Minor Masterpiece

A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD by Denton Welch. 254 pages. University of Texas. $3.75.

Literature was conscious of no loss when Britain's Denton Welch died in 1948 at the age of 33. A gaunt, gifted art student, he had been invalided at 20 when a motorist crashed into his bicycle, fracturing his spine. Often unable to paint, scarcely able to walk, he took up his pen and wrote two books of stories, two fictionalized autobiographies of boyhood, a lengthy journal and this brilliant, terrible novel. Published in England in 1950, it received scant attention; but critics have recently recognized Welch's memoir as a minor masterpiece, and it has now been published in the U.S. for the first time.

The book was written largely during the final racking months before Welch's heart gave out. Echoing his own tragedy, it is a lyric, rebellious plaint of pain, fear and despair.

The accident itself is described in forceful, fearsome terms. "I heard a voice through a great cloud of agony and sickness," writes Welch. "The voice was asking questions. It seemed to be opening and closing like a concertina. The words were loud, as the swelling notes of an organ, then they melted to the tiniest wiry tinkle of water in a glass. I knew that I was lying on my back on the grass. I could feel the shiny blades on my neck. Bright little points glittered all down the front of the liquid man kneeling beside me. I knew at once that he was a policeman, and I thought he was performing some ritual operation on me. There was a confusion in my mind between being brought to life--forceps, navel-cords, midwives --and being put to death--ropes, axes and black masks; but whatever it was that was happening, I felt that all men came to this at last."

What Welch's protagonist comes to, first of all, is the noisy antiseptic indignity of life in a hospital ward. Patients are frenzied or conniving; doctors hearty and indifferent. Drifting in and out of fantasies, he plods a painful path from demi-death to limited life. Welch's perceptions are keen, and his imagery probes reality like a scalpel. A nurse's face "gained an unreal nutcracker severity from the curve and compression of her nose and lips. It was as if a heavy weight on her head had crumpled the features underneath." Railroad tracks, "like never-ending stilettos, seemed to pierce into the grey, veined, bulging heart of the future." From his sickbed, Denton Welch saw life with the poignant clarity of a man seeing it for the last time.

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