‘The Day of the Dead’
by Graham Collier
More on my connections with Lowry can be seen and heard on The Day of the Dead page in grahamcolliermusic.com.
Malcolm Lowry has said that he 'learnt to write while listening to Bix Beiderbecke,' and he once spoke of trying to write a new kind of novel - 'something that is bald and winnowed, like Sibelius, and that makes an odd but splendid din, like Bix Beiderbecke' (SL, 28). Lowry's favourite jazz musicians were undoubtedly Beiderbecke, a white trumpeter of German extraction whose lyrical style was highly influential, Joe Venuti, one of the few violinists in jazz, Venuti's partner, guitarist Eddie Lang, and saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer. All worked at various times in Paul Whiteman's orchestra, but there is no significance in that or in Lowry's apparent liking for white musicians. (Other names that appear in Lowry's work or letters are Red Nichols, Benny Goodman, and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France with Django Reinhardt.) Lowry's selection of favourite musicians is presumably accidental, formed through listening to the limited number of records available in his time, particularly in England. Lowry's strong interest in the guitar would naturally have led him to Eddie Lang, and through Lang to Venuti, Beiderbecke, and Trumbauer.
It was the records made by Trumbauer's group (featuring Beiderbecke and Lang) in 1928-29, when Lowry was in his late teens, that seemed to have impressed him most. Ralph Case, a Lowry friend from Cambridge, has said: 'to anyone who knew Malcolm intimately it was inevitable that jazz should be tied up with, indeed be part of, his literary output.' (1) Lowry refers to jazz often in his fiction and his letters and, as I will show later, he seemed to see some kind of common language too, which Case was astute enough to recognize.
three characters in search of a volcano
There are three characters in Lowry's writing for whom jazz is a very solid interest. Hugh, the Consul's half-brother in Under the Volcano, is given Lowry's own musical background; he talks about Venuti and Lang often, and speaks of 'a day like a good Joe Venuti record.' (2) In Lunar Caustic the protagonist says: 'perhaps it was America I was in love with. You know, you people get sentimental over England from time to time with your guff about Sweetest Shakespeare. Well, this was the other way round. Only it was Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti and the death of Bix.' (3) Then, in 'Forest Path to the Spring', Lowry has his hero say: 'One evening on the way back from the spring for some reason I suddenly thought of a break by Bix in Frankie Trumbauer's record of 'Singing the Blues' that had always seemed to me to express a moment of the most pure spontaneous happiness. I could never hear this break without feeling happy myself and wanting to do something good.' (4)
Lowry's first biographer, Douglas Day, is among those who have felt that Lowry's relationships with jazz requires further attention. My feeling is that such a study can only be undertaken by somebody who understands jazz fully. In the only published article on Lowry and jazz to date, Perle Epstein describes 'the construction of Volcano with its twelve chapters [as] based to some extent on the Zohar (a reference to the Cabbala) with its emphasis on the mystical number twelve. Here I would like to note that the blues form in jazz is also based on a twelve-bar construction.' (5) True enough, but so what? The twelve-bar blues was formalized from a tradition that could just as well use eight or eleven or thirteen or any number of bars. Taken overall, the blues form simply provides a basic structure for improvising, and it is on the repetition of such structures than jazz is traditionally based.
splendid din
Leaving matters of form aside, it is my feeling that Lowry attached himself to that personal, highly individual look at the world that a jazz musician expresses when he is soloing. What he got from jazz was the kind of oblique thinking one intuits from a good jazz soloist: he speaks of Beiderbecke's 'odd but splendid din' (SL, 28) and of Venuti's 'wild controlled abandon' (UV, 158) and there is an obvious link between Lowry's freewheeling language - moving from connection to connection in a kind of stream of consciousness - and jazz soloing. Take this passage from Lunar Caustic, for example:
' - Or - was he dead ? Ah ha, watch the surgeon slit the foot of the dead man! What next, Nostradamus? Will blood appear? Or has it clotted, in some vital organ ? Bleed, dead man, bleed, set the poor surgeon's mind at rest, so that he won't have to get drunk and go through the jumps and the blind staggers; the horror of the rats, the wheeling bushmills, and the Orange Bitters; bleed, so that he won't find himself reflecting in summer that even Nature herself is shot through with jitteriness, the neurotic squirrel and the sparrows nibbling the dung where the octoroons, the creole and the quadroon have galloped past in black dust; bleed, so that he will not have to think how much more beautiful women are when you are dying, and they sway down the streets under the fainting trees, their bosoms tossing like blossoms in the warm gusts; bleed, so that he will not have to hear the louse of conscience, nor the groaning of imaginary men, nor see, on the window blind all night the bad ghosts - .'
It does have a kind of sense to it, but it could perhaps best be described as 'an odd but splendid din.' There is a sense, too, of each of the characters in Volcano stepping forward for his or her 'solo,' in which, as Dale Edmonds has pointed out, 'the interplay of thought and action filters through an individual's sensibility, much like a jazz soloist filters the given material of melody, harmony, rhythm and mood through his own sensibility.' (6)
'Mosaics of experience' is another phrase used about Lowry's writing that has a relevance to jazz and is, perhaps, a way of explaining how a jazz musician improvises. He doesn't usually attempt to build a structure logically, moving from A to Z through B, C, D, etc.; he explores his subject, uses his experience in a stream-of-consciousness way, moving from idea to idea until his allotted space is up or he has said all he has to say at this time.
and... and... and...
Discussing Lowry's later work, Muriel Bradbrook has said that 'each book culminates and absorbs the previous books, and its many layers include images that go back to childhood. This combination of fragility and rooted strength arises from the method of writing and the free, almost random mixing of overlapping versions; this allows craftsmanship to combine with spontaneity.' (7) Again, there is a definite parallel with jazz: craftsmanship and spontaneity. She also cites the enormous sentence length in Lowry's later work: 'He uses what the Greeks termed the 'kai' style, phrases linked by 'and ... and ... and.' It is the style used by children but also by the great jazzmen. The effect is to stress the musical element and to give a unified sweep analogous to that of...' - and there she spoils it by citing Bob Dylan, who can hardly be called a jazz musician, but I feel that the points she raises do nevertheless have validity. Another parallel to jazz was found in Conrad Aiken's use, in a review, of a quotation about poetry: 'The initial stimulus, the stimulus which first set the language habit to work, is soon lost sight of in the wealth of other language associations which are evoked from the subconscious.' (8)
However, it is important to realize that the language in today's jazz parallels Lowry's writing style more than the language of that of his heroes such as Beiderbecke and Venuti. There was a formal underpinning to all the music of that era that is not present in Lowry's writing or in the best of contemporary jazz, where the forms used and the freedom offered to the musician allow much more to be said, and for it to be said in a much deeper way than in previous styles. To quote Aiken again, this time from comments about Faulkner: the 'purpose [of Faulkner's sentences] is simply to keep the form - and the idea - fluid and unfinished, still in motion, as it were, and unknown, until the dropping into place of the very last syllable.' (9) As with the jazz musician there is a subconscious logic to it all, and when it works it is what jazz critic Charles Fox has called the sudden transformation of the unexpected into the inevitable.
enter Hemingway...
Many composers in all areas of music have been inspired by words. Such inspiration can be subdivided into those of title, mood, and text. The first is most common, where a composer may write a ballad and decide that 'Tess' is as good a name as any because he has vague memories of reading the Hardy book or seeing the film. The second, being inspired by the mood of a literary work, is much more valid. Here the piece 'Tess' has arisen as a direct result of a love of Hardy's work, and the music is closely informed by what the composer enjoyed in that particular novel. Some titles can be literary but indirect, as in my series of fragments 'Pebbles Fresh from the Brook', where the music came first but the phrase about Hemingway's style fitted the bill admirably as a title.
Many composers have used texts directly, whether in the setting of a poem or a series of poems, or less often a prose passage. Some of these have undoubtedly worked well, but it seems to me that in most works that have literary aspirations, whether they include text or not, the music side is purely descriptive accompaniment to the poems or prose passages. That can be interesting enough, stimulating enough, but at the end the poem is still there, unchanged, and the music has done little if anything more than just remain in the background. To make it work properly you must find something that has hidden depths, of the sort I found in Lowry, that are capable of being plumbed by the music. My initial stimulus came from the link, which I saw at first subconsciously, between contemporary jazz language and Lowry's, but in each of my works inspired by Lowry I have tried to suggest by the music another dimension of meaning - not simply to use the words as exotic colour but rather to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Undoubtedly my composing has developed because of my understanding of Lowry's techniques ('the layers, the depths, the abysses, interlocking and interrelated,' SL 421) and my application of them to my own technique of controlling jazz improvisation within a compositional framework where I utilize levels and layers, ranging from completely improvised passages to completely written ones, with finely controlled gradations between.
flying grand pianos
The earliest of my Lowry works was 'Symphony of Scorpions,' written while I was heavily immersed in Lowry and his works for the first time. The title comes from that marvellously evocative phrase in Ultramarine: 'A symphony of scorpions, a procession of flying grand pianos and cathedrals.' (10) The work explores in musical terms the co-existing levels, both horizontal and vertical, of Lowry's writing, as well as what he called 'the technique of divided attention.' Then came 'Forest Path to the Spring,' where my discovery of the story, and the necessity to find a companion piece for the Scorpions album, made me interested in trying to capture the feeling of the novella in music. As Douglas Day has said, 'It is all quite lovely, and described with a simple eloquence that often approaches, but seldom falls into, sentimentality.' (11) The obvious musical starting point was the solo break by Bix in 'Singing the Blues', which had always struck Lowry as expressing 'a moment of the most pure spontaneous happiness' (HL 255). Those few musical notes served me well as the musical germ behind the piece, but the attempt to capture Lowry's feat in the novella in musical terms was to prove one of the most difficult tasks I have ever taken on.
The 'Forest Path' theme occurs again in 'The Day of the Dead', the largest work I have done to date. (I say to date because I still nurture plans for a jazz opera based on Volcano, but so far the necessary funding has eluded me.) 'The Day of the Dead' was commissioned by the Ilkley Literature Festival and first performed there in 1977, with a subsequent British tour, record, and the first North American performance at the 1987 Lowry Symposium in Vancouver. It was as a direct result of the recording of this work that I was asked to write the music for the BBC Hi Fi Theatre dramatization of Under the Volcano in 1979.
The Day of the Dead uses Lowry's words, from Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave, as well as some extracts from the letters and short stories. They were selected and assembled to make, with the music, a composite portrait of Lowry and the Consul. I have heard that Margerie respected the choices I made, while admitting that the music was a little beyond her. The Financial Times, however, did say that it was 'a perfect marriage of words and music!' Although the setting was loosely meant to be a Mexican cantina on the Day of the Dead, I wanted to avoid purely descriptive writing. I could see little point either in recreating Volcano, in the sense of using a straight narrative line where literary event would be copied by musical happening. I wanted to add another layer, to utilize voice and music together to make a whole experience. In one section the Consul is asleep in his bathroom, with memories echoing around him. The words, drawn from many parts of the novel and some of the letters, are presented, often in a distorted way, by two simultaneous tracks of the same voice. The musicians, solo or in groups, improvise within some constraints suggested by me as composer/director, reaction to the words swelling around them. In the penultimate section of the work we hear my 'Forest Path to the Spring' theme in its entirely after earlier, fragmentary, echoing hints. This time it has words from the novel, illustrating what the Consul has given up for drink. (When I came to assemble the record, the narrated words 'the sudden O'Neillian blast of a ship's siren' [HL 258] coincided with a very high, almost distorted saxophone note on the pre-existing music track. What a Lowryan coincidence, matched only by the fact that the original 'Forest Path' recording had been done at my engineeer's house in Bix, a village in Oxfordshire!)
By such choices and contrasts of music and words I wanted to combine my knowledge of Lowry's life, work, and techniques with the often disregarded resources of jazz techniques and improvisation to present a different aspect of Lowry's genius. In so doing I hoped to present a portrait of Lowry and of his Consul, perhaps of all of us in our struggle between good and evil.
Notes
1 From a taped conversation with Ralph Case.
2 Under the Volcano (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1963), 125. (UV above)
3 Lunar Caustic (London: Jonathan Cape 1968), 19.
4 Hear Us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre 1987), 255. (HL above. SL is The Selected Letters.)
5 Perle Epstein, 'Swinging the Maelstrom: Malcolm Lowry and Jazz,' in Malcolm Lowry: The Man and His Work, ed. George Woodcock (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1971), 150-1.
6 Dale Edmonds, 'Under the Volcano: A Reading of the 'Immediate Level,'' Tulane Studies in English 16 (1986), 66.
7 Muriel Bradbrook, Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life - A Study in Transformation (London: Cambridge University Press 1974), 92.
8 Quoted from Nicholas Kostyleff's Le Mécanisme cérébrale de la pensée by Aiken in Collected Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press 1968), 52.
9 Conrad Aiken, 'William Faulkner: The Novel as Form,' Atlantic Monthly (November 1939), 652.
10 Ultramarine (New York: Lipincott 1962), 133-4.
11 Douglas Day, Malcolm Lowry: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press 1984 [1973]), 457.