SOURCE: "Mescallusions or the Drinking Man's Under the Volcano," in Journal of Modern Literature, 6, 2, April, 1977, pp. 277-88.

In the following excerpt, Edmonds recounts the details and blissful qualities of Geoffrey Firmin's drinking binge in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.

My thoughts toward this paper began at the first MLA Malcolm Lowry Seminar in New York in 1974. In the discussion period following delivery of papers David Markson, Lowry's novelist friend and author of the first academic study of Under the Volcano, pointed an accusatory finger at me and said, "Obviously you're not a drinking man." After the hysterical outburst on the part of my friends in the audience had died down, Markson took me to task for something I once wrote about the novel. In tracing the mouthful-by-mouthful progress of Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul, through the Day of the Dead (November 2, 1938, the day of the novel's action) I wrote...