Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain

Benjamin Kohlmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409450603
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317145653
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Offering the first book-length consideration of Edward Upward (1903-2009), one of the major British left-wing writers, this collection positions his life and works in the changing artistic, social and political contexts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upward's fiction and non-fiction, from the 1920s onwards, illustrate the thematic and formal richness of left-wing writing during the twentieth-century age of extremes. At the same time, Upward's work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upward's work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent and his formally and thematically innovative later stories. The essays collected here reevaluate Upward's central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1
Playing Up: Edward Upward in Cambridge and Beyond

Charlotte Charteris

Introducing Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Raymond Williams describes the difficulties he encountered in settling back down to life at a Cambridge college after serving in World War II: ‘I had been away only four and a half years, but in the movements of war had lost touch with all my university friends.’1 This loss was most palpably exemplified by the ‘new and strange’ (11) meanings those around him had begun to attach to words that he had previously considered relatively stable signifiers. Recalling the growing feeling that he and those surrounding him were no longer speaking ‘the same language’ he explains with the clarity of hindsight:

When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. (11)

What we witness is a process in which, through ‘certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed’ (12). Though in many situations this process may take decades to make itself evident, Williams asserts from experience that in ‘a large and active university, and in a period of change as important as a war, the process can seem unusually rapid and conscious’ (12).

Williams was not the first to detect the impact of war on the pace and palpability of a language’s development with particular reference to university life. The Great War had prompted a fundamental reassessment of the value of language by a generation who, if not so well placed as Williams to analyse and codify their observations, were at least determined to record them. A frequent visitor to Cambridge during and immediately after World War I, Rose Macaulay figured the evident divide between newly-returned veteran undergraduates and their slightly younger civilian counterparts as a keenly linguistic phenomenon in her poem ‘Cambridge’ (1919):

They shall speak kindly one to another,

Across gulfs of space.

But they shall speak with alien tongues,

Each an alien race.
They shall find no meeting place,

No common speech at all;
And the years between, like mocking owls,

Shall hoot and call.2

Indeed, Graham Chainey has suggested that this preoccupation with meaning – or, more properly, with meanings – is inherently Cantabrigian: ‘While Oxford produces successions of prime ministers and literary putsches, Cambridge asks “What exactly do you mean?” and is prepared, if necessary, to spend a lifetime finding out.’3 The evidence of the 1920s alone – the decade that saw Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood go up to Corpus Christi to read History – strongly supports this assertion. Fiercely exclusive school friends, Upward and Isherwood arrived from Repton for the Cambridge entrance exams early in 1922, in a mood of black suspicion exacerbated by the city’s seasonal gloom. Both won scholarships, but by the time Upward started at the university later that year, their macabre apprehensions and resentment at being separated had only increased. The invective of his letters, and – after Isherwood joined him in October 1923 – of the pair’s conversations, was focused squarely on the university authorities. And yet, as was becoming clear from these inventive exchanges, ‘words were so important to them’4 that they were surely in the right place, Macaulay’s prophetic poem being followed in the 1920s by the rise of I.A. Richards.

Writing in Slang To-day and Yesterday (1933) on the influence of the war on the English language, Eric Partridge asserted ‘it is a rather significant fact that the War induced, in many countries, a desire to “smash things up,” but this violent tendency only occasionally translated itself into action. Nevertheless, as is best, such violence must out: and, curiously enough, it spent itself in the destroying of tradition by the coining of new words and phrases, usually of a slangy nature’.5 The war, he believed, had made ‘vital and important’ (124) a course that culminated in shifts of meaning, but this process had not ended with the war itself, nor with its adult witnesses and survivors: ‘the post-War generation has … contributed their quota’ (124). This post-war generation, a generation in fact caught between two wars, were certainly as eager as their elders to ‘smash things up’ in the aftermath of the Great War. They zealously engaged in the destruction of tradition, sometimes by coining new words and phrases, but more often by reconfiguring existing words through variations in tones and rhythms, in an attempt to construct modern social identities.

In Lions and Shadows (1938) Isherwood recalls how effortlessly he and Upward (Allen Chalmers) were able to achieve intense effects with just such methods during the exchanges that would come to characterise their time as undergraduates, forming the basis for the shared fantasy world – initially an ‘Other Town’ secreted within Cambridge itself, later Mortmere, a village on the Atlantic coast – that spawned their early writings:

The mere tones of Chalmers’ voice would start me giggling in anticipation, and I had only to pronounce some quite ordinary word with special emphasis in order to send him into fits. We were each other’s ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us.6

Isherwood emphasises the ‘ordinary’ nature of his vocabulary: he elicits a particular response by variations in emphasis, tone and context, rather than by using an entirely new word. Still, anybody eavesdropping on the pair might have been tempted to assert ‘we just don’t speak the same language’, and this is amongst the reasons why Keywords provides a useful model for a reading of their early works. Williams states that the words he selected for inclusion in Keywords were chosen not because they appeared unique or strange in themselves, but because they did not. They gained his attention when he ‘saw or heard them being used in quite general discussions in what seemed … interesting or difficult ways’ (14).

For young writers like Upward and Isherwood, during a period of change as profound as that of the interwar years in Britain, sensitivity to the nuances of seemingly simple words (and an ability to exploit those nuances) was vital for the construction of modern identities. It has been easy in the past for critics such as Valentine Cunningham to suggest that because Upward sometimes deploys the ‘private language of the prep school’7 in his early writings, he and his protagonists are no more than overgrown schoolboys equipped with the values appropriate to that class:

It was a way of avoiding being altogether serious about serious things. And a way of coping with grown-ups in an ungrown-up way that Old Boys from the same kind of nursery … would understand. They’d all been shaped by the same sort of nursery reading which they hadn’t, it seems, grown out of and which they allowed to go on defining for them the shape of the adult world. (141)

Cunningham fails to acknowledge two significant factors here. The first – that the language he so repudiates is emphatically not a youth vocabulary but a vocabulary coined by adults in an attempt to impose their own standards on youth – is intimately connected to the second: that it is not ‘nursery reading’ itself that shaped these writers but their responses to such reading. Cunningham mistakenly assumes that writers of the interwar generation themselves deploy the terms and phrases of the preparatory and public school exactly as they encountered them there – that is, parrot-fashion, with the same intended meaning. In light of Judith Butler’s work on identity and the performative, however, such readings seem incredibly reductive. Butler asserts that human identity ‘is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’.8 The speech act is one of the most important of these repeated stylisations, and thus, though it might once have been commonplace to assume that people use certain words in certain ways because of who they are, in fact, they are who they are because of the ways in which they use certain words. Deborah Cameron elaborates on the implications of Butler’s work, figuring men and women as conscious agents, ‘active producers’ able to ‘engage in acts of transgression, subversion and resistance’ as they construct their own identities.9

I would suggest that, in their Cambridge writings, Upward and Isherwood shape unique identities for themselves by engaging in linguistic ‘acts of transgression, subversion and resistance’. By shifting critical focus from the ‘private language’10 Cunningham identifies to the pair’s manipulation of the everyday words associated with, but not confined to, 1920s educative life – to the phrase ‘play the game’ and to terms like ‘sport’, ‘team’ and ‘spirit’ – we might redefine the friends as maturing conscious agents actively producing and reinforcing their own social, political and sexual identities.

Prefacing An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921), Ernest Weekley defended his inclusion of slang terms, asserting, ‘in the past the slang of one generation has often become the literary language of the next, and the manners which distinguish contemporary life suggest that this will be still more frequently the case in the future.’11 He might almost have had the phrase ‘play the game’ in mind. A euphemism – that is, as Partridge puts it, a term or phrase that supposedly ‘acts as a sedative’ in order to avoid ‘all such unpleasant reactions as might reasonably be expected to ensue on the evocation of certain ideas’ (15) – imported from the sports-field, the idiom was utilised by schoolmasters intent on instilling honour, duty and discipline in the young. Precipitated by the public-school ‘cult of athleticism’ championed in works such as Thomas Hughes’s open love-letter to educator Thomas Arnold – the novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) – the phrase was turned to literary use in Henry Newbolt’s now infamous Boer War poem ‘Vitai Lampada’ (1892).

The poem was penned by Newbolt in a fit of nostalgia for his old school, Clifton College, and served as a tribute to English patriotism. Relying on a combination of simple rhythm and repetition for its mnemonic effect, it was seized upon by educators during the Great War. Its first stanza is indicative:

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –

Ten to make and the match to win –

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in.

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –

‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’12

Newbolt turned a slang expression of his father’s generation to poetic use, but there his innovativeness ceased, articulating as ‘Vitai Lampada’ does the same sentiments with which that generation had invested the expression. He did not question the ethical validity of the euphemism and the poem became a means of teaching loyalty, discipline and above all, ‘how to die violently, but properly’.13

Repeated ad nauseam the phrase – and its attendant vocabulary – had lost much of its ‘sedative’ effect by the time it reached the younger schoolboys of the Great War. Questioned tentatively by writers who saw action during the war, such as Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth (1917), the phraseology and the motivations of its disseminators come under greater scrutiny in the work of Upward and his contemporaries. In his autobiography Stephen Spender recalls the paralysing fear it engendered on the football pitch: ‘A game of football ceased to be just the kicking about of a leather ball by bare-kneed boys. It had become confused with the Battle of Life. Honour, Integrity, Discipline, Toughness and a dozen other qualities haunted the field like ghostly footballers.’14 Isherwood notes in Lions and Shadows that for him such talk inspired contempt: ‘I had arrived at my public school thoroughly sick of masters and mistresses, having been emotionally messed about by them at my preparatory school, where the war years had given full licence to every sort of dishonest cant about loyalty, selfishness, patriotism, playing the game and dishonouring the dead’ (12–...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Edward Upward – A Chronology
• Writing of the Struggle: An Introduction to Edward Upward’s Life and Works
• 1 Playing Up: Edward Upward in Cambridge and Beyond
• 2 In the Thirties: Upward, Literature and Politics
• 3 Modalities of Thirties Writing and Writers: The Case of Edward Upward
• 4 ‘Only degradation and slavery?’: The Figure of the Teacher in the Writing of Edward Upward
• 5 Radical Eccentricity and Post-war Ordinariness
• 6 ‘History will not always be living here’: Edward Upward’s Comic Historiographies
• 7 The Post-war Künstlerroman: Edward Upward and Henry Williamson Taking Themselves Seriously
• 8 Upward’s Later Stories, Modernist Intimacy and the Marxist Unmentionable
• 9 Edward Upward and the Critique of Everyday Late Life
• 10 ‘Walkers, not marchers’: The Scope of Walking in Upward’s Late Fiction
• 11 Edward Upward’s Remains
• Bibliography
• Index