Sylvia Townsend Warner, still best known as the author of Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune's Maggot, has collected a score or so of stories into a volume called, after prevalent fashion, from one of them, The Museum of Cheats. The title is also of a fashion: it puzzles rather than explains, incites more than invites, and in a literary world wary of face-value, it fools best by not fooling at all. Thus, in the name-story, the Museum is a real Museum and the Cheats are real Cheats. But being told that, you are no nearer to guessing what the story is about: indeed, there are readers who might still feel a need to guess when they had finished, They might conclude, after a re-reading, that it is just a story about a Museum of Cheats.

More successful, to my mind, are some of the other stories. There is one called "The House with the Lilacs" which, on the surface is a simple anecdote about a family who continually wish they had bought, when house hunting, a different house, but they hunted so much that they cannot recall where the lost paragon was though the most exact and curious details about it have lingered in memory. Not such a simple anecdote though: for the construction, to a writer who analyzes it clinically, is a small miracle of craftsmanship: while to the reader who reads it sensitively, the mood it puts him in may well seem an equal miracle after so few pages. It could be said, as of once-heard music by Delius, that one remembers it long after forgetting it.

There are other items in this collection that deserve mention: "Major Bruce and Mrs. Conway" (a few pages, brilliantly insufficient, about an American man and an Englishwoman who are not in the least like Babbitt and Mrs. Miniver: "Story of a Patron" a fantastic yarn about a retired policeman who paints primitives); and "To Come So Far" (a neat piece of bone-surgery on the skeleton of a marriage). In all of these appear Miss Warner's distinguishing qualities; an eye for the detail of English life, a prose that exactly matches the thought, both being quick, sharp, polished and sometimes pert; antiquarianism and folk-lore draped a little consciously, but in the main with elegance; and a complete absence of the pugilistic qualities so much admired in merchandised fiction—punch, snap, hit, smash, and what have you. Miss Warner does not even come to grips with a situation: one rather pictures her at the beginning of any story hovering over its general theme like a deceptively blithe spirit, wondering how she will haunt.

Since the material of this volume deals mainly with recent English years, it is of interest to note how far in the background Miss Warner keeps the war—or, alternatively, how deep are the undertones when for a change she lets it come to the front. Her English folk are plausibly preoccupied with all the harassments of their time—conscription and rations, fuel shortage and billeting, mountainous red tape and multiple interferences of officialdom—yet beyond all this they seem to have wise eccentric roots in the English past, and to derive strength from them—uneasily, perhaps, because it is 1947.

In the last of these stories Miss Warner writes: "It was one of those pull-down bells that answer from the depths of the house long after one has pulled—like dropping a stone down a deep well." The simile would suit The Museum of Cheats collection; it pulls down the bells, but to enjoy the performance one must listen as well as read.