Up and down

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

The Railway Accident Edward Upward I Heinemann 35s) The Rotten Elements Edward Upward (Heinemann 30s) Until 1962, when the first part of his trilogy In the Thirties (now republished by Pen- guin 6s) appeared, Edward Upward was known to the general public as a rather shadowy eminence grise 'behind' Isher- wood, Auden and Spender, and as Allen Chalmers of Isherwood's autobiographical Lions and Shadows. Upward had published four stories in the 'thirties and two more in the 'forties; these, and the novella, Journey to the Border (published by the Hogarth Press in 1938), are now collected together in The Railway Accident, and issued sim- ultaneously with the second part of the trilogy, 'a novel of fact', The Rotten Ele- ments.

The Railway Accident, which has a val- uable introduction by W. H. Sellers, is a remarkable collection, and the most re- markable part of it is the title story. As readers of Lions and Shadows will know, Isherwood and Upward invented together a 'mad' village called Montmere, which Isherwood called 'a sort of anarchist para- dise in which all accepted moral and social values were turned upside down .. . It was our private place of retreat from the rules and conventions of university life'. In 'The Railway Accident'—the only one of the Mortmere pieces which has been published —the narrator, Hearn, is looking forward to a vacation in Mortmere, to which he is going by train. This journey turns into a comic nightmare.

Its ingredients will be familiar to those who have read The Orators and the early Isherwood-Auden verse-dramas; but it has a power and inner coherence that these works never achieved, and which is hardly to be found outside the pages of Kafka. Much of its effect is gained by the appli- cation of a quietly realistic style to the fantastic material: 'The Railway Accident' has the status of a dream, and, like many works of genius, it has deep sociological significance, in that it aptly and terrifyingly sums up the difficulties of being young, creative and intelligent at the time it was written (1928).

The product of an intelligent game, and of a stereotyped conflict between political activism and poetic quietism, it quite transcends the rules (or non-rules) of that game, and the commonplaceness of the conflict. Such prose as this is individual in quality, highly original, and by no means adequately dismissed as lantasy'—Up- ward's own term for it later on: `Up the bleached gravel drive, oppressed by ink-dark trees. Lilac bifurcated past the windscreen in perfumes of wan blue gauze. Odours of chimes of croquet hoops. tango of views of choirboys through the rustling privet. A lawn-mower wove its rainbow

fountain among imagined rock and fern. Shreeve had fainted. The front door was held open by the brass head of a fox. Summer mildly billowed into a hall shadowy as a cave where Welken's geo- graphical globes faded beneath clusters of hats. A rubber ball struck one of the windows.'

The other stories in The Railway Acci- dent are less successful; but all of them,

even 'Journey to the Border, into which dogma intrudes, bear the marks of a major writer, with an extraordinarily intelligent mastery of his material. Had 'The Railway Accident' appeared in 1928, few critics would have failed to predict that its writer

had a future; it would have seemed in- evitable. Clearly Upward had not only a rich and wild imagination, but also he saw what he was writing about—and he could exercise an iron control.

Upward became a dedicated Communist, and throughout the 'thirties and 'forties published little apart from 'Journey to the Border' (1938) and a 'Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature', which appear-

ed in a collection, The Mind in Chains:

Socialism and the Cultural Revolution (1937), edited by the present Poet Laur- eate. This is a dreary reiteration of the party line: `no modern book can be true to life unless it recognises, more or less clearly, the decadence of present-day society and the inevitability of revolution.' It contains no trace of subtlety or humour, and all too

clearly foreshadows the method and style of In the Thirties and The Rotten Elements, upon which Upward presumably worked during the 'fifties and 'sixties.

The trilogy is the story of Alan Sebrill, and In the Thirties begins where Isher-

wood left his friend Allen Chalmers—in the Isle of Wight. It tells of Sebrill's diffi- culties with his poetry and his pursuit of 'the Poetic Life'. After Sebrill's realisation that his poetry is no good, he returns to London, takes up teaching, joins the Com-

munist party, and marries. The Rotten Elements describes Sebrill's and his wife's disillusionment with the British Communist

party's post-war policy of limited cooper- ation with the Labour government (they called such deviants as Sebrill 'the rotten elements'), and with Sebrill's own struggles to reconcile 'the Poetic Life' with his rigid Marxism. Eventually he leaves the party; but the concluding book, Upward states, will describe how 'before the end of the 1960s, he is able to be politically active as a Marxist once again'.

Both novels are autobiographical, and should have been written as autobiography.

For the dialogue is absurdly stilted, and the conventional omniscient approach is embarrassingly painful. John Lehmann, who had previously stated that Upward gave 'evidence of an imaginative gift . . . the fate of which one will never cease to mourn, slowly killed in the Iron Maiden of Marxist dogma', took the charitable view that In the Thirties was humorous, and that Sebrill's pompous solemnities were Upward's ironic self-appraisal.

Alas, that this is not so is demonstrated in its sequel. Upward's own imaginative gift as revealed in 'The Railway Accident' is turned into the sterile concept of 'the Poetic Life': Sebrill continually worries about whether his poetic inspiration will in any way compromise with bourgeois ethics; -consequently he sits trying `to con- ceive a poem; 'he cannot get over his guilt at having been born into the middle classes. and this guilt stultifies all that is mysterious or surprising in him.

All this is painfully honest. But it is pitifully inadequate as fiction (or auto- biography) because it never for one moment faces the real nature of Sebrill's creative gift--which is, of course, the 'deviationism' exhibited in 'The Railway Accident'. In the interests of a sterile dog- matism, Upward is guilty of transforming Sebrill's creativity into a lucubrated—and incidentally, extremely bourgeois—parody of what creativity really is.

It may be humanly reprehensible to be a supporter of the semi-literate gangsters who now run Russia in the name of Com- munism; it is certainly not intellectually or emotionally reprehensible to be a Marxist or a quasi-Marxist. But Upward's rigorous Leninist-Marxism is quite deliberately un- subtle a secular religion: Sebrill is pre- sented throughout —pace Lehmann—as a sympathetic and intelligent person, and not as a neurotically ruined literary genius. This is valuable as an account of how drastically Marxist dogma could and can limit the thinking of a shrewd and gifted man. But think what it might have been if it revealed why such men allow them- selves to be so limited—if the capacities of 'The Railway Accident' had been applied to this grim material!

One can only surmise that the richness of Upward's genius was too much for him; that he needed a savage censor, and that. rationalising his passion for justice and equality, he turned to the Communist party (the ludicrousness of the British section of which he. unlike the Russians, never seems to have realised). The result is dismaying. For we never get a sense of such notions as justice or equality from these novels; only one of a man sacrificing himself to his inferiors—of a man continually modi- fying all that is new and exciting by apply- ing to it the rigid letter of the Leninist law. Upward has deliberately withdrawn every gift he has, to produce the most tragically inept work of this century.