over the text that he made out of the world, of his life being subsumed into an ever-expanding web of meaning of his own devising. Lowry, ultimately, sought someone to help him rein in this endlessly expanding web of meaning, reading, and interpretation. What Lowry needed, in other words, was an editor.

Gordon Bowker makes a similar point, writing that authorship for Lowry ‘became the very means whereby he struggled to maintain a stable and coherent sense of himself’.³⁰ Sue Vice also claims that ‘just such a lack of distinction between life and art was [Lowry’s] besetting fear’.³¹ Recent Lowry scholarship has continued to explore such fears with, for example, Christopher Madden writing that despite ‘The dangers for literary criticism of all too easily conflating the bio-social reality of an author’s life with his poetics […] it is not only possible but patently obvious that Lowry transferred his lifelong fear of conflagration […amongst other fears] to his narrative poetics’ as just one example of the closeness of Lowry’s life and work.³²

This difference of approach, with Erskine on the one hand offering an understanding of the text as whole and complete unto itself, and Lowry on the other struggling with an ever-evolving text that threatened to consume the life that produced it, would seem to set the two men at odds. However, Erskine’s training produced an approach that allowed a text that threatened to overwhelm Lowry to be reined in. It was precisely Erskine’s faith in the ability of a work—if sufficiently well-wrought—to bring together its disparate voices, threads of meaning, symbol and, ultimately, experience within a textual unity that would so suit him to the task of bringing into being the best possible version of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a task that was as much about stopping Lowry from writing (and re-writing) as it was about getting him to write. As McCarthy argues, with all of its complications and its intricate and sometimes impossible ties to his own life:

Lowry’s fiction becomes a critique of the modernist enterprise, demonstrating how the modernists’ emphasis on organic form and intricate design, as well as their expansion of linguistic and symbolic meaning, poses a serious problem for writers who, like Lowry, have difficulty in maintaining a safe distance from their works. Lowry attained that distance only rarely, and through great sacrifice.³³

Erskine, for Lowry, became a critical component of attaining that ‘safe distance’ from his text, and his editorial presence and New Critical training provided a crucial way of mitigating the sacrifices that this distancing demanded of Lowry.

In fact, Lowry’s difficulties with conceiving of a text as ‘finished’ went even further than Erskine might have imagined. As Patrick A McCarthy explores, ‘in his 1951 “Work in Progress” statement, written four years after publication of Under The Volcano, Lowry still referred to the Volcano as “a more or less finished novel, that has already been published, but which is a cub that can still stand at a little further licking”’.³⁴ As McCarthy explains, ‘[t]he purpose of further divisions [within Under the Volcano] would have been to integrate the novel into the sequence of The Voyage That Never Ends […] in the guise of The Valley of the Shadow of Death by Sigbjørn Wilderness’.³⁵The Voyage That Never Ends was to be the great design that connected all of Lowry’s work together, with Under the Volcano at its heart, a design in which, as Sherrill Grace explores, everything ‘connects or corresponds to form a highly significant whole’.³⁶ Lowry struggled for the rest of his life to bring this grand design into being. It is not clear what Erskine made of the suggestion to reopen the text of Under the Volcano over which both men had laboured so intensively, though his later work ironing out inconsistencies in the work of William Faulkner suggests that he might not have been opposed to the idea of revisiting ‘finished’ texts.³⁷ What is clear from an examination of Erskine’s work on the novel, however, is that what he helped Lowry produce was the best and most unified version of Under the Volcano that could be achieved in 1947, a text that would not have been possible without his editorial guidance.

Erskine’s determination to work toward a productive unity of text explains why, given his furious response to Cape’s reader, Lowry answered Erskine’s first editorial letter, sent to him on 14 June 1946, surprisingly positively.³⁸ Erskine began by saying that ‘[b]y now, nearly all of us here have read “Under the Volcano”, and our admiration for it is beyond expression’ and assured Lowry of his efforts to pass this enthusiasm on to his ‘salespeople’.³⁹ Erskine then went on to respectfully approach the issue of his notes: ‘I have been able, since my first reading of the manuscript, to read it through again more carefully and to make a few notes which I shall enclose with this letter. Some of them are trivial matters, and some of more importance; but I shall lump them all together in the order in which they occur’.⁴⁰ Erskine attached these notes as separate sheets in a manner that would come to characterize his editorial technique, keeping them separate from the body of the letter.

Typical of Erskine’s queries was his question about whether, when introducing the sign pointing to the town in Chapter I, there was ‘anything gained by printing QUAUHNAHUAC with a border around it? Or rather, is enough gained to offset the appearance of eccentricity it will give?’⁴¹ Equally typical was the suggestion ‘to cut the parenthesis explaining the use of “J’adoube”’, which had originally appeared in in Chapter V in the middle of a long conversation the Consul has with his neighbour Mr Quincey. The Consul, having already consumed most of a bottle of mescal, looks down and ‘discovered his open fly’, prompting him to fasten it while borrowing the chess term for adjusting a piece without moving it.⁴² Erskine suggested cutting the original parenthetical explanation of ‘j’adoube’ for the simple reason that Lowry made ‘many allusions more esoteric than this without explaining them (and rightly so)’ meaning that ‘it looks rather odd to go into detail about this one’, not to mention the break in the flow, and therefore unity, of the text that might result from this kind of authorial editorializing.⁴³

Lowry’s long sentences, a key feature of his style, were also picked over by Erskine. In the version Erskine worked on, once such sentence from Chapter VI read:

Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, but the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens.⁴⁴

Erskine explained that he had ‘been unable to work out the syntax’ of this sentence despite several passes. This sentence is significant, as it forms the key part of Hugh’s memories of his time at Cambridge University. The sequence is one of the earliest and most extensive insights readers get into Hugh’s mind and the guilt about a past life he feels he has wasted, making it a crucial moment of character and world building within the unity not just of Hugh’s character but the world of the text itself. It was an important sentence for Lowry to get right, and so attracted particular attention from his editor.

Erskine concluded his covering letter with two more personal and conciliatory notes, writing that ‘[w]hat I wish to make entirely clear before you read these notes is that they are only tentative in nature, that I should be quite willing to set up and print the manuscript as its stands (and will do so if you prefer)’.⁴⁵ Erskine also told Lowry that he had ‘asked Mr [Harold] Matson to procure a copy of “Ultramarine”, which [he was] extremely anxious to read’.⁴⁶ Even as he suggested revisions, Erskine’s tone was respectful of Lowry’s talent and his control over his text, an impression confirmed by his willingness to set up the manuscript as it stood, and his interest in reading Lowry’s earlier work.

Lowry began his reply, sent on the 22 June 1946, to this first piece of editorial correspondence by thanking Erskine for his letter and the ‘more than heartening words’ it contained, before assuring his new editor that he was ‘replying as quickly as I can’ with responses to his queries.⁴⁷ Unexpectedly, Lowry acquiesced to many of Erskine’s suggestions, offering that ‘[i]f nothing is gained by the border around Quauhnahuac […] then I suggest you drop it down to a separate line without the rules around it, just as you say’.⁴⁸ However, he does then go on to detail the significance of the name and to argue for the ‘universalising’ impact of having the name outlined, which would ‘relat[e] it to any wayside station anywhere’, a point that, ultimately, Erskine would concede.⁴⁹ Other points, like the removal of the explanatory parenthesis after ‘J’adoube’, Lowry simply agreed to, seemingly relieved to have received editorial permission.

On the long section beginning ‘Cambridge!’ from Chapter VI Lowry was more expansive, telling Erskine that:

[p]ossibly you have ‘but the strange dream…’ etc. instead of [the correct] ‘than’. This would be caused by my having written originally: ‘Not (of) the loud mosaic of etc…but the strange dream, etc.’ And the ‘but’ has survived when it should be ‘than’. The ‘of’ before ‘loud mosaic’ is cut out in either case to avoid Flaubert’s crime of two ‘ofs’ in one clause: but if it is too obscure perhaps we should reinstate it

Lowry’s explanation and solution seem complex but lead us, via the reinstatement of the previously eliminated second ‘of’ before ‘loud mosaic’, to the final version of the sentence, in which the formulation ‘Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there […] than the strange dream of some old monk’ does make the sentence slightly easier to parse thanks to the linkages between ‘less of’ and ‘than’.⁵⁰ These may seem like small points—minor corrections united by a desire to clarify and simplify—but, in a novel as complex and tightly controlled as Under the Volcano, Lowry’s engagement with his editor’s concerns and his willingness to take these suggestions on board are remarkable, especially when compared with his response to Cape. Erskine’s close attention to these points, moreover, is further evidence of the value that he placed in securing the unity of Lowry’s work. In order for the text to bring together its disparate strands and voices, according to Erskine’s New Critical training, it had to form a cohesive whole. Flaws in significant sentences which might trouble or interrupt a reader’s engagement with the textual world Lowry was creating could, by shutting the reader out, endanger the unity of form for which Lowry and Erskine were striving. They worked together to repair that unity at the manuscript stage.

SENSE AND TYPOGRAPHY: ERSKINE’S NEW CRITICAL EDITING

Erskine, then, was willing to make concessions to Lowry’s style, but his concern over the unity of the text remained. After agreeing to the restoration of the borders around Quauhnahuac, Erskine wondered at length about ‘how far we can go with letting typography serve the sense’ of the text, because of his concern about ‘where we would ever end? Somewhere Yvor Winters never dreamed of when he talks about the “fallacy of imitative form” and where he means only (I take it) qualities in the prose or verse itself and not the way it is printed’.⁵¹ The quotation that Erskine refers to here comes from Winters’s Primitivism and Decadence (1937), in which Winters develops an argument about ‘The law of literary aesthetics that […] Form is expressive invariably of the state of mind of the author; a state of formlessness is legitimate subject matter for literature, and in fact all subject matter, as such, is relatively formless; but the author must endeavour to give form or meaning to the formless’ through the unity of their art.⁵² Winters, one of the key American New Critics cited by John Crowe Ransom in The New Criticism, here makes arguments in line with Brooks’s earlier comments about the ability of good literature to bring together its disparate voices and threads into a cohesive whole. Winters cautions, however, that that ability is only safeguarded through the unity of the form of the text. If a text comes too closely to resemble its formless subject matter, then it risks itself, too, becoming formless, endangering its ability to unify its subject matter into a cohesive whole. In one of the most overt demonstrations of his New Critical training, Erskine raised a concern over Lowry’s ability to bring the work’s disparate threads into a unified whole with reference to one of the key practitioners of American New Criticism.

For the same reasons, Erskine objected to Lowry’s idea of using different typefaces in his depictions of the tourist material the Consul reads in Chapter X.⁵³ In this sequence, which evokes more than anything else the ‘Ithaca’ chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the drunken Consul is distracted from his bus journey to Parían by a series of tourist information pamphlets advertising the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, whose contents he is compelled to read and which he finds overriding the conversation going on around him.⁵⁴ Running almost 10 pages in the published version of Under the Volcano, the pamphlets take in everything from the hydrology of the area to its colonial history to the schedule of its buses. Interrupted by brief snatches of the conversation going on between Hugh and Yvonne around him, the Consul is only finally roused from his reverie when he makes eye contact with a clearly emotional Yvonne ‘across the table’, at which point he recognizes, for the first time, that ‘there was, as it were, a mist between them’, a clear image for his realization that their estrangement had become, finally, irrevocable.⁵⁵

Originally, Lowry had argued in favour of adopting different typefaces for these sections, much smaller and very different from the body of the rest of the text, marking the intrusion of a new textual voice. Instead, Erskine suggested simply setting ‘the extracts narrower than the body of the text […] and with less leading - just enough to make them look slightly different, to set them slightly apart’.⁵⁶ Erskine justified this suggestion by stating that they ‘aren’t, I’m aware, purely extracts, because you’ve made alterations to convey the nature of [the Consul’s] reading; but I think such a presentation would be the most desirable’.⁵⁷ Erskine’s point is clear: he argues against breaking up the flow of Lowry’s text for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Like Winters before him, Erskine’s faith in the ability of a text to function was inextricably tied to the unity of its form. Break up that form too much and the text’s ability to give unity to its disparate voices and subject matter is damaged. Erskine’s suspicions concerning Lowry’s experiments with graphology therefore become, through an understanding of Erskine’s own critical perspective, not a rejection of experimentalism per se but rather an example of the value that he placed on unity of form. Erskine, citing the New Critical Winters as an authority, argued that the presentation should remain consistent as readers are still inhabiting the Consul’s consciousness, with all the unreliability this brings with it, and that while note should be made of the fact that these are the Consul’s readings of outside texts, the novel’s unity should be preserved by not disturbing its physical makeup too much. In a lengthy explanation of what seems quite a simple question, Erskine was able to meet Lowry on his own terms and to make his arguments in a way that his author would both understand and appreciate, in the process offering a striking instance of New Criticism influencing editorial practice.

‘¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!’: MALCOLM LOWRY’S SPANISH

The most significant question that Erskine asked over the course of his editorial correspondence with Lowry, however, concerned a page that, in manuscript, read: ‘?LE GUSTA ESTA JARDIN? ?QUE ES SUYO? !EVITE QUE HIJOS LOS DESTROYEN!’.⁵⁸ Erskine’s initial question to Lowry about this passage came in his first piece of editorial correspondence, dated 14 June 1946, and concerned where the page was supposed to appear in the text, as it had become wedged between two unrelated pages in Chapter XI of the manuscript in transit, leaving it clearly out of place.⁵⁹ Erskine’s Spanish was not sufficiently sharp for him to notice the grammatical mistakes in Lowry’s phrase, but he recognized its significance and the importance of putting it in the correct place in the manuscript. This sign is one of the most important recurring images in the whole of Under the Volcano. In the final version, it reads ‘¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN? ¿QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!’.⁶⁰ Encountering it for the first time in Chapter V as he surveys ‘the fence that separated his garden from the little new public one beyond that truncated his property’, just before the encounter with his neighbour Mr Quincy, Lowry’s Consul translates it inaccurately as ‘You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!’.⁶¹ Later, in Chapter VIII, Hugh encounters the same sign and offers the correct translation: ‘Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!’.⁶² The differences between the two translations reveal how afraid of being evicted from his tortured Eden the Consul had become and the depths of his paranoia. The sign appears one final time, alone and untranslated, at the very end of Under the Volcano, immediately following Lowry’s depiction of the Consul’s fatal plunge into the ravine outside the Farolito bar, leaving the sign as the final looming image of the text.⁶³ Despite its clear significance, Lowry’s original version included several errors, making it less meaningful in Spanish than Lowry might have intended, threatening precisely the unity that Erskine and Lowry were seeking to protect.⁶⁴

Lowry responded to Erskine’s query with a three-page note. He first clarified the importance of the sign appearing ‘at the end of chapter XII, on a separate page, at the very end of the book, in fact’.⁶⁵ He then goes on to give the story of the origin of the sign, stating that ‘It is not quite correct and since I haven’t yet puzzled out what I finally ought to do about it perhaps you can give me some advice as it is important’.⁶⁶ In particular, he asks Erskine ‘[w]hether later the Consul should see it (in V) in its correct form’ and that if he did so, Lowry would still ‘be right to imply that he […] translates it wrongly to himself, for most certainly he should see the eviction in it’.⁶⁷ Lowry also suggests that ‘[p]ossibly somewhere else in the book, possibly in VIII, Hugh should see it in the correct form and translate it properly’, drawing attention to the Consul’s mistake and its significance.⁶⁸

Responding to Lowry’s explanation, Erskine insisted in his next letter that ‘it is essential that someone go through and pull out and check all the Spanish (and German) because I am beginning to find things you are not noting in your notes’.⁶⁹ Erskine argued that he did not ‘see any advantage to errors in the Spanish, unless they are significant errors’ that is to say, ‘errors which bend the meaning to your purposes – and then I think they should be consistent errors’.⁷⁰ The answer he proposed was to make the sign grammatically correct and consistent throughout the novel, but to vary the translations that the Consul and Hugh offer for it. Erskine wrote that ‘since we begin with Le gusta, wouldn’t the error immediately call attention to itself for anyone who knows any Spanish, if este didn’t follow’, undermining the ambiguity the Consul’s mistranslation was meant to provide, as suddenly the sign itself would become suspect rather than the Consul’s translation of it. Erskine argued that the Consul’s error could stand, even if the sign itself was corrected, maintaining that ‘after all, what he thinks it says is the important thing at first, and he is not reading correctly even the incorrect version’.⁷¹

Elsewhere, Erskine allowed Lowry more latitude. In his 22 June letter, Lowry asked whether ‘La Despedida’ can, in fact ‘mean The Parting in the sense that I’ve used it for the name of the picture of the split rock in II’.⁷² In his reply, Erskine noted that ‘[y]our questioning this usage started me off on the wrong foot’ and that he had ‘looked up all the words that mean both leave-taking and splitting apart’ before realizing that ‘a caption that means farewell, leave taking etc., and does not mean the other [literal splitting apart] – that is the right word. Otherwise there is no metaphor’.⁷³ Erskine concluded that ‘La Despedida seems right to me, and if it has never in this world been used under the picture of a broken rock, what does that matter?’⁷⁴

The assumptions that Erskine was working under when dealing with Lowry’s Spanish further suggest the impact of his New Critical training. His privileging of the text itself, and of Lowry’s and his characters’ interpretations of the world, is what allowed him to assert the sustainability of the Consul’s incorrect translation of the corrected sign. Erskine’s insistence on the sign itself being correct is a good example of the kind of ‘safe distance’ from his text that Erskine helped Lowry achieve. Where Lowry was tempted to see the world itself as suspect, a paranoia that threatened the form of his text, Erskine was prepared to allow the world to remain reliable, while rendering the Consul’s interpretations of that world unreliable, making the whole section a good example of Winters’s faith in the ability of good literature to bring form to the formless. Moreover, it was Erskine’s ability to justify his choices both aesthetically and philosophically that gave Lowry the confidence to allow Erskine to correct the actual Spanish in his text, but not the characters’ translations of that Spanish. In that vein, Erskine successfully argued for adding accents to ‘Parián and Tomalín’.⁷⁵ As Erskine pointed out, without these accents (absent in Lowry’s earlier manuscripts), ‘we’d say Pa-ree-an and To-mah-lin’, while with them, the pronunciation shifts to ‘Parian and Tomaleen’, which Erskine’s Spanish expert assured him would be more in keeping with real Spanish place names.⁷⁶ Despite this argument, Erskine told Lowry that he would be content to change them back ‘if you have some reason for wanting them otherwise’, inviting Lowry to respond ‘saying accents ok, or off with the accents, or whatever occurs to you’. Again, Erskine took care to reassure Lowry that the novelist remained in ultimate control of his work.⁷⁷

A PARÍAN: SAFEGUARDING THE END OF THE VOLCANO

One final battleground lay ahead. In a letter sent late in the editing process, Lowry vehemently objected—one of the few occasions on which he did so—to a copyeditor’s suggestion that the pointing hand indicating the route ‘A Parían’ in Chapter XI be removed.⁷⁸ It is immediately after seeing and following this sign, and therefore committing once again to return to Parían and the Consul, that Yvonne is suddenly and fatally trampled by the horse we later discover was startled by the same gunshot that kills the Consul, giving the sign significant importance as a symbol. In his letter to Erskine, Lowry launched into a full and passionate defence of the sign: ‘My hand! My hand!’, he insisted, informing Erskine that it is ‘[v]ery important, very original (straight out of Jude the Obscure, in fact)’ due to the importance of its ‘positive sinister emotive effect’.⁷⁹ Hardy’s hand is similarly significant, as it is after following a similar sign (which, as Erskine would later note, reads not ‘“To Christminster.” [as Lowry had originally suggested] But rather “Thither J.F.”’) that Hardy’s tragic hero commits to his similarly doomed journey to Christminster, a reference and, as Spender would have it, ‘analogy’ that Lowry was keen to safeguard.⁸⁰ Erskine took this defence on board and, realizing its significance, made sure to restore the pointing hand before moving to the proof stage.⁸¹

Having secured Lowry’s pointing hand, Erskine next made one of his few direct suggestions for cuts. The editor raised objections to the voices of the ‘sailor and the pimp’ in the Farolito bar of Chapter XII as ‘there is a point here where my identification with the Consul and my sense of oppressiveness upon him of these stupid dull drunk incoherences ceases, and beyond which they begin to oppress me, as reader’.⁸² Coming right at the end of the novel, these voices were designed by Lowry to make the bar, where the Consul was doomed to die, as unfriendly, confusing, and threatening as possible, his drunken confusion and loss of his official papers during a ride on a Ferris wheel leading to his ultimate demise at the hand of the ‘Chief of Rostrums’.⁸³ Any loss of focus or too great a slowing of pace here would undermine the climax of the novel. Erskine concludes his point by citing Coleridge’s ‘wonderfully sharp observation on Wordsworth’s oversuccess in creating dull and stupid characters’, which he was unable to quote but which he felt neatly explained his objection to this section.⁸⁴ The reasoning for this cut is as significant as its content. Erskine advised Lowry to make this cut because here the line between simulating the oppression of the Consul and the oppression of the reader is crossed. In essence, Erskine was arguing that the overextension of the scene threatened to break the reader’s engagement with it through oppression, confusion, or boredom, imperilling the function of Lowry’s scene as one building tension toward its climax, and damaging its ability to bring together its various voices and strands of meaning.

In response to his editor’s queries, Lowry made cuts to the scene in the Farolito. In Lowry’s earlier version these characters had been taking part in ‘some talk going over his head’, snatches of which populate the next few pages of his manuscript. Following Erskine’s lead, Lowry eliminated this crosstalk entirely in favour of having the sailor simply turn away on his stool.⁸⁵ These changes, together with the removal of a series of stage directions of the Consul looking around the bar, streamlined considerably what is, even in its published form, a polyvocal and complex sequence reflecting the Consul’s confused state of mind. Nonetheless, he was receptive to Erskine’s plea to distinguish between the character’s and the novel’s confusion.

BEGINNING THE VOYAGE: SELLING UNDER THE VOLCANO

Following a final round of edits, Erskine passed the galley proofs of Under the Volcano to the Reynal and Hitchcock printers in November 1945. His editorial duties on the text itself complete, Erskine moved to promote Under the Volcano in the best way he knew how: by collecting notices from some of the literary intelligentsia of his day. Erskine sought comments from Alfred Kazin, Stephen Spender, and Conrad Aiken, all of whom wrote admiringly of Lowry’s prose and achievement.⁸⁶ Most significantly, Erskine solicited the opinion of key New Critical voices including Robert Penn Warren, who wrote that ‘Few novelists I know can create an atmosphere and pace a story as well as [Lowry]. And at the same time his book has a solid intellectual substructure’ and praised Lowry’s ‘combination of virtuosity and seriousness’.⁸⁷ Erskine’s selection of advance readers is telling. He clearly sought to position Lowry’s novel as an experimental work of serious importance, but seeking out the approval of New Critical voices specifically reveals his ongoing regard for Warren and other New Critics as literary authorities whose opinion he valued. Furthermore, in Warren’s praise of both Lowry’s virtuosity and ‘intellectual substructure’ Erskine found confirmation of his own impression of Lowry’s work as one able to bring into unity the widest range of voices and strands of meaning.

In his letters Lowry made clear his eagerness to visit New York to help promote Under the Volcano following its publication, as well as to meet face to face an editor who he had yet to encounter in person. This trip, however, revealed some of the limits of Erskine’s understanding of his author. Following the publication of Under the Volcano to the critical fanfare that Erskine had played at least some part in creating, he arranged for the Lowrys to make their long-promised visit to New York. Arriving on a cold and wet 19 February 1947, the couple’s time in New York has become part of Lowry folklore. According to Bowker and most other biographers, Lowry was totally overawed by his success and took to drinking heavily during the trip, resulting in incidents at both the party thrown in his honour by Frank Taylor in Greenwich Village and in the offices of Reynal and Hitchcock itself, where Lowry made a scene, offending Eugene Reynal during their one and only meeting.⁸⁸ The visit was a disaster, Lowry’s temperament rendering him unsuited to the life of a famous author in a pressurized environment—a miscalculation from Erskine, perhaps, but one from which he would definitely learn in the future when dealing not only with Lowry but also with other publicity-averse writers. Despite these difficulties, Erskine was nonetheless able to secure the promise of future work from Lowry, who handed Erskine ‘the manuscript of Lunar Caustic with notes on little bits of pink paper attached, and his copy of Ultramarine, which he handed over reluctantly and with many words of derogation’, setting the scene for the next stage of their relationship.⁸⁹

Over the following years, Lowry and Erskine would go on to exchange dozens of letters, postcards, and hundreds of pages of draft materials. Feeling isolated by Erskine’s move from Reynal and Hitchcock to Random House in 1947—a move which was partly prompted by Eugene Reynal’s delay in ordering a second printing of Under the Volcano—Lowry politicked heavily to follow Erskine and seemed unable to work in his absence, despite being delivered into the very capable hands of the celebrated literary editor Robert Giroux. Lowry eventually got his wish and followed Erskine to Random House in 1952. Erskine worked hard to support Lowry and his literary efforts over the next years, organizing his contract with Random House and sending him additional funds from his own pocket when Lowry’s ran dry. During this period, Erskine became as much Lowry’s friend as his editor, and someone Lowry relied upon not just for opinions on the half-completed work he sent to his editor but also for reassurance and constancy. Erskine’s failure to get any more completed work out of his author (Random House would never publish anything by Lowry) may in part have been to do with this blurring of professional and personal boundaries—with Erskine unwilling or just simply unable to keep Lowry to his deadlines. Nevertheless, Erskine remained Lowry’s committed ally and someone to whom the novelist wrote even from his sickbed. An examination of their working relationship makes it clear that, for both Lowry and Erskine, the task of finishing Under the Volcano had been a monumental one, and one in which Erskine’s faith in Lowry’s project and in Lowry himself played a critical role. This faith came in part from Erskine’s training in an American New Criticism which gave him the ability to support Lowry in finding the unity in a complex, polyvocal text which had eluded his other editors, offering unusually rich insights into the twentieth-century dialogue between literary-critical theory and editorial practice.

Footnotes