Volume 32, Number 18 · November 21, 1985
An Unfinished Man
By Rosemary Dinnage
Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer
by Michael De-la-Noy
Viking, 303 pp., $20.00
'Nothing but this small picture will be left of the day; many years after, people may be able to read, then say, 'He was cold, he watched the sunset, he ate a chocolate,' but nothing more will be left to them.' The English writer Denton Welch wrote this in the last year of his life, when he was thirty-three, in 1948. His sense of time always passing, of the fragility of things, was the result of an unsettled childhood and the death of his mother when he was eleven. But in the last years of his life, when he was dying from the aftereffects of a traffic accident, it was accentuated. Death had to be staved off, he grew more and more ill. Time had to be preserved in diaries (they were begun six years before his death), his three autobiographical books had to be written; 'I must not be so ill that I cannot be famous,' he had written in 1942. In the end he was wrong to say that nothing more would be left for us but the cold and the sunset and the chocolate; he left behind the outline of his life and sensibility, in a few small works that are like the miniature antiques he loved so much—delicate, accurate.
Review, 2710 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |