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Thirties novelists
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emotional involvement in the author’s style takes on a highly ambiguous
and chilling note as the 1930s moved rapidly towards the Second
World War.
A trilogy published by Edward Upward in 1977, The Spiral Ascent, is
one of the clearest illustrations of the ideological, political and cultural
conflicts in English intellectual life of the 1930s. A close friend of
Isherwood’s, Upward and he concocted a fantasy world, Mortmere,
which appears in Upward’s The Railway Accident and Other Stories
(1969) and is described in Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938), in
which Upward is the character Allen Chalmers. Upward’s need for escape
into a surreal fantasy world is at the opposite extreme from his strong
commitment – stronger than Auden’s or Isherwood’s – to the Communist
Party. Mortmere is a kind of antidote to the profoundly negative forces
which were working against the idealism of the early 1930s.
Rex Warner’s Poems (1937) established him as close to Auden and Day
Lewis in his sympathies. His novel The Aerodrome (1941) is a Kafkaesque
parable, reflecting the increasingly pessimistic outlook of 1930s Europe
as the decade shifted from idealism to civil and then total war.
William Gerhardie is also interesting in the context of the early
twentieth-century novel. He was born in St Petersburg of English parents,
and many of his works have Russian connections, including his studies
of Chekhov and the Romanovs. His first novel Futility, a novel on
Russian themes, was published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses, The
Waste Land, and Jacob’s Room, but has tended to be ignored by recent
critics despite being widely admired at the time. Gerhardie catches the
mood of futility combined with wild hope that is characteristic of the
post-First World War era. The Polyglots, a semi-autobiographical novel
published in 1925, is his best-known work, combining comedy and
tragedy in an international setting filled with trivia; it is a representative
mixture of the confusion and alienation in early twentieth-century Europe.
Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) is a novel of the 1930s
Depression, which still carries resonances over half a century later. It
represents contemporary working-class concerns in a language that
blends with romantic fictional conventions. Greenwood in some senses
prepares the way for the working-class provincial novelists of the