I Left My Grandfather's House - Hardcover

The third volume in Enitharmon's "Denton Welch" series is his autobiographical novella, "I Left My Grandfather's House", written in 1943, first published posthumously in 1958 and only briefly in print since. In the novella, Welch recounts a walking tour undertaken in southern England ten years before, while he was a painting student at the Goldsmiths' School of Art. His many adventures along the way are described with a characteristic lyricism and energy, as well as with a sense of nostalgia not only for the pre-war world, but also for the innocent enjoyment of existence in the years before Welch was permanently disabled by a life-threatening accident. As Edmund White has written: 'Welch has the power to generate interest out of even the most meagre materials. He had this gift from the beginning but suffering and illness refined it into a white-hot flame.'

Denton Welch was born in 1915 in Shanghai and educated in England. When he was sixteenth he ran away from Repton School, an episode later described in his first autobiographical book, Maiden Voyage (1943). He enrolled at the Goldsmiths' School of Art in 1933 to study painting. He showed great promise as an artist but in June 1935 he was knocked off his bicycle by a motorist; for the rest of his life he was a semi-invalid. The accident and his long convalescence form the basis of A Voice Through a Cloud, posthumously published in 1950 and recently reissued by Enitharmon. Welch's other books are In Youth is Pleasure (1945; reissued by Enitharmon 2005), Brave and Cruel (1949), and A Last Sheaf (1951).