Mexican Altar dedicated to Malcolm Lowry

It is funny that nearly 2 years after the Centenary Celebrations for Malc's birth that I keep finding things related to the event:

With the help of the people from Liverpool, we created an altar dedicated to the English writer Malcolm Lowry on the foyer of the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool.

The altar included all the traditional, decorations, food and objects used by mexican people to remember their deaths every year during the first and second of Novermber. Food, sugar skulls, special bred, marigold flowers and other crafts were all created in various workshops with different groups of people from Liverpool. We baked bread, made sugar skulls and cooked special food to eat during the first of November. A large picture of Lowry at the center of the altar and a other small pictures were displayed alone with of bottle of Mezcal and other objects associated to Lowry. The program on Sunday also included selected music by the Bluecoat's artistic director Brian Biggs, two requiems by members of the Lantern's choir and workshops and activities for children. Read more

Julian Cooper @ Heaton Cooper Studio

Julian Cooper's paintings were a major feature in the exhibition staged by the Bluecoat in Liverpool to celebrate the centenary of Malc back in 2009.

You can see all the paintings exhibited at the Heaton Cooper Studio website

Studio blurb:

UNDER THE VOLCANO
- a group of paintings inspired by Malcolm Lowry's novel. Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano is written in a way that combines intricate symbolism with a vivid representational surface and an especially close identification with the protagonists on the author's part.

The main protagonist is a British Consul in 'Quauhnahuac', based on Cuernava, a town in Mexico where Lowry lived; the action takes twelve hours on the 'Day of the Dead', the 2nd November 1938. It is written on a variety of planes but Lowry summarized it thus:
"It is concerned with the forces in man which make him terrified of himself. It is also concerned with guilt, remorse, struggles toward the light, doom. The allegory is that of the Garden of Eden. The drunkenness of the Consul is used to symbolize the universal 'drunkenness' of mankind, during the war or during the period leading up to it."

The paintings here depict particular moments in the drama chosen for their self-sufficiency and symbolic power.

Writer Jorge Martinez exhibited in Liverpool in 2009

I found this on the Universidad de Playa Ancha website:

23/11/2009

Noted writer and academic of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Playa Ancha, Jorge Martínez García, had the privilege of participating in the exhibition "Under the Volcano"in honor of the centenary of the birth of poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry, an activity which held from September 25 to November 22 The national artist presented "Under the Volcano and other works: graphic interpretations of Malcolm Lowry Literature, "a play, which began in January 2006 - which is based on thirty images that arise as a form of interpretation of the works the poet. This will amount to exponents of Latin American and the United Kingdom to share the admiration for the work of Lowry. After the exposure, the neo-Baroque painter well-developed a series of lectures at universities in Britain and Canada.

You can read a thorough article by the Bluecoat's Artistic Director Bryan Biggs about the exhibition, which was staged to celebrate Malc's centenary, in the first edition of The Firminist magazine.

Malcolm Lowry's Merseyside: Illustrated Talk 10th November 2009

Tuesday 10th November 7.30pm
The Bluecoat
School Lane
Liverpool

Free

Wirral resident Colin Dilnot introduces places of significance for Lowry who was born in New Brighton, grew up in Caldy, sailed from Birkenhead and was horrified by the Liverpool Anatomy Museum in Paradise Street. People interested in the writer and local history alike will be fascinated by relevations about Lowry's formative years.


As part of my presentation, I have produced a 30 minute video featuring images and film associated with Lowry's Merseyside. The presentation also has a soundtrack by Lowry's favourite jazz artists.

Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry was inspired by the Wirral of his childhood

Liverpool Echo Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry was inspired by the Wirral of his childhood 22/10/09

Catherine Jones follows in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry

WIRRAL doesn’t recognise Malcolm Lowry. It recognises Wilfred Owen but he wasn’t from Birkenhead – he went to the school and Wirral has managed to put a blue plaque on a house in which he was in for a very short period of time and they also named a road after him,” says Colin Dilnot.

“The irony for me is that Lowry wrote a lot about Wirral. And Wilfred Owen couldn’t stand Birkenhead!”

Colin is a passionate advocate for the man who wrote what is considered one of the great novels of the 20th century – Under The Volcano. While he’s acclaimed internationally, and is a favourite author of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude), Lowry is little known at home.

In fact, Colin would like to see a blue plaque erected on the writer’s birthplace in New Brighton.

Lowry, who would have been 100 this year, is currently being celebrated in a festival of art, writing, film poetry and performance at the Bluecoat arts centre.

Organisers hope to raise the profile of the writer who left the banks of the Mersey as a young man – the 17-year-old’s departure on a ‘gap year’ working his passage on the tramp steamer Pyrrhus was reported in the ECHO under the priceless headline “Deckhand With A Ukulele” – and whose love of adventure later took him to America, Canada and to the Mexican town of Cuernavaca which became the inspiration for his 1947 semi-autobiographical masterpiece.

Under The Volcano tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the Mexican town on the traditional Day of the Dead in 1938.

But, says Colin who first discovered the author at college and who contributed to the new book Malcolm Lowry: From The Mersey To The World, although Lowry’s stories may be set all over the place, the heart that beats within them is recognisably from Merseyside.

“If you look at his novels, his writing, his letters, they’re all permeated with mentions of Wirral, Liverpool, the river,” he explains.

“In Under The Volcano he talks about something called the ‘hell bunker’ and that was on one of the greens of the Royal Liverpool golf club at Hoylake. Lowry used a number of golfing symbols to symbolise things like hell”.

These local connections will be explored in a Malcolm Lowry magical mystery tour this month.

The Voyage That Never Ends is billed as a “day long journey by ferry, coach and foot” tracing the writer’s early years in Wirral and his forays across the river to Liverpool where his well-to-do father worked at the Cotton Exchange in Old Hall Street.

The tour starts in Liverpool, but citizens of the city may be dismayed to learn Lowry wasn’t exactly a fan.

In fact, he described it as a “terrible city” and in his work October Ferry to Seacombe he talked about being “imprisoned in a Liverpool of self.”

In what is rather like a reverse Brick Up the Mersey Tunnels, Lowry instead revelled in his Wirral ‘Eden’ roots.

“If you look at some of his writings, his love of nature began on the Wirral,” says Colin. “Where he lived in Caldy he was surrounded by wonderful places where you could walk, and he describes walking over the gorse – in those days it was wilder, the Wirral was a much more rural paradise than it is now.

“His communing with nature continued when he went to Canada. One of the most striking things for me is that if you look where he went in Canada, when you see photographs, when you look out across the hills its not dissimilar from looking out across the Dee.

“It was obviously a place where he felt very comfortable.”

Lowry was born in North Drive, New Brighton, but moved to Inglewood at Caldy when he was two.

The tour will visit both houses, along with the aptly-named (although as Colin points out, ironically not for him) Lowry’s Bank, waterfront pubs in Birkenhead and the site of the anatomy museum in Paradise Street.

“Lowry was obsessed with this. It’s recorded he paid a couple of visits and it stuck in his mind. They produced a guidebook and what he did was took a chunk of that and put it into his book Ultramarine.”

Then of course there’s the peninsula’s famed golf courses – home of ‘hell bunker’ and the equally infamous ‘donga’. Young Lowry was Hoylake Boys’ Golf Champion in 1925 and spent a lot of his time on the courses.

At Caldy, the vista takes in Hilbre Island, the lighthouse, Dee estuary and marine lake – all images Lowry, who died an alcoholic at 47, purposefully inserted into his work.

“We’re trying to allow people the opportunity to see the landscape and topography of what he’s talking about in his novels, because the detail he writes about is quite real,” says Colin.

“And we want to with some of the spirit of Lowry as well.”

Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey To The World is published by Liverpool University Press and the Bluecoat.

You can also catch Colin Dilnot’s Lowry blog

Liverpool Echo

Read more details on the tour mentioned above here

The Voyage That Never Ends Saturday, 31 October 2009 9:00am - 9:00pm

A day long journey by ferry, coach and foot, tracing Malcolm Lowry's early years on the Wirral and his forays into Liverpool. Expect hot jazz, hymn singing, films, hidden histories, literary discoveries and more on this psychogeographical mystery tour devised by The Firminists.

(Please note that Tickets are £15 for the full day, or £5 for the music event in the evening)

Book tickets here

Below is an breakdown of the day:

Approx. Timings

Lowry Bank to North Drive, 7 minutes
North Drive Circular Walk, 10 minutes
North Drive to New Brighton Methodist Church, 3 minutes
New Brighton to Hoylake Golf Course, 24 minutes
Hoylake Golf Course to West Kirby Promenade (walking, 25 minutes)
West Kirby Promenade to the Donga (Caldy), 8 minutes
The Donga to Birkenhead Docks, 27 minutes
Birkenhead Docks to Mersey Tunnel, 5 minutes
Mersey Tunnel to Paradise Street, 20 minutes

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari @ FACT Liverpool 17/11/09

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (U)
17 November 2009 6.30pm
FACT
88 Wood Street
Liverpool
Tickets £7/£5.50
Tel No 0871 704 2063

A favourite film of Malcolm Lowry to be shown as part of the Centenary Festival.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 silent film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films.



The deranged Dr. Caligari and his faithful sleepwalking Cesare are connected to a series of murders in a German mountain village, Holstenwall. Caligari presents an example of a motion picture "frame story" in which most of the plot is presented as a "flashback", as told by Francis.

The narrator, Francis, and his friend Alan visit a carnival in the village where they see Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist Cesare, whom the doctor is displaying as an attraction. Caligari brags that Cesare can answer any question he is asked. When Alan asks Cesare how long he has to live, Cesare tells Alan that he will die before dawn tomorrow – a prophecy which is fulfilled.



Francis, along with his girlfriend Jane, investigate Caligari and Cesare, which eventually results in Cesare kidnapping Jane. Caligari orders Cesare to kill Jane, but the hypnotized slave refuses after her beauty captivates him. He carries Jane out of her house, leading the townsfolk on a lengthy chase. Cesare falls to his death during the pursuit, and the townsfolk discover that Caligari had created a dummy to distract Francis.

Francis discovers that "Caligari" is actually the director of the local insane asylum, and, with the help of his colleagues, discovers that he is obsessed with the story of a Dr. Caligari, who, in 1703, in northern Italy used a somnambulist to murder people as a traveling act. After being confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari reveals his mania and is imprisoned in his asylum.

A "twist ending" reveals that Francis' flashback is actually his fantasy: he, Jane and Cesare are all inmates of the insane asylum, and the man he says is Caligari is his asylum doctor, who, after this revelation of the source of his patient's delusion, says that now he will be able to cure Francis. Wikipedia


You can read more here in an earlier post on Malcolm Lowry @ The 19th Hole

John Huston's Under The Volcano Movie Titles

Showing in Liverpool on 7/10/09 as part of Malcolm Lowry Centenary Festival.

Liverpool’s Bluecoat celebrates “lost” Wirral literary hero Malcolm Lowry

Liverpool’s Bluecoat celebrates “lost” Wirral literary hero Malcolm Lowry
Sep 30 2009 by Lorna Hughes, Wallasey News

A “LOST” literary hero from Wirral is being celebrated at the Bluecoat in Liverpool from this week.

Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel Under the Volcano has been hailed as a modern masterpiece by Time magazine and Nobel literature prize winner Gabriel Garcia Márquez but many have never heard of the New Brighton-born author.

The Bluecoat hopes to change that with a season of events celebrating his life and work.

The ambitious eight-week programme includes an exhibition, new book – Malcolm Lowry: From The Mersey To The World – live music, dance, talks and special participatory events.

Bryan Biggs, Artistic Director at the Bluecoat, said: “This exhibition, book and events programme at the Bluecoat aims to reclaim Malcolm Lowry for Merseyside.
“His masterpiece, Under the Volcano, has been claimed one of the top 20 books of the last century, yet he remains relatively unknown in his home town. We hope it will help to restore him to his rightful position as one of our truly great creative exports.”

Lowry was born on July 28, 1909. In 1927 he swapped the comforts of his home at Inglewood, Caldy for to sign on as a deck hand on the steamer SS Pyrrhus, sailing from Birkenhead for the Far East.

This marked the beginning of 30 years of voyaging that would take in two marriages, three continents, several jails and a couple of psychiatric hospitals, and would leave in its wake both thousands of empty bottles and one of the greatest 20th-century English novels.

Under the Volcano: An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry is open daily at the Bluecoat on School Lane until Sunday, November 22. Wirral News

Mexican Day of the Dead Altar @ The Bluecoat Liverpool 1/11/09

Angus Balbernie: The Lining Of Bees @ The Bluecoat Liverpool 10/10/09

Angus Balbernie: The Lining Of Bees
The Bluecoat
School Lane
Liverpool
10 October 2009
8.00 - 9.30pm
£5
Tickets from The Bluecoat Box Office 0151 702 5324

Angus Balbernie, A Lining of Bees – what the critics said of previous Lowry inspired dance/theatre:

Materials For A Small Winter

“Inspired by the semi-autobiographical writings and rantings of Malcolm Lowry and erotically shaded by the evocation of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Materials For A Small Winter seemed to physically shimmer and warp in the heat of a boozily recalled Mexico. A simple, striking backdrop of slatted wood presumably corresponded to the author's fisherman's hut in British Columbia, yet resembled nothing so much as the spied through window blinds of classic film noir. Rising late and stumbling from the audience, Clive Andrews' Lowry – crumpling and contorting, intermittently inspired and doubling over with regret – seemed to pass through various stages of lucidity during an intensely personal Day of the Dead. A young femme fatale in an elegant red dress barked questions in Spanish that confused even the fluent amongst the audience and later pleaded with them to pluck out her eyes with a gleaming blade.

“Five female dancers passed at various times across the stage, all but ignoring Lowry and his proffered scribblings, the strums of his ukulele and his more idyllic memories. Instead – seemingly possessed by the raw spirit of Elise Dabrowski's yowled vocalising and mournful double bass – they were sometimes free to move gracefully, other times jerking violently and crushed into a physically demeaning, crawling departure.

“Conceived and devised in just five days by director Angus Balbernie and the cast, Materials For A Small Winter has an intensity and immediacy that render it impossible to wrench your eyes from”.

(Jay Richardson. The Scotsman. Scotland)

“’Intensive’ hardly encompasses the processes set in motion by Angus Balbernie - his Materials for a Small Winter was made from "zero to finish" in five days. Taking impetus from the life and writings of Malcolm Lowry, and with nods in the direction of Rita Hayworth's performance in the film Gilda, the piece had a discomfitting, raw energy that - like the vocalisings of double bassist Elise Dabrowski - yowled and jittered with the madness and sadness of Lowry's various booze-altered states.
“A dividing stretch of slatted wood created separate realms while the cast of seven threw caution to the wind, seized on Balbernie's mix of text and movement and delivered up one of those radical onslaughts that leave you feeling sand-bagged, unlikely to forget it, and amazed at what five days can produce”.

(Mary Brennan, The Herald.)

“It is an atmospheric 80 minutes of beautifully choreographed theatre designed to give its audience a weird but tempting insight into the brilliant mind of alcoholic novelist Malcolm Lowry...the characters combine mesmerising physical theatre with the equally off-the-wall words of the novelist’s literature.”

(Rebecca Gilbert. Bristol Evening Post.)

“Malcolm doesn’t understand borders ...of any kind”, declares one of the characters in Angus Balbernie’s take on the life and work of alcoholic author Malcolm Lowry. It’s a phrase that applies equally to this work, which ignores all performer/audience, dance/theatre, reality/fantasy boundaries. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this dance-theatre was a dream to look at, stimulating throughout, and both perplexing and engaging in turns.”

(Lesley Barnes. Venue Magazine.)

Under The Volcano Movie @ FACT Liverpool 7/10/09

Under The Volcano (15)
Directed by John Huston Mexico/USA 1984 112mins
Introduced by Mark Goodall (University Of Bradford)
FACT
88 Wood Street
Liverpool
Tickets £7/5.50
Tel. No. 0871 704 2063


John Huston's film version of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under The Volcano is being shown as part of the Malcolm Lowry Centenary Festival as above.

Under The Volcano

Under the Volcano is a 1984 film directed in Mexico by John Huston with Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Andrews and Katy Jurado heading the cast. The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Albert Finney) and Best Music, Original Score (Alex North).

It is based on the 1947 novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry which was adapted to radio on Studio One in 1947.

Remaining faithful to Lowry's original novel, Huston's film tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (recognizably Cuernavaca), on the Day of the Dead in 1938.

The film was entered into the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Reviewing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin had much praise for Finney's performance:

Drunkenness, so often represented on the screen by overacting of the most sodden sort, becomes the occasion for a performance of extraordinary delicacy from Albert Finney, who brilliantly captures the Consul's pathos, his fragility and his stature. Alcoholism is the central device in Mr. Lowry's partially autobiographical novel. (The author, like the Consul, was capable of drinking shaving lotion when nothing more potable was at hand.) Yet the Consul's drinking is astonishingly fine-tuned, affording him a protective filter while also allowing for moments of keen, unexpected lucidity. Mr. Finney conveys this beautifully, with the many and varied nuances for which Guy Gallo's screenplay allows. For instance, when the exquisite Yvonne (played elegantly and movingly by Jacqueline Bisset) reappears in Cuernavaca one morning, she finds her ex-husband in a cantina, still wearing his evening clothes. He turns to gaze at her for a moment, pauses briefly, and then continues talking as if nothing had happened. Seconds later, he turns again and looks at Yvonne more closely, still not certain whether or not this is a hallucination. It takes a long while for the fact of Yvonne's return to penetrate the different layers of the Consul's inebriated consciousness, and Mr. Finney delineates the process with grace and precision, stage by stage. Wikipedia

Ross Birrell and David Harding's Cuernavaca: A Journey in Search of Malcolm Lowry

Ross Birrell and David Harding's Cuernavaca: A Journey in Search of Malcolm Lowry chases Lowry's ghost through the Mexican town that inspired his novel. Their film and installation is in two parts. In the upstairs gallery, surrounding a lawn, a wall text is the Consul's mistranslation of a sign he encounters in a public garden next to his own. It should read 'Do you like this garden, which is yours? Make sure your children don't destroy it!' but instead it reflects Lowry's fear of being evicted, of being cast out from the Eden he had found at Dollarton.

The text in Spanish, repeated at the end of the book, provided the source for Birrell and Harding's installation, whose film, shown here in the Vide space outside the gallery entrance, revisits the final footsteps of the ex-Consul. It includes readings from Octavio Paz and Lowry, the painting of a mural/text from the novel, interviews with local people who claim to have met the author, a journey to the peaks of Popocatepetl and a ritual in which a spiritualist communicates with Lowry's tormented soul.

The artists describe how 'the mescal-infused poetic symbolism drawn from Dante to the Kabala, which informed the writing of Under the Volcano, was the inspiration for the composition of Cuernavaca - where the editing attempts to mirror Lowry's intoxicated syntax' . Bryan Biggs Artistic Director The Bluecoat Liverpool: Under The Volcano; An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957

Under The Volcano; An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957

The Bluecoat's celebration of the centenary of writer Malcolm Lowry (born New Brighton, 1909) includes this special exhibition alongside a programme of performances and events. The exhibition takes its title from his best-known work, Under the Volcano, published in 1947. Set in Mexico, it is considered one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Gabriel Garcra Marquez described it as 'probably the novel that I have read the most times in my life. I would like not to have to read it any more but that would be impossible, for I shall not rest until I have discovered where its hidden magic lies' .

Lowry has influenced not just writers, but artists working across the creative spectrum - painters, filmmakers, choreographers and musicians. This exhibition brings together contemporary visual artists from the UK and Latin America, who each respond to Lowry in different ways through painting, film, printmaking, sculpture, photography, drawing and installation. Much of the work relates to Under the Volcano, but other books and aspects of Lowry's life also provide the impetus.

The exhibition is intended to reflect Lowry's continuing inspiration for artists today, and to explore what Malcolm Bradbury has described as Lowry's 'curious internationalism'. Indeed the artists echo some of the writer's journeys, which took him from Merseyside to the Far East, Europe, USA, Mexico, Canada and finally back to England, and many points in between. Whilst the exhibition reflects Lowry's creative compass, works are not arranged chronologically or geographically and the exploration of themes moves away from simply a literal reading of the subject. Like Lowry's own writing, much of the work here is multilayered and can be read on several levels. Finding contemporary resonance in his work, the artists demonstrate that Malcolm Lowry is a writer very much for today.

Some of the works have been made especially for the exhibition, others selected from artists with a longstanding interest in Lowry. Others still, such as the paintings by Edward Burra, were created during Lowry's lifetime.

It is appropriate that the exhibition is taking place on Merseyside where Lowry was born a hundred years ago. He described Liverpool as 'that terrible city whose main street is the ocean', and though he never returned, Liverpool and the Wirral peninsular where he grew up continued to haunt him, and local references appear often in his writing. The exhibition includes a timeline tracing key moments in Lowry's colourful life, which ended in 1957 in mysterious circumstances in a village in Sussex.

Read more below about the exhibition:

Ross Birrell and David Harding's Cuernavaca: A Joourney In Search of Malcolm Lowry

Paul Rooney's film Bellvue

Adrian Henri's Entry of Christ Into Liverpool and Day of Dead, Hope Street

Julian Cooper's Under The Volcano series

Cian Qualye's photographs and film

Pete Flowers's series

Jose Martinez Garcia's etchings

Edward Burra's Mexican Church, Skeleton Party and Dancing Skeletons

Cisco Jimenez's Peddler

Ray Lowry's Under The Volcano

Brian O'Toole's Cartoons

Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry is globally celebrated but forgotten in his Wirral home

It was good to see Liverpool's Daily Post newspaper giving the Malcolm Lowry Centenary Festival a 2-page spread in yesterday's edition.

You can read Laura Davis's full article, which includes an interview with Bryan Biggs, the Artistic Director of The Bluecoat in Liverpool, who is the curator of the exhibition and the driving force behind the festival, here:

Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry is globally celebrated but forgotten in his Wirral home

Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World Book Launch 24/9/09

The new book on Malc was launched last Thursday night at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. The launch was a prelude to the opening of Malc's Centenary Festival in Liverpool over the next 2 months.

Several contributors to the book attended the launch including Ailsa Cox, Mark Goodall and Rob Sheppard above. Rob was just passing me another bottle of the Malcolm Lowry Golden Ale which has been brewed for the festival!

After the book launch, we had an opportunity to view the exhibition which accompanies the festival. I will be posting more details on the exhibition in the next few posts.

Malcolm Lowry: From The Mersey to the World Book Launch 24/9/09

Under The Volcano: Exhibition For Malcolm Lowry 1909-1957

Malcolm Lowry Festival Liverpool 25/9/09 to 22/11/09

Bluecoat to celebrate ‘lost’ literary hero
Malcolm Lowry Centenary Festival
25/9/09 to 22/11/09
Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool, L1 3BX

His classic novel Under the Volcano has been hailed as a modern masterpiece by Time magazine, Modern Library and most notably Nobel literature prize winner Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Add to that an intriguing personal life including battles with alcoholism, worldwide travels and a mysterious death in 1957 and in Malcolm Lowry you have one of Merseyside’s most fascinating and significant writers.

Over the next eight weeks from 25 September the Bluecoat celebrates the New Brighton born author’s centenary with an ambitious programme that includes an exhibition, book, live music, dance, talks and special participatory events such as a Mexican Day of the Dead altar dedicated to Lowry.

The influence of Lowry’s work, especially Under the Volcano, which is set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead on the eve of the Second World War, has extended beyond writers to visual artists, and this free exhibition brings together twelve from Merseyside, the UK, Mexico and Chile, who respond to Lowry in different ways.



Paintings by Julian Cooper (from his Under the Volcano series), Pete Flowers and Adrian Henri (taking a Day of the Dead in Liverpool theme), are shown alongside watercolours, loaned from the Tate Gallery, by Edward Burra who visited Lowry in the 1930s in Cuernavaca. This town in Mexico, where Under the Volcano is set, is home to Cisco Jiménez, represented here with sculptures.

Another Latin American artist, Jorge Martínez García, exhibits a series of prints, and there are cartoons by Ray Lowry (NME, the Clash) and Brian O’Toole. Cian Quayle’s film and photographs interrogate Lowry’s fascination with the Isle of Man. Liverpool artist and Northern Art Prizewinner Paul Rooney has made a new film, commissioned by the Bluecoat with Film & Video Umbrella, drawing on Lowry’s time in New York, and Ross Birrell & David Harding’s film installation follows Lowry’s footsteps to the Mexican volcanoes that inspired his great novel. The exhibition also includes films and rare and previously unseen material relating to Lowry’s Merseyside upbringing, collated by Wirral resident Colin Dilnot.



Portraying the Wirral in his 1947 masterpiece Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry recalled: ‘The smoke of freighters outward bound from Liverpool hung low on the horizon’. Outward bound: at the age of seventeen Lowry was already eager to explore the world. Yet at the same time he retained always in his mind, and in his writing, his early years by the Mersey.

In 1927 Lowry forsook the comforts of his home at Inglewood, Caldy, overlooking the River Dee, for a rigorous sea journey, shipping as a deckhand at £2.10s a month on the steamer SS Pyrrhus sailing from Birkenhead, bound for the Far East. This marked the beginning of thirty years of voyaging that would take in two marriages, three continents, several jails, a couple of psychiatric hospitals, and a squatter’s shack; and would leave in its wake both thousands of empty bottles and hundreds of thousands of words, including arguably one of the greatest twentieth-century novels in English.



Artistic director at the Bluecoat, Bryan Biggs said: ‘This exhibition, book and events programme at the Bluecoat aims to re-claim Malcolm Lowry for Merseyside, and to position him as a writer very much for today. His masterpiece, Under the Volcano, has been claimed one of the top 20 books of the last century, yet he remains relatively unknown in his home town. Like Lowry, our programme has an international outlook, whilst being rooted in Merseyside. We hope that it will help to restore the writer to his rightful position as one of our truly great creative and cultural exports.’

Exhibition: Under the Volcano: An Exhibition for Malcolm Lowry (1909 – 1957) Open daily 10.00am – 6.00pm. Free
Other programme highlights include:

Screenings

Donald Brittain’s Canadian TV documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976). Daily during the exhibition, Fri 25 September to Sun 22 November.

Films

Two films shown at FACT, John Huston’s Under the Volcano (starring Albert Finney), and one of Lowry’s favourite films, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Music

A music strand in response to Lowry’s passion for jazz and his own skills on the taropatch (ukulele), includes a contemporary song cycle written by poet Ian McMillan and musician Luke Carver Goss, performed by acclaimed Liverpool choir Sense of Sound. Sat 21 November.

Dance

A performance choreographed by Angus Balbernie and inspired by the Lowry legend. Sat 10 October.

Talks

Lowry specialists and writers respond to Lowry’s life and work, including his biographer Gordon Bowker (Wed 14 October), whose Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry is re-published by Faber and Colin Dilnot, who gives an illustrated talk about Lowry’s childhood on the Wirral and references to Merseyside throughout his writing. Tues 10 November

Lowry Day Sat 31 October

The Voyage That Never Ends is a 12 hour psychogeographical day, journeying by ferry, coach and foot to resonant sites on Merseyside, with hymn singing, hot jazz, films and much more.

Lowry Day of the Dead Altar Sun 1 November

Join Mexican artist Javier Calderon and local people in creating an altar dedicated to Lowry.

Illustrated Book

Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, published by Liverpool University Press and the Bluecoat featuring 12 new texts by Lowry experts and many new images.

For full programme visit www.thebluecoat.org.uk

Malcolm Lowry From the Mersey to the World

Last night at the birthday bash for Malc, Helen Tookey one of the editors of the above new book, told everyone gathered that the book had gone to the printers and was on course for publication in September 2009.

Helen also distributed a flyer detailing the contents:

Contents

Introduction
"The voyage that never ends": Malcolm Lowry - from the Mersey to the world
Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey

Malcolm Lowry: who he was and who I was and who I am
Ian McMillan (poet and broadcaster)

Lowry's Wirral
Colin Dilnot (Wirral-based artist/writer)

Elliptical journeys: Malcolm Lowry, exile and return
Cian Quayle (Manx artist/writer)

Lunatic city: Lowry's Lunar Caustic and New York
Michele Gemelos (University of Cambridge)

It is not Mexico of course, but in the heart.."
Alberto Rebollo (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

"Lowrytrek": towards a psychogeography of Malcolm Lowry's Wirral
Mark Goodall (University of Bradford)

No se puede vivir sin amar
Ailsa Cox (short-story writer/Edge Hill University)

"Eridanus, Liverpool": echoes and transformations at the edge of eternity
Annick Drösdal-Levillain (Strasbourg University)

Uxorius prose: Malcolm Lowry's October Ferry To Gabriola
Nicholas Murray (Liverpool-born writer)

The Malcolm Lowry Room
Michael Turner (Vancouver-based writer)

Malcolm Lowry's land
Robert Sheppard (poet and writer/Edge Hill University)

Malcolm Lowry: neglected genius
Gordon Bowker (literary biographer; author of Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry).

You can order an advance copy from Liverpool University Press.

I am very pleased to be involved with the book and I must thank again Helen and Bryan for inviting me to contribute.

In my essay Lowry's Wirral, I have taken 3 aspects of Lowry's Wirral as examples of my on-going research into Lowry's Wirral. The 3 aspects are a detailed analysis of his birthplace 13 North Drive New Brighton, Lowry's first school Braeside in West Kirby and 103 Meols Drive, West Kirby, the former home of the Furniss family who Lowry based the Taskersons upon who feature in Under The Volcano.

I will also be delivering a lecture called Lowry's Merseyside as part of the Lowry Centenary Festival later this year at The Bluecoat, Liverpool. I will post more details of the festival events in the near future.