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: âI had been away only four and a half years, but in the movements of war had lost touch with all my university friends.â1 This loss was most palpably exemplified by the ânew and strangeâ (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 âthe same languageâ he explains with the clarity of hindsight:
When we come to say âwe just donât speak the same languageâ 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 âcertain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changedâ (12). Though in many situations this process may take decades to make itself evident, Williams asserts from experience that in âa large and active university, and in a period of change as important as a war, the process can seem unusually rapid and consciousâ (12).
Williams was not the first to detect the impact of war on the pace and palpability of a languageâs 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 âCambridgeâ (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 â or, more properly, with meanings â is inherently Cantabrigian: âWhile Oxford produces successions of prime ministers and literary putsches, Cambridge asks âWhat exactly do you mean?â and is prepared, if necessary, to spend a lifetime finding out.â3 The evidence of the 1920s alone â the decade that saw Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood go up to Corpus Christi to read History â 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 cityâs 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 â after Isherwood joined him in October 1923 â of the pairâs conversations, was focused squarely on the university authorities. And yet, as was becoming clear from these inventive exchanges, âwords were so important to themâ4 that they were surely in the right place, Macaulayâs 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 âit is a rather significant fact that the War induced, in many countries, a desire to âsmash things up,â 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 natureâ.5 The war, he believed, had made âvital and importantâ (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: âthe post-War generation has ⌠contributed their quotaâ (124). This post-war generation, a generation in fact caught between two wars, were certainly as eager as their elders to âsmash things upâ 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 â initially an âOther Townâ secreted within Cambridge itself, later Mortmere, a village on the Atlantic coast â that spawned their early writings:
The mere tones of Chalmersâ 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 otherâs ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us.6
Isherwood emphasises the âordinaryâ 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 âwe just donât speak the same languageâ, 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 âsaw or heard them being used in quite general discussions in what seemed ⌠interesting or difficult waysâ (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 âprivate language of the prep schoolâ7 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. Theyâd all been shaped by the same sort of nursery reading which they hadnât, 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 â 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 â is intimately connected to the second: that it is not ânursery readingâ 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 â that is, parrot-fashion, with the same intended meaning. In light of Judith Butlerâs work on identity and the performative, however, such readings seem incredibly reductive. Butler asserts that human identity âis 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 beingâ.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 Butlerâs work, figuring men and women as conscious agents, âactive producersâ able to âengage in acts of transgression, subversion and resistanceâ 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 âacts of transgression, subversion and resistanceâ. By shifting critical focus from the âprivate languageâ10 Cunningham identifies to the pairâs manipulation of the everyday words associated with, but not confined to, 1920s educative life â to the phrase âplay the gameâ and to terms like âsportâ, âteamâ and âspiritâ â 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, âin 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.â11 He might almost have had the phrase âplay the gameâ in mind. A euphemism â that is, as Partridge puts it, a term or phrase that supposedly âacts as a sedativeâ in order to avoid âall such unpleasant reactions as might reasonably be expected to ensue on the evocation of certain ideasâ (15) â 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 âcult of athleticismâ championed in works such as Thomas Hughesâs open love-letter to educator Thomas Arnold â the novel Tom Brownâs School Days (1857) â the phrase was turned to literary use in Henry Newboltâs now infamous Boer War poem âVitai Lampadaâ (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:
Thereâs a breathless hush in the Close to-night â
Ten to make and the match to win â
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And itâs not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a seasonâs fame,
But his Captainâs hand on his shoulder smote â
âPlay up! play up! and play the game!â12
Newbolt turned a slang expression of his fatherâs generation to poetic use, but there his innovativeness ceased, articulating as âVitai Lampadaâ 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, âhow to die violently, but properlyâ.13
Repeated ad nauseam the phrase â and its attendant vocabulary â had lost much of its âsedativeâ 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: âA 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.â14 Isherwood notes in Lions and Shadows that for him such talk inspired contempt: âI 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 deadâ (12â...