A Voice Through a Cloud - Hardcover

Welch, Denton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904634060 ISBN 13: 9781904634065

Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Denton Welch is one of those mysterious writers who are always interesting. The more his world is reduced to a hospital room and a handful of human contacts, the more fascinating he becomes. It is the precision of his observations, the fierce but gentle strangeness of his personality or his love of nature that captivates the reader? Like Colette and Jean Rhys, Welch has 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 into a white-hot flame."

About the Author:

Denton Welch was born on 29 March 1915 in Shanghai, the youngest of three brothers. Welch was sent back to England to attend St Michael's prep school in Uckfield, and then Repton School, where his main achievements were in art. Soon after his sixteenth birthday he ran away from school. With his family's approval he enrolled at the Goldsmiths' School of Art in April 1933 to study painting. He showed great promise as an artist but in June 1935, while still a student, he was knocked off his bicycle by a motorist, severely damaging his spine and kidneys; for the rest of his life he was a semi-invalid. Welch settled in Kent, in a succession of rented flats and cottages. His final home was in the village of Crouch, where his faithful friend Eric Oliver cared for him until his premature death on 30 December 1948.

About this edition

• Publisher: Enitharmon Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1904634060
• ISBN 13: 9781904634065
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 229