A Writer's Eye Part 7

Of course, an editor who sent out a new book called Men Without Women to Virginia Woolf knew what he was doing. 96 The New York Herald Tribune received a very farsighted review. (The t.i.tle she decided merely "to stare out of countenance.") She thought Hemingway's characters talked too much, but she would, "if life were longer," care to read the stories again. Hemingway "lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter's cloak, get between him and the fact. . . .But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the hornscall them life, truth, reality, whatever you likepa.s.s him close each time."

This 1927 review is published in Granite and Rainbow.97 It seems there were still pieces left out by Virginia Woolf herself when she put together both series of The Common Reader and that eluded her husband when he published three books of her papers after she was dead.98 Two lady scholars99 from Americaa country she always thought showed signs of being restlessfound them, and are thanked for this collection by Mr. Woolf in a foreword. Seventeen years after her death appear twenty-five essays and book reviewseleven written before 1920, twelve written during the Twenties, one in 1930, one in 1940. Writing them earned her the time to write her novels, and the least of them is a graceful and imperturbable monument to interruption, though it saddens us to see her "whipping the heads off poppies," as she called it to Lytton Stracheyand Marie Corelli was surely a poppywith The Waves waiting in ma.n.u.script on her table.100 The essays, of course, are the heart of the book. For one thing, she is back Page 121 in invited companySterne, Defoe, Jane Austen, Peac.o.c.k, the old cronies. The finest and longest piece, "Phases of Fiction," was written for the old Bookman, which published it in three parts in 1929. 101 "There is . . . some design that has been traced upon our minds which reading brings to light," she says, and brings it to light.

That beautiful mind! That was the thing. Lucid, pa.s.sionate, independent, acute, proudly and incessantly nourished, eccentric for honorable reasons, sensitive for every reason, it has marked us forever. Hers was a sensitivity beside which a Geiger counter is a child's toy made of a couple of tin cans and a rather common piece of string. Allow it its blind spots, for it could detect pure gold. It could detect purity. In the presence of poetic fire it sent out showers of sparks of its own. It was a mind like some marvelous enchanter's instrument that her beloved Elizabethans might have got rumor of and written poems about.

She has told how, after the enormous pressure under which she wrote her fiction, the intensity of feeling she lived through, the exacerbations she suffered, writing criticism was, for her, release. Critics, she once observed, are persons who have "done their work as a good housemaid does hers; they have tidied up after the party was over." The reading and re-reading she set herself to do for The Common Reader, for instance"to go through English literature like a string through cheese"would, she said, be good for her mind"rest it anyhow," for "one day, all of a sudden, fiction will burst in."

In the early pieces there are no early sentences. "Far be it from us to hazard any theory as to the nature of art" is, so far as I can see, the only slip she ever made. Her early recognitions range from fine ("No one felt more seriously the importance of writing than she did," of Katherine Mansfield) to finest: once she saw that streak of vulgarity in Henry James, she was incapable of being scared by his ghost stories until she got to The Turn of the Screw; a masterpiece made her afraid of the dark.

She scatters treasure everywhere she reads. "The novelist [of all those practicing the arts] . . . is terribly exposed to life. . . . He can no more cease to receive impressions than a fish in mid-ocean can cease to let the water run through his gills."102 This aside comes in the course of reviewing a second-rate novel, about which she presently observes that "a hundred pages have flashed by like a hedge seen from an express train."

And now what we can dofor no farewell glimpse is ever satisfactoryis what Virginia Woolf herself loved to do in her own reading: let the work as Page 122 a whole swim up into the mind. "Breaking the mold" she called the task she set herself. The novel, of course, was never to be the same after the day she started work on it. 103 As novel succeeded novel she proceeded to break, in turn, each mold of her own. It is a perilous life. The innovators of fiction, like the Jumblies of Mr. Lear, come from lands that are far and few, and they go to sea in a sieve.104 "Every moment is the center and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed," she wrote in one of these essays. It was 1927. She was forming her prophecy of what the novel of the future would deal with. She was just in time: To the Lighthouse was about to burst in.

Page 123 The Most of S. J. Perelman By S. J. Perelman All is Grist for His Mill:

New York Times Book Review 12 October 1958: 4, 14

Give him a cliche and he takes a mile. "The color drained slowly from my face, entered the auricle, shot up the escalator, and issued from the ladies' and misses' section into the housewares department." And, "I sent him groveling. In ten minutes he was back with a basket of appetizing freshpicked grovels. We squeezed them and drank the piquant juice thirstily." Spring returns to Was.h.i.+ngton Square: "It lacked only Nelson Eddy to appear on a penthouse terrace and loose a chorus of deep-throated song, and, as if by magic, Nelson Eddy suddenly appeared on a penthouse terrace and . . . launched into an aria. A moment later, Jeanette MacDonald, in creamy negligee, joined the das.h.i.+ng rascal, making sixty-four teeth, and the lovers began a lilting duet."

Our garden of prose has no more been the same since a certain silky party put in an appearance than the Garden of Eden after the Serpent called. S. J. Perelmanfor it was indeed hehas this to say by way of a concluding note to this collection of thirty years' work: "If I were to apply for a library card in Paris, I would subscribe myself as a feuilletoniste, that is to say a writer of little leaves. I may be in error, but the word seems to me to carry a hint of endearment rather than patronage. In whatever case . . . I should like to affirm my loyalty to it as a medium. The handful of chumps who still practice it are as lonely as the survivors of Fort Zinderneuf; a few more a.s.saults by television and picture journalism and we might as well post their bodies on the ramparts, pray for togetherness, and Page 124 kneel for the final annihilation. Until then, so long and don't take any wooden rhetoric."

"There has never been a year like this for the giant double-flowering fatuity and gorgeous variegated drivel," Mr. Perelman said in "CautionSoft Prose Ahead" and that was back in the Thirties. If the only trouble is that all he's lampooned has now caught up with its parody, it's anybody's fault but S. J. Perelman's.

The book is put together chronologically, which is as good a way as any to see what was going on, prosewise, from 1930 to 1958 when Louella Parsons, whose syntax Mr. P. recommends for its narcotic value ("You don't even need a prescription") sets him the scene for "Nirvana Small by a Waterfall." Each reader will make a leap for his own favorites. Here's "Strictly From Hunger," the masterpiece on Hollywood (" 'Have a bit of the wing, darling?' queried Diana solicitously, indicating the roast Long Island airplane with applesauce.") Here's "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,'' the one that gets Raymond Chandler right between the private eyes, both of a dusty lapis lazuli; and "Genuflection in the Sun," in which a gourmet journeys to pay his respects to the author of a piece of fountain-menu prose"the finest thing since Baudelaire's 'The Flowers of Evil'." ("'Did you ever get any figures from Liggett's? Were there many conversions?'") Shall I not simply list some of the old friends you will find again here? 105 The Schrafft hostess, "well over nine feet tall, with ice mantling her summit." Mrs. Lafcadio Mifflin, of "Kitchenware, Notions, Lights, Action, Camera!," "seated at the console of her Wurlitzer, softly wurlitzing to herself." And Mr. Mifflin, "in a porous-knit union suit from Franklin Simon's street floor, stretched out by the fire like a great, tawny cat. Inasmuch as there is a great, tawny cat stretched out alongside him, also wearing a porous knit union suit, it is not immediately apparent which is Mifflin." And, as a matter of fact, Gisele Mifflin, who delivers that indelible speech about the shades her wedding tailleur comes in at Altman's"among them wine, russet, beige, peach, grackle, stone, liver, lover, blubber, blabber and clabber."

There are "my escort, a Miss Chicken-Licken"; "Pandemonium, the upstairs girl" (she entered on a signal); "my hostess, Violet Hush" (of Los Angeles, of course); "my brokers, White-lipped and Trembling"; "kindly old Professor Gompers, whose grizzled chin and chiseled grin had made his name a byword at Tunafish College for Women." "John J. Antennae, spiritual father to millions, . . . fox-nosed, sallow, closely related to G.o.d on his Page 125 mother's side." Manual Dexterides, who knows a lot about Tommy Manville; Hyacinth Beddoes Laffoon, "queenpin of the pulp oligarchy embracing Gory Story, Sanguinary Love, Popular Dissolution, and Spicy Mortician." There is Rosy Fahrleit (she plays over your face), and old man Huysmans, owner of a delicatessen. ("In slicing Huysman's brisket," it comes to be asked, "does one go with or against the grain?") Here are the well-known biopsies of the fas.h.i.+on magazinesa certain June issue of Vogue "was certainly a serious contender for the ecstasy sweepstakes." "Cloudland Revisited" is here, those vignettes of the TwentiesDr. Fu Manchu and Victims to the left, Theda Bara and Victims to the right. Here are the plays about (I mean, anent) the advertising world: "You mean that the finger of suspicion points to Loose-Wiles, the Thousand Window Bakeries, whose agents have recently been skulking about in dirty gray caps and gooseneck sweaters?" Here is Westward, Ha! and Acres and Pains.

Here, in the Hollywood pieces, we find Perelman among colleagues "listening to the purr of their ulcers," or noting how the movie Stanley and Livingstone, "by an almost unbelievable coincidence, was released the very same day luminal was first synthesized." Groucho Marx, for whom, of course, Mr. Perelman has done his share of writing, seems imminent here and once appears in person; we get an intimate glimpse of him indulging "his pa.s.sionate avocation, the collecting and cross-fertilization of various kinds of money."

As always, Mr. Perelman's sources are allowed to play about upon each other. When he, "together with five hundred other bats, hung the rafters at Loew's Strabismus to see Joan Crawford's latest vehicle," we are shot from there into a parody of a Ventura column on a Barbara Hutton story.

In my dictionary is an engraving of most intricate design, labeled "human ear." 106 When I consulted it recently, in connection with this review, I was forced to exclaim, "But this must be the ear of S. J. Perelman!" When I looked up "ear" also in my Nouveau Pet.i.t Larousse and found the very same picture of the very same ear, I think I may quietly say it can hardly be laid any longer to mere coincidence. Mr. Perelman misses no mad word we write or say, and its image and essence he translates back to us with an artistry acute, brilliant, devastating, and, Heaven keep preserving him, funny.

Now for the sequel.

Page 126 Henry Green:

Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag

By John Russell Life's Impact Is Oblique:

New York Times Book Review 2 April 1961: 5

In this country it was 1949 before the first of Henry Green's novels was published, Loving, which came midway in the eight so far now written; after which we eventually got all but the first, Blindness. We still can't read Pack My Bag: a Self Portrait unless we send to England for it, which we do, because it is a good book and unique and because it is, like the novels, the work of a writer of steadily astonis.h.i.+ng powers and of a truly original mind. As a novelist of the imagination, he stands almost alone, a pure artist in our times. 107 He enriches us, all by himself, more than do the others put together of those writers, not artists, of whom there are so many.

All of a sudden three books have been written about Henry Green's work at almost the same time. And by young men, if one supposes rightlywhich is encouraging for the young men. This of John Russell's is a worthy study. It is plain, and makes good sense to start with, that Mr. Russell (of the English Department at the University of South Carolina) has been seized by the delight that Henry Green's extraordinary prose can give, for delight I think does open the door to this writer whose work then comes to be so moving. And he is also aware that past the door there is a great deal more to meet with.

"The mere exchange between two human beings in conversation is mysterious enough. . . . That we talk to one another in novels, that is between Page 127 strangers . . . is nothing less than miraculous if you once realize how much common experience can be shared. My plea is that we should not underestimate this." Using this and other remarks of Henry Green on fiction to form a "wedge into Green's world," John Russell begins his book with a general but concentrated discussion of the author's theory, technique and style. Then he takes up the novels separately or in combination, pressing on as far as he can by the light of their singularity and by that of certain relations.h.i.+ps he finds between them.

Mr. Russell recounts sanely, interprets with imagination and without insistence the cryptic plots. He imposes no harness on the author along the way, being engaged simply in tracing through the novels a course from optimism to pessimisma pessimism from which he is able to find in the end that "wholesome and positive att.i.tudes may be constructed." His terms are precise and sensitive to the complexities of his subject. His approach has a zest congenial to the novels and might have caught it from them.

Mr. Russell says that basically, to Henry Green, "existence is an enigma, not a trap: 'We shall never know the truth,' says Mr. Rock at the end of his day" in Concluding. "Green resists being placed in a niche alongside other contemporary English novelists. His humor seems to derive from the rational, limited view of man prevalent in the eighteenth century; his nearmorbid insistence that man threads an obstacle course to death from the Continental writers I have named." (Kafka, Celine.) "That he should also be a symbolist is the most fascinating and perplexing thing about him, for there is an energy of pa.s.sion in much of his symbolism."

Butderive? It does seem difficult to think of Henry Green with sources not of the living present world. And as to comparisons, these illuminate, but do they hold? For instance Laurence Sterne is here mentioned, and isn't his humor essentially that which emanates from formlessness, while Henry Green's relies on, comes jumping out of, form?

"Green is remarkably sensitive to human beings' needs," Mr. Russell says with perception, "though aware that it is potentially dangerous to have longings and need fulfilled." And he quotes from Pack My Bag: "We seldom learn directly; except in disaster, life is oblique in its impact upon people."

Mr. Russell, to this reader, does well by the characters, especially those in "that great gallery of restive souls from which Green populates the comic novels." Mr. Russell says, and this is important: "Although his tendency to concentrate on exterior behavior of characters is foreign to the methods of Joyce and Mrs. Woolf, Green's criteria remain aesthetic ones. . . . Speaking Page 128 of his attempts to be selective and non-representational, Green once said: 'The Chinese cla.s.sical painters used to leave out the middle distance.' He himself leaves out a middle distancethe a.n.a.lyzed minds and motives of his charactersand is enabled to work his figures into tableaux almost mathematically precise, and aesthetically satisfying." He carefully qualifies this: "Form is a medium for Green, not an end."

Relis.h.i.+ng the marvelous dialogue, Mr. Russell observes that the characters "talk not with phonographic realism but just far enough from it to freshen the idiom as inflection freshens speech," and suggests a way this might have been done. Good advice, but let another writer try it.

The author speaks sane, if perhaps too sane, words about Mr. Green's dazzling style; for instance: "From first to last he evolved no series of styles, but . . . was equipped early to cope with what challenged him." And: "Because Green's writing is so flexible, I feel that judgments of his style are apt to be unrewarding, unless it is granted right off that his restraint and his ability to pull out stops are ever waiting on his vision."

It is through the forms and structures of the novels that Russell seems to this reader to have caught the most and given the best of his feeling about Henry Green's work. He shows himself sensitive to their proportion, balance, framework, their motion through s.p.a.ce. At the same time, he is not afraid to look deep.

It's illuminating how unlike in approach, method, and mood are this book and Edward Stokes' The Novels of Henry Green, published last year. 108 Both are serious, scholarly works devoted to the marvels and riddles of the novels.

It does charm the imagination to think that while Mr. Stokes, at the University of Tasmania, was running up a table of comparison how many times the color red was used in Loving, Mr. Russell in South Carolina was drawing a little hexagonal diagram of the emotional ties in Nothing. But Mr. Stokes was seeing Nothing as a stream of conversation flowing into whirlpool and then out again, and he was making a quadrilateral involving six triangles out of Doting. It just goes to show that a work of art is infinitely accommodating.

The Freudian pattern is next to be imposed, we gather from an interpretation of Pye in Caught, quoted by Mr. Russell in a footnote, from a critique yet to appear.109 The heart may quail, but the mind applauds: if there must be any a.n.a.lyses about this writer (and this is certainly in the air), let there be many, all different.110 Page 129 The World of Isak Dinesen By Eric O. Johannesson The Acceptance of Life Is a Defense of the Story:

New York Times Book Review 17 December 1961: 6

This painstaking study could not have been easy to write. As we all know, Isak Dinesen's work is very much something of her own: curious, elaborate, beautiful and mercurial, very strange and at the same time very much what it seems. 111 It is lord of its time and place, and reflects such a sense of fun. You cannot put salt on its tail. It might at different times in different stories seem a dedication to pa.s.sion or a toy and as either, full of delicacy and marvels, grandeur and high jinks, with everywhere more dark to it than light. And for some of us Out of Africa, the autobiography, outdistances all the rest she has written for its intensity and beauty of personal feeling.

Eric O. Johannesson is a fellow Scandinavian, an a.s.sistant professor of Scandinavian at the University of California; he acknowledges thanks to a number of Scandinavian scholars in this work. We can thus be grateful for an opportunity to learn special information from him, as we do at the start when he pays attention to the Dinesen family and the Danish background.

He has followed what would seem to be an admirable purpose and plan. "In this study I have sought to describe the neat and orderly structure which is the world of Isak Dinesen. . . . I have also sought to define what I believe to be the underlying theme of Dinesen's tales: the defense of the story and the art of storytelling, a theme so pervasive112 that it has come to form the Page 130 very basis of the author's world view. I have not felt it in my power to deal with the fascinating personality of Isak Dinesen herself."

He has chapters called "The Art of the Story," "The Gothic Tale," "The Mask," "Marionette and Myth,'' "The Art of Acceptance," "Aristocracy," and "Africa." He writes about the exotic settings, the element of artifice in the tales, the use of metaphor and simile, the relation of the Dinesen stories to the old stories and myths, about illusion and the stage. This is all well. 113 Mr. Johannesson tells how Miss Dinesen, writing from Germany during the last war, spoke of her faith in "the strange kind of reliance on the grace of G.o.d, which one calls humor"; and when he brings forth this sort of firsthand thing, it is worth all our literary comment. He says of this, and goes to the root of the tales: "Humor, as understood by Isak Dinesen, is an affirmation and acceptance of life in all its forms, the opposite of rebellion, . . . a kind of yes-saying to life, an acceptance of whatever fate will bring, and the theme of acceptance is a profound one in Dinesen's tales. But, in saying yes to life, the figures in the tales are also acknowledging the authority of the story and the divine storyteller. Thus Dinesen weaves her tales in such a way that the two themes become one: acceptance of life is a defense of the story."

Again, in discussing the theme of the mask, he saysand one feels he has again touched base"A deep and fundamental skepticism lies at the basis of this view of art and life."

If he could have gone ahead, saying simply what he thinks! But Mr. Johannesson has an unfortunate willingness to prove his observations out of the stories, in a way fatal to any rapport with the stories themselves. "A good example," says Mr. Johannesson, "is seen in the final speech of the fish in 'The Diver': 'Man, in the end, is alarmed by the idea of time, and unbalanced by incessant wanderings between past and future. The inhabitants of the liquid world have brought past and future together in the maxim: Apres nous le deluge.'" A good example of what? Of "the habit of some of the figures in the tales to pluck quotations out of the air and use them very consciously." What in the literal world has Mr. Johannesson got us to talking about?

He uses Miss Dinesen's tales and stories as if they were so many yardlengths of solid and consistent material. He states some point in general, then sets forth a list of examples from the stories; he attaches to the quotes the t.i.tle of the story in parentheses and by its initials (SGT), to keep the scholars.h.i.+p straight. Otherwise he uses her work like a fishpond.

Page 131 What good is a haul-in of similes? He has found good ones, but out of context their original purpose is gone, and so their meaning, which belongs to fiction, and to a sentence in a page in a certain story.

It would be hard to know how, in a study of a writer like Isak Dinesen, to lift out just the bits that are wanted to bear out some theory or observation. It would be like undoing a mosaic. Something gold and twelve feet high is not to be conveyed by any one pebble between the broken fingernails of the most devoted hand.

Behind this somewhere may lie the requirements of a thesis or dissertation. Which is no sin, except that there is another involvedthe author who is the subject of it. Such a book is written to solve the work of Isak Dinesen. And one doesn't solve stories as if they were riddles, even when (as hers may do) they resemble riddles. One reads them. An encounter takes place, which is more than, and different from, an exchange of a riddle and a guess at an answer; otherwise, one would really need to read anything only once.

Of this authorand one is sure Mr. Johannesson respects her deeply (even though he never refers to her in any way except as "Dinesen")he nowhere says or gives any strong evidence to show that he has been stirred, delighted, touched, bored, maddened, even baffled. Indeed, the sad thing about this study is that its author does not seem to have felt any excitement in her work. 114 He is thorough, sincere, and believes that he has finished with her. In one sense he has, for one feels her stories will never trouble him again. But what a fate, for the books we love never to stir us again, never to compel us to read them again and again, as hers can do.

Page 132 The Stories of William Sansom By William Sansom Time and Place-and Suspense:

New York Times Book Review 30 June 1963: 5, 27

Since the appearance of his first book of stories, Fireman Flower, 20 years ago, 115 the enormously talented English writer, William Sansom, has been warmly read and warmly admired for his stories, novels and travel pieces in this country.116 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 rereading 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 faster-flowing 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 Page 133 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 sound, 117 this writer can hardly be surpa.s.sed. 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 Ma.r.s.eilles restaurantbut to start naming them is not to be able to stop.

"How Claeys Died," "Various Temptations," ''Episode at Bastein," "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 una.s.sailable 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 lunatic who wanted him to keep 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 nowsurprisinglyit 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 rescuethe 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 Page 134 only exist to an intense degreethey 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 comicfor a certain length of timein 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, towndwellers.

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, toobut gently, slowlyto be thickening still and closing in. But perhaps that was the illusion of their eyes training for some point of definitionany 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 resumedor 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 t.i.tle 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 Gla.s.s" happens in Trondheimwhere everybody wears dark gla.s.ses; there is the landscape of snow and icicles and ice-bound lakes, the clarity, the frozen beauty, transparency, and cruelty. And we learn that Page 135 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 gla.s.s; her blindness is revealed to have been caused by gla.s.s, 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 s...o...b..und north.

The narrator himself is not a simple tourist. He is an actor who must disguise himself to hide his famous ident.i.ty. It is with the blind young girl, the victim, he tells us, that eventually he explores and examines this strange cityit has become all but an abstraction"through her eyes." And before he can leave he is arrested for a.s.sault. He attacks a tourist he sees there from his own country, and punishes a perfect stranger. The scene, the charactersboth the characters, the prevailing figures of speech, the action, the words of dialogue, the t.i.tle, the whole conception is this, and to make this, a world of gla.s.s, the gla.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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.'"

Page 136 The Gayety of Vision:

A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art

By Robert Langbaum Cook, Care for the Mad, or Write