Malcolm Lowry died 40 years ago this month, his stomach full of gin and barbiturates, his body ravaged by chronic alcoholism. He was 47 years old. The coroner recorded a verdict of misadventure; there were unconfirmed whispers of suicide. Lowry died in a rented cottage in Sussex, but his name is indelibly associated with Mexico, the setting of his masterpiece, Under the Volcano.
The book was first published in , so this is really a double-anniversary year for Lowry. It seemed an auspicious time to go off in search of "Lowry's Mexico". The trail begins in the pleasant town of Cuernavaca, an hour's drive south of Mexico City.
To be more precise, it begins on a certain concrete bollard on a street called Calle Rio Balsas. If you stand on this, on tiptoe, you can just see over the wall opposite, to a large pinkish-coloured building set in overgrown gardens. It used to be a hotel called the Casino de la Selva. Among the trees is a statue of the conquistador Hernan Cortes, whom Keats famously imagined standing "silent upon a peak in Darien", staring at the Pacific, though it was in fact the less scannable Nunez de Balboa who did that.
But my eye is fixed on the old hotel, and in particular the balconied terrace which runs along the front of it at first floor level. It is the precise spot where Under the Volcano begins. The two men are Dr Vigil and Jacques Laruelle. The scene is a kind of prologue to the main action, which describes the last day in the life of the ex-Consul, Geoffrey Firmin. The volcano of the title is the great mountain Popocatapetl, which in those pollution-free days could be clearly seen from here.
Lowry's drinking buddy, the American poet Conrad Aiken, nicknamed the book "Poppa-gets-the-botl". I had imagined taking a commemorative anis on the terrace, but it was not to be. The hotel closed down a couple of years ago. As the cigarette- seller standing nearby puts it simply: "No existe. There is an ostentatiously padlocked gate. There is a nightclub called Mambo, also closed, in what was probably one of the hotel's outbuildings.
