The late Malcolm Lowry wrote only one book (Under the Volcano) to which everything else, now being presented under the editorial aegis of Douglas Day and Margerie Bonnet Lowry, is both co-relative and subsidiary. (The letters two years ago; Lunar Caustic just appeared in England, and Professor Day is working on a critical biography although owry's anguished life and death, like Thomas Wolfe's, needs little amplification. It's nakedly there on every page he wrote.) This, based on one of several diaries also based on a return trip to Mexico in the '40's, admittedly imperfect and incomplete (the editors) is also a replicating re-run of Volcano which again finds Lowry driven by countless nameless fears, prodded by the temptation and tyranny of the bottle, hoping to salvage himself in this return to Mexico with the serene Primrose (Mrs. Lowry). Only ""no darkness has the same quality of hopelessness as the darkness in Mexico,"" This then is a ""notebook on the way to becoming a novel""--a long way from it since it is both formless and repetitious. But the dynamics of the man and his particularized talent are there in patches of rampant, imagistic, symbolic but overt writing with all the stigmata of his immolating La Vida.