Making and Roaring

The weather is all bluster here—not ice and snow, like they've had a few hours north, but a fierce, chilled wind. Perfect weather, really, to sit and read The New Yorker by, and yesterday that's some of what I did—reading from the back forward as I always do and stopping for a long time for "Day of the Dead," D.T. Max's haunting piece on Malcolm Lowry. Lowry spent a decade writing UNDER THE VOLCANO, as his many biographers have told. He wrote it in every direction, was brought back to the page by his wife, lived through its rejection, wrote it once and forever more, and was finally made desperate by its success, for could Lowry ever, he wondered upon VOLCANO's publication, equal himself? Could he ever write past it? The answer, as it turned out, was a long, spiraling-toward-dying no.

These tortured writers terrify me. I go in many self-persecuting directions, wondering, on the one hand, if I can call myself a writer if I don't live in a shack and wash my hair in the sea and depend on the generosity of a crab hunter for my meals, but wondering, as well, whether greatness really does require such desperate sacrifice—whether it was necessary for Lowry, or Fitzgerald or Faulkner or Mann or Agee, for that matter, to suffer so extremely.

Is it the writing that did them in, or would they have drowned inside themselves no matter what they chose to do? Was the roaring there from the very first, inevitable, unstoppable, ineffable?