Apparently Incongruous Parts: The Worlds of Malcolm Lowry ed. by Paul Tiessen, and: The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry's ‘Tender is the Night’ ed. by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen (review)

158 LETTERS IN CANADA 1990 cousins, brothers, and sisters. The Carman letters, with their coyly coded references to the two cousins' various lady loves (many of whom still remain unidentified), illustrate the sexual and emotional immaturity that would impede Roberts's ability to maintain a lasting relationship with a woman until the final decade df his life. We also learn that Roberts and Carman exchanged naughty 'pomes' for 'private circulation: which, on the evidence of the few examples still extant (Collected Letters, 193-4; Collected Poems, 346--7), suggest that early Canadian literature was a little less stuffy than the canon would have us believe. This book is likely to serve its audience more effectively as a valuable research tool than as an engaging narrative. Still, during the current climate of concern regarding the aging of the Canadian population, it is heartening to follow the story of a career that flourished for more than sixty years and remained good-humouredly vital until the very end. (CAROLE GERSON) Paul Tiessen, editor. Apparently Incongruous Parts: The Worlds ofMalcolm Lowry Scarecrow Press. xii, 230 Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen, editors. The Cinema ofMalcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry's 'Tender is the Night' University of British Columbia Press. xlii, 262 As a Lowry scholar, Paul Tiessen is indefatigable. In addition to regularly editing the semi-annual Malcolm Lowry Review, and within two years of his publication of The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, "940-1952, come the volumes under review. Of the two, Apparently Incongruous Parts is decidedly the less important, being made up almost entirely of previously published material. The single new piece is Gordon Bowker's 1984 interview with Lowry's friend from Cambridge, the artistJulian Trevelyan. There are no real revelations here, unless one excepts the anecdote, apparently Malcolm-generated, that once when Trevelyan's girlfriend of the moment had been stolen away by another man, Lowry had held the thief's hand on a hot stove 'till it sizzled.' This is produced in illustration of 'the loyalty of Malcolm' (as Trevelyan blandly calls it) to his friends, but it rather seems to suggest a streak of aggressive violence that makes no appearance in other reminiscences from this period ('I told that story to [Lowry biographer1 Douglas Day: Trevelyan remarks in apparent ingenuousness, 'but he didn't print it'). Otherwise, the interview is perhaps most notable for Trevelyan's response to Lowry's first wife, Jan Gabrial, whom he met in Paris and clearly liked, another small contribution to a more balanced view of Jan, who still to many Lowryites has not emerged from Conrad Aiken's vicious portrait in Ushant. (Trevelyan'S remembrance HUMANmES 159 of Lowry's second wife, Margerie Bonner, whom he met many years later, is less favourable.) The rest of Apparently Incongruous Parts is made up of critical essays that appeared either in The Malcolm Lowry Review or in a paperbound volume partly sponsored by that organ, Proceedings of the London Conference on Malcolm Lowry 1984. Although it is good to have them (and William C. McConnell's fine fictional recollection of Lowry, 'In Search of the Word') in a more permanent and accessible form, they will not of course be news to other students of Lowry. In a different class altogether is the other volume under review here, The Cinema ofMalcolm Lown). Margerie and Malcolm's filmic version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is probably the last piece of creative work to be quarried out of the manuscripts left behind at Lowry's death (the drafts of another Mexican novel, La Mordida, have so far resisted editing and are almost certainly in too primitive a state to have anything other than scholarly interest). Unlike other Lowry remains, however, the Tender Is the Night filmsci'ipt - together with notes and preface- constitutes a finished work, one submitted in 1950 to Malcolm's friend and former editor, Frank Taylor, first at MGM, then at Twentieth-Century Fox (the mediocre film eventually produced by the latter was based on another script than the Lowrys'). Aside from a single short story, in fact, it is the only manuscript in the decade...