Malcolm Lowry’s outline for the unpublished “The Voyage That Never Ends”

Malcolm Lowry’s heavily annotated working typescript of his most complete articulation of his life’s work: his plan for an epic that would rival in scope the great literary undertakings of the 20th century of Proust, Joyce, and Pound. It is the immediate precursor – with substantial variations – to a foundational document of Lowry scholarship housed in the Lowry Archive at University of British Columbia.

Lowry envisioned The Voyage That Never Ends as his magnum opus: an epic cycle encompassing his existing novels and stories as well as projected works, with Under the Volcano as its centerpiece. This outline, typed on the verso of a partial typescript of Margerie Lowry’s unfinished novel The Castle of Malatesta, along with one typed draft leaf of Lowry’s short story "Elephant and Colosseum," opens with a three-page overview, to which 26 pages of individual treatments of the project’s component works and their significance to the whole are appended. The pages are copiously annotated, with Lowry’s lengthy manuscript additions and cancellations, and an additional five autograph leaves interpolated throughout. Read more at Glen Horowitz