Small Grand Guignoi

A TOUCH OF THE SUN (250 pp.)--William Sansom--Reynol ($3.50).

The English are an incurably romantic race, one of whose romantic illusions is that they are a commonsensical people. English Author William Sansom--one of the best short-story writers now at work--is commonsensical enough to know this. His characters may be environed by a wilderness of asphalt, or by a sea of powder-blue wall-to-wall carpet, or by the price-tagged jungle of a department store; yet each embarks on a voyage of the spirit, with misery as the home port.

In A Touch of the Sun, his title story, Sansom gives evidence that he is trying to escape the thrall of La Belle Dame Sans Merci--the enchantress who from Keats backwards and forwards has been the patroness of all true romantics. The unattainable, visionary woman dominated Sansom's novel The Loving Eye (TIME, April 15), and now she crops up again like a bad guinea. The story is a little shocker of how "this man Greville, traveller, Englishman, thirtyish, a sort of student on remittance, sitting now cooling off in his little Spanish police-cell, tried again to piece together in his hot red mind what in all strange hell had happened." He is tantalized by a fleeting vision of beauty--a girl he thinks he once loved. But as pieces of the mad mosaic drop into place, it becomes clear that he is not facing a beautiful girl but a harridan with blue-rinsed hair and "grey old teeth that licked at him with such a smile of knowledge." In the end, the knowledge comes to him that his fate is at the mercy of a vengeful crone he has jilted.

Author Sansom has learned the lesson of V. S. Pritchett that the proper study of British fiction is class. One of the best stories in this collection is set in Venice and is strongly reminiscent of theVenetian episode in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Like D. H. Lawrence, Sansom plays his defunctive music undersea on the G string of sex, but class composes the melody. In this case, a gondolier rashly falls in love with a beautiful English girl whose snobbery is so intense that it simply does not occur to her that a mere gondolier could aspire to be her lover. When the uninformed Venetian finally begins to understand, he swills wine, falls off a quay and is drowned, but not before the reader wishes that he had taken his painted oar to the girl in Liberty silks.

In story after story, Sansom demonstrates his special ability for staging Grand Guignol within the puppet-sized theater of the short story. He can write about the rivalry of two barbers, in Impatience, without giving the reader the feeling that he has just dropped in for a quick shave; the scene in which the barbers take to each other with straight razors evokes the violence of the London slums in a specially horrible way. And On Stony Ground introduces a wistful clerk who has only two window boxes, but each day he buys a packet of seeds; his predicament is comic but only on the surface. Sansom is a real bloodletter. Suicide, madness and irreparable loss are the themes of other stories, and in each case the atmosphere is created with the soft, ghostly touch of a man who could feel at home in a haunted house.

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