Edward Upward

• Name — Edward Upward • Born — 9 September 1903 • Birthplace — Romford, Essex, England • Died — 13 February 2009 • Place of death — Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England • Education — Corpus Christi College, Cambridge • Period — 1920–2003 • Occupation — Writer, schoolteacher

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; 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 Repton School, where he became a close friend of Christopher Isherwood in the sixth form. Upward's first published material appeared in the school magazine, The Reptonian, in February 1920. From 1922 to 1925 he attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, reading History and then English. After the arrival of Isherwood in Cambridge in 1923 the two created the surreal town of Mortmere, an obscene parody and repudiation of the various upper-class characters they encountered at the university. Upward was awarded Cambridge's Chancellor's Medal for English Verse in 1924, for his poem "Buddha". Through Isherwood Upward met and befriended W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender; his first meeting with Auden was at a café in Soho in 1927.

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." 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. On 13 February 2009 Upward died of a chest infection at a care home in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, where he had relocated in 2004 to be close to his daughter. He was 105 years old. 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.

• 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)

• 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.

• 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).