"Malcolm was a very educated man, a brilliant conversationalist and an excellent athlete," Gabrial recalls. "He did have one problem though -- a very small penis. It didn't bother me. I felt we could work around it. But it bothered him. That was something he never really overcame. In his adolescence it had been a problem; his brothers teased him about it, apparently."

Gabrial mentions this by way of explaining the first major row in her marriage to the bibulous literary giant whose alcoholic excesses were portrayed with such marvelous accuracy by Albert Finney in John Huston's 1984 film adaptation of "Under the Volcano." Gabrial's new memoir, "Inside the Volcano: My Life With Malcolm Lowry," depicts the ups and downs of her six-year union with Lowry from 1934 to 1940. The first of the downs came a month into their life together, when Lowry discovered and read through Gabrial's diaries. There she had written frankly of Lowry's appendage.

"Diaries are personal things," explains Gabrial, as if the argument had occurred yesterday. "I was annoyed and disturbed, as was he. It was probably my fault for not keeping them under lock and key, but I hadn't thought that would be necessary. Fortunately, by about 2 in the morning, we had put it all to rest."

Nevertheless, the inner demons that seemed to be part of Lowry's personal cosmology pursued the couple with increasing intensity as they moved from England to France to New York and finally to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Lowry wrote the first draft of "Under the Volcano," based in large part on his life with Gabrial.

Drawn from her diaries and letters of that era, Gabrial's memoir depicts the couple's love affair in intimate detail and with an engaging literary style that spares neither herself nor Lowry. In "Inside the Volcano," Lowry is both handsome man of letters and hopeless drunkard. He's the kind of fellow who could write long, amorous epistles capable of wooing the young Gabrial as well as a congenital barfly with a thirst so prodigious that he would drink almost anything he could get his hands on: after-shave, cleaning products, embalming fluid, you name it.

And he could be a mean drunk. At a New Year's Eve party in Paris just prior to his marriage to Gabrial, he almost single-handedly wrecked his host's residence during one of his more outrageous tears, pouring wine over his fiancée and getting into fisticuffs with a fellow he'd wrongly accused of making a pass at her. In private, he could be verbally abusive, with a threat of violence behind his words. Lowry's second wife, Margerie Lowry, reportedly suffered physical abuse from him, but Gabrial denies that Lowry ever struck her, though she was afraid it might happen.

"Initially, when we were in Europe, he drank so heavily that it frightened me. You have to remember, I was still in my early 20s. And though I had traveled all over, I had never known an alcoholic. We were living in Paris, and I'd go to bed at 10 or whatever. I'd hear the door banging when he came home from his rounds at maybe 1 or 2 o'clock. He would hover over my bed. I remember one time him saying, 'Dormez. Le diable est mort.'

"I wasn't asleep, but I kept myself looking asleep because I didn't know what to expect at that point. It could get a little hairy," confides Gabrial. "I could have invited blows, of course, but I was very wary. You don't wave a red flag in front of a bull, you know."

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