Prof. Richard Hauer Costa: Recollections on Lowry

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Chasing the ghost of Malcolm Lowry
Recollections of Prof. Richard Hauer Costa

[photo]

Mike Erlindson

RECOLLECTIONS: Prof. Costa talks about the novel that changed his life at the Toronto Malcolm Lowry Symposium. (June 1997)

TORONTO--An emeritus professor of English at Texas A&M University, while doubting that new books can be life-changing discoveries for today's readers, told delegates to the recent Malcolm Lowry Symposium here that Lowry's 1947 "contemporary classic" novel UNDER THE VOLCANO had --literally--changed his. Richard Hauer Costa, author in 1972 of the first critical study of the British novelist-poet who died in 1957, told the nearly 100 delegates to the international conference on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the book's publication that his reading of THE VOLCANO led to his selection of wife, choice of Mexico for a three-month honeymoon, eventual shift of career from journalism to literary study and teaching, and an undiminished love of the book which he read the week of its original publication in February 1947.

"These days new books are merely grist for the New York City-based media mill," Costa declared, displaying a headline article from the WALL STREET JOURNAL noting that merchandising methods featuring super-market "hyping" of celebrity-based, ghost-written books were not producing expected profits. "To 'discover' a new book now requires freedom from the merchandising of even bad books into best-sellerdom months before publication--one remembers scores of instances from JAWS to Gingrich where promotion begins before a word has been written. It requires ignorance of an author's previous books, his/her name a/o notoriety. In 1947, in North America, at least, Malcolm Lowry and UNDER THE VOLCANO met all the terms."

Costa credited a review by John Woodburn (SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE) and the word passed down by a legendary teacher at Syracuse University (Leonard Brown: "I have read the galley proofs of a novel about Mexico that I think is the finest work of fiction since Joyce's ULYSSES") with inducing him to buy the book and read it the week it appeared. He was a newspaper reporter in Syracuse and a graduate student in journalism at the time.

"After fifty years, I still recall what in the book caught me up from the first word, sped me through it and prompted me for the only time in my life to reread the book immediately. I've known many serious readers who give up after the first chapter. It's all wrong in terms of the kind of suspense we expect in a thriller or a Hitchcock movie. The fate of the two main characters is revealed amidst intricate but not obscure flashbacks and stunningly evoked local color. Lowry provides something in keeping with the somber mood of the chapter: a sense of dread at something that has already happened, a thing so shattering that it has left the survivors no peace. A straight-line graphic extends from the end of Chap. 1 across the page to the start of Chap. 2. The time has shifted from the Mexican Day of the Dead --November 1939--to the same celebration exactly one year earlier. The next 11 chapters cover only 12 hours, but they could be a lifetime. Readers have to be willing to give themselves to the challenge of a poetic style, replete with literary allusions, punning, and descriptions of Mexico that are less true to physical geography than to a geography of Lowry's mind. The book briefly replaced FOREVER AMBER at the top of the charts. However, my sense was that it made good party talk but that only a few were actually reading it."

Mike Erlindson

NIAGRA-ON-THE-LAKE: Richard and Jo Costa pause for a photo outside The Shaw Festival Theatre following the play 'Good Night Disgrace.'

The reminiscences of the Philadelphia-born teacher-writer, who is 75, included these "life- changing" highlights:

Enrollment, summer 1950, in a writing program, conducted by Stanford U. in Mexico City, to follow the path of Malcolm Lowry and VOLCANO fourteen years earlier into the Mexican interior. Engaged to be married, Costa suggested they delay their marriage until the fall when he would return to Utica (N.Y.) College of Syracuse U.

Costa's fiancee disagreed with the proposed delay. They tacitly agreed on a compromise. If Jo would read UNDER THE VOLCANO and join her husband-to-be under the book's spell, they would get married and go to Mexico together. "Call it a version of what these days is called male chauvinism," Costa recalled. "Jo responded to the book with undeniable enthusiasm. So we headed to Mexico together to find Quauhnahuac, the fictional locale of most of the novel.

"Unknown to me, at the time, Quauhnahuac is the Aztec Indian name for Cuernavaca. Our Mexican landlady owned a villa there. We were her weekend guests once. If I hadn't been so ignorant, I might have found in Cuernavaca the settings of the book, including the hellish barranca where Geoffrey Firmin--the Consul--dies."

Although a 12-year interval as a newspaper columnist-reporter followed the Mexican adventure, Costa began the writing of a critical study of Malcolm Lowry--the first such--and decided to make it the cornerstone of a doctoral program in English literature at Purdue University which he completed in 1969. That same year he met Lowry's widow, writer Margerie Lowry. They corresponded until her death in 1988. His book was published by Twayne/ Bookman. Costa's seventh and most recent book, a collection of memoirs and criticism (AN APPOINTMENT WITH SOMERSET MAUGHAM & OTHER LITERARY ENCOUNTERS, Texas A&M Press, 1995) contains newer material on UNDER THE VOLCANO.

Two biographies and various critical studies have followed. As for Lowry, only an apprentice novel, ULTRAMARINE, and UNDER THE VOLCANO were published in his lifetime. He died in Sussex, in his native Britain, in 1957, at the age of 48. Two unfinished novels and two editions of his poetry were published after his death.

Among Lowry scholars who participated from a dozen countries were Profs. Sherrill Grace, Univ. of British Columbia, keynote speaker and editor of two recent volumes--nearly 2000 pages--of Lowry's letters; Christopher Ackley, Otago Univ., New Zealand, co-editor of A COMPANION TO 'UNDER THE VOLCANO'; Patrick A. McCarthy, Miami U., author of a new book on Lowry and James Joyce and editor of LA MORDIDA, another posthumous Lowry novel; Ronald Walker, Western Illinois Univ., and Dale Edmonds, authors of major published essays on Lowry. Also among the participants was Anne Yandle, longtime director of the Malcolm Lowry Special Collection, Univ. of British Columbia. William Connell, Vancouver, who was Lowry's attorney, spoke on his memories of the writer . Besides those from Canada, where Lowry completed a decade-long composition of THE VOLCANO, and the United States, delegates attended from England, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and India.

This, the third Lowry International Symposium (earlier, meetings were held in London,1984, and Vancouver, 1987), was co-chaired by Lowry scholars Prof. Frederick Asals, Univ. of Toronto, and Prof. Paul Tiessen, Wilfrid Laurier Univ., whose schools, along with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, were sponsors.

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