Year: 2014
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Introduction xxvii (he was of course living "under the reign of Bloom & Sweeney"), but his appropriations sometimes extended well beyond the modernist allusive technique that Eliot's friend Aiken had described in a review of The Waste Land, where he argued that Eliot and Pound attempted "to make a 'literature of literature'-a poetry not more actuated by life itself than by poetry" ("An Anatomy of Melancholy" 99).Aiken's characterization of The Waste Land and the Cantos as products of a "very complex and very literary awareness able to speak only, or best, in terms of the literary past, the terms which had moulded its tongue" would have applied with equal force to Lowry, for whom Aiken was also part of the "literary past" that shaped Ultramarine.According to Clarissa Lorenz, Aiken's second wife, as Lowry wrote and revised his first novel he showed Aiken numerous drafts, from which Aiken repeatedly excised imitations of passages from Blue Voyage.Even worse, when Lowry read a draft of Aiken's next novel, Great Circle, which included Aiken's dream of eating his father's skeleton, Lowry wanted to appropriate the dream as his own.12 Of course, it is possible that Lowry played at testing the limits of influence with Aiken, appropriating material that he knew Aiken would recognize and delete from the manuscripts, but his very different relationship with Nordahl Grieg, whose name he would later conceal from David Markson, made it impossible for him to play the same game with the Norwegian writer.The result was not only that a passage like "Outside was the roar of the sea and the darkness" could make its way intact from Grieg's novel into Ultramarine but that Lowry would then write In Ballast to the White Sea, confronting and overcoming his sense of indebtedness to Grieg without acknowledging any debt to Aiken in the novel.Elsewhere I have argued that Lowry's open acknowledgment of Aiken's influence might be read as an attempt to create his literary father-a father whom he believed he would eventually overcome (Forests 24).Grieg was too geographically distant from Lowry, and too close to him in age, to be a father figure, but Lowry certainly regarded Grieg as a kindred spirit.In any event, he was fully aware of how much he owed to the writings of both men.It is therefore ironic that the charge of plagiarism that Lowry always feared would come from Burton Rascoe, an author who had not influenced him and to whom he owed virtually nothing. III.Apart from the fire that destroyed his manuscript, the most traumatic event for Lowry during the years when he worked on In Ballast to the White Sea occurred in 1935, after his agent, Harold Matson, submitted the novel-in-progress to Doubleday, along with a copy of Ultramarine to demonstrate that Lowry was xxviii In Ballast to the White Sea a published novelist.The materials were passed along to Rascoe, an editor at Doubleday, who looked into Ultramarine just long enough to decide that it was largely plagiarized from his story "What Is Love?"When the two met, Rascoe subjected Lowry to grossly exaggerated claims that an author less sensitive than Lowry to the charge of being derivative, one who had not already written a novel on the subject of his indebtedness to another writer, would have dismissed out of hand, perhaps with the threat of a lawsuit for slander.Instead, Lowry was "in a state of shock" (Bowker 193).In fact, he appears to have read "What Is Love?" and to have borrowed a few lines from it, all of them quotations from other works that amount to very little.Although both narratives use a streamof-consciousness technique that neither Rascoe nor Lowry invented, their plots, locales, themes, and characters have almost nothing in common.Still, Rascoe threatened to expose Lowry as a plagiarist, and according to Rascoe, Lowry signed a confession to that effect.Rascoe's claim cannot be confirmed, and Jan Gabrial told Sherrill Grace she did not believe Lowry ever signed such a confession (CL 1:330).Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Lowry was deeply shaken by the accusation.13 Nearly two decades later, Rascoe, still claiming he had been victimized by Lowry's "plagiarism," wrote to a friend about the incident.14 In the letter he mentioned in passing that when Lowry had gained some fame for a novel either entitled "Beneath the Volcano" or "Under the Volcano" (Rascoe used both titles), he had not read it, so he did not know whether that was the novel Lowry had submitted to Doubleday in 1935.Although by his own admission Rascoe had not read much of In Ballast, and could not remember its title, he recalled telling Lowry that the novel was clearly a version of Charles Morgan's The Fountain, with some borrowings from Céline and Malraux.Before Jan revealed that a manuscript of In Ballast had survived, there was no way of testing the veracity of Rascoe's claim that Lowry had copied Morgan, although a perusal of The Fountain would have shown that its style and themes were quite unlike anything in the Lowry canon.Now that the two novels can be compared, it is hard to imagine what connection Rascoe saw between them, unless it is that in each case the protagonist of the novel is himself writing a book or that both Lowry and Morgan use epigraphs to preface parts of their novels.15 However, given that the volumes the protagonists are writing are quite different (Lewis Alison's archivally based study of "the development of spiritual concepts in England since the Renaissance" [Morgan 26] is a project unattended by the anxieties that plague Sigbjørn), and that Morgan and Lowry never use the same-or even, as far as I can tell, similar-epigraphs, these connections only underscore how fundamentally different the two novels are.It is possible that Lowry read The Fountain, but he did not plagiarize from it.
Author: Malcolm Lowry
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: New York Public Library
OpenAlex ID: W4390801987