Edward Upward's Complete Works Now Available for Electronic Download

I was delighted to see that relatives of the late Marxist writer Edward Upward have put together a superb commemorative website, which provides a definitive source of data and information connected to Edward Upward.

The writer fully acknowledges with gratitude material provided in the piece below derived from the Edward Upward website described. I wrote earlier at the time of Edward death about my connection with him and my great regard for his work HERE

Of particular interest to readers of 'Unrepentant Communist' will be the opportunity to download in its entirety 'the Spiral Ascent' dialectical triad of novels, set in the period of the 1930's, 1940's, and the 1950's and early 1960s. Charting the developments both artistically and politically surrounding the Communist teacher and writer Alan Sebbrill. Picture above the Battle of Cable street, antifascist activity is described in wonderful detail in the first section of the triad, 'In the Thirties'.

You can access the Spiral Ascent and download in its entirety electronically here

Edward Upward was a writer of novels and short stories from the 1920s until into the present century. His literary associates included Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Upward's early and late stories often involve a fantastical element, whilst his trilogy of novels The Spiral Ascent recalls the events and atmosphere of his overlapping literary, political and educational worlds. The question of how art should relate to real life and, more specifically, how a socialist can combine artistic creativity with political commitment, is central to his mature work.

Although The Spiral Ascent is not strictly autobiographical, most of the characters and incidents in it are very similar to real-life counterparts, with Alan and Elsie being based on Upward and his wife Hilda, and Richard on Isherwood. One of the obvious divergences from reality is that Alan is a poet in the book rather than a writer of prose.

In the Thirties recounts Alan Sebrill's attempts to write and find love, his personal crisis, and then his involvement in the Communist Party, his job as a teacher and his marriage to Elsie. The opening chapter by the seaside sees the young writers Alan and Richard glorying in language and nature but also deliberately making contact with 'the so-called lower classes'. This may seem strange until the reader realises that they have had the same isolated, privileged upbringing as the 'poshocrats' they despise. Later in the book we find Alan sometimes fighting to suppress some lingering snobbish attitudes, but he doesn't waver in his commitment to the side of the workers.

Later chapters give a vivid picture of the activities of CP members, including opposition to Oswald Mosley's blackshirts and routine leafleting. Upward is not afraid to put the opinions of the time into Alan's mouth without the benefit of hindsight, including those showing his ignorance of the extent of Stalin's crimes. He thus provides a truthful account of the events, atmosphere and his own feelings of the 1930s. This is one of the most notable achievements of the trilogy, and one which is partly a result of Upward retaining his revolutionary politics. Many writers about the period who were on the left in the thirties moved to the right during the Cold War and easily fell into cynicism or opposition to their earlier ideas, whereas Upward is still able to recognize the genuine motivations and positive results of the actions of ordinary CP members despite the effects of Stalinism on the Party. The final chapter closes shortly before the war begins, with comrades on a walk in the country, and includes what is effectively a prose ode to trees, reflecting Upward's own love of the natural world as well as his observational and descriptive powers.

Whereas In the Thirties has Alan and Elsie going along with the Party's condemnation of a dissident member, the subject of The Rotten Elements is their own disagreement with the Party's post-war policy in Britain, which they believe is a reformist betrayal of Leninism. This involves them in a theoretical confrontation with the Party leadership in which their reasoned arguments are arrogantly dismissed. The novel soon begins to take on some of the colouring of a political thriller. There is good cause for paranoia given both the hostility of the Party leadership and state surveillance, although Elsie has a more level-headed reaction to events than Alan, who has a tendency to emphasize the ominous.

Upward's intermittent discussion of religion in the trilogy features strongly in The Rotten Elements, where Alan and Elsie are shown having conversations with their children about Christianity and a Communist ex-minister plays a prominent part. Whilst Alan sometimes compares his attitudes to those of a religious person, he has long been an atheist and does not impute any religious aspect to Marxism itself.

In the final volume of the trilogy, No Home But the Struggle, Alan (like Upward as he was writing) has retired from teaching and is able to write full-time. The narration is now in the first person and the book is full of reminiscences of Alan's childhood and university days, told in a relaxed, Proustian manner. These are interspersed with accounts of Alan and Elsie's political activities in the post-war decades, particularly as members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But the dominant thread, as throughout The Spiral Ascent, is Alan's ongoing struggle to write poetry which will be both artistically truthful and contribute to the fight for a better world.

Edward Upward- Farewell to a Gentle Man.

I wish to say farewell to the writer, teacher, and communist Edward Upward who has died recently in Pontefract at the remarkable age of 105, which adds further to my theory that all these active politically committed comrades seem to have quite long lives . I see that there have been a number of serious obituaries about him most notably the one in The Times. There has also been a good obituary to Edward in The Guardian , one that deals with his political commitment with the greatest clarity is that which appears in the Morning Star

I wish to merely record how it was in rather bizarre circumstances that my path crossed with that of Edward Upward. The remarkable thing was that the day that I met him 1981 I had just the previous night finished reading the third volume of the dialectical triad 'The Spiral Ascent' so it was rather like finding oneself talking face to face with the main character from the book that you have just finished reading, which was a little surreal, I also met his wife Hilda who is of course a key figure in the novels, which does not try too hard to pretend that the characters are all fictional, it is clear that the three volumes, 'In the Thirties' 'The Rotten Elements' and 'No Home but the Struggle' were all pretty close to auto-biographical.
Anyway I was selling a quire of the Morning Star in Kings Heath high street in Birmingham with a girlfriend and comrade. I was approached by a well spoken elderly man in navy blue corduroy cap, who stood looking at me and said after a while...'I used to do that a lot'...fearing he was a'nutter' or at best a current opponent , I ignored him...He repeated the comment and added "my wife and I used to do that an awful lot you know"...convinced now that he was indeed 'a nutter' of some sort I asked him what he was on about and he started to chuckle..I then realised he was having a bit of sport with me..'selling the Daily Worker of course, you two remind me so much of us at that age'..Well a conversation commenced and I as it happened just happened to mention that I had just finished reading an excellent triad of novels about life in the CPGB in the 30's and 40's which I supposed, he being an elderly former CP member might find of interest. He started to laugh once again and said...'really now what were those books called?' and asked me to tell him more about them. At length I twigged that he knew about them and in a while he revealed that he was the author, this was getting very very bizarre.... He invited us back to his son's house 'for tea and cakes', his son was a lecturer at Birmingham and is since sadly now deceased also . I was charmed by Edward Upward's gentle humour and his wonderful diction and beautifully precise speech. I was also fascinated by his life story and his encyclopedic experience of the literary world. He told a hilarious tale about going to the Woolfs home in Bloomsbury for a meal and to be given his cheque for a contribution he had written for their journal. Virginia instructed hubby to draw up the cheque but Upward recalled, ' it visibly pained him, and his hand shook and his face was agonised as he slowly drew out the cheque, at long last, reluctantly handing it to me before I left for home'...he also recollected his close association with the likes of Auden, and Spender, the latter he was scathing about for his political conversion to the right and his association with a CIA sponsored magazine in his latter years. Christopher Isherwood he spoke of with great warmth though. On another occasion I, forgetting precisiely his age, asked him had he known Burgess or Philby et al..he said ' oh no...I had long left Cambridge before they came up'...a comment which emphasised to me his extraordinary longevity...he was already the senior member of the group consisting of Auden, Spender and Isherwood at that stage and they regarded him as THEIR mentor. I am glad to say, that with the exception of a gap in the 1990's which was my fault, we maintained contact until he moved to Pontefract from his beloved Isle of Wight. He liked greatly the retrospective of his life which I wrote about him in in the Morning Star,which I was particularly pleased succeeded in appearing on his 100th birthday, He joked to me that it felt a little like a sort of 'rehabilitation'. He would talk at length about a wide range of subjects, and never lost the political edge that his grasp of Marxism and Leninism afforded him.He was convinced that the US 'empire' was in terminal decline, drawing parallels in his conversations with me to the fate of the Roman Empire. He had an utter contempt for Tony Blair, who he referred to only as 'Toady Blair'..I thought at first that he had a slight head cold when he said this first , but after the joke was repeated a number of times, I realised it was not just a humorous play on words but a studied insult that he delighted in.
The last thing he asked me to do was to take down a message from him to be written into the memorial book on his behalf at the visitors book at the museum to the International Brigade in Spain, which I did. I was honoured to have met him, I am pleased that I will be able to continue to read his wonderful novels and short stories long after his passing...I am convinced that his stature as a writer will continue to grow long after his death, I also believe that much of the negative criticism of his literature was in fact a literary and critical form of political opposition to his chosen form of creativity, and of course a dismissal and a contemptuous dismissal at that, of any attempt to employ the socialist realist or written documentary form. A dismissal that was primarily political in its motivation, in reaction of course to the profoundly political issues raised by his writings and his aesthetic sensibilities themselves. Whilst he did indeed suffer from writers block, it is wrong to ascribe this to his embracing of Marxism. On the contrary in the conversations I had with him he was always clear that it had been his political commitment which had saved him from the powerlessness which could so easily, he knew, slump into depression.Upward related that, "in those days, even using the word 'capitalism' was enough to damn you, so not much was said. But I carried on my political work in the evenings selling the Daily Worker, and politics was my salvation. I was miserable and couldn't have borne the life of a teacher without it."

My memories of him are warm, he contributed something of value to my life, and I am grateful to him for that, he allowed me to understand some of my own feelings about the nature of political commitment, and how it can be redemptive, he was most interested when I told him that I was very struck by the phrase he created as the title of his third novel 'No Home But the Struggle' since I felt that it rang a chord with me, he knew exactly what Iwas driving at. I fear that so many of the literary critics will never really understand that sentiment either, since it is in fact alien to their own experience. I believe that he is home now. SALUD!