DENTON WELCH was born in Shanghai in 1915, the youngest of four boys, to a wealthy British-American family. After leaving his English boarding school (Repton), Welch decided to follow his dream of becoming a painter, and studied art at Goldsmiths in London. The physical injuries sustained in a cycling accident in 1935, however, saw him increasingly turn towards a hitherto secondary interest: writing. When Welch’s debut, Maiden Voyage, was published in 1942, it was an instant literary sensation (‘I have been told that it reeks of homosexuality,’ wrote Winston Churchill’s secretary; ‘I think I must get it’). This was followed by In Youth Is Pleasure in 1945 and, after his premature death from spinal tuberculosis in 1948, the publication of his unfinished masterpiece, A Voice Through A Cloud. ‘If any writer has been neglected it is Denton’, wrote William Burroughs in 1985 – but Welch is also a writer who has attracted a firm coterie of admirers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Alan Bennett, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. Of his short life, Edmund White has noted, ‘He had the power to generate interest out of even the most meagre materials. He had this gift from the beginning but suffering and illness refined it to a white-hot flame.’

‘Maybe there is no better novel in the world that Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse crime than hunger’

JOHN WATERS

‘Denton Welch makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes… If any writer has been neglected it is Denton’

WILLIAM BURROUGHS

‘Denton Welch is like a British baby Proust in his astounding grasp of his own (usually ‘mundane’) experience. Nothing much happens in his books but the most wonderful writing’

RICHARD HELL

‘Are we not all, emotionally, what Mr Welch is in fact – orphans, each traveling alone on a journey which, if it is headed in the direction of unknown dangers, at least is heading away from the fears one knows?’

W.H. AUDEN

‘So much of what Welch wrote trembled on the brink of sex. His art is full of colour… and more than fifty years later, it is unfaded’

ALAN BENNETT

‘Welch’s work is all extraordinary passages: he is an anthologist of his own life’

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

In Youth Is Pleasure, © 1945, The University of Texas

Introduction, © 2014, Steve Finbow

This edition published in 2014

by Galley Beggar Press Limited

37 Dover Street,

Norwich, NR2 3LG

Typeset by Galley Beggar Press Ltd

All rights reserved,

The right of Denton Welch to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted by him

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that

it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be

lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated

without the publisher’s prior consent in any

form of binding or cover than that in

which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition imposed on

the subsequent purchaser

ISBN 978-1-910296-30-1

IN YOUTH IS PLEASURE

Denton Welch

With a new introduction by Steve Finbow

INTRODUCTION

This may have happened. It’s 1931, or thereabouts, and sixteen-year-old Denton Welch is strolling along Shanghai’s Bund. He passes an amah pushing a large perambulator and looks within to see the smiling face of the infant J.G. Ballard. Both of these idiosyncratic English prose stylists were observers of societal and personal minutiae; both used a pared-down language flecked with surrealist motifs; both were obsessed with motor-vehicle accidents, injuries and medicine; both were born in Shanghai and returned to England feeling exotic and alienated. If this places Denton Welch in company one wouldn’t expect him to be in, then it is all the more surprising that William S. Burroughs used Welch as a model for his gay gunslinger, Kim Carsons, antihero of The Place of Dead Roads. Burroughs regarded Welch as a fellow explorer of inner space, a writer who constantly and consistently escaped the death virus through writing, who used language as time-travel.

If, as Nick Land – another Shanghai resident – states, ‘the machinic unconscious tends only to flee, across a primary-process topography that is shaped by pain-gradients and escape thresholds’, then Welch mapped that topography in a lucid and bejewelled prose, using suffering as elucidation, memory as an escape into the present. A few months before he wrote In Youth Is Pleasure, Welch noted in his journal, on 19 April 1943, ‘Now I am home and I will not write about it till morning, for I have too much to say and I must think.’ Nick Land continues, ‘What registers for the secondary process as memory, experience, data-acquisition, is for the primary process, scarring, damage, sticky micro-softed irritations.’ This isn’t to say that Welch was a proto-cyberpunk or England’s answer to Georges Bataille, but his experiential novels, his journal-based fictions are much more than the precocious and ‘precious’ ramblings of an Interwar diarist. Trapped in his broken body, Denton Welch was information inquisitive; tuberculosis of the spine – caused by the motor-vehicle accident at the age of twenty – focused his mind on emotions recollected, not so much in tranquillity, but in pathology.

In Youth Is Pleasure recounts a summer spent in Surrey and East Sussex in the early 1930s. It is a sequel to Maiden Voyage and a prequel to Voice Through A Cloud. Heavily autobiographical, mostly culled from journals, Welch uses fifteen-year-old Orvil Pym as an observer and transmitter, creating the world from closely observed objects and mannerisms. Orvil is on holiday with his father and two brothers yet is intent on escaping their company and their power over him. Throughout the short novel, Orvil is ‘always praying for freedom and loveliness’; he exists on the edge, on the boundaries, spying on people, a voyeur of social interactions, the passive scopophile turned active as he records his observations in his notebooks. And in doing so, Orvil/Denton transform that world, make it newly realized, ‘She was snapping her nutcracker lips together and saying something vicious to the young waiter who bent over her’, ‘the mushrooms, with their flattened gills radiating from the centre, looked like shrunken scalps of course Oriental hair’, and ‘Orvil likened the grey colour of the silent room to a plate piled high with cooked brains. It was woolly, a little disgusting, an outrage’. And that is what the world is like for Welch, woolly, disgusting, an outrage, until he transforms these found objects in his journal, in his novels, into works of art, the textual metamorphosis of seemingly trivial actions and things into literature, what the Japanese would call ‘mono no aware’ – a sensitivity to ephemera.

Orvil/Denton cycles, he sunbathes, he shops, he investigates, he meets people on his travels. He’s a teenager, cynical, egotistical, unsure of his sexuality and caught in the no man’s land between the revels of childhood and the responsibilities of the adult world. Although not strictly a Künstlerroman, the novel portrays Orvil as a fledgling artist who struggles with the worldly success and cocksureness of his two brothers, while complaining about and relishing his father’s rather neglectful parenting. Orvil hates the school where he boards and dreads his return there, fearful of the bullying and the social tectonics. Running beneath the summer-holiday narrative are the pressures and complexities of Orvil/Denton’s sexuality. Like most fifteen-year-old boys, whether he’s boating, eating dinner, or examining a plate bought in a local antiques shop, the oars, eggs baked in butter, and cracked Chinese saucers play supporting roles to the stuffed mastodon that is sex, as Orvil/Denton experiences and examines a masturbatory psychogeography, anchoritic flagellation, incestuous voyeurism, and a crush on several people he encounters, young and old, male and female, known and unknown.

There can be no plot spoiler in this introduction because there is very little plot; there are no Joycean epiphanies, no satori in Surrey. Orvil observes, transmits, observes again. He explores the hotel grounds, a pet cemetery, the riverbank and forest; he camps it up in the empty ballroom, steals lipstick and paints himself crimson. His mother’s death shadows the events, as does his fear of school. Despite his strident ego, he is a victim and riddled with anxiety, finding solace only in objects and fantasy. And this is where Denton Welch’s genius resides, the apprehension of the world and its re-creation in words that, in turn, become palpable realities, a prose of thisness, a story of things and their psychological effect on the human. Welch’s characters are always a little grotesque, somewhat ill and verging on the insane but only in the way that we all are. His world, at first sight, is genteel, twee even, a near-idyllic time between two world wars. Yet, apocalypse, horror, unreality and the bizarre encroach on this coming-of-age eclogue, ‘Then suddenly he had a vision of the river flowing swiftly beneath the old toll bridge. It was swollen with the filth of ten thousand cities, sweat, excrement, blood, pus poured through the stone arches. The filth curled into marble patterns, streaked into horrible arabesques…’ And all this while Orvil is having lunch with his father and brother at the Ritz.

‘In filthy hovels needy Marbles are close to molting, the shell eaten through in patches, pus leaking out… flesh under there has lost all immunity… skin is long gone…’ This is from The Place of Dead Roads and it is strange to think that William Burroughs was born a year before Denton Welch and that, by the time Welch had died in 1948, Burroughs was in the middle of his ‘lost years’ in Texas and only beginning to sketch episodes for Junky. On re-reading In Youth Is Pleasure, I was surprised by how much Denton Welch’s writing reminded me of an English Kafka or a home-counties Borges in his unfamiliar interpretation of an apparently familiar world. Denton Welch is also a precursor of Bruce Chatwin and Robert Macfarlane in his philosophy of walking (and bicycling) as a means of creative thinking. Returning to that cracked Chinese saucer Orvil Pym buys from a local antique shop, it reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, the repairing of broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum. Reading the sketches for the novels in the journals – in themselves works of literature – and then reading the finished product, it is as if Denton Welch has used precious metals to burnish his memory, to gild his experience and observations and, like Édouard Levé, another artist/writer who died young, saw art where others saw things.

Steve Finbow

ONE SUMMER, several years before the war began, a young boy of fifteen was staying with his father and two elder brothers at a hotel near the Thames in Surrey. The hotel had once been a country house, and before that a royal palace. But now the central courtyard was glassed over to make a huge tea-lounge; there was a glistening range of downstairs cloakrooms, and a whole new wing with ballroom, and little box bedrooms above.

The hotel still stood in charming parkland, with terraced gardens and lawns sloping down to a little artificial lake almost entirely surrounded by huge overgrown brambles. Only the lake and its banks were neglected; the rest of the grounds, with the fountain, the grotto, the cottage orné, and the elaborate pets’ cemetery, were kept in very trim order.

The young boy, whose name was Orvil Pym, wandered out into these trim gardens on his first night at the hotel. He and his father had arrived that afternoon in one of those large black polished Daimlers which the suspicious always imagine have been hired.

Mr Pym, home from the East for six months, had gone up to the Midlands to fetch Orvil from school. Orvil had been ill for the last few days of term. Being already very uneasy and anxious about life, he was one of the first to show signs of food-poisoning; but soon two wards in the Sanatorium were full of other boys from his House showing the same signs. A little fever, a little sickness, a little diarrhoea, that was all. The boys were merry and bright, rolling the white china po’s along the boards, swearing and telling stories and abusing one another in the stillness of the night.

The poisoning upset the Housemaster’s wife far more than it upset its victims. The food was good in her house, the boys knew it, everyone knew it. She did not scrimp or save to put money in her husband’s pocket for their retirement. Why, only last Sunday there had been salmon and cucumber, and trifle with real cream!

She went about ashamed, turning red suddenly for no outward reason. She hated to think of the things the other Housemasters’ wives were saying. The mean ones would be delighting that she, who gave good food generously, should poison half her boys; and the kind ones would be pitying her. Both the imagined exulting and the pity gave the poor Housemaster’s wife a great deal of pain.

What could it have been? she kept asking herself. Could it have been the potted meat at tea?

Orvil was delighted and relieved when he knew that he was physically ill at last. His first year at a public school had been so alarming and disintegrating that he found himself longing, all the time, for a very quiet room where he could go to sleep.

At first the Sanatorium had been quiet, and he had enjoyed himself; but then the other boys had begun to arrive and the place was turned quickly into a bear-garden.

One evening Orvil could stand no more. His face and arms had become bluish, with ugly spreading red blotches. This condition was due to three things: the poisoning, his anxiety, and the large amount of a drug, like aspirin only stronger, which the nurse had given him. He got out of bed, seemingly in a trance; then he hopped on all fours round his bed, croaking, ‘I’m a frog, I’m a frog, a huge white frog.’

There was a silence for a moment in the ward; then a large boy, with black hair just beginning to sprout in his nose, shouted out in a frightened voice, ‘Nurse, nurse, come quickly; Pym has gone queer and is hopping round the floor saying he’s a frog.’

The nurse ran in and raised Orvil up in her arms. Although she was so small, her body was very strong and hard, and she held Orvil’s weight against her with ease. She was laughing quietly to herself as she led him back to bed.

‘Fancy thinking you’re a frog!’ she said, trying to smooth back his thick coarse curly hair, and doing up the top button of his pyjama jacket which he always left undone. She bustled away to get water and towels for a tepid rubdown.

Orvil still pretended to be in a dreamlike state. When she returned, he heard the boys whispering, ‘Pym’s delirious, he’s seeing things!’

The nurse took off his jacket and began to sponge his chest and arms with the tepid water. He kept his eyes closed; he did not like to see her looking at his chest. She held up one of his hands gently, and let the water trickle down till it tickled his armpit. He gave a little shiver and she