Playing Up: Edward Upward in Cambridge and Beyond

Chapter 1 Playing Up: Edward Upward in Cambridge and Beyond Charlotte Charteris Introducing Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Raymond Williams describes the difficulties he encountered in settling back down to life at a Cambridge college after serving in World War II: ‘I had been away only four and a half years, but in the movements of war had lost touch with all my university friends.’1 This loss was most palpably exemplified by the ‘new and strange’ (11) meanings those around him had begun to attach to words that he had previously considered relatively stable signifiers. Recalling the growing feeling that he and those surrounding him were no longer speaking ‘the same language’ he explains with the clarity of hindsight: Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. (11) What we witness is a process in which, through ‘certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed’ (12). Though in many situations this process may take decades to make itself evident, Williams asserts from experience that in ‘a large and active university, and in a period of change as important as a war, the process can seem unusually rapid and conscious’ (12). Williams was not the first to detect the impact of war on the pace and palpability of a language’s development with particular reference to university life. The Great War had prompted a fundamental reassessment of the value of language by a generation who, if not so well placed as Williams to analyse and codify their observations, were at least determined to record them. A frequent visitor to Cambridge during and immediately after World War I, Rose Macaulay figured the evident divide between newly-returned veteran undergraduates and their slightly younger civilian counterparts as a keenly linguistic phenomenon in her poem ‘Cambridge’ (1919): 1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev. edn, London: Flamingo, 1983; repr. London: Fontana, 1988), p. 11. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. 20 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. They shall speak kindly one to another, Across gulfs of space. But they shall speak with alien tongues, Each an alien race. They shall find no meeting place, No common speech at all; And the years between, like mocking owls, Shall hoot and call.2 Indeed, Graham Chainey has suggested that this preoccupation with meaning – or, more properly, with meanings – is inherently Cantabrigian: ‘While Oxford produces successions of prime ministers and literary putsches, Cambridge asks “What exactly do you mean?” and is prepared, if necessary, to spend a lifetime finding out.’3 The evidence of the 1920s alone – the decade that saw Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood go up to Corpus Christi to read History – strongly supports this assertion. Fiercely exclusive school friends, Upward and Isherwood arrived from Repton for the Cambridge entrance exams early in 1922, in a mood of black suspicion exacerbated by the city’s seasonal gloom. Both won scholarships, but by the time Upward started at the university later that year, their macabre apprehensions and resentment at being separated had only increased. The invective of his letters, and – after Isherwood joined him in October 1923 – of the pair’s conversations, was focused squarely on the university authorities. And yet, as was becoming clear from these inventive exchanges, ‘words were so important to them’4 that they were surely in the right place, Macaulay’s prophetic poem being followed in the 1920s by the rise of I.A. Richards. Writing in Slang To-day and Yesterday (1933) on the influence of the war on the English language, Eric Partridge asserted ‘it is a rather significant fact that the War induced, in many countries, a desire to “smash things up,” but this violent tendency only occasionally translated itself into action. Nevertheless, as is best, such violence must out: and, curiously enough, it spent itself in the destroying of tradition by the coining of new words and phrases, usually of a slangy nature’.5 The war, he believed, had made ‘vital and important’ (124) a course that culminated in shifts of meaning, but this process had not ended with the war itself, nor with its adult witnesses and survivors: ‘the post-War generation has … contributed their quota’ (124). This post-war generation, a generation in fact caught between two wars, were certainly as eager as their elders to ‘smash things up’ in the aftermath of 2 Rose Macaulay, ‘Cambridge’, in Rose Macaulay, Three Days (London: Constable, 1919), p. 44. 3 Graham Chainey, A Literary History of Cambridge (Cambridge: Pevensey, 1985), p. 238. 4 Katherine Bucknell, ‘Introduction’, in Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, The Mortmere Stories, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 11. 5 Eric Partridge, Slang To-day and Yesterday: With a Short Historical Sketch and Vocabularies of English, American and Australian Slang (London: Routledge, 1933), p. 124. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Playing Up 21 the Great War. They zealously engaged in the destruction of tradition, sometimes by coining new words and phrases, but more often by reconfiguring existing words through variations in tones and rhythms, in an attempt to construct modern social identities. In Lions and Shadows (1938) Isherwood recalls how effortlessly he and Upward (Allen Chalmers) were able to achieve intense effects with just such methods during the exchanges that would come to characterise their time as undergraduates, forming the basis for the shared fantasy world – initially an ‘Other Town’ secreted within Cambridge itself, later Mortmere, a village on the Atlantic coast – that spawned their early writings: Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. The mere tones of Chalmers’ voice would start me giggling in anticipation, and I had only to pronounce some quite ordinary word with special emphasis in order to send him into fits. We were each other’s ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us.6 Isherwood emphasises the ‘ordinary’ nature of his vocabulary: he elicits a particular response by variations in emphasis, tone and context, rather than by using an entirely new word. Still, anybody eavesdropping on the pair might have been tempted to assert ‘we just don’t speak the same language’, and this is amongst the reasons why Keywords provides a useful model for a reading of their early works. Williams states that the words he selected for inclusion in Keywords were chosen not because they appeared unique or strange in themselves, but because they did not. They gained his attention when he ‘saw or heard them being used in quite general discussions in what seemed … interesting or difficult ways’ (14). For young writers like Upward and Isherwood, during a period of change as profound as that of the interwar years in Britain, sensitivity to the nuances of seemingly simple words (and an ability to exploit those nuances) was vital for the construction of modern identities. It has been easy in the past for critics such as Valentine Cunningham to suggest that because Upward sometimes deploys the ‘private language of the prep school’7 in his early writings, he and his protagonists are no more than overgrown schoolboys equipped with the values appropriate to that class: It was a way of avoiding being altogether serious about serious things. And a way of coping with grown-ups in an ungrown-up way that Old Boys from the same kind of nursery … would understand. They’d all been shaped by the same sort of nursery reading which they hadn’t, it seems, grown out of and which they allowed to go on defining for them the shape of the adult world. (141) Cunningham fails to acknowledge two significant factors here. The first – that the language he so repudiates is emphatically not a youth vocabulary but a vocabulary 6 Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (London: Methuen, 1985) p. 65. 7 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 148. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 22 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris coined by adults in an attempt to impose their own standards on youth – is intimately connected to the second: that it is not ‘nursery reading’ itself that shaped these writers but their responses to such reading. Cunningham mistakenly assumes that writers of the interwar generation themselves deploy the terms and phrases of the preparatory and public school exactly as they encountered them there – that is, parrot-fashion, with the same intended meaning. In light of Judith Butler’s work on identity and the performative, however, such readings seem incredibly reductive. Butler asserts that human identity ‘is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’.8 The speech act is one of the most important of these repeated stylisations, and thus, though it might once have been commonplace to assume that people use certain words in certain ways because of who they are, in fact, they are who they are because of the ways in which they use certain words. Deborah Cameron elaborates on the implications of Butler’s work, figuring men and women as conscious agents, ‘active producers’ able to ‘engage in acts of transgression, subversion and resistance’ as they construct their own identities.9 I would suggest that, in their Cambridge writings, Upward and Isherwood shape unique identities for themselves by engaging in linguistic ‘acts of transgression, subversion and resistance’. By shifting critical focus from the ‘private language’10 Cunningham identifies to the pair’s manipulation of the everyday words associated with, but not confined to, 1920s educative life – to the phrase ‘play the game’ and to terms like ‘sport’, ‘team’ and ‘spirit’ – we might redefine the friends as maturing conscious agents actively producing and reinforcing their own social, political and sexual identities. Prefacing An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921), Ernest Weekley defended his inclusion of slang terms, asserting, ‘in the past the slang of one generation has often become the literary language of the next, and the manners which distinguish contemporary life suggest that this will be still more frequently the case in the future.’11 He might almost have had the phrase ‘play the game’ in mind. A euphemism – that is, as Partridge puts it, a term or phrase that supposedly ‘acts as a sedative’ in order to avoid ‘all such unpleasant reactions as might reasonably be expected to ensue on the evocation of certain ideas’ (15) – imported from the sports-field, the idiom was utilised by schoolmasters intent on instilling honour, duty and discipline in the young. Precipitated by the public-school ‘cult Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 33. 9 Deborah Cameron, ‘Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity’, in Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (eds), Language and Masculinity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 49–50. 10 Cunningham, pp. 148, 153. 11 Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (London: Murray, 1921), p. vi. 8 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Playing Up 23 of athleticism’ championed in works such as Thomas Hughes’s open love-letter to educator Thomas Arnold – the novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) – the phrase was turned to literary use in Henry Newbolt’s now infamous Boer War poem ‘Vitai Lampada’ (1892). The poem was penned by Newbolt in a fit of nostalgia for his old school, Clifton College, and served as a tribute to English patriotism. Relying on a combination of simple rhythm and repetition for its mnemonic effect, it was seized upon by educators during the Great War. Its first stanza is indicative: Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night – Ten to make and the match to win – A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat, Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote – ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’12 Newbolt turned a slang expression of his father’s generation to poetic use, but there his innovativeness ceased, articulating as ‘Vitai Lampada’ does the same sentiments with which that generation had invested the expression. He did not question the ethical validity of the euphemism and the poem became a means of teaching loyalty, discipline and above all, ‘how to die violently, but properly’.13 Repeated ad nauseam the phrase – and its attendant vocabulary – had lost much of its ‘sedative’ effect by the time it reached the younger schoolboys of the Great War. Questioned tentatively by writers who saw action during the war, such as Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth (1917), the phraseology and the motivations of its disseminators come under greater scrutiny in the work of Upward and his contemporaries. In his autobiography Stephen Spender recalls the paralysing fear it engendered on the football pitch: ‘A game of football ceased to be just the kicking about of a leather ball by bare-kneed boys. It had become confused with the Battle of Life. Honour, Integrity, Discipline, Toughness and a dozen other qualities haunted the field like ghostly footballers.’14 Isherwood notes in Lions and Shadows that for him such talk inspired contempt: ‘I had arrived at my public school thoroughly sick of masters and mistresses, having been emotionally messed about by them at my preparatory school, where the war years had given full licence to every sort of dishonest cant about loyalty, selfishness, patriotism, playing the game and dishonouring the dead’ (12–13). 12 Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitai Lampada’, in Henry Newbolt, Admirals All and Other Verses (London: Matthews, 1898), p. 21. 13 Cecil D. Eby, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 103. 14 Stephen Spender, World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 10. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 24 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris Isherwood was no doubt appalled, on arriving at Repton, to find the same sentiments – expressed in the same terms – in a school song dedicated to the institution’s founder; ‘Sir John, he was a Faithful Knight’ figuring the Reptonian as ‘Steadfast in aim, playing the game, / Guarding the Gate that is free from blame’.15 Isherwood’s impatience with such ‘cant’ allied him with Upward, ‘a natural anarchist, a born romantic revolutionary’,16 who had rebelled against his mother’s principles because ‘she wished to be different by being better than those around her, and this apparently moved him to wish to be different by being, from the point of view of her values, worse’.17 On reaching Cambridge, then, Upward had already formed an opinion that Patrick Balfour would express in print a decade later: ‘Parrot-phrases like “doing the right thing,” “playing the game,” “sticking to your guns,” [have] replaced in [the Englishman] freedom of thought and action. Our fathers will continue to “play the game” long after it is played out and a new game, with new rules, begun.’18 Upward arrived at the university dubious and guarded, eager to turn the Newboltian phraseology on its head, to query, and in so doing, to queer the inherited meanings of terms like ‘game’ and ‘spirit’ as he rehearsed, with Isherwood, this new set of rules. In adopting the terms ‘query’ and ‘queer’ here I approach Upward’s and Isherwood’s formative (and, indeed, inherently performative) writings from the perspective of an emerging Queer Studies concerned with literary-historical expressions of all those attitudes and behaviours encompassed by the word ‘queer’ in its many senses, the more traditional of which, though since lost within a contemporary vocabulary of gender and sexuality, remained in common use throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Whilst the Cambridge writings were, as Katherine Bucknell suggests, the product and expression of an intense homosocial attachment that ‘generated the sheer excitement more usually associated with erotic love’,19 they also served as an imaginative space within which the friends might experiment with what Isherwood would later term ‘the market value of the Odd’.20 Their composition enabled Upward and Isherwood to enact linguistically a queered set of rules – a set queer not only in its deviation from the sexual but from the social and political ‘norms’ of the day – and, as such, the fragments might be taken as a starting point for an alternative canon of queer literature predicated upon the understanding – apparently so obvious as to be routinely ignored (and Sheet music, c.1907 [personal correspondence with James Drinkwater, Repton School, 21 January 2010]. 16 Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, p. 18. 17 Katherine Bucknell, ‘The Achievement of Edward Upward’, in Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (eds), W.H. Auden: The Language of Learning and the Language of Love: Uncollected Writing, New Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 174. 18 Patrick Belfour, Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (London: Long, [1933]), p. 201. 19 Bucknell, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. 20 Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, p. 20. 15 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Playing Up 25 particularly pertinent to a case such as Upward’s) – that, as was noted as early as 1951: ‘Many homosexuals are, in the totality of their lives, not queer people at all, and many heterosexuals are extremely queer.’21 The working out of these new rules, or ‘different immediate values or different kinds of valuation’ (11) as Williams puts it, itself initially took the form of a game, a mise-en-abyme constituted of literary games within games, each a game in the traditional sense of that term: an amusement or diversion. Alone in Cambridge during 1922–23, Upward found physically extricating himself from the ‘cult of athleticism’ somewhat more difficult than did his recently converted friend. He was, as Isherwood recalls in Lions and Shadows, ‘extremely good at football’ (18), and, though he continued to rail against ‘the team-spirit’ (45) in his letters, this proved a useful attribute, if only as a distraction, a masochistic means of maintaining the self-imposed ‘cult of gloom’22 he then regarded as a necessary prerequisite for successful poetry. Isherwood’s arrival prompted penitence: ‘At our very first meeting, he confessed to me, rather shamefacedly, that he had been playing soccer and had actually been given his college colours. This term, he added, he was determined not to play at all.’23 Upward’s reunion with Isherwood prompted a shift from public displays of physical proficiency to private displays of intellectual acumen, complex linguistic games deriving their amusement from the intimacy of each young writer with the other’s mental processes. The bond described in Lions and Shadows as existing between Chalmers-Upward and Isherwood is couched in the terms of the fashionable word-game of the 1920s: ‘there existed between us that semitelepathic relationship which connects a crossword puzzle-setter with his most expert solvers’ (65). The pair had already coined words with which to entertain friends and encode their private correspondence during their year apart. In No Home But the Struggle (1977) Upward’s alter ego Alan Sebrill recalls the amusement he inspired on developing the phrase ‘the poshocracy’ (663) to describe the college elite, whilst in the ‘Introductory Dialogue’ (1925–26) of The Mortmere Stories (1994) Isherwood explains that ‘Laily meant The Enemy in our letters while I was still at school’.24 Together again at Corpus Christi, Upward and Isherwood began to refine and expand upon their conceptions of such characters, making the poshocracy, its constituent poshocrats and Laily – or ‘The Laily Worm’ (35) – the combined focus of their anti-Cambridge feeling. The resentment with which Upward and Isherwood regarded the poshocracy was not a result of exclusion from it. Both were inspected and deemed acceptable upon 21 Donald Webster Cory, ‘Take My Word for It’, in Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick (eds), The Language and Sexuality Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 34. 22 Edward Upward, No Home But the Struggle, in The Spiral Ascent: A Trilogy (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 662. 23 Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, p. 51. 24 Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, ‘Introductory Dialogue’, in Isherwood and Upward, The Mortmere Stories, p. 35. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. 26 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris arrival in college, but as Isherwood recalls in Lions and Shadows Upward made it clear that he ‘did not want to get to know them’ (56), whilst he himself, though initially tempted, soon tired of their company. What garnered contempt from the pair were the criteria upon which admission to the poshocracy depended, criteria founded on the cliquery of the English upper classes, a cliquery that, disseminated as ‘team spirit’ (14) in public schools and perpetuated by the most privileged and credulous of undergraduates, found its way full-circle in the mentality of the graduating elite. As far as the poshocracy were concerned, as Upward asserts in his autobiographical trilogy of novels, if you were not ‘rich or socially well-connected or outstandingly good at physical games or athletics’ (663), you need not apply. The Laily Worm need not have applied – but he was not going to take ‘no’ for an answer. A fictional character based on The Enemy of Isherwood’s Repton letters, Laily was never of the poshocracy but, for Upward and Isherwood, he was always intimately connected with it. In the ‘Introductory Dialogue’ his creators reveal his significance: ‘We regarded ourselves as rebels, self-appointed pariahs. The Laily Worm was therefore the symbol of the Public School social-team-spirit’ (35). Subsequent references to Laily are littered with the words ‘team’ and ‘spirit’ and their related terms. Isherwood’s projected epitaph for him reads: Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Laily who, living, pined to be Of service, felt the lure Of strenuous community – Laily is now manure. But the kind worms that grope and glide Fulfil his brightest dream And, mystically multiplied, He is, himself, a team. (35) Upward explains: ‘We were uncertain as to whether to make him a mere sycophant who consorted with the social majority only to further his own academic ambitions, or the complete figure of the ludicrous, because unathletic, team-enthusiast’ (35). Ultimately Laily became a combination of the two, because, ‘being eager to succeed with and be accepted by the Poshocracy, he was careful to pretend an enthusiasm for athletics and the team spirit’.25 The falsity of this enthusiasm, of Laily’s apparent predilection for the ‘strenuous community’ of Isherwood’s epitaph, is underscored by Upward in his companion epitaph: ‘Communities he loved, yet lived apart’ (35). The pun on ‘team’ at the close of Isherwood’s second stanza serves a similar purpose, and in doing so affords an excellent early example of the capacity both writers had for layering and queering the inherited meanings of everyday words. For the poshocracy, a ‘team’ is simply a number of persons associated in some joint venture – be that a game, a sport or upper-class life itself – and governed by a shared set of rules. This, Upward and Isherwood suggest, is the meaning 25 Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, pp. 66–7. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Playing Up 27 Laily would have us believe he attaches to the term, though he, like his two creators, is in fact acutely aware of the flaws in these rules. Cast by Upward and Isherwood – heavily influenced by François Villon and the cult of gloom – in the role of decaying corpse, however, Laily’s ‘brightest dream’ is realised with a medieval twist: ‘he is, himself, a team’ in the sense that his decomposing body has not only become a brood of young creatures but (these creatures being worms and he The Laily Worm) has simultaneously turned into that which constitutes his own progeny. In drawing on these medieval senses of the term ‘team’ Isherwood is not simply indulging an immature fascination with obscure or obsolete meanings, but highlighting the decaying heart of the team-spirit-oriented society in which he and Upward live. That Laily, like this society, is riddled through and through, was no doubt emphasised when the piece was read – as they often were – aloud, ‘a team’ being a homophone of ‘ateem’ (or teeming), the irony of Laily’s projected fate being that while in life his enthusiasm for the team spirit is only skin deep, in death it encroaches on every fibre of his body. In Upward’s and Isherwood’s eyes Laily is more detestable than the poshocrat because his subscription to the poshocracy’s values is both duplicitous and selfserving, whilst the poshocrat accepts these values with a sincerity no less valid for its credulity. Sincerity was so important to Upward and Isherwood that they invented a ‘familiar’ (34) for themselves, an airy figure named The Watcher in Spanish (34), charged with policing their own activities. In Lions and Shadows we are given a full description of the duties of this macabre semi-comic character: ‘He appeared to us, we said, at moments when our behaviour was particularly insincere; one might, for example, be telling a boastful story … and there, suddenly, he would be standing, visible only to ourselves’ (53). With no such guardian to monitor Laily’s duplicities Upward and Isherwood take the task upon themselves. Sebrill-Upward recollects in No Home But the Struggle that, as well as being symbolic of the social-team-spirit of the poshocracy, ‘Laily was our imaginative representation … of the spirit of Historical studies at Cambridge as they appeared to us then’ (674). This ‘spirit’ was characterised by ‘its fact-grubbing passionlessness, its dull indifference to human suffering, its lack of love, generosity, beauty or poetry’ (673) – in short, like the spirit of athleticism, it was characterised by a seemingly contradictory desire to encourage competitiveness whilst suppressing individualism. The academically ambitious side to Laily is thus also expressed in sporting terms. In Upward’s ‘Tale of a Scholar’26 (1924–25) Laily compares himself to renowned historical figures and, finding them wanting, dismisses them in the words of a match-player: ‘Dizzy and Byron lose to me’ (37). Upward explains sneeringly that, though Laily had very little interest in his subject, he nonetheless ‘loved competitive exams and prizes / And all rewards the History Board devises’ (37). For Laily, as for many of the undergraduates by whom Upward and Isherwood 26 Partially reprinted within the ‘Introductory Dialogue’ in Isherwood’s hand, the poem itself is now lost. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. 28 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris were surrounded during their time at Cambridge, university life is simply a game to be won or lost. For the two friends, an alternative game became necessary in order that each might maintain, in the face of such a spirit, an ‘imagination developed in spite of all the constrictions and distortions which might have stunted its growth’27 during their years at public school. Casting themselves as two pornographers named Edward Hynd and Christopher Starn the pair began a private ‘imaginative game’28 in which their erstwhile predominantly verbal invective against Laily, the poshocracy and the social-teamspirit found a more formal artistic outlet. Each began to compose for the other a series of stories peopled by poshocracy grotesques, clandestinely depositing them on each other’s breakfast tables during the night, often incomplete but with ‘sufficient hints to make plain to each other … how the action will develop’.29 A tangible alternative to the physical team-games played in Cambridge by their peers, this creative game served Upward and Isherwood – as cricket and rugby served those misguided peers – as a framework within which to develop and rehearse the principles or ‘rules’ that were beginning to shape their adult lives, not only as writers, but as distinct social and political entities. In No Home But the Struggle we are given an account of Upward’s first ‘move’ in this game – his first story, now lost: Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. The Leviathan of the Urinals, which was the first I wrote, was about a very drunk young man going down after midnight into a public lavatory where he sees lying on the copper grating over the drain in one corner of the urinal a small shaggy seaweed-coloured object which as he urinates grows rapidly in size until it becomes a gigantic and fungus-covered fishlike monster […] and before he escapes up into the outer air again it touches him with one of its fins: and next day he discovers he has syphilis. (670) It would be easy to dismiss this story, along with Isherwood’s first attempt – a grotesque parody of the popular detective story entitled ‘The Horror in the Tower’ (1924–25) – as the product of a puerile interest in toilet-humour. Certainly one of the pair’s objectives was to revolt as much in this sense as in any other: they explain in the ‘Introductory Dialogue’ that the ‘humour’ of the tales ‘is that they lead up to climaxes of disgust and horror absurdly in excess of anything the ordinary reader could be expecting’ (46). However, as Sebrill-Upward asserts in No Home But the Struggle, their lurid detail was not an end in itself, but a means to an end: ‘obscene farce was our answer to the kind of namby-pamby delicately indelicate pseudopornography … which was fashionable with some members of the poshocracy’ (671). ‘The Horror in the Tower’ and ‘The Leviathan of the Urinals’ serve, if not as a dose of reality, at least as a striking counterpoint to euphemism. 27 Upward, No Home, p. 603. Edward Upward, Christopher Isherwood: Notes in Remembrance of a Friendship (London: Enitharmon, 1996), p. 5. 29 Isherwood and Upward, ‘Introductory Dialogue’, p. 46. 28 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Playing Up 29 If, as Upward’s outline indicates, ‘The Leviathan of the Urinals’ (1924–25) follows a similar pattern to ‘The Horror in the Tower’ and the other early Hynd and Starn stories, it seems fair to suggest that it represented another spoof of the cautionary tale. Fair too to infer that, as its subterranean setting suggests, the action of Upward’s story takes place, like that of Isherwood’s ‘The Adventures of Fooby Bevan’ (1924–25), not in the mythical Other Town (the conception of which coincided with, but remained for some time unrelated to, the invention of Hynd and Starn) but in London. Certainly Isherwood had a passion for the seedier side of life in the metropolis at this time. In Lions and Shadows he recalls exploring the capital, during his first Long Vacation from Cambridge, with Hector Wintle (a fellow old-Reptonian, novelist and mutual friend of Isherwood and Upward, fictionalised as Philip Linsley): he shared with Wintle ‘an endless pleasure in walking about the London streets. Particularly, … the great lost decaying districts, where the fly-blown respectability of the lower-middle-class clings to its dreary outposts against the slums: … Wapping and Limehouse … achieved mystery and danger when seen through the Chinese spectacles of Thomas Burke’ (94). That Isherwood, as Upward’s only reader, was familiar with London’s seamy side, and with the writings of Burke, is crucial both to an understanding of ‘The Leviathan of the Urinals’ as an individual story, and to a full appreciation of the attitudes and values being ‘played out’ in the Hynd-Starn-Mortmere canon as a whole. The plot of Upward’s story – a casual encounter between a young man and an unidentified other in a subterranean public convenience – is redolent of the snatched sexual encounters between young Londoners detailed by Burke in The London Spy (1922), ironically more private for their public settings: ‘Only in the misty corners of the thickening streets can they attain the solitude they seek.’30 It is certainly the sexual mores of London that Starn seeks on arriving in town with the effeminate and inexperienced Fooby Bevan, charged with ‘awakening him to the pleasures of the metropolis’.31 As with Burke’s lovers, it is in the spirit of anonymity within the public sphere that Starn finds his opportunity, ‘The Adventures of Fooby Bevan’ ending abruptly as the pair enjoy an amorous entanglement in a blacked-out taxi-cab. Accompanied by two young women, the implication is nonetheless that (whether consensually on Starn’s part or not) the pair are entangled with each other, a sheepish Starn observing: ‘I cannot answer for all that took place in the cab’ (75). Upward claimed to have always ‘accepted and encouraged’32 Isherwood’s own homosexuality. Taking this into account, within the context of the extant Hynd and Starn stories, ‘The Leviathan of the Urinals’ would appear to have been a lurid representation of the perils of a certain kind of urban game: the practice of soliciting 30 Thomas Burke, The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels (London: Butterworth, 1922; repr. 1925), p. 53. 31 Christopher Isherwood, ‘The Adventures of Fooby Bevan’, in Isherwood and Upward, The Mortmere Stories, p. 74. 32 Upward, Christopher Isherwood, p. 7. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 30 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris for sexual – and more specifically homosexual – favours in public conveniences. It is a game with which Upward credits his sole reader a greater familiarity with than his poshocrat protagonist. Though it is impossible to verify whether the term ‘game’ appeared in Upward’s manuscript with this queered meaning, it is clear that the term was being employed by the pair in exactly this sense in full knowledge of the alternative set of ‘rules’ it implied. In a later story Ronald Gunball is rebuked by Starn for allying courage with sporting prowess: ‘I should have expected you to remember that our school life was not devoted to Rugby Football. If you retain the least recollection of the Frisbald Cellar Game, you will admit, I think, that the two codes could scarcely be described as similar.’33 That the term was being used more widely is evidenced by another Burke publication, For Your Convenience (1937). For Your Convenience – which claims to detail the locations of public lavatories for those ‘caught short’ in London – appears in fact to represent the first (thinlyveiled) ‘gay guide’ to the capital. The text takes the form of a dialogue between a perennial and a newcomer in a London club, the younger man demonstrating an extraordinarily precise knowledge of the city’s public urinals. Denying that familiarity with this ‘game’34 is indicative of a misspent youth, he remarks: ‘Many of the best men I have taken on did not begin until they were thirty. It is, after all, a game for the steady’ (27). His interlocutor agrees: ‘I fancy you’re right. I myself did not indulge until I was over forty, and in a couple of years I could show quite reasonable game against some of the youngsters’ (27–8). The elder man buys the younger drinks in return for information on the whereabouts of every manner of ‘desired but hidden haven’ (15), until the youngster offers him a map (a copy of which is included for interested readers). In No Home But the Struggle SebrillUpward recollects that ‘several of the most nauseous characters we invented were based on actual poshocrats whose affectations we more especially resented’ (671). Accepting this alongside Burke’s assertion that soliciting is ‘a game for the steady’ (27), I would suggest that ‘The Leviathan of the Urinals’ worked not only as an attack on affected dandyism within the poshocracy – a projection of the chaos that might ensue should the ingenuous dandy attempt to practise what he preached – but also, as such, as a defence of those sincere in their homosexuality – a genuine (if crude) expression of Upward’s acceptance of Isherwood’s emerging adult identity. Developing alongside the Hynd and Starn tales was the concept of the Other Town or ‘Rats’ Hostel’ which served, Isherwood notes in Lions and Shadows, as yet another distraction from Cambridge History, ‘a sophisticated kind of nursery game’ offering ‘a way of escape from Cambridge altogether’ (68). Where the early stories had been peopled by the enemy – by grotesques of poshocrats, history scholars and dons – the Other Town, as ‘a world which the dons didn’t even dream Isherwood, ‘The Javanese Sapphires’, in Isherwood and Upward, The Mortmere Stories, pp. 97–8. 34 [Thomas Burke], For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue, Instructive to all Londoners & London Visitors, Overheard in the Thélème Club and Taken Down Verbatim (London: Routledge, 1937), p. 26. 33 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Playing Up 31 existed … right in their very midst’ (68) was inhabited by the pair’s supporters: ‘its denizens were our natural allies. Our enemies were their enemies’ (72). In this world, accessible only via a disused alley off Silver Street and through ‘a strangelooking, rusty-hinged little old door in a high blank wall’ (68), these ‘denizens’ were rallying: ‘Laily and his colleagues were plotting day and night against us, … very soon, the powers of the Hostel would counter-attack’ (72). Among these powers were ‘Wilfred, Kathy and Emmy’ (72), ghosts of three writers – Wilfred Owen, Katherine Mansfield and Emily Brontë – of whom Upward and Isherwood talked ‘as if they were personal friends, wondered what they would have said on certain occasions, how they would have behaved, what advice they would have given’ (72). In a model of intertextuality that foregrounds not the literature, but the lives and deaths of specific literary figures, Owen’s presence is telling, particularly within the context of Upward’s and Isherwood’s revulsion for the public-school socialteam-spirit. That the pair’s sentiments – if not their experiences – reflected Owen’s own is clear from the final warning of his ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917). Ten years Upward’s senior, Owen numbered amongst the Great War casualties duped by the Newboltian ideal, and would, had he survived, have been a contemporary of Gunball. Gunball, a character who emerged from the Hynd and Starn stories, had become, by Isherwood’s second year at Cambridge, the key to the Other Town in its new guise as Mortmere Village: ‘he appeared to us to represent the whole Mortmere illusion.’35 He is listed in ‘Mortmere. The Persons of the Tragedy’36 as an ‘ex-sportsman and drunkard’ (31); the ‘Introductory Dialogue’ offers an elaboration: ‘Gunball is the middle-class vulgarian fisherman drunkard. His lies are of two kinds. Those of the traditional exaggerator of the dimensions of fish; and those of a man living among the apparitions of delirium tremens’ (39). His catchphrase – reputedly ‘Of course, it didn’t surprise me in the least’ (39) – epitomises the Mortmere attitude: he is as ‘the boy who wants to find genuine pumas … in his bedroom but does not want to be afraid of them when he finds them. The communal phantasy to which all the inhabitants of Mortmere contribute is really an intellectualised form of the boy’s game’ (33). In his lies, his exaggerations and his very vocabulary Gunball is boy-like. Physically a survivor of the upheavals of the Great War he is mentally stunted by its experiences, by the discrepancy between the Newboltian ideal disseminated at school and the bloody realities of battle. Upward and Isherwood explain in the ‘Introductory Dialogue’ that one way of rationalising Mortmere would be to assume that ‘all the characters are insane … escaped lunatics from an actual asylum’ (34). As such, the chaos of Mortmere is, I would suggest, a projection of the anarchy that would ensue were the call to ‘play the game’ taken, if not literally, then as the only guiding principle of adult life. It is never the children of Mortmere we see playing. To play is instead the preserve of the adults, the verb 35 Isherwood and Upward, ‘Introductory Dialogue’, p. 39. Isherwood and Upward, ‘Mortmere: The Persons of the Tragedy’, in Isherwood and Upward, The Mortmere Stories, pp. 30–31. 36 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 32 Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain / Charteris itself taking on sinister connotations. ‘The Convocation’ (1926) finds Reverend Welken denying he is ‘deliberately playing the holiday buffoon’37 as Edward Hearn (a narrator and observer combining Hynd and Starn) notes: ‘The almost cadaverous sallowness of his cheeks contrasted strangely with the sprightliness and energy of his movements’ (110). The implication is that, whether ‘deliberately’ or not, Welken is ‘playing’ in a manner inappropriate to his age and station. In ‘The Railway Accident’ (1928) it is the thought of grown men playing the fool around certain choirboys that dissuades Gunball from attending a rectory party: ‘Shreeve and Wherry prancing about and imagining they’re school kids again. Ten to one someone’ll get a cricket stump pushed through his eyeball.’38 Spotted from the train window, curate Wrygrave is accused of having ‘played the truant’ (144) from his duties at Frisbald College, the accusation couched in terms one would ordinarily apply to his charges. Wherry is likewise suspected of ‘foul-play’ (146). Just what these men are ‘playing’ at is implied throughout the Mortmere canon, each being guilty of what is here referred to only as ‘the act’ (143), that is, the sexual abuse of boys. Such characters, and not their authors, inhabit a state of arrested development sanitised for them by a vocabulary learnt at school. The folly of conflating the terms of play with the terms of an upper-middle-class ideal remains a concern throughout Upward’s writings of the 1930s, its expression characterised by a uniquely Mortmereish queerness, even as Upward struggled to extricate himself from the perceived limitations of fantasy. Upwardesque master Mitchell of ‘The Colleagues’ (1933) has been cited for his view of games as irrelevant to successful social life: ‘Nothing that happens in the school grounds has any connection with what happens in the town outside. Every day here certain ceremonies are independently performed. Latin lessons are given. Games are organized.’39 What has been ignored, however, is his partial coincidence with his more conservative colleague Lloyd – in whom Mitchell’s evident reluctance to subscribe to the pedagogical conventions of public-school games elicits dismay: ‘Why can’t the man change into proper clothes when he’s refereeing?’ (74) – who cannot see the point of ‘scouting and everything else the kids do’ if it is ‘indistinguishable from a disorganized nursery game’ (71). But the most striking illustration of the dangers of allying social and military values with the rules of the sports-field for juvenile consumption occurs during a climactic scene for Upward’s tutor-protagonist in Journey to the Border (1938). Initially regarding an assembly of young militants at the races ‘as wholly ridiculous, a comic game’,40 the tutor is startled, by their leader’s call to action ‘for the spirit’ (170), into a nightmare vision of the future: 37 Upward, ‘The Convocation’, in Isherwood and Upward, The Mortmere Stories, p. 110. 38 Upward, ‘The Railway Accident’, in Isherwood and Upward, The Mortmere Stories, p. 127. 39 Edward Upward, ‘The Colleagues’, in The Railway Accident and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 77. 40 Edward Upward, Journey to the Border, in The Railway Accident, p. 168. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=1336199. Created from cam on 2021-09-06 13:50:10. Playing Up 33 He must try to remember that this parade was only a game, a charade of unreason. It was a game, and he too, could play it. But did he want to play it? Would it enable him to realize his profoundest desire, give him scope to use his brain? He … would have to talk about abstract colourless words like ‘romance,’ and ‘the spirit.’ Or worse, he would have to stand at attention and listen carefully while Tod gave orders. He wouldn’t be able to think for himself at all, not even unreasonably. And suppose he refused to play Tod’s game, suppose he attached himself to some other group in the marquee – would he be any less restricted? (170) The term ‘spirit’ has become, for protagonist and author, dysphemistic for its overuse in schools and at the university, appropriated by a Fascist movement familiar with the resonances it still holds for the credulous Englishman. In Tod – a figure who in name illustrates Isherwood’s continuing influence on his friend’s work, the word Tod meaning ‘death’ in German – we meet a character-type familiar from the Mortmere writings. Like the original Mr Tod, who, listed in ‘Mortmere. The Persons of the Tragedy’ as a ‘fellow of St Salvador’s College, Cambridge’ (31), would seem to have been conceived as a colleague for Laily, Upward’s Tod is a symbol of the social-team-spirit and is, as such, a destroyer. The tutor’s anxiety in Upward’s text is fuelled by his consciousness of the discrepancy between who Tod’s boys actually are and what they might become, between what they expect and what is expected of them. The parade might be ‘a game, a charade’ to those in the ranks – it serves both Tod’s and his superior’s purposes to actively promote this perception – but, led by death, the game will soon turn serious and, as the tutor himself realises, none of them know the rules. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Coda Products of a ‘cult of gloom’ that rivalled the ‘cult of athleticism’ and came to characterise Upward’s and Isherwood’s life in Cambridge, The Mortmere Stories cannot simply be dismissed as juvenilia. The sentiments embedded in their language articulate much more than neophyte dissatisfaction with predominant educative and social systems in interwar Britain. Though they were not published together until 1994, the fragments were circulated influentially among friends from the late 1920s. Indeed, debunking the myth that they represented mere self-indulgence, Upward reiterated late in life that early stories like ‘The Railway Accident’ were ‘written to amuse my homosexual literary friends’.41 Inherently performative, both the original writings and those they influenced – works not only by Upward and Isherwood themselves but by W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender among others – questioned ‘normal’ values as disseminated through game-play vocabulary, quite literally queering the pitch. As such, they serve not only as a starting point for an alternative canon of Cambridge literature, but also – and this is true too of Upward’s later work – as a perceptive challenge to any narrowed conception of what constitutes the ‘queer’ in literary culture. 41 Upward, Christopher Isherwood, p. 7. Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. 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