Charlton Mackrell, impaled on the shaft of Sylvia Townsend Warner's fine irony, was a gentleman who, "in seeing both sides of a question, giving the Devil his due, stating the other man's case, allowing that to err is human, and never committing himself to any opinion till he had made quite sure there were no signs of error or prejudice about it . . . had attained eminence both as a judge of Shorthorn cattle and as a literary critic." This pleasant baiting brings to mind an apposite statement made by a certain writer a few weeks ago, who remarked that he believed the most valuable criticism to be highly opinionated, personal, emotional and biased. Somewhere between these nice exaggerations, the reviewer attempts to maintain a delicate balance: the short stories in Miss Warner's latest book, Winter in the Air, are, quite objectively, impeccable in craftsmanship and thoroughly enjoyable reading.

Since her first novel, Lolly Willowes (which, if I remember correctly, was the initial selection of the new-born Book of the Month Club back in 1926), Sylvia Townsend Warner has produced some fourteen volumes of prose and poetry. Her prose has much of poetry in it, as a matter of fact—the vividness and accuracy of sensory impression. For example: ". . . she remembered the colors of the parched landscape, at once violent and pale, and how strongly everything had smelled; the mown field where they had taken their supper one evening and everything they ate tasted of warm figs because of the intense, figlike sweetness of the cut clover, cooked all day in the blazing heat.. . ." And the poet's ability to bring together disparate elements into a graphic image, as in this description of a sleeping cat: "Like a frond of weed in the depth of ocean an ear stirred, but the cat did not wake . . . it deepened the profundity of its slumber, as though the intensity of her gaze were pushing against it like a tide...." And the capacity to condense into a few lines or phrases the enormous pathos or meanness or dignity of human personality: and the gift of seeing in the commonplaces of existence those signs and symbols of things not in the least ordinary.

Such dualities are eminently suited to the short story, and to the type of short story which Miss Warner does superlatively well—the brief, sharply focused incident or series of incidents delineating and making clear a character and a history, in a manner which is subtle, subjective, often complex but not avantgarde Arty. The eighteen stories in Winter in the Air are on a variety of subjects, some poignant, some humorous, some grisly, some gay; gently, or not so gently, probing and trenchant. In "A Kitchen Knife" the humble tool which on impulse a young wife purloins from her neighbor's scullery is the symbol of the means by which she severs herself from her miserable pretences and illusions. In "Under New Management" there appears the aging spinster, Miss St. John, a Permanent among the inferior Transients of the Peacock Hotel, who has developed the capacity to be disagreeable to a fine art; a figure which, for all the author's unrelenting detail she still allows its tragic pitiableness. In "Absalom, My Son" a celebrated writer recognizes both his triumphant relief and his shamed grief that a young unknown imitator of his has died at the age of twenty-six, and would never write another book to match or surpass him.

In all the stories the author's technical skill is evident but never obtrusive; her insight and sensitive perception, coupled with her extraordinary ability to describe and illuminate, give her characters an intense reality. And her genuine compassion removes far from them the root of bitterness. Winter in the Air is a rewarding and stimulating book; short stories which, as is not always the case, can be re-read with fresh pleasure.