Category Archives: Writers

Raymond Chandler Timeline Updated

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Loren Latker, whose Shamus Town website is a great resource for anyone interested in Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles, has been doing some excellent research on Chandler’s early life and his family. His Chandler Timeline has just been updated with new material. Loren writes:

It now starts in 1858 with the birth of Morris, or Maurice, B Chandler. I’ve added many popup images for Ray’s birth certificate, his school records, a Laramie new item about an M Chandler attending a party in 1886, obits about his uncle Fitt’s brother and his aunt Francis Grace. I also found the document from 1927 where Ray started the process to regain his U.S. Citizenship. From that we learn that after WWI he returned to Canada, made is way to Victoria BC, boarded the Governor bound for San Francisco and arrived in March of 1919. He and Florence [Ray's mother] were living at the West 12th Street address then. [Link to the Chandler Timeline]

My own take on Chandler’s early life is here.

Malcolm Lowry Centenary Exhibition and Book

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano. His home city of Liverpool will be commemorating the event with an exhibition at the Bluecoat Arts Centre between September 25th and November 22nd. Ahead of that though comes the release of a book about Lowry and Liverpool co-edited by poet Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs. Helen writes:

It includes twelve new pieces of writing (critical and creative) and some fabulous images from artists who have been influenced and inspired by Lowry. You can buy it from the well known online bookshop whose name begins with an A, or indeed from Liverpool University Press’s own website (click here). Meanwhile, preparations are in full swing for the centenary exhibition Under the Volcano at the Bluecoat, which will include visual art, film, and fascinating archival material relating to Lowry – described by biographer Gordon Bowker in his essay for our book as ‘probably the most neglected genius of modern English literature’. [Read More]

Helen is also running a short five-week course on Lowry at Liverpool University, in the Continuing Education department entitled Voyaging Under the Volcano: An Introduction to Malcolm Lowry. For more information visit the Continuing Education English webpage or contact the Centre for Lifelong Learning t cll@liverpool.ac.uk Enrolment ends on Monday September 21st.

Where Melville Wrote Moby Dick

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The Kenyon Review has a nice piece by Cody Walker on Arrowhead, the house where Herman Melville wrote parts of Moby Dick, among other things. Writers’ houses don’t often tell you much in themselves of course, but they certainly make a good place to start thinking about the writing:

I visited Arrowhead three times this summer. The view from the piazza is marvelous: a field of tall grass and wildflowers, a stand of maples and birches, and Mt. Greylock, surfacing in the distance. In an 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville wrote, “I have been ploughing & sowing & raising & printing & praying, and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farmhouse here.” Melville lived at Arrowhead from 1850 to 1863; he wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the other Piazza Tales during his stay, along with Pierre, The Confidence Man, and the final draft of Moby-Dick — which he dedicated to Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius.” Facing financial difficulties, he sold half of the property in 1856, and then the remainder in 1863, to his brother Allan and moved his family back to New York, where he took a job as a customs inspector. The property stayed in his extended family until 1927; the Berkshire County Historical Society bought it from private owners in 1975.

[Link via Powermobydick]

Malcolm Lowry Centenary Events

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Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, was born in 1909 on the Wirral peninsula, just across the Mersey from Liverpool. To mark his centenary there are many events going on in Liverpool and around Merseyside over the next six months, including an exhibition and literature events celebrating his life and work running from 25 September to 22 November. In September Liverpool University Press is publishing Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World edited by Brian Biggs and Helen Tookey. From the blurb:

Malcolm Lowry described Liverpool as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’. Born on the Wirral side of the river Mersey, Lowry’s relationship to the Merseyside of his youth informs all of his writing and Liverpool itself continued to hold tremendous significance for him, even though he never returned.

The book includes writing by Gordon Bowker, Ailsa Cox,  Colin Dilnot, Annick Drösdal-Levillain, Michele Gemelos, Mark Goodall, Ian McMillan, Nicholas Murray, Cian Quayle, Alberto Rebollo, Robert Sheppard and Michael Turner.

And there’s more. Helen Tookey is also running a short course about Lowry and his work at the University of Liverpool in September and October. The course is open to everyone. Details will be available from the department of Continuing Education later in the summer.

For information about the book, visit the publisher’s page.

Information about Lowry events in Liverpool is available from The Bluecoat.

More on Literary Tourism

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Following on from the Robert McCrum piece in the Observer about George Orwell and Barnhill, Randy Malamud has an article  in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education [original link has now died, download a pdf of the article from here] about literary tourism, commenting on the ‘ownership’ aspect of pilgrimages to writers’ houses but in the end drawing a positive conclusion:

Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn’t shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds (“so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, “flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot’s dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.

[Link (pdf)]