Feverish Haste

In 2005 an excellent article by Lucy Lethbridge about Denton Welch appeared in Slightly Foxed. So why another? Well, he is one of those writers who attract a small but passionate band of devotees. Though regarded as a minor author by many, much as Saki is, or Nancy Mitford or Henry Green, he has nothing in common with any of these. He is unique, and my love of his books has continued throughout my reading life.

Welch was born in 1915 and died in 1948. Almost everything he wrote is in the first person and based on real events in his life. He describes things exactly as they happened with a disciplined and assured spontaneity. As Edith Sitwell commented, ‘He is a born writer. He never fumbles.’ I discovered his writing when I was very young, at a time when I identified completely with his adolescent self. He was still alive then, and I wish now that I had thought to write to him. I first found his story ‘The Judas Tree’ at a time when copies of Penguin New Writing could be picked up for 6d. In it Welch relates how, as an art student, he was accosted by an obsessed, slightly crazed ex-school-master who lured him back to his house in Greenwich and beseeched him to paint Judas Iscariot, hanging from a tree with his tongue black and lolling. He must have red hair, he insisted. We feel the young man’s discomfort at finding himself so trapped. As the schoolmaster leans over him, he can smell ‘the juicy pipe tobacco, the animal smell of tweeds, and something between alcohol and the smell in chemist shops’. We know this man. Welch engages all the senses, touch and smell especially, to describe things and people. Now when I reread this story, I identify more strongly with the sad, pathetic old man desperately attempting to hold back time and satisfy his yearnings before it is too late. I searched for more of Welch’s books and will always remember the excitement when I found his selected journals in a blue Boots Library copy, thumbed and stained, with a metal hole at the base of the spine. I didn’t know he had written a journal. Later I came across a Readers’ Union copy of his unfinished autobiographical novel A Voice through a Cloud (1950). Inside was a handout with a photograph of an aesthetic but conventionally dressed young man staring soulfully through thick 1940s spectacles. And in an article by Maurice Cranston I learned of the accident that had fractured his spine when in 1935 he was knocked off his bicycle by a car. He was 20. Cranston wrote that from that moment Welch became ‘at once a boy and an old, old man’, combining the intense, raw passion of youth and a feverish haste that stemmed from not knowing how much time he had left. Once I had found all his published books – his fictionalized autobiography of his early years in China, Maiden Voyage (1943), his novel In Youth Is Pleasure (1944) and the posthumously published collections of short stories, Brave and Cruel (1949) and A Last Sheaf (1951) – I began to meet other people who liked his work. A postman who lived in Kent spent all his spare time visiting the churches and houses Welch wrote of in his diaries. Anne Rothenstein had inherited from her uncle, the art historian John Rothenstein, a cactus apparently potted up by Denton, now huge and adorning her piano. I was allowed to touch it. In the early 1970s I searched out more people who had known him. One of these was Noël Adeney, a painter who had lent Welch the house in Kent where he lived his last few years. She had written a book called No Coward Soul, based on the letters he had written her and very hard to find now. She in turn had known Eric Oliver, the man with whom Welch fell in love and who looked after him so devotedly. I began to discover that, as often happens when a writer dies, vicious feuds ensued. Noël would not speak of Eric; she claimed she did not know where he lived. Her book describes the rivalry between them. My conclusion was that she also was in love with Denton. In due course I did meet Eric. I had been reading some of Welch’s stories on the radio and he wrote to thank me. I had always imagined that he was ‘a bit of rough’, but he was charming and cultured, very shy and strangely reluctant to say much about Welch. I knew that he had disposed of many of the manuscripts, which are now housed at the University of Texas. All he had left were Welch’s ashes, which he kept on top of his wardrobe. However, he did tell me that a typescript of the complete journals was in the hands of one of Welch’s friends, who would not let it go. This was the working copy Jocelyn Brooke had used when he edited them for publication in 1952. In 1976 I eventually met this friend. His name was Francis Streeten. In a letter written before our meeting he told me ‘he had the invidious distinction of appearing in several of Denton’s stories’. He came to London to see a play I was in. I had no difficulty afterwards in spotting him – a large, almost elephantine man with a brown complexion, decorously picking his way towards the stage door. Welch’s descriptions were often cruel, but they were also accurate. We went to Fortnum’s for tea. As we talked I noticed with delight all the strange characteristics that Welch had noted in Francis thirty years earlier – the baby voice, the tittering laugh ‘as if someone was tickling his feet with a feather’, the nicotine-stained fingers ‘like chipolatas’. I liked his literate and articulate mind and his 1930s manner. He said he had been surprised by Denton’s fame. Of all the friends they mixed with, he believed him to be the least interesting. Of course, I thought. They said that of Jane Austen and of Thomas Hardy. It’s the one who sits at the back taking it all in who produces the work of genius. The next year Francis died. His niece asked if I would go to the funeral with her and afterwards to his flat in St Leonards to help her rescue some family things. It was a sad day, with only a token few present at the service. The flat was on the top floor of an Edwardian block. That hot August afternoon we had to compete with the fleas as we picked our way over the unwashed dishes and discarded shirts. The sofa was piled high with detective novels. The wardrobe, full of new shirts still in their wrappings, had a bottom drawer that had been pulled on to the floor close to the unmade bed. In it was a cardboard box covered with cobwebs. Had Francis left it purposely on view? Without looking we knew it contained the journals. After some negotiation with the family, I was allowed to take them away, promising to try to get them published. The typescript was scored and pasted together where Jocelyn Brooke had made his selections, and some of it was hard to decipher. I couldn’t risk ripping it apart, so had to hold the pages up to the light to read what was typed underneath. It was a slow but exciting business. For almost a year I spent my spare time typing it out in duplicate. Then, by a lucky coincidence, I learned that Allison & Busby were planning to reissue the selected journals, and that a biography was to be written. So it was that I was able to pass on the complete journals, which were edited by Michael De-la-Noy and published for the first time in this country in 1984. His biography Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer came out in the same year. There was also an exhibition of Welch’s paintings at Abbott and Holder’s gallery in Bloomsbury. The writer I loved was suddenly being talked about by the literati. I had mixed feelings about this. I was pleased he was getting the recognition he deserved, but I wondered how long it would last. Ten years ago a further biography appeared. The author, James Methuen-Campbell, had managed to meet many people who had known Welch and track down many of his paintings, which were beautifully reproduced in the book. He also persuaded the same publisher, Tartarus, to bring out in two huge volumes all the known stories. Denton Welch began to write because he had read and enjoyed J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday. He thought he would try to write a similar diary about how he ran away from school. He quickly discovered that he had almost perfect recall. The solitude enforced by his accident concentrated his memory, as it does sometimes with ill or elderly people who remember vividly and afresh things that have not been thought of for years. And he wrote it down just as it had occurred, in simple and disciplined prose. Many people have speculated as to what Welch would have made of his life had he lived longer. I believe he would have gained recognition as a painter, but the pleasure of enjoying the active life that was denied him would not have induced him to write anything of significance. He himself admitted that he found a serenity in writing that he had never known before. It is our gain that he did.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 38 © Benjamin Whitrow 2013