Finally, this year Margerie Lowry and Douglas Day collaborated to edit and publish Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, Lowry's most baldly autobiographical novel.

Of the two published this year, Lunar Caustic is easily the better work. Reminiscent of both The Enormous Room and Naked Lunch, it easily surpasses both of these novels in control and precision of detail.

In Lunar Caustic, Lowry uses his secondary characters effectively to expand upon and control the main autobiographical figure, William Plantagenet, a young Englishman and a drunk, who is committed temporarily to Bellevue Hospital in New York. In the central conversation between Plantagenet and the Doctor, Lowry plays the Doctor's practical, mindlessly psychologistic comments against Plantagenet's solipsism. At the same time, however, the Doctor's words serve as a kind of objective warning against the distortions implicit in Lowry's habit of creating only autobiographical characters.

In one such exchange, Plantagenet raises the common Lowry theme of the struggle for regeneration:

"Can't you see the horror of man's uncomplaining acceptance of his own degeneration? Because many who are supposed to be mad here, as opposed to the ones who are drunks, are simply people who perhaps once saw, however confusedly, the necessity for change in themselves, for rebirth that's the word."

And the Doctor replies:

"If you're talking about yourself, all this is very helpful. If not, I don't think you have a grasp of the facts."

Dark As the Grave is much less polished. The editors carved the "novel" out of seven hundred pages of garbled and unfinished work. Intent on not adding a line that Malcolm didn't write they simply lined up the incidents of the book in chronological order and then shaved off any narrative duplication. The resulting document is occasionally rich enough to stand alone, but often outrageously thin and even tinny. The ending is particularly disheartening--a page and a half of a kind of maudlin twaddle suggesting a facile and most un-Lowrylike redemption.

Dark As the Grave is perhaps most useful as a new guide to Under the Volcano, more personal data for the cultists, more evidence with which to locate Lowry's favorite cantinas. The novel traces Lowry's return to Mexico with Margerie, just before Under the Volcano was finally accepted for publication. In Dark As the Grave, we meet some of the characters who appeared in different form in Under the Volcano, and we discover the often mundane source of what had seemed brilliant invention in the earlier novel. The Consul's mistranslation of the sign "Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan" as "We evict those who destroy" was, Lowry admits, his own careless error, not a conscious subtle distortion.

Some of the dialogue in Dark As the Grave is miserably stiff, more declamation than discussion. Much of it seems not even remotely directed towards the particular characters who are victimized by Lowry's alter-ego in these moments of prolixity.

Still, there are a few scenes in Dark As the Grave that recall the control of Under the Volcano and Lunar Caustic, the humor and self-mockery that save Lowry's protagonists in spite of themselves. When the imagery gets a little too mucky even for Lowry's strong-backed readers to bear, he pushes his always tenuous symbolism gently over the edge, and it tumbles to the bottom with the almost comic relief of self-parody:

Up, up they climbed, ever higher into the Sierra Madre, mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains where on these mountains the farmers sowed their seed crops and left them, upon seemingly inaccessible peaks. ... And what a lesson there was for a writer in this; it was an ascension into heaven itself.

There are portions of Dark As the Grave that recall Lowry's remarkable ability to capture an emotional moment, honestly and exactly. That ability, crafted and formed with care, made Under the Volcano a great work.

But I wonder, especially after reading Dark As the Grave, whether Lowry was in fact just another writer with one fine novel in him. To write Dark As the Grave, he trudged back through the country, the town, and even the buildings that had plagued him into writing Under the Volcano. Through most of the book, Lowry paws around, at times almost dispassionately, in the relics of the earlier novel. What had come off as supra-human desperation in Under the Volcano now emerges as an occasional fit of pique.

Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid may be the last of Lowry's incomplete works to be published, unless Mrs. Lowry squeezes the manuscripts for another "find." And of the lot, Under the Volcano remains the only major testament to Lowry's right to a place among the finest writers of the century. Despite his remarkable talent at self-portrayals, Lowry's power derives almost solely from the infernal torture of one two-year period in his life which he somehow survived. In the end, his contribution may come down simply to the fact that, as Ken Kesey put it, "He's been to the edge and looked over."