Denton Welch - a life revealed. . - Reviews - book review

Contemporary Review, April, 2003 by Richard Whittington-Egan

Denton Welch, Writer and Artist. James Methuen-Campbell. Tartarus Press. [pounds sterling]30.00. 268 pages. ISBN 1-872621-60-0.

A new biography of Denton Welch is, make no mistake, in many a refined and esoteric corner, quite an event. It is eighteen years since Michael De-La-Noy published the last - and first. It was curate's eggish. This new offering is a very much more minutely excavated undertaking, even though the narrative is quintessentially factual, and what is retrieved somewhat lacking in the tissue-paper of comment and the fancy string of analysis. But, as Methuen-Campbell prophetically wrote to me back in 1987, 'The actual writing will be made up of reminiscences of people who knew him, extracts from his writings, as captions for some of the pictures, a biography (shortish) and my comments on his pictures and writings'. This is a very fair summation of the parcel that has emerged fifteen years later.

Denton Welch, a cult figure, sealed of the tribe of Barbellion and Bruce Chatwin, who has been described, not without acuity, as 'this cross between Stephen Tennant and James Dean, a stroppy teenager with a taste for Dresden and "mer-cats"', died in 1948, aged thirty-three. This was thirteen years after the June day in 1935 that the car driven by Mrs. Annie Hutley, of Lee, hurled him from his pedal cycle on to the hard surface of the London-Reigate road, fracturing a small, but fearfully influential, spinal bone.

Thenceforth, his art student days at Goldsmith's perforce cut short, he was to lead the wounded life of a semi-invalid, still managing somehow, in the small ration of time left to him, to produce three autobiographical novels, two collections of short stories, a lengthy journal, some poems, and a large number of paintings and illustrations of noteworthy originality. Beside his deathbed lay the unfinished manuscript of his last work, A Voice Through a Cloud.

In terms of empirical fact, Welch's life was pretty uneventful. He was born in Shanghai of a family of merchants, sent home to be educated at Repton. For all his surface effeteness, he never lacked courageous depths. When the pain inflicted by his bullying schoolfellow, Roald Dahl, exceeded the sadomasochistic pain-pleasure ratio, Welch upped and spunkily ran away from Repton.

After the accident there were long and agonising months in the Hospital for Nervous Diseases in a leafy Bloomsbury square, a convalescence at Broadstairs, where the brave and cruelly crippled Denton contrived a meeting with the aged Walter Sickert.

A large part of the remainder of his life was lived against the background of the Second World War - a war which he determinedly ignored, spending most of it among the fields and orchards of rural Kent. He saw the soldiers and the land-girls, the silver sausage shapes of the barrage balloons in the sky, the occasional flight of marauder or defender aeroplanes droning aloft. Below, he picnicked alone on crimped cardboard Ryvita, cheese, apricot jam, chocolate, dried fruit and flasked coffee, watching the naked boys of summer harvesting in the fields and swimming in the brooks.

I never met him, but I knew his lover Eric Oliver, well, and was indeed at one time asked to act as Denton Welch's literary executor. After his accident Denton constantly wore a catheter and his sexual life was, Eric confided, all hetero-stimulatory. He was, to the ultimate degree, forced to be the onlooker in all things.

Among the bonnes bouches on offer in this elegantly produced book, which would have delighted the Welchian fastidiousness, are the first publication of three previously uncollected short pieces of his, a full bibliography of his writings, 61 plates, fifteen of them in colour, and a catalogue of all his known pictures -- except two in my possession -- and illustrations.