Lowry, Malcolm

expressing his love, discussing his literary ambitions, later acknowledging her lack of romantic interest in him, and finally writing from the Far East as a deck hand, one leaf seemingly from another letter and incorporated a sketch of a saxophonist, 27 pages, 4to and 8vo, Inglewood, Caldy, Cheshire, the Leys School, Cambridge, and "Keelung, Formosa, yes I think so" [on board SS Pyrrhus], [early April 1926 to early September 1927], two letters with envelopes, and with three further autograph addressed envelopes

See Gordon Bowker, Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (1994), pp.49-56

Condition is described in the main body of the catalogue, where appropriate.
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"...all I know's this: ever since I waltzed out of the golf club and found you in the Austin 7 ... the name Carol has sung, as indeed it should, to me from rivers, streams, oceans, seas, trees, hedges, pot-holes and even ponds..."

Carol Brown was a neighbourhood friend some two years older than Lowry himself. She was about to go to art school when Lowry was suddenly smitten with love for her. She never reciprocated his feelings and his passion only lasted a few months, but over that period Lowry bombarded Brown with letters. This group includes a remarkable 19-page letter written from his school in Cambridge during the General Strike (4-13 May 1926), begun when Lowry was supposed to be translating Latin. Along with protestations of love, including his own somewhat bizarre translations of Balzac, this letter gives a fascinating insight into the writer manqué. He is absolutely clear in his ambitions, claiming that his only talent is to "write a story or two, and I'm forced to write absolute tripe for the Fortnightly [the Leys School magazine] because they won't accept anything else". Early in his career Lowry had something of a penchant for plagiarism and much of this letter is given over to an extraordinarily elaborate story about his supposed authorship of two published stories by the (real) American writer Richard Connell, in which he explains that other stories that appeared under Connell's name were not by Lowry but by a friend (presumably also invented), and that "Richard Connell you may say, then, is an unsteady syndicate, and not a personality".

The final letter in the group is written just over a year later than the rest and in entirely different circumstances. Before going up to University, Lowry took a job as a deckhand on a freighter bound for Japan, the SS Pyrrhus. The trip was to provide much of the background for Ultramarine, Lowry's first novel, and Lowry's brief letter to Carol from Taiwan, sent "via Siberia", strikes a swaggering tone very different from the earlier schoolboy letters ("...it is all very pleasant with people dying and birds singing & the sun shining...").

Tom Maschler
This lot is from the personal archive of Tom Maschler (b.1933), one of the leading figures of modern British publishing and identified by the Bookseller as one of the ten most influential figures in publishing of the twentieth century. As editorial director at Jonathan Cape from 1960, he was responsible for shaping the literary scene through the publication of authors including Joseph Heller, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Philip Roth, as well as many of the best English novelists to emerge in the 70s – Amis, Barnes, Chatwin, McEwan, Rushdie. Under his leadership Cape published some 15 Nobel laureates, and his forays into children’s books included bringing together Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. The ten lots from his collection (lots 188-197) give significant insights into his varied career and literary interests, from Declaration, the collection of essays that made his name, to correspondence with two very different writers with whom he developed a particular rapport – John Fowles and Doris Lessing. They also include a small number of letters by an earlier generation of authors (Raymond Chandler and Malcolm Lowry) that were acquired by Maschler.