2009 ‘We were the 1930s’, boasted Stephen Spender. If so, the decade ended with the death of Edward Upward on this day, six decades later. Although he was not included in Roy Campbell’s satirical collective name ‘MacSpaunday’ (Louis Macneice, Spender, W.H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis) Upward was, through his connection and collaborative writing efforts with Christopher Isherwood, one of what Spender called ‘the gang’ (unironically – it was the era of Prohibition and Al Capone). As Spender wrote to one of the gang’s outriders, the publisher John Lehman, in 1931:
There are four or five friends who work together, although they are not all known to each other. They are W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward and I … Whatever one of us does in writing, travelling or taking jobs is a kind of exploration which may be taken up by the others.
Unlike the others Spender mentions (and John Lehman), Upward was not gay. He married, very happily, in 1936. Unlike his fellow gangsters, Upward took up a career as a public school teacher, sticking at it for the whole length of his career (Spender and Auden dabbled, but found the classroom uncongenial). And Upward, a card-carrying member of the Communist party after 1932, brought a Marxist stringency to the ‘gang’. A contemporary of Isherwood’s at Cambridge, Upward wrote with him a series of squibs and satires set in the imaginary village of Mortmere.
Despite loyal attempts by his fellow gangsters to promote his fiction, Upward’s novels (half of which came out in the last fifteen years of his life) were all politely received but made no great impact. He resigned from the Communist party (which he regarded as having become soft in its ideology) in 1948. Widowed, and having outlived all his fellow gangsters, he lived out the last decades of his life on the Isle of Wight, a living monument to the Thirties which – like MacSpaunday – he never really left.