Malcolm Lowry – Reading Markson Reading

Pg. 75 of David Markson’s copy of The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

On which Markson underlined a passage in red:
“And in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

—-

The term “dark night of the soul” dates back to the 16th century, from a poem entitled “Dark Night of the Soul” by Saint John of the Cross.

St. John of the Cross.
Who was, unsurprisingly, mentioned multiple times in Markson’s oeuvre.

     Kate, in Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, writes of the saint a few times, but there is one particular exchange I love:
     “Though as a matter of fact there are also certain things that one remembers while one is writing that one did not remember one remembered but does not happen to put down, either.
     For instance when I was writing about the fact that Rembrandt and Spinoza had lived in Amsterdam at the same time, which I had learned from a footnote, I suddenly remembered from a different footnote entirely that when El Greco had lived in Toledo such people as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross had lived there, too.
     Even though I remembered that, however, I did not put it down.
     Basically my reason for not doing so may have been because I do not know one solitary thing about either St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross.
     Except obviously that they were both in Toledo when El Greco was in Toledo.” (Pgs. 156-157).

Though Kate may not know anything of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross except that they lived in Toledo in the time of El Greco, Markson surely knows much more than that.

In The Last Novel, Markson writes of:
“The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses.” (Pg. 2).

     “Saint John of the Cross was short and slight.”
     We learn on pg. 56 of Vanishing Point.
     And then are told:
     “Half a friar, Saint Teresa of Ávila playfully spoke of him as.”

     Markson also clearly knows of the St. John of the Cross term: “dark night of the soul.”
     Which has become a recurring metaphor for the trying times of a spiritual journey.
     And which Markson used in one of his early detective novels:
     “He digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.”
     From Epitaph for a Dead Beat (on pg. 242 of the combined: Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat).

In Markson’s analysis of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning), he also uses the term, when he explains:
“The Consul has just now endured the latter illusion; and since it will be death at the hands of a pistol that ends his larger ‘dark night of the soul,’ also to be noted is a pistol once described here as ‘a bright jewel.’” (Pg. 197).

     Other scholars have discussed Lowry’s masterpiece, and especially his personal experience in writing it, in the terms of “a dark night of the soul”:
     As we learn from Sherrill Grace’s Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism:
     “Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) began Under the Volcano shortly after arriving in Cuernavaca, Mexico, with his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in 1936. Before he left Mexico in July 1938 he had separated from Jan, failed to drink himself into total oblivion, generally experienced every horror associated with the dark night of the soul, and completed a first draft (there would be three more, and even then he was not satisfied) of the Volcano.” (Pg. 164).
     Barry Wood mentions in his Malcolm Lowry: The Writer & His Critics:
     “According to his letters—to John Davenport, Conrad Aiken, James Stern (SL, pp. 11-13, 15, 27-30)—the next few weeks were a truly dark night of the soul, full of hallucinations, suspicions, horrible dangers, ‘an absolutely fantastic tragedy’ of isolation (SL, p. 11).” (Pg. 256).

Lowry saw the book in terms of “a dark night of the soul”—obviously knowing the St. John of the Cross origin of the term, but not realizing Fitzgerald had also used the term in Crack-Up until years later, as he relays in a letter to Robert Giroux (from his Selected Letters on pg. 303):
“What remains of this moral obligation I now apply to yourself, to think of at 4 o’clock in the morning, which I had not known Fitzgerald had advanced as the real dark night of the soul when I wrote the Volcano, and it may be that it is 3 o’clock or even 5 o’clock.”

He digs his doom better in the depths. He communes with the dark night of his soul.

And in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

The first page / title page of David Markson’s copy of Satan in a Barrel and Other Early Stories by Malcolm Lowry:

     On which the editor of the collection, Sherrill E. Grace, presumably wrote Markson the inscription:
     “For David
     With love—
          Sherrill
          31/03/99.”

—

Sherrill E. Grace, in addition to her great work on Malcolm Lowry and Margaret Atwood, actually wrote a short piece on Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress titled “Messages: Reading Wittgenstein’s Mistress.”

Some excerpts from that piece will follow…

“‘In the beginning,’ that is, on my first reading of David Markson’s fourth novel, I knew I was missing many of the messages. They were there before me all right—in the street, in the sand, on the page, and I thought I knew the language (both the signs and the game)—but I had little idea what they meant.”

“Wittgenstein’s Mistress was a beautiful, an important book, a book that meant to mean (a book about meaning and the importance of making meaning) and, thus, a book to reward richly my subsequent readings.”

“Kate’s mind is a storehouse of Wittgensteinian facts that she has some difficulty sorting into chronological or biographical categories.”

“Choose almost any passage of Wittgenstein’s Mistress at random and you will discover that it operates through repetition: repetition of words, hence of syllables, sounds and stresses, repetition of phrases, grammatical constructions (or misconstructions), repetition of names, facts, descriptions, quotations, and, of course, repetition of events such as writing those messages, visiting Simon’s grave, going to Hisarlik, burning books page by page, leaving food for a cat in the Colosseum, bouncing tennis balls down…Small wonder Kate’s favorite composer is Bach; her monologue could be called the Wittgenstein Variations.”

“After my first reading, I felt (as I suggested above) that in creating Kate, Markson had out-Mollied Joyce because his woman was so much more complex.”

“My third reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress only confirmed my belief that the entire text was somehow contained, adumbrated in its first sentence: ‘In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.’”

“The mystery story she gives us is, I would suggest, the very grail she is looking for: Dasein.”

“Kate’s readers must be prepared to become her co-creators and co-curators.”

“Markson’s Kate is waiting, still, time out of mind, for me to start reading again.”

The inside front cover of David Markson’s copy of The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet:

     On which Markson wrote as an inscription:
     “David M Markson
      Columbia University—1951”

—

Markson bought this book while getting his Masters at Columbia University.

During this time he was writing his master’s thesis on Malcolm Lowry, which would later be published as the book: Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning.

“When David Markson first wrote to Lowry on 3 June 1951, he was working on his master’s thesis at Columbia University, and his subject was Under the Volcano. He explained that he was ‘23, a foetal artist,’ and had read Lowry’s book three times before daring to write.”
So says pg. 398 of Sursum Corda!: The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Pt. 2.

Notice that the year Markson wrote Lowry, 1951, is also the same year he picked up Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature.

Was Highet’s treatise on Greek and Roman influences on Western literature perhaps research for reading and analyzing Lowry?

Pg. 351 of David Markson’s copy of Forces in Modern British Literature: 1885-1946 by William York Tindall:

On which Markson made a line in the margin and wrote the name of his friend “Dylan Thomas” to mark where Tindall’s discussion of Thomas begins.

—

This seems like the right time to share a piece Markson wrote re: Thomas, in prose, that became one of the appendices for Markson’s own Collected Poems:

APPENDIX B

DYLAN THOMAS
TWENTY YEARS LATER

     For weeks now, I have been scowling over the premise behind this essay. Can it truly be possible that twenty full years have passed—to the day, come Friday—since Dylan Thomas died on West Eleventh Street? My lord, I think I saw him yesternight. And out of what ineluctable, startling legerdemain can I myself actually be older now than he was then?
     Dylan, you randy, rumpled, boilermaker-chugging young dog…twenty years?
     There he stands, in the White Horse Tavern. Though I have been to Laugharne as well, in southern Wales the color of owls, and seen where he rests in country sleep….
     So what words then, to mark the day? That for many of us he remains the truest poet in the language since Yeats? Even were there point in such a judgment, just who am I to venture it?
     I had thought of a reminiscence also, possessed of the trivial fond records of some eight or ten Dylan-soaked nights—but time, I am sure, must long since have distorted most. Did he and I really once race, mad as birds, some several staggered blocks along Hudson Street after a midnight’s glorious lying about our boyhood heroism at track? Or have I been making up most of that story for years?
     But perhaps I find something I can trust. I have letters that I wrote about him, that seem in retrospect a fair accounting of what one casual acquaintance saw and felt, back then—and worth a modest footnote’s pause, as it were, for today. (The letters were to Malcolm Lowry, then in British Columbia; they were returned to me after Lowry’s death later on. If I abridge them considerably, often without ellipses, the only other very few changes will be for clarity.) Thomas died on November 9, 1953; the date on the earliest excerpt, at the time but incidental intelligence, is November 3:

Dylan is here again—kind of painful. He has been setting records with the bottle, unfortunately—doesn’t focus, moves about as if hypnotized, speaks past you into the emptiness of a limbo all his own—and is apparently writing nothing. I love the bastard’s stuff, and have for years; and liked him much when I was seeing him about a year and a half ago. Then, even in the drunkenness there was a kind of wit and vitality and stimulation that means life in abundance; but now he seems a caricature of himself, even in appearance. A dirty shame….

Even youth, it strikes me now, is flimsy excuse for that sort of prose—though there would appear more insight back of it than I knew. Before writing, I’d seen Thomas only once during the two weeks of his then-current visit; yet within days I was to send Lowry the following:

A brief and terribly painful follow-up to something in my letter of a couple days ago. I learned just now that Dylan collapsed at the Chelsea (his hotel) yesterday, and is in a local hospital with a serious brain ailment. Precisely what it means I don’t know, but will let you know as soon as I hear anything. Christ.

Typing hurriedly, I contrived to write “brail” instead of “brain.” In a reply he started before taking things quite seriously, Lowry asked if I meant to intimate “an ailment as of one slightly blind.” There was no returning the jest when I wrote again, however; I would post the letter only a few hours before Thomas “expired,” as the hospital switchboard was to have it that evening:

What to tell you, but the facts? There is no change in Dylan’s condition: five days in a coma, still critical. He has a brain hemorrhage and they have no idea what is keeping him alive. Caitlin flew in yesterday.
   The facts. And your damned guts turn over. The young men already composing their elegies, and a disgraceful mob of them mills around the corridors of St. Vincent’s holding a premature wake. To be able to tell their tavern friends: look on Shelley plain? Hell, I was in the hospital the day he died….
   I remember your story about him as a kid, hacking his lungs out, breaking bottles, declaiming on death. And so it’s taken twenty years. I guess he must have known—or knows, whatever the damned tense—his position. At the time I got to know him best, he was caught up in a whirlwind in which he seemed indifferently content. On the trip before, he had wondered, honestly, if he would be liked or understood. And on these later visits it was the purest degradation. They liked him, all right, all the fawning, uncreative sycophants who robbed him of his time and his energy and every other damned thing until even the person was gone and only the “personality” remained. What matter if he is mesmerized, mechanical, inarticulate? Hell, ma, look at me, sitting here buying beers for Dylan Thomas…and I also, those months in 1952. The mob that will feed upon him even in death—or what is worse, right now….
   I saw a manuscript of his once, a poem of about thirty lines that made a sheaf as thick as a fist. I wonder, after the early romanticism passed, what he was like alone, working that way, doing “Fern Hill” and “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” the others that will last. When he was his own, I mean, and belonged to himself. The picture I have now is so cluttered, so unclean. But there is such a damned impossible purity and vitality in some of his things that probably it is that, even now, that is keeping him alive this long. It is the thing that made him, and will remain….
   “When he walked with his mother through the parables of sunlight and the legends of the green chapels….” “And death shall have no dominion.” Jesus Jesus Jesus.
   Two years ago the White Horse Tavern was an empty, unknown seamen’s bar where old men played chess, peripheral to the Village, nowhere. And now, because Dylan found it and had the instinct to make it a refuge in the beginning, it is the most mobbed, crawling bar downtown, the place to be. They came like flies, now like jackals. And now for a while it will be hushed, somber, a kind of shrine….
   Balls. I’ll have a drink there with you one day. Meanwhile I’m sorry, with both of you out there, who knew him so long. I wish I had, before….

Pg. 115 of David Markson’s copy of Ushant by Conrad Aiken:

On which Markson places a check next to a mention of “Hambo,” as he does at every other mention of the name “Hambo” anywhere in Ushant.

—

The reason why he’s checked every mention of “Hambo” in his copy of Ushant is because, as he writes on pg. 226 of Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning:
“Lowry appears as ‘Hambo’ in the work; only in an edition republished after Lowry’s death did Aiken append an identification.”

And, as we know, Lowry was to Markson, what Aiken was to Lowry.

Markson in conversation with Joseph Tabbi:
“[Under the Volcano] quite simply knocked me out of my chair. Within a couple of years, I’d read it probably half a dozen times. And then I finally sent [Lowry] a letter saying God knows what—be my father, or something as asinine. But evidently it did strike the right chord, since one of the first letters I got back ran on for twenty or more pages[…]Of course something I didn’t know at the time was that Lowry had written the same sort of letter himself, as an even younger man, to Conrad Aiken. So he was ready to be sympathetic with that “identification” that someone can feel for a given book.”

Pg. 229 of David Markson’s copy of Ushant by Conrad Aiken:

On which Markson underlined the following phrase about Hambo (aka Malcolm Lowry):
“That sixth-sense mysticism of his, and his eternal, and so often verifiable, adduction of cabalistic correspondences—the evidences, to him, of a mystic pattern.”

And also placed a rather awkwardly large and squiggly check mark next to that mention of Hambo/Lowry.

—

Aiken’s mention of Hambo’s(/Lowry’s) “sixth-sense mysticism” and “adduction of cabalistic correspondences” reminds me of Markson’s discussion of similar things in his study of Lowry’s(/Hambo’s) Under the Volcano.

For example:
“But since this Cabbalistic abyss will also again recall Dante’s, there are simply too many of Lowry’s key symbolisms thrown into simultaneous juxtaposition here to be separated this early; discussion of his occult apparatus will occur elsewhere.”

Elsewhere:
“And here the novel’s configurations of light and dark can be put into occult perspective also—connected, as Lowry points out, with the summit of the Cabbalistic Tree of Life.” (Pgs. 64-65).

And:
“In the preface Lowry states that ‘the deeper layer of the novel’ and the Cabbala are ‘linked’ through this usage.” (Pg. 68).

One more:
“What Laurelle dismisses as a ‘trick of the gods’—his unplanned Mexican reunion with the Consul—in the latter’s eyes is a specifically Baudelairean or Swedenborgian ‘correspondence,’ an interaction between the comprehensible and the unknowable of Hermetic proportions.” (Pg. 68).

Special bonus:
Here is a handdrawn version of the diagram of the Cabbalistic Tree of Life with Correspondences that Lowry sent to Markson: