cover image Welch: Journals

Welch: Journals

Denton Welch. Dutton Books, $24.95 (377pp) ISBN 978-0-525-24364-9

In 1935, Welch, an English art student of 20, was hit by a caran accident that curtailed his career as a painter and precipitated his death 13 years later. In the interim, Welch redirected his talents to writing novels (three of which have recently been reprinted), a journal and these short stories. Though he credited the accident with having saved him from becoming ""a precious young man in a gallery,'' preciousness and an antic imagination couple in his writing in an annoying way. Eccentric aristocrats, brooding laborers, precocious children and passive yet predatory young women are summoned up in brilliantif febrileimages, only to be allotted great dollops of adolescent loneliness, more reflective of the author's sensibility than their own. Whenever possible, their costumes are allowed to sliprevealing other aspects of Denton Welch himself: his sensitivity, snobbery, sexual ambiguity and, sadly, his avid appetite for a life that was slipping away. January 14