Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry ed. by Sherrill E. Grace (review)

HUMANITIES 309 their own lives more clearly, serving simultaneously as the confirmation of this new 'story' of how things are. This approach produces excellent readings of individual works, particularly 'Murder for the Wrong Reason' (a short story of 1929), Brighton Rock, and The Ministry ofFear (the endpoint of Diemert's study). It has the defects ofits qualities, however. Writers of the 1930S are represented chiefly by Auden, Isherwood, and George Orwell. Other novelists who shared Greene's social and political unease, but devised different narrative methods, like Henry Green, are absent. The thriller most often mentioned is Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps of 1915; Greene's rivals for the thriller market in the 19305 are barely mentioned (Sapper, Dornford Yates, Eric Ambler not at all). Greene's novels are thus largely isolated from the literary and commercial context in which they appeared. Michael Irmes is named twice (misspelled) in the text, but doesn't-make the index, which is a pity, because he not only wrote both detective stories and thrillers, but also most unusually allowed his detective to appear in a thriller, in The Secret Vanguard (1940), probably the unnamed bookwhich inspired Greene to write The Ministry ofFear. Diemert's summary of 19308 literary politics is simplified sometimes to the point of distortion, as in his presentation of F.R. Leavis,who thoughtlittle ofJoyce, detested Bloomsbury, and preached the moral Significance of literature, as an apostle of high modernism and the separation of art and life. Finally, he never asks whether Greene's strategy worked - did his books actually change readers' view of the world? Although Diemert portrays the Leavises as elitists because they disapproved of commercialized popular culture, his own thesis tends to confirm their position. By turning the thriller into a vehicle for sentiments congenial to late twentieth-century opinion (dislike of capitalism and 'an imperialistic and class-bound social structure'),Greene redeemed the form, if not the times; these are thrillers we can read with a clear conscience. Consequently, to devotees of thrillers and detective stories this book may appear narrowly based and unsympathetic. Its true audience will be found among students of Greene's fiction, who will appreciate its lucidity, deft interweaving of theory with readings of texts, and compelling interpretation of Greene's early career. It deserves many such readers. (JOHN D. BAIRD) Sherrill E. Grace, editor. Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters ofMalcolm Lowry, Volume 2: 1946-57 University of Toronto Press. xx, 1000. $60.00 This second and concluding volume of the Lowry letters is in every way worthy of the first (see last year's 'Letters in Canada'). Once more, Sherrill Grace has done a fine and tactful job of collecting and annotating the 310 LETTERS IN. CANADA 1996 available materials (even as a few new pieces continue to surface - see her appendix 3), and the two volumes together make a major addition to the Lowry canon. The editorial work is again thorough and scrupulous if not flawless: once in a while notes are unhelpful (those on pop culture figures Dorothy Dix, Lloyd Douglas, C.B. deMille, and Bing Crosby, on film versions of The Children's Hour and Hangover Square, on Forster rather than Whitman, on HenryJames's The Ambassadors ratherthan The American;now and again errors creep in, sometimes amusingly so (Nelson 'Eddie' as star ofRose-Marie, Double 'Endemnity' as title ofJames M. Cain's novel and 'Rita Hayward,' the improbable merger of two 19405 actresses, Elinor rather than Philip Wylie as commentator on 'momisffi,' and William Blackstone as the first set~ler 'on' Rhode Island; rarely, sheer inadvertances appear (David Markson's Under the Volcano manuscript placed at Texas rather than Tulsa, the mislocation of the Vancouver Public Library o of the 19405, the only serious one being the misidentification (twice) of the menu used in chapter 11 of Under the Volcano. But such lapses are motes in a volume of this size, small and unusual irritants more than outweighed by the mass ofadequate oand helpful identifications and useful contextualization. Some notes, such as that on Lowry's listing oillis address at the 'CarolineCourt Apartments,' are small acts of criticism in themselves; and the reading of an apparently...