Malcolm Lowry
Throughout the fall of 1953, Malcolm Lowry sent his editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, a series of increasingly erratic, digressive, peculiar (and playful) letters concerning his work-in-progress, tentatively entitled October Ferry to Gabriola. Lowry’s deadline for Random House was November 1st, and his dispatches did little to assuage fears among Random House employees regarding the state of Lowry’s work. Their fears were well-founded: October Ferry to Gabriola would not be published until 1970—when Lowry’s wife, some thirteen years after her husband’s death, prepared the incomplete manuscript for print.
TO ALBERT ERSKINE:
October 31, 1953, Dollarton
Castle of Otranto
Halloween
Clocks striking midnight
Enter Gower Ghosts & others
Tucket within & a flourish of strumpets.
Enter Ariel & Caliban singing in unison:
Ah gotta shake a wicked tail to getto Liverpool!
Dear brother—
Yippee!
—Or maybe that’s an inappropriate remark to make when we’re already running shamelessly overdue: but maybe not so much. All’s a’taunto save that we have our starboard engine snaggled in a wisdom tooth the chief engineer has an ulcerated throat, & the ship itself is running on sulfalanimide. So the main trouble is still typing; there’s more complete than this too, & of course beyond but there’s a snag on the next page (the more so since it is a ‘snag’ literally), so thought this was a good place to break off, as for being sent round Hallowe’en & to arrive over All Souls, with the other batch to follow the beginning of next week. After which there’s still another 50 pages or so to go till I reach my old final draft, which will need some overhauling too when—touch wood—I overhaul it; perhaps you better reserve your judgment in the meanwhile, but I can tell you this, the book gets much better as it goes along—brother, you just wait till that old tide starts a’ coming in, a’ roarin’ & a growlin’ & it does too, a bit:—in the next batch, and then what rugs & jugs & candlelights: & corpses & last judgments & perilous chapels:; I suppose I ought to tell you for your peace of mind that I do get my bloody hapless characters off the bus eventually and on to the ferry. That is to say, though the temptation may be great, I do not avail myself o the priceless opportunity no doubt offered by progress in the meantime since I began the book, of taking the bus on to the ferry itself, where, thus still seated in the dimensions of one element and floated off on the bosom of another—that’s not quite [what] I mean but still, let it pass—they may reach their destination, without having once set their foot on land, or in fact wake up again, or the reader either, or the author come down to terra firma. You will be wondering at the length of this first chapter too—if it is a first chapter & which, if so, threatens to be the longest on record so I will expound thus far the magic of Dr. Lowry’s dialectical-Hegelian-spiritualism-caballistic-Swedenborgianism-conservative-christian-anarchism for ailing paranoiacs: the first chapter (whether visibly such or not) is the base to the triangle or triad (and/or radical having a valence of three):
viz [1]:
As you observe, in this configuration it is difficult for Chap II not to seem to be going back to its starting point,—or both ways at once—& in fact where does III start? And how is it solved? H’m; something that must have muzzled mightier minds than mine—but no more On with the work of those falls! through the weeds!
Love from us both
Malcolm
P.S. Which is meant to illustrate no more than that Chap I might be 180 pages long, Chap II & III each half that length, without its form being over balanced:—to the contrary. Anyhow I’m having a bloody good time writing it now—if you’re having an anxious one reading it—which is more than I could say a year ago, when every page was covered with invocations to St Jude the Saint of the Impossible, & once iit took me 3 months to produce as many readable pages, & even so some of the writing seems slack or matey in places or redundant (though sometimes later it is meant to appear redundant on purpose—as to give the effect of the man caught, washed to & fro in the tides of his mind, unable to escape—) & can stand tightening!
P.P.S. Just received at this moment your very reassuring letter for which many thanks and contents duly noted. And thank you very much . I think it’s better for me to behave behave [sic] as if I were overdue though. It gives the firemen something to think about. I think this letter anticipates some of your anxieties too. Perhaps if I were to tilt the triangle on its side it would be more helpful? Especially if you got out your atlas? [2]
+
NOTES
[1] The diagram is intended to illustrate the (geographical) path of the characters through the novel, beginning at Victoria Island. In Lowry’s original, hand-drawn diagram, the three labels “Chapter I,” “Chapter II” and “Chapter III” are set parallell to the three sides of the triangle—so, the triangle’s base is “Chapter I,” the lefthand side “Chapter II,” and the righthand, “Chapter III.” Also, the original triangle is ticked with arrows: arrows on “Chapter I” and “Chapter II” lines travel counter clockwise, while the righthand “Chapter III” side contains arrows pointing both toward “Chapter II” and “Chapter I.”
[2] In the margin of the letter, Lowry crams a small diagram of a “tilted” triangle, the base of which abuts a scribbled outline of Vancouver Island; to the right of the triangle, he attempts to label (again, based on geographical position) the various islands relevant to the story. We were unable to produce this second triangle here.