Poet, short-story writer, novelist, movie scriptwriter, legend-

ary alcoholic, jazz musician, sailor, golfer, student of the

Cabbala, mythopoeist, and indefatigable jester, Malcolm

Lowry died at the age of forty-eight in 1957 in Ripe, near

Lewes, Sussex, according to one version by taking twenty

sodium amytal tablets after a struggle with his wife over a

bottle of gin; according to another, by suffocation in his

sleep. He was buried in the churchyard of St. John the Bap-

tist in Ripe following an inquest by the coroner who pro-

nounced the cause of death, "Misfortune." The epitaph tells

something of his life as well, for misfortune, no doubt invited,

seemed to pursue him. His manuscripts were lost or burned

in conflagrations; he was accident-prone, and though physi-

cally very strong, suffered from a series of shattering illnesses;

he spent turbulent, dark nights and darker days in an alcoholic

penumbra filled with demonic "familiars." He led a life, for

the most part, of poverty and frustration and died known as

the author of a single book, Under the Volcano. There is a

certain justice in this fact since he himself thought of his

lifework as a single cycle, first as a modern Commedia of

which Under the Volcano was to be the Inferno, then as a

five-part series, and later as a cycle of seven novels. And

though infrequently he published poems and short stories, his