07.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: Exploring the regional conditions that led to the Lowry's extended residency in Dollarton we turn to the mill site itself. Reachable only by ship, the town of Dollar was constructed to house the hundreds of workers who kept the timber rolling from 1918 until the early 1940's. Malcolm would have been well aware of the mill, treading to the foundations of the old burner, crawling in for the view, or looking on at its infernal shadow.

The top image below gives view of the mill at peak capacity, and at bottom is a photo of the log dump in Union Bay where giants were felled, rolled, afloat.

06.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: Al Neil and Carole Itter were the last waterfront shack dwellers along this stretch of mudflat. Much reminds us of this formidably talented duo when reflecting back on the Lowrys- writers, thinkers, but also musical and artistic. Al Neil passed away last year. They lost rights to live in their cabin a while back. It has since been bought, renovated and will soon be re-launched as an artist's residence- possibly in False Creek. The Grunt Gallery is overseeing the work and more information is available here.

05.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: Canadian writer and teacher, Dorothy Livesay, also lived in a shack along the shores of Dollarton, and on many an occasion befriended the Lowrys, indulged the excesses, endured the onslaught. Malcolm's erratic behavior and overall decline after the publication of Under the Volcano gradually drove many of his friends away. Among the self-exiled was Livesay, a poet with strong socialist roots and a rebel heart. It is worth considering that her sympathies lay more with those fighting outwards and against the oppressive other, rather than those entrenched in bloody self-warfare:

Lorca

And fountains curl their plumes

On statue stone,

In secret thicket mould

Lovers defend their hold

Old couples hearing whisperers

Touch in a handclasp, quivering.

For you sang out aloud

Arching the silent wood

To stretch itself, tiptoe,

Above the crowd…

                  You hold the word

                  Unspoken.

You breathe. You be!

Bare, stripped light

Time’s fragment flagged

Against the dark.

You dance. Explode

Unchallenged through the door

As bullets burst

Long deaths ago, your breast.

And song outsoars

The bomber’s range

Serene with wind-

Maneuvered cloud.

                  Light flight and word

                  The unassailed, the token!

 - Dorothy Livesay, 1941

04.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: There are rare occasions when a book is made into a film, made more rare in our humble opinion when the movie eclipses the book. On this the day when Oscars are distributed we tip our hats to Albert Finney who was either nominated or won numerous awards for his performance.

Of note a documentary was produced by the National Film Board entitled Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. Richard Burton is credited with the narration. Skip the rental fees and view the excellent film here.

03.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: On this rocky shore the man of steel and the long weekend in skin tights, neoprene, chest full of salted atomic mist stands with sun to back. Al Purdy wrote a poem entitled Malcolm Lowry, published in his excellent collection, The Cariboo Horses:

Malcolm Lowry

Not much to remember
     going to see the soused writer and
     bursting from dull green wood
     out to the live green water
with introductions and awkward handshakes
on a shore full of driftwood and stones with blue
boats on a blue horizon
not seeming to move but moving anyway and
ourselves unacquainted with one another
unnoticed by the sea
And in the nature of things I shouldn't
have been surprised if there hadn't
been any gin that day
     and getting drunk on tea

Not much reason
to remember that bit of land or
the old iron ship I found later
on an exploring trip I guess
the hectic spots of flame still dance
on the cheeks of the salty old whore
of a city over the water shine
still on a blue or a grey day
and the gulls no doubt still scream
louder than ever in a noisy masquerade
of permanence
                        but that red face is dead

Not much reason
                        to remember him on the beach
                        no knowing even the stones
                        he shifted in the exuberant morning
                        or what trees have fallen or
if some of the mountains were restless
                        and moved
slightly moving also a little down there on the water only
the composition of colours must be
                       much the same
And buried in a next of deep grass a couple
of old gin bottles
                       but they're empty

- Al Purdy from The Cariboo Horses

02.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: The Vancouver Sun published this photo, attributed to no one, most likely in Mexico somewhere... perhaps within the region of Cuernavaca. But back to Al Purdy who spent some time with Vancouver photographer and artist Curt Lang, and  Malcolm on the tide swept shores of Dollarton.

Al Purdy was recognized by Bukowski as the one hip, beat poet in Canada. In the photo above he reminds us of William Burroughs in pose and manner. A great northern still life from the front of his own shack, a quite famous and still standing artist residency in Ameliasburgh. Purdy writes of Lowry:

"On our second visit to the beach shack, the dead man went swimming in Burrard Inlet, his face red and barrel chest bobbing around in the cold water like pieces of coloured driftwood. Later, it seemed completely natural that my friend and I, Lowry and his wife, drank Bols gin, which sometimes replaced coffee and tea in that household.

It grew darker then. Across black water silver candles of the oil refinery lit in the early evening, the same ones Lowry called, ironically, "the loveliest of oil refineries," He and my friend sang songs outside, while I sat at Lowry's typewriter and copied his poems by lamplight, feeling very literary and virtuous.

They were odd, doom-laden poems, very regular and formal, maybe even Elizabethan-sounding, death implicit in all of them. But in each poem, generally at the end, a line or two would silently go "boom": a phrase incandescent-

No Kraken shall depart till bade by name,
No peace but that must pay full toll to hell.

Then the rough-tender voices of my friends, the literary drunks, floated through the window to join i my mind the many-tentacled Kraken: "Away, away, away you rolling river."

- from Al Purdy in Starting from Ameliasburgh

01.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: Genuine glee on Malcolm's face here. With the pier behind him we can only guess he is holding a satisfying volume if not an edition of Under the Volcano, freshly minted.

"Suppose you land in Vancouver, as seems reasonable. So far not so good. McGoff didn't have much use for modern Vancouver. According to him it has a sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down the Burrard Inlet... As for drinking, by the way, that is beset," only beer parlours so uncomfortable and cold that serve beer so weak no self-respecting drunkard would show his nose in them. You have to drink at home, and when you run short it's too far to get a bottle-"

- from Under the Volcano 

 

The symmetry is pleasing, and the adoration they had for each other, endearing.  Worth the double take. Shoreline bohemians that embraced squalls and solitude in equal measure. Such shacks lining the sliver of land around Roche Point were numerous. The great Canadian poet, Earle Birney, had a waterfront stilted shack nearby. Curt Lang was a visitor. Al Purdy frequented. There were others, most welcome. Here stands Birney and Lowry in 1947:

 Bushed

He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it
Yet he built a shack on the shore
learned to roast porcupine belly and
wore the quills on his hatband
At first he was out with the dawn
whether it yellowed bright as wood-columbine
or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel of storm
But he found the mountain was clearly alive
sent messages whizzing down every hot morning
boomed proclamations at noon and spread out
a white guard of goat
before falling asleep on its feet at sundown
When he tried his eyes on the lake ospreys
would fall like valkyries
choosing the cut-throat
He took then to waiting
till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset
But the moon carved unknown totems
out of the lakeshore
owls in the beardusky woods derided him
moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed
their antlers up to the stars
then he knew though the mountain slept the winds
were shaping its peak to an arrowhead
poised
And now he could only
bar himself in and wait
for the great flint to come singing into his heart

 - Earle Birney, 1951