BOOKS AND WRITERS

DENTON WELCH was an unexpected artist. He was born (at 6 p.m. on March 29th, 1915) to a family irreproachably mercantile and philistine, Shanghai English on the one side, Boston Puritan on the other. He was trained to be a painter, believed himself a poet, and made his name as a writer of prose. He was a wonderfully gifted, wonderfully genuine man. He had the sweetest nature and the saddest life. Less manly as a child than his elder brother, he was motherless at eleven ; the misfit at Renton (he ran away at sixteen) was still an oddity at the art school. Then there was a motor smash, and Denton Welch was left, with thirteen years to live, a cripple.

A mocking fate surrounded him from birth with Christian Scien- tists, denying the reality of pain, actually rebuking him for the agony he felt and the clamant certainty of death. He outwitted that philosophy by creating a reality of his own which transcended the reality of pain: an artist's private universe, and one furnished with the richest treasures of rococo fantasy. From it as a novelist—a " novelist " in the Proustian sense—he surveyed at least a small area of the physical world with astonishment and gaiety and insight. He had the eye of a child and in many ways the simplicity of one. He had great zest for beauty and imagination almost overburdened with its own inventiveness. " Would the images," he asked himself in hospital, " never stop forming ? " He was very truthful and surprisingly knowing. Only the truth about his injuries was hidden, and with it a strange, confused guilt. Most of Denton Welch's work is sparkling with life. He often

wrote, as he often behaved, as the enfant terrible. His first pub- lished prose was a wickedly boyish account of a visit to Sickert, which reappears in the latest and last collection* of Denton Welch's writings. Originally Cyril Connolly used it in Horizon in August, 1942, so that Denton Welch was a Connolly " discovery " although his greatest debt as a writer was, as he knew, to Dr. Edith Sitwell. It was she who introduced his first book to the public in 1943. In her foreword, Dr. Sitwell said of Maiden Voyage: In the touching very youthful creature who is the central character, with his curious young wisdom and his occasional young silliness, his lolling for affection and hatred of falsehood, his adventurous- ness, his enquiring nature, his courage, his fright, his shyness and agonies of mind, his youthful clumsiness, his warm kindness and his pathos, we live again our youth.

How well Dr. Sitwell understood him ! And how wrong the impression given by the snapshot on the jacket of A Last Sheaf and by the later Denton Welch paintings which are printed inside. The snapshot shows a darkly lowering cadaver, discontented, dis- approving. He was in fact a fair and charming personality, slight, good-looking and amusingly dressed—though one usually met him towards the end propped with pink pillows on his bed, a velvet eiderdown beneath to show he was not in it. (Gamely he preserved the illusion that he would soon be getting up.) He had a high, fine forehead, close golden curls, full lips and bright, shy eyes. He was excitable and laughed a lot. He was witty and relished gossip with a- touch of malice in it.

Between the ages of 20 and 27 he kept up a marvellous show of good health. He never talked about his accident. If he had to-keep to his bedroom for a day, he would encourage his friends to suspect hypochondriasis. He would have hated people to know the extent of his injuries, or that he had to wear a catheter. He was very proud. Denton Welch's writings are hardly anywhere a sick man's work. It was his painting which had to serve towards the end as his catharsis, and the pictures reproduced in A Last Sheaf are distress- ing—half-heartedly meticulous, crowded, literary, almost psychotic. The little drawings arc different and better. In graphic art his emphasis was always decorative and while the idioms—sea shells, snakes, fish-bones, cats, fans, pointed arches and broken pediments —suggest the age of bogus ruin, they were all real to him. Maiden Voyage is a magical book, not unconsciously naive. It begins with an account of the author's running away from school. He takes a bus to a London station: When the conductor called out " Waterloo " I ran down the steps and stood for a moment in the road.' A carthorse was pouring out a golden jet of water. I watchcd it bubbling and hissing into the gutter, then I began to climb the stone stairs between the fat statues. The trains inside the station were lying close together like big worms.

• A Last Sheaf. By Denton Welch. (John Lehmann. 12s. 6d.) Denton Welch learned later to write a more sophisticated language, but he kept the trick of lighting up a passage of conven- tional narrative with one of his arresting child's images. Thus, from his second book, In Youth is Pleasure, this paragraph: He walked slowly into the dark water and lay down flat. His exultation passed into a more sober delight. Water always soothed him. He felt calm and peaceful. As he floated, he felt the sun hot on his face and on the parts of his chest and arms which were still above water. The rest of his body was tingling with cold. "I'm like one of those Baked Alaskas," he thought, " one of those lovely puddings of ice cream and hot sponge."

In Youth is Pleasure, for all the merits of its style, is Denton Welch's least good book. It is cast in the third-person form, and thus demanded an interest in the external world which Denton Welch could not sustain. He was a born solipsist, and it was nature which held the mirror up to him. In Youth is Pleasure i3 not moving because it is artificial. Perhaps it is rightly called " precious."

To Denton Welch himself the thought that he was " precious" was never disagreeable. His tastes were for delicate, exotic things. His home was furnished with 'a remarkable collection of eighteenth- century pieces. He enjoyed the music of the harpsichord, candle- light, punch and fragrant snuff. In one of his poems he writes:

In Total War I lead a life

Epitomised by Chinese Chippendale. I still am Gothic on a painted bed,

Rococo in a grotto underground,

Baroque in cloisters pillaged from dead Spain, Enjoying what will never live again.

Clearly he was not the poet he wished to be. But he was a real .artist and unusually complete as a personality. Only the super- ficial eye would have been misled by the colourful accoutrements with which he fortified his spirits. He had no desire to epater le bourgeois; on the contrary he liked to be the perfect gentleman, and his manners were charming.

After In Youth is Pleasure he worked slowly on his most impor- tant book A Voice Through a Cloud. If only because its subject was his accident, the work at it was a great emotional strain. All the time, what is more, his health was worsening, and it was largely composed a few words at a time between the crises of his last great illness. Nevertheless he also wrote in those years between fifteen and twenty short stories. Several of them appeared in one volume with his nouvelle entitled Brave and Cruel, and there are several more less-finished ones in A Last Sheaf. This same book• also carries an early draft of A Voice Through a Cloud, and a most revealing piece called A Fragment of a Life Story which, if nothing else, should satisfy enquiring minds about events which followed those narrated in A Voice Through a Cloud.

There is a sinister quality in much of Denton Welch's work. He suggests the plight of Adam immediately the forbidden fruit had been eaten: the eye still innocent, the heart filled with a sudden, shocked knOwledge of iniquity. He was a visual writer with his own iconography of evil: lepers in a Chinese street, shabby shuffling perverts, ageing painted harpies and crumbling houses where the mad have lived. The very titles of his stories bear wit- ness here: The Judas Tree, Narcissus Bay, The Coffin on the Hill. The most horrifying story he ever wrote is called A Diamond Badge and is about the visit of a lady to a young novelist whose domestic circumstances are precisely Denton Welch's own. She has never seen the young novelist before. He is ill, and must receive her in his bedroom. She is startled to discover that: He was terribly deformed, his hands all twisted and his body

seemingly telescoped into itself, so that he was broad but perhaps only three feet tall. He had a smooth oval face with rather delicate features. His hair was red and a little silky fringe ran right round

his jaw _dine, framing his face and making him look like a parti-

cularly well-groomed ill-disposed monkey.

As a picture of Denton Welch himself this is absurdly, mon- strously false. But it suggests how he felt or feared others saw him. And as such it underlines his most conspicuous failing. He had no trust. This in turn connects with his greatest limitation as an artist. He built too many barricades and enclosed the range of his understanding. If he could have seen the wider human comedy with his miraculously penetrating eye, and described that world as he described his own, he would surely have been among the greater writers in our language. As it is he will survive as a minor genius, one of very few from an uncreative age. MAURICE CRANSTON.