Denton Welch (1915-1948)

[My new favorite writer of late has been Denton Welch -- I've read both In Youth Is Pleasure and A Voice Through A Cloud in the past month. I have a bad cold, however, so outside of providing this caricature that I found online, I'm just going to have to paste some prose I had found on a Denton Welch fan site that gives a pretty accurate description of what it's like reading him.

Burroughs was a fan, as was Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden; Rod Smith also wrote about him in Rain Taxi a few years ago. Welch reminds me most of Rimbaud, though, especially in In Youth Is Pleasure -- some of these paragraphs are so well put together, and so full of imagistic detail, and he is so openn to all sorts of experiences -- ranging from the Tennysonian temper of his interest in ruins and castles, the Huck Finn-like taking to the open road, to the more Genet-like moments of putting on make-up or even self-flagellation just because it piques his interest to do so -- you think you're reading someone whose senses were just coming to life, and certainly he was quite brave to take on the responsibility of investigation.]

It would be difficult to find any more intensely cultural, or cultured world in literature than Welch's. His obsession with old churches, rambling gardens, ruling-class mansions, period furniture and all the smaller artefacts, like 'Gothic Revival toast-racks', that are special emblems of Englishness make him more English, more pre-War, and more literary in the Bloomsbury sense than any other writer of his time and place.

And yet what you will find in these excerpts, as in all of his work, is a highly-coloured, imagistic, raw and seemingly unsophisticated style that seems to invite ridicule, before the reader realises it is his or her own psychological defences that Welch's clear, factual voice has aroused. While its grammatical construction is precise to the point of sounding stiff to our ears, Welch's language continually stimulates because it is uncensored in terms of the private experiences it unfolds. The author is continually saying what is unsayable, even 'unthinkable' in daily social life, and the anarchic result is hilarious and moving.

Like Austen or Proust, Denton Welch achieves a surgical accuracy of description of the poltroons, wasters and fops of his own class. Few writers etch the vanity of human beings with too much money and too little experience so sharply as he. But in his writing there is also a frankness about his own oddities of mind that is disarming and deceptively easy to read (as it surely is not easy to write). A passage of Welch leads us to understand how charm can have a serious evaluative meaning in prose. It is a lesson in good style. It astounds me that a person whose social world was so rarefied and hermetic could write with such sensitivity to human suffering and with no sense of self-importance or pretence. Welch writes about human feelings and motivations with an unblinking candour that we associate with a Sartre or Camus: his gaze on the world is of such clarity that he leads me to wonder what the greats of French literature could have achieved if they, like Denton Welch, were never tempted into intellectual posturing.