{"id":35515,"date":"2012-07-16T11:00:43","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T15:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=35515"},"modified":"2012-07-16T13:42:01","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T17:42:01","slug":"through-a-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/16\/through-a-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Through a Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Self portrait by (Maurice) Denton Welch, oil on hardboard, circa 1940-1942, National Portrait Gallery.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was twenty, I traveled to London to study for a year at University College. It was shortly after 9\/11 and the flight was so empty that I was able to lie down across four seats and sleep. My dorm turned out to be a dreary, brutalist, self-catered affair in Camden Town, and it would take me a while to work out that the pervasive gloom that dogged me day in and out was a product not of my environs but of the onset of the clinical depression which I would not have diagnosed and treated for another two years.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure I romanticized my former self during this time, but I knew I had changed. I had always taken pleasure in a thousand small things every day: a good cup of coffee, a furious baby, a funny typo, a teenager who couldn\u2019t smoke a cigarette properly, a bizarre exchange on the subway, the fact that neck ties serve no practical function. Now, all that was gone. I could only think about myself, and it turned out I was boring. I didn\u2019t recognize the sad, unstable girl who suddenly seemed unable to contain her emotions or find joy in life\u2019s small things, who gave into uncontrollable crying jags and alternated between a gnawing loneliness and an unwillingness to subject anyone to her company. I\u2019d never understood suicide; now, in my lowest moments, I didn\u2019t understand how anyone even found the mental energy for it. My parents were baffled, alternately irritated and frightened by the change in me. \u201cBrisk walks\u201d and sunshine were prescribed by my mother. A small television was proposed, and duly purchased. My father, inexplicably, recommended repeatedly that I \u201cgo to Piccadilly Circus,\u201d of which he had vague and apparently distorted memories from a trip in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t go to class much\u2014preferring to lie in the increasing squalor of my room and watch reruns of Diagnosis Murder <\/em>on my new TV\u2014but because of the independent nature of the British system, the trust the faculty seemed to place in students, and my American-hewed ability to knock out a paper in jig time, this was less of a problem than it really ought to have been. I did read, but rarely from the long syllabi of my English lit classes. Rather, I retreated to comfort books: Betsy-Tacy\u2019s safe world of Deep Valley; the cozy order of cookbooks, the keenly observed detail of Barbara Pym. On a rare foray out to Waterstones, I followed a friend\u2019s recommendation and bought Denton Welch\u2019s Maiden Voyage.<\/em> Having finished that, I went out and bought the rest of his books, comforted and delighted by the combination of rich detail and sensitive prose. I highlighted a passage from A Voice Through a Cloud<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

I stared at all the types, and a terrible feeling of loneliness swept over me; this in spite of my special wish to be alone that night. I felt that everyone was cut off from me, that it would always be so, and that nothing I could do would ever make any difference. I turned away from the people hating them passionately, yet longing to be taken into their bosoms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On better days, I took the tube to Bethnal Green and visited the dollhouses in the V&A Museum of Childhood. At first, I\u2019d made myself do it: this was the sort of thing that normally<\/em> would have delighted me, and the thought that I couldn\u2019t muster any enthusiasm for the initial outing was frightening. But sure enough, once I was surrounded by miniature Welsh cottages, the fully furnished three-foot models of sandstone estates, the Tri-And Tudor with its custom wallpapers, the familiar magic took over and I found myself enraptured.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d always been fascinated by dollhouses, from the time I could remember. Back in New York, I\u2019d begged my father to drive me to the Museum of the City of New York on weekends so we could visit the toys gallery; my bookshelves groaned with volumes covering the history of the medium from expensive adult novelty to design aid to children\u2019s toy. I\u2019d visited famous dollhouses at Windsor and in Paris and had secretly thrilled to the fact that my college was mere steps from Colleen Moore\u2019s Fairy House at the Museum of Science and Industry.<\/p>\n

For those who have not felt the pull of these tiny worlds, it is probably easy to chalk up such passions to something arrested, or some sort of god complex, or maybe just an interest in the small and twee. Through the years, those who have some inkling of my interest have helpfully sent me articles about obsessives who paint ever-smaller landscapes with eyelashes, or medieval artisans who spent years carving biblical scenes in walnut shells, or pictures of elaborate architectural models. These are nice, of course, but not at all what interests me and, I\u2019d venture to guess, those who share my obsession. Artistry is inexplicably bound up with the whole thing\u2014of course it is\u2014but it is the impulse to create a miniature human world that is intriguing, rather than merely the physical smallness itself.<\/p>\n

I had decided to mete out the treat of the dollhouse collection, rewarding myself for venturing out. On each visit I explored one area, poring over each dollhouse. This was also a matter of self-preservation; I found the bounty on display so exciting, so wholly absorbing, that more than this might have proved overwhelming. It was therefore not until perhaps my third visit that I encountered a miniature Georgian mansion which a plaque informed me was the Denton Welch Dollhouse.<\/p>\n

Denton Welch was a twenty-year-old art student when he was struck by a car while riding his bicycle in Surrey. The accident fractured his spine, left him a lifelong invalid, and would lead to the complications that killed him thirteen years later. During a lengthy and very painful convalescence he ran across a shabby dollhouse in the cellar of his friend Mildred Bosanquet\u2019s home and set about returning it to its original glory. Quickly, the dollhouse became his full-time project, and he excitedly updated his friends on its progress in a series of letters.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Denton Welch with his dollhouse.<\/p><\/div>\n

The restoration was painstaking\u2014the young man not only applied all his considerable artistic skill to the project but was committed to getting every historical detail right, and as such became something of an expert on architecture of the period. (He loved the fact that it had been in the Littledale family since its creation, and was determined to do its history justice.) A tiny central staircase and the beautifully wrought balustrade are authentic local oak; a fanlight over a hall door is colorfully painted, as it would have been in the late eighteenth century. Colors are consistent with those found on the walls of well-preserved homes of the era, and Welch stripped away many layers of paint to find the original brickwork tracery on the house\u2019s outer walls\u2014which he recreated. The preoccupation with color was characteristic; as he wrote in a journal, “Do not think that brilliant colour is difficult to live with. It is always stimulating and refreshing; and change to a neutral-toned, colourless room would be exhausting, lowering and depressing.”<\/p>\n

This attention to the minute will come as no surprise to any lover of Welch\u2019s writing. The three novels he wrote in the thirteen years following his accident\u2014frankly autobiographical, peopled with the artists and writers who made up his circle\u2014as well as the posthumously published journals, are noteworthy for their rapt attention to the aesthetic. Interiors, snacks, and landscapes are vividly described; table settings, the cut of a jacket or a woman\u2019s brooch become almost characters in their own right. This, too, was an extension of Welch\u2019s metafictional approach to writing; as he told a friend in a letter, his primary hobbies were \u00a0\u201cold glass, china, furniture, little pictures and picnicking alone.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Although certainly considered a \u201cminor writer,\u201d if only due to his narrow scope, Welch was well-liked in his own time and has developed a fiercely devoted following since his death. His patroness Edith Sitwell termed him \u201cthat rare being, a born writer.\u201d William Burroughs dedicated The Place of Dead Roads<\/em> to him, declaring Welch \u201ccertainly the writer who most directly influenced my work.\u201d John Waters has called In Youth is Pleasure <\/em>\u201cso precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, [it] is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much as I might like to claim so, it would be an exaggeration to say that there is a well-documented tradition of writers applying themselves to miniatures. (Although I daresay an enterprising grad student could wrest a thesis from less.) Still, it\u2019s a curious truth that several of my favorite authors have shared the obsession. All of them have brought a notable attention to detail to their work. And perhaps they understand, as did Welch, that this level of magnification and the emotional pull of a story are rooted in much the same thing.<\/p>\n

For all his love of detail, Welch left the dollhouse unfurnished. Indeed, it is an austere little house, elegant and restrained\u2014and, along with his books, a self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, and the detailed pen-and-ink drawings he left behind, an important part of his idiosyncratic legacy. To those interested in eighteenth-century architecture, it\u2019s interesting; to dollhouse lovers, fascinating; to Welch fans, essential; and, for those few of us on the intersecting bit of that particular Venn diagram\u2014well, I need hardly say.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t pretend (again, much as I might wish to) that running across this dollhouse, just when I did, made an end to my youthful troubles. But I can tell you this much: not very long afterwards, I resurrected the collection of miniatures I had sheepishly pushed into a drawer when I moved into my Camden Town room (leaving them behind would have been out of the question) and may or may not have set about constructing an artist\u2019s studio in a Top Shop shoe box.\u00a0Because there is a great deal to be said for a world you can make, and perfect, and imagine.<\/p>\n

There is another passage from A Voice Through a Cloud<\/em> that I highlighted during that period. It takes place after the narrator\u2019s friend, a young man, has died unexpectedly in an accident. Initially prostrated by sadness at the senseless tragedy, the protagonist wakes the next morning to find that, somehow, he can go on.<\/p>\n

\n

Life seemed now nothing but a long reverie, made up of imaginings and memories of childhood. Over this sunken, buried life, the facts of every day rippled and tinkled like a shallow stream; and they seemed to move so rapidly that I had no time for reflection. I was only able to note them with a flickering interest; then they were gone, hidden and submerged by new happenings.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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