Bookend; It's Pretty, but Is It Broken?
By Caleb Crain
Published: June 20, 1999
THE English novelist Denton Welch loved to write about picnics and antiques. Unfortunately, as he learned early on, the peculiar modesty of these pleasures required some defense. ''Some people might call it precious,'' Welch's first publisher warned him, over a lunch of duck soup, plaice and mashed potatoes. ''But then I suppose that's my personality,'' Welch answered, bravely but with a croak in his voice.
''Precious'' is a label writers dread. As a homosexual and chronic invalid, Welch must have dreaded it especially, since it was what people were expecting from him. They were right to expect it. Welch's plots were uneventful, and the only character he knew in depth was himself. But no one ever wrote more beautifully about chipped tea saucers.
Pursued fiercely enough, every literary vice becomes admirable. Thus Laurence Sterne redeemed digression; Walt Whitman, grandiose sentimentality; and Donald Barthelme, winking at the reader. Denton Welch is the champion of preciousness. As he wrote in his journal in December 1944, ''I wish that people should mention the tiny things of their lives that give them pleasure or fear or wonder.'' Welch's first novel, ''Maiden Voyage,'' is returning to print next month, thanks to a small Boston press, Exact Change, which has already reissued his two later novels, ''In Youth Is Pleasure'' and ''A Voice Through a Cloud.'' Readers have a new chance to appreciate the delicacy of his achievement.
Welch crammed his fiction and journals full of menus. The short story ''Anna Dillon,'' for instance, opens with Anna packing into her bicycle basket a ''thermos of coffee, Ryvita bread, cheese, minute parcel of butter, a little honey in an old cold-cream pot, her precious ration of chocolate, an early, brilliantly red apple.'' Maybe because Welch was a painter before he was a writer, he looked forward to a picnic with the anticipation and anxiety of a painter designing a composition. A painter can choose precisely which items to put into a still life, but then the work of art unfolds according to its own logic. A picnicker too moves from a sense of absolute control to an enjoyable abandonment of oneself to the experience. Anna Dillon, for example, finds her careful lunch plans complicated by the discovery of an airman sunbathing in a ''startlingly white singlet.'' Like a work of art, a picnic also appeals by reconciling contrasts -- by marrying ceremony to appetite, the containment of a wicker basket to the liberty of open air.
Food's strangeness delighted Welch. When young Orvil Pym, the Firbankianly named hero of ''In Youth Is Pleasure,'' digs into a helping of creamed spinach, he tells himself, fascinatedly, ''I'm eating cowpat, I'm eating cowpat!'' Orvil's father, meanwhile, has ordered mushrooms on toast, which, ''with their flattened damaged gills radiating from a center, looked like shrunken scalps of coarse Oriental hair.'' For this grotesque dinner's coup de grce, Orvil's imagination turns the yellow fruit of his pche Melba into ''a celluloid cupid doll's behind.''
Some perversity lurks in Welch's interest in antiques as well. Several chapters after the meal of cowpat, scalp and doll's behind, Orvil shows off two new purchases: ''a lovely little Chinese armorial saucer and a scent-bottle.'' The saucer was cracked when Orvil bought it. ''What do you buy all this broken muck for?'' his brother asks. ''Why do you like hitting balls, or oiling engines, or unscrewing nuts?'' Orvil answers, in a valiant attempt to make his estheticism sound no more decadent and arbitrary than an interest in sports and machinery. Crockery, however, is not usually the chief passion of a boy of 15. Young Denton chatted about luster pots at an age when his peers were curious about lust. And for some reason, porcelain that had been mended with glue or rivets always seemed to attract Welch more strongly than porcelain undamaged.
Perhaps broken china somehow symbolized for Welch his early childhood in Shanghai, where his father had worked in the rubber business and his mother, a Christian Scientist, had died of a wasting kidney disease. But another biographical fact goes further toward explaining his feeling for pretty, injured things. In 1935, at the age of 20, Welch was hit by a car while bicycling. His spine was fractured. The accident left him partly impotent. He learned to walk again (somewhat spastically) and even to bicycle. But his bladder was permanently paralyzed, subjecting him in those pre-antibiotic days to recurrent kidney infections and prostrating fevers. He would die of pyelitis at 33.
It always pained the adult Welch to hear of an old building being torn down, or even renovated. Architectural conservation became for him a matter of almost religious fury. ''Men feel it indecent in some way to lavish care on things that never can be replaced,'' he once wrote in his journal. ''If a precious thing should get broken, there will be many people who in secret will sigh with relief. It is as if care and love were too exhausting, too constricting.''