BOOKS
A Contrary Talent
BY JULIAN SYMONS 'FIRST avoided Denton Welch's work,' my little unwritten essay 'On Not Reading Denton Welch' begins, 'in,1944, in a train carriage full of soldiers, Clacketty clack clock, Second Front "ow, went the train wheels. The story in the magazine said, "I put my hand inside my flannel shirt and felt the flesh on my chest .. . 1 looked down at the vague whiteness of my skin. I thought of the men I had seen, with tufts of strong hair on their chests and under their arms." Men in khaki crowded the carriage, sprawled not only on the seats but between them, not only between them but in the aisles. All of them, no dotibt, had hair under their arms, many had hair on their chests. I turned the pages quickly.' The story was 'The Barn,' the writer Denton Welch. I have a notable history of successful Welch-avoidance in the past nineteen years, a history ended in the last couple of weeks. I justified this—to solemnise the critical tone a bit 'by the feeling that Welch was a writer with Whom I should feel out of sympathy. As Mr. Jocelyn Brooke puts it in his introduction to this selection,* 'He is very much the sort of author Whom one either immediately likes or immedi- ately dislikes, depending upon whether or not one happens to be in sympathy with the kind of Person he was.' Many of those who have Written about Welch in the past have been sym- pathetic to the point of calling him a genius. It d, oes not seem unreasonable that a voice should De heard on the other side. But first Mr. Brooke, whose long introduction is so intelligent, and is written so far this side of idolatry, as almost to make it seem that in the course of re-reading he came to the conclusion that Denton Welch was an inconsiderable writer. At several points Mr. Brooke disarms criticism ,7 making it himself. Was one about to say I at the decorative pastiche of Welch's graphic Work shows the essential flippancy of his mind? !Pa pictures, Mr. Brooke says, emphasise the
'over-contrived rather chichi side of him,' they are
n"er-contrived and lacking in force and liveli- Jsas.' (To see their real feebleness, as of some dismal imitator of Rex Whistler, one should look at the paintings reproduced at the back of A voyage Sheaf or the decorations for Maiden _r.) Does one find his snobbishness disa- greeable, his ecstatic response to the maleness of men disconcerting, his rhapsodising about bits of Ct'ibr inese porcelain tedious? Well, so does Mr. it °°sIce,, who admits the snobbishness but excuses a a comparatively mild [infection] which Would so on have run its course,' admits to hci,tut Cation by that frequent concern with dolls' `thesesf and cracked Nankiri cups, and says that a requent descriptions of masturbation 'at stes become slightly embarrassing.' He rations also a spitefulness which I did not Br_`e in the works. As compensations Mr. r e mentions sueness of ouch, sharness of obserk vation, and 'a touch oft genius.' Weplch, he WoRID,ENTorq WELCH EXTRACTS FROM HIS PUBLISHF.D Brn—okse. . Edited with an introduction by iocel■n tetlaPman and Hall, 25s.)
says, 'didn't aim very high, but his aim was sure, and 'he seldom missed his target.'
The claim is modest, but not modest enough. What was Welch's reason for existence as a writer? The spring of it was a complete Uarcissistic self-absorption. It is not merely that all !Ms work is autobiographical and most of it written in the first person, but that really he is not capable of seeing any thing or person except in relation to himself. His descriptions of people are rarely sharply visual, his descriptions of places hardly ever take on the obsessional quality that may turn neurosis into art. His style avoids, the preciosity of his drawings and the sub- Housmanic bathos of his verse CO Roger I shall yet remember, In the winter's wet December'). There are a good many vivid images to be found in his work, but their effect is limited by the poverty of his subjects. These are his own youth, food—which is described at length in a way less . adolescent than childish, with much emphasis on sweet cakes and toothsome delicacies—and sex, which is approached in a way both timid and disagreeable.
A Voice Through a Cloud, in which he tells the story of the bicycling accident which he suffered at the age of twenty and from the effects of which he never fully recovered, is by a long chalk his best work. Here the description of the eighteenth-century house at Beckenham which he visited ,before the accident, with its colonnades, its splendid drawing-room, its tea- urn and advertisements for Schweppes and Player's, is brilliantly contrasted with the new and terrible world of pain which he enters after the accident. Yet even here Welch is the only figure with any reality : the doctors, nurses, friends, other patients, are shadows lacking individuality. The fragment of a novel included In A Last Sheaf but omitted from this selection begins excellently with an account of a grotesque female model at an art school, but it quickly collapses into homosexual fantasy.
The accounts of Welch's work had left me unprepared for the degree and extent of this fantasy. In a characteristic short story called 'When I Was Thirteen' the narrator, who is on holiday in Switzerland with his elder brother, goes out for the day with an undergraduate named Archer. At the end of the day the two return to Archer's chalet. There the narrator massages his leg ('His calf was like a firm sponge ball. His thigh, swelling out, amazed me'), smells his, foot 'in its woolly, hairy, humid casing of sack,' scrubs his back with a nailbrush ('Delicious tremors seemed to be passing through Archer'), bathes in his already used water, gets slightly drunk at dinner and is taken back to the chalet by Archer and put to bed. Technically their relationship has been innocent, but when on the following morning his brother learns what has happened he beats the boy, yelling at him in a hoarse, mad, religious voice, "Bastard, Devil, Harlot, Sod !" '
Now, one can see that this anecdote might have been successful if it had been pointed to show the narrator's realisation of his own nature: but it is not told in that way at all. Here and throughout his writing Welch was unable to resist the luxury of titillating his own emo- tions by describing in detail the attraction of lovely young toughs. His narrators are forever taking off their shirts, letting their trousers drop to the ground, and comparing their own soft white bodies with the hardness of—say—that of the tramp in The Barn' ('Through a rent in his trousers I could see his hard thigh') or the boys seen engaging in horseplay with a young man whose legs 'glinted like silk' and were 'like those of a wild animal.' I do not think it is an over- statement to call the continual expression of these adolescent fantasies disagreeable and dreary. Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, who was also a frustrated homosexual, was able in more than one book to make the imaginative effort needed to turn obsession into art. Welch never got further than writing about himself. Mr. Brooke truly says that his work never developed, and the immaturity of adolescence was something to which his literary persona desperately clung. He almost always wrote about himself as a very young person, much younger than in fact he was. Dame Edith Sitwell, in her foreword to his first book, Maiden Voyage, wrote of the 'touching very youthful creature who is the central character,' and it is difficult not to feel that the book has also been written by a very youthful creature. Welch was in fact twenty-eight years old when it was published.
There remains the question why such a high valuation was ever placed upon Denton Welch's work. The answer is interesting. The war period is thought of as a time when most writing was 'over-solemn or boringly "documentary" . . . hardly less drab and uninspiring than the "utility" paper upon which it was printed,' to quote Mr. Brooke once more. It is perfectly true that the war period was like that, but most periods contain their opposites, and just as the esthetic Nineties were also the time in which the talents of Wells and Kipling flowered, so an extreme and conscious aestheticism flourished in what is thought of as this 'documentary' period. Welch's books filled the gap that was waiting for the appearance of a young `aesthetic' genius. Had they been published a decade later they would have caused much less critical excitement, and only one of them is now in print. He was a pathetic rather than a tragic figure. The pathetic thing about his career as a writer was not really the accident against the effects of which he struggled : it was the fact that when he had told the story of this accident he really had nothing more to say.
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