And it struck him, more than prophetically as it happened, that these songs alone, while both of the requisite thirty-two bars, of an equal banality, and even faintly touched with moronism – Hugh became so ashamed of their titles that to this day he kept them locked in a secret drawer of his mind – might be insufficient to do the trick. – UTV, 156.
And there, indeed, were Hugh's songs. They had been published, a thousand sheets of each, as Bolowski said: that was all. No effort had been made to distribute them. Nobody was humming them .... No one had ever heard a word more of the songs "the schoolboy undergraduate" had written. – UTV, 169.
Above image: Charlestons written by Malcolm Lowry and his school chum Ronald Hill prior to Lowry's voyage in 1927. As Hugh would find, these songs did not achieve the popular success for which Lowry had, somewhat naïvely, wished.