One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with. 

November 23, 2010, 7:20 p.m. I’m feeling low. The feeling fades when I write, and that’s why I write, to escape from myself. Even if I write about me. Something happens when my thoughts meet words and sentences, a space opens up, a space beyond any thought or sentence.

The themes of Lunar Caustic, like unreliable demons, pursued Malcolm Lowry for most of his writing life. He first undertook the story in 1934, during his particularly black discovery of New York in his youth. The city, he once wrote a friend, “favours brief and furious outbursts, but not the long haul. Moreover for all its drama and existential fury, or perhaps because of it, it’s a city where it can be remarkably hard—or so it seems to me—to get on the right side of one’s despair...”

On the night of June 26, 1957, Malcolm Lowry pitched forward and died, and his body lay on the floor all night amid a gin bottle’s broken splinters. His big novel, Under the Volcano, had been published ten years before, and somebody called him a genius then, but after the inquest “death by misadventure" only eight people attended his country church funeral. The Brighton Argus ran a few paragraphs under the headline, ’’She Broke Gin Bottle.” The Times did not cover it.

I was born in South Africa on 9 May 1927. Towards the end of January 1948, I left Cape Town for the last time to join my mother in Paris. As the boat sailed away.

I am face to face with Joseph Stalin in Lodz in 1950. I was then a freshman at the State University of Lodz, a Stalinist school in Stalinist Poland. It was early morning and I was late for an obligatory meeting of a student union.

Along with Goethe, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was the most famous German literary figure of the nineteenth century. He was known not for his novels (he didn’t publish any) or his drama (his plays were never much produced) or his thinking (it was ­deliberately unsystematic) but for his lyric ­poetry and for the characteristic wit and irony of his ­reportage and travel writing and polemics. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

I do not know if you intend to pay any attention to unsolicited contributions to New Directions, but I think the enclosed pieces are the kind of work you want for your anthology. If I am wrong, forgive me,

Pound always set his sights high. Nothing but the best. When I was studying with him at his “Ezuversity” in Rapallo in 1935 he advised me not to waste time trying to write stories. Stendhal, Flaubert, James, Ford and Joyce, he told me, had done all that could be done with the novel. They had finished it off.