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“Edward Upward: The Captive Mind”

Edward Upward…that’s really his name…very cool. This is an essay about Upward precipitated by Hitchens’ visit with the author sometime in the late nineties. He writes of his work in the context of Upward’s “conscious decision to… become a fiction writer with a mission”…the mission of representing his devotion to communism in his fiction. He comments on Upward’s early works, “…the trilogy of novels on which Upward worked after he dropped from view, before the Second World War. Collectively titled The Spiral Ascent…the novels tell of the distraught life of a Communist schoolteacher named Alan Sebrill, who discovers to his horror that the Communist Party has become insufficiently revolutionary.” Hitchens goes on to say, “ Upward stands alone for resigning his membership [in the Communist party of England] in 1948, on the grounds that the British Communists were insufficiently Stalinist!”

Sounds great. I think I’ll add In The Thirties to my reading list.

New Learning: “On the eve of Valentine’s Day this year [2009], at the age of 105, the last British author to have been born in the Edwardian epoch died.”

New word: portmanteau = in this usage, the combining of two or more normally separable aspects or qualities.