It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o'clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyong along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engined freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers forthe moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg's angels, under a sky clear save where far to the north-east over distant mountains whose purple has faded, lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by light in an alabaster lamp, illuminated from within by gold lightning, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing-boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of beach, its growing thunder and commotion now koined to the diminishing thunder of the train, and now breaking reboant on our beach, while the floats, for there are timber diving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightning within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing-boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightning in the blue evening, unearthly...
And as we stand looking all at once comes the wash of another unseen ship, like a great wheel, the vast spokes of the wheel whirling across the bay --
(Several mescals later.)
Lowry -- Under the Vulcano (p.42f)
But so far as that is concerned, some of the best passages in the Vulcano do deal, indirectly, with British Columbia. There is one character who may seem to be sneering at Canada per se (though he is not in fact doing so); but the particular passage I have in mind is in Chapter I, where the Consul has a delirious version of a happier life, British Columbia (where he owns an island) being of course identified in his mind with Paradise. I have not a copy of my book with me but without wishing to blow my own horn, I perceive in the Saturday Review that the reviewer says:
'On page 37 there is a sentence which is 32 lines loing and does not falter in its music and can be read aloud without burdening the breath, and that is more than Wolfe ever did for me.'
This sentence concerns the wake of fishing boats on a June evening while a freight train is passing and a thunderstorm is going on high up in the mountains and the scene of it, of course, is none other than Indian Arm (an extension of Burrard Inlet) right here in B.C.
I am very proud of this sentence (I only wish to heaven that you or someone would quote ot for so far people have only quoted horrors.)
Malcolm Lowry to Sybil Hutchinson, March 1947