In Ballast to the White Sea

Lowry's longest and most ambitious project of the mid-1930s was the autobiographical novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, about a Cambridge undergraduate who wants to be a novelist but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been "written" by a Norwegian novelist.Only decades after Lowry's death in 1957 did it become known that his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript of the book. In Ballast to the White Sea-which Lowry once imagined would be the Paradiso of his trilogy, with Under the Volcano as the Infernoand Swinging the Maelstrom (or Lunar Caustic) as the Purgatorio-is one of Lowry's most intensely personal works.The introduction places the narrative in relation to Lowry's sense of himself in the mid-1930s and draws parallels with his post-Volcano writings such as Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, La Mordida, and Through the Panama. The text of the novel, as well as Chris Ackerley's extensive annotations provide crucial evidence about Lowry's life and art during the 14 years between the publication of Ultramarine (1933) and Under the Volcano (1947), the only novels he completed and published during his lifetime.