Pieter Bruegel the Elder

... we see Central Park again, changed from winter to spring and almost into another kind of Breughel, with bushes and trees in bloom, and young lovers wandering through it, children playing, little ducks swim, as church bells ring The cinema of Malcolm Lowry: a scholarly edition of Lowry's "Tender is the Night"

... in a Breughel garden with dogs & barrels & vin kegs & chickens & sunsets & morning glory with an approaching storm & a bottle of half wine. And now the rain! Let it come, seated as I am on Breughel barrel by a dog's grave crowned with dead irises. Letter to Albert Erskine 10 August 1948


The first in a series of posts in which I will be exploring Malc's references to paintings and artists in his work.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Dutch pronunciation c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) was a Flemish renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He is sometimes referred to as "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which Bruegel is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel. Read more on Wikipedia

Hangover Square 1945

..as with those novels or plays (The Children's Hour, Hangover Square, etc) which have been utterly transmogrified, but made into effective movies... Letter to Frank Taylor April/May 1950

Malc is arguing a case in his letter for the production of his transcript of Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night withstanding the issues of incest in the novel and how problems around difficult subjects have been overcome in other movies including Hangover Square.

Hangover Square (1945) is a film noir directed by John Brahm, based on the novel Hangover Square (1941) by Patrick Hamilton. The screenplay was written by Barré Lyndon who made a number of changes to the novel, including the transformation of George Harvey Bone into a classical composer-pianist and filming the story as a turn-of-the-century period piece.

In Victorian London (the date 1899 is shown in the opening scene), the police suspect that a composer who suffers from periods of amnesia may be a murderer.

The period setting creates a dark mood, especially in the key scene when Bone (portrayed by Laird Cregar), having strangled Netta (Linda Darnell) on Guy Fawkes Night, carries her wrapped body through streets filled with revelers and deposits it on top of the biggest bonfire.

The final scene shows Cregar as Bone, playing his piano concerto (composed by Bernard Herrmann), unmindful of the conflagration around him, as flames consume all.
Wikipedia



Hangover Square is a 1941 novel by English playwright and novelist Patrick Hamilton (1904–1962). Subtitled A tale of Darkest Earl's Court it is set in that area of London in 1939.

A black comedy, it is often cited as Hamilton's finest novel, exemplifying the author's concerns over social inequalities, the rise of Fascism and the hovering doom of World War II.



Set against the backdrop of the days preceding Britain declaring war on Germany, the main character is George Harvey Bone, a lonely borderline alcoholic who suffers from a split personality. He is obsessed with gaining the affections of Netta, a failed actress and one of George's circle of "friends" with whom he drinks. Netta is repelled by George but being greedy and manipulative, she and a mutual acquaintance, Peter, shamelessly exploit George's advances to extract from him money and drink.

George suffers from 'dead moods' in which he is convinced he must kill Netta for the way she treats him. Upon recovering from these interludes, he cannot remember them. However outside these he embarks on several adventures, trying in vain to win Netta's affections, including a 'romantic' trip to Brighton which goes horribly wrong (Netta brings Peter and a previously unknown man with whom she has sex in the hotel room next to George's).

Apart from being a source of money and alcohol, Netta's other reason for continuing to associate with George is because of Johnnie. He is one of George's long-time friends who works for a theatrical agent, and Netta hopes that through him she will get to meet Eddie Carstairs, a powerful figure in the theatre. However in a final reversal of fortune it is George, not Netta, who ends up attending a party amongst the theatrical great and good whilst Netta is cast aside by Eddie who (unlike George) has immediately seen her for the unpleasant person she is. George suddenly realises what it is like to be surrounded by 'kind' people who are interested in him as a person rather than what he can provide.

This potentially promising turn of events in George's life is, however, dashed, when he suddenly clicks into a dead mood and resumes his murder plans. He executes his murder of Netta (and also of Peter, whom the narrative describes as a 'Fascist' moments before he is murdered) before escaping to Maidenhead. Throughout the novel, Maidenhead represents for George a semi-mythical new beginning, and representing a picture of traditional Englishness in contrast to the seaminess of Earl's Court. However, in the closing pages of the novel the stark fallacy of that dream becomes apparent to George. It is the same as everywhere else. Now penniless, he gasses himself in a dingy Maidenhead boarding house. Wikipedia

Cow Dung Lake

Lowry seems from an early age to have taken an interest in unusual or exotic names which he built into his work.

In Under The Volcano, Hugh recalls an "idiotic verse" which refers to a series of places in Saskatchewan. Year later, Malc referred to these names in a letter to Clemens ten Holder:

p.120 Silly, unimagainative names in the state of Saskatchewan. They have some beautiful examples in British Columbia of which Cow-Dung Lake is perhaps the most expressive.

I have started trying to track down images for the places named in Lowry's works for my Postcards from Malc blog. I cannot imagine that Malc ever visited all these places as elsewhere he mentions looking at an atlas searching out unusual place names. The searches on those long nights in his Dollarton cabin probably recalled his youth in his Inglewood home where you can imagine him looking to where you could go in the world!

I failed to find Cow-Dung lake until I discovered that it had been renamed:

This lake near the Yellowhead Pass has been known by several names. In 1824, Hudson’s Bay Company governor George Simpson, heading for the Athabasca Pass, noted, “the track for Cranberry Lake takes a Northerly direction by Cow Dung River.” The Cow Dung River was the Miette and Simpson’s Cranberry Lake may have been our Yellowhead. In 1862, when the Overlander gold seekers crossed Yellowhead Pass (which they called Leather Pass) they camped on Cow Dung Lake. A year later, the lake was known to Milton and Cheadle as Buffalo Dung Lake. In 1872 George Grant suggested its present name, recalling the namesake of the pass.

“It is a very charming litle sheet of water,” wrote Arthur Wheeler, “four miles long, with a greatest width of half a mile. There are several narrows, and the irregularities of its form are by no means the least part of its charm. For the most part it is surrounded by green forest and is distinctly one of the most beautiful lakes in the district. In colour the waters are a creamy sap green.” Read more on Spiral Road

Teba, Spain

One of the most frustrating things about running the Postcards from Malc blog has been sourcing appropriate postcards. I made the task harder for myself by wanting to only use postcards contemporary to when Malc or others had written the piece.

One of my favourite letters written by Malc is one to The Viking Press in 1951 after the company published Samuel Putnam's translation of Cervantes's Three Exemplary Novels. He wrote to the company concerning the phrase "We are neither from Thebes nor from Murcia" and the annotation on the phrase and whether Cervantes was referring to the Andalusian town of Teba. What follows is a wonderful description of the memory Malc has carried around with him since passing through the town on a train back in 1933 while on holiday:

Though I've never met anybody who has been there, & have never even heard the place mentioned until this bit in Cervantes called it (even wrongly) to mind, it made a greater & weirder & more dramatic impression upon me than any single place I have ever seen in my life, - though I only passed through in it in the train. That is to say the town is about 3 miles away from the station, at which we stopped only about two minutes, but built between Taxco the House of Usher & the Castle of Worms, painted by Ryder & El Greco, with orchestral effects by Wagner Hieronymus Bosch & God. All this is 20 years ago, but I remember there was a terrific thunder storm going on, & a sinister individual in dark clothes wearing a top hat descended from the train climbed into a dark coach drawn by two black horses & then began to drive up the hill into the lightning as the train drew out, so that I told myself I certainly was going back to Theba one day & also knew that I could never forget it.



The train journey Malc refers to was either the outbound trip from Algeciras to Ronda en route to Granada or the reverse journey in the early summer of 1933. It was during this holiday in Spain that he met Jan Gabrial who he later married. There is an earlier record of the impact Teba had on Malc as he wrote to Jan in June 1933:

Did you see a place in Spain called Ceba or Seba or Zeba - anyway pronounced Theba, obviously a corruption of Thebes: twenty or thirty miles from Ronda I imagine - I saw it from the train & I thought "we must go there". It is unearthly place looking like Poe's Usher, or Kafka's Castle place I've ever seen.


Teba is a town in Spain. It sits on a rock saddle in the mountains east of Ronda, some 15 kilometre north of Ardales, in the comarca of Antequera and provincia of Málaga in Andalusia. The castle Malc is writing about is called Estrella Castle, locally known as Castillo de La Estrella or Castillo de Teba, which lies on a hill next to Teba. Estrella Castle was probably built somewhere in the 10th century by the Moors. During the 12th and 13th century, under Almohad rule, the castle was strengthened and enlarged. Read more about the castle and see photographs on Castles.nl

Sable Island: Isle Of Lost Ships

Click on map to enlarge
Gerald Noxon - a friend of Lowry's - wrote a letter to him on June 6th 1943:

"In the meantime I enclose something which I found in Halifax which will give you some idea of the fantastic story of Sable Island. I found the little map in a ship-chandler's on Water Street and I think you will agree that it is something of a curiosity. In fact I know of no more amazingly suggestive document in connection with men and ships - suggestive and at the same time tantalizing."

Lowry was fascinated by the map sent to him by Noxon and wrote back on June 15th 1943:

"What a romantic story. It's the most exciting thing I've heard of - I suppose Sable Island is the original Isle of Lost ships legend."

Lowry goes on to speculate abut the ships mentioned especially Inglewood - the name of his childhood home. He concludes by saying; "I would like to live on Sable Island for a few months after the war and write a book containing 195 chapters, one for each ship."

When I first read the above, I too was immediately fascinated by the thought of such a map. The only problem was that Sherril Grace, the editor of the Collected Letters, informed readers that the map had gone missing from the letter. Recently, I came across the map on the Nova Scotia Department of Education website.



Sable Island (French: île de Sable) is a small Canadian island situated 300 km southeast of mainland Nova Scotia in the Atlantic Ocean.

Sable Island is famous for its large number of shipwrecks. An estimated 350 vessels are believed to have fallen victim to the island's sand bars. Thick fogs, treacherous currents, and the island's location in the middle of a major transatlantic shipping route and rich fishing grounds account for the large number of wrecks. The first recorded wreck was the English ship Delight in 1583, with the second-to-last occurring in 1947. The last vessel to wreck on Sable Island was a yacht, the sloop Merrimac in 1999.[12] The construction of two lighthouses on each end of the island in 1873 probably contributed to the decrease in the number of shipwrecks.
Few wrecks are visible on the island as the ships are usually crushed and buried by the sand.[13] The large number of wrecks have earned the island the nickname "Graveyard of the Atlantic",[12][13] although the phrase is also used to describe Cape Cod and the Outer Banks area of North Carolina.
Read more on Wikipedia

You can read more about Sable Island here.

I will be returning to the stories behind the ships picked out from the map by Malc. I will also post on the story of The Isle of Lost Ships which Malc refers to in his letter to Gerald Noxon.