news | Wednesday June 30, 2010

Of Strange Comfort

On Canada Day, many faces painted with maple leaves jouncing atop bodies wearing red and white can be seen strolling through Cates Park for a picnic, perhaps without happening upon the stone in memory of Malcolm Lowry. They walk along, unaware that across the water, the ‘S’ was once burnt out and that the sign ‘HELL OIL’ would blaze out of the verdant darkness.

Malcolm Lowry was a remittance man who turned up living in the Dollarton Flats on Vancouver’s North Shore. His existence was nomadic to the point that a number of countries have claimed him as their own, including Canada. It was in a squatter’s shack in the Dollarton Flats during the 40s and 50s where he completed his masterpiece Under the Volcano, apparently while limiting his drinking and standing upright. He was vocal about Vancouver, and his observations from the book are often quoted:

“it has a sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet…”

His former haunt, the pub in the Dominion Hotel, is now lined wall to wall with blaring television screens. Go a couple of blocks towards the former Woodward’s building, now a cozy sconce for Nester’s, and you will find a more or less accurate variation upon Lowry’s poem:

Beneath the Malebolge lies Hastings street
The province of the pimp upon his beat
Where each in his little world of drugs or crime
Drifts hopelessly, or hopeful, begs a dime
Wherewith to purchase half-a-pint of piss
Although he will be cheated, even in this.

Just when it seems that the ghost of Lowry has been completely exorcised from Vancouver streets, outside of the new Living Shangri-La development on Georgia and Thurlow, there has arisen a sculptural installation by Ken Lum (until September 6th), which includes a reduced replica of Lowry’s shack. The exhibit is an ironic reminder that an edict by the City of Vancouver led to the destruction of these makeshift homes. It is not so much of a stretch to remind ourselves of the Downtown Eastside in the form of tent cities outside of high-end mod-connish properties intended for purchase by absentee owners.

One poignant memory is from the National Film Board’s eerily brilliant Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry, in which a past letter to his publisher is read aloud, a request for enough money to mend his radio so Lowry and his wife can listen to a Canadian broadcast about his own genius as a novelist.

Strange Comfort is a collection of essays by Sherrill Grace about Malcolm Lowry that addresses these and other key issues of the 21st century in his writing.