[Bowen was an Anglo-Irish fiction writer and critic. Her novels and short stories are often compared with the fiction of Virginia Woolf and display similar stylistic control and subtle insight in the portrayal of human relationships. Bowen is also noted for her series of supernatural stories set in London during World War II. Here, she asserts that two of Sansom's greatest strengths are his ability to convey hallucination and to depict scenes. She also comments on Sansom's ability to achieve "a compulsive hold on the reader."]

Rare is the writer with command of his powers who absolutely cannot write a short story—if he so desire, or if (as may happen) it be desired of him. Few there must be who have not, at one time or another, wanted to try the hand at this form, or found themselves seized by an idea which could be embodied in no way other than this. The writer not sooner or later tempted to try everything, if only to prove to himself that he cannot do it, must be exceptional; might one not say, defective? Incidental short stories of writers by nature given to greater space, or by need bound to the synthesis of the novel, generally warrant attention and give pleasure. Some have the éclat of successful command performances. Few quite misfire. Few fail to merit the author's signature or to bear the particular stamp he gives any work. Yet such stories, recognizably, are byproducts. One does not feel that they were inevitable. In this, they differ essentially from stories by the shortstoryist par excellence: the short-storyist by birth, addiction and destiny. Such is William Sansom.

William Sansom, I do not need to point out, has extended himself into other fields. One could say he has experimented with extension, and that there has, moreover, been no experiment he has cause to regret. His by now six novels are in a position, a foreground, of their own. And of his equal command of the 'short novel' (novelette or novella has he not given us examples? His two travel books exercise a sharp, sensuous fascination: of their kind and in their own manner they are unrivalled. He has mastered the essay; he has manifested a gift for writing for children. It could be that these his other achievements eclipse, for some of his readers, his short stories—as achievements, these others have been substantial and dazzling. Yet the short story remains (it appears to me) the not only ideal but lasting magnet for all that is most unique in the Sansom art.

Here is a writer whose faculties not only suit the short story but are suited by it—suited and, one may feel, enhanced. This form needs the kind of imagination which is able to concentrate at high power and is most itself when doing so. The tension and pace required by the short story can be as stimulating to the right writer of it as they are intimidating to the wrong one: evidently they are stimulating to William Sansom. That need to gain an immediate hold on the reader (a hold which must also be a compulsive one) rules out the writer who is a slow starter: the quick starter, reacting, asks nothing better. There is also the necessity to project, to make seen, and make seen with significance—the short story is for the eye (if the mind's eye). Also the short story, though it high-lights what appears to be reality, is not—cannot wish or afford to be—realistic: it relies on devices, foreshortenings, 'effects'. In the narration there must be an element of conjury, and of that William Sansom is an evident master.

Though all the short stories written by William Sansom are not, I find, present in this collection, the thirty-three which are present have been well chosen. (That a reader should be so conscious of those missing testifies to the power those pieces had to stamp themselves on the memory and, indeed, haunt it.) Those here are, one must concede, outstanding examples of their different kinds. Kinds? One had better say, types of subject—pedantic though that sounds. The wider a storyist's range, the more unavoidable it becomes that one should classify when attempting to take stock of his whole output. From his wartime London, N.F.S. and fly-bomb period, we have, for instance, those two masterpieces, "The Wall" and "Building Alive." Portrayal of the terrible, or of the nature of terror, reaches three of its highest levels in "The Vertical Ladder," "How Claeys Died" and "Among the Dahlias." Comedy, canine in one case, human in the other, overflows with a cheering rumbustiousness from "Three Dogs of Siena" and "A Contest of Ladies." That extra dimension of oddness added to humans by their being in a pub or bar, or even in a hotel with the bar closed, appears in "Displaced Persons" (another masterpiece), "Eventide" and "A Game of Billiards." Of the pursuit of man (or woman) by a fatality, not to be given the slip or shaken off, there are several examples in stories here, the most memorable, and grimmest, being "Various Temptations." The resignation-reconciliation theme (very pronouncedly a Sansom one when he writes of courtship, engagements to marry, or marriage) carries to their conclusions two other stories, "A Waning Moon" and "Question and Answer."

Two of the greatest, at times awesome and certainly most curious powers of this writer appear in two kinds of story not mentioned yet. Where it comes to conveying hallucination, I know few if any who can approach him. (Kipling, possibly, though in another manner?) The fewness of 'pure' hallucination stories in this collection to me is a matter of regret—above all, I hope that this does not mean that this author is reneging on this power? We have, however, the wondrous "A Saving Grace" . . . The other group, to be identified with the other power, are what one might nominate the great scenic stories: those in which what in the hands of another writer could be called 'background' or 'setting' steps forward, takes over, dominates like a tremendous insatiable star actor, reducing the nominal (human) protagonists to 'extras', to walkers-on. In such Sansom stories, who, what, why and how people are is endlessly less important than where they are. How this can be made to come off, and come off triumphantly, is evident in "My Little Robins," "Time and Place," "Gliding Gulls," "Episode at Gastein," "A Country Walk," and, to a great extent, two stories already spoken of in another context (or, under another heading) "A Waning Moon" and "Question and Answer" . . ."Pastorale" is debatable: in a sense, the couple in it defeat the landscape.

To a point, all Sansom stories are scenic stories. Corsica, maritime Provence, Scandinavia, the Highlands of Scotland, the Isles of the West and the past-haunted, mountainous Austrian spa are far from being the only robbers. In this formidable and dismaying world of the Sansom art, no 'inanimate' object is inanimate—mutely, each is either antagonist or accomplice. Influences and effluences are not only at work; they seem the determinants—to a point where mock could be made of human free will. The human is not only the creature of his environment, he becomes its plaything. For the moment, that moment, perhaps, only? But a Sansom moment, given extraordinary extension, so that during it hands may move round round the clock face, the sun set then rise, or leaves be torn from a calendar, is a Sansom story.

This writer's timing, with its expansions and contractions (as though he were playing on an accordion, or squeezebox) is one of the instances of the trickiness he so well uses—trickiness which (I suggested earlier) a short story not only licences and justifies but demands.

The need for the writer's obtaining compulsive hold on the reader (that is, the reader's imagination) has been referred to. Few, if any, are the occasions when the writer of the stories in this collection allows you or me to slip through his fingers. I suggest that what rivets one to a Sansom story is a form of compulsion, rather than "interest" in the more usual, leisurely or reflective sense. The characters, the men and women protagonists, are not in themselves 'interesting'—or at least to me. In the main they are pallid; the few more coloured ones (like Miss Great-Belt, the Danish beauty-contestant in "A Contest of Ladies") are, often, handsome wound-up automata, jerking through their small ranges of looks and gestures. The fatalism shown by most of these people is, one feels, neither desperate nor romantic; rather, it is the outcome of an incompetence which may shade off at any moment into sheer impotence. These people do not appeal to us, or attract our sympathies. But to say that they 'fail' to do so would be misleading. Why? Because it has not for a single instant been their creator's intention that they should (interest, attract or appeal to us, I mean). The enormous suspense element in a Sansom story is generated in no ordinary way. Since we care little for, or about, these people, do we greatly care what happens to them? Why, no! Then how are we held? We are held not by what happens but by how it happens. The substance of a Sansom story is sensation. The subject is sensation. The emotions are sensations of emotion. The crisis (to be depended upon to be 'sensational' in the accepted sense) is a matter of bringing sensation to a peak where it must either splinter or dissolve because it can no more. Or it may, sometimes, simply, ironically and altogether subside. . . . We accompany, thus, the nominal Sansom 'character' throughout the ups-and-downs of fear, or infatuation, or suspicion, or daydream-success, or amazement, or apprehension, or whatever it be. We ease off during the intermissions, let-ups and pauses allowed by the malady or the ordeal (or, it may be, the delight) only to quiver under the shock of renewed assault.

Held we are: either rooted, like the firemen looking up at the falling wall in "The Wall," or gummed, like the youth scaling the gasometer in "The Vertical Ladder."

A Sansom story is a tour de force. Readers who dislike, mistrust or resent that should turn to something other than this volume. In me these stories induce, also, suspense of another kind, call it sympathetic suspense—will they come off? It is staggering how they do. Their doing so is anything but a matter of fortuity. Nothing here is slapdash or 'got away with'. The writer has taken, and shown himself right in taking, a succession of calculated risks. He is not writing for effect, he is dealing in it, and masterfully. For his purposes, vocabulary is clearly very important—vocabulary in the literal sense, in the matter of words, yes; but also there has to be a complete command of the vocabulary of the senses. To have knowledge of, to be able to call up into what in the story is actuality, to be able not merely to convey to the reader but impose on him (almost, inflict on him) smells, tastes, sounds rendered complex or curious by acoustics or echoes, differences (as though under the touch) of surfaces, gradations of light and its watery running off into shadow—this was essential for the writer of the Sansom stories. Equally, the writing of these stories, these particular stories, as they come to us, must have been an essential for William Sansom—burdened, he would have otherwise been, with a useless faculty.

Weather is part of the vocabulary. 'The day slate-dark, the air still, the cindertrack by the cottages without life in a watered middle-day light'—is the overture to "Something Terrible, Something Lovely." The visage of the house in "A Saving Grace" (the house from out of whose open door one by one the dead are to proceed, the dog and all, to group themselves smilingly on the lawn, as though for a photograph), is framed in 'the hour before dusk . . . when the hot afternoon is grown old and cool'. There are, again and again, in "A Country Walk," those weatherpassages betraying the terrible animosity of Nature. Such as:

The shadow of a cloud was passing over the map, it came towards him like a fast-moving tide, heaving the hills as it came.

A simple matter? Not so simple. He watched it, he began to judge whether it would envelop him or not. It came at a fast windblown pace, eating up the fields, blotting out life like the edge of a dangerous sea moving in.

The whole countryside grew more inimical. Every deep acre of this ancient sleeping earth breathed a quiet, purposeful life—and it was against him. Not now the simple material conflict with animals—the grave earth itself and the green things growing in collusion with it took on presence and, never moving, breathed a quiet hatred on to the mineral air.

Animals, birds also are part of the vocabulary—they seem, at the moments of their emergences, long to have existed within it, behind all words. Corsican robins, the lion at liberty in the middle of the dahlia-edged path, and those dogs of Siena—Enrico, Osvaldo, Fa. And, in the Hampstead garden, 'isolated at the very top of a tall sapling, crouched on the tapering end of this thin shoot so that it bent over under the weight like a burdened spring .. . a huge dazed cat'.

The Stories of William Sansom speak for themselves. A peril of introduction is that it can go on for too long. So this breaks off, though there could be more to say.