Writing 
- Denton Welch's writings
have been admired by many other influential writers and
artists. In his own lifetime he attracted the help and
patronage of Edith Sitwell and John Lehmann. A generation
later he influenced William S. Burroughs, who records
that Welch was the writer who most influenced his own
work (he also says that Jack Keroac read Welch). Recently
Denton Welch has been championed by the playright and
author Alan Bennett.
- So why is Denton Welch so highly thought of? There are few other writers who have recorded their impressions of the world around them more intensely. His experiences of life were not particularly narrow (he had lived in a foreign country and culture), but once he became an invalid and his horizons were restricted his writing often focused on the details of things around him, giving away his fascination for old furniture, ornaments and curios, or the oddities and pretentions of people he knew. His often painful honesty makes his work appear at first unsophisticated, but his descriptions are precise and his words chosen for maximum effect. An apparent "innocent", he manages to say what should not be said, both about himself and other people.
- This honesty, and the fact that much of his writing is based on verifiable incidents in his real life, give the impression that Welch was rather a naive writer. When Michael de-la-Noy wrote his 1984 biography of Welch he was happy to retell events in the life of Welch taking the author's own accounts as fact. However, his later biographer, James Methuen-Campbell, showed that Welch's writing could not always be considered strictly autobiographical - Welch was an artist and knew how to change the details for artistic effect. Most people retelling events of their life will put themselves in a favourable light by the omission of anything awkward or embarassing, but Welch revelled in such events, often exagerating them to his own detriment.
- Welch's early life as described in Maiden Voyage and In Youth is Pleasure is one of money and some privalege. His pre-War world is particularly English and comfortable, and his fascination for the materialistic trappings of that world, its architecture, jewelery, antiques etc suggest that he was a "young fogey", but his precision stops his writing from being merely "period". There is something of Proust in his surgical meticulousness, but there is perhaps more of the existentialist in Welch than anything else. His ability to describe feelings and motivations with such dispassionate clarity might almost put him into similar intellectual territory as that of Satre and Camus, but Welch's style is uniquely his own.
Page updated 16th February 2006