Malcolm Lowry (1909—57) was an English author whose prodigious talent lay in direct inverse proportion to his heroic abuse of alcohol. His Under the Volcano is both widely-read and universally accepted as one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Before the eventful trip to Mexico that inspired that book, and in the midst of a stormy relationship with his co-dependent first wife, he crossed the Atlantic and checked himself into Bellevue Hospital in New York for treatment. The incomplete novella Lunar Caustic came into being as a result. City Hospital is a four-movement soundtrack to the novella, a “mere” three-inch disc housed in a sumptuous jackdaw edition filled with facsimilie period maps, postcards and photos for an ephemeral “psycho-geography” of the city and its docklands during a stretch of the 1930s of which Lowry himself must have had only hazy, vague memories.
Seeing as the author spent nearly half his subsequent life in a squatter’s shack on the beach of his hometown, Vancouver’s Loscil is an appropriate interpreter and one whose concept and structure is lucid and stirring. It’s a concerto in minor for battered jazz pianist Bill Plantagenet, who disembarks a passage from England queasily, unkind waves conducting unkind electricity still shooting through his nervous system. Repetitive depressions of a single note on the piano are fog-horn blasts from a distance as he stumbles into the Bowery. As the protagonist flounders in hospital, pinpricks of light penetrate the fog and the windows, no matter how sooty, letting in the reality right outside the window, in the sky and on the street, both just as run-down and unattainable as sanity and sobriety. The waves return and then recede, the familiar opening notes of Edvard Grieg’s “The Death of Ase” intone, played simply and elegantly “by” Plantagenet, until drowned out by a powerful marine engine. Though the piano gets the absolutely final word.
An altogether brilliant package wrapping together what Lowry left as an unfinished draft.
City Hospital is available on Wistrec. [Release page]
