Melville House Books

Edward Upward (1903-2009)

Edward Upward, “the last living link was broken to writers like Isherwood, W.H Auden and Stephen Spender who shaped English literature in the 1930s,” has died in Pontefract, England at the age of 105. As a New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin observes, with Christopher Isherwood he wrote a series of silly and fantastic stories — one was called “The Leviathan of the Urinals” — about an imaginary place called Mortmere mostly to amuse each other, but found that the writings would become influential amongst their increasingly well-known friends. “I shall never know how much in these poems is filched from you via Christopher,” Auden once wrote to him. Upward published a novel with Virginia and Leonard Woolf‘s Hogarth Press in 1938, but published relatively little, even though some of his stories became legendary on the underground circuit. And often enough, what he chose to write was about his politcal passion — he was an ardent communist, even for too long, a defender of Stalinism. Nonetheless, an obituary in The Times of London “one of the last century’s most distinctive writers of English prose,” with a “descriptive mastery and talent for creating dreamlike fantasy.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.