HE BEGAN WRITING HIS NOVEL IN 1936...
AND FINISHED THE FINAL DRAFT eight-years later, when he was 35.  As a writer, what has always fascinated me about the man is this: He finished almost nothing for the remainder of his life, certainly no other major novel. He was by his own account an alcoholic, often fell into delirium tremens, sometimes collapsing into charity wards. He was by most accounts the sort of a drunk who would pass a certain point and become a disgusting bore, was a horrible husband to both of his wives, but about one thing he was convinced, he had created a masterpiece.  

   When the book at last was published in 1947, Malcom Lowry's Under the Volcano,  met with virtually unanimous critical praise. The critics marveled at its classical structure, its dense, layered texture, its feeling for history, its use of symbols and myth, and its powerful examination of an alcoholic's descent into damnation. There was also the legend of Lowry, the man. He was a throwback to the romantic tradition of the artist consumed by his art to the point of his own self-destruction.  Stories of his drunken escapades were common knowledge in most literary circles; he was no isolated inhabitant of an academic ivory tower; he was down there carousing with the bandits and groveling with the cockroaches on the floor of the cantina, passing through paradise on the way to his self-made inferno.  

   The novel was not a popular success, selling only 30 thousand copies in its first 10 years of existence, which, of course, helped feed the legend; nothing reinforces romantic agony better than the feeling of being almost completely ignored.  And later the legend was made whole by the sleazy facts of Lowry's demise.  Eight years after Volcano's publication, Lowry and his wife, Margerie, were finally back home in England, residing in a cottage in Sussex.  But home brought no peace; in 1955 and 1956, he was committed to two different London hospitals for psychiatric treatment, in an attempt to bring a halt to his alcoholism.  By this time, Lowry had failed three times to commit suicide, twice to kill his wife.  

   On June 26th of 1957, he had another clash with Margerie and threatened to kill her.  She ran to a neighbor's house and spent the night.  Lowry was found the following morning in his bedroom, a plate of dinner scattered on the floor, along with an almost empty gin bottle and a broken bottle of sodium amytal.  He'd swallowed more than 20 tablets. At the end of Under the Volcano, a major character's dying words are: "Christ, what a dingy way to die."  He was buried in the appropriately named town of Ripe.  

   Before he fell headlong into death's dark ocean, Lowry himself longed to write the screen version of his own novel.  It never happened.  And I often think that there was a possibility that he may have asked himself: 'If only I had...'  'And what if...? Considering that Under the Volcano is now eleventh on the list as one of the of best English-language novels written in the twentieth-century.

   It was finally made into a film in 1984.  The director of the movie was the seventy-seven years old, John Houston, five times married, director of thirty-eight motion pictures, actor in dozens more, storyteller, poker player, horseman, long-ago prizefighter, legend. When asked why he chose to direct the film, Houston's smiled: "There are certain men who accept fate stoically, knowing that for them it is too late to change or compromise; in an odd way, Lowry was one of them.  The novel is one of the best of our generation, surely.  There are those who put it on the same plane as Ulysses and Waste Land and The Magic Mountain.   The problem was that he was in such a fret, a true emotional ice-jam, he would not allow himself to even contemplate more masterpieces, to see the truly excellent writer he actually was. And that is genuinely tragic."

THE COLLECTIVE PUBLIC FACES WILL BE...
MADE UP OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Rick Perry and Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum and the ever-mustached John Bolton - these yahoo crusaders will once again be loudly pounding the drums of freedom, trembling with disgust at the terrifying thought that anyone would dare to oppose them.  All of them will be gathered in Houston, Texas in May of next year for the 142nd Annual Meeting of the National Rifle Association.   

  Their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their tearful and apocalyptic solutions to American freedom: more pistols and rifles and automatic weaponry. Led by Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the organization, a man who once described federal agents as, "Jack-booted government thugs, who wear Nazi bucket helments and black storm trooper uniforms," they are desperate for a new enemy.  

  They have found one, and as usual, it is other Americans with some degree of sanity and self-respect and human-decency, those who remember the day when a man named Adam Lanza entered the Sandy Hook Elementry School in Newtown, Connecticut on the 14th day of December in 2012 with an automatic weapon in his hand,  and cut down 26 innocent people, 20 of whom were first-graders; as well as the many more who followed in the year since that godawful incident.  

  Basically, LaPierre is a professional lobbyist.  That is to say that, like a priest, a theologian or a romantic revolutionary, he is exclusively dedicated to the service of gun manufacturers.  LaPierre's gun-toting vision is not limited to the inarguable formulas for the respect of others lives, complete legal  and political equality and full opportunity for those opposed to his stance.  Like most megalomaniacs he doesn't want opposition.  He wants to overthrow the entire system of those who simply want background checks.  During the past decade, when the country shifted to the left and millions of Americans rejected the harder ideologies of the NRA, LaPierre labored on with revolutionary zeal.

   That zeal was shaped by the social upheavals when the Tea Party, with no positive program, arrived upon the scene. Men and women and children with an almost religious embrace of "The Second Amendment," found both both a focus and an engine for LaPierre.  PaPierre's basic formulation was simple:  "President Obama is trying to take your guns away." 

  But for all LaPierre's passion and occasional brilliance, even some gun-toting folk who applaud his zeal find some of his vision indefensible. He dismisses them all, firm in his belief that he has discovered the truth.  His common enemy is that vague concept: background checks.  LaPierre's basic legal theory is that gun discrimination is a form of governmental intrusion of "the right to bear arms."  He then instituted what he called "The School Shield Program," which would allow every school in America to have an armed police presence.  And he has had some limited success.  

  But the NRA never surrenders.  They have gathered various mountebanks from the religious right, have written articles, given interviews and held public hearings, vetoed political descent behind voters who kicked opponents out of office, and put a halt to any Congressional point of view.  Back in 2000, LaPierre said that Bill Clinton tolerated a certain amount of gun violence to score points for gun control and for his party, to which his spokesman, John Lockhart, replied, "...this is really sick rhetoric and should be reputed by anyone who hears it." 

  That is the heart of this grim little crusade.  LaPierre has grander plans for us all.  Like the wonderful folks who brought us Prohibition, he wants he and his allies to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country, the furious, fear-driven shoot-'em-up visions to become the law of the land.

   Surely, that requires a sane response from the rest of us.  In the sad and bitter world of Wayne LaPierre, there is no wide understanding of a species capable of living life without being armed-to-the-teeth, of forgiving our endless desire to have another solution, whatever that solution may turn out to be. And I hope that my grandchildren will never forced to live in his fearful new world.     

I AM IN THAT CURIOUS STRETCH OF LIFE WHERE I AM NO LONGER YOUNG...

AND NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BECOME A CORPSE.  Having arrived in that curious zone where I am now decades past being pubescent and not yet bereft of life, I would be a fraud if I said I had no regrets. I have committed my share of absurdities, was a somewhat deplorable husband, tried to be a flawless father but made many mistakes, and the jury is still out as to whether I am or am not a good grandfather.  Down through the years, I have treated some women badly and failed others; through idleness or imbibing in work, I also allowed some fine friendships to deteriorate.  As you tumble into old age, however, you somehow learn to forgive yourself. You acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misbehavior. The damage of the past is done; there is nothing you can do to avoid it or repair it.   Popeye was dead on when he said, "I yam what I yam an' that's all I yam."

  If I regret anything, it is the loss of the illusions of my youth. This is a familiar process, of course, better men than I have acquired the same sorrowful knowledge. It is difficult to explain to the young the potent excitement that attended the election of John F. Kennedy or the pounding hole his death blew through this country.  More impossible still to tell them that there actually was a time, when I was young, that Americans thought change could be effected through politics; and that my two grandchildren still cannot believe that there was once a world without television or the internet and that I had once lived in it.     

  It was 30 years ago when I first took note suddenly in the window of a store that there was a chunky middle-aged stranger looking back at me.  At the same time, white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp.  The hard, invincible body I thought I possessed when I was young was forever gone.  I once worked 70 hours straight without sleep, belting down coffee, smoking too many cigarettes.  I now take afternoon naps, sleep less, rise before dawn, have become aware that hair seems magically to bud forth from my nose and spring from my ears on an almost weekly basis, I urinate more often than I once did, and I now avoid whenever possible the brittle chatter of cocktail parties, due to a minor loss of hearing.

   And yet, sometimes I wake up in the morning and in the moments between sleep and true consciousness, I am once again in my college dormitory when I was 20, full of possibilities and dreams, with my whole life spread out before me.  When I realize that I am 77 and no longer that confused romantic boy, I am filled with an amazing sense of sadness, and give a moment's though to my past sins, both mortal and venial.

  The up-beat side to all of this, however, is that in a few more months, they'll be playing the first games of another season of baseball, and I will be able to see a fresh new rookie try to hit a curve ball, exactly like I tried to do so many years ago. The snow will melt, lakes will make churning sounds, the trees will become noisy with birds, and my hope is that I won't be a carcass in a casket listening to folks looking down at me and saying, "My goodness, the cosmetologist certainly did a good job on him.  Now that he's finally checked out, he looks better  as a cadaver than he did when he was still full of piss and vinegar..."