Good Night, Beloved Comrade: The Letters of Denton Welch to Eric Oliver

by Denton Welch, Daniel J. Murtaugh (Editor)

Denton Welch (1915–48) died at the age of thirty-three after a brief but brilliant career as a writer and painter. The revealing, poignant, impressionistic voice that buoys his novels was much praised by critics and literati in England and has since inspired creative artists from William S. Burroughs to John Waters. His achievements were all the more remarkable because he suffered from debilitating spinal and pelvic injuries incurred in a bicycle accident at age eighteen.

Though German bombs were ravaging Britain, Welch wrote in his published work about the idyllic landscapes and local people he observed in Kent. There, in 1943, he met and fell in love with Eric Oliver, a handsome, intelligent, but rather insecure "landboy"―an agricultural worker with the wartime Land Army. Oliver would become a companion, comrade, lover, and caretaker during the last six years of Welch's life. All fifty-one letters that Welch wrote to Oliver are collected and annotated here for the first time. They offer a historical record of life amidst the hardship, deprivation, and fear of World War II, and also are a timeless testament of one young man's tender and intimate emotions, his immense courage in adversity, and his continual struggle for love and creative existence.

Genres: LGBT, Queer

144 pages, Hardcover

Published February 7, 2017

About the author

Maurice Denton Welch was an English-American writer and painter, admired for his vivid prose and precise descriptions.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this volume is nonessential to the appreciation of Denton Welch's unique brand of writing, it is still quite intriguing for the reader to hear Welch's authorial voice in a context that is completely different from his excellent autobiographical fiction. In general terms, Welch's published journals are the richer source, and Murtaugh quotes liberally from them in his extensive notes to the correspondence.

The editor made a smart choice to focus only on the correspondence to Eric Oliver, rather than assembling a more comprehensive "selected letters" sort of a volume. Because all of these letters are addressed to the same recipient, we get to follow Welch's changing relationship with that individual, which allows the reader to truly feel like a fly on the wall.

Again, not core to the Welch canon, but if you're as fascinated by Welch's unique and magnificent writing as I am, this volume will allow you to experience his voice in another register.

[Sphinx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, joy, confusion, loneliness and a sense of mortality are expressed in the letters the author and artist wrote to his companion of the last few years of his life - dying in his early 30s as the result of a 1935 bicycle accident that left him at times in pain and depressed. Although few in number, the letters of their early relationship are touching as each tries to understand the other’s personality - Denton especially wanted their relationship to succeed and deepen. Unfortunately we don’t have Eric’s correspondence. But Denton is a magical novelist and short story writer and his intelligence, exuberance, tenacity and captivating personality all shine through in these letters.