Arthur Calder-Marshall

Arthur Calder-Marshall (19 August 1908 – 17 April 1992) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist, and biographer. Life and career Calder-Marshall was born in El Misti, Woodcote Road, Wallington, Surrey, the son of Alice (Poole) and Arthur Grotjan Marshall (later Calder-Marshall; 1875 –1958), a civil engineer. The elder Arthur was grandson of the sculptor William Calder Marshall (1813–1894). William Calder Marshall's father William Marshall (1780–1859), D.L. (Edinburgh), a goldsmith (including to the King in the early nineteenth century) and jeweller, had married Annie, daughter of merchant William Calder, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1810–11, by his wife Agnes, a daughter of landed gentleman Hugh Dalrymple. The Marshall family were Episcopalian goldsmiths from Perthshire; the Calder family were merchants. In his youth, Calder-Marshall lived with his family in Steyning, where he made friends with Victor Neuberg, the poet and associate of Aleister Crowley. His 1951 memoir The Magic of My Youth includes extensive anecdotes re: Neuberg (nicknamed "Vickybird"), Crowley himself, and other Crowley associates such as Raoul Loveday and Betty May. A short, unhappy stint teaching English at Denstone College, Staffordshire, 1931–33, inspired his novel Dead Centre. In the 1930s, Calder-Marshall adopted strong left-wing views. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and was also a member of the London-based left-wing Writers and Readers Group which also included Randall Swingler, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mulk Raj Anand, Maurice Richardson and Rose Macaulay.