Denton Welch

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Self-portrait, around 1940–1942

Maurice Denton Welch (born March 29, 1915 in Shanghai , † December 30, 1948 in Middle Orchard Cottage , Crouch, Kent ) was an English writer and painter who was particularly admired for his lively prose and precise descriptions. He studied art and wrote three novels, two volumes of short stories and hundreds of poems and was also a passionate diary writer.

Life

Welch was born in Shanghai as the youngest of four children of Arthur Joseph Welch and his wife Rosalind Basset. He spent his childhood in China . He received his education in Great Britain , first in a pre-school (St. Michael's, Uckfield , Sussex, since 1929 in Repton Public School ). During the summer holidays he spent most of his time at his grandfather's house in Sussex . His mother died in March 1927. At the age of 16, he ran away to avoid returning to the hated public school and went back to China.

Welch described the early years of his life in his autobiography Maiden Voyage (1935). With the help and patronage of Edith Sitwell and John Lehmann , this book achieved a small but lasting success and cemented Welch's literary reputation. Next, he published In Youth is Pleasure , German " The joys of youth " (1943), a study of growing up, and Brave and Cruel (1949), a collection of short stories that appeared only after Welch's death. Among his shorter works, the essay on the painter Walter Sickert is particularly significant. It was originally published in The London Magazine ; he drew the attention of Edith Sitwell to the author. An unfinished novel entitled A Voice through a Cloud was published posthumously in 1950 .

Welch originally had no plans to become a writer. Since 1933 he studied art in London at the Goldsmith School of Art, New Cross, because he intended to become a painter. Edward Bawden was one of his teachers . At the age of 20 on June 7, 1935, he was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and suffered a spinal fracture. After his release from the nursing home in July 1936, Welch rented an apartment with Evelyn Sinclair in Tonbridge , near his doctor. Although he did not remain permanently paralyzed, he did suffer from severe pain and complications such as spinal tuberculosis and recurrent bladder infections. He died on December 30, 1948 at Middle Orchard Cottage, Crouch, Kent .

His literary work, dense and introverted, includes profound portraits of his friends as well as meticulously observed descriptions of English country life during World War II. Time and again, his writings deal with the precise observation of the aesthetics that he found in human behavior, physical appearance, clothing, art, architecture, jewelry and antiques. Occasionally he continued to paint. There is a good self-portrait of Welch in the National Portrait Gallery , and there are marginal illustrations in the first editions of his books.

In November 1943 a friend introduced Welch to Eric Oliver (1914-1995). He lived and worked in Maidstone . Soon he was visiting the house regularly and eventually moved in with Welch. Eric Oliver served Welch as a nurse, secretary, and eventually his literary executor. He gave away parts of the estate to friends and sold the main part (especially drawings, pictures, manuscripts and letters) as a bundle to a bookseller. The largest part of the literary estate is now in the University of Texas ("The Denton Welch Art Collection"). Oliver kept the urn with Welch's ashes in his cloakroom for many years until he was persuaded to hand it over to a clergyman for safekeeping.

William S. Burroughs called Welch the author who had influenced him most deeply. John Lehmann said that Welch, had he only lived longer, would have become something like “an English André Gide , but more unusual and exotic”. Stephen Spender admired him, but EM Forster was surprised that the topic of sexuality was not resolved in his works. Nevertheless, Denton Welch was open to his homosexuality and wrote, for example, a letter to the editor of the "Times Literary Supplement" in which he complained that an article about Gerard Manley Hopkins did not mention the poet's homosexuality.

Welch's diaries , 1952, were not fully published until 1984. His passion for old churches, overgrown gardens, mansions of the ruling class, contemporary furniture and all the little artifacts like “ Gothic revival ” toast stands, these unmistakable emblems of “ Englishness ”, make him more English, pre-war, more authoritative in the sense of the Bloomsbury Group than every other author of his time and his country appear.

Works (selection)

stories
  • A picture in the snow and other stories from the estate; plus a fragment of a novel (“A last sheaf”). Zweiausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1992.
  • The fire in the forest. Narration . Steidl, Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3-88243-434-1 (library of storytellers; 7).
  • Michael De-la-Noy (Ed.): Fragments of a Life Story. The Collected Short Writings of Denton Welch . Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1987, ISBN 0-14-007620-4 .
  • I left my grandfather's house . Enitharmon Press, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-904634-28-7 .
  • Robert Phillips (Ed.): The Stories of Denton Welch . EP Dutton, New York 1985, ISBN 0-525-24364-X .
  • Brave and cruel ( "Brave and Cruel and Other Stories"). Zweiausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-86150-401-4 .
  • When I was thirteen . In: Edmund White (Ed.): The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction . Faber & Faber, London 1991, ISBN 0-571-14473-X .
Poetry
  • Dumb instrument. Poems and fragments . Enitharmon Press, London 1976.
Novels
  • Joys of youth. Roman ("In Youth is Pleasure"). New edition Zweiausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-88243-343-4 (preface by William S. Burroughs , translated by Carl Weissner ).
  • Maiden voyage. Roman ("Maiden Voyage"). Steidl, Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3-88243-416-3 (preface by Edith Sitwell , translated by Carl Weissner).
  • Fate. Roman ("A Voice Through a Cloud"). Zweiausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1987 (translated by Carl Weissner).
Diaries
  • Jocelyn Brooke (Ed.): The Denton Welch Journals . Hamish Hamilton Publ., London 1973

literature

  • Michael De-la-Noy: Denton Welch. The Making of a Writer . Viking Press, Harmondsworth 1984, ISBN 0-670-80056-2 .
  • Robert S. Phillips: Denton Welch . Twayne, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8057-1567-3 (Twayne's English Authors series; 163).
  • James Methuen-Campbell: Denton Welch. Writer and Artist . Tauris Parke Paperbacks, London 2004, ISBN 1-86064-924-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael De-la-Noy, Obituary: Eric Oliver, in: The Independent, April 4, 1995 p. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-eric-oliver-1614132.html
  2. ↑ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-eric-oliver-1614132.html
  3. ↑ former title: Maiden Journey . Carl Habel Verlag, Berlin 1947 (German first edition)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Welch, Denton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Welch, Maurice Denton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English painter and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Shanghai
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1948
Place of death Middle Orchard Cottage , Crouch, Kent