Malcolm Lowry famously worked on several texts at the same time and was rarely satisfied with his own writing. During his lifetime Lowry managed to finish ‘only’ two novels: his debut Ultramarine (1933) and – fifteen years later – his masterpiece Under the Volcano (1948).
He kept on returning to these two novels after they were published. He was especially unhappy with Ultramarine and severely edited it after the novel’s publication.
‘I would come upon him with the battered copy [of Ultramarine] in his hands staring at it angrily and making notes on the pages, or sometimes just holding it and gazing out of the window; he would turn to me and say, “You know I must rewrite this one day”,’ writes his widow Margery Lowry in the introduction to the revised edition which was published in America in 1962.
It is strange to think that the daring, highly original and quite brilliant novel Ultramarine had been out of print in the UK for several decades and had never even been published in the USA. The revised edition, published by J.P. Lippincott in 1962, was in effect the first American edition, something the publisher proudly states on the copyright page.
Jonathan Cape, who had published the novel originally in 1933 and reissued it once in 1935, followed suit and published the American edition in the UK a year later (in 1963).
We have in stock a proof copy of this 1963 Jonathan Cape reprint. Not quite as sought-after as the first edition from 1933 (which I’ve never seen), but still pretty scarce. (No other copies are currently available online.)