'William Burroughs recommended Denton Welch to students, perhaps as material ready to be cut up, each phrase or word a bright shiny object that could find itself next to new neighbours and lose none of its patina.'
Denton Welch likes bright shiny objects, he's already a collector, at 17, bargaining in the chinese interior in the early nineteen-thirties for old porcelain and curios. Even on the boat going out, he began.
In the Red Sea I wrote a poem .... I had just come on deck with my drawing-book and I saw them (the burnt-up mountains) crumbling in long lines to the sea. They were like piles of brown sugar, everlasting and fierce, sticking up out of the sea. .... I leant on the rail and scribbled in my drawing-book. What I wrote seemed almost perfect.
He has run away from school and is now on a boat to china to join his father. He's an aesthete, which is to say, a hidden soul delighting in the surface of things. Here he is drinking tea:
Each cup had a lid, and when I lifted mine I saw whole leaves swimming in the water like a school of fishes. They were pale green. Some had not yet uncurled. I watched them opening with pleasure, and I thought we missed a lot in England by not leaving the tea-leaves in our cups. To watch them swirling and drifting is like watching the smoke from a cigarette. And what is smoking in the dark?
Denton Welch was hit by a car while cycling in Surrey, and suffered a fractured spine. He died at thirty-three. Not sure what brought me to Maiden Voyage this time. Maybe the need to travel without travelling, in the Finnish way.
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