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This is the first edition of In Ballast to the White Sea, the autobiographical novel by Malcolm Lowry, known to most only through the highly romanticized story of its loss in a fire. In fact, the typescript itself has probably been read by at most a dozen people since Lowry scholars learned that it was deposited at the New York Public Library.
In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry’s most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been “written.”
After a fire broke out in Lowry’s squatter’s shack, all that remained of In Ballast to the White Sea were a few sheets of paper. Only decades after Lowry’s death did it become known that his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript. This scholarly edition presents, for the first time, the once-lost novel.
Patrick McCarthy’s critical introduction offers insight into Lowry’s sense of himself while Chris Ackerley’s extensive annotations provide important information about Lowry’s life and art in an edition that will captivate readers and scholars alike.
Published in English.
Chris Ackerley is Professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research focus is modernism, and his speciality is annotation.
Malcolm Lowry (Author)
Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 in northwest England, near Liverpool. During the 1930s he lived in London, New York, Mexico, and Los Angeles before moving to British Columbia in 1939. This move marked the start of a startlingly fertile period in Lowry’s career as a 20th-century literary modernist. The 1940 Under the Volcano formed the basis for his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947)—one of the last great modernist novels.
Patrick A. McCarthy (Editor)
Patrick A. McCarthy is Professor of English at the University of Miami. He has authored several studies on Lowry, including Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction.
General editor’s note
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In ballast to the white sea
Annotations
Bibliography
Textual notes
Contributors