Word: welching
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...young protagonist of The Coffin on the Hill climbs aboard a houseboat on the Yangtze River (Welch was born in Shanghai, where his father was a partner in a firm that managed rubber plantations): "Leaning forward and putting out my tongue I licked the brass rim of one of the portholes, in order to realize the ship with all my senses. Then I curled up in a corner of the fitted seat and felt like a mole, or some other perfectly happy blind animal, burrowing deeper and deeper, coming at last to its true home...
These are incidents recalled by an adult, with the freshness and candor of a child. Yet if all of Welch's work is disguised autobiography, he is occasionally capable of imagining the complexities and frustrations of adult life. In The Hateful Word, a middle-aged woman is infatuated with a prisoner of war. She impulsively embraces him, only to hear the cruel pronouncement " 'Soon I go back to Germany; I tell them there you are like, like--' He strained after the one word to express his gratitude. 'You are like mother to me--my English mother...
Such work resists categories. In theory, Welch could be placed on the gay studies shelf: he was a homosexual, and his female characters are sometimes men in literary drag. But there is nothing erotically explicit in these stories, no precious attempts at special pleading. He could belong with the invalid writers, like Marcel Proust and Flannery O'Connor, whose illnesses gave them a vital solitude. But unlike them, Welch had little interest in society. As his biographer, Michael De-la-Noy, notes, "Politics, literature, indeed the entire world outside his bedroom window, scarcely existed...
...indifference is understandable. The man diagnosed himself accurately as "almost a corpse." It is miraculous that he had the wit and energy to remember, much less to create. Welch's world is barely larger than a sickroom, but its travel books intrigued some famous tourists, including Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and E.M. Forster, who praised the author's "sensitiveness, visual and tactile." The style-struck critic Cyril Connolly described Welch's prose as ripening "like an October pear that measures every hour of sunshine against the inevitable frost...
...Welch had his own way with similes: he described people "like bottles walking; their heads as inexpressive as round stoppers. What if some god or giant should bend down and take several of the stoppers out? I thought. Inside there would be black churning depths like bile, or bitter medicine." But it is his wary view of the adult world that lingers. Even a Punch and Judy show has an ominous significance: when Punch "began hitting the baby with hard wooden thuds I felt its skull crack and knew that none of us were safe while grown-ups thought that...