A Perfect Nightmare

In 1935, Denton Welch – then an art student at Goldsmith’s College – was knocked off his bike on a busy road just outside Bromley. He spent over a year in hospital and was permanently weakened by his injuries. He died thirteen years later at the age of 33, leaving behind him a few strange but compelling books – all of which obsessively pick over Denton’s recollections of his life before the accident. They culminate in A Voice through a Cloud, a nightmarish account of his months in hospitals and convalescent homes in southern England. He died before he finished it and it ends, with poignant abruptness, in the middle of a paragraph, with Denton sitting, uncertain and in pain, in his doctor’s car which is parked outside a bungalow in Broadstairs.

A Voice, and Welch’s other best-known book Maiden Voyage, are generally described as novels, probably because they do not seem to fit into any other category. Yet there is no fiction in Welch: everything in his writing is refracted through the broken mirror of his own experience, and recounted in the first person in his own peculiar, inimitable voice. Maiden Voyage is an account of Denton’s running away from boarding school, then going out to China where his father was the director of a lumber company in Shanghai. It was the first Denton Welch I ever read and was given to me by a boyfriend. I was gripped by its narrator’s odd-angled eye on the world, but it was a weird kind of book to give as a love token: fastidious, snobbish, voyeuristic and intensely self-absorbed, Welch appears to be more concerned with objects than people. He was the kind of child who, while his friends were playing cricket, was polishing his parents’ antique furniture, rearranging his collection of ivory snuffboxes or sifting through his mother’s jewellery. From an early age, a lustreware teapot could send him into raptures. His narrative voice was confidently established from the first in a quite brilliant account of going to tea with Walter Sickert in 1936 (published in Horizon). ‘I remember with a vividness the slight shock I received on being confronted with a glistening white WC, as soon as the door was opened.’ Later we find Denton slyly turning over the Sickerts’ silver teaspoons to check the hallmark. But although Welch’s world often seems composed only of surfaces, the reader soon finds that his apparently artless, surreal juxtapositions reveal deep feelings of fear and longing. His memories of his own few golden years are an elegy for an England now vanished – teashops, church-crawling, antique-shop treasures, lovely, unself-conscious farm boys stripping off to plunge into rivers after a day’s labour – but it is also touched by a sense of creeping uncertainty and fear: ‘The castle at Chilham, perched on its hill in the heart of the trees, brought back my tiredness under the hot sun, my sense of isolation in a world of motor cars and melting tar.’ In A Voice through a Cloud this uncertainty comes to a head in ruthlessly dissected horrors – it is as if, sensing the imminence of his own death, Welch was saving the worst for last. The book begins on a Whitsun bank holiday as Denton sets out on his bicycle to visit his uncle in his Surrey vicarage. On the outskirts of Beckenham he stops to have tea in an eighteenth-century house which he describes with characteristic Pevsner-like attention to detail, recoiling at the way the proportions of the room have been ruined by the tea urn and the gaudy advertisements. He gets back on his bicycle and minutes later is run down by a car, waking up in a hospital unable to feel his legs. Welch has an extraordinary gift for description. His writing is spare and precise and he has a brilliant knack for the spot-on simile that brings one up short. Sometimes he overdoes it and tips over into the lurid, but this is rare. Edith Sitwell, one of his mentors, on whom he poured lavish adoration in his journals, wrote quite rightly that Welch ‘never fumbles’. The horrors in A Voice come thick and fast, but they are intensely vivid and made more so by the curious, separated voice in which they are recounted. In the next-door hospital bed to Welch is a man whose girlfriend visits him. She is lame and, when she brushes back her hair, he sees she has no ear, only a gaping hole. ‘She appeared to me as the victim of some horrible medieval brutality.’ Yet while the other patients look on her with compassion, Welch is struck by the unsentimental nature of his neighbour.

He told me about his marriage plans, the council flat and the increased pay he hoped for. I tried to look under his words for something hidden, something more; but each plain statement refused to be given more depth or colouring. His girl was his girl. She had no ear. She had a game leg. They had no house or flat yet. He hadn’t enough money yet. Still, they would be married. No more thought need be wasted on the matter.

We do not know what his fellow-patients thought of Denton Welch, but he must have been disconcerting to meet: camp, waspish, tremblingly thin-skinned – at least when it came to himself – perhaps whipping out an exercise book to note down observations of his company and their conversations. Though he was quick to pour scorn on the taste and pieties of the bourgeoisie, he held firm to a few bourgeois prejudices himself – one nurse, a novice Catholic priest, he describes as ‘a great black tarantula in cassock and biretta, with hairy spider ankles’. Yet for me anyway, despite all this, he makes one see the world through his curious personal kaleidoscope, all the pieces shaken into a new, sometimes jangling pattern of shapes and colours. In the end, one’s feelings of irritation (even sometimes repugnance) are outweighed by sympathy for Welch’s loneliness and admiration for his art which, for all its over-wrought aestheticism and its self-consciousness, is always painfully honest. In A Voice, Denton tells us of the daydream with which he fills the long days in hospital. In a world reduced to a white bed and to excruciating pain, he has created a characteristically Welchian consolation – a perfect room, with no one else there to spoil the effect and everything in it beautiful and placed there for its own perfect purpose: a winged armchair covered in old needlework, a kitten, candles in silver sconces, a delicious tea of toast and one speckled brown egg, a dish of jam made with white cherries. One can imagine Denton lovingly developing every detail of this daydream in the sanitary chilliness and horror of the hospital. All in this dream room is perfectly in its place and aesthetically pleasing; nothing is excessive – there is just one brown egg. And there at the centre of it all sits Denton, with his antique sconces and his white cherries a shield against the vulgarities of the outside world. Reading Denton Welch has always made me feel like a Peeping Tom, looking through the window of that room with a melancholy, sometimes horrified fascination – all the while knowing that, despite its appearance of intimacy, I, the reader, am unlikely to be invited to enter.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Lucy Lethbridge 2005