Editing Malcolm Lowry (section)

===''The Voyage That Never Ends''===
Lowry envisioned ''The Voyage That Never Ends'' as his [[magnum opus]]: an epic cycle encompassing his existing novels and stories as well as projected works, with ''Under the Volcano'' as its centrepiece.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.glennhorowitz.com/featured/malcolm_lowrys_outline_for_the_voyage_that_never_ends_never_published |title=Malcolm Lowry's outline for the unpublished "The Voyage That Never Ends" |website=glennhorowitz.com |access-date=4 August 2018 |archive-date=27 April 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180427120443/http://www.glennhorowitz.com/featured/malcolm_lowrys_outline_for_the_voyage_that_never_ends_never_published |url-status=dead }}</ref> He spent much of his writing life crafting his body of work into a greater, thematically cohesive whole, which he called ''The Voyage That Never Ends''. It was to rival the epics of other great modernists, and he referred to it in several personal annotations and letters as the concept evolved over many years and works-in-progress. An early typescript has the sequence's contents listed as:
* The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness I
–
* Untitled Sea Novel
* Lunar Caustic
–
* Under the Volcano
–
* Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid
* Eridanus
* La Mordida
–
* The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness II

Lowry labelled ''Under the Volcano'' as "The Centre" while marking ''Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid'', ''Eridanus'', and ''La Mordida'' as "Trilogy". In addition, ''Eridanus'' (the name Lowry gave his West Coast surroundings, referring "to both the stellar constellation and mythical river to which Faeton was cast down by gods")<ref>{{cite web|url=http://malcolmlowryatthe19thhole.blogspot.com/2011/07/andrzej-brakonieckis-series-eridanus.html|title=Brakonieckis|website=malcolmlowryatthe19thhole.blogspot.com|date=6 July 2011}}</ref> seems to consist of the story collection ''Hear Us Oh Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place'', the poems of ''The Lighthouse Invites the Storm'', and "other tales, poems, a play, etc."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-m-MpDce-5aU/U7wHX0K88cI/AAAAAAAAUuc/16qHdtlTdEg/s1600/Malcolm_Lowry_11_thumb.jpg|title=Info|website=3.bp.blogspot.com}}</ref> As well, ''The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness'' was a novel he planned after spending time in a hospital after breaking his leg in 1949: "His experiences there due to a mixture of alcohol withdrawal and drugs were as traumatic as his time in Bellevue in 1936. As ever Malc turned these experiences into literature which he initially entitled the 'Atomic Rhythm' which eventually became ''The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness'', which was never developed beyond a rough sketch and remains unpublished."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://malcolmlowryatthe19thhole.blogspot.com/2011/07/cowled-sisters-of-darkness.html|title=Cowled sisters|website=malcolmlowryatthe19thhole.blogspot.com|date=13 July 2011}}</ref> His plans for ''The Voyage That Never Ends'' ultimately grew into a 34-page outline that he gave to the editor Albert Erskine, with whom he was friends.
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| quote  = It's hellish near impossible to make a précis of my plan...but I've tried to give you an idea, a frame. I myself can hear – almost – the whole thing; that is to say I can already project myself into a given section, no matter how remote, and feel, hear, sense more or less how it must be. (November 23, 1951)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.glennhorowitz.com/featured/malcolm_lowrys_outline_for_the_voyage_that_never_ends_never_published|title=Outline|website=glennhorowitz.com|access-date=27 April 2018|archive-date=27 April 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180427120443/http://www.glennhorowitz.com/featured/malcolm_lowrys_outline_for_the_voyage_that_never_ends_never_published|url-status=dead}}</ref>
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It was this letter and outline that secured for Lowry a long-term contract with Random House. Lowry's alcoholism and early death, however, prevented him from finishing his grand project. Several of the works intended as part of the sequence were rewritten many times over many years—he worked on ''Lunar Caustic'', for instance, from the 1930s until his death, first titled ''The Last Address'', then ''Swinging the Maelstrom'', and finally ''Lunar Caustic''.<ref name="triumphofthenow.com">{{cite web|url=https://triumphofthenow.com/2016/12/21/swinging-the-maelstrom-a-critical-edition-by-malcolm-lowry/|title=Swinging the maelstrom|website=triumphofthenow.com|date=21 December 2016}}</ref> The [[posthumous publication]]s of his unfinished manuscripts have brought several more parts of ''The Voyage That Never Ends'' to light, though these vary in completeness and Lowry's final intentions with these works can only be speculated on. The published version of ''Lunar Caustic'', for instance, was compiled by his widow Margerie Lowry and poet [[Earle Birney]] from "two distinctly different manuscripts. One bore the first title and was last worked on in 1942–44, while the other had the second name and was last edited by the (at the time living) dead author in 1951–52."<ref name="triumphofthenow.com"/> 

In the intervening years, the story had undergone vast changes in style and thematic emphasis. A scholarly edition was eventually published in 2013 that includes the three major versions with annotation on the history of the text's composition. When the novel ''[[In Ballast to the White Sea]]'' was finally published in 2014—after being thought lost for decades—it represented only an early draft of the 1000 page manuscript that had been destroyed in the same shack fire that nearly destroyed ''[[Under the Volcano]]'', and as such does not represent the more complete text Lowry had been working on for nine years.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://triumphofthenow.com/2015/02/15/review-in-ballast-to-the-white-sea-a-scholarly-edition-by-malcolm-lowry/|title=Review|website=triumphofthenow.com|date=15 February 2015}}</ref> ''La Mordida'' was inspired by Lowry's deportation from Mexico in the mid-1940s. "The central narrative of ''La Mordida'' involves a descent into the abyss of self, culminating in the protagonist's symbolic rebirth at the book's end. Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism. Above all, ''La Mordida'' was to have been a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them and who is not only unable to write but suspects that he is just a character in a novel."<ref>{{cite book|title=Data|isbn=0820317632|last1=Lowry|first1=Malcolm|year=1996|publisher=University of Georgia Press }}</ref> It was published in 1996 as notes, sketches, outlines, and rough chapters—it was to feature the autobiographical character Sigbjørn Wilderness. ''Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid'' was published only twelve years after Lowry's death, and also featured Sigbjørn Wilderness. It was "collated from a huge volume of notes ... almost every chapter exist[ing] in three or four different forms."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://triumphofthenow.com/2014/03/13/review-dark-as-the-grave-wherein-my-friend-is-laid-by-malcolm-lowry/|title=Review|website=triumphofthenow.com|date=13 March 2014}}</ref>

Because so much of ''The Voyage That Never Ends'' was left incomplete (much of it hardly begun, barely going beyond his initial conceptual framework) what exists only hints at the final form Lowry intended for his magnum opus.