What Denton Welch’s life was like before his accident we know from the books he wrote after it. They give a picture of a teenager’s experience unparalleled in its vividness and oddity. Welch was born in Shanghai in 1915, to an American mother and an English businessman father, and brought to England when he was four. In his first book, 1943’s Maiden Voyage, he describes his return to China in 1932, after he’d run away from Repton school in Derbyshire.
All his characteristics as a writer are evident from the start: an astonishing candour of response to sensations of all kinds, with childlike repulsion registered as keenly as attraction; a clarity of style unbothered by literary convention; and a fierce solipsism, his sense of others exact and often unsparing, but his overwhelming purpose the record of his own needs, excitements and perceptions: not just things seen but the acutely subjective feelings they stir up in him.
For his short 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure, he wrote in the third person about a holiday he’d spent at the age of 15 with his father and two elder brothers at a country-house hotel in Surrey. The book enlarges our sense of a central paradox in Welch. On the one hand there is his hunger for wild physical sensation, focused here on a scoutmaster camping in the woods nearby with two teenage boys, who stir fantasies of a homoerotic alternative to the conventional family Welch keeps trying to escape from.
The Postern, Tunbridge, by Denton Welch. Photograph: Denton Welch. Courtesy John Swarbrooke Fine Art
On the other there is his yearning for old and poignantly fragile things, his precocious connoisseurship of buildings, decoration, porcelain and objets de vertu. From childhood he’d developed a very personal taste, pursued through his short adult lifetime in sharp-eyed visits to Kentish junk shops and sales, so that his various makeshift homes became little museums of his sensibility – not of what he called “boringly 18th-century revival taste”, but of vigorous, bright, eclectic non-English taste, “‘Walter Scott’ beautiful”. His assemblage of objects is illustrated in many carefully posed photographs, and reflected more obliquely in a number of his paintings and drawings.
There’s a further telling glimpse of Welch, 20 by now, and a student at Goldsmiths school of art in London. This is the beautiful portrait by his friend Gerald Leet, which shows him reclining on a sofa in grey flannels and a yellow roll-neck sweater, but barefoot, and with something a little provocative about him – a boyish odalisque in glasses and warm English clothes. The book loosely held in his left hand, and covering his crotch, is Poems and Essays of Oscar Wilde, in the recent Collins Pocket Classics series. His blue eyes, much paler than in Welch’s self-portraits, have a memorable intensity. They signal his strong private sense of himself, and of what he has it in him to do.
Striking … Self-Portrait. Photograph: Denton Welch. Courtesy John Swarbrooke Fine Art
At Goldsmiths, Welch, working mainly in the life room and from casts, had been rather tentatively “feeling his way”. We cannot know how far or in what direction he would have gone if he’d finished his schooling. In June 1935 he was knocked off his bicycle on an open stretch of road south of London, and suffered severe injuries to his spine and a number of internal organs. His months in hospital and in nursing homes are described in his final book A Voice Through a Cloud, not quite finished at the time of his death, aged 33, in 1948. Through those 13 years between accident and death his determination and hunger for life bore fruit in defiantly original creativity, as both writer and artist.
Welch’s pictures, some of which have just gone on show at John Swarbrooke Fine Art in London, are as unmistakably his own as his books are, though they tend to be more heavily worked, and are sometimes wonderfully elaborate. The accretion of small units of sensation in his prose has a clear parallel in the way he described working on a picture by a process of addition, starting with a vase of flowers and introducing unanticipated elements as he went on: “Evolution, not planning!”
But where the delight of the prose lies in its absolute transparency, that of the most interesting pictures lies in their obscurity. For his own books, he designed elaborate jackets, endpapers, frontispieces, title-pages and complex section-headings involving his private repertoire of living and inanimate things, trees, books, shells, cats and cupids. Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery. The mutating animal and vegetable forms that he had known since childhood in the strapwork and plasterwork of great Elizabethan houses are recreated in his designs. Later drawings and watercolours take on the air of densely worked engravings.
Welch’s landscapes are more or less free of the surreal juxtapositions of his vivid and sometimes sinister still lifes; though the late Cottage in the Wood teems with unsettling storybook detail. He disparaged his portraits of other people, which tend to be simple and striking and not notably sympathetic. But there are also seven arresting self-portraits (none exhibited in his lifetime), austere in colouring and composition, some more conscious than others of models reaching back to the Renaissance. Unlike the books’ energetic attempts to recapture his youth, these are sombre confrontations with the present, and with questions, no doubt, about the future too.
Strange Discoveries: The Art of Denton Welch is at John Swarbrooke Fine Art in London until 30 October
