Edward (Falaise) Upward Biography

Edward Upward as a young writer in the 1930s achieved a great reputation, was indeed something of a legend, among a number of writers of his own age and younger. Christopher Isherwood told in Lions and Shadows how he and Upward (called Chalmers in Isherwood's book) at Cambridge invented a fantasy world they called Mortmere which paralleled and parodied the world about them. Mortmere seems to have been at once sinister and comic, partly surrealist and partly Gothic. That it had affinities with Auden's early poetry, influenced as it was by Freud, seems clear, and something of it seems to merge in the plays Isherwood wrote in collaboration with Auden, notably The Dog Beneath the Skin. Upward, however, overtly pursued the vein of fantasy in his fiction, but was even then politically committed in the cause of Marxism. The central character of Journey to the Border is a middle-class young man employed as a tutor in the house of a rich man; he is constantly struggling against the implications and ignominies of his position but is unable to resolve them. He is persuaded against his will to accompany his employer to a race-meeting. On the way, and while there, he experiences a series of hallucinations that mount in intensity and are the counterparts of the debate going on in his mind. By the end of the novel he is forced to realize that the only solution to this problem, the only way to reality, is for him to identify himself with the working-class struggle.

When the novel was first published, reviewers read the influence of Kafka into it. This is not much apparent now, if it ever existed. Upward's novel is much less complex than those in simple allegory. Nevertheless, the voltage of imaginative work is admirably sustained. It remains a brilliant experimental novel of a very unusual kind.

Upward published nothing for twenty-five years, and then in 1962 published In the Thirties (followed by The Rotten Elements and, as a complete trilogy incorporating No Home But the Struggle, The Spiral Ascent). These novels are based, it is impossible not to think, on the author's own life. In the Thirties describes the stages by which a young middle-class man comes to Communism. In a sense, the theme is that of Journey to the Border, but the treatment is entirely different. Fantasy has been replaced by literal realism, which is also the vein of later volumes of the trilogy. In The Rotten Elements the hero of the earlier novel, a school teacher now married, finds himself compelled in the years immediately after the war to leave the Communist Party, not because he has lost his political faith but because for him and his wife the British Communist Party, under the influence of Moscow, has deviated from Marxism-Leninism. No Home But the Struggle shows them recommitted to the campaign for nuclear disarmament. The trilogy lacks the literary interest of Journey to the Border, but it has an anguish of its own and a documentary quality which suggests that, though it may not be read in the future for its artistic value, it will be essential reading for scholars concerned with the role of the Communist party in Britain.