The stories of Denton Welch.

The Stories of Denton Welch DENTON WELCH (1915-1948) became a writer quite literally by accident. On June 7, 1935, the English art student was struck by a car, and his serious ambition to be a painter came to an end. The 13 years of invalidism he had left were used instead mostly to become a prolific writer of novels, journals, and short stories, a hard-bound volume of which is now published in America for the first time. A good many of them involve a sexy, mysterious stranger coming to perform an erotic awakening upon a shy protagonist and then departing, like Shane, in a mist of longing. The encounters occur between a bored English housewife and a German POW; a lonely artist ad a woodsman; a tubercular young woman and an airman. The slow buildup of these erotic tales sometimes relies on lazy, almost pornographic, formulae. Shirts unbutton on schedule; hairs glisten on command; there's a lot of heavy adjectival breathing. The effects are occasionally powerful, but as often repetitious. Welch's editor finds him to be "relatively free from influences," but other readers are likely to feel their eardrums annoyed with loud echoes of D. H. Lawrence. Welch is capable of remarkable description. Waves on the beach "suck and mumble," and an exploding bomb makes an "eating, tearing noise." His imagery can be witty and exact: A pine tree falls "like a huge guardsman fainting on parade"; a nose bleeds in a "hot meaty rush." but sometimes such virtuosity overwhelms narrative. One wishes the author would stay longer in the social world of plot and manners and ethical dilemma, in whole communities of characters instead of desperate pairs. In a few stories he exhibits a talent for wider demographics without losing the eccentric perceptions of his narrator-heroes: "Memories of a Vanished Period" offers a vision of wartime London both nightmarish and merry, and "Brave and Cruel" is an almost Jan Austenish account of how some friends and acquaintances react to the impending marriage of a local girl to an impostor who claims to be a RAF hero. Welch can be entertaining when his imagination is out and about in the real world, and when he's lowered the flame under his metaphorical pot. One almost wants to cry, as does one of his repressed heroines in an attempt to turn off her distracting imagination: "Stop making everything something else!"