UNDER THE VOLCANO
A film review by Ralf Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralf Benner
Finishing Malcolm Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO, which took weeks to get through, I had to concede it's a great book--a great bad book. I fought it not just because it's a ceaseless journey into the Hell of drunkenness, or because of its hit or miss cinematic style, but also--maybe mostly--because of what it insanely purports to be: an illumination about how there's genius in alcohol. Partially autobiographical--Lowry, like his central character Geoffrey Firmin, was an incorrigible drunk--the book is a maddening wish fulfillment about booze as a blessing or cure instead of a curse. Lowry attempts to persuade that in alcohol a writer can achieve a mind-blowing success, that in the bottle a person can fight off loneliness and lovelessness. You don't have to be a convert to A.A. to know that is the big lie--or, as Lowry himself writes somewhere in the novel, "dehydrated excrement." The book's own notorious unreadability is confirmation of the lie he's perpetuating. Nevertheless, his effort is astounding; the interpolation of sloshed perceptions and prolixity as streams of foggy consciousness--embellishing the story of a 1930s world and specifically Mexico losing its moral values to Fascism--have been compared to James Joyce's ULYSSES and Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. And who could doubt that Lowry aims for these lofty literary plateaux? Yet a good case could be made that he's only a step or three away from the novels I think, in his boozed-up consciousness, he quite possibly stole from: Graham Greene's CONFIDENTIAL AGENT and THE POWER AND THE GLORY and Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. And, even more than those, from D.H. Lawrence's PLUMED SERPENT.
When Lowry originally wrote UNDER THE VOLCANO in 1936, it was a 7,000-word short story about a British Consul's experience during a fiesta in Mexico, where he was accompanied by his daughter Yvonne and her fiance named Hugh. The basic story then is as it remains in the novel--about tourists watching fascist peladoes robbing, plundering, murdering and getting away with all of it. The Consul, Yvonne and Hugh come across a dying victim of murder but due to the Mexican civil law at the time--a form of the Napoleonic code (some of which is still in effect)--anyone assisting a victim becomes an accessory after the fact. The message of Fascism clear: guilty until proved innocent. A few years later, when Lowry went to Mexico, the story evolved into a novel with subsequent changes that (at least I think) make the narrative of the characters indigestible: Lowry made Yvonne his actress-wife and Hugh his half brother, as well as making Firmin an ex-Consul who remains in Mexico--for no other reason than to indict its system of justice. ("The Plumed Serpent" starts out as an indictment of a Celtic woman's initial prejudicial views of Mexican culture.) Yvonne's presence bothers the reader by the simple fact that there's no reason for her to be there. As the novel starts, she's left Firmin because of his boozing and then she reappears showing a new-found patience, making inexplicable pleas to have children, making out to be the wife she understandably couldn't be previously, even though Firmin's alcoholism has now progressed beyond repair. Perhaps because there are so many religious symbols--the story, which has an ULYSSES time span of only twenty four hours, takes place on the ghoulish Mexican celebration of The Day of the Dead--Yvonne's a foreboding apparition, a sacrifice to the Old Testament's cannibal sun god Moloch, filtered through Mexican mythology. Does it make any kind of sense that an ex-wife would return to a supposedly fascist country and attempt a reconciliation with a fatalist boozer like Firmin? Had Lowry retained his initial concept of Yvonne as Firmin's daughter, we could see the reason for her return--to attempt to save the old man from himself and the fascists. Her fate would also make much more tragic sense. In transposing the Florence Nightingale act from Yvonne to Hugh, Lowry may, as English poet-critic Stephen Spender suggests in an essay published in some editions of UNDER THE VOLCANO, be trying to formulate a sexual repression angle but nowhere did I get any such impression. (According to Spender, the half-brother in his cowboy boots and hat and blue jeans spouting a lot of flatulent Marxist-Catholic rhetoric--some of it cut for the movie--is probably a copy of the young Firmin. Maybe. But does it matter?) When Lowry finished the second draft in 1941, it was turned down by four publishers and though the reasons are unknown, one doesn't really have to assume that it's not only his booze-soaked prose and depressions that bothered them but also that, having lost their original poignancy, Yvonne and Hugh are only there as targets for Firmin to aim his declamations.
Spender writes, "UNDER THE VOLCANO is an authentic modern tragedy because somehow the murder of the Consul by the fascist police transforms his life into a convincing affirmation of values which he deeply knew, and which in his own consciousness he did not destroy." Well, yes and no. The affirmation isn't quite as convincing as Lowry attempts to make it because he not only invokes the tiresome Christ analogy, he tries to link it to one of the two William Blackstones in history. In both the novel and movie, summoning up the clergyman William (1595-1675), who became the first white settler in Boston, Firmin feels an affinity with Blackstone because when the Puritans settled in Boston, Blackstone found their intolerance unacceptable and moved elsewhere and preferred mingling with the local Indians instead of the bigots. This gets confusing: despite Firmin's admiration for the 1st William, Firmin really doesn't show much tolerance for Mexicans, and Lowry himself often misread the vicissitudes of Mexican cultural ways, at one point so insistently querulous that he was deported. (Though he had a love/hate relationship with Mexico, he wrote an unpublished novel entitled "La Mordida" that most likely is an excoriation.) But there's a second Blackstone who, coming roughly a hundred years later, was indeed value-affirming: he was a renowned British jurist and legal scholar, whose four volume "Commentaries on the Laws of England" were used for more than a century as the foundation for all legal education in Great Britain and the U.S. This is the Blackstone who is closer to Firmin's politics.
Further, the affirmations of values in Firmin don't register as convincing because long before the ending, his consciousness is destroyed by the bottle. What Lowry does raise--at least in fair-minded readers--is the dual specters of anti-Semitism and anti-Capitalism. When the fascists (in the movie) hear the name Blackstone, they assume it's Jewish and Firmin's only response is, "Jews are seldom very borracho." (Perhaps true in general but not, I'll wager, of Jewish writers.) Neither the novel nor the movie give a hint of an explanation as to why foreigners--Americans, the British and the Dutch--were often objects of hatred in Mexico. When the National Revolutionary Party of Mexico took power in 1932, it implemented a six year program for economic reform based on socialism that included a labor code, public works, distribution of land and, when necessary, seizure of foreign-controlled oil fields and other capitalist undertakings. Anathema to the outsiders. The expropriation of the oil fields began in 1938--roughly a year before the novel starts--when the oil companies refused to submit to the demands of higher wages for the Mexican workers. In retaliation, the executives refused to import Mexican oil. Though this changed when W.W.II commenced, what didn't change was the new round of animosity of Mexicans for gringos. This disparity between the rich foreign exploitists and the poor indigents appears only on the surface in the book and movie. It's this one-sidedness to the horror show of UNDER THE VOLCANO that invalidates it: when the capitalists cried foul over the moral indignation of fascism in Mexico, much as they do elsewhere today, the strong likelihood is that the criers were barred from exploitation and got treated as what they were (and still are)--rapists.
Director John Huston and screenwriter Guy Gallo are more than reasonably faithful to the novel--everything is heavy with slumberous reverence. It's also what's wrong with the movie. Because Lowry employs movie devices--flashbacks, flashbacks-inside-flashbacks, seemingly camera-like instructions and descriptions of settings and characters that are close-ups, having characters involved in the movie business (Lowry spent some time in Hollywood), using movies and their titles symbolically--it's understandable why it's been said that the book has attracted more directors and writers than any other novel except Paul Bowles' SHELTERING SKY in the last forty years. Lowry even tried to adapt it. The cirrhotic theme of alcoholism the major attraction and challenge. (Joseph Losey wanted to film it, with a script by Cabrera Infante, and with Jane Fonda as Yvonne.) But Huston didn't find a way to bring much of Lowry's streams of radiant verbiage to the screen with matched visuals. Though there are fleeting glimpses of the mythologicalized volcanoes Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl in an appropriately diffused color, almost a dignified black and white, supplied by Gabriel Figueroa (who also did Huston's NIGHT OF THE IGUANA), they're obligatory, and as figuratively vacant as the adaptation. What we get of Mexico itself--the setting is Cuernavaca but filming was done in Morelos--is all too proper and unblurred, all too clean, as if the sirvientas swept away all the doom and gloom of Lowry's pesadilla before the camera started to roll. (As with Lawrence's PLUMED SERPENT, it's Lowry's descriptions of Mexico that are the best parts of his book.) Huston has eliminated all the fever and rot and highly toxic imagery--the whole thing looks like a Spic and Span hangover.
In the novel Firmin is constantly on the move, belying the often accepted generality that most drunks are probably sedentary, and Huston keeps his Firmin--Albert Finney--in constant motion as well. The movement keeps all the talk from becoming too weary for viewers, but it also makes us see that Finney's becoming much too mechanical of an actor, using all the externals to impress but unable to show what's inside. Most of his inability stems from the fact that he doesn't have the right material from the novel to get into Firmin, so the reliance on physically impressing us is heavily used. In MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and THE DRESSER and now here, Finney is a superb technician. And proving once more that the British make the best screen dipsos. As Firmin his bloated tummy and engorged fingers are right on, and when he's guzzling straight from the bottle, sometimes making near-gagging sounds, or drinking his after-shave, or wobbling through hopscotch, the waste is obscene and frightening. For the first time in some years, we see evidence of his "Tom Jones" handsome boyishness which, in a movie way, makes his Firmin all the more sad in that he suffers from faulty pride and from his idiot thinking that he can't tolerate the love of others. In pictures published in Douglas Day's biography of Lowry, and on display in the 1976 Oscar-nominated documentary "Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry," certain periods of him, especially when he's flabby from drink and in his goatee, suggest a blend of D. H. Lawrence and Lenin. Photos of earlier years tease with a bit of Hermann Goering, and there's a little of that monster in Finney as well. The pictures also show that Lowry never quite got the hang of wearing belts, and this is given a loving nod in the movie when Finney uses a tie to keep his white suit pants up. As "chief of borrachos," Finney bends and curves his lines, and he sure knows how to flop out on streets, but he's exhausting; we watch and admire enormously but, finally, it's all an updated message--The Days of Tequila and Mescal.
At the beginning of the movie, there's something in Finney's duck walk that brought Richard Burton to my attention. Conflicts in scheduling prevented Burton from doing the role he was the most qualified to play. In his last years, Burton had the dissipated, burnt out look that I envisioned in Firmin, in fact the visionary apocalyptic look that's required. In Burton (as well as Firmin and his creator) is the search for something of value that would forever escape them because they couldn't escape the ravages of the bottle. There are countless arias in the novel that demand Burton. What I wouldn't give to hear him sing this one:
"How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anis, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses--towering, like the smoke from the train that day--built to the sky, then dens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygenee, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvadoes dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Carribean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotsman on the Atlantic highlands--and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning--bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Wiskey blanc Canadien, the aperitifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal..." Lowry's description of the morning after is, then, a classic: "An inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears."
The more one considers the failure of UNDER THE VOLCANO as movie, and it's a failure of conception, the more one might believe that it should be an opera. There probably isn't any other way to include all those paragraphs that cry out for rich, expansive voices. Placido Domingo as Firmin, and a Greek-like chorus igniting to flames the descriptive prose. And the melodramatic apparatus of opera might rescue Yvonne too--increasing the depth and scope of her fate. There's another, more troubling part of the novel that keeps it from translating with intended righteousness: Franco's Spain. The novel (and the movie) uses the twin volcanoes as premonitory symbols for one very obvious polemic: Lowry, and well as other writers and journalists, believed that a populist uprising would explode against what they perceived as Franco-inspired Fascism in Mexico. It didn't, not only because the writers' idea of fascism was in fact anti-Americanism (and always soothed when the greenbacks rolled in), the lawlessness they condemned had been there long before political labels were attached. One of the suspicious omissions by Lowry and by the critics who praised his book (which sold roughly 30,000 copies during its initial shelf life) is that Franco, at the time of the novel's publication in 1947, was ensconced in a 9th year of a thirty-nine year reign, which saw no revolt, and he was, it should be noted, allied with the Spanish Roman Catholic Church. With its giant cross, the Valley of the Fallen, built in honor of those who died during the Civil War and where Franco is buried, is the most loathsomely powerful monument to Fascism remaining.
In both the book and movie there are repeated references to LAS MANOS DE ORLAC--THE HANDS OF ORLAC--a movie better known to audiences as MAD LOVE, the 1935 Peter Lorre chiller in which he plays a doctor who grafts the hands of a murderer onto a pianist. It's likely that Lowry's saying his own hands were his mad love given up to his own Moloch--he wouldn't keep them off the bottle. Only he doesn't seem to want to admit why; he has no Lorre to blame. He tried though when he once wrote, "The real cause of alcoholism is the complete baffling sterility of existence as sold to you." There's nothing new in what he's excusing his behavior for--the need to escape boredom. (And I haven't any doubt that his thumbnail truism resonates empathetically with literary-minded boozers.) UNDER THE VOLCANO is Lowry's ultimate escape--reaching for a state of genius before exploding. He was in the process a tortured soul who, in a fit of depression, died in his own vomit induced by an overdose of pills and booze. It wasn't his acquired love mescal but gin--probably Bole's. (The last music he might have heard that night was "Le Sacre du Printemps.") What's god damn scary is that he did it on my birthday. The irony had me hitting my own mad love--Myers, original dark.
-- Ralph Benner 102673.2156@compuserve.com
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