More than most writers, the circumstances of Malcolm Lowry’s death are peculiarly relevant to a consideration of his work, since excess of every kind was both his method and his subject.Was it advanced alcoholism that eventually killed him? His great, tragic novel Under the Volcano, recounts the last day in the life of a drunkard, ending with his murder and the contemptuous disposal of his corpse into a ravine in Mexico. Lowry himself did not die in Mexico, like his protagonist in that novel, the consul Geoffrey Firmin. His passing was in a Sussex village with the unlikely name of Ripe, in 1957. (The exact date is unknown, it could either have been late on June 26 or very early on June 27.)
There are a few unexplained inconsistencies in accounts of how his death actually came about. He seems to have choked on his own vomit after an unrestrained bender, his powerful constitution already dilapidated after prolonged abuse – though at the inquest his internal organs were found to be in excellent condition.
There were rumours: a mysteriously emptied bottle of barbiturates – but we should not regard his demise as suicide. In an interview conducted in 1975, his first wife Jan Gabrial said this of Lowry’s death: “His own experiences, his own actions fascinated him as much as anyone else. So everything went down. So…there is no way that I can conceive of Malc committing suicide without there being … copious notes, letters, something to indicate why. He was not a man to slip away quietly into the night.” more…
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