In Youth Is Pleasure: & I Left My Grandfather's House

by Denton Welch

A tender and fierce account of boyhood and nascent homosexual desire

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-48). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at private school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1878972138
• ISBN13: 9781878972132
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Exact Change
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 7.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

His Own Genre

To read all of Welch's writing is to know almost everything about him. Everything he wrote was drawn out by deep introspection after a road accident that left him maimed at 20 and suffering till his death at 33 years of age. I recommend reading Maiden Voyage first, then In Youth is Pleasure. This will give you context. His writing style is so simple and amazing. His other novels are all first person and I believe he writes better in that vein. But as a third person novel, this work is better than novels by many other writers who wrote with the intention of being a writer.

Edmund White Recommends Welch

This book is an account of a walking tour of England by a young man. Mostly, it's full of wry and critical descriptions of the people he encounters. There are odd aunts, strange villagers, haunting fellow hostel guests. Welch himself was a visual artist by training. He was a promising, public school educated young man when he had a crippling bicycle accident. His writing consistently describes athletic situations: swimming, skiing, bicycling. Because he wrote so little, though, I'm not certain how important this was to him. As I read, I felt I was in the company of Paul Theroux. Then I'd feel it was Graham Greene or DH Lawrence. He's such a craftsman of the written word. His skills equal those of the other writers I'm mentioning here. However, it's a shame to compare him to these writers. He simply didn't leave enough writing behind him. Welch feels very accessible. Though his writing has become obscure to us, there is no feeling that he is writing in an obscure way. You have an oppurtunity to be the first one on your block to get to know Welch. The fun part is that nobody has to know just how easy Welch is to read.