Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry, 1947)
Under the Volcano (dir. John Huston, 1984)
Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel follows Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the last day of his life, the second of November in 1938. It is the Day of the Dead, when the deceased are remembered by the living, and Firmin’s estranged wife Yvonne and half-brother Hugh have reentered his life on this fortuitous day. Under the Volcano is a dense, allusive work drawing on the whole of the Western canon and in which the history and inner lives of its three lead characters are explored in detail through stream of consciousness and complex flashbacks. It belongs to that class of Modernist fiction like Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s Orlando that should be unadaptable, but nonetheless did become a film, in this case directed by John Huston, released in 1984, and starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset and Anthony Andrews as Geoffrey, Yvonne, and Hugh respectively.
The screenwriter Guy Gallo realized the limitations of film and rather than attempting to copy the intricate structure of Lowry’s book or include extensive voice-over narration instead has dialogue drive the story. In addition, Gallo alters the story by omitting the novel’s first chapter—set in November 1939 and following a tertiary character as he reflects on the anniversary of Firmin’s death—by instead opening on November 1, 1938 on a party that Firmin attends, which makes the film an explicitly political text.
While Lowry’s novel is by no means unconcerned with politics—Hugh Firmin’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War are covered extensively—Huston’s film emphasizes the political context of 1938 and the looming Second World War to a level that sits just below the interpersonal drama of the trio and Geoffrey Firmin’s alcoholism. In the course of this party, Firmin, by now resigned from his post, is introduced to the German attache Krausberg, who has no equivalent in the novel. Firmin directly asks Krausberg whether Germany is funding the Mexican fascist organization, the National Synarchist Union, then noting that Britain and Germany currently have friendly relations under the Munich Agreement signed only a few weeks earlier. Firmin, characteristically, then launches into a speech:
But let’s not be too hasty. Let’s hedge our bets, what? After all, the Mexican railroad has. They don’t mean to be taken by surprise. Just take a look at their newest timetable–at the fine print. Corpses must be transported by express. Each of these express corpses must be accompanied by a first-class passenger. Now, let’s suppose, uh, the treaty fails and it’s bloody Armageddon… All of those bloody corpses, each holding a first-class ticket. One Day of the Dead won’t be enough. Month. Decade. Age of the Dead, more like it! The whole world will learn to laugh at the sight of stinking cadavers.
The commentary about the unusual requirements for moving the deceased in Mexico comes from the novel, but the rest of it is original to the film, though well within Lowry’s use of dramatic irony, which is present from the first chapter forward and especially employed regarding the Spanish Civil War. Gallo’s screenplay further repurposes Lowry’s writing, as we cut to the next morning as Firmin tells his companion Fernando of his experiences in the British Navy during the First World War:
Are you listening, Fernando? Si es absolutamente necesario. Pay close attention. A lesson. A parable. I’m telling you about responsibility,Fernando. Si es absolutamente necesario. This ship was a thoroughgoing lie and I was the commanding officer. This ship–the S.S. Samaritan it was called–looked from the outside like a harmless, fat old lady, a laden freighter lying heavy on the sea. Are you listening, Fernando? …Sink anything the Germans might send our way! It was 1917, spring. We sight a periscope sighting us. Are you listening, Fernando? They prepare to board us. Then the big surprise. Are you listening, Fernando? Oh. We drop our disguise. The predator suddenly becomes the prey. I got a medal for capturing that sub. But first I had to be tried at a court-martial. The mystery of the missing German officers. You see… the remains of seven men… were found in the furnace ashes. Rather gruesome, hmm? It just isn’t done, Fernando. People just don’t go around putting other people into furnaces.
Again, this backstory is present in the novel and referred to extensively, but the original context is in the remembrance of Firmin’s friend, Monsieur Laruelle:
He had even been enormously funny about it. ‘People simply did not go round,’ he said, ‘putting Germans [my emphasis] in furnaces.’ It was only once or twice during later months when drunk that to M. Laruelle’s astonishment he suddenly began proclaiming not only his guilt in the matter but that he’d always suffered horribly on account of it. He went much further. No blame attached to the stokers. No question arose of any order given them. Flexing his muscles he sardonically announced the single-handed accomplishment himself of the deed. But by this time the poor Consul had already lost almost all capacity for telling the truth and his life had become a quixotic oral fiction (Lowry 35).
While one can make a comparison between the war crime Firmin commits and the European genocide of the Second World War as it appears in Lowry’s novel, in the film’s version it is instead difficult not to draw that comparison given Finney’s guilt ridden performance of his monologue, the crucial change from Germans to people, and the preceding scene’s speech declaring a future Age of the Dead centered around mass rail transit.
Gallo’s screenplay also establishes a new political and connected context for two scenes. While traveling by bus, Hugh points out to Geoffrey and Yvonne that a fellow passenger is “a bloody sinarquista. Look at that badge on his lapel. They’re the ones I’ve been writing about. The ones getting money from the Nazis.” Hugh then asks the bus to stop as he spots a dying man along the side of the road, who has obviously been the victim of a violent crime. They are unable to assist him due to a clause in Mexican law that can make anyone providing assistance accessory after the fact. Police arrive by horseback, interrogating Hugh about any potential involvement in the crime. These police return late in the film and are heavily implied to be affiliated with the National Synarchist Union, interrogate Geoffrey as a potential communist spy in addition to referring to him in antisemitic terms. While the scene involving the dying man and the presence and much of the dialogue of the police in the final chapter in which Firmin meets his fate are in Lowry’s novel, the additional detail in the film emphasizes a political reading: the moral failure of not intervening in an obvious crime and unjust persecution by militant authorities.
At this point, it seems prudent to give some context about the film’s director John Huston and why this material may have attracted him. By 1984 and the age of 78, Huston had lived a full and messy life marked by alcoholism, interpersonal conflict, frequent womanizing and five tumultuous marriages, and his prolific work in the film industry. He was born to the actor Walter Huston and made his directorial debut in 1941 with an adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. 1942 would see Huston direct two additional films—In This Our Life and Across the Pacific—before he joined the war effort. As an officer in the Army Signal Corps he directed three documentaries—Report for the Aleutians (1943), The Battle of San Pietro (1945), and Let There Be Light (1946). San Pietro and Light both came under scrutiny from higher ups in the military due to unflattering—and accurate—depictions of combat and its lasting psychological trauma. After the war, Huston resumed his career in Hollywood until undertaking a self-imposed exile to Ireland due in part to the House Un-American Activities Committee and anticommunist hysteria, though he would continue to work frequently in the US. His filmography as a director is marked by a number of literary adaptations, beginning with The Maltese Falcon and continuing with such works as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Moby Dick (1956), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Wise Blood (1979) and ultimately concluding with an elegiac retelling of James Joyce’s The Dead in 1987, shortly before his death due to lung disease.
The points of comparison between Huston and the often catastrophic life of Malcolm Lowry, which heavily informed the characterization and scenarios in Under the Volcano, as well as their shared fondness for liquor and Mexico are evident enough, as is Huston’s commitment against both fascism and the horror of war, but I also suspect that Huston found one another aspect of Lowry’s novel tempting: its frequent references to the Peter Lorre starring film Mad Love, or as it is repeatedly called in-story: Las Manos de Orlac. The film, themed around jealousy and a pair of hands that act independently and destructively toward their possessor, is an apt one for a book centered on an alcoholic whose wreck of a marriage featured infidelity. Stephen Spender, in his introduction to the edition of Under the Volcano that I own [1], argues that the invocation of Las Manos de Orlac con Peter Lorre along with phrases like No se peude vivir sin amar and ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN? ¿QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN! are drawn from cinematic techniques and “are interpolated into the action like subtitles in a foreign language [2]” in addition to Lowry’s adaptation of Eisensteinian montage in his writing, Yvonne’s status as a former actress, and M. Laurelle’s profession as a film director (Lowry xiii-xv).
As for Huston, I think he might have simply appreciated seeing his friend Peter Lorre in a masterpiece like that after directing him in both The Maltese Falcon and Beat the Devil (1953). Furthermore, none of the characters in Lowry’s novel are particularly fond of Orlac: Laurelle believing that “not even Peter Lorre had been able to salvage it,” though he admits that “an artist with murderer’s hands” is “the hieroglyphic of our time” (26) and Yvonne dismisses the film as “a lousy picture” (115). In contrast, Huston’s adaptation actually shows us a short scene from Mad Love and allows a character to give it a little love: “It’s a good story.”
The film follows the plot of the book and ends in the same dark manner. Lowry, before dissolution and misadventure caught up with him and ended his life early, had modeled Under the Volcano in part on Dante’s Inferno, intending to write his own prose versions of Purgatorio and Paradiso to follow it. Huston allows Geoffrey Firmin in the film, like his literary counterpart, to “choose hell”, as he phrases it, but watching the film, I was continually struck by the sympathy and grace Huston allows for him. The scene in which Yvonne and Hugh undress, clean, and shave Geoffrey, who is unable to do any of this himself due to delirium tremens, evokes pity from the audience, but Finney’s charm makes you understand why his ex-wife still loves him against everything and half-brother are so invested in a cause as lost as the Republicans in Spain. Whenever Geoffrey unleashes a rambling monologue about William Blackstone or makes a truly terrible knock-knock joke [3], you like him. I mean, how can you not love even a little someone who names their cat Oedipuss?
I suspect that Under the Volcano the film was as much a semi-autobiographical text for Huston as Under the Volcano the book was for Lowry, in addition to being an explicitly political work as evidenced by the screenplay’s deviations from the novel. These elements do much to add to a film that, simply due to the inherent characteristics of cinema, cannot do justice to a prose novel deliberated written in the modernist tradition. Divorced from the mythic and literary sources that inform every aspect of Lowry’s novel, Huston, Gallo, and the actors must turn to the drama of Geoffrey’s addiction, its effects on his loved ones, and the larger context of this day in November 1938, when the dead are remembered and the world is poised for global conflict: at once a case history, a memory piece, and a chronicle of a war foretold.
[1] Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007.
[2] Given that this is an English language book and those phrases are clearly Spanish, this seems a little redundant to say, but who am I to argue with a US Poet Laureate?
[3] “Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Cat”
“Cat who?”
“Cat-astrophe”
“Catastrophe who?”
“Oh, uh, cat-astrophysicist?”
oliveresque 