There are some voices which reach out from the past because they feel so alive with mischievous humour and a startlingly singular point of view. Prose can strongly encapsulate such a sensibility when it's written with as much feeling and precision as Denton Welch used to embody his 15 year-old character Orvil's perspective. We follow him during his idle summer holiday spent at a hotel with his aloof father and older brothers. The slim novel “In Youth is Pleasure” was first published in 1945 and its author only lived for a few more years (dying when he was 33 years old), but this text is still breathing and giving us the side-eye.
Orvil does a lot of looking, a lot of observing and a lot of judging in this story. He could be classified as a voyeur as he watches from behind a bush some boys and their schoolmaster out on a peculiar boat trip where “Jane Eyre” is read aloud. In another scene he spies from the shadows his eldest brother making love to a woman. From a window he looks through another window at a man dancing to music and dressing after his ablutions. There's a safety found in his solitary observations where he can silently appraise some people as “rather fat” or certain behaviour as “vulgar”. He seems to be equally harsh on himself as it is stated “He was afraid that now, at fifteen, he was beginning to lose his good looks.”
Through his gaze the world is transformed in a brutally bizarre and imaginative way. For instance, he describes a man's flabby pecs as “so gay and ridiculous; like two little animated castle-puddings” and a woman's breasts become “miniature volcanoes with holes at the top, out of which poured clouds of milky-white smoke, and sometimes long, thin, shivering tongues of fire”. Bodies morph into absurdities, but he also regards people with a kind of detached fascination so that we understand the sharp barrier between him and the world. When this barrier is removed it elicits terror and violence but also ecstatic jubilation. In doing so, Welch captures Orvil's intensely solitary state where he longs to be with other people but is also repulsed by them.
Orvil's father seldom figures in his days as there is a mutual disinterest and he's wary of spending much time with his brothers. The figure he really longs for is his mother who died a few years ago, but he maintains vivid and sometimes disturbing memories of her. Two individuals he meets appear to be kinds of parental replacements. He forms a sweet attachment to his eldest brother Charles' maternal friend Aphra. He also has a few encounters with the mysterious, nameless schoolmaster who seems to alternately fill the roles of father, teacher, persecutor and a fairy tale witch. Their interactions are so curious it makes me wonder if this is even a real person or a figure that Orvil has simply conjured as part of his imaginative games.
As Edmund White observes in his astute introduction to the new edition of this novel, Orvil is “strangely attracted to filth”. Though he has a desire for what is refined such as a trip to lunch at the Ritz he can't help but envision the flowing filth of the city accumulating beneath the civilized surface. I think the allure of what's repulsive isn't so much about revelling in being gross, but an attraction for what's transgressive as a way to question the values and morals of the society he feels detached from. He is also fascinated by and sees beauty in things which have been discarded or broken. The way he relates to and values very particular objects movingly demonstrates the distinctive way he sees the world.
Orvil has a unique aesthetic, but there's also a poignancy in this depiction of a boy at a stage in his life where he has the sensibility of an adult and the imagination of a child. A lot of his wanderings include losing himself in fantasies where he can indulge in pretensions or revel in sado-masochistic desires. In one private game he wraps himself in chains and violently flogs his own back. In such mental spaces he can also playfully explore the boundaries of gender. He steals of a tube of lipstick to secretly paint his lips and other parts of his body. At other times he strips down naked outside as an act of transgression and liberation. The way that Denton writes about these experiences makes them feel more natural than they are perverse because they are freed from a general morality and merely reflect the proclivities of an utterly unique teenage boy. I absolutely adored this book and its tender spirit of youthful curiosity which casually dances through fantasies and nightmares.
