Remapping Melville’s Liverpool: Reading Redburn in Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea

Melville was an important influence on the British-Canadian writer Malcolm Lowry, best known for his novel Under the Volcano (1947). Lowry’s letters reveal both his fascination with Melville, and his anxious attempts to obscure his knowledge of Melville’s works, fuelled by fears of being thought a plagiarist. Lowry’s novel In Ballast to the White Sea (1934–36)— thought lost during his lifetime, but now recovered and published—draws particularly on Redburn (1849), despite Lowry’s claims not to have read the book. Lowry’s use of Redburn to examine father-son relations, to chart the fate of the individual in an increasingly globalised world, and to construct the Liverpool setting shared by the two texts suggests that he was, indeed, familiar with the novel. More importantly, Lowry understood Melville as a theorist of modernity’s impact on time and place, anticipating twenty-first century readings of Redburn. Approaching Redburn through In Ballast reveals the interplay between real and imagined space in Melville’s depiction of Liverpool, and his efforts to understand and represent heterotopia. Recovering In Ballast and its debt to Melville, therefore, also recovers Lowry as an original and astute reader of Melville, and repositions Redburn as an experimental fiction.