[Welty is a highly-respected American fiction writer and critic, whose works include the novel Losing Battles (1970) and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980). In this review of The Stories of William Sansom, Welty notes the "wonderful set-pieces of description in the book" and declares that Sansom can "hardly be surpassed" in this regard.]

Since the appearance of his first book of stories, Fireman Flower, 20 years ago, the enormously talented English writer, William Sansom, has been warmly read and warmly admired for his stories, novels and travel pieces in this country. This is a welcome collection of 33 of his stories, here presented with an excellent appreciation by exactly the right fellow-writer, Elizabeth Bowen.

One sees different things, or sees familiar qualities differently, in re-reading at a stretch a good writer's work. One gets to know better the long thoughts, the cast of mind, the range and play of mood, the feelings that have lain deeper for their weight and reserve than the fasterflowing ones that color the separate stories and impart the first effervescence.

The flesh of William Sansom's stories is their uninterrupted contour of sensory impressions. The bone is reflective contemplation. There is an odd contrast, and its pull is felt in the stories, between the unhurriedness of their actual events and their racing intensity. In fact their speed is most delicately regulated to suspense. The suspense, which is high, has not a positive, but a negative, connection with the pace at which things happen. Things happen slowly, even in slow-motion, but the suspense mounts fast and high because all the while it has been compressed within. And it is the suspense that the stories are really about.

The wall, in "The Wall," takes three pages to fall. The story is three pages long. The wall that falls is the story, and those three pages are the length of excruciation that we can bear. We have been given the measure.

For conveying in the short story how places, hours, objects, animals, human beings in their behavior look and feel, and wound, this writer can hardly be surpassed. One after the other here are the wonderful set pieces of description that characterize his work, the flourish of flags in Siena, the masterpiece of a centerpiece of fresh, dead fish in a Marseilles restaurant—but to start naming them is not to be able to stop.

"How Claeys Died," "Various Temptations," "Episode at Gastein," "Three Dogs of Siena," "Among the Dahlias"—here are his best-known stories, sinister, comic, tragic. Here is "A Saving Grace," a true original among ghost stories. What a marvelous conviction it brings, that there is an affinity quite unassailable between what is dead and gone and what has been altogether foolish and delicious, a connection delicate and wistful (if slow to arrive) between human memory and a certain hilarious, vaudeville quality that living life will ask for till death comes.

Here are the fine comic stories. How did Patten meet his wife? "A Game of Billiards" tells us. Patten got caught in the deserted billiard room of the upstairs floor of his pub on his way to the "Gentlemen's" by a score for an imaginary game of billiards with an imaginary opponent. Patten had indeed day-dreamed of being closeted with a madman some day, and has always imagined that "he would crumble instantly. But now—surprisingly—it was the opposite. He felt capable, alert, strong. After all, the rehearsals had been of some use." But the game goes on, and how is Patten ever going to get out? And then the door of the billiard room is opened by mistake: a girl is looking for the "Ladies'." "She stood like the embodiment of all heroic rescue—the figure of sudden salvation, the sworded angel . . . in her pink dressy blouse and her blue serge skirt." She isn't really the one who sounds the alarm for the rescue, she only takes his signaling for a friendly direction. But back safe in the pub, whom does Patten see first, to tell his story to? "It was his saviour in the satin blouse."

In Mr. Sansom's humor lie both caprice and tolerance; his wit goes along in splendid partnership with fantasy. And his comic stories do not go on for long without the element of threat, or peculiar danger.

The stories of scenes are well represented here. These are highly complex and extremely accomplished works of art. Time and place, in the stories, not only exist to an intense degree—they create the characters out of themselves, and then belabor or nourish or trick or lure or teach or obliterate or exalt them.

In "A Waning Moon," we go into the giant, metallic, malevolent outside of the Western Highlands from the claustrophobic and malevolent inside of a trailer with a husband and wife on holiday. The story is at once terrifying in the true nightmare sense and comic—for a certain length of time—in the domestic sense. How Mr. Sansom can write about place! It is so marvelous, for example, to see the slate hillside in this story marbled in moonlight and the marble chips moving and turning out to be goats.

In "Pastorale," a loving pair traveling in remote wilds on the Corsican coast, who have been completely absorbed in each other, feeling no need to even say "Thank you" or smile, are suddenly confronted by the sight of the Calanches: "precipitous cliffs of fierce red granite, a steep convulsion of weird rock . . . figures deep in thought about themselves, their stone thoughts cowled and draped with red stone .. . An aeolian music sang round them, but it was too ancient a sound for human ears." The lovers shudder at last and run back to their bedroom. They are, it seems, town-dwellers.

In "Time and Place," a man and woman who are, on the contrary, nothing to each other, self-sufficient fellow guests of a hotel, take a casual walk into the Highlands and are caught in a Scotch mist: "The circular blindness . . . and wherever they looked it was circular and perpetual, round and round, and round overhead. It seemed, too—but gently, slowly—to be thickening still and closing in. But perhaps that was the illusion of their eyes training for some point of definition—any mark for their human eyes." What can they do in the long run but lie down together on his mackintosh and wait for the mist to lift? Back in the hotel, of course, a mere nodding acquaintance is resumed—or rather avoided.

In these scenic stories, as in the war stories, there lies an element of allegory. It is the situation itself, which he sees as already existing as he began the story, that has inspired or directed or driven Mr. Sansom. One feels the surer of this because all of a given story's attributes, aspects and elements, from its title on, are each in their own way parts of one whole; and this whole has been conceived, one needs hardly say, as a work of art.

"A World of Glass" happens in Trondheim—where everybody wears dark glasses; there is the landscape of snow and icicles and ice-bound lakes, the clarity, the frozen beauty, transparency, and cruelty. And we learn that the story is, in fact, the story of an eye, the eye of a young girl, a lifelong resident of this city; the eye is then revealed as being glass; her blindness is revealed to have been caused by glass, a broken bottle in the hand of her husband, a deed of unseeing drunkenness. And there are also elements of reflection, of things in reverse: Trondheim's architecture is false Greek in the snowbound north.

The narrator himself is not a simple tourist. He is an actor who must disguise himself to hide his famous identity. It is with the blind young girl, the victim, he tells us, that eventually he explores and examines this strange city—it has become all but an abstraction—"through her eyes." And before he can leave he is arrested for assault. He attacks a tourist he sees there from his own country, and punishes a perfect stranger. The scene, the characters—both the characters, the prevailing figures of speech, the action, the words of dialogue, the title, the whole conception is this, and to make this, a world of glass, the glass eye. And it all reveals very well another vein, perhaps the deepest, of Mr. Sansom's feeling: the need, in every place and every thing, for the human element.

William Sansom has never been anything less than a good writer. I think as time passes his writing becomes more flexible without losing its tightness of control; the flexibility is its own sign of such sureness. And what is perhaps more unusual among writers so good, his work with time seems to have gained, not lost, spontaneity.

The very act and mystery of writing a story is central to his work, this reader believes. And which came first, the work or the mystery that brought it about? One wonders how he might have even escaped the allegory form of "Fireman Flower," for instance, given the raw experience of firefighting in wartime London out of which it came. He makes us wonder how often, indeed, as life works it out, is the allegory not the literal, the literal not the allegory. In fact, it is pretty much like the two snapshots of her sailor son, who is growing a beard, that the lady bartender in "Eventide" shows her customer. The cleanshaven one she puts on the bar for him to see.

"That's how he is really,' said the woman and then showed him the other photograph, of a similar young sailor, but with a beard.

'"And that's how he really is.'"