The Mortmere Stories

by Upward, Edward; Isherwood, Christopher; Bucknell, Katherine; Crowley, Graham

• ISBN13: 9781870612692
• ISBN10: 1870612698
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-01
• Publisher: Enitharmon Press

Summary

Although legendary in literary and academic circles, these sometimes gothic, sometimes grotesque, and often hilarious stories are published here For The first time. Christopher Isherwood and his old school friend, Edward Upward, were Cambridge underg

Author Biography

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. Christopher Isherwood was born into an army family on August 26th 1904 and was educated at St Edmunds School Hindhead, where he developed a lifelong friendship with the poet W.H. Auden. He went to Cambridge in 1924 to read History but left without taking a degree. He was to become swept up with the changes happening across Europe and travelled to Berlin to meet Auden where he thrived and gathered the material for his 'Berlin' stories, Goodbye to Berlin, and Mr Norris Changes Trains. He left Europe in 1933 as Hitler came to power and after writing three plays in collaboration with Auden, the most famous of which is probably The Ascent of F-6, he travelled to China and finally moved to America where he was to spend the rest of his life. In the States he became interested in Hindu philosophy and became a pacifist, considering at one time becoming a monk in the Ramakrishna order. He then moved to California where he continued writing, producing amongst other writings: A Single Man, and Christopher and His Kind, both highly acclaimed. Isherwood became a significant and influential spokesman for the emerging gay community in America during the 1970s. In the words of his biographer, C.J. Summers he was "a deeply revered icon of contemporary Anglo-American gay culture, a courage-teacher who vigorously protested the heterosexual dictatorship and who unashamedy expressed solidarity with his 'kind'." He died in 1986 at Santa Monica in California.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 9
Note on the Text	p. 22
Map: Mortmere and Environs	p. 25
Mortmere Title Page	p. 27
The Symposium of Hynd and Starn: Title Page with Epigraphs	p. 29
Mortmere. The Persons of the Tragedy	p. 31
Introductory Dialogue	p. 33
The Horror in the Tower	p. 49
The Greatness of Andy Shanks	p. 65
The Adventures of Fooby Bevan	p. 69
The Garage in Drover's Hollow	p. 76
Regime of Frisbald College	p. 86
Untitled Beginning (At Market Wormald corner...)	p. 91
The Dead Wasp, versions 1 and 2	p. 92
Christmas in the Country	p. 94
The Javanese Sapphires	p. 97
The Convocation	p. 109
The World War	p. 111
The Railway Accident	p. 125
The Recessional from Cambridge	p. 163
Letter Written to the Tutor of Corpus After a Year's Historical Study	p. 168
Prefatory Epistle to My Godson on the Study of History. Biographical Note on Starn	p. 170
Books of Mortmere: Books of the Bible	p. 174
One Hundred and Fifty Titles for Stories	p. 175
The Mortmere Charade	p. 177
Vision of Scilly	p. 179
Epilogue: The Return to Mortmere	p. 183
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