I missed this article when it first appeared in May, but I must say it made nostalgic reading on this damp Saturday night. In it, Christopher tells of his trip to the Isle of Wight "a decade or so ago" to meet Edward Upward (not exactly a household name, but a talented if under-appreciated British novelist), who would have been coming up to his century at that time. Upward was born on 9 September 2003 and died on 13 February 2009. Back in the old days he was a mate of Isherwood's Auden's and Spender's. Hitch admires Upward's anti-fascism while sniggering a little at his lifelong Stalinism and his admiration for Arthur Scargill. Indeed, the Preening Popinjay's judgement is final and damning: "his career was forever warped by his communism." Still, nobody's perfect.
In a vicarage-style house not far from the railway station in the small town of Sandown, Upward received me and led me to a side room. He explained without loss of time that the main rooms of the little home were out of bounds because his wife, Hilda, was in the process of dying there. “I shall miss Hilda,” he said with the brisk matter-of-factness of the materialist, “but I have promised her that I shall go on writing.” Attired in gray flannel trousers, a corduroy jacket, and a V-neck jersey, he reminded me of something so obvious that I didn’t immediately recognize it. On a table lay the Morning Star, the daily newspaper of the Stalinist rump organization that survived the British Communist Party’s decision to dissolve itself after the implosion of the Soviet Union. It is entirely possible that Upward was the paper’s sole subscriber on this islet of thatched cottages and stained glass and theme-park rural Englishness. Seeing me notice the old rag, he said, rather defensively, “Yes I still take it, though there doesn’t seem much hope these days.” When I asked him if there was anyone on the left he still admired, he cited Arthur Scargill, the coal miners’ thuggish leader, who was known to connoisseurs as the most ouvriériste and sectarian and demagogic of the anti-Blair forces in the Labour movement. Yet to this alarming opinion he appended the shy and disarming news that the last review he had had in the Morning Star had been a good one, precisely because it stressed that not all his work was strictly political. “It particularly mentioned my story ‘The White-Pinafored Black Cat.’” I inquired if he was working on a story at that moment. “Yes I am.” “And may one know the title?” “It’s to be called ‘The World Revolution.’” At this point and in this context, I began to find the word surreal recurring to my mind.
Surrealism apart, Hitchens is fair to the old codger where it suits his own purposes and dismissive where it doesn't. Upward shocked Hitch by remaining faithful to his youthful communist ideals much as John Anderson and Melanie Safka still retain a recognizable hippy ambiance. Consequently, he failed to share a slew of Christopher's most preciously held views, which must have been a disappointment. But he did satisfy in one major way. Back in the early thirties, he was as quick off the mark as George Orwell in seeing through the fascists.
In one respect of “realism,” though, Upward deserves great praise. It is a deplorable fact that the English literature of the 1930s contains scarcely a mention of the phenomenon of fascism. Anthony Powell’s long excursion through the upper crust doesn’t turn up a single Blackshirt (something of a shortcoming in point of verisimilitude, as he might have phrased it). Evelyn Waugh avoids the subject. Graham Greene’s fascists are not English. But for Upward, especially in his first volume of The Spiral Ascent, the miasma of fascism is in the very air that his characters breathe, and a direct clash with the Blackshirts conveys the intense and local reality that this force sometimes possessed in Britain. Upward at least faced what many shied away from.
Not being up to Mastermind level on English literature of the 1930s, I can't take issue with Hitch's claim. Whether or not Orwell employed the wor "Blackshirts" in his work before 1940, the spirit of anti-Blackshirtism pervades his work from The Road to Wigan Pier onwards. But for a definitive 1930s fictional English Blackshirt, we need look no further than P.G. Wodehouse's redoubtable Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, clandestine lingerie designer and leader of the Black Shorts, who is instantly recognizable as a Spitting Image caricature of Sir Oswald Moseley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, who hit my father on the head with a brick during the Battle of Cable Street, instantly converting him into a lifelong socialist. There are some aesthetes out there who contend that whatever else he may be Wodehouse is not not English literature. But Christopher is surely above such snobbery.
Somebody else who has some heartwarming reminiscences about Edward Upward is the blogger Gabriel at The Unrepentant Communist. He also has some excellent words about political commitment that will doubtless sound quaint or even surreal to the likes of Mr.Hitchens, who, I think it's fair to say, is no stranger to treason in either the political or the personal realm.
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 precisely 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.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
”
