A hunger for wild, physical sensation': Alan Hollinghurst on painter and writer Denton Welch who died tragically young

"All his characteristics as a writer are evident from the start: an astonishing candour of response to sensations of all kinds, with childlike repulsion registered as keenly as attraction; a clarity of style unbothered by literary convention; and a fierce solipsism, his sense of others exact and often unsparing, but his overwhelming purpose the record of his own needs, excitements and perceptions: not just things seen but the acutely subjective feelings they stir up in him."

"For his short 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure, he wrote in the third person about a holiday he'd spent at the age of 15 with his father and two elder brothers at a country-house hotel in Surrey. On the one hand there is his hunger for wild physical sensation, focused here on a scoutmaster camping in the woods nearby with two teenage boys, who stir fantasies of a homoerotic alternative to the conventional family Welch keeps trying to escape from."

Denton Welch was born in Shanghai in 1915 to an American mother and an English businessman father and was brought to England at age four. He ran away from Repton school and returned to China in 1932, an episode recounted in Maiden Voyage (1943). His writing displays striking candour toward sensations, a clear unadorned style, and a solipsistic focus on personal needs and perceptions. In Youth Is Pleasure (1945) portrays a teenage holiday revealing a hunger for intense physical sensation and homoerotic fantasy alongside a yearning for delicate, old objects and a precocious connoisseurship that shaped his domestic environments.

Read at www.theguardian.com