William Sansom (1912–1976)
Author of The Body
About the Author
Image credit: Penguin Books, 1959
Works by William Sansom
The Passionate North 5 copies
A Woman Seldom Found 5 copies
Lord love us 3 copies
The Bay of Naples 3 copies
The Equilibriad 2 copies
Chendru, the Boy and the Tiger. 2 copies
Choice: Some New Stories and Prose 2 copies
Svartsjuka 1 copy
The Kiss 1 copy
Varie tentazioni : racconti 1 copy
Associated Works
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 12 Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV (1957) — Contributor — 163 copies
Flower of Cities - A Book of London: Studies and Sketches by Twenty-Two Authors (1949) — Contributor — 7 copies
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January 1955, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1955) — Contributor — 6 copies
Tredive mesterfortællinger — Author, some editions — 3 copies
Who's Zoo — Illustrator — 2 copies
New Writing and Daylight : Summer 1943 — Contributor — 2 copies
Gala day London — Contributor — 1 copy
The Uncertain Element: An Anthology of Fantastic Conceptions — Contributor — 1 copy
The Amateur: and Other Modern Stories (English Language Learning: Reading Scheme) (1979) — Contributor — 1 copy
Mystery and Suspense — Contributor — 1 copy
Modern Choice 2 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1912-01-18
- Date of death
- 1976-04-20
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Camberwell, London, England, UK
- Place of death
- London, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Bonn, Germany
- Education
- Uppingham School
- Occupations
- novelist
short-story writer
biographer
travel writer
screenwriter - Relationships
- Rosoman, Leonard (friend)
- Organizations
- National Fire Service
- Awards and honors
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
- Short biography
- British short-story writer and novelist, born in Camberwell, London, educated at Uppingham School. He joined the National Fire Service at the outbreak of war and witnessed the bombing raids on London. At the time, he contributed short stories to New Writing and Horizon. Many of the stories in his first collection, Fireman Flower (1944), display documentary realism, while others are in the surreal vein of Kafka. The stories tend to evoke a drab, seedy post-war London, and often reproduce the distortion of perception suffered by those under severe stress. Among other collections of stories are South (1948), The Passionate North (1950), and The Stories of William Sansom (1963), with an introduction by Elizabeth Bowen. His novels include The Body (1949), a tour de force which plunges the reader into the deranged mind of a married middle-aged barber consumed with obsessive jealousy; A Bed of Roses (1954); The Loving Eye (1956); The Cautious Heart (1958); and The Last Hours of Sandra Lee (1961). He also wrote Westminster in War (1947), and the travel books Away to It All (1964) and Grand Tour Today (1968).
Read more: William Sansom (William Norman Trevor Sansom) Biography - (1912–76), (William Norman Trevor Sansom), New Writing, Horizon, Fireman Flower, South, The Passionate North http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages...).html#ixzz0jtin2Ug4
Members
Discussions
THE DEEP ONES: "The Long Sheet" by William Sansom in The Weird Tradition (November 2023)
Reviews
Beautiful colour photographs of their daily life and a satisfying story of a boy and his constant companion, a young tiger.
Considering William Sansom's short fiction was once widely anthologized in frighteningly titled story collections (e.g., London Tales of Terror, Ghosts in Country Houses, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, as well as several installments of The Pan Book of Horror Stories), with a novel named The Body, readers already acquainted with his better known, more diminutive, phantasmal forebears, could understandably conclude that Sansom's first novel The Body was likewise macabre. For those ghoulish connoisseurs of ghost stories with a taste for Sansom's peculiar style of understated extravagance—a style similar to yet not quite as distilled as that of those refined denizens of the fin de siècle, nor as lugubrious as the later Lovecraft crowds he was often lumped in with (peruse any of the table of contents of one of the dozens of anthologies Sansom contributed to in order to better see my point)—and for whom, understandably, may have approached the The Body expecting the same disquieting ambiance of his eerie short stories, may have been disappointed that The Body was not a similarly quiet horror novel.
For The Body rises from a different ground—a novel, expertly crafted by Sansom out of a molehill. It is seeded in what amounts to a sandbox, rooted as it is in an immature husband's absurd overreaction to a neighbor's leering glance. The novel flourishes swiftly, like a prickly weed, from the uncommunicative cracks of this self-hating husband's heart, feasting on his doubt and festering insecurity. Over another man staring over the wall at his attractive wife. The Body, then, is about a marriage that may soon be buried, because of a husband's jealousy and profound paranoia. A paranoia so profound its become perverse as the husband repeatedly "goes out of town" that he may spy on his wife and that ungodly garrulous, lascivious neighbor-paramour. Alleged paramour. Watching this extraordinarily double minded husband as he deviously befriends his wife's envisioned lover for pints at taverns all over town, concocting elaborate traps to prove himself a cuckold (and a cuckoo cuckold at that) in the very company of the vile offender, demonstrates exactly how pathologically overpowering and perverse the husband's paranoia has become. He'll do just about anything to contrive some future indiscreet rendezvous between the pair to "prove" there's been an affair, even as he's the one orchestrating it. Is a single unreciprocated glance, in the first place, automatic grounds for a spouse's jealousy and suspicion? That's the molehill William Sansom turned into a novel. A novel that may have been better executed and more believable as a long short story. Because even as I'd rate it a good but not great novel (perhaps "great" for a first novel, I won't quibble over that), it's still a novel at heart that's as shallow as a sandbox upon first inspection. Upon introspection, however, the novel gains major mass. One could say it embodies the depth of dunes. Holy shit, though, God forbid that such measly weaselly husks of human beings otherwise known as men indeed exist in this world who are as idiotic and insecure as the husband in The Body. And what could possess a wife to remain true to that, anyway, to her husband's faithlessness in her faithfulness? Are there really wives that forbearing and angelic in this world, willing to put up with such unjust and unfounded barrages of bullshit? What are the odds that this marriage, on the verge of being embalmed, can bounce back and survive?
Yet somehow, The Body has survived, barely, since its publication in 1949, even enduring decades of being out of print; survived largely, I suspect, because of both the underground but growing reputation of William Sansom's short stories and on the hard won approval of one Anthony Burgess, who included The Body in his influential 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (published in 1984) and wrote, in part, of it:
"Sansom's ear, matching his eye, renders the idioms and rhythms of post-war lower-middle-class English with a frightening exactness. The final image that emerges in the self-tortured brain of the husband is of the human body growing old and unsavoury -- the broken toenails, the rough skin, the bad breath -- and the sexual urge as a kind of insentient insanity. It is what the sharpened eye is led to observe at last and it leads, in its turn, to a kind of resigned philosophy. By a paradox, Sansom mines into the human spirit by staying on the surface."
The surface of my tattered 1959 Penguin Books copy of The Body has sure seen better days. The cover, in fact, is held on by scotch tape. Who knows for how many years it languished, in the dust and dimly lit glory, on a long crowded shelf at the late great Acres of Books in Long Beach before I salvaged it, thanks to Anthony Burgess, in 2008, just before the store closed. The Body remained out of print until Faber and Faber reissued it in 2011. I believe it's worth the steep price to obtain, or I'd be happy to send you my copy.… (more)
For The Body rises from a different ground—a novel, expertly crafted by Sansom out of a molehill. It is seeded in what amounts to a sandbox, rooted as it is in an immature husband's absurd overreaction to a neighbor's leering glance. The novel flourishes swiftly, like a prickly weed, from the uncommunicative cracks of this self-hating husband's heart, feasting on his doubt and festering insecurity. Over another man staring over the wall at his attractive wife. The Body, then, is about a marriage that may soon be buried, because of a husband's jealousy and profound paranoia. A paranoia so profound its become perverse as the husband repeatedly "goes out of town" that he may spy on his wife and that ungodly garrulous, lascivious neighbor-paramour. Alleged paramour. Watching this extraordinarily double minded husband as he deviously befriends his wife's envisioned lover for pints at taverns all over town, concocting elaborate traps to prove himself a cuckold (and a cuckoo cuckold at that) in the very company of the vile offender, demonstrates exactly how pathologically overpowering and perverse the husband's paranoia has become. He'll do just about anything to contrive some future indiscreet rendezvous between the pair to "prove" there's been an affair, even as he's the one orchestrating it. Is a single unreciprocated glance, in the first place, automatic grounds for a spouse's jealousy and suspicion? That's the molehill William Sansom turned into a novel. A novel that may have been better executed and more believable as a long short story. Because even as I'd rate it a good but not great novel (perhaps "great" for a first novel, I won't quibble over that), it's still a novel at heart that's as shallow as a sandbox upon first inspection. Upon introspection, however, the novel gains major mass. One could say it embodies the depth of dunes. Holy shit, though, God forbid that such measly weaselly husks of human beings otherwise known as men indeed exist in this world who are as idiotic and insecure as the husband in The Body. And what could possess a wife to remain true to that, anyway, to her husband's faithlessness in her faithfulness? Are there really wives that forbearing and angelic in this world, willing to put up with such unjust and unfounded barrages of bullshit? What are the odds that this marriage, on the verge of being embalmed, can bounce back and survive?
Yet somehow, The Body has survived, barely, since its publication in 1949, even enduring decades of being out of print; survived largely, I suspect, because of both the underground but growing reputation of William Sansom's short stories and on the hard won approval of one Anthony Burgess, who included The Body in his influential 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (published in 1984) and wrote, in part, of it:
"Sansom's ear, matching his eye, renders the idioms and rhythms of post-war lower-middle-class English with a frightening exactness. The final image that emerges in the self-tortured brain of the husband is of the human body growing old and unsavoury -- the broken toenails, the rough skin, the bad breath -- and the sexual urge as a kind of insentient insanity. It is what the sharpened eye is led to observe at last and it leads, in its turn, to a kind of resigned philosophy. By a paradox, Sansom mines into the human spirit by staying on the surface."
The surface of my tattered 1959 Penguin Books copy of The Body has sure seen better days. The cover, in fact, is held on by scotch tape. Who knows for how many years it languished, in the dust and dimly lit glory, on a long crowded shelf at the late great Acres of Books in Long Beach before I salvaged it, thanks to Anthony Burgess, in 2008, just before the store closed. The Body remained out of print until Faber and Faber reissued it in 2011. I believe it's worth the steep price to obtain, or I'd be happy to send you my copy.… (more)
6 
absurdeist | Aug 29, 2015 |
absurdeist | Aug 29, 2015 | 
This is a preliminary reading to another preliminary reading to a final reading.
The final objective is Proust’s entire À la recherche du temps perdu (Visit Group http://www.goodreads.com/group/list/3593962). The immediate preliminary reading is [b:Marcel Proust: A Life|1258289|Marcel Proust A Life|William C. Carter|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1182310193s/1258289.jpg|1247105] with close to 800 pages. And this preliminary to the preliminary is, with only 124 pages and with half the space taken up by photographs, a perfect apéritif.
I bought the book for the pictures, and these did not disappoint me but saddened me. The pictures are a wonderful selection of places and people. Some are photos, some are paintings, but it is such a shame that they all are in black and white. How could Thames and Hudson do this?
The surprise was the text.
Sansom has managed in few words to give a very good introduction to Proust’s life, to his times, to his fellow writers, socialites and lovers. Early in the book he conjures up Proust, convincingly, as the figure of an “excluded man” and proceeds to narrate his life touching on various aspects and episodes, such as his family, his finances, his health, his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, the relationship with his publishers etc…, as they crop up along the years.
The last pages introduce some of the themes developed in his work, like the role of memory and how this can be best preserved in Art. Sansom is particularly acute at picturing the frame of mind that La recherche requires, and inviting us to start savoring the durée that will last, at least, the whole work.
This was then an excellent introduction. So, I am now ready for the next Preliminary of about twelve times the amount of words. And then I will be fit for the sixty times more words of the final
I think this book is out of print. I found it second hand.
… (more)
The final objective is Proust’s entire À la recherche du temps perdu (Visit Group http://www.goodreads.com/group/list/3593962). The immediate preliminary reading is [b:Marcel Proust: A Life|1258289|Marcel Proust A Life|William C. Carter|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1182310193s/1258289.jpg|1247105] with close to 800 pages. And this preliminary to the preliminary is, with only 124 pages and with half the space taken up by photographs, a perfect apéritif.
I bought the book for the pictures, and these did not disappoint me but saddened me. The pictures are a wonderful selection of places and people. Some are photos, some are paintings, but it is such a shame that they all are in black and white. How could Thames and Hudson do this?
The surprise was the text.
Sansom has managed in few words to give a very good introduction to Proust’s life, to his times, to his fellow writers, socialites and lovers. Early in the book he conjures up Proust, convincingly, as the figure of an “excluded man” and proceeds to narrate his life touching on various aspects and episodes, such as his family, his finances, his health, his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, the relationship with his publishers etc…, as they crop up along the years.
The last pages introduce some of the themes developed in his work, like the role of memory and how this can be best preserved in Art. Sansom is particularly acute at picturing the frame of mind that La recherche requires, and inviting us to start savoring the durée that will last, at least, the whole work.
This was then an excellent introduction. So, I am now ready for the next Preliminary of about twelve times the amount of words. And then I will be fit for the sixty times more words of the final
I think this book is out of print. I found it second hand.
… (more)
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Somebody mentioned Sansom as Aickmanesque and he was also known during his time as "the British Kafka." Neither of these does him justice. The Kafka thing I just don't get at all except that at times his characters are unnamed and somewhat faceless. However there is an Aickmanesque quality at times to some of these stories in that characters are placed in situations where disturbing (to the protagonist) occurrences lead to that person questioning their beliefs or habits. However, right next to it, these may be a simple story about the people of an evening in a pub. There are sad, happy, tragic, and equivocal endings. People are strikingly changed in one story while in others people remain oblivious to the absurdities in their lives. Sometimes people become all too aware of who they are and cannot cope with the truth of it. However, there is no template for a Sansom story.
Except for one story, "A Woman Seldom Found," there isn't a single overtly supernatural-seeming incident in the entire collection, so don't expect spooks and spectres and the unexplained: all things can be explained by logic and coincidence or fate (however unlikely that seems at times).
There are 33 stories here and an excellent introduction by Elizabeth Bowen and a small author bio.
Since this particular Faber Finds edition is available as a print-on-demand (PoD) or ebook, it is generated from a machine scan of one of the original editions. You know what that means: TYPOS. Its worth it. Not as bad as the FF Aickmans, but you are gonna find them; get used to 'em, embrace 'em, read through 'em, after all you know what should have been there.
Sansom seems to be largely forgotten, at least here in the US. His best known work: [b:Fireman Flower and Other Stories|5100263|Fireman Flower and Other Stories|William Sansom|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256371127s/5100263.jpg|5167013] has been out of print for years and even poor copies of second editions command a high price. Faber Finds has reprinted a number of his novels and this collection, but never "Fireman." I couldn't find a single contemporary edition of "Fireman" on Amazon US or UK. I also could not find another ebook of Sansom other than this collection.
… (more)