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Welland, Patrick

Patrick Welland worked as a national newspaper journalist for thirty-six years, retiring in 2008. He mourns the passing of old Fleet Street in its hot metal heyday but has finally come to terms with computers. He now happily dabbles as a freelance writer.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [29] 48; [34] 58; [41] 49; [45] 36; [49] 7; [50] 36; [51] 34; [55] 54; [58] 20; [59] 62; [63] 7; [64] 86; [71] 13; [75] 18; [77] 66

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20230301100035 Patrick Welland on Robert Nye, Falstaff, Slightly Foxed 77

Oh Sir John!

Patrick Welland on Robert Nye, Falstaff

In 1976, a year remembered in the UK for its blazing summer, publication of a scabrous novel so inflamed a group of academics that they burned copies in the library at Reading University. Less delicate souls embraced the book. It won that year’s Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Guardian Fiction Prize, garnering encomiums from reviewers who struggled to match its exuberant prose. The New York Times called it a ‘fresco of groinwork’; Time Magazine welcomed a ‘swollen, rumbustical bladder of a book . . . unstoppable as a rush of sack to the kidneys’; Anthony Burgess praised its ‘wordy divagations of a more monkish (Rabelaisian) tradition’ and included it among his 99 best modern novels.
20210812132006 SFE No. 56: George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna

Elegy to a Family

Patrick Welland on George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna

I have a photo of Aunt Margaret standing outside Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, beret jauntily askew. It is 1937 and, aged 28, she is on her return with a friend from Czechoslovakia, travelling in an Austin Ruby. Margaret – think Joyce Grenfell in St Trinian’s – always maintained she crossed Central Europe without difficulty despite losing her passport. It seems improbable but maybe not impossible. Regardless, the small black-and-white image enduringly appeals because it was taken amid perilous events in Austria of which Margaret, in her artless exuberance for life, was probably unaware. I wanted to know more of that time.
20110301114309 Patrick Welland, Henry Fielding - Slightly Foxed Issue 29

A Terrifying Business

Patrick Welland on Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela

My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a previous school I was not going to waste my time and new freedom by studying A levels when I could do more exciting things, such as being thrown out of pubs for drinking weak beer under age. But although student and college were glad to see the back of each other, I had one regret - no more English lectures with genial Mr Butler, the single teacher for whom my rigid code of sloth made an exception.
20120601111226 Patrick Welland on William Hickey, B. Lodge

Artless but not Heartless

Patrick Welland on William Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake

In May 1797, the 33rd Regiment of Foot Officers arrives in Calcutta. A round of parties ensues, one at Colonel Sherbrooke’s ‘small mansion’ in the village of Alypore three miles from the city. A guest later describes the company – which includes 28-year-old Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington – as ‘eight as strong-headed fellows as could be found in Hindustan’.
20191201161223

Perilous Times

Patrick Welland on Olivia Manning’s Levant trilogy

In the summer of 1974, the author Olivia Manning reread the transcript of a BBC radio talk she had given eleven years earlier about her arrival in Cairo in 1941 with her husband, Reggie Smith. Although she was not well, it inspired her to follow her Balkan trilogy (see SF no. 63), detailing the wartime experiences of Harriet and Guy Pringle in Bucharest and Athens, with a second sequence set in Egypt and the Middle East. The task took five years and by the time it was finished Manning had only months to live. She died in July 1980, aged 72.
20190901155008 Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy, Patrick Welland

Adrift on the Tides of War

Patrick Welland on Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy

It is an irony that the dramatization of a novel may deter not spur. Instead of leading the viewer to the book, it becomes a substitute. Such a fate appears to have befallen Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, which in its Balkan and Levant trilogies traces the wartime travails of young Harriet and Guy Pringle as they flee the advancing Germans, first in Bucharest and Athens, then in Egypt and the Middle East. The six volumes were published to acclaim between 1960 and 1980. Yet Manning’s work is now probably better remembered as the 1987 BBC TV dramatization starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.
20180901154305 Anthony Powell - Patrick Welland on Graham Greene, SF Issue 59

In a Class of Their Own

Patrick Welland on Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School

The Old School is made up of seventeen essays by writers who achieved literary distinction later in life, though some are all but forgotten today. Apart from Auden, still familiar names include Harold Nicolson, H. E. Bates, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen and Stephen Spender. Less well remembered are the South African novelist and poet William Plomer and the novelist and film critic E. Arnot Robertson.
20160901113110 Daniel Macklin. Patrick Welland on J.G. Farrell

Collapse in the Colony

Patrick Welland on J. G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

With two prize-winning novels – Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur (see SF nos. 49 and 50) – behind him, J. G. Farrell felt sufficiently confident to paint his next exploration of the decline of the British Empire on a larger canvas. The Singapore Grip (1978), set in the build-up to Japan’s invasion of the colony in 1942, continues the theme of its predecessors in portraying a complacent élite teetering on the edge of an abyss and then tumbling to its fate.
20160301150013 David Eccles crop - Patrick Welland on J. G. Farrell, Troubles

Murder at the Majestic

Patrick Welland on J. G. Farrell, Troubles

On 11 August 1979, a humane and singular man, who after long periods punctuated by adversity declared himself ‘happier than I’ve been in years’, left his isolated cottage near Bantry Bay in the west of Ireland to fish from his favourite rock. There he was swept away by a huge wave, outrider of an unprecedented storm which two days later would claim the lives of eighteen crew in the Fastnet yacht race. A witness said no cry left the fisherman’s lips and he made no visible attempt to save himself. The body of the novelist J. G. Farrell was found a month later. With his death at 44, contemporary literature lost a unique voice and the prospect of even greater riches to come. John Banville said it was ‘nothing short of a disaster for English fiction’.
20150301103559 Patrick Welland on Gore Vidal, Julian

Last of the Pagans

Patrick Welland on Gore Vidal, Julian

Vidal explores this confrontation between old and new in a fictive autobiography drawing on three surviving volumes of Julian’s letters and essays, and contemporary recollections. In doing so, he paints a sympathetic portrait of an individual gullible and pragmatic, sensitive and stubborn. Julian was a skilful military commander, a talented administrator and a concerned social reformer. But he was driven by contempt for Christians who he saw bowing to an authority they regarded as greater than Rome. He mocked them as Galileans, and their churches packed with relics he called charnel houses.
20140301113332

A Quare One

Patrick Welland on the novels of Flann O’Brien

I sensed him looking at me as I sat in the tobacco fug of the Palace Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street back in the ’60s engrossed in Joyce’s Dubliners. His scrutiny from the adjacent bar stool was unsettling. Suddenly, without apology, he tapped his finger on the page and nodded at me, signalling silent approval of my choice of book. Fixing my eye, he asked: ‘Did you ever hear of O’Brien?’ I shook my head. ‘Now there’s a hard man who runs Joyce close,’ he said. Then, pausing for dramatic effect, he added portentously: ‘And it was in this very bar he’d be drinking.’ Flann O’Brien, who loved to parody pub conversations, would have relished the bathetic conclusion. But I owe to that chance acquaintance a great debt. Over the next hour, he introduced me to the writing of a drunk and waspish comic genius who stretched the boundaries of literary invention and became a legend of Irish letters.

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