An Underground Piccadilly Circus of the Soul

in a kind of underground Piccadilly Circus of the soul Letter to Gerald Noxon

could not imagine that this beer parlour with its eternally recurrent ranged batteries of soapsuds-filled glasses on the bar was spinning on the same axis as he did, at the centre of the world, Piccadilly Circus and the Pantheon. October Ferry to Gabriola

See Piccadilly Circus on Postcards from Malc

The idea of an underground Piccadilly Circus of the soul appealed to me! Then I discovered the picture sleeve of Francis Bay's E.P. and loved the juxtaposition of a favourite Malc tipple Tequila and Piccadilly.



Here's the two tracks together:

Celebrating Malc's Birthday with Yorkshire Blonde

After my talk last night on Malc's Merseyside, we decamped to the nearest pub from Wallasey Central Library - The Telegraph in New Brighton which I now regard as my local mainly because the beer and atmosphere is the best around. I just wish Malc had written about it then it would have been perfect!



We had a few glasses of a good beer for a warm evening is Ossett's "Yorkshire Blonde" - "pale coloured ale is full bodied, well-rounded and slightly sweet on the palate. A generous late addition of Mount Hood hops result in a delicate fruity hop aroma."



The above description of the beer made me smile - a nice Lowryan coincidence - Mount Hood crops up in a few of Malc's works; "Ethan said, "there's old Mount Baker out this morning, or is it Mount Hood? Out very clear and beautiful.." October Ferry to Gabriola; And far away over in America the snowy volcanic peak of Mount Hood stood on high, disembodied, cut off from earth, yet much too close, which was an even surer presage of rain, as though the mountains had advanced, or were advancing. ... The Bravest Boat and "A hint of the summit of Mount Hood remained, or it might have been clouds." The Bravest Boat; "that ribbed the continent from Alaska to Cape Horn — and of which Mount Hood was no less a part than Popocatepetl...." The Forest Path to the Spring; "I see a great cold white and grey remote peak that vanishes behind rows of flats and stores so I can hardly believe I’ve really seen it. Presently Malc sees it also and there we are, out of the city, on a long straight highway running between neat farms and there it is: Mt. Hood." La Mordida








See Mount Hood, Portland, Oregon 1946 on Postcards from Malc

Green River Whisky

I fear that was the consequence of a case of none too good American whisky bought in Los Angeles because I liked its name, Green River. Even so, there is not half enough for this voyage. Through The Panama

Green River was the most advertised whiskey in the United States before prohibition. There are Green river tokens and bar pieces to be found in flea markets on a regular basis today. That illustrates how much was made. A fire in 1918 pretty much put the distillery out of business because wartime prohibition made it unprofitable to rebuild. The last of the Green River whiskey was sold by AMS during prohibition. After prohibition, the distillery was sold to new owners and eventually became the Medley distillery that is being re-opened by Angastura today.

The brand was also sold to new owners and was made at several central Kentucky distilleries, including Chapeze Station, until it was sold to Schenley in the 1940's. Schenley kept the brand alive until the 1960's and it was passed on to United Distillers. Straight Bourbon Forum

The above detailing the changes to the whisky explain Malc's comments in 'Through The Panama'.

The California Ramblers Dromedary Columbia 1925

Lowry mentions the above track to Carol Brown in a letter to her in June 1926 when he realises that his love is not going to be reciprocated by Carol.

Lowry asks her to remember the song on the other side of "Just A Little Drink" - on Columbia. This can only refer to the California Ramblers track "Dromedary" which is the other side of the 78. I am not certain why he refers to the track as a reference to be be remembered by except that a dromedary is an Arabian camel and Malc used the alias Camel when he wrote for the Leys School magazine Fortnightly.

Unfortuantely, I was only able to find a snippet of the song. However, here's the Paul Whiteman Orchestra's version of "Just A Little Drink" which could have been Malc's theme song!



One of the most popular jazz outfits of the 1920s, the California Ramblers were also certainly the most prolific. Though signed with Columbia Records they waived all royalties with the label for the right to record for other companies under differing names. Throughout the decade they recorded for practically every label in the United States, Canada and Great Britain using 111 different pseudonyms, however they most often worked under the Rambler's title and the nom de plume ''Golden Gate Orchestra.''



The name California Ramblers is deceiving as most of the original members of the band were from Ohio. Their career began when agent Ed Kirkeby found them work in New York accompanying singer Eva Shirley. The group soon began arguing amongst themselves, however, and broke up. Leader Ray Kitchingham then took over Arthur Hand's orchestra, which at that time included such personnel as Red Nichols and the Dorsey Brothers. Kirkeby found the new group work, which included a stay at the Post Lodge in Pelham, New York. The lodge later changed its name to the California Ramblers Inn, and the group took its moniker.

The orchestra first recorded in 1921 and was instantly successful. Its lively rhythms and hot solos, different than the staid dance music of other white orchestras, caught the public's ear. Standing out on many of the recordings was the bass sax work of Adrian Rollini. Rollini shunned the traditional role of the instrument as rhythm and emerged as a soloist, giving the group a distinctive flavor. Trumpeter Bill Moore became the first permanent black member of a white orchestra when he joined in the early 1920s, though most audiences never knew, as the Ramblers had become primarily a studio orchestra. At various time vocals were by Kirkeby, Artie Dunn, Billy Jones, Irving Kaufman, Arthur Hall, and Sammy Fain.

In 1924 Kirkeby formed a quintet with some of the group members in order to exploit the public taste for ''hot'' jazz and novelty numbers. Called the Goofus Five (a ''goofus'' was a small instrument that looked like a saxophone but sounded like a harmonica), the outfit eventually expanded to seven or eight members and recorded for the Okeh label. Vocals were sparing on Goofus Five recordings but when present were handled variously by Beth Challis, Russell Douglas, Ernest Hare, Billy Jones, Earl Rickerd and Blanche Vincent. The group stopped recording in 1927.

1927 also marked a turning point for the Ramblers. After a successful tour of England, many of the band's key musicians decided to remain behind when it came time to return to the United States, including Adrian Rollini. The Ramblers' sound suffered considerably. The new orchestra focused more on dance music than on jazz and the group's popularity and novelty declined. Rollini returned in 1929 for the outfit's ''final'' recording. Various units, however, recorded under the Rambler names throughout the 1930s. Solid

Here's a tune which Malc probably sang many times after leaving the pub:

Doris "Dolly" Lewis

Please play the Bix Beiderbecke track below entitled Dolly Dimples while you read this post:



Lowry met Dolly Lewis on his first trip to the USA in 1929.

Lowry first visited the USA after writing to the American poet Conrad Aiken who he had just discovered after reading Aiken's Blue Voyage, a book which had a profound effect on Lowry. Lowry had suggested to the recently unemployed Aiken that Aiken should become his mentor to help with entry to Cambridge University. Aiken couldn't turn the offer down once Lowry was able to secure funding from his father. When Lowry discovered that Aiken had recently returned to the USA, he "invited" himself over to meet his literary hero who would become his life-long friend. Initially, Lowry stayed with Conrad Aiken in Cambridge Massachusetts at Aiken's apartment in 8 Plymton Street.



The above apartment was just by the famous Grolier Poetry Book Shop opened in 1927.



After a couple of weeks in Cambridge, Aiken took Lowry with him to stay in South Yarmouth, Cape Cod where Dolly lived. Dolly was the step-daughter of Charles D. Voorhis, an old friend of Aiken's.



Lowry's first biographer Douglas Day paints an idyllic picture of Lowry and Dolly going for long walks on the beach, reading poetry and painting as well as visiting the theatre in Boston with Lowry staying over at Dolly's house. This picture is based on the archives of Conrad Knickerbocker who was an early researcher of Lowry's life. Knickerbocker's archive contained letters from Dolly to Knickerbocker in the early 60's.

Day claims that this was Lowry's first proper love affair. This claim was before documentary evidence emerged in the form of two letters from Tess Evans that she and Lowry had been close before Lowry embarked on his sea voyage to the Far East in 1927. When Day wrote his biography, he thought that the character Janet in Ultramarine was a Lowryean fantasy but in actuality the character Janet was based on Tess.



However, according to Lowry's later biographer Gordon Bowker, Dolly says in interviews that she was not smitten with Lowry and found him a nuisance. Either way, both biographers detail that Lowry wrote to her from on-board the SS Cedric on the way home to England.

How much Lowry was in love with Dolly is debatable with Lowry adopting an absurd tone of affection in the letter which couldn't possibly be serious. You can read the full acount in Bowker's Pursued By Furies Pgs. 89-90. The only letter to have been published between Lowry and Dolly is the fragment contained in The Collected Letters Of Malcolm Lowry Volume 1. Day and Bowker elude to a much longer letter written on board the Cedric and perhaps other correspondence.



Lowry did meet Dolly again in 1934, when he visited the Cape Cod area with his first wife Jan Gabrial. Bowker tells the amusing story of Lowry calling Dolly from Provincetown, where he was staying on the trip, inviting Dolly over to meet him and Jan. When Dolly arrived, Jan was absent and she found Lowry drunk on the floor with sheet music for the song "My Dolly" open on the piano. I can only assume that song was the Vincent Youmans classic which I was unable to find but I thought the YouTube video below might suffice to go with whatever was going around Lowry's head! Tea For Two, from the 1925 musical, No No Nanette. Song by Irving Caesar and Vincent Youmans; performed by Helen Clark and Lewis James.



I was intrigued about Dolly and wondered whether she continued with her painting. This is what I discovered:

Artist and environmentalist, Doris ("Dolly") L. Lewis (Henriquez) divided her life among Massachusetts, the Caribbean, and South Florida. Her paternal grandparents descended from old New England families and built a house on Boston's Marlborough Street when the Back Bay neighborhood first opened. Later, some of the family moved to Cambridge, where several in-laws had lived for many years; one had married Longfellow's artist son, Ernest.



On her mother's side, Lewis descended from the prominent "Anglo" Lindo family of Jamaica and Costa Rica. Her grandfather was one of the eight partners of Lindo Brothers, members of which owned extensive plantations for coffee, bananas, and sugar in Jamaica and Costa Rica, as well as the J. Wray rum company, the Daniel Finzi wine and spirit business, and properties on Jamaica's north coast that later were developed into resorts. They also founded the Bank of Costa Rica.

Born in 1909 at the Cecil Lindo (her great uncle) Historic House on Parque Morazan in San Jose, Costa Rica, Lewis returned to a family plantation "El Sitio" at Juan Vinas, with her father, Sidney Lewis (of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and her mother, Daisy ("Mimi") Lindo Lewis (later Voorhis). For a few years just before and during World War I, Sidney Lewis ran mining interests out of Wheeling, West Virginia, but decided to return to Costa Rica in 1919 when his daughter was ten. The family stopped in New York on the way, staying with Doris Lewis's grandfather, August Lindo, on Park Avenue. Before embarking, her father traveled alone to Cambridge to visit his mother for a few days and suddenly died, perhaps a victim of the flu epidemic. After her father's death, Lewis was taken by her mother to live with members of the Lindo family in Jamaica for one year, possibly at her great uncle Robert's plantation, "Sunnyside," two miles outside of Linstead.



Then Lewis and her mother migrated to Cambridge to live near her father's family. In the Boston area she attended the Buckingham School, the May School, and the Museum School. Summering on Cape Cod from the late 1920’s and moving to South Yarmouth about 1934, Lewis at a young age became associated with a group of New York, Boston, and Cape Cod artists and writers, including Van Gogh's acquaintance Dodge McKnight (friend of Isabella Steward Gardner), poet Conrad Aiken, and novelist Malcolm Lowry. Lowry wrote perhaps his most famous letter to her—a 30-page love letter, which remains in her family.

Other artists who were close associates were Howard Gibbs (whose first-class "Still Life" Lewis owned), Harold Dunbar (who painted her portrait, and she, one of him), Byron Thomas (whose famous "The Skater" she owned), Frederick Wight (later associated with UCLA), and Alice Stallknecht (who did two portraits of her). For over sixty years Lewis was a close friend of Catherine Huntington, who owned the Provincetown Playhouse and kept Eugene O'Neill's plays alive during the 1940's. She also painted Huntington's portrait.

On Cape Cod Doris Lewis at first painted typical Cape landscapes in oil, which exhibited in Cambridge in the early 30's. But at the same time she produced a strong body of modernist surrealistic oils, which exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and other locations. She also painted in New York and Boston.



Through her mother's family, Lewis maintained keen interest in the Caribbean, and in 1937 married Anglo-Jamaican Edward Henriquez in Havana, where she spent the next twelve years. Henriquez had been educated at Belmont Hill School, founded partially for him and his brother by the Atkins family, who had extensive sugar holdings in Cuba and land in Belmont outside Boston. An "Anglo" herself, Lewis—unlike many North Americans—showed great interest in and love for both native peoples, Cuban Hispanics and Blacks.

Briefly in the late 1930's—when her husband's sailboat was being built—Lewis lived under primitive conditions among Afro-Cuban sugarcane workers some distance from the cultivation of Havana. During the day the men toiled in the fields, and Lewis was struck by the spiritual faces of the women and children left at home—especially by their long-suffering and innocence. The only art materials she had with her were conte pencils and a sketchpad. And so were born 25 character-full portraits in an exhibit, "Faces of Afro Cuba," which showed posthumously at the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill in 1996.



In 1949 Lewis returned to the States to live in Florida for the rest of her life. There, in addition to pursuing her own artwork in hard-edge oils and in pottery, she personally encouraged countless artists, potters, and gardeners, as well as serving on various county- and state-wide boards and founding the Ceramic League of Palm Beach County. She also performed a busy, vocal, and courageous role in Florida's environmental affairs and is credited as one of the leading activists to save the Everglades. She died in 1995 at her home in West Palm Beach.JAMES R. BAKKER ANTIQUES, INC


As ever with Lowry there is an ironic touch in the above which I enjoyed. The fact Dolly came from a family who owned rum distillers would have surely made her interesting to Lowry even if they had to drink bootleg booze due to prohibition. Dolly also painted the picture below called Circus which includes a ferris wheel which was such a potent symbol in Lowry's Under The Volcano. Dolly painted Circus in 1939 just as Lowry was struggling with the first drafts of Under The Volcano.



One of the reasons why I was intrigued by Dolly was after reading Lowry's letter to Conrad Aiken on 24 April 1931 which included the following about Dolly:

Thank God Dolly's got a job. I was thinking last night of her saying - I'm so excited you GNAW, I must always get a little bit aTIPSY you GNAW MRS CHERRY MRS CHERRY oh I'm so excited you GNAW. Jesus bloody christ I was nearly sick when I thought of her - I wonder why she knocked at my door the last night all the same-

We will never know the true extent of their relationship but perhaps Lowry invited her over to his temporary Provincetown home to find out why she knocked on the door and then got too drunk.

ROGUE SCHOLARS TELL TALES OF THE COCKTAIL

In Under The Volcano, Malcolm Lowry wrote about the phenomenon of “drinking yourself sober.” He’d be right at home in New Orleans during Tales Of The Cocktail, where sober discussion about drinking rules the day — five days, to be precise (July 16-20), packed with seminars about how to make drinks, how to taste drinks, even how to write about making and tasting drinks. Read more

Top 10 List Of Films About Alcoholics

Check out List Verse's list of Top 10 movies about alcoholics which includes Huston's Under The Volcano:

Under the Volcano isn’t necessarily an amazing film, but Albert Finney’s subtle and scrupulous portrayal of alcoholic Geoffrey Firmin is unmatched in its ironically graceful stupor; is in itself is amazing. Against a background of war breaking out in Europe and the Mexican fiesta Day of Death, we are taken through one day in the life of the lead character Firmin, a British consul living in alcoholic disrepair and obscurity in a small southern Mexican town in 1939. The Consul’s self-destructive behavior is a source of perplexity and sadness to his nomadic, idealistic half-brother, Hugh, and his ex-wife, Yvonne, who has returned with hopes of healing Geoffrey and their broken marriage. It is based on the 1947 novel of the same name, which is a semi-autobiographical account the author, Malcolm Lowry’s, life.

David Markson Interview

Read an interview with David Markson a friend of Lowry as well as one of the earliest commentators on Lowry's work.

Interview with David Markson by Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 3/1/2004

As PW treks to David Markson's place in Greenwich Village, the thought occurs that the apartment is almost equally distant from two of the great New York literary saloons of the last half-century—the White Horse, still happily alive over on Hudson Street, and the late, lamented Lion's Head, which lived a couple of blocks east on Christopher Street. Both bars have rich literary histories: the legend says that Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at the White Horse—he actually died at close-by St. Vincent's Hospital days later—and the Lion's Head was home to several generations of writers from Norman Mailer and Frederick Exley to Frank McCourt. But one of the lucky few who was in both places at the precise serendipitous time was Markson, author of Vanishing Point, just published by Shoemaker & Hoard. Read more

Check out a short piece of video of Markson talking about Lowry:

Malcolm Lowry, Mescal, and the Charms of Cuernavaca

Malcolm Lowry, Mescal, and the Charms of Cuernavaca by Barry Evetts:

Of his host country sometime British novelist, short story writer, poet, wanderer and dipsomaniac Malcolm Lowry once said; “Mexico… is the most Christ-awful place in the world to be in any form of distress.”

His cry from the heart comes as little surprise from a writer perennially short of cash, his work seen as confusing and difficult to market, and his drinking habits consuming much of the money he received as an allowance from his wealthy, remote, and sometimes disapprovingly Victorian father. But in Cuernavaca, today a popular weekend getaway spot an hour or so south by car from the fumed-filled valleys of Mexico City, Lowry conceived and drafted the short story which would later grow to be a novel and become his contribution to quirky yet colourful literature as Under the Volcano. Read more

Checkout Time at the Asylum

Here's an interesting article on former occupants of Bellvue from the NY Times:

To the healthy and/or wealthy, Bellevue was still considered a hellhole. But that didn’t prevent it from becoming a pit stop for a roiling, turbulently unhappy segment of cultural and literary New York, a chapter in the biographies of countless writers and artists. A very young Eugene O’Neill was taken there after attempting suicide, and in 1935, Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) spent two weeks being treated for acute alcoholism. In 1946, the story goes, Joan Vollmer, the wife of William Burroughs, was found on the street, incoherent and neglecting her infant daughter. She was committed for psychosis brought on by the amphetamines she and Burroughs had been injecting. Vollmer may or may not have been psychotic, but Burroughs was certain he didn’t want her in Bellevue. Seven years earlier, he had gone to his analyst’s office and presented him with the tip of his own finger, which he had severed in order to impress a young man. The analyst had called Bellevue. Burroughs knew what was on the other side of those gates, and he got Vollmer out. Read more