Backlisted - Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry - Rerun

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Recorded back in 2017, John and Andy were joined by poet, radio presenter, playwright and genuine tyke Ian McMillan to discuss Malcolm Lowry's 1947 masterwork, Under The Volcano. Also, The Factory of Light by Michael Jacobs, and more Rosemary Tonks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Have it all with BYU on Disney Plus. Hello and welcome to Backlisted. This is another episode from our vault, from our archive. It's an episode that we recorded back in September 2017. And it's on a novel that Andy and I have long admired Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. And we were joined by the great Ian McMillan, famous as a radio presenter in his own right. But also a massive fan of Malcolm Lowry. And this book set in Mexico, it's essentially.

the last day in the life of an English consul set in a small Mexican town under, as the title says, under a huge Mexican volcano. There's a sense of foreboding of his own life. He's a terrible drunk. I mean, this is one of the greatest books ever written about drink and drinking culture and the joys and the perils of drink. one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century and this is our attempt to put that right for those of you who are subscribers because the show's on pause at the moment which is why you're getting reruns

we've got some other exciting things for subscribers that are happening. Nikki, what have we got? Yeah, so we may be on pause new stuff in the main show feed but if you are our patron subscriber, patron.com forward slash backlisted We've got loads of good stuff on there

like new weekly writing from you and Andy, which is amazing. And also audio versions of your weekly writing on both books and music, which is genuinely really, really brilliant. And I'm doing this show where the patrons themselves get to suggest their backlisted books. So they're coming on and being guests.

And we've got the first one is up next week with an absolutely terrific. terrific book that blew our minds. Brilliant book. Are we allowed to say what it is? Yeah, yeah, let's just say it now. It's called Kindergarten, and it's by P.S. Rushfuth, an English writer of the late 20th century, a book that I was vaguely aware of but had never read. Amazing book in a fantastic episode.

So if you want to hear that, go to patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Otherwise, enjoy Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. and we'll be back in a fortnight with some more of our reruns. See you then. My last book I wrote quite a lot about Julian Cope, as you know, who is a great hero of mine. I think a very inspiring figure in terms of the different ways he's gone in his career and the brilliant things that he's done and the crazy stuff that he's done as well.

It was a big life moment for me. You will have seen anyone who follows me on Twitter will have seen my silly beaming face. I've been so happy at being next to, Julian Cope and his wife, Dorian, ever so nice, ever so enthusiastic. And we had a conversation about enthusiasm. And Cope said a really brilliant thing that I want to pass on in the knowledge that this will be listened to by people.

He said the thing is everyone's going on at the moment about how, what a terrible state of the world's in, what a tight spot the world is in at the moment. And that's true. We are in a tight spot. But at the same time, if you're an enthusiast and we, Andy, are enthusiasts. I thought, oh my good. We, you and I do. Yes, we are enthusiasts.

If you're an enthusiast, about music or books or film or whatever you care passionately about, you have ways of getting that out to people that we didn't have 10 years ago. And people want that. So we have to embrace this moment. This is a great moment

because what people need and what we all need is passion for the things that we believe in, the positive things that we believe in, and that we can get out there, that we were never able to get out there in the way that we could do in the old days. So we should seize this moment. I thought, wow, this is so genuinely inspiring. So it's brought me back here to talk about old books,

with the new ideological fervour. And enthusiasm, which is great, of which there will be so much today. Masses, I can feel it. I can feel the coiled up kind of spring of enthusiasm. remained utterly silent throughout this chat. I remember talking to Julian Cope about Tamworth. He thinks Tamworth, because he was from Tamworth. I interviewed him on the verb.

We just said, I said, don't you think Tamworth's a kind of, isn't it a sort of vortex of the strange? He said, yes, it is. We talk forever about Tamworth, and he said, I'm sorry I've got to go. He said, I'd love to stay in gas. Nobody's ever said that to me before. I'd love to stay in gas.

I said, less gas. With which. Shall we start? I feel it incumbent on somebody to take by the scruff of the neck and say, Hello and Welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that brings new life to old books. A rather special episode of the show today, we've managed to fly all the way to Mexico, where you find us in a run-down canteener,

surrounded by three-legged pariah dogs, and fending off the insufferable heat with round after round of mescal. I'm John Mitchinson. And I'm Andy Miller, author of, on this occasion, the appropriately named the year of reading dangerously because there are few books more dangerous to either read or write than our book today Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and joining us on this trip is poet presenter

and after a certain painter Yorkshire's greatest living artist Ian McMillan, hello Ian McMillan, hello thank you so much for asking me to talk about Under the Volcano one of those great books that you talk about and people go under the what? Malcolm who? And it's just so great to be in a room with four people who've heard of him and have read past the first chapter and have seen the film and didn't like it.

And it's just so... I'll talk about that. The film. So, John, before we get on to the main events, what have you been reading on your holiday? Well, the best book I read on my holidays other than Under the Volcano, which I reread in Spain, which wasn't a bad place.

Southern Spain stands in pretty well for Mexico. I read a wonderful book called The Factory of Light. by Michael Jacobs in 2003. Michael Jacobs is a very, very interesting man. He died in 2014, quite young. He was only 62, I think, when he died. One of the foremost kind of scholars and travel writers to deal with Spain, particularly southern Spain,

but also he's written books about the Andes, about travelling the Columbia. He was once kidnapped by the FARC and managed to charm his way out of that. I think he's a really interesting, again, sort of underrated writer because he doesn't do the obvious thing. He doesn't, he did, the book is about moving to Spain

and becoming part of a community, Frieles in Andalusia. But he does it without any of the cliches. He doesn't find an old farmhouse. He doesn't find an old woman next door. He doesn't do it up and he doesn't, you know, try and fail to farm. He's much more knowledgeable and he resists all the cliches.

But it is still a kind of weird and wonderful story about finding this village by chance. and being led there because he was interested in the sort of mystical, there was a mystical sort of tradition of local saints that he became interested in was researching. But they were so overwhelmed by the kind of the, it's not a particularly attractive looking village. It's one of those villages where you wouldn't notice if you drove through it.

But he became fascinated by the community there. And there is an amazing kind of pre-apic, very, very kind of compelling character called El Serena, who is sort of an El Serena. Serene, who is sort of an elderly, he has the world's smallest oil press in his, which he makes the most incredible olive oil, which apparently has massive aphrodisiac properties

and can cure all diseases. I mean, Jacobs, they become kind of friends. And their friendship and how that develops is beautifully done. And he's kind of resistant. He's, you know, he's a scholar. He was an extraordinary man, Jacobs. He was Anthony Blunt's star pupil. And when Blunt was uncovered as an art historian,

and as a spy. He remained loyal to him. So he kind of did in his chances as a sort of academic scholar. But in a way, the world benefits from the fact that he's such a good writer and his knowledge of Spain and culture. He was also, and that's one of the reasons I thought it would be appropriate. He was, you know, Jacobs was well known as a massive man of food, drink, would party all hours and be the first person up in the morning,

always wanting to explore it, but kind of real life force. He's a great friend of the Hay Festival, particularly the ones in in Latin America. So if you're interested in a kind of a different, the experience, you know, we're all kind of fascinated by going in exile, by going and living in another culture and becoming part of another culture and how you do that without being inauthentic

and how you do that without just feeling like another bloody tourist. It was a very good piece on this by Suzanne Moore this week in The Guardian, you know, you are the problem. Then I think, Factory of Light, the brilliant thing that he does is he finds an old cinema and he manages to, with the help of the villagers. They reinvent the factory of life is. They reinvent this cinema and they get the most important film star of the 1940s in Spain

to come and visit and open the cinema. It's fabulous. The final scene of the book is one of the, and it's wonderfully written and full of, if you're interested in Spanish history and Spanish culture, it's a good a place to start. As any published by John Murray in 2003 and I'm sad to say out of print. This being backlisted, I am of course,

obliged to say that Michael Jacobs must have, if he was a pupil of Anthony Blunt, he must have been a contemporary of Anita Bruchness. Anita Bruchner, who was also at one stage a pupil of Bluntz and who also stood by Blunt. And now we'll never know what they, maybe they knew each other, maybe they talked to him. Indeed. That sounds very, very good. Jacobs, when he was growing up, apparently, he was very serious kind of academic household. His father insisted that they only spoke Latin. So his widow, Jackie Ray, I think, still lives in the house in others.

In his sort of late 30s, early 40s, he suddenly discovered this whole Spain unlocked, you know, staying up late, drinking late into the night. And he became, I mean, I think his travel book, his literary travel book to Anderlucia, published by the excellent Palace Athene, is the best single volume guide to Andalusia, I think, out there if anybody's, that is still just clinging by its fingernails to being in print. but a factory of light really really superior travel book I'm just pleased that given that we're doing under the volcano and Mexico there must be some similarity between Mexican and Spanish pronunciation

which you're going to be far better than I am pulling off we shall see Andy and you what have you been reading several things there's a book called The Lucky Ones by Julian Pachico which I'm going to talk about on the next episode good but because we have Ian with us today I want to talk about a different book that I read over the last six weeks or so. I booked today at the British Library, regular listeners to Backlisted, May Recall,

after I read some of the poetry published by Bloodaxe of Rosemary Tonks, which blew me away. I read a couple of the poems out here on Backlisted, and we got an amazing response from listeners, which is fantastic. And rightly so. I mean, wonderful. Yeah. And so I booked today at the British.

British Library to read one of her novels because she wrote half a dozen novels. They're all out print. They go for big sums of money secondhand. And I read one called the Bloater, which I mentioned last time. The Bloater is a novel set in and around the BBC Radiophonic Workshop where Rosemary Tonks collaborated with the composer Delia Darbyshire during the 19th senior in the mid-season. on a setting of RESTEs and you can in fact go to the British Library also and listen to that setting. It's not commercially available but the half hour piece of work of Rosemary Tonks reading this version of Arrestes over Delia Darbyshire's electronic compositions is available there at the British Library to listen to. Anyway so I read this novel called The Bloater and it's fascinating. It really reminded me of something by Bridget Brofie, Brofey who we did on Backlisted about six months

ago. So it's very 60s, it's very of its time. I'm not sure it quite comes off and yet it's full of fantastic little passages of writing. And I've just read a very short one here. This is a paragraph from about halfway through the book with the protagonist who I think we can assume is a, is Rosemary Tonks by any other name. And she's just got a new boyfriend who she's trying not to fall head over heels in love with. And she says, I need new clothes, something in PVC with a visor.

I want to change the shape of my face. It should be absolutely round. Yes, I need a circular chin and a rosebud mouth to cope with Billy and ten hours sleep every night and a complete don't care kit of cigarettes, records, hairdressing appointments, films and so on.

Once I've decided on that, I realise it isn't enough. Even if I can't. cram every hour of the day with phony pleasures, I can't get rid of the smell of Billy's face, or of the authority and care of his arms when they grip me. 2,000 cucumber sandwiches, a Ferrari, a summer, raspberry jelly, ping pong, a naked picnic in long grass, might possibly take my mind off him. One has to admit he knows how to woo.

Oh God, why doesn't he make a few mistakes? He's bound to sooner or later. You bet he's got some dancing routine hidden away, some David in front of the arc caper that will really let him down, and I shall pounce on it without mercy. At all costs, I must go on being spoiled and petted. I need presents.

It's just... It's like a poem. Well, the list, because I remember, was it Rosemary Tonks that Brian Patton did a programme about on Radio 4? When he was rediscovering people. And there's a definite link I think in the list, the listy quality of that is like some of Brian Patton's stuff,

some of Adrian Henry's work. You could probably tell in a time capsule when that was written. And what I liked about it was just the way it did leap out at you and it did feel like it was written for the voice, didn't it? It felt like that. Tonk says or said that she, we won't go again into what happened to her, but when she was writing and when she was speaking about her work. What she was trying to do was be specific to the era,

but also try to say, well, people have been reading Valéne and Rambo and Baudelaire for over 100 years and have learned none of the lessons of those poets, of the derangement of the senses in the urban environment. So what you have are these incredible, as you say, specific lists of PVC visors. Who would want of BBC visor rather than in 1965? And yet these incredible

flashing chains of images to use the lane phrase. It's interesting you say that you feel that novels are bit dated because the poetry, reading the poetry after your fulsome recommendation, I found it incredibly precise

and contemporary. I mean, there were bits, I guess, but it's interesting whether prose I mean, the idea that prose dates quicker than poetry, I don't know. I wonder. Ian, were you familiar with her poetry from, I mean, I have no sense of how well-known she was in like the 70s or 1980s. In the 70s, she was one of those names that you'd see in a magazine.

Yeah. And you think, oh, there's a, there's Rosemary Tongues. But there were so many names, so many writers around at the time, that when she disappeared from the scene, it made no ripple in a way. Because she thought, well, there's not a Rosemary-Tonks, poem in that magazine or in that magazine. And I had totally and utterly forgotten about it until Brian Patton and then Blood Act revived her.

And it just makes you think, as you talk about on this podcast a lot, of those massive cues of writers that are yet to be rediscovered, that have disappeared, that have gone, that had their names in the magazines and names in pamphlets and small books and where are they? And they were good, that's the thing. They haven't disappeared because they were rubbish. That's the thing. Some do disappear because they're not very good,

but a lot of them hang on and she deserves to be revived in a huge way, I think. Well, I hope somebody will, I mean, there may well be issues with the estate and there may be well be issues with copyright and things, but those books totally deserve to be available in print and available for people to read easily, you know. Great.

And now we're back in the room, Malcolm Lowry. Do you want to start the interrogation? So there's so much, so much to say. So Ian, you. You said that you would come in today and make total and perfect sense of under the volcano for us and for all our listeners. Did you? Oh no way, you didn't say that.

So Under the Volcano, how many times have you read Under the Volcano? I'd probably read it once a year since 1977. Because I first came across it when I was a student at North Staffordshire Polytechnic. In fact, I brought along my actual North Staffordshire Polytechnic copy. Because what happened was my mate Dave Thorpe from Newark. he'd live with his mom and dad worked in a factory did his air levels late

went to college and he'd never done anything he's kind of proud of that never done a thing and he went out and he bought in this bookshop in Stafford some books that included under the volcano and I went to his house on Newport Road

and he was sitting there and he went have this it's rubbish he passed it to me have this he said have that it's rubbish and he passed it to me and the first thing you see was the cover that amazing

cover. The fellow with the Tilby hat glugging and you think gosh that's the thing. Meanwhile in the background I've got to say that we were doing this degree called modern studies. I thought modern studies because this is in 1974. I thought modern studies meant we'd be looking at rosemary tongues. We'd be looking at living writers and on the first lecture Dr Daniel Lamont stood up and said you do know there's a difference between modern and contemporary. Oh god there is. It's not rosemary tongues so I think we'll start with the Herman Melville. So I like Herman Melville, but he wasn't contemporary.

So I bought, I got this book, I got it from Dave Thorpe. I sat there. As you can see, this is the copy that was lost for years. It says here, from Mac, May 1978, because I lent it to a girl from Bolton. And then, and she left. We both left. I had another copy, but we both left.

And then 10 years later, she came along to a writing workshop I did. Yeah. In 1988, here, here's your book back. I thought, goodness me. So because, and it's full of strange tequila-induced things. So here, on the inside, cover it says 21212 P-E-P-E-P-E-P. Oh.

You see, but so... Is that your handwriting? It is my handwriting and underneath it there's 2-1-3-213. Very true. 2-1-2-2-2-2-2-2-1-3. And do you have any idea what those things... I think, embarrassingly, they might refer to hand-bell ringing. Because at the time I was a hand-bell ringer, and I was also a church bell ringer.

And as you know, with church bells, with three bells, you can't ring very much. You can only ring 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 3, 1.2. So this has me trying to devise a Malcolm Lowry-esque piece. So I just got all of the book, and it was one of those books where I, at the time, I've been reading, I've been trying to read a lot of modernism. I was defiant with this course. I thought, well, I'm going to read much. So I read things like, I read Ulysses, and I read forgotten writers like Tom Malin.

Remember Tom Malin? His son is Rupert Malin, who was a point, and he was writing big slabs of modernist. prose and I was reading that kind of thing and then I started reading this and at the same time stupidly I think as well as reading about it I read the book but I read about Lowry yeah so I became

involved in the biography of Lowry at the same time just the way that this was his I think he'd had several goes at writing this book and of course he left it on the train and he set fire to it and he did all that and so as a young man from a small town in another small town this became the er text you thought gosh

this is what writers do this is how writers live This is what writers are And also the prose was just astonishing That opening bit Two mountain chains Traverse the Republic Roughly from north to south

Forming between them A number of valleys and plateau Overlooking one of the valleys Which is dominated by two volcanoes Lies 6,000 feet above sea level The town of And of course I couldn't pronounce it I call it in my head

I call it for everything I didn't say the word I was waiting for you to get there in Everybody was But so these days, I call it, I call it, because I don't like to say it. Because if I say it, it makes it, it changes it. Yeah, so at the time I would go,

I just do it, it was like a little like a door closing. Because it is such a gorgeous set of, I mean, consonants, lots of consonants to get all together. And later on in the book, he talks about Waxaca, which is the other place. And he talks about it sounding like a muffled bell. The towns of Waxaca sounds like a muffled bell, which I thought was the same in a sense.

Look on that. I thought it was exactly the same. So I started reading the book, and of course, Jeffrey Furman, the book is not about very much, to be honest. It's about the last 12 hours in the life of the alcoholic, ex-British counseling. Jeffrey Furman. And as they start at the book, they find him in this El Farolito, the Little Latthouse. And he's reading from the post office book,

and he goes, a corpse will be transported by express. And there's a tiny woman who looks a bit like Miss Cranky. Yeah. In the corner thing, that's right. Playing. Fantastic. Dabby Booze. Double those with a chicken.

She is. And you think, I said, John, fan dabby boozy. Very good. Very good. Oh, sorry. Very good, Andy. But imagine reading this as a young man and going,

goodness me, this is what the world should be. This is what writing is. This is somebody who's a bit like me, a kind of hopelessly romantic figure because his wife comes back to see him. His brother-in-law turns up. It just gets, and to be honest with you, I'm not that big a fan of plot.

A plot escapes me. I've written plays where people have gone, that's all right, there's no plot. He can't come in through that door because he's just gone out through that door. And what I like about this book is, in a sense, it's more of a prose poem. Yes, true.

Absolutely, absolutely. It lies on plot. Although, amazingly, I'm always amazed. I read it when I was a student for the first time, and it blew me away then. And it's one of those great things you come back to it. I suppose the third time I've read it, it's even better.

And one of the things you notice, there are little details that you, like the fact that he put, he was wearing Hugh's jacket so that the piece of paper that incriminates him, I don't think we would care about spoilers in this. No. He dies at the end of the book, everybody. He's shot. But just in case you're reading it for plot, we've scuppered that.

Sorry, Matt. But you think actually that's quite plotty, the fact that he's actually thought through the details because you read it for this incredible swirling. I didn't think anybody could write anything as good as you'll he's ever and it was one of those kind of Joyce obsessives as a student and I read Malcolm Lowry and I thought this is even better

in lots of ways this is even better. A little later on I want to talk about Larry's intentions for the book and I'm going to talk a little bit about the letter that he wrote to his publishing but Ian one of the things about Under the Volcano I've read Under the Volcano three times every reading is a preparation for the next reading which is what Lowry intended

but certainly the first reading can be quite challenging I think and I I was looking, of course, I remembered that when you were on Desert Island Discs, you chose a track from Trout Mask Replicer by Captain Beefheart on the Magic Band. And it struck me that there are parallels between Under the Volcano and Trout Mask Replica. For instance, but they are unique. You heard it here first. You heard it here first, folks. There is no other album like Trout Mask Replica.

There is no other book like Under the Volcano. similarly the first listen to trout mask replica any normal human being will go what's going on what's going on but then the more you listen to it it kind of grows fins and it becomes this amazing complex piece of music but the third way in which they are similar to one another is the awful psychic trauma

visited upon all those involved in making the Trout Mask replica and under the volcano know, that Malcolm Lowry effectively destroys himself through the writing of the book, Beefheart famously locks up the members of the Magic Band for six months in a house, making them play the songs over and over and over again. You know, but there's a Lowry, Larry's friends and Lowry's wives and these awful vortex of booze and art together, fueling one another, you know. And we have a little clip here now of Malcolm Lowry's self-penned obituary

followed by one of his friends, Hugh Sykes Davis, one of his contemporaries at Cambridge, reminiscing about Malk, as they called him. Malcolm Lowry, late of the barry, his prose was flowery and often glari. He lived nightly and drank daily and died playing the ukulele. He told me he was doomed, I believed him. But the suffering he had to go through in order to produce the volcano, that's the thing that simply as a human being makes one wonder whether the game's worth the candle. I'd rather have the game and the candle. I've so far managed it, but Malcolm was one of these people, doomed as he said, he had to choose the one or the other.

He chose, he was completely consistent, in a certain sense. he knew what he was about and he chose to live as he did and he produced the volcano. I chose to live in a different way and I didn't produce anything much. Well, that's not true you've produced a long. Well, yes, but I'm still alive.

That's a big difference. He's dead. I think Hugh Sacks Davis is a fantastic point. Yeah, right. He's a great one of the great British surrealist. But what's interesting about Malcolm Lowry's voice is it's not quite what you expect. I wanted him, I've heard his voice a few times,

I want him to have a bit more of a... It's got a boom more, but also it's got to be a bit more ragged round the edges. He's got to be a little bit like... Not a stage drunk, but you've got to be able to hear the voice fading away at the edge. But that was him, yeah. I think you're right when you talk about the difficulty of it.

When I introduce people to it, I say, look, the first chapter is really hard. Please just... If you don't like the first chapter, just go on to the second chapter. I don't think Malcolm Bauer would mind, because the first... I'm not sure about that. Yeah, you would, he would, man.

I've given the book to people They've gone, I can't get past page eight. The aforementioned Dave Thorpe from Newark when I messed up with him in 2006. I said, go on, have another go, Dave, have another go. He rang with it. I had a go. That first chapter was rubber. I said, look, because the first chapter is more difficult.

After the first chapter, it starts to get into more of a trot. So read the first chapter like you might do your warm-ups before you go running, or like you might do your press-ups before your exercising, your proper exercising. Because the first chapter is not easy, to be honest, When he submitted the book to publishers, it was, of course, rejected by most publishers because it was, first of all, too difficult on first reading. But also, I've got a little bit here.

I mentioned earlier, he submitted the book to Jonathan Cape. Jonathan Cape wrote back saying... It was William Plumer, wasn't it? It was. Thank you for your letter, Mr. Lowry. Our reader has responded to your book and made a few notes. We are willing to take the book on. He spent years trying to get this book published.

But we need you to make a few amendments. And as Tom Mashler, the clip we just heard is from a film called Volcano, which was recommended to me by our friend Andrew Mail, which is wonderful. It's on YouTube. It's a documentary. As Andrew said, it's like an episode of arena in the last stages of tertiary syphilis. It's like a hallucinogenic documentary, but it's wonderful, right?

And the then Cape publisher in 1976 said of this letter. Tom Mashley. Tom Mashler wrote, that Lowry wrote to Cape. This is one of the greatest letters. Probably the greatest letter ever from an author to their publisher. But one of the great letters of the... 40 pages long, is it? I just read a couple of little bits about...

And Lowry subsequently said to friends about this letter, God, that letter sounded good. I don't know if it's all true But he talks about the book And about the difficulty of the book He says I ventures to suggest that the book is a good deal Thicker, deeper, better

And a great deal more carefully planned and executed Than your reader suspect And that if your reader is not at fault In not spotting some of its deeper meanings Or in dismissing them as pretentious or irrelevant Or uninteresting where they erupt onto the surface of the book That is at least partly because of what may be a virtue and not a fault on my side, namely that the top level of the book,

for all its longer, has been, by and large, so compellingly designed that the reader does not want to take time off to stop and plunge beneath the surface. If this is in fact true, of how many books can you say it? And how many books of which you can say, also that you were not somewhere on along the line the first time you read it bored because you want to. to get on. I do not want to make a childish comparison, but to go to the obvious classics. Isn't that one? That's segue from one to the other. To go to the obvious classics, what about the idiot, the possessed? What about the beginning of Moby Dick? To say nothing of Wuthering Heights. E.M. Forster, I think, says somewhere that it is more of a feat to get by with the end.

And in the volcano, at least I claim I have done this. But without the beginning, or rather the first chapter, which as it were answers it, echoes back to it, over the bridge of the intervening chapters, the end, and without it the book, would lose much of its meaning. And one of the things that he says in the Reader's report said, this book is quite like a book called The Lost Weekend. And he said, the thing about the Lost Weekend is, that's something telling you you already know about Hellfire.

I am telling you something new about Hellfire. which is great line. He was obsessed with that book in Darkus the Grave wherein my friend is laid, which is his return to Mexico, a novel, a half-written novel where he returns to Mexico. It's a bit like, under the volcano,

the return, but as I think I said this morning, it's a bit straight to DVD, to be honest. What does it call himself in that? He has a fantastic name. He calls himself. His surname is Wilderness. Sigbyorn Wilderness. Sigbyorn Wilderness.

In the excellent Michael Schmidt introduction to the Penguin, latest Penguin modern classic. He says, Larry's critics, the letter is often taken as gospel by Larry's critics. The views are so clearly stated that we are freed from having to read with independent eyes. This is Lowry.

It can be regarded as a kind of symphony, he remarks, then catches fire, or in another way as a kind of opera, or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, and so forth. So Schmidt says,

fortunately in the teeth of such nonsense it can be regarded as a novel unique in its characterisations and in the stylistic objects it sets itself which is a funny thing because actually that there's a brilliantly funny review of a biography of Lowry by Gordon Bauker

by Martin Amos and Amos says something and he says many many funny things in the review including calling Larry a world-class liar but he also says when he's kind of coming back to the work. He says something I think really good about

that under the volcano, he remembered it as chaotically confessional as a torrent of consciousness but re-reading it, he says, now it feels formal, literary, even Mandarin in its intonations. The word pub is daintily sequestered by inverted commas.

It is what Lowry could never be. It is lucid and logical. It is well-behaved. Quite interesting. It's a really interesting thought. I sort of know what he means It's when you go back to it's always a better More structured less kind of

I mean it always strikes me that there's more going on in the book That's why you keep going back to it I think Because there's the layer upon layer And he worked really hard at burnishing it Didn't he worked really hard at trying to bring out the coming Because there's all the symbolic schemes and the cabalism You don't really need to know that to enjoy the novel I don't think But it's there if you're interested in

I point my learned colleagues back to Captain Beefheart because you think you're hearing chaos, but of course you're not. You're hearing a minutely arranged version of chaos. And in fact, I would have been listening to BFAT whilst reading this. This is great. So there's a thing. So BFat and Laueri at the same time.

My dad thought they were both rubbish. So I'd be listening to Captain BFat, my dad would have turned that rubbish off. What are you reading? I don't know, it sounds like it's Scottish German, doesn't it? But then you look at this and go, I seem to be saying, everybody I talk about,

who talks about this book has told me it's rubbish. Maybe that made me want to read it more. So Dave Thorpe handed it to me saying it was rubbish. My dad told me it was rubbish. But you're right, the more you read it. Isn't that the fact with all these books that the person you are now reading it is not the person you were then reading it. This young man had read it in 1974.

I thought it was a young man's book. Absolutely couldn't agree more. He didn't want a 61-year-old's book. If you've got a passage there, Ian, that is a favourite passage you might like to share with us. I love the ending. We talked about it I mean he's not just thrown down possibly the best ending

I think of any novel Are you going to the final line? I think I yes Yeah I think this is the greatest final line There's no doubt I wouldn't it be a great Captain B fat song We could imagine him singing it We should write the song

We should write the song I do it from just a little bit before the end Nor was this summit A summit exactly It had no substance No firm base It was crumbling to whatever it was collapsing

While he was falling falling into the volcano. He must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly. It was an eruption. Yes, no, it wasn't the volcano. The world itself was bursting, bursting

into black spouts of villages catapulted into space. What a great sentence! With himself, falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of 10 million burning bodies falling into a forest falling.

Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though the scream were being tossed from one tree to another as its echoes returned then as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, prying. Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine. Brilliant.

Then it goes, Lagusta is de chas de chas no destroyan. So what does it mean? This is your garden. And it's interesting because earlier in the novel, he mistranslates it. Yes. Do you like this garden?

Do you like this garden that is yours? make sure it means make sure that your children don't destroy it but what he says earlier in the book is the consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? He gets that wrong so it's not a question.

We evict those who destroy simple words, simple and terrible words which one took to the very bottom of one's being words which perhaps a final judgment on one were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne's departure.

God, that was so beautiful. Isn't that great? You've got goosebumps, actually, that's great. In a way, that's the book in a... He sees something, he notices it something. It makes a string of synaptic connections fire off in his alcoholic brain. It's also what Ian was saying about it being a prose,

poem. You know what holds the book together is imagery, not narrative. Despite Lowry claiming narrative, you can read my book as a thriller if you want. Well, you can. I like the idea of it being a horse... I like it being that we're saying it was a horse opera. Because it's horses and trees and gardens

and vegetation and chasms and all that dantean kind of the town becomes hell. Originally he intended it as one of a trilogy. He was trying to rewrite Dante's Inferno and this was going to be the inferno part of it but he didn't really I mean that's the other thing about

the book which is that ending is dark I mean it's hard I mean knowing anything about we'll talk we'll obviously have to talk a bit more about his terrible life but he's a dark vision but shot through with things of such beauty I was down in Sussex

a couple of weeks ago we were visiting here's the contrast we were visiting Charleston near Lewis the seat of the Bloomsbury set and while we were there we detoured to a nearby village called Ripe which is where Lowry died and where he is buried do you think he chose it for the name

and he's buried in a small plot at the corner of the churchyard if you follow me on Twitter you'll see that I tweeted a photograph of the grave which is very plain to which somebody has physically attached a ceramic plate that has that message you just read Ian printed on it we evict those who destroy and actually it's rather beautiful

that somebody's done that but that kind of the other thing we should say about the relationship between death and Lowry and under the volcano the book is set on November the 2nd the Day of the Dead in Mexico it prefigures and this is one of the reasons it's

perceived it was so successful when it was published in 1947. It prefigures the Atombo in several ways. The bit that you just read written prior to the Second World War was perceived after the war as having a relationship to the war. We also talked, didn't we, about the divisive nature. What was the guy who you were urging to read it several times? Oh, Dave Thorpe. Dave thought was not alone.

We have a clip here of the writer and, no, the drinker and occasional writer Charles Bukowski. Got a very good important distinction. Did you ever read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano? Yeah, I did. No, I yawned myself to shit. Why? Why? Because like any other writer, there's no pace,

there's no quickness in his lines. There's no life, there's no sunlight. When you write, your words must go like this. Bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim. Each line must be full of a delicious little juice flavor. They must be full of power. They must make you like to turn a page. Bim, bim, bim.

What these guys do, they say, well, in blah, blah, da, da, da, da, da, there was a porch chair. The flies were walking around. You see, they're too leisurely. They're setting up the scene for the grand emotion And when they get to the grand emotion there isn't any. This is a different age.

It's the atomic age. So you want bim, bim, bim, bim, not... See you, finally I'll know. So simple. Thanks, Charles. But the point, the point is... You see what he means? Well, at the same time, I could disagree with every little bit of what he says.

He also goes on to say rather ungenerously that he was a crap drinker because he choked to death on his own vomit. And then goes to demonstrate the Bukowski method for hanging your head over the side of the bed so you don't do that. He was an amateur. The guy was an amateur. Can I just make a point that it is a kind of a book of one man's descent into kind of hell and whatever.

But there's bits that are very funny. Hugely funny. The bits where his younger brother, Hugh, signs on to what his captain of the ship is affronted that Hugh calls a tramp steamer. And how he's treated by his colleagues, by his shipmates on the boat. It's just that had me kind of like laughing out loud. It's like it's really, really fluted. funny writing. That felt to me like a hangover, as it were, from Ultramarine. Yeah.

I felt like that came from an earlier, that was his first novel and that felt like a hangover. I never, I didn't like those bits as much. I didn't want him to make me laugh. I thought he'd make me laugh. Please stop making me laugh, Malcolm Maori. What then when you read it? Yeah, because I don't want it, I don't want to laugh. I want to be, I want to more tragedy. Doesn't it work as a kind of, as a relief between the kind of first bit where he's got the DTs and stuff? I prefer those bits. What about, does the bit make you laugh where he's talking to his neighbour and he flies over him?

And he goes, I think I'm a bird in a tree. Yeah. And then he falls down. Yeah. That makes me laugh. But then I think, I wish you hadn't made me laugh, Malcolm, because it's like when he got a serious uncle and a daft uncle. And you always want the serious uncle to be the serious uncle. And he tells Joan it doesn't work. And the daft uncle says something profound. It's that kind of thing.

I always want Malcolm Lowry to be my serious uncle. But Mr. Quincy, this is the neighbour. Mr. Quincy, stand up magnet. He's wandered into the garden because he's hidden a bottle of mescal somewhere in the garden. He can't remember where. Tequila. And then the next thing, this is brilliant, this brilliant Lowry technique of the next thing, literally the next paragraph, he's got it in his hand

and he can't remember how it got there. And he thinks his neighbour isn't watching him. So I'd better go and say good morning to the neighbour. The neighbour's totally over. Mr Quincy stared at him evenly, then began to refill his watering carm from a hydrant nearby. That ought to take you back, said the consul to the dear old soda springs eh?

Yes, I've cut liquor right out these days. The other resumed his watering, sternly moving on down the fence, and the consul, not sorry to leave the fruit tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust, followed him step by step. Yes. I'm on the wagon now, he commented, in case you didn't know.

The funeral wagon, I'd say, Furmin. Mr Quincy muttered testily and so on and so forth. I think you're right, Matt. It is funny, it is funny, but I just, I enjoyed it. It made me laugh at the time, but I thought, I wish, it's a serious adolescent that I was. Yeah, yeah, no. Wanted it to be serious.

The restaurant, the restaurant towards the end, with the, you know, the spectral chicken of the house, and Onans in garlic soup on egg, that's also humorous, but you can feel the gathering kind of horror of that scene, which sort of the humour is, lightens it, But it's, I mean, there's not a lot of laughs in the last 80 pages of the book. No.

So we've, we talked about things that this novel is about, right? So it's about World War II, perhaps, or a sense that civilization is beginning to unwind. It's about Lowry, because that's all Lowry wrote about fundamentally. All these books that he didn't finish, all part of one great work, which he called the bolus, where he would draw things out. And he wrote and rewrote and weaved in and out and recycled. But it's also, of course, it is a book about booze. And as a book about booze, it's perhaps the greatest book about booze. In terms of capturing the shifting of perspectives.

And we have another clip. I thought you would appreciate this, Ian. This is from a work called The Day of the Dead by Graham Collier. Oh, yes, right, yes. The great British jazz musician, Graham Collier. This was commissioned for the Ilkley Festival in 1977. I saw it. This piece?

Wow, okay, well let's just listen. You might hear me in the background. Let's just listen to the pit. We're going to play like a minute of this. This is the, is he a poet, John Carberry? No, he's just a, he's an actor, I think. Right, so this is John Carberry reading a part about booze of Under the Volcano to music by, set to music by Graham Collier.

Suddenly, the council rose, trembling in every limb. But it wasn't the scorpion we cared about. It was that. All at once, the thin shadows and isolated males, the stains of murdered mosquitoes, the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm. So that wherever he looked, another insect would form, wriggly instantly towards his front. And now the saw. It was as if smell the walls from the very beginning. The whole insects were but somehow moves nearer and lasses of slursing in.

And larses of stonies of Pornier, crushing in. I'm trying to hear a whiskey, blackedian. The epitistice of damage to daublas. and hair overs, the Etrax, the Tootan Tosin Tadikida, and the Gourge, beautiful mess. Brilliant. A squid in a polyethylene bag is fast and vulvas, Ian, get me? Gosh.

So you saw that in... Yeah, because it was 1977, so I'd read the book at college in 1975, and I went along to the Oakley Festival every year. That was the year when there was this magazine called The Urban Gorilla. I remember that was a magazine called The Urban Gorilla, edited by a fellow called Tom Owen, and I remember in my enthusiasm, picking up the magazine and looking through it and he went, if you don't want to buy it,

don't handle the fucking merchant. And I thought, and again, I thought this is... That's not very obeying. It's not very abate. I thought this is the literary life. This is, then I went to see this, that, I went to see that, and the Kings All, and luckily, as you know, the Kings All,

it's quite a genteel venue. It's like performing inside a wedding cake and there was this fantastic squeaky gate music of the kind that I like, and this fella in toning over the top. And again, people around you going, What is it? But, yes, and at the time, I loved that.

And I thought this is actually an hour old representation of what Under the Volcano is doing in my head when I read it. Because I've always been a fan of that kind of jazz. And so to hear that with the speech of Under the Volcano was fantastic. Yes, I'd forgotten all about that. I remember that now. God. Yes.

But again, you know, people next to you like Dave Thorpe, like my dad, people sitting next to me on the King's Hall, this is terrible. Yeah, and God, this is bad. It's a very I mean it's such a cliche Isn't it the phrase acquired taste But like Like booze

And cigarettes And olives All the good things Like oysters They are It's an acquired taste But once you have to work a little bit Once you get it

It's incredible I think the thing about the drinking was It was again at the time When I read it You thought gosh this was romantic The drinking that he was doing Was romantic At North Staffordshire Polytechnic

We had 15 pence whiskey night And we thought this and we pretended to be Malcolm Lowry. Me and Dave Thorpe and Dave Vanatzer and the girl Karen that I lent the book to. You thought, well, we were being like him. But then you read about the end of his life, the terrible ending. There was a fantastic bit in one of the books about him where it said that he spent several hours trying to get some pieces of bread and cheese into his mouth because he'd lost, he trembled, he couldn't.

And you thought, well, that is a terrible ending to the whole thing. So maybe you want to be leaving him as somebody who wrote about. about it, but then not actually take on the consequences of it as a reader, I guess. The book is about, it's brilliant, it's brilliant among many things, but it's about as good a portrait of addictive behaviour, of addiction of what the drink does. And I read just a little bit, because this is the kind of the optimistic calculus of the serious drinker, which he gets better than anybody. Stop, look, listen, how drunk or how drunkly sober or undrunk, can you calculate,

you are now, at any rate. There had been those drinks at Signora Gregorios, no more than two, certainly, and before. Ah, before. But later in the bus, he'd only had that sip of Hughes Havoniero then at the bull throwing, almost finished it. It was this that made him tight again, but tighten away he didn't like,

in a worse way than in the square, even, the tightness of impending unconsciousness, of seasickness. And it was from this sort of tightness, was it? He'd tried to sober up by taking those mescalitos on the sly. But the mescal, the consul had realised, had succeeded in a manner somewhat outside his calculations. The strange truth was he had another hangover. There was something, in fact, almost beautiful

about the frightful extremity of that condition the council now found himself in. It was a hangover like a great dark ocean swell, finally rolled up against a foundering steamer by countless gales to windward that have long since blown themselves out. And from all this, it was not so much necessary to sober up again, as once more to wake, yes, as to wake, as so much as to, and then he's back into the narrative again.

Isn't that beautiful, that's a beautiful poem, a recipe, a map? The thing in the book that is impossible, which is why doesn't he just, she's come back to him, why doesn't he just go with it? She wanted to come back with him, they could make a go of it, the beautiful sort of vision of the life, which in fact the life he did lead, Barry led with Marjorie up in his little squat in Vancouver. but he can't do it can he he can't he's in love with this sort of vision of his own damnation he can't let it go but it reminded me of the thing that a lot of people you know alcoholics say that you don't if you

have to want to give up you have to want to stop drinking and he doesn't really want to stop drinking he loves the amazing towards the end farolito the vision of the bar in the early morning and the beauty you know the beauty of that first glass of mescal and then that thing about negotiating your way through the day. So there are moments when he falls asleep, moment when he wakes up again. But as you say... Well, that bit there, the Farolito in the early morning was the thing that as a young man reading that, you thought, this is, what a jewel of a couple of pages that is. We have one last clip, which seems appropriate at this juncture,

which is the documentary I was talking about earlier, which is called Volcano An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. You will have heard his voice on the first clip. There has readings from under the volcano by Richard Burton. who himself knew a thing or two about a drink. And it reads it beautiful. And we have a clip here of Richard Burton reading an extended passage from one of those scenes under the volcano,

which, as you will hear, the resonances of it with the lives of everyone involved are come through pretty strong. Ousing alcohol from every pore, the consul stood at the open door of the salon of Phelia. How sensible to have had a mess hall. How sensible. for it was the right the soul drink to have under the circumstances. Moreover, he had not only proved to himself he was not afraid of it,

he was now fully awake, fully sober again, and well able to cope with anything that might come his way. But for this slight continual twitching and hopping within his field of visions of innumerable sand fleas, he might have told himself he hadn't had to drink for months. The only thing wrong with him, he was... too hot. But look here, hang it all. It is not altogether darkness. You misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness, I see. And if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it?

But if you look at that sunlight there, then perhaps you'll get the answer. See, look. Look at the way it falls through the window. What beauty can compare to that of a canteener in the early morning? Not even the gates of heaven opening wide to receive me could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash. I never saw him without. All mystery, all Pope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster is here beyond those swinging doors. And by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco's sitting in the corner? corner how unless you drink as I do can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning a woman could not know the perils the

complications yes the importance of a drunkard's life unbelievable unbelievable can you imagine the audio book that could have been I know I mean we that's a long clip for us to play here we don't normally play clips that long, but I really felt that was worth hearing. The extraordinary... Perfect. It's perfect. It is, exactly. It's perfect. The man reading the words that must speak to him loud and clear. In the background, we heard the fair, didn't we? Yeah. The turning wheel.

Turning wheel, which the whole book is, isn't it? The whole book is a wheel that turns around the spokes of the 12 hours and the whole thing. And it is a bit like you could think you get to the end and you start again. because it is the endless thing of the drunk, the waking up, the sobering up, the back again down the ravine. It's patterned, isn't it? So patterned is that scene where he's looking at the horse at the end and he tells the joke to the guy who's saying, what are you doing, looking at my horse? And he says, you know, I hear the world goes round and I'm just waiting for my house to arrive. That cyclical, and that joke is the beginning of the end where he's too drunk to realize that he's in danger and in trouble.

and that you know, I mean, I don't think there are very many novels that are as great as this. I can't think it's hard. I mean, you know, Ulyssi, there are very few, I think. The best told story. I think it's right in the very top lead. I agree with you, John. I mean, for me, that I read this book about for the first time about 12 years ago, and I've read it three times.

And I would be hard pressed to, and it has become one of my favorite novels, books. I hard pressed to think of a book that so, successfully marries, as Ian was saying, not just poetry and fiction and philosophy and religious writing, all those things, but humour and pain and artistry. The layers upon layers of symbolism that he puts into the book that you can't apprehend first time. You might begin to get second time, that on third time you begin to see that actually what sounds like bravado.

That idea that my book is a wheel. You could pick it up at any point. Actually, he's come to believe it. He's convinced himself of his own brilliance, which is one of the reasons why subsequently he becomes so unhappy and so distraught because he can't find his way back. I guess the thing to say to people is if you don't want to read the whole book, just don't want to at random and read a page.

And you'll get magnificent sentences, you'll get images that will stay with you forever. You'll get paragraphs. And it might lead you to the next one, but it might not. Just keep going through it. Just find your way through it like he might have staggered through a street. Find your way through it in that way. You don't have to read it from start to finish, I would say. It's a lovely way because, as you say, the plot is so not the point.

I love that it was, Marquez said it was the book he read more than any other. And it's interesting. You find a writers who you wouldn't think of. Richard Ford, a huge admirer of it. And then you think, well, of course, Frank Bascombe, a weekend in, you know, taking it. There's a lovely thing that the writer underrated, writer Dawn Powell said, which she said, in Under the Volcano, you love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding, which is, I really like that, because that, the thing about

Larry, you feel he understood everything. He couldn't control his life, he couldn't, but he could control his book. And there's not, the insight, the sense of, I mean, his, his, his fine-grained quality of his psychological understanding, of that, the, the relationships at the heart of the book, you know, the unfaithfulness, the pay. I mean, it's, it's, as you say, I think, I can't imagine a time in my life when I'm not going to go back and get more from it. And there are very, very few books you can say that about. You may have heard listeners that we have in the backlisted tradition,

wherever possible, we like to respond to the book. And we have just uncorked a fine bottle of what is this, John? It's a single village mescal. but now it's kind of mescal has gone has gone hip now but it was strongly recommended by people who I know who I brought a far cheaper bottle of mescal but mine does have a little word that would be that would be that would be that would be that would be much more likely to go for that

so should we should we send malc on his way with salo salo into the ravine dog to follow I don't drink but that is really nice at least we caught this historic moment on tape what are you doing after the recording oh who cares

my goodness it's quite something isn't there's some smoke in that it's amazing isn't it they make it they make it and still made in the same way they made it in 400 years ago to north Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1970s Reverie we should say there's a very good website

if people want to called I think is it called the World of Malcolm Barrett. It's an incredible web. I'm going to give the address out. It's run by two academics. Chris Ackley. Weirdly in the University of Otago in New Zealand. W-W-W-O-T-A-G-O-A-C-N-Z,

which is a hypertext annotated under the volcano. And there's also a blog called Gutted Arcades of the Past. Is that the 19th hole? It's by the guy who does the 9th Bowl as well. Early is that it's a kind of, it's a sort of an encyclopedia of Larry's early life, which is sort of lots of interesting stuff about before he gets to Mexico.

It's great pictures. Which scales the, both these websites and the people who've written about the books, you know, like Lowry, scale the heights and plumb the depths of the book. The layer upon layer upon layer of referencing and mirroring that goes on in the book. And I always say to people, like you were saying in about when you recommend it to people. I always say, you know what, there's no shame if you're serious about reading it, like with Ulysses, about reading

it with a crib. Oh, yes. And then read it again with the stabilisers off. And I love Ian's idea of just pick it up. Just pick it up and do it at random. I don't know why there isn't, it's odd, isn't it, why November 2nd hasn't become Lowry Day? Well, I was just wondering, is that...

But you couldn't do what you do for Bloom's Day in this book, with this book, could you? I mean, if you recreated the day. Not the streets, literally. Unless she'd booked a liver transplant first. It seems a shame to leave this behind, but I guess we all... I would like to write an opera about it. I've been writing some libretchen recently.

And I thought, what an operatic subject this is. I've been talking to various composers about it, and you've got to be a fan of the book. If I find a composer as a fan of the book, then we'll write an opera about it. And we'll have the premiere at the Ilklai Literature Festival. That's what we'll do. You heard it here first?

The shades of Lowry and Collier and Thackeray will and Don Van Vleet will gather together to celebrate. Good. And the captain himself, let's be honest. I think an opera would be an amazing idea because it sure as hell didn't make a good film. We don't need to go on about that. It's a good point to end. Thanks to Ian McMillan. Thank you.

To our producer Matt Hall, to Spiritland in Kings Cross, fabulous venue. and to Richard Andrews, our engineer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. Bim, bim, bim, bim, bim, bim.