Edward Upward

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Edward Upward
Upward c. 1938
Born	(1903-09-09)9 September 1903 Romford, Essex, England
Died	13 February 2009(2009-02-13) (aged 105) Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Writer, schoolteacher
Alma mater	Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Period	1920–2003
Spouse	Hilda Percival ​ ​ (m. 1936; died 1995)​

Edward Falaise Upward,

Early life and education

Upward was born on 9 September 1903 in Romford, Essex, where his father had a doctor's surgery. His parents were Harold Arthur Upward (1874–1958), who came from a middle-class family on the Isle of Wight, and Louisa "Isa" Upward (née Jones; 1869–1951), who had trained as a nurse and tried acting. His mother, who had grown up in Wanstead but was of Welsh descent, came from a lower-middle-class background but was very class conscious, a trait Upward strongly disliked. His siblings were John Mervyn Upward (1905–1999); Laurence Vaughan Upward (1909–1970), who had schizophrenia;^[1] and Yolande Isa Upward (1911–2004). Another brother, Harold, was born in 1907 and died in infancy that same year. His first cousin once removed was the poet and novelist Allen Upward, who committed suicide in 1926.

In 1917, at the insistence of his mother, Upward was sent to

From January 1926 Upward took up various teaching jobs in a number of locations, such as Carbis Bay, Worcester, Lockerbie, Loretto, Scarborough and Stowe. In 1932 he became an English master at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, having been recommended by a friend of his brother, Mer, who was also a schoolmaster and became headmaster of Port Regis School the following year. He remained at Alleyn's until his retirement in 1961.

In 1931 he began attending meetings of a branch of the

Upward's first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by the

In 1954 Upward began to overcome his creative block and started work on an autobiographical trilogy titled The Spiral Ascent, dealing with the struggle of a poet, Alan Sebrill, to combine his creative endeavours with political commitment to the CPGB. The trilogy was published in the years following Upward's early retirement in 1961 to the house where his parents used to live in Sandown, Isle of Wight. In the Thirties (1962), the first volume, describes Sebrill's early involvement with the CPGB and the struggle against the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. The Rotten Elements (1969) involves Sebrill and his wife's clash with the party leadership, and their decision to leave the party. The final volume, No Home but the Struggle (1977), sees Sebrill find new meaning by joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which helps him to write again. It also includes largely autobiographical recollections of Upward's family and childhood, inspired by Marcel Proust, whom Upward greatly admired.

Later years

In the last decades of the twentieth century Upward returned to writing short stories, which were published, along with reprints of earlier works, by the Enitharmon Press. His last years were also punctuated by sadness, with the deaths of his wife Hilda, in 1995, and his son Christopher, in 2002. In 2003 Enitharmon celebrated his centenary by publishing selected short stories, edited by Alan Walker, as A Renegade in Springtime. He often gave interviews recalling memories of his famous friends. In an interview with Nicholas Wroe, which appeared in The Guardian the month before his hundredth birthday, Upward explained that the title "came from an idea for a story about Auden. I never wrote the story, but the phrase stayed. The renegade is the one with a sense of reality and everyone else is too happy-go-lucky."^[3] His last story, "Crommelin-Brown", was written in 2003, shortly before he turned 100.

In 2005 Upward was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded its Benson Medal.^[4]

On 13 February 2009 Upward died of a chest infection at a

Edward Upward: Art and Life by Peter Stansky was published in May 2016. There are collections of Upward's literary papers and correspondence in the British Library (Add MS 89002) and in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Bibliography

Novels

• Journey to the Border (1938; revised ed., 1994)
• In the Thirties (Vol. 1 of The Spiral Ascent, 1962)
• The Rotten Elements (Vol. 2 of The Spiral Ascent, 1969)
• No Home But the Struggle (Vol. 3 of The Spiral Ascent, 1977)

Collections of short stories

• The Railway Accident and Other Stories (1969)
• The Night Walk and Other Stories (1987)
• The Mortmere Stories by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward (1994)
• An Unmentionable Man (1994)
• The Scenic Railway (1997)
• The Coming Day and Other Stories (2000)
• A Renegade in Springtime (2003)

See also Edward Upward: A Bibliography, 1920–2000 by Alan Walker (Enitharmon Press, 2000).

Biography and criticism

• Mario Faraone, L'isola e il treno: L'opera di Edward Upward tra impegno politico e creatività artistica, Rome: La Sapienza Università Editrice, 2013: in Italian, but with extensive passages quoted in English, a previously unpublished interview with the author, and a bibliography updated to 2012; further details available here
• Peter Stansky, Edward Upward: Art and Life, London: Enitharmon Books, 2016.

References

External links

• Edward Upward website includes electronic editions of The Spiral Ascent and other works
• World Socialist Website obituary, 30 March 2009
• The New York Times obituary 22 February 2009
• Socialist Worker obituary Archived 28 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine
• The Guardian obituary 16 February 2009
• Guardian article August 2003
• Observer article March 2003
• Socialist Review article October 2003
• Socialist Review review Archived 6 June 2004 at the Wayback Machine May 2003
• Camden New Journal review Archived 12 October 2006 at the Wayback Machine August 2003
• The Dulwich Society review Archived 16 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine Winter 2003
• New Humanist review June 2003
• Morning Star [1]
  16 February 2009
• An Unrepentant Communist (blog) [2] February 2009