[In the following review, Stallings provides a thematic analysis of the stories comprising Six Feet of the Country.]

With each new book, Nadine Gordimer augments her status as a writer. Six Feet of the Country, a collection of short stories which have, with only two exceptions, already appeared in American magazines, establishes beyond any doubt that she is not merely a gifted regionalist but a writer of great sophistication who is aware of all the subtle innuendoes of human relationships. Her perception is intensely feminine, but she expresses herself with a fine unfeminine irony; compassionate, she rejects pathos.

Most of the fifteen stories here are concerned with one of two themes: the first, the baffling, tragic encounters of one race with another; the second, the no less complex and unsatisfactory meeting grounds of sex. Yet it is as if Miss Gordimer had taken care to prove that the banalities of love and sociology are misleading; that the human animal, whether it be white or black, old or young, man or woman, is capable of experiences outside the range of ordinary imaginative fiction. "Which New Era Would That Be?" and "The Smell of Death and Flowers" deal with attempts by well-meaning whites to protest against South Africa's racial injustice, but Miss Gordimer strips their humility away and shows the selfishness that lies behind even their best efforts.

They thought they understood the humiliation of the pure-blooded black African walking the streets only by the permission of a pass written out by a white person. . . . There was no escaping their understanding. They even insisted on feeling the resentment you must feel at their identifying themselves with your feelings. . . .

Porcelain-skinned Joyce McCoy, at her first "mixed" party, cannot stop thinking about the fact that she dances no closer to, or farther from, a black man than her white beaux. The title story, in a quieter key, makes the same point that even the feudalism of the white man practicing paternalism toward his black workers means giving them what he wants to dispose of, rather than what they need.

When she writes of men and women, Miss Gordimer shows the same talent for nuance that characterizes Pamela Frankau's novels. With a strong feeling for the sensuous, she understands that it is nevertheless emotional and social overtones that make or break relationships; three or four of these stories are little master-places of psychology. "A Wand'ring Minstrel, I" gives a devastating glimpse of a marriage, revealed in the faces of the children sitting in rapt fascination around the man whom the adult members of the party have denounced as an irresponsible drunkard. A reverse denouement closes "A Bit of Young Life," where an entire resort hotel makes a pet of a young mother vacationing alone, only to be bitterly betrayed.

Love; the great motivator, is not the only one, and in "Enemies" Miss Gordimer gives us a brilliant portrait of an old woman clinging to a life of empty perfection. Sometimes these delicate motivations come from the world of childhood, as in "Clowns in Clover," with its gradual revelation of madness. Terrifying and pitiable in another context is Carlitta of "A Face From Atlantis," for the fate which overtakes a beautiful woman transplanted to an alien culture where her arrogance is misunderstood. The motif of the displaced European forever rootless in Africa or America turns up again, notably in "The White Goddess and the Mealie Question," the only purely funny story in the book. It is one of the ways in which Miss Gordimer broadens our understanding that she reveals the immigrant and his way of life as South Africa's doubleedged liability, just as it is America's.

Perhaps this element in the South African character has given Miss Gordimer her vivid grasp of contrasting worlds. Then it may also be true that even South Africa's appalling problems have done good work in making her young writers appreciate the value of the rare poetic vision.