In Ballast to the White Sea

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. 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.

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 writer. His masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), is one of the last great modernist novels.

Patrick A. McCarthy is the author or editor of 11 books and monographs, over 50 scholarly articles, and numerous reference articles and reviews. He authored several studies on Lowry, including Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction; Malcolm Lowry’s ＂La Mordida＂ A Scholarly Edition; and ＂Under the Volcano＂ in The Literary Encyclopedia.

Chris Ackerley is a professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research focus is modernism, and his speciality is annotation, especially of the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett.

Vik Doyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He did archival research in the Malcolm Lowry Collection at the University of British Columbia for his doctoral dissertation.

Miguel Mota is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published on numerous 20th-century and contemporary writers and filmmakers, including Malcolm Lowry, Derek Jarman, Jeanette Winterson and Mike Leigh.

Paul Tiessen is the founding editor of the Malcolm Lowry Newsletter (1977-1984) and The Malcolm Lowry Review (1984-2002). In addition to scholarly articles and book chapters on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Tiessen wrote the introduction for Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner Lowry’s Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.