SOURCE: “Swinging the Maelstrom: Malcolm Lowry and Jazz,” in Canadian Literature, Vol. 44, 1970, pp.57-66.

In the following excerpt, Epstein explores Malcolm Lowry's implementation of jazz elements in his novel Under the Volcano.

When during the course of treatment a psychiatrist asked Malcolm Lowry to free associate “anything that comes into your head that begin with B”, Lowry instantly replied, “Bix Beiderbecke.” For some reason the psychiatrist would not accept this answer; if he had, he would have learned a great deal about his patient in a short time. Had the therapist been a jazz fan himself, he would have known that Beiderbecke, one of Lowry's lifetime idols, played a brilliant trumpet and died an alcoholic at age twenty-eight. One short step, and he would have understood that in many ways Bix was to jazz what Lowry was to literature: an American counterpart, in fact, only a year older...