'I never sat down on lavatory seats, public or otherwise...'
Peter Stansky, Edward Upward: Art and Life
Enitharmon, 368pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781910392843
reviewed by Louis Goddard
Towards the end of his valuable new biography of Edward Upward, Peter Stansky charts the tidal course of the communist novelist’s literary reputation: occasional waves of recognition interspersed with long periods of neglect. Upward was a key figure among the young writers of the 1930s, a close friend of Christopher Isherwood and well-acquainted with both WH Auden and Stephen Spender. He dropped out of view as teaching and political work – he was a committed member of the Communist Party until 1948 – began to conflict with his literary ambitions, but re-emerged in 1962 with the publication of In the Thirties, the first of three semi-autobiographical novels. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Upward once again travelled under the radar, but, as Stansky has it, ‘on the eve of his ninetieth birthday he was rediscovered yet again and this precipitated an active interest in him virtually until the end of his life in 2009.’ Stansky’s book is itself a symptom of this latest rediscovery, which has included the publication of numerous short stories, a comprehensive bibliography and a collection of academic articles on Upward’s work.
Born in 1903 to a middle-class family in Romford, Upward attended Repton School, where he met Isherwood, one year his junior. His literary career began with a number of poems published in the school magazine. When both Upward and Isherwood won scholarships to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (albeit a year apart), they embarked on the creation of a joint fantasy world, depicted in a set of lurid short stories left in each other’s college rooms. Dubbed ‘Mortmere’, this collective delusion included key roles for the pair’s enemies in the ‘poshocracy’ and the college authorities, against whom Isherwood would eventually deploy the nuclear option of deliberately failing all of his exams. Mortmere also provided the setting for Upward’s best-known early story, ‘The Railway Accident’.
Upward would quickly disown Mortmere, however, going so far as burn many of his early stories. Following a series of temporary teaching jobs and an almost-religious crisis of aesthetic faith, he joined the Communist Party on a probationary basis in 1932. The same year, he was offered a permanent post at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, South East London, where he taught for thirty years. In a sense, Upward was his own biographer, chronicling the major events of his life in the trilogy published in full as The Spiral Ascent. In the Thirties depicts Alan Sebrill, Upward’s protagonist, joining the Party and marrying a working-class member named Elsie — a cipher for Upward’s wife, Hilda (née Percival). The Rotten Elements focuses on the hard-line Sebrills’ split from the Party over its support for the post-war Labour government – a heartbreaking decision for Upward in real life – while the final volume, No Home But the Struggle, offers the retired Sebrill’s reminiscences of his childhood.
An American and an eminent historian of modern Britain, Stansky is adept at placing Upward’s century-spanning life in context. He is insistent in his presentation of Upward as a product of his time, class and environment: public school, Cambridge and a career in teaching, followed by retirement to the Isle of Wight. By the same token, this is an historical rather than a literary biography, though Stansky does venture literary judgements, clearly preferring Upward’s dream-like earlier and later work to his autobiographical mid-period. Readers seeking detailed exegeses of Upward’s work would do better to turn to 2013’s Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann.
Setting aside a thematic chapter on ‘Being a Communist and a Writer,’ Stansky follows a quite rigid chronological structure. Chief among his primary sources is Upward himself, via a continuous sequence of 76 notebooks held among the novelist’s papers at the British Library. Stretching from 1924 to 2002, these journals provide such direct insight into Upward’s mind that to read them feels almost like cheating. While the journals focus primarily on Upward’s torturously slow creative process, Stansky has scoured them for biographical detail, using quoted passages as a constant support to his own historical narrative. Extensive use is also made of Upward’s letters to Isherwood, held at the Huntingdon Library in California, while more esoteric archival sources – including Upward’s personal MI5 file, released in 2014 – provide welcome colour.
While Stansky is careful to point out that the book is not an authorised biography, he does rely on anecdotal material from Upward’s family in places. In the early stages of the book, particularly, there is a tendency to veer towards family history for its own sake, marring the scholarly sheen of the text – do we really need so much information on the name of Upward’s house? Allied to these unnecessary detours is an Anglophilia which verges on the patronising. Encountering some of Stansky’s fruitier ruminations on the English character – ‘how passive-aggressive the use of the phrase “I’m sorry” can be in England’ – the English reader is likely to be bemused at best.
This is, nevertheless, an even-handed biography, both politically and in relation to the more sensitive aspects of Upward’s personal life. While Stansky clearly deplores the Stalinism with which Upward allowed himself to go along as late as the 1950s, he shows no scorn for his subject’s lifelong commitment to communism as an ideal, only occasionally slipping into grand dismissals of revolution as such: ‘It is a hope eternally doomed to failure.’ About Upward’s occasional fantasies of persecution for his political beliefs, Stansky is both realistic – people just weren’t that interested in his work – and sympathetic. During a useful survey of contemporary reviews, Stansky notes that ‘Upward exaggerated the degree to which he was ignored’: his books almost always received notices in the national papers, and more illustrious friends such as Spender and Isherwood regularly used their positions to promote his work.
Upward’s failure to reach the heights of publicity enjoyed by his thirties contemporaries was probably as much a result of his personal diffidence and innate caution as of his political opinions. Discussing Upward’s introduction to Auden via Isherwood, Stansky quotes a passage of reminiscence which makes the differences between the two men abundantly clear: ‘he [Auden] attacked, loudly enough for other diners around us to become interested, the sort of person who wouldn’t sit down on public lavatory seats for fear of getting clap. (I wondered whether he had been told by Christopher that I never sat down on lavatory seats, public or otherwise…).’ Yet it is this same seriousness – particularly in the sense that the smallest of aesthetic decisions can have far-reaching moral and political ramifications – that makes Upward’s limited oeuvre enduringly interesting. At its worst, the deliberately flat surface of Upward’s mid-period style can be simply dull. At its best, it offers an ethical clarity far outstripping anything achieved by Isherwood or ‘Sir Stephen’. Providing a similarly clear and meticulously researched account of the man behind the style, Stansky’s book will prove extremely useful to future scholars of Upward’s work, whenever he is next rediscovered.
Born in 1903 to a middle-class family in Romford, Upward attended Repton School, where he met Isherwood, one year his junior. His literary career began with a number of poems published in the school magazine. When both Upward and Isherwood won scholarships to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (albeit a year apart), they embarked on the creation of a joint fantasy world, depicted in a set of lurid short stories left in each other’s college rooms. Dubbed ‘Mortmere’, this collective delusion included key roles for the pair’s enemies in the ‘poshocracy’ and the college authorities, against whom Isherwood would eventually deploy the nuclear option of deliberately failing all of his exams. Mortmere also provided the setting for Upward’s best-known early story, ‘The Railway Accident’.
Upward would quickly disown Mortmere, however, going so far as burn many of his early stories. Following a series of temporary teaching jobs and an almost-religious crisis of aesthetic faith, he joined the Communist Party on a probationary basis in 1932. The same year, he was offered a permanent post at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, South East London, where he taught for thirty years. In a sense, Upward was his own biographer, chronicling the major events of his life in the trilogy published in full as The Spiral Ascent. In the Thirties depicts Alan Sebrill, Upward’s protagonist, joining the Party and marrying a working-class member named Elsie — a cipher for Upward’s wife, Hilda (née Percival). The Rotten Elements focuses on the hard-line Sebrills’ split from the Party over its support for the post-war Labour government – a heartbreaking decision for Upward in real life – while the final volume, No Home But the Struggle, offers the retired Sebrill’s reminiscences of his childhood.
An American and an eminent historian of modern Britain, Stansky is adept at placing Upward’s century-spanning life in context. He is insistent in his presentation of Upward as a product of his time, class and environment: public school, Cambridge and a career in teaching, followed by retirement to the Isle of Wight. By the same token, this is an historical rather than a literary biography, though Stansky does venture literary judgements, clearly preferring Upward’s dream-like earlier and later work to his autobiographical mid-period. Readers seeking detailed exegeses of Upward’s work would do better to turn to 2013’s Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann.
Setting aside a thematic chapter on ‘Being a Communist and a Writer,’ Stansky follows a quite rigid chronological structure. Chief among his primary sources is Upward himself, via a continuous sequence of 76 notebooks held among the novelist’s papers at the British Library. Stretching from 1924 to 2002, these journals provide such direct insight into Upward’s mind that to read them feels almost like cheating. While the journals focus primarily on Upward’s torturously slow creative process, Stansky has scoured them for biographical detail, using quoted passages as a constant support to his own historical narrative. Extensive use is also made of Upward’s letters to Isherwood, held at the Huntingdon Library in California, while more esoteric archival sources – including Upward’s personal MI5 file, released in 2014 – provide welcome colour.
While Stansky is careful to point out that the book is not an authorised biography, he does rely on anecdotal material from Upward’s family in places. In the early stages of the book, particularly, there is a tendency to veer towards family history for its own sake, marring the scholarly sheen of the text – do we really need so much information on the name of Upward’s house? Allied to these unnecessary detours is an Anglophilia which verges on the patronising. Encountering some of Stansky’s fruitier ruminations on the English character – ‘how passive-aggressive the use of the phrase “I’m sorry” can be in England’ – the English reader is likely to be bemused at best.
This is, nevertheless, an even-handed biography, both politically and in relation to the more sensitive aspects of Upward’s personal life. While Stansky clearly deplores the Stalinism with which Upward allowed himself to go along as late as the 1950s, he shows no scorn for his subject’s lifelong commitment to communism as an ideal, only occasionally slipping into grand dismissals of revolution as such: ‘It is a hope eternally doomed to failure.’ About Upward’s occasional fantasies of persecution for his political beliefs, Stansky is both realistic – people just weren’t that interested in his work – and sympathetic. During a useful survey of contemporary reviews, Stansky notes that ‘Upward exaggerated the degree to which he was ignored’: his books almost always received notices in the national papers, and more illustrious friends such as Spender and Isherwood regularly used their positions to promote his work.
Upward’s failure to reach the heights of publicity enjoyed by his thirties contemporaries was probably as much a result of his personal diffidence and innate caution as of his political opinions. Discussing Upward’s introduction to Auden via Isherwood, Stansky quotes a passage of reminiscence which makes the differences between the two men abundantly clear: ‘he [Auden] attacked, loudly enough for other diners around us to become interested, the sort of person who wouldn’t sit down on public lavatory seats for fear of getting clap. (I wondered whether he had been told by Christopher that I never sat down on lavatory seats, public or otherwise…).’ Yet it is this same seriousness – particularly in the sense that the smallest of aesthetic decisions can have far-reaching moral and political ramifications – that makes Upward’s limited oeuvre enduringly interesting. At its worst, the deliberately flat surface of Upward’s mid-period style can be simply dull. At its best, it offers an ethical clarity far outstripping anything achieved by Isherwood or ‘Sir Stephen’. Providing a similarly clear and meticulously researched account of the man behind the style, Stansky’s book will prove extremely useful to future scholars of Upward’s work, whenever he is next rediscovered.