Malcolm Lowry's La Mordida: A Scholarly Edition ed. by Patrick A. McCarthy (review)

HUMANITIES 311 her assistant editor reliable source of ess'enjOal mt:orlma,QC,n less committed or ........''''......~_.....L4... llnpOJ~ta.Ilt modem 1'f."'''''''£T PatrickA. Grace and these volumes will be a sch101aI'S, but "'l"h,nll'll'ill Edition La Mordida: A Edition is an thanks to the ",.,.,..,,0..1-> crattslna11Sl1 312 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Sometimes,in the guise ofms autobiographlcal narrator, the writer Sigbjeffi Wilderness, he feels doomed, unable or unwilling to deal not only with the past by means of the small bribe implied by the book's title, but also with the feeling of spiritual burdens weighing on him. Sigbj0mis in a quandary, barely able to explore the distinctions between life and art that produced his The Valley ofthe Shadow ofDeath (read: Under the Volcano), and the life that" should inspire art in his present pilgrimage; when he wants to write, he is overwhelmed by the feeling 'that he is being used as a protagonistin a novel writtenby a daemon.' For his wife Primrose his malady is obvious; he is drinking too much: /J'You'll never write again," Primrose said cruelly, "If you go on as you are doing./I' A trail of 'Margienotes' is scattered through the text. Performing under the guise of pleading autobiographical authenticity, Margerie Bonner Lowry gains a toe-hold as an interrogating or resisting reader or co-writer, often humouring the master, sometimes cheering him along, finally challenging him directly. Here is the opening of a paragraph where Lowry is describing the Wildernesses' journeyon a 'great train grinding through the night': I After Primrose is asleep (Margienote: I never slept a goddamn bit on that horrible train, I can't sleep sitting up anyhow) Sigbj0rn sinks into this cold sphere of his own horror and agony: relate his reflections to Schopenhauer on the will.' Towards the end of the novel there is a comic .expansiveness in her notes addressed to the laId boy' or I dearduck,' a playfulness informed by the relief that comes from Margerie's and Malcolm's shared triumph as survivors of a nightmarish baptism into a Kafkaesque (i.e., Lowryesque) world. As McCarthy rightly suggests, when the 'tantalizingly incomplete' La Mordida is laid before us in its present form - and Lowry 'never intended that it be published as it stands' - 'it provides us with a fascinating glimpse into Lowry's life and art and demonstrates, perhaps more clearly than any other work, the complex self-involvement of his fiction.' (PAUL TIESSEN) Ralph Maud. Charles Olson's Reading Southern Illinois University Press. 383. us $44.95 Ralph Maud, in Charles Olson's Reading, gives us a remarkable intellectual biography, pure and simple - the life of a fascinating mind at work among books. Charles Olson, while always a centre of contention and controversy, remains one of the most important American poets of the last half of the twentieth century. Prophetic, cantankerous, brilliant, combative, he leapt in mid-life from a career of public service (he was part of the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War) to a life in poetry, becoming one of the primary voices raised at mid-century against the stranglehold that the poetics of T.5. Eliot and his followers held on English-language ...