Under the Volcano | Themes & Symbolism

Under the Volcano Significant Topics

If Ernest Hemingway was right when he declared that what writers talk about they do not write, Malcolm Lowry's epistolary preoccupations may very well have distracted him from writing fiction. In a sense, however, readers are the beneficiaries of the fruits of Lowry's defects as a working novelist. The long letter he wrote to the English publisher Jonathan Cape on January 2, 1946, protesting a Cape reader's recommendations for cutting and altering, is so thorough an anatomization of the book's themes and techniques that Granville Hicks praised it as "the most careful exposition of the creative imagination" he had ever encountered. Stephen Spender recommended that the letter be made the standard preface to Under the Volcano.

His novel, Lowry wrote, is "principally concerned with the guilt of man, with his remorse, with his ceaseless struggling toward the light under the weight of the past, and with his doom."...
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