He imagined Mr. and Mrs. Wilderness, Sigbjørn and Primrose. Or she was Astrid Storlesen or Lovey L’Hirondelle or Tansy Fairhaven. Sigbjørn Wilderness an unsuccessful Canadian composer or an American writer on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Rome or an alcoholic jazz musician. Real Margerie typing away La Mordida, where Sigbjørn and Primrose bus to a fiesta in Tecalpulco, Sigbjørn watching devil dancers he’d written into his Valley of the Shadow of Death (real-life Volcano), watching in this new novel, La Mordida, a sinister figure that real Margerie wrote in her real notebook shuffled round and round in tattered clothes carrying a little stuffed ferret.
With each new sight in their travels, Sigbjørn’s brain clamoured with so many poems — had he not gone mad with them — that he could see nothing at all except through Primrose’s eyes. Out of spite, he refuses to look at craggy windswept scenery, sees instead a scene from his Valley novel, then thinks, It was as if he [Sigbjørn, the novelist] were the character, being moved about for the purposes of some other novelist, and by him, in an unimaginable novel, not of this world [the world of an imagined novelist in a novel about himself encased in the unimaginable world and novel of the author Lowry]. Sigbjørn nevertheless lacking all interest in “character” and holding nobody more disastrously ill-equipped than the novelist to observe such a creature. Real people, Sigbjørn thought, are good or evil omens, menaces, warnings, emblems, investments, wastes of time. Least of all to be trusted were those novelists claiming to love their characters, since almost no one, Sigbjørn included, was capable of loving others. Sigbjørn mulls over suicide.
Real-life Mexican authorities hold them in Acapulco, make them come back day after day to Migración, demand Margerie go alone to Cuernavaca for papers and money, Margerie writing in her notebook on the night bus: cattle browsing, do they never sleep … suddenly a village of leaping torches … The fat Mexican keeps falling against me leaning on me in his sleep. A woman is vomiting, the noise & then the smell, the terrible roar of the motor. At Taxco we change drivers. The new one is large & fat & drunk. Where is your husband? He tries to take my hand and feel my knee while changing gears.
Returning to Acapulco after two days on buses, no sleep, she finds real husband hallucinating on drink that real Juan Fernando Márquez (Zapotec, Volcano’s imaginary Dr. Vigil) is scolding him for distressing real wife, she now saying, Get up, you drunken bastard. But they do not pay la mordida. Mexican authorities put them under arrest back in the real fictional house of Volcano’s imaginary Parisian film director where they receive letters from Jonathan Cape and Reynal & Hitchcock accepting real Volcano as is. The house is a mess, Margerie writes in notebook (real husband folding several such into his novel La Mordida): no clean linen, bugs in kitchen, floors filthy with cigarette stubs & dirty clothes covering all chairs… I am so tired so tired, tired, tired, I don’t care except for dull anger that flames & rages against Malcolm & hatred & disgust that I am dragged down myself in trying to drink with him & hatred of bottles & exhaustion & sense of my soul slipping away & my whole grip on life. Pencils in palm-size black notebook, a despair so utter that all I want is death. Why don’t I kill myself? Is it some vague lingering loyalty to Malcolm whom I must still love but now only hate & despise & fear — above all fear? Asks (in palm-size black notebook continued from blue) how many times have I said in passionate praying & meaning it, oh God give Malcolm his success, let his volcano be recognized for the great thing it is & I will die or be damned in payment — so perhaps that is what happens. Pencils in palm-size black notebook (someone has labelled La Mordida), the stabbing burning unendurable agony of seeing the one you love reduced to a shambling idiotic dirty animal.
After seizing their bond of five hundred pesos, Mexican authorities jail and deport them for Malcolm’s failure to pay a fine (overstaying his visa), and for his bad behaviour and drunken offences: borracho, borracho, borracho reads his file. They go back to British Columbia Dollarton / pretend Eridanus, which he dreamed of making a novel where Sigbjørn and Primrose, in the real fictional house of Volcano’s imaginary Parisian film director, would talk over their idyllic times living in a real shack on a real beach on the western edge of land known fictionally as North America.
Then Sigbjørn and Primrose set out again to France on a French cargo ship, the SS Diderot / real-life SS Brest, the name in itself ironic enough, down the west coast fictionally known as the United States, past haunted and forever-closed-to-him Mexico, and through the Panama, which becomes the title of a novella cast as the journal of Sigbjørn planning a novel in which a character named Martin Trumbaugh becomes enmeshed in the plot of a novel he has written in Mexico, as Sigbjørn has, tangling him in the real fictional house of his imagined film director, Sigbjørn’s novel being The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Sigbjørn being haunted by imagined Parisian film director Jacque Laruelle’s incessant “Frère Jacques” drumbeat in the ship’s engines. Martin’s thoughts invade the journal with memories of his little cabin by the sea, memories of a misty winter sunrise through its windows, the sun a tiny little sun framed in one of the panes like a miniature — unreal, white. Martin plans to call his novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Martin has been reading The Crack-Up and thinks his little cabin by the sea would have saved Fitzgerald.
In his cabin on SS Diderot, Sigbjørn Wilderness finds a newspaper clipping about an albatross shot by a John Firmin, undoubtedly a relative of Volcano’s alcoholic consul. Don’t shoot, the crew, said, reminding Firmin of the Ancient Mariner. But he’d killed the bird anyway because it was the only one of its kind.
Nothing could be more unlike real experience, Sigbjørn the character novelist comments, than the average novelist’s realistic portrait of a character. Despite this, he tells us, his imagined character Martin Trumbaugh had been on this planet for so long that he had almost tricked himself into believing he was a human being. Much of Martin’s suffering, says Sigbjørn, comes from the fact that he could not find his vision of the world in any books and the fact that he’d got into pretending that he thought like other people. Other characters. The real ones.
On the other hand, Sigbjørn records in his journal an excellent fellow on board the SS Diderot, a Mr. Charon, who, just like Consul Firmin in pretend novel Valley of the Shadow / real novel Volcano, says, as acting Norwegian consul, he has no country. Man not enmeshed by, but killed by his own book, muses Sigbjørn, whose journal now carries along its edges Coleridge’s glosses to the Ancient Mariner. The crew on SS Diderot capture an albatross but Old Charon won’t come look at it. All in all though, gentlemen, Sigbjørn records from a book on the canal, what I would like to say about the Panama Canal is that it is a work of genius — something like a novel — in fact just such a novel as I, Sigbjørn Wilderness might have written — indeed without knowing it am perhaps in the course of writing.