The Mortmere Stories

by Edward Upward, Katherine Bucknell (Introduction), Graham Crowley (Illustrator)

As Cambridge undergraduates in the mid-1920s, Christopher Isherwood and his old schoolfriend Edward Upward engaged in a literary attack on the dons and the ‘poshocracy’ – the fashionable and well-heeled students – by creating the bizarre fictional world of Mortmere, a village inhabited by surreal characters modelled on their Cambridge friends and acquaintances. The rector, Casmir Welken, resembles a ‘diseased goat’ and breeds angels in the church belfry; his sidekick Ronald Gunball is a dipsomaniac and an unashamed vulgarian; Sergeant Claptree, assisted by Ensign Battersea, keeps the Skull and Trumpet Inn; the mannish Miss Belmare, domineering and well starched, is sister to the squire, and Gustave Shreeve is headmaster of Frisbald College for boys. There are engrossing accounts of the writing of the Mortmere stories in Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows and in Upward’s No Home but the Struggle, but the stories have never before been published – with the one exception of Upward’s The Railway Accident. Dr Katherine Bucknell, the editor of W. H. Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922-28 (Princeton University Press/Faber and Faber, 1994) and Isherwood’s journals, has written a fascinating introduction to the stories, and Graham Crowley’s drawings provide a lively accompaniment to them.

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Edward Falaise Upward was a British novelist and short story writer and, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK's oldest living author.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Mortmere Stories is a selection of early stories and fragments written by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward when they were precocious undergrads at Cambridge. There are a few gems, chiefly the parodies of Holmes and Watson style detective stories, flecked as they are with scatalogical humor and amusing riffs on the common tropes of this style. Upward's story 'The Railway Accident' (the only one previously published, as the titular story in Upward's first collection) also ranks as a highlight. A strange and incomplete vision of the fictional town of Mortmere slowly emerges from the remaining unfinished tales, poems, and miscellany. There is just enough structure of character and setting to intrigue, but ultimately it goes nowhere. These two writers were clearly gifted from an early age, and yet much of this work still feels primarily like a private joke. For example, the two were so tuned into each other's imagination that they frequently ended their stories as soon as one felt he'd provided enough plot for the other to figure out where it was going. As a result, many of them just end suddenly (and not in a mysterious way). This might be of interest to Isherwood completists (most of these are his stories, as Upward destroyed the majority of his share), but its uneven, ephemeral nature left me unsatisfied. (2.5)