In Oaxaca Lowry was thrown into a jail-he was considered a Spanish spy. Once he forgot the first draft of his manuscript in a bar. By the time Lowry left Mexico, his first marriage was in ruins. Later, in her book Inside the Volcano (2000), Jan Gabrial wrote that "He would drink anything. I had thrown out the rubbing alcohol I'd used to massage his back, but he gulped the contents of a bottle he thought contained hair tonic but which Josefina had refilled with cooking oil..." His second wife, the novelist Margerie Bonner, Lowry met in Los Angeles. He moved in 1939 to Dollarton, British Columbia, where he built for himself and for his wife a squatters shack to live. The hut burned down in 1944, but Margerie Bonner managed to save his manuscript from the fire.
After a short visit to Mexico in 1945, the Lowrys returned to Canada, where they stayed until 1954, then moving to England. During his last years Lowry planned a modern, "drunken Divine Comedy," a sequence of seven novels built around Under the Volcano, titled The Voyage That Never Ends. He had already written the "Purgatory" part, "Paradise" had been destroyed in the fire. Simultaneously Lowry worked on a number of manuscripts, unable to bring his plans to completion. Under the Volcano was for a short time on a best-seller list in the United States, but according to the author, the book sold in Canada only two copies. In France is was a critical success and hailed immediately as a classic.
The above, is a great case in point. The Canadians, god bless 'em, always seem to call things as they see them, and in this case ol' Malcolms' book didn't fare well. In this country, it was a best seller, and in France it was "hailed immediately" as a "classic". Does this reflect the French as higher up in the evolutionary scale or more full of (sh)it? I think the latter, but I'll hold my judgement until I read the book. Maybe it translates into French in more magnificent fashion. Most literary reviews rate the book very highly, and he never matched it with anything else. Pity. He lived in a shack in BC, a reclusive alcoholic, and could afford to be so; apparently he came from very wealthy stock.
