Fratellinis

....only the signs above and around her said: Dubonnet, Amer Picon, Les 10 Frattelinis (Malc's spelling).... Under The Volcano

...and to push the matter further we can even half remember that Dick (les Fratellinis, ...) had "helped" a circus clown......The cinema of Malcolm Lowry: a scholarly edition of Lowry's "Tender is the Night By Malcolm Lowry, Miguel Mota, Paul Tiessen, Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Lowry first saw the famous clowns at the Grand Guignol in Paris during his 1926 visit to the city with his school for a hockey tournament.

The Fratellini Family was a famous circus family in the late 1900s and 1920s. An engagement at the Circus Medrano in Paris, France, after World War I was so successful that it sparked a strong resurgence of interest in the circus. By 1923, the Fratellini brothers had become the darlings of the Parisian intellectuals. They were lauded in print and worshiped by adoring fans who would show up at the circus just in time for the Fratellini entree, which sometimes ran as long as forty-five minutes:

Paul Fratellini (1877–1940)
François Fratellini (1879–1951)
Albert Fratellini (1886–1961),

Read more on Wikipedia

I have been searching for some video on the Fratellinis sometime to illustrate this post - finally found one:


Les freres fratellini les trois fameux clowns by jean_luc_arsene

You can read more here:

The Clown Hierarchy

Winchester in Under The Volcano

Winchester! Hell, that’s something else. Don’t tell me. Righto! The Black Swan is in Winchester. They captured me on the German side of the camp and at the same side of the place where they captured me is a girl's school. A girl teacher. She gave it to me. And you can take it And you can have it."
Under The Volcano

Weber's words in Under The Volcano made me wonder how Lowry knew the city. There is no record of him visiting the city though it is possible that he passed through the city on trips to the West Country in the 1930s. However, I have come to realise that Malc often imbues deeper meaning into his writing with literary references is this possible with Winchester?



The character of Weber pervades the different versions of Under The Volcano Malc describes him as "a sort of pseudo-American fascist" who is part of the sinister sub-plot of the novel. Could Malc have seen death and evil in Winchester? The reference to the Black Swan could be yet another pub Malc imbibed in or is it a reference to the Conan Doyle story where Sherlock Holmes and Watson have lunch with Miss Hunter in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. There are some Lowryan coincidences in the story beyond the Black Swan - the villain Mr Toller is a drunkard; one of the characters Mr Rucastle has a dual personality - which reflects Malc himself and something which he was obsessed with; Holmes's remarks at the beginning of the story have a certain resonance in Malc's methods of working: "To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of The Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived." and the female character Miss Hunter has "a rather peculiar tint of chestnut" to her hair i.e. reddish, which Malc had; Miss Hunter later becomes principal of a girls' school and there is even a dead dog!

Unfortunately, the black Swan was demolished before World War Two and stood in part on the site now occupied by Barclays Bank.

You can read the full story here

Or you can watch the silent movie version:



Georges Treville appeared as Sherlock Holmes in a number of short features in 1912. His series of films were the first officially authorised series of Holmes Films, produced under the supervision of Conan Doyle himself. This is the 8th and final episode it is also the only episode that survives. The series comprised the following films, all directed by Adrien Caillard and produced by Eclair.

1. The Speckled Band
2. The Silver Blaze
3. The Beryl Coronet
4. The Musgrave Ritual
5. The Reigate Squires
6. The Stolen Papers
7. The Mystery of Boscombe Valey
8. The Copper Beeches

Ecalir also produced a feature, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1911, which is lost.



We also have the other references to Winchester in Under The Volcano. Chris Ackerley has noted:

During World War I, there had been a large military camp on the out-skirts of the city, which was used in the later days of the war to house POWs. There is a girls' boarding school directly opposite the site of the camp, but Weber (whose smuggled arms may include Winchester repeating rifles) seems to be living out a fantasy since it was not built until 1932-34.

The camp could possibly be Hursley Park but I will need to speak to Chris as I could n't find the girl's school. Chris refers to Weber's "fantasy" - Weber besides having a sinister political role also adds to the sexual mores of the novel - Yvonne overhears him having sex in the next room to her's in Acapulco in the 1940 Under The Volcano. The girl's school may also be an echo back to Malc's time at the Leys with the Pense Girls school lying across the road. Both may combine to underline Malc's own feelings of sexual inadequacy.

Another literary reference to Winchester lies in Hardy's Tess of the d’Urbervilles. See Literary Winchester

Editing Modernism in Canada - Important news for Lowry Enthusiasts

I am pleased to report some significant news regarding the publishing of new and out of print works by Malcolm Lowry under the banner of the Editing Modernism in Canada project:

The EMiC project is affiliated with and/or partnered with several presses and series of editions: The Porcupine’s Quill; the Canadian Literature Collection, edited by Dean Irvine, and the Anthology Collection, edited by Janice Fiamengo, both published by the University of Ottawa Press; the Laurier Poetry Series, edited by Neil Besner, and the TransCanada series, edited by Smaro Kamboureli, both published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press; the CrossCurrents series, edited by Paul Hjartarson, published by the University of Alberta Press; McGill-Queen’s University Press; and the University of Toronto Press.

The editions in preparation include texts by a wide range of canonical, formerly canonical or popular, and non-canonical authors: Carroll Aikins, Ted Allan, Sol Allen, Irene Baird, Marius Barbeau, Bertram Brooker, Ernest Buckler, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Sui Sin Far, Marie Joussaye Fotheringham, A.M. Klein, Raymond Knister, Dorothy Livesay, Malcolm Lowry, Hugh MacLennan, Eli Mandell, P.K. Page, E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, Elizabeth Smart, Miriam Waddington, Sheila Watson, Wilfred Watson and the collaborative authorship of Martha Ostenso and Douglas Durkin as well as Oscar Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Ed Cecil-Smith, and Frank Love. Many of these editions include digital apparatuses, and many of the proposed editions will be published online in the EMiC digital repository.

Given the EMiC project’s mandate to supervise and train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows working on their own editions, these editions are but a partial representation of the potential number of EMiC editions.

Our rationale for the selection of authors and texts has been determined by multiple criteria:

1) canonical authors whose works are either out of print or available only in excerpts in anthologies;

(2) canonical authors whose work is in print but unavailable in critical editions;

(3) previously unpublished works by canonical authors;

(4) formerly canonical or popular authors whose works are out of print and otherwise inaccessible;

(5) non-canonical authors whose work has already been the object of previous critical and literary-historical study but remains unpublished, uncollected, or out of print;

(6) marginalized and minoritized authors whose work has not yet been widely recognized as part of modernist literary cultures.

In addition to EMiC editions, the project will issue a series of essay collections and special journal issues with contributions by participants in the 2011 workshop and the 2010 and 2012 conferences. Read more on EMiC

What is exciting for Lowry enthusiasts is the following which EMiC has in the pipeline:

2011

* Malcolm Lowry, Lunar Caustic, eds. Victor Doyen and Christopher Ackerley. Print edition with web-based apparatus (University of Ottawa Press)

* Lowry and Space, eds. Miguel Mota and Richard Lane. Multimedia book.

* After Lowry, dir. Miguel Mota. Film.

2012

*Malcolm Lowry, In Ballast to the White Sea, eds. Paul Tiessen, Patrick McCarthy, and Miguel Mota (University of Ottawa Press). Print edition with web-based apparatus.

2013

* Malcolm Lowry, The 1940 Under the Volcano, eds. Paul Tiessen, Patrick McCarthy, and Miguel Mota. Print edition with web-based apparatus (University of Ottawa Press)

Probably, the most exciting news is the publication of the supposedly "lost" manuscript of In Ballast to the White Sea. I understand that this publication will be based on an early draft held in Jan Gabrial's archive. This early draft may not be as complete as the one lost in the fire in Lowry's shack in 1944. However, it will provide a glimpse into the long thought lost work which will have huge significance for Lowry enthusiasts and scholars.

I will keep readers posted on above when I have more details.