Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry

First published: 1933; revised, 1962

Type of work: Comic social realism

Time of work: The late 1920’s

Locale: Tsjang-Tsjang harbor, China, and Merseyside, England

Principal Characters:

• Eugene Dana Hilliot, the upper-middle-class protagonist, a nineteen-year-old on his first voyage as deckhand and seaman
• Andy, the “chinless wonder,” the ship’s cook and social arbiter, a sensualist and cynic
• Norman, the cabin boy, Andy’s friend
• Janet, Hilliot’s sweetheart in Liverpool

The Novel

Like that of Under the Volcano (1947), the story of Ultramarine is deceptively easy to summarize. On one level, it tells the story of forty-eight hours on board the tramp steamer Oedipus Tyrannus, “outward bound for hell”: forty-eight hours of unloading, loading, drinking, whoring, gossiping, and drudgery. On another level, in a series of internal monologues, it charts a sensitive young man’s confrontation with the human problems of sexuality, class conflict, and vocation, and the more philosophical problems of the nature of time and the status of the past—for in his mind Eugene Dana Hilliot’s Merseyside past is as vividly alive as the present: his childhood, his troubled relationship with his parents, his schoolboy traumas, and the idyll of his innocent relationship with Janet. In sum, then, Ultramarine tells of a spot in time when its protagonist is neither man nor boy, but both anticipates and achieves (at the novel’s close) a leap forward into manhood and acceptance of life, and also gazes back intently into childhood.

One hour out of Tsjang-Tsjang, as he spies on them at ease in the mess room, Hilliot dreams of being accepted by the crew. He misses a chance when a pigeon gets stuck atop the mainmast; it is Norman who brings down the bird, to the applause of all. Yet youth brings joy—on entering the harbor, for example, from which wafts the promise of exotic cargoes and erotic treats ashore. In these, however, Hilliot will not or dare not share. Nightfall finds him instead alone aboard, where an invitation to the quartermaster’s cabin leads to a proposition of a still more unwelcome kind. The night ends with a retreat, in dreams, into the securities of the past.

Next morning, stagnated at port, the crew turns to gossip and horseplay for amusement. Meanwhile, fed up with Andy’s taunts about his class and youth, Hilliot retaliates: trouble brews. His meditations center on celibacy, Janet, and the horrors of syphilis, the seaman’s scourge. His dreams become increasingly complex and story-like, absorbing all of his (and the reader’s) attention.

That evening, like rebukes, letters from his mother and Janet arrive at precisely the moment he succumbs to the call of the fleshpots ashore. In response, he embarks on an all-night binge—the quintessentially Lowryan core of the novel. At the Cabaret Pompeia, he spins fake autobiographical yarns to an uncomprehending German, Popplereuter, who accidentally pockets Janet’s letter. At the local cinema (featuring Olga Tschechowa in Love’s Crucifixion), he meets a very drunk Norman demanding of the cashier a “one third [class] day-return to Birkenhead Central.” The three take a sodden tour of the sights, including an anatomical museum, where “the visitor sees the awful effects of MAN leading a DEPRAVED life.” Nevertheless, Hilliot soon finds himself dancing with a girl at the Miki Bar whose calling card proclaims her “Olga Sologrub, queen of love. Night work a specialty.” A loss of virginity, however, is not in the cards. Instead, as Hilliot discovers when he withdraws for thought (and to discover his loss of Janet’s letter), the Tarot cards (according to a shadowy fortune-teller) foretell acceptance (“everybody like you when you play [the ukelele]”). More drunk, he returns to the Miki Bar. Olga is in Andy’s arms.

The next day, ship gossip focuses on Hilliot—so drunk the previous night that he slept on the wrong ship. His own meditations circle closer to dealing with that decisive moment of his life—his good-bye to Janet in gray Merseyside. His resentment of Andy leads to more lurid, detailed fantasies about his removal. Finally, in richly expletive-laden language, he challenges the “chinless wonder” to a kind of “duel.” Later that day, while the ship loads a cargo of zoo animals, Hilliot discovers that Norman’s prized pigeon has fallen overboard. Andy, however, prevents him diving into shark-infested waters to save it. Hilliot at first views this as a contribution to his failing, yet again, to distinguish himself by some heroic act. Yet from this bathetic mess comes a victory of sorts: their concern for Norman draws Hilliot and Andy together. “Come into the roundhouse later, son,” the cook invites. The ship moves out into the liberating freshness of the open sea; with her, Hilliot now feels one. Popplereuter forwards Janet’s letter, to which Hilliot mentally drafts a reply. He tells of his envy of and rivalry with Andy, and how he will eschew isolated speculation and dedicate himself to active life. Meanwhile, in the mess room, the crew riot in gossip, card games, and songs. Hilliot joins them and wins their laughter for topping another sailor’s narration of a strange dream with a story of his own—entirely invented. Next, he is told that he has been promoted and will now work in the hot, chaotic engine room—at the heart of life.

The Characters

The Oedipus Tyrannus herself is described in far more tangible and particularizing detail than the novel’s minor (and even some of its major) human characters. Ultramarine evinces as little interest in Orientals as it does in exploring the socio-political dimension of its Oriental setting (Merseyside is kept much more in mind). The working classes fare little better; in the mess room scenes, the slangy, gritty speeches are not ascribed to individual speakers but orchestrated into a counterpointed cacophony of voices—the speakers themselves are thus invisible, dehumanized.

Characterization of the women in Hilliot’s life is also weak. Olga, as her name and surreal calling card suggest, is a convenient symbol for fleshly desire. Even Janet is essentially the madonna to Olga’s whore; her independent voice is hardly heard until the reading of her letter. She is instead the auditor to whom Hilliot’s monologues are addressed, sometimes directly; the representative of old values; the soft white lamb of his overblown romantic-religious imagery. His mother, like his father, appears in Hilliot’s memories as both idealized figure and someone on whom to take novelistic revenge, perhaps for her bourgeois ordinariness.

Hilliot half humorously confesses to Popplereuter: “I am a strange man, or I would like to be a strange man, which is nearer the truth.” Even nearer the truth would be an admission that the internal voyage Ultramarine charts is a quest not only for manhood but also for identity, specifically identity as a writer—as the “dream”-telling episode, above all, would suggest. It is partly because Hilliot has realized this identity at the novel’s end that he can declare of his sensualist alter ego, rival and surrogate father: “I have identification with Andy: I am Andy.... But I have outgrown Andy.” By then neither the tattooed, chinless cook (the most impressive of the novel’s cast) nor the friendly, plucky, and eminently “normal” Norman has any further use as a model for selfhood; they can dwindle to mere friends.

Critical Context

Clearly it is impossible to discuss Ultramarine without reference to its literary and still less to its autobiographical context. On his 1927 voyage as deckhand on the SS Pyrrhus, Lowry took extensive notes in order not to miss anything of the “experience” that he intended from the first to be the basis of his novel. Like Hilliot, he was “a man who believed himself to live in inverted, or introverted, commas,” and a man keen to cut his ties to his bourgeois heritage; Ultramarine marks the beginning of Lowry’s invention of the Lowry myth of the bohemian expatriate writer—a myth he was to live.

“I can no more create than fly,” Hilliot tells Popplereuter. “What I could achieve would be that usual self-conscious first novel, to be reviewed in the mortuary of The Times Literary Supplement.” Worse, Lowry himself feared that Ultramarine might be regarded as plagiaristic—the very theme of the search for and argument with a father figure owes something to Lowry’s intense relationship with Aiken. The hero’s name itself is a compendium of influences and identities—Eugene for former seafarer O’Neill, Dana for the author of Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Hilliot (crew pronounce it “Illiot”) for Eliot; its first line is “What is your name?” In Ultramarine, the self-consciousness and acute awareness of literary tradition that was to mark all of Lowry’s work, as indeed so much of modern fiction, has its anxious beginnings.

Lowry envisioned Ultramarine as the first of his projected life’s masterwork “The Voyage That Never Ends,” which was to take in all of his works, including Under the Volcano. Its connections to Under the Volcano are numerous and close: the journey framework and vision of life as a spiritual quest, the intimations of doom and loss, the interest in the occult, the recurrence of haunting images, often of words in many languages, the alcoholic haze, the experimenting investigation of memory and time—after the drowning of the pigeon, “Norman’s words made a sort of incantation in his brain. ‘Time! Of course there would have been time. Time wouldn’t have mattered if you’d been a man.’” Changes in the revised edition were designed to underline such parallels: the ship’s name was changed from Nawab to Oedipus Tyrannus, the name of Hugh Firmin’s ship.

Bibliography

Binns, Ronald. “Lowry’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” in Canadian Literature. LXIV (Spring, 1975).

Binns, Ronald. Malcolm Lowry, 1984.

Bradbrook, M. C. Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life, a Study in Transformation, 1974.

Cross, Richard K. Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to His Fiction, 1980.

Grace, Sherrill E. The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction, 1982.

Wood, Barry, ed. Malcolm Lowry: The Writer and His Critics, 1980.