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MALCOLM LOWRY

Lunar Caustic

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Lunar Caustic

MALCOLM LOWRY

Born 28 July 1909, New Brighton, United Kingdom

Died 26 June 1957, Ripe, United Kingdom

‘Lunar Caustic’, begun in 1936 and worked on intermittently until Lowry’s death, first published in The Paris Review, No. 29, 1963, and as a book in 1968.

ALSO PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN BOOKS

Under the Volcano

‘Staring out at the river his agony was like a great lidless eye’

Lunar Caustic

I

A man leaves a dockside tavern in the early morning, the smell of the sea in his nostrils, and a whisky bottle in his pocket, gliding over the cobbles lightly as a ship leaving harbour.

Soon he is running into a storm and tacking from side to side, frantically trying to get back. Now he will go into any harbour at all.

He goes into another saloon.

From this he emerges, cunningly repaired; but he is in difficulties once more. This time it is serious: he is nearly run over by a street car, he bangs his head on a wall, once he falls over an ashcan where he has thrown a bottle. Passers-by stare at him curiously, some with anger, others with amusement, or even a strange avidity.

This time he seeks refuge up an alley, and leans against the wall in an attitude of dejection, as if trying to remember something.

Again the pilgrimage starts but his course is so erratic it seems he must be looking for, rather than trying to remember something. Or perhaps, like the poor cat who had lost an eye in a battle, he is just looking for his sight?

The heat rises up from the pavements, a mighty force, New York groans and roars above, around, below him: white birds flash in the quivering air, a bridge strides over the river. Signs nod past him: The Best for Less, Romeo and Juliet, the greatest love story in the world, No Cover at Any Time, When pain threatens, strikes –

He enters another tavern, where presently he is talking of people he had never known, of places he had never been. Through the open door he is aware of the hospital, towering up above the river. Near him arrogant bearded derelicts cringe over spittoons, and of these men he seems afraid. Sweat floods his face. From the depths of the tavern comes a sound of moaning, and a sound of ticking.

Outside, again the pilgrimage starts, he wanders from saloon to saloon as though searching for something, but always keeping the hospital in sight, as if the saloons were only points on his circumference. In a street along the waterfront, where a bell is clanging, he halts; a terrible old woman, whose black veil only partly conceals her ravaged face, is trying to post a letter, trying repeatedly and failing, but posting it finally, with shaking hands that are not like hands at all.

A strange notion strikes him: the letter is for him. He takes a drink from his bottle.

In the Elevated a heavenly wind is blowing and there is a view of the river, but he is walking as though stepping over obstacles, or like Ahab stumbling from side to side on the careening bridge, ‘feeling that he encompassed in his stare oceans from which might be revealed that phantom destroyer of himself.’

Down in the street the heat is terrific. Tabloid headlines: Thousands collapse in Heat Wave. Hundreds Dead. Roosevelt Raps Warmongers. Civil War in Spain.

Once he stops in a church, his lips moving in something like a prayer. Inside it is cool: around the walls are pictured the stages of the cross. Nobody seems to be looking. He likes drinking in churches particularly.

But afterwards he comes to a place not like a church at all.

This is the hospital: all day he has hovered round it; now it looms up closer than ever. This is his objective. Tilting the bottle to his mouth he takes a long, final draught: drops run down his neck, mingling with the sweat.

‘I want to hear the song of the Negroes,’ he roars. ‘Veut-on que je disparaisse, que je plonge, à la recherche de l’anneau … I am sent to save my father, to find my son, to heal the eternal horror of three, to resolve the immedicable horror of opposites!’

With the dithering crack of a ship going on the rocks the door there was grass growing down to the East River. But between

II

Looking down from the high buildings on 4th or 5th Avenue and 30th Street in New York you would never have thought there was grass growing down to the East River. But between the Observation Ward of the Psychiatric Hospital and the water, in a little lot to the left of the powerhouse – a building distinguishable even from midtown because its derricks are out of alignment and yearn over towards the hospital – you might have seen this grass as it grew there.

At the edge of the grass was a broken coal barge and beyond that, a little harbour bounded by two wharves. On the wharf to the right was the powerhouse and in front of it a shed used by the doctors as a garage, near which a green hospital ambulance was often parked.

The wharf to the left, though complicated by an extraordinary arrangement of wind-chutes, foghorns and ventilators, whose purpose was undiscoverable, had nevertheless a friendlier, more simple quality of holiday, of the seaside. Here white and blue motor boats were moored, with such names as ‘Empty Pockets III’, ‘Dunwoiken’, ‘Lovebird’, boats which seemed as they nudged and nibbled ceaselessly at the suicidal blackness of the stream to tell tender tales of girls in summer.

The only boat that tied up to the wharf by the powerhouse was the ferry, Tekanas. This, so someone said, went to the Ice Palace at Rockaway.

But between the two wharves and fast against the poverty grass before the hospital lay the coal barge, sunken, abandoned, open, hull cracked, bollards adrift, tiller smashed, its hold still choked with coal dust, silt, and earth through which emerald shoots had sprouted.

In the evenings, the patients would stare out over the river at the Jack Frost Sugar Works, and if there was a ship unloading there it seemed to them she might have some special news for them, bringing deliverance. But none ever came …

Sometimes, when there was a mist, river and sky merged in a white calm through which little masts and tilted, squat towers seemed to be slowly flying. A smudged gasworks crouched like something that could spring, behind the leaning, vaporous geometry of cranes and angled church steeples; and the factory chimneys waved endless handkerchiefs of smoke.

Farewell, farewell, life!

Every so often, when a ship passed, there would be a curious mass movement towards the barred windows, a surging whose source was in the breasts of the mad seamen and firemen there, but to which all were tributary: even those whose heads had been bowed for days rose at this stirring, their bodies shaking as though roused suddenly from nightmare or from the dead, while their lips would burst with a sound, partly a cheer and partly a wailing shriek, like some cry of the imprisoned spirit of New York itself, that spirit haunting the abyss between Europe and America and brooding like futurity over the Western Ocean. The eyes of all would watch the ship with a strange, hungry supplication.

But more often when a ship went by or backed out from the docks opposite and swung around to steam towards the open sea, there was a dead silence in the ward and a strange foreboding as though all hope were sailing with the tide.

III

The man who now gave the name of Bill Plantagenet, but who had first announced himself as the s.s. Lawhill, awoke certain at least that he was on a ship. If not, where did those isolated clangings come from, those sounds of iron on iron? He recognized the crunch of water pouring over the scuttle, the heavy tramp of feet on the deck above, the steady Frère Jacques: Frère Jacques of the engines. He was on a ship, taking him back to England, which he never should have left in the first place. Now he was conscious of his racked, trembling, malodorous body. Daylight sent probes of agony against his eyelids. Opening them, he saw three Negro sailors vigorously washing down the deck. He shut his eyes again. Impossible, he thought.

And if he were on a ship, and supposedly therefore in the fo’c’sle, the alleyway at the end of which his bunk was must be taking up the fo’c’sle’s entire length. He considered this madness – then the thrumming became so loud in his ears he found himself wondering if he were not lying in the propeller shaft.

As day grew, the noise became more ghastly: what sounded like a railway seemed to be running just over the ceiling. Another night came. The noise grew worse and, stranger yet, the crew kept multiplying. More and more men, bruised, wounded, and always drunk, were hurled down the alley by petty officers to lie face downward, screaming, or suddenly asleep on their hard bunks.

He was awake. What had he done last night? Played the piano? Was it last night? Nothing at all, perhaps, yet remorse tore at his vitals. He needed a drink desperately. He did not know whether his eyes were closed or open. Horrid shapes plunged out of the blankness, gibbering, rubbing their bristles against his face, but he couldn’t move. Something had got under his bed too, a bear that kept trying to get up. Voices, a prosopopoeia of voices, murmured in his ears, ebbed away, murmured again, cackled, shrieked, cajoled; voices pleading with him to stop drinking, to die and be damned. Thronged, dreadful shadows came close, were snatched away. A cataract of water was pouring through the wall, filling the room. A red hand gesticulated, prodded him: over a ravaged mountain side a swift stream was carrying with it legless bodies yelling out of great eye-sockets, in which were broken teeth. Music mounted to a screech, subsided. On a tumbled bloodstained bed in a house whose face was blasted away a large scorpion was gravely raping a one-armed Negress. His wife appeared, tears streaming down her face, pitying, only to be instantly transformed into Richard III, who sprang forward to smother him.