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)

Moji, Japan

Moji-ku is a ward of Kitakyūshū, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. It is the former city of Moji which was one of five cities merged to create Kitakyūshū in 1963. It faces the city of Shimonoseki across the Kanmon Straits between Honshū and Kyūshū.

Moji was first made into a port by Suematsu Kenchō with the financial backing of Shibusawa Eiichi in 1889. It was chiefly used for the transportation of coal, though there is a traditional song about the sale of bananas imported into Moji from Southeast Asia which survives to this day (Banana no tataki-uri). Moji was also the departure point for many troops in the Russo-Japanese War who were ferried across to Korea.

Lowry refers to the port in his novel Ultramarine when Norman is warning Dana about contracting venereal disease when he goes ashore in Tsjang Tsjang (Dairen); "Voyage before last, in Muji, it was, I picked up, the finest dose you ever saw, voyage before last in the Maharajah - she's lying in this port now" (Pg. 34) and again when the crew of Oedipus Tyrannus are talking about how Smithy contracted venereal disease in Moji; "got it in Muji he had, and never said damn all to anybody.." (Pg. 61).

There is no record that Lowry visited the port on his 1927 voyage to the Far East. Lowry was familiar with J. Johnston Abraham's The Surgeon's Log, which features a visit to the port where his ship takes on coal (Pgs. 122-144), which may have inspired him to feature the port in Ultramarine. Or Lowry may have known that Moji was a regular port of call for Blue Funnel ships to take on coal on trips to Japan.

Falmouth

Falmouth is a town, civil parish and port on the River Fal on the south coast of Cornwall, England. Falmouth is famous for its harbour. Together with Carrick Roads, it forms the third deepest natural harbour in the world, and the deepest in Western Europe. Read more on Wikpedia

There is no documentary evidence that Lowry ever visited Falmouth though he may have visited the port on a family holiday to Looe, Cornwall in the early 1920's. Lowry refers to the port in his first novel Ultramarine when Nikolai, one of the crew of Oedipus Tyrannus, relates that he caught venereal disease in the port; “In Falmouth I make a fire to my my pipe, knaw, and I stood listening to the children playing - laughing same troubles as Norwegian children. But Falmouth left me a souvenir of my wisit (sic) , he added laughingly, 'the third time I have had a souvenir in England”. (Pgs. 19-20). Lowry is probably referring to the fact that Pyrrhus - the ship he sailed on to the Far East in 1927 - arrived in Falmouth on 24th April 1927 and went into dry dock in Falmouth the next day until May 1st 1927 when she sailed to Swansea.