A Voice Through A Cloud

by Denton Welch

Overview

At the age of twenty, the novelist Denton Welch suffered a cycling accident that left him partially paralyzed; the injuries that he sustained were to leave him in almost constant pain for the rest of his life, as well as bestowing upon him the spinal tuberculosis that would kill him at the age of 33. A Voice Trough a Cloud - increasingly regarded as Welch's masterpiece - is his account of this accident and the period of convalescence soon after. The unsparing chronicle of the world of a hospital patient - riddled with anger, boredom, almost unbearable stabs of pain and sharp flashes of humour - A Voice Trough a Cloud is, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, "An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit." His third and final novel, and written at a point when Welch could write for no more than a few minutes a day, A Voice Trough A Cloud is nonetheless possibly one of the most complete accounts of health and mortality; as Edmund White says, it is a book of "long slow dying", "through which all the world's strangeness can be perceived."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910296295
Publisher:	Galley Beggar Press
Publication date:	09/17/2014
Series:	Galley Beggar Digital Classics
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	823 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Denton Welch (1915-1948) was born in Shanghai in 1915, the youngest of four boys, to a wealthy British-­American family. After leaving his English boarding school (Repton), Welch decided to follow his dream of becoming a painter, and studied art at Goldsmiths in London. The physical injuries sustained in a cycling accident in 1935, however, saw him increasingly turn towards a hitherto secondary interest: writing. When Welch's debut, Maiden Voyage, was published in 1942, it was an instant literary sensation ('I have been told that it reeks of homosexuality,' wrote Winston Churchill's secretary; 'I think I must get it'). This was followed by In Youth Is Pleasure in 1945 and, after his premature death from spinal tuberculosis in 1948, the publication of his unfinished masterpiece, A Voice Through A Cloud. 'If any writer has been neglected it is Denton', wrote William Burroughs in 1985 - but Welch is also a writer who has attracted a firm coterie of admirers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Alan Bennett, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. Of his short life, Edmund White has noted, 'He had the power to generate interest out of even the most meagre materials. He had this gift from the beginning but suffering and illness refined it to a white-­hot flame.'

What People are Saying About This

William S. Burroughs

"When asked what writer has most directly influenced my own work I can answer without hesitation: Denton Welch."

Jocelyn Brooke

"I can think of no writer who has described extreme physical and mental agony with a more appalling vividness. The real horror implicit in the book is that pain is the only reality."

Editorial Reviews

'If any writer has been neglected it is Denton. Certainly the writer who most directly influenced my work.' - William S. Burroughs

'So deliciously subversive, it is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.' - John Waters

'That rare being, a born writer.' - Edith Sitwell

'The real horror implicit in the book is that pain is the only reality.' - Jocelyn Brooke

'Are we not all, emotionally, what Mr Welch is in fact - orphans, each traveling alone on a journey which, if it is headed in the direction of unknown dangers, at least is heading away from the fears one knows?' - W.H. Auden

'So much of what Welch wrote trembled on the brink of sex. His art is full of colour ... and more than fifty years later, it is unfaded' - Alan Bennett, The Guardian

'A Voice Through a Cloud is one of the saddest books in all fiction. It is also one of the most exquisite.' - Lars Iyer

'An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit.' - John Updike, The New Yorker

'His best book.' - The New York Review of Books

'Rapt attention to the aesthetic ... His protagonists are misfits: alienated, implicitly gay, longing for love, frequently hard to be around, always fixated on small pleasures that compensate for an essential feeling of not belonging.' - The Paris Review

From the Publisher