I.S.R. Miles

An unidentified teacher referred to by Lowry in the novel Ultramarine; "I.S.R. Miles, the mathematics master, sitting at the head of the hall, presiding over preparation, his eyes lecherous and rolling, the eyes of a ferret. One had always suspected homosexuality. Herod, he looked like, Herod, watching Salome." (Pg.116).

One of several gay references in Ultramarine in which the younger man is threatened by older authority figure. Lowry makes reference to the Dance of the Seven Veils suggesting the teacher's inflamed desire similar to King Herod's incestuous desire for Salome - in this case Lowry says a "Male Salome" (Pg. 116).

William Henry Schofield English Literature: From the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (1906)

Lowry refers to a "comic song", which is mentioned in the William Henry Schofield's book, in a letter to Carol Brown dated April/May 1926 as he describes to her his love saying that the song; "....expresses exactly my state of mind. I can't believe that anybody loved like me. 'For her love I cark and droop' Another comic song. (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 18)

The quote's context is detailed below:

"Refrains from, folk -songs seem to have been adopted by trained writers to accompany their art-lyrics, which were probably composed with popular airs in mind To a charming poem of  the troubadour style, for example, is attached the following refrain :

Blow, northern wind, 
Send thou me my sweeting, 
Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow 


The author of this poem offers a very graceful, somewhat allegorical, description of his lady. He appeals to Love for counsel in trouble; and is advised to plead with his sweetheart and implore her to relieve his pain. Thus he concludes :

For her love I cark and care, 
For her love I droop and dare (decline). 
For her love my bliss is bare, 
And all I wax wan. 

For her love in sleep I slake, 
For her love all night I wake, 
For her love mourning I make, 
More than any man."

Schofield's book is most likely Lowry's source for the song though there was an earliersources e.g. New Monthly Magazine, Volume 11 edited by Thomas Campbell, Samuel Carter Hall, Edward Bulwer Lytton Baron Lytton, Thomas Hood, Theodore Edward Hook, William Harrison Ainsworth (1819) Pg. 338 and Thomas Campbell Essay on English Poetry (1819) as well as various other 19th Century texts. It is possible that Schofield's book was a text book at The Leys School.

Rudyard Kipling Stalky & Co

This was the cover of Kiplings Stalky and Co. It depicts Stalky, Beetle and M'Turk. One of them is smoking a pipe which was not allowed at school

Stalky & Co. is a book published in 1899 (following serialisation in the Windsor Magazine) by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of linked short stories in format, with some information about the charismatic Stalky character in later life. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself. Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford, Mr King is based on William Carr Crofts. The school, which is referred to as the College or the Coll. is based on the United Services College in Devon which Kipling attended. Read more on Wikipedia

Lowry refers to Kipling's stories in a letter to Carol Brown dated April/May 1926 when he tells Carol that he has formed a group with Ley's school friends Tom Macmorran and Nichol; 'We formed between us, a sort of stalky & Co..." (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 17).

Shaftesbury House, Cambridge

Shaftesbury House, 4 Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge was a hotel in the 1920s. The former hotel is now called Lutheran Church House and occupied by the German Lutheran Church.

Lowry refers to a visit to the hotel during his time at the The Leys in a letter to Carol Brown dated 2nd June 1926 to see whether he could find somewhere for Carol Brown to stay on a proposed visit to Cambridge:

"So I rallyed round some - and eventually ran to earth a sort of Look-at-our-tennis-court-nice-bathroom place, with a thin manageress with positively no teeth at all: bearing the intriguing title of 'Shaftsbury House' in (what is not altogether unexpected) Shaftesbury Road - There are trees in Shaftesbury Road. Willow trees? I am not sure. Anyhow trees. And a man in white painting gates green.

Well at any rate, I popped into this place and saw the manageress and the tennis court and a bedroom and a full set of magazines.

And some washing spread over the tennis court to dry - which gave quite an expressionist effect." (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 38)

Lowry's use of the term expressionist is worthy of note demonstrating his knowledge of modernist movement  as early as 1926 when he was 15 years old.

Traffic

A lost play written by Lowry circa 1926 while he was at The Leys School. Lowry's only reference to the play is in a letter to Carol Brown dated 2nd June 1926; 9.30 pm, I've just completed a one act play entitled 'Traffic'. It is nothing about material traffic at all - it refers to human traffic. The careless roar of material traffic can be heard (off) all through. It is not bad - but by no means good, as yet." (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 39).

This is probably the play that Lowry had referred to earlier in another letter to Carol Brown dated May 1926; "..and the first act of a rather unsatisfactory play, which by the way I have decided to be the only act (this play is undergoing a French translation at the hands of Monsieur Georges Yardley, who being a knowing bird, actually entertains hopes of smuggling it into the 'Theatre du grand guignol' for me: home of 1 act plays." (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 24).

The Revelers "Oh Miss Hannah" 1925

Lowry refers to the above song in a letter to Carol Brown dated May 1926; "Talking about Hannahs. There's another tune, "Oh Miss Hannah!" on the other side of "Collegiate", sung in the most original manner by the Revellers on HMV. It's absolutely the world's best sung tune, and they sing it in Fox Trot Time as though they were a band. (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 27). Note Lowry's mis-spelling of the Revelers.

Oh, Miss Hannah Fox Trot (Hollongsworth-Deppen) played by the Revelers Victor Record Company with Orthophonic Scroll label 19796-A Electrically Recorded in 09.15.1925 with the A-side Dinah. The 78 playing record was issued in England on the HMV imprint. The 78 would appear to have been a hit with the young Lowry while at the Leys School in Cambridge.

The Revelers were an American quintet (four close harmony singers and a pianist) popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Revelers' recordings of "Dinah", "Old Man River", "Valencia", "Baby Face", "Blue Room", "The Birth of the Blues", "When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba", and many more, became popular in the United States and then Europe in the late 1920s. Read more on Malcolm Lowry @ 19th Hole

Michael Arlen

Michael Arlen born in Rousse, Bulgaria, 1895-1956, original name Dikran Kouyoumdjian, was an Armenian essayist, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and scriptwriter, who had his greatest successes in the 1920s while living and writing in England. Although Arlen is most famous for his satirical romances set in English smart society, he also wrote gothic horror and psychological thrillers. Read more on Wikipedia

Lowry was allowed to chose a copy of Arlen's Mayfair as a prize by the Leys Fortnightly in 1925. (Bowker Pursued By Furies Pg. 38).

Lowry refers to Michael Arlen in a letter to Carol Brown dated 27/4/1926; "..... young lovers of the present generation are helped greatly in awkward situations by the use of words which have been used by their fictional heroes in similarly awkward positions, or position, helpful matter which would have been denied to those who lived before the days of shall we say, Charles Dickens, James Elroy Flecker, and Michael Arlen". (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 14). Lowry was probably recalling either The London Venture (1920), Piracy (1922), The Green Hat (1924) or Mayfair (1925). Lowry again refers to Arlen in another letter to Carol Brown dated May 1926 when he tells her about what Rev. Harry Bisseker, the Leys's Headmaster had been saying about him to W. H. Balgarnie treasurer and president of the Leys Fortnightly committee; "that...I had been reading Alec Waugh, but I had been reading Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Eugene O'Neill, and Samuel Butler." (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 25).

Lowry also refers to Arlen in his short story 'The Blue Bonnet' for the Leys Fortnightly; "With apologies to the Author of "Mayfair", "The Green Hat", etc (Pg. 5) - the short story is a pastiche of Arlen's work.

Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev

Portrait of Andreyev by Ilya Repin

Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev 1871 – 1919 was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer. He is one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period in Russian history. Andreyev's style combines elements of realist, naturalist and symbolist schools in literature. Read more on Wikipedia

Lowry refers to Andreyev in a letter to Carol Brown dated 27/4/1926; "The great trouble about this first school tea is that one has'nt salved any of one's friends as yet, one sits where one may find a place, there is such a clatter of bent tin knives and forks on rancid ham that one can't hear oneself eat if one would eat, which one in one case- one-would'nt: the whole thing, believe me, reminding me of the sordidity of the first chapters of a Russian novel by Leonid Andryev." (Collected Letters Vol 1 Pg. 13). Andryev only wrote one novel The Seven Who Were Hanged  - so we must assume that Lowry is referring to this novel. The reference is an insight into Lowry's feelings for The Leys.

Later, everything in the world—day and night, footsteps, voices, the soup of sour cabbage, produced in him a continuous terror, plunging him into a state of savage uncomprehending astonishment. His weak mind was unable to combine these two things which so monstrously contradicted each other—the bright day, the odor and taste of cabbage—and the fact that two days later he must die. He did not think of anything. He did not even count the hours, but simply stood in mute stupefaction before this contradiction which tore his brain in two. And he became evenly pale, neither white nor redder in parts, and appeared to be calm. Only he ate nothing and ceased sleeping altogether. He sat all night long on a stool, his legs crossed under him, in fright. Or he walked about in his cell, quietly, stealthily, and sleepily looking about him on all sides. His mouth was half-open all the time, as though from incessant astonishment, and before taking the most ordinary thing into his hands, he would examine it stupidly for a long time, and would take it distrustfully. The Seven Who Were Hanged Chapter 3

Illustration for The Seven Who Were Hanged by John Buckland Wright

Robert Louis Stevenson The Wrecker

In 1925, Malcolm Lowry was given a copy of Stevenson's novel as a prize by his school magazine Fortnightly at the Leys in Cambridge. (Gordon Bowker Pursued By Furies Pg.38 )

The Wrecker (1892) is a novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. The story is a 'sprawling, episodic adventure story, a comedy of brash manners and something of a detective mystery'. It revolves around the abandoned wreck of the Flying Scud at Midway Island. Clues in a stamp collection are used to track down the missing crew and solve the mystery. It is only in the last chapter that different story elements become linked. Read more on Wikipedia

This novel is an early example of one of the literary influences that stirred Lowry's desire to travel the world and escape the confines of his Ingelwood home in Caldy.

Read more on Malcolm Lowry @ 19th Hole 

Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue

Lowry refers to the Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue in a letter to Carol Brown April/May 1926; "A gramophone playing "Rhapsody In Blue" reminding me of you awfully." (Collected Letters Vol. 1 Pg.20 )

Lowry is writing to Carol from the Leys School. We can only imagine that they may have shared moments together when the song was played on his trips back to the Wirral on school holidays.

Read more on Malcolm Lowry @ 19th Hole 

Uppingham School

Uppingham School is a co-educational independent school of the English public school tradition, situated in the small town of Uppingham in Rutland, England. The school was founded in 1584 by Robert Johnson, the Archdeacon of Leicester who also established Oakham School.

Lowry refers to the school in Chapter 1 of Ultramarine as Dana Hilliot recalls ; "Left out of the swimming team, the important match against Uppingham. He has stole out of last period to have a look at the notice board." (Pg.25). The memory is probably based an incident during Lowry's time at the Leys School.

E.E. Kellett 1864-1950

He was English master at The Leys School, Cambridge when Lowry attended. He was a master from 1889-1924. Educated at Kingswood Scool and a scholar and prizeman of Wadham College, Oxford. He had an "extraordinary memory and knowledge of any man I have ever met. He was a classic, mathematician and English man of great resource and teaching power, if a boy wanted to be taught. He was a light versifier of merit and wrote for Punch and other journals." J.H. Hays quoted in Derek Baker's book on The Leys; Partnership in Excellence. He also acted as a referee for Caldicott School which Lowry also attended in preparation for the The Leys.

He wrote many books including Story of Myths 1927, The Northern Saga 1929, The Whirligig of Taste 1929, Fashion in Literature 1931, Story of Religions 1934 etc. He appears to have had connections with several literary figures during the 1920's and 1930's including the Woolf's as he had work published in their Hogarth Press. He also had links to the magazine Life and Letters.

He lived after retirement at 5 Woodville Road, Blackheath. Lowry spent several months in Blackheath being tutored by Kellett for the entrance examination to Cambridge between 1927 and 1928. Kellett had considerable knowledge of Scandinavian mythology which may have have been an influenced Lowry who was already obsessed with Norway. There is also a possibility that Kellett introduced Lowry to modern Scandinavian literature by Bang, Hamsum, Jensen and even Grieg. The link, as yet unconfirmed, being that all the novels were translated by A.G. Chater. Another interesting link is that Kellett wrote a book Literary Quotation and Allusion 1933, a subject matter used to great effect by Lowry in his work.

Lowry refers to his time with Kellett in his novel Under The Volcano when Hugh recalls; "He was already entered at Cambridge for a year or so hence. He had not, however, the slightest intention of going there. The prospect of it, for some reason, he dreaded only less than being stuck meantime at some crammer's. And to prevent this he must act swiftly." (Pg. 160).