Edward Upward was one of the last century’s most distinctive writers of English prose. For some critics the work of his maturity was blighted by what the publisher and poet John Lehmann termed “the Iron Maiden of Marxist dogma”, but for younger generations of readers his major novels — Journey to the Border (1938) and the trilogy The Spiral Ascent (1962-77) — illuminate the complex political and social history of the 1930s and the midcentury, and show Upward’s descriptive mastery and talent for creating dreamlike fantasy.

Edward Falaise Upward was the son of a doctor with a practice in Romford, Essex. Upward’s grandfather ran a profitable grocery business on the Isle of Wight, and his father had a deep interest in books and wanted his son to be a poet. At Repton School Upward began to display his loathing of authority by refusing to join the Officer Training Corps and by opposing fagging.

In the History Sixth he found the perfect foil in Christopher Isherwood, who was to depict him in Lions and Shadows as Allan Chalmers, “a natural anarchist, a born romantic revolutionary”. Though both hated Repton, they benefited from the encouragement of the historian G. B. Smith, who stimulated their interest in English and

history and groomed them for Cambridge. In 1922 Upward won a history scholarship to Corpus Christi College; Isherwood joined him there a year later, also with a scholarship.

At the university Upward and Isherwood were in effect a clique of two who mocked the dons (with the exception of I. A. Richards, whose lectures fascinated them) and well-heeled

undergraduates, whom they dismissed as “the poshocracy”. Their unwillingness to play the traditional undergraduate role led them to invent the bizarre

fictional village of Mortmere, peopled by a surreal cast of characters.

The surviving Mortmere stories, which were eventually published in 1994, have echoes of Sir Thomas Browne, Poe, Baudelaire, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Kafka, but they also display two powerfully individual writers in the making. Upward destroyed most of his stories in 1952, in a period of disenchantment with the literary

extravagances of his youth; those that remain reveal him as a writer of hallucinatory power and as a savage caricaturist of an upper and middle-class

imperialistic prewar England. This is particularly evident in Upward’s most

famous Mortmere story, The Railway Accident (1928).

While Isherwood was sent down for sabotaging his tripos papers, Upward graduated in 1925 and won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse for his long poem The Buddha. He subsequently worked as a private tutor in Cornwall and then for five years as a teacher in Scarborough and at Ottershaw, Surrey. In 1931 he moved to Alleyn’s school in Dulwich, where he was to remain until his premature retirement in 1961. By the early 1930s, Upward seemed the foremost name in what reads like a roll-call of New Writers, including Isherwood, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. For he always remained the ultimate arbiter for Isherwood, who sent every one of his novels to Upward before publication for critical comment. Auden, too, relied on his judgment, showing him drafts of his emerging political opinions.