Denton Welch

Against the backdrop of an English country hotel in a languid pre-war summer, Denton Welch's alter ego, Orvil Pym, examines his early life and formative experiences with a Proustian intensity. An adolescent voyeur, Orvil takes pleasure in the microscopic observation of his relatives and fellow guests, charting their eccentricities and love affairs as faithfully as he exposes his own obsessions. In a highly perceptive Afterword, Jeremy Reed relates the novel to Welch's life and work, praising it for writing that 'oscillates between moments of lyrical serenity and outbreaks of psychological disorder.' Flagrantly controversial on its first publication in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure will impress new readers with its arresting visual descriptions and its defiance of convention.

In Youth is Pleasure

Fijnzinnige en gedetailleerde dagboeken van 1942-1948 waarin een auto-ongeluk in 1935 steeds weerkeert als thema.

The Journals of Denton Welch

In Youth Is Pleasure

Collection of seventy-six short stories and related autobiographical writings.

The Complete Short Stories (and Other Related Works)

Where Nothing Sleeps

Na Juventude Está o Prazer

Sitwell, Edith Dame

Voice Through A Cloud

'Unlike any other person I had come across, Welch seemed to be speaking particularly to me' Alan Bennett 'Vivid ... surprising ... an exquisite balance of pain and beauty' Guardian Orvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric, sensitive fifteen-year-old, he hates school and longs to be alone. Spending his Summer holidays in a genteel Surrey hotel with his mysterious father and two brothers who don't understand him, he explores ancient churches, spies on a man rowing in the river and collects antiques, escaping into his own singular aesthetic world. First published in 1945, this is an unforgettable portrayal of a young man's sensuous coming-of-age. 'A heightened, sensual journey ... it is Orvil's vibrant energy that allows this book to bubble ... beautifully odd ... spectacular' Independent

The Stories of Denton Welch

I Left My Grandfather's House

Maiden Voyage is an account of author Denton Welch's sixteenth year when he ran away from his English public school, and was then sent to Shanghai to live with his father. The book was Welch's literary debut and created a sensation on publication in 1943: its frank description of public schoolboy life forced publisher Herbert Read to seek advice from libel lawyers. Even Winston Churchill's private secretary gossiped in a letter that, "the book was reeking with homosexuality ... I think I must get it." Today, Welch's expressions of sexuality may seem more demure than outrageous, but his graphic portrayal of the passions and humiliations of adolescence have made him a beloved writer for a growing cult of devotees.

Maiden Voyage

Denton Welch, one of the most gifted creative artists of his generation, died in 1948 at the age of thirty-one, leaving this, perhaps his finest work, almost but not quite completed. Under the thin disguise of fiction Denton Welch recreates the world of hospitals and nursing homes in which he spent so many months after the accident which was eventually to prove fatal to him. The details of daily routine, the fellow patients, the nurses and doctors, the comedies and tragedies which loom so large in the confined existence of the sick, all are described so vividly, with so much humour and pathos, with so accurate a listening ear, so watchful and penetrating an eye, that it is almost impossible to believe that the experience on which it is based was one of long exhausting pain to the author himself, and that book was conceived in pain and carried through with failing physical powers.

A Voice Through a Cloud

A beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel. Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is fifteen, and the novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school. As in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of Orville's surroundings, as reflected through his remarkable perception. Includes a foreword by William Burroughs, who said of Welch's work 'It is time Denton received the attention he deserves.'

In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House

Poems and Fragments

Dumb Instrument

Journals

Welch

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure recounts a summer in the life of 15-year-old Orvil Pym, who is holidaying with his father and brothers in a Kentish hotel, with little to do but explore the countryside and surrounding area. ‘I don’t understand what to do, how to live’: so says the 15-year-old Orvil - who, as a boy who glories and suffers in the agonies of adolescence, dissecting the teenage years with an acuity, stands as a clear (marvelously British) ancestor of The Catcher In The Rye’s Holden Caulfield. A delicate coming-of-age novel, shot through with humour, In Youth Is Pleasure, has long achieved cult status, and earned admirers ranging from Alan Bennett to William Burroughs, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. ‘Maybe there is no better novel in the world that is Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure,’ wrote Waters. ‘Just holding it my hands... is enough to make illiteracy a worse crime than hunger.’

In Youth is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming of age novel. Welch, who began to write after an accident left him partially paralyzed, is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation. "Denton Welch makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes.... It is time Denton received the attention he deserves". -- William Burroughs.

Denton Welch

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