Some things go without saying, but fiction is not one of them. William Sansom is a writer much published in the past fifteen years; the thirty-three stories in The Stories of William Sansom span those years in a rough chronological way, with the last story, probably the earliest, making a return to the beginning. The arrangement is chronologically arbitrary, as if the important thing to see was the development of the writer, and finally merely arbitrary, suggesting that perhaps he has not developed at all.

Sansom is not a writer to whom one can be indifferent. When a number of years ago, somewhere in the slough of graduate school, I read an earlier volume of his stories, I thought that I would not have to read Sansom again. But he has continued to publish—novels, stories, travel books—so that I had an uneasy feeling that perhaps I had been wrong, remembering J. B. Priestley's unarming aside: "unlike many writers and all politicians and editors, I am often wrong." Perhaps I had been, so I began reading the collection, half wanting to change my opinion, if only the stories would change my mind. The reputation and the reviews I knew. Eudora Welty has praised him publicly over the years; Elizabeth Bowen presently in the introduction. The reputation is, of course, divided; no one is indifferent. The praise is, as far as one can judge, real praise; the damning almost always condescension—as if the stories needed putting down. And so they do.

My only real objection to the stories, although it is manifested in three different ways, is that the meaning is always explicitly stated; it is never made implicit. This particular strategy appears in the stories in a failure of an appropriate point of view, in an overdependence on syntactic qualification, and finally in an intrusive use of statements of meaning, establishing the meaning of the story independently of the narrative. All but seven stories are told by an omniscient narrator, discussing the characters and events in the third person. Not one of the exceptions makes a meaningful use of first-person focus. This lack of functional interest in the point of view causes, I should think, the working up of significance through adjectives and other modifiers, as in this paragraph near the beginning of "Pastorale":

Against such earthen textures the pearl-pale car shone with a princely lustre; the chromium flashed precious silver, the clean canvas of its hood sat reefed like Parisian cloth, the luggage of yellow pigskin and gold clasps told the tale of Pullman seats and luxury. At the wheel sat a young lean dark man; the sun flashed on his oiled hair, on the platinum watch glittering from his soft glove, on the white card he now studied. The woman at his side, her face like a soft white nut in its rich brown hat, peered over—and then, with eyes screwed, looked up at the house above in disbelief.

I am unconvinced that the scene means what he says it does, and this doubt causes me to be unconvinced that it could appear as he describes it. In fact, it must not be so if he has had to labor so hard in writing it up.

Let me illustrate the third aspect with two brief examples. The story entitled "The Girl on the Bus," so that I will not be misunderstood, might not have been a bad story; it focuses on a single moment—almost split second—with great intensity, but the original moment, finally so blown up, expanded, and made much of, cannot take the meaning which Sansom insists on. The story begins: "Since to love is better than to be loved, unrequited love may be the finest love of all." Now, that is rather clever—for the beginning of an essay. Once said, can one go on to write a story that will mean just that? The narrator confesses that he finds the story of "my friend Harry" engaging, producing the effect of prefacing a joke with "this is the funniest thing I've ever heart." The story can hardly live up to its narrator's publicity. Other inanities of narration: "It would be useless to describe her." (Either do it or not, but do not excuse yourself for either.) "Now if you knew Harry as I know Harry, you would know that Harry then began to worry." (Unfortunately, that is not quite the way the song goes.) "Life is so very various, nothing has quite such a unique importance as we give it." (To which I said amen, but proceeded to watch Sansom give the events of this story more significance than either they or I could bear.)

My second example is "Three Dogs of Siena," which begins, too, with its essay-like first paragraph, clever, witty, and a little pompous: "What we would call the 'mongrels' of Italy are more than an essay in democratic procreation: they are an unceasing pleasure to the eye of those who love the individual, the purely creative rather than the creatively pure, the fresh." After viewing the three dogs closely (not quite, alas, from their points of view) and after sharing their inspection of the strange town and the stone tablet of Romulus and Remus, with significance almost established, Sansom becomes the editorial narrator, impatient with us that we might have been inattentive to what he has presented. So he comments: "Such, then, were the minor encounters of these three eager lovers of life. Before the following day, we saw them again twice. . . . No, they were not to be touched by such ceremonies of stone—they went in search of life." So we are told what we must think and forced to back off. "The Italians love their dogs as they love life—but they also love ceremony, and in all ceremony there is the touch of death." Complete and explicit, this kernel of idea might have resulted in a real story. Instead, the commentary prevents the rendering; the statement of significance inhibits the writing of the events in a way that would make them become meaningful.

One should say something about the seriousness with which Sansom has been taken. Mr. John Vickery has written recently of Sansom's connections with "logical empiricism," persuasively, I suppose, if one accepts the proposition. It is that "Sansom's fiction demonstrates the capacity of philosophy to permeate literature with that challenge the intelligence hurls at itself when man is earnestly seeking the truth." Well, that may be. The proposition certainly says more about philosophy than it does about literature; stories might be seen as being permeated with the intelligence hurling challenges at itself, but in what way are they also good stories? Mr. Vickery deals with some thirty-two stories in developing his thesis; he discusses only two of the stories in the present collection, although he mentions four others. Could Sansom really care this much about refutation?

Sansom rarely suggests in his stories that he knows how the meaning of a piece of fiction arises, that a story is not a piece of exposition but an object of art, that its significance comes from the way whatever is told is said. Sansom is always telling us, always insisting on the meaning, never letting it alone. As far as I can tell in reading these stories, aside from a certain efficiency and cleverness, he does not care how the stories are told at all; he does not seem to have discovered the necessity of relation between the matter of a story and its manner, nor to have learned that the significance of a story lies in their connection. I should like to think that I have accounted for the terrible feeling of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, which I had while reading through this volume. It is sad to see a man with energy, inventiveness, and experience never discovering that what he has been doing should be an art, that the meaning of a story arises from the presented form and not from the interpreted subject. It is sad because it reveals a man with real talent who has not discovered any way to use it. Sansom's stories are written, but they are not made; nothing achieves a meaning; everything is forced, interpreted, slapped with meaning and allowed to die, unwrought, in the imagination.