Maiden Voyage

The [Salisbury Cathedral] Lady Chapel was dark and glittering; the brown and yellow Victorian tiles shone like a wet bathroom floor.  I sat down on one of the oak chairs and started to pray.  I grew more and more unhappy; there was nothing that I could do.  I could not go back and I could not stay away for long; my money would run out.  I felt hopeless and very lonely; I longed for someone to talk to me but nobody did; they were all too busy looking at the sights or praying.

Denton was sixteen -- but small enough and immature enough in appearance to still travel half fare -- when he decided he couldn't bear another year at Repton, a prestigious "public" school in Derbyshire.  He stood up his older brother (and fellow Repton student) who was waiting to join him at London's St. Pancras station, where they were to catch the train back to school.  With five pounds in his pocket, he instead departed from Waterloo station for the cathedral city of Salisbury.

It was 1931, and the painfully introverted (but grimly determined) Denton had flown the coop.

His money and his nerve lasted several days.  Negotiations with his family finally resulted in his agreement to return to Repton -- for the current term, at least.

Denton's adventures "on the road" and his ensuing term at Repton make up only the first quarter of Denton Welch's highly autobiographical novel Maiden Voyage, published in 1943.  The rest of the novel relates to his subsequent voyage to Shanghai to visit his loving but remote father, and his adventures in pre-war China.  But that first section of the book, set in England, establishes the young man's persona in the reader's mind.

He leaves London for Salisbury because he loves architecture, and has happy memories of visiting the cathedral with his deceased mother.  He stays at hotels, avoiding embarrassing questions from skeptical desk clerks.  He eats in restaurants, self-consciously solitary among the diners.  He is paranoid in his fear that every police officer is looking for him.  Growing short of money, he stays at a hotel he finds disgusting and dirty.  He gathers up his courage, enters a pawnshop and pawns his watch for a fraction of its value.  He finally spends a night in a jail cell, offered him by a sympathetic cop. 

What some reviewers have called descriptions of behavior that is odd,  perhaps mentally unbalanced, I would describe as honest self-revelations by a shy, young boy.  As a young-looking 21-year-old myself, traveling alone about Europe, I recall many of the same worries, nervousness, and repeated need to screw up my courage.  The first time walking alone into a hotel and asking for a room, walking into a restaurant and dining alone under the gaze of curious eyes, wandering around an unfamiliar city, short of money, and buying the cheapest train fares I could get to the next.  Everything, perhaps, but Denton's paranoia about the police.

Denton Welch, in real life, also quit school at Repton, and studied to become a painter.  After a severe cycling accident at the age of 20, he began writing instead.  He had been born in Shanghai in 1915, the son of a mixed English-American marriage.  His autobiographical novels and other writings enjoyed a certain vogue in the 1940s; they now seem to be in the public eye once more.  I had never heard of the writer until Sunday, when classical scholar and writer Daniel Mendelsohn, in an interview published in the New York Times Book Review, mentioned that he was currently reading  Denton Welch's journals, and was a long-time fan of his novels.

Don't read Maiden Voyage expecting an exciting plot and superb characterization.  The novel is more a fictionalized memoir, based very closely on the author's own life.  In many ways, Maiden Voyage is a more readable Proustian novel than those of Proust himself (although Proust's lovers would probably sneer!).  After I became bogged down forty percent of the way through the narrator's protracted ponderings over the minutiae of life in a small French village, as found in Swann's Way, Denton Welch's obsessions and thoughts, in a more global context, came as a welcome relief. 

Like Marcel in Swann's Way, young Denton has keen eyes for the small details of the world about him, and especially architecture, home furnishings, art works, and nature.  He also -- like Marcel and like many other introverted teenagers -- has an obsessive concern with the reactions (real or imagined) of those about him.  He overthinks almost every social interaction.  The slightest criticism or frivolous remark from others is the occasion for hours of brooding, and often by Denton's explosive admission that he has "now begun to hate" the offender.  These hatreds sometimes blow over; other times, the relationship has been poisoned forever.

He seems to have been liked by most adults and peers, if in a somewhat patronizing fashion.  They recognized a boy who was overly intense, idiosyncratic in his interests, and a bit of an odd duck.  But many obviously enjoyed his company.

If for no other reason, the novel can be read for its honest and exacting picture of England between the world wars, and especially the "public" school life of the upper classes.  Even more, the book offers a devastating picture of China -- at least as viewed by Denton -- as a cruel, dirty, and barbaric country, and of Shanghai as a European colony where the European "masters" rule with contempt over the Chinese masses, and are despised in return.

Welch's best-known novel, I understand, is the similarly autobiographical In Youth is Pleasure, written from the perspective of a 15-year-old.  Sooner or later, I plan to read it.

Denton Welch died in 1948, at the age of 33, from spinal tuberculosis, the result of injuries from the cycling accident thirteen years earlier.