A Week in Books: Onward with Upward

It was a TV moment that exuded as much faded period charm as the damp tweeds and skinny fags surrounding it. During Jack Rosenthal's recent adaptation of Lucky Jim, Stephen Tompkinson – as Kingsley Amis's shambolic hero – delivered a fine harangue on the virtues of a free NHS, public ownership and the radical redistribution of wealth. "How quaint; how terribly 1951," the setting and the acting proclaimed. The novel's author soon concurred. Within a decade, he was explaining "why Lucky Jim turned right".

We often assume that all the major English writers of the mid-century made a parallel lurch to starboard. Not so. A May Day holiday weekend might be an auspicious time to applaud not just the survival, but the continuing creativity, of one who kept a deep red flag aloft. Edward Upward – the mysterious pioneer admired in the early Thirties by his juniors Auden, Isherwood and Spender – will celebrate his 100th birthday this September. Even more remarkably, he still writes haunting short fiction that hovers somewhere between dream and documentary. More than half a century ago, Stephen Spender recalled student days when "just as Auden seemed to us the highest peak within the range of our humble vision from the Oxford valleys, for Auden there was another peak, namely Isherwood, whilst for Isherwood there was a still further peak" – Edward Upward himself.

Enitharmon Press is issuing a selection of stories to mark his coming centenary. You don't, of course, need to share Upward's obdurate commitments in order to relish his enduring prose. A Renegade in Springtime (£15) gathers a dozen pieces that range in date from the classic fantasia "The Railway Accident" of 1928 to "The Coming Day", first published in 2000. The volume's editor Alan Walker reveals that Upward – who retired from teaching as long ago as 1961 – has "lodged sufficient material in the British Library to furnish at least one further collection".

It's customary to depict Upward's fictional career as a struggle between Surrealism and Socialism. In the Thirties (runs this orthodox account), he dazzled with his bizarre dreamscapes. Then dogged revolutionary politics silenced a unique voice: this, after all, was a man who left the Communist Party in 1948 because he thought it had sold out. His semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels The Spiral Ascent (1962-77) was deemed to have nailed a wayward genius into the iron cage of socialist realism. However, a miraculous late flowering over the past 15 years allowed the hallucinatory, Gothic Upward to flourish once again.

I'm not sure I believe any more in this simple dichotomy. Perhaps the same unquiet imagination runs through all his work. "The Railway Accident" – half Mervyn Peake, half Monty Python – conceals under its japes a terrifying vision of the violence inherent in bluff, imperial Englishness. And the supposedly stodgy Spiral Ascent novels sometimes drift into mesmerising passages where the suburban-socialist world of earnest discussion melts into reverie.

A Renegade in Springtime ends with the wonderful "The Scenic Railway" (1987). Its elderly rider first imagines the defining horrors of the century – the Flanders trenches, the Spanish Civil War – unfolding before him. Later, he slips into a time-warp of memory in which he goes home to meet his parents. This is one of the great postwar English stories, and its uncanny power – beyond nostalgia, beyond regret – stems precisely from Upward's gift for fusing the mundane and the magical. The legendary "peak" that Spender glimpsed in 1930 still stands – and still shines.