An Unmentionable Man: Five Short Stories (Edward Upward S.). Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.An Unmentionable Man: Five Short Stories (Edward Upward S.)

These new stories give strong support to the claim that their author is “one of the very few left-wing imaginative writers of literary ability who have not betrayed their principles”... Reflecting on his achievements in a very long career, one cannot help thinking that Upward presents in his work a reliable record of an extraordinary period of history. His unique blending of the past, in art as well as in politics, still has lessons for the future. We should be grateful that a devoted artist has lived so intensely through so much. – from the Introduction by Frank Kermode. The first four of these new short stories by Edward Upward, written in his nineties, form a closely linked sequence – almost a single story – and could be described as ‘realistic dreams’. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward’s earlier fantasies ‘The Railway Accident’ and Journey to the Border, both also published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, ‘Fred and Lil’ is straightforwardly realistic and humanly sympathetic, while ‘With Alan to the Fair’ deals with love, hate and political extremism in serious and in highly comical episodes.

Edward Upward (1903-2009) was the last of the ‘Auden generation’. While at Cambridge, he created with Christopher Isherwood a series of stories about the fictitious village of Mortmere. After graduating he was a private tutor and for thirty years a schoolmaster, until his retirement in 1961. His first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1938 and between 1962 and 1977 Heinemann published his trilogy The Spiral Ascent. Upward's The Railway Accident and Other Stories was a Penguin Classic. Enitharmon has been Upward's exclusive publisher from 1994, issuing a series of critically acclaimed stories as well as memoirs of Isherwood and Auden. Edward Upward died in 2009, at the age of 105 years.

Edward Upward taught at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, from 1931 until his retirement in 1961.