[In the following review, Jones finds the stories in Children Are Bored on Sunday masterfully written, but sometimes to a fault ]

Of the extraordinary ability of Jean Stafford as an imaginative writer there can be no doubt, but the quality of that ability is difficult to define. Her new collection of sketches and short stories, Children Are Bored on Sunday, raises the whole problem of the nature of her talent, its strength, and its weakness.

It is, of course, an extraordinarily perceptive talent; it is also a talent having masterly control over language as an instrument. There is no sentence in the volume which does not have its clean, precise line. Difficult ideas are stated with effortless ease, the difficulty of the idea not being a metaphysical difficulty but a difficulty of conveying to the reader the impression made upon some problematical personality by a particular human situation. The visible world exists. The visibility of the world is a double visibility—the world is visible alike to the writer and to the character under scrutiny, and yet the duple quality of the vision is everywhere scrupulously conveyed.

And yet, despite all this remarkable ability, Children Are Bored on Sunday leaves upon this reader, at least, a mixed and somewhat disturbing impression. Certain pieces—for example, "A Country Love Story" and "The Interior Castle"—are deeply felt, albeit the feeling in nowise disturbs the firm control of the artist. But other pieces—for example, "A Modest Proposal" and 'The Bleeding Heart"—seem to me contrived, they are almost bravura pieces, they are intricate and beautiful mechanisms that move in a vacuum, they are products of that state of mind, that attitude towards writing which Malcolm Cowley found disturbing in an essay, recently published in Harper's, on the younger novelists.

I confess I do not understand the nature of this weakness. It does not spring from lack of social sympathy ("The Home Front" is as neat an indictment of man's cruelty to man and animals as I have ever read). It does not spring from a lack of what in the broadest sense may be termed political responsibility—a story like "The Maiden" raises by implication the whole vast problem of whether international misunderstanding is not the basis of our confusion. Perhaps it springs from a kind of terror—terror at the abysses of human nature itself, its unpredicability, its self-deception, the little role which rationality has in its operation.

If this be true, an absorption in the technological aspects of writing becomes a kind of protection against fear. One retreats into one's tower, not from disdain of the multitude, but from fear of one's self. One spins his intricate armor of art as a momentary stay, not so much against confusion, as against distrust. One takes refuge in irony, even in sympathy, as behind a shield. The horror of existence becomes, as it were, a fashionable code; and brilliant swordsmanship, unwonted dexterity of wrist and eye grow to be ends in themselves.

I do not think Miss Stafford is wholly of this camp; and yet there are elements in this collection that disturb me because they seem to point in this direction. In the long run I doubt that it is the right direction in which to go, since, at the end of the journey, one finds, so to speak, only a rich rhetorician like D'Annunzio. Meanwhile, should these metaphysical considerations seem irrelevant to the general reader, let that mythical character read Children Are Bored on Sunday and receive from it the pleasure which expert writing always gives to those with cultivated eyes and ears.