That Rare Being, a Born Writer

By Stefan Kanfer

Almost 40 years after his death at the age of 33, Denton Welch is little more than a literary footnote. Hard-cover editions of his three novels have long been out of print. The New Oxford Companion to English Literature grants him 16 lines (Pocahontas gets 20). Yet in this deep obscurity there are glimmers of revival. The Journals of Denton Welch has recently been reissued, and a biography appeared in Britain last year. Now The Stories of Denton Welch is making its first appearance in the U.S. Readers weary of conventional narrative or the current mode of minimalism can examine the unique, indelible works of a man Edith Sitwell called "that very rare being, a born writer."

The talent would have been in the blood; it could not have been learned. Welch's schooling was so desultory that at the age of nine he was still unable to read. When he was 20, better educated but still without focus, he was struck by a car as he cycled along an English country road. From then on he lived with increasing pain until spinal injuries and heart failure killed him 13 years later. But in that period he summoned up his childhood and adolescence and transformed them into art. His tales were produced with a combination of will, eidetic memory and emotional immaturity. His skills were those of a polished ironist, but his obsessions seldom progressed beyond puberty.

The young protagonist of The Coffin on the Hill climbs aboard a houseboat on the Yangtze River (Welch was born in Shanghai, where his father was a partner in a firm that managed rubber plantations): "Leaning forward and putting out my tongue I licked the brass rim of one of the portholes, in order to realize the ship with all my senses. Then I curled up in a corner of the fitted seat and felt like a mole, or some other perfectly happy blind animal, burrowing deeper and deeper, coming at last to its true home." In At Sea, a boy watches his mother exhausted by the disease that will kill her (Welch's mother died when he was eleven): "He was overcome with the beauty and sadness of his own singing ... He wasn't going to help her. He was going to cry." In The Trout Stream, a child confronts a man in a wheelchair: "The plaid rug across his knees made me wonder fearfully what the legs could be like underneath. Were they all withered away? Were they like drumsticks when the chicken has been eaten?"

These are incidents recalled by an adult, with the freshness and candor of a child. Yet if all of Welch's work is disguised autobiography, he is occasionally capable of imagining the complexities and frustrations of adult life. In The Hateful Word, a middle-aged woman is infatuated with a prisoner of war. She impulsively embraces him, only to hear the cruel pronouncement " 'Soon I go back to Germany; I tell them there you are like, like--' He strained after the one word to express his gratitude. 'You are like mother to me--my English mother.' He was out of the room and down the stairs, leaving the hateful word tingling in her ears."

Such work resists categories. In theory, Welch could be placed on the gay studies shelf: he was a homosexual, and his female characters are sometimes men in literary drag. But there is nothing erotically explicit in these stories, no precious attempts at special pleading. He could belong with the invalid writers, like Marcel Proust and Flannery O'Connor, whose illnesses gave them a vital solitude. But unlike them, Welch had little interest in society. As his biographer, Michael De-la-Noy, notes, "Politics, literature, indeed the entire world outside his bedroom window, scarcely existed."

The indifference is understandable. The man diagnosed himself accurately as "almost a corpse." It is miraculous that he had the wit and energy to remember, much less to create. Welch's world is barely larger than a sickroom, but its travel books intrigued some famous tourists, including Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and E.M. Forster, who praised the author's "sensitiveness, visual and tactile." The style-struck critic Cyril Connolly described Welch's prose as ripening "like an October pear that measures every hour of sunshine against the inevitable frost."

Welch had his own way with similes: he described people "like bottles walking; their heads as inexpressive as round stoppers. What if some god or giant should bend down and take several of the stoppers out? I thought. Inside there would be black churning depths like bile, or bitter medicine." But it is his wary view of the adult world that lingers. Even a Punch and Judy show has an ominous significance: when Punch "began hitting the baby with hard wooden thuds I felt its skull crack and knew that none of us were safe while grown-ups thought that this sort of thing was funny."

Rediscovered, Welch is more likely to be influential than popular. His undeceived tone, coupled with wide-eyed looks backward, gives him the air of a boy in the costume of a judge. That sort of grotesquerie is not to everyone's taste. But there has been no one like that boy before or since, and adults who hope to understand children ought to be on reading terms with their strange, stunted laureate. --By Stefan Kanfer