WIRRAL TIME TRAVEL
BY ANDREW WOOD
MALCOM LOWRY
AUTHOR AND REBEL
Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born at 13 North Drive,
Wallasey, on 28th July 1909, the youngest of four sons
of Arthur Osborne Lowry and Evelyn Boden Lowry. His
strict Methodist father was a wealthy cotton broker who
owned cotton plantations in Egypt, Peru and Texas.
The Lowry family moved to ‘Inglewood’ in Caldy when
Clarence was two. Like his brothers, he was educated in upper-
middle-class public schools: Braeside Preparatory School, West
Kirby (now closed), then Caldicote School founded in Hitchen,
Hertfordshire, in 1904 by Heald Jenkins, and finally the Leys
School, Cambridge, a Wesleyan Methodist foundation.
At home, the Lowry boys were encouraged to take part in all
kinds of outdoor activities. Clarence himself became a good
golfer, winning a junior competition at the age of fifteen; he
was also a very good swimmer. However, he seems always
to have been the black sheep of the family. He had an early
inclination to escape from the austere atmosphere of home,
first with an enthusiasm for jazz, which led him in his teens to
dream of making a career as a song-writer. The same desire to
escape what must have seemed to be his fate – to follow in his
father’s footsteps – first to an active form in 1928, when he took
the ferry to Liverpool one day and signed on as a cabin boy
on the Blue Funnel Line’s SS Pyrrhus, a cargo ship bound for
Yokohama.
The experience was not entirely pleasant, but that did not
stop him, two years later, from sailing as a deckhand on a ship
bound for Oslo, where he succeeded in meeting the Norwegian
writer Nordahl Grieg, author of the novel “The Ship Sails On”,
published in 1927, which had gained attention with its revealing
picture of the hard life of Norwegian sailors, and which was to
influence Lowry’s own writing.
Lowry disliked the name Clarence, preferring his middle name,
which is the one he subsequently known by. His enthusiasm for
literature led him into an exchange of letters with the American
poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, whose “Blue Voyage”,
published in 1927 had impressed Lowry. In the summer of 1929
Malcolm somehow persuaded his father to finance a visit to the
USA, where Aiken took him in as a paying guest at his home
in Boston, Massachusetts, as a sort of litery apprentice. In the
following year Aiken won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his
“Selected Poems”.
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In the autumn of 1929, after his visit to Aiken, Lowry went
up to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. However, his
encounters with Aiken, Greig, and other younger writers he
met at Cambridge influenced his literary style far more than
his academic studies. By the time he graduated in 1932, Lowry
had already earned a reputation as an excellent writer – and a
heavy drinker. Despite his excessive drinking, and a stew of self-
doubt, alienation and despair, Lowry had charm and charisma
that drew others to him, particularly in the bars of Cambridge.
“Ultramarine”, the first of two major works published in his
lifetime, was published in 1933, when he was 24 years old.
“Ultramarine” follows its main character, an educated young
man, Dad Hilliot, and his psychological and social development
during a sea voyage to the Far East. Hilliott is rejected and made
the butt of the crew’s ribald jokes because of his upper class
background and sexual inexperience. After weeks of isolation
and internal anguish, however, he finally wins the men’s
approval. Quite clearly, many of the elements of the story are
based on Lowry’s own experiences on the SS Pyrrhus.
The critics were less than enthusiastic about “Ultramarine”. The
chief criticism was that the narrative line failed to be sustained
over the course of the novel. Lowry was also criticised for
his perfunctory descriptions of the ports and countries that
Hilliot encounters, focusing too much on his character’s inner
thoughts and feelings. Although a few perceptive critics saw a
potential for extraordinary writing in Lowry. “Ultramarine” was
essentially a failure: of the 1,500 copies that were printed, barely
half were sold.
After he graduated, Lowry spent some months in London,
where he became friends with several other writers, notably
Dyln Thomas, a similarly enthusiastic drinker. In April 1933, he
became restless again and he began travelling through Europe
with Conrad Aiken. It was while they were in Spain that Lowry
met an American writer, Jan Gabriel, and after a lightning
romance they married in Paris on 6th January 1934. However,
even at the outset, their relationship was fractious and she
returned to New York, leaving him in France. In 1935, Lowry
followed Jan to New York, but he was drinking excessively and
he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital.
He stayed there for two weeks before discharging himself. He
then went to Hollywood with the intention of trying to find
work as a screenwriter. The following year he and Jan were