Gerald de Nerval Aurélia

Lithograph by Pearl Binder for Aurélia  1932

Gerard de Nerval's Aurélia is a fantasy-ridden interior autobiography— "Our dreams are a second life," he wrote — which influenced the Surrealists. Lowry makes no direct reference to Richard Aldington's 1932 translation of Gerald de Nerval's Aurélia. However, Lowry uses a line in his novel Ultramarine taken from Aldington's introduction to the translation. Compare:

"When I was fourteen I was under the delusion for a year I was Thomas Chatterton.....mad? No ...not even that. But a kind of semi-madman, pernicious and irritating and apathetic in the extreme, for whom in madness, as in death to the impotent, exists the only dignified escape." (Ultramarine Pg. 95).

"Literature, especially of the Romantic and Pre-Romantic period contains numerous semi-madmen who, upon the whole, are rather pernicious and irritating." (Introduction to Aurelia Pg. xvii)

Lowry's work contains other references to Aldington's work whom he may have known through Conrad Aiken. If they didn't actually meet then Lowry appears to have been familiar with Aldington's work.

Nerval's Aurélia may have appealed to Lowry for several reasons. The fantasy-ridden interior autobiography Aurelia can be compared to parts of Ultramarine especially in the more dream like sequences. Lowry was also drawn to references to suicide following Paul Fitte's suicide - Nerval hung himself. Nerval travelled to the Far East documenting it in his work Voyage to the Orient -  published during 1851, resulting from his voyage of 1842 to Cairo and Beirut. In addition to a travel account it retells Oriental tales, like Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, in terms of the artist and the act of creation. Lowry's construction of Ultramarine is in part a complex montage of a voyage to the East, in which the artist plays with forms to create a novel, using a variety of techniques including allusion and plagarism. Nerval added a series of appendices to Voyage to the Orient, the majority of the material taken directly from Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians - a technique not unlike Lowry's later use of travel brochures in La Mordida. Lowry also appears to have been drawn to writers who are accused of plagarism or manipulate other's work such as Herman Melville, Thomas Chatterton etc. The linking of Nerval and Chatterton may also have to do with both committing suicide and also the possibility that venereal disease may have been the reason for both writer's "madness" which was a fear for Lowry reflected in Dana's fears in Ultramarine.

Lowry's nickname was 'Lobs' and he may have known about the story of the lobster and Nerval. Nerval is quoted as having said "Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? ...or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad." (Gautier, Théophile. Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires (Paris: Charpentier, 1875), Richard Holmes trans.).

Nerval's suicide by Gustave Doré.

In the same paragraph from which Lowry took the words "a kind of semi-madman, pernicious and irritating";  he could have easily have seen the rest of  the paragraph pertaining to the kind of creation he may have wanted to aspire to and which he later achieved in Under The Volcano:

Nerval was a real madman, and so far as I know he is one madman who has recovered and attempted to give some account of his sensations and experience while lost in the dreadful gulf of insanity. I confess I cannot read Aurélia without a shudder. Its incoherences, its repetitions, its formlessness, its deformation of reality, its wanderings among old memories, its pitiful attempts at sincerity and still more pitiful attempt at concealment or justification, produce a more genuine feeling of horror than the most horrific tale of Poe. (Introduction to Aurélia Pg. xvii)

Robert Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit

Lowry alludes in his novel Ultramarine to Robert Greene's criticism of Shakespeare when speaking about Janet; "Your lamb's heart was beating under your white woollen sweater. A sheep in sheep's clothing ... a tiger's heart wrapped in a sailor's hide" (Pg. 52). Greene is reputedly parodying Henry VI Part 3 when York curses Margaret: "O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide!" - a play Shakespeare contributed to.

Robert Greene (1558 – 1592) was an English author best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, widely believed to contain a polemic attack on William Shakespeare. He was born in Norwich and attended Cambridge University, receiving a B.A. in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England. Greene published in many genres including autobiography, plays, and romances, while capitalizing on a scandalous reputation.

The dramatist is most familiar to Shakespeare scholars for his pamphlet Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit (full title: Greene's Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance), which the majority of scholars agree contains the earliest known mention of Shakespeare as a member of Elizabethan London's dramatic community. In it, Greene disparages Shakespeare, for being an actor who has the temerity to write plays, and for committing plagiarism. The passage quotes a line which is purportedly from Shakespeare's play Henry VI, part 3, but scholars are not agreed on exactly what is meant by this cryptic allusion:

"...for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey".

Greene evidently complains of an actor who believes he can write as well as university-trained playwrights, alludes to the actor with a quotation from a Shakespearean play, and uses the term "Shake-scene," a unique term never used before or after Greene's screed, to refer to the actor. Though anti-Stratfordians argue that the early date of Greene's remark precludes a reference to Shakespeare (who in 1592 had no published works to his name), most scholars think that Greene's comment refers to Shakespeare, who would in this period have been an "upstart" as an actor who is writing and contributing to plays such as Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and King John, which were most likely written and produced (though not published) before Greene's death. Others argue that it is a reference to another actor, Edward Alleyn, whom Greene had attacked in an earlier pamphlet, using much the same language.

Some scholars think that all or part of the Groats-Worth may have been written shortly after Greene's death by one of his fellow writers (the pamphlet's printer, Henry Chettle, being the favoured candidate) hoping to capitalize on a lurid tale of death-bed repentance. Wikipedia

Lowry would have been aware of both the line in Henry VI to describe deceit in women and Greene's parody. Lowry firstly creates a joke that Janet is an innocent compared to Margaret in Henry VI - "Your lamb's heart was beating under your white woollen sweater. A sheep in sheep's clothing..." (Pg. 52) Then the change of the line in Henry VI to "a tiger's heart wrapped in a sailor's hide" both alludes to Dana's status as a sailor but alludes to Greene, with Lowry making a joke about his own plagiarism in Ultramarine and maybe the "accusations" that Lowry was a "literary upstart" who was trying to be too clever.