Allen Upward
was a colourful and eccentric individual. He was by turns a
Radical politician and lawyer, a writer of light romances and
formula fiction, a gossip columnist, a gunrunner for the Greeks in
their wars against the Turks, a colonial administrator in Nigeria,
a commentator upon Confucius, a refuter of Nietzsche, an early
mentor for Ezra Pound and his Imagist circle and ultimately a
tragic and unfulfilled figure who committed suicide in part
because he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his
philosophical works. Like M. P. Shiel and Frederick Rolfe (Baron
Corvo), Upward mingled great vitality and individual flair with a
wayward egotism, in his case perhaps in reaction to his strict
Plymouth Brethren upbringing. He wrote a series of fictional ghost
stories for periodicals, presented as "authentic", with
photographs of the supposedly haunted houses: they have not yet
been collected. His The Domino Club (1926: in the USA,
The Club of
Masks) is a
Stevensonian thriller.
Mark Valentine
Novel
The
Discovery of the Dead, A.C. Fifield (London), 1910
An
intriguing novel in which a chemist discovers "necromorphs" - the
next stage for humans after death, and is able to communicate with
them.
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