In Youth is Pleasure

The title comes from a poem by the sixteenth century English poet Robert Wever. As originally published, the dustjacket, endpapers and frontispiece were designed by Welch. The frontispiece bears a dedication to his late mother, who died when he was eleven, using her maiden name, Rosalind Bassett.^[3]

In Youth is Pleasure differs from Welch's other novels and most of his short stories, in that it is written in the third person. Set "several years" before World War II, which Welch's biographer Michael De-la-Noy has determined is 1930,^[4] it tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy, Orvil Pym, who spends a summer holiday at a country hotel outside London with his widowed father and two older brothers. As with virtually everything Welch wrote, it is strongly autobiographical, leading several commentators to state that Orvil is Denton Welch. The original typescript bore the subtitle "A Fragment of Life Story with Changed Names".^[3] Welch himself identified the principal location as the Oatlands Hotel, Weybridge,^[5] and both the pet cemetery and the grotto are real.^[6] Welch remained attached to the place until the end of his life and lamented the demolition of the grotto ("the wickedly neglected, enchanted little corner!") sometime before May 1948.^[5] The hotel still exists, as do the pet cemetery's headstones, though they have been relocated.

The novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy's summer vacation. A limited amount of background material helps the reader understand him in his familial and social context, but the novel presents a series of episodes focused on his encounters with a series of other characters, returning periodically to his family as in a rondo. Though limited to the span of a few months, it has elements of a coming-of-age story as it focuses on the development of his character and personality. At the same time it partakes of the picaresque tradition in presenting a series of adventures or escapades, always surprising and at times outlandish. The narrator's voice avoids information outside the character's frame of reference and maintains the perspective and analytical capabilities of a very precocious schoolboy. He is, writes one critic, "a fretful child" with "fastidious aesthetic sensibility".^[7]

In Chapter One Orvil's father picks him up from school and they spend the night in Oxford, before heading to Salisbury Plain to collect his older brother Ben. In Chapter Two they arrive at the hotel where they meet Orvil's oldest brother Charles with whom he has an awkward relationship. He goes canoeing and spies on two boys who are camping with a man. He later hides in some bushes where he masturbates before being caught by an older man; later still he is jeered at by a picknicking group of young men. In Chapter Three he tries sweat therapy before dressing up in plus fours and goes out boating with his brothers. He then buys a little scent bottle and a Chinese armorial saucer in an antiques shop. In Chapter Four he borrows a bicycle and explores a church where he drinks some communion wine. He re-encounters the man he had seen earlier with the boys, who is a schoolmaster, and spends the afternoon with him in a scout hut. In Chapter Five he is charmed by a young woman called Aphra, one of Charles' friends, but at a party later sees Aphra and Charles having sex in a grotto near the hotel. Chapter Six describes Orvil's visit to the family of a schoolfriend in Hastings. In Chapter Seven he re-encounters the schoolmaster where he discloses his feelings about the loss of his mother. Finally in Chapter Eight he returns to school by train where he is bullied by an older boy before being rescued by Ben.