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
The Bay of Naples 4 copies
Lord love us 3 copies
The equilibriad 2 copies
Choice : some new stories and prose 2 copies
The Kiss 1 copy
Associated Works
The World of the Short Story: A 20th Century Collection (1986) — Contributor — 514 copies, 4 reviews
75 Short Masterpieces: Stories from the World's Literature (1961) — Contributor — 320 copies, 2 reviews
Alfred Hitchcock Presents : Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV (1957) — Contributor — 180 copies, 7 reviews
Chamber of Horrors: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1984) — Contributor — 70 copies, 1 review
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January 1955, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1955) — Contributor — 7 copies
FLOWER OF CITIES, A BOOK OF LONDON Studies and Sketches by Twenty-Two Authors (1949) — Contributor — 7 copies
Die englische Literatur 10 in Text und Darstellung. 20. Jahrhundert 2. (2001) — Contributor — 6 copies
Who's zoo — Illustrator — 2 copies
New Writing and Daylight : Summer 1943 — Contributor — 2 copies
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
Gala day London — Contributor — 1 copy
Modern Choice 2 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1912-01-18
- Date of death
- 1976-04-20
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Uppingham School
- Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
biographer
travel writer
screenwriter - Organizations
- National Fire Service
- Awards and honors
- Royal Society of Literature (Fellow)
- Relationships
- Rosoman, Leonard (friend)
- 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 - Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Camberwell, London, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Bonn, Germany
- Place of death
- London, England, UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- London, England, UK
Members
Discussions
THE DEEP ONES: "The Long Sheet" by William Sansom in The Weird Tradition (November 2023)
Reviews
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. show more 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. show less
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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
Review is for the short story "The Long Sheet" in the collection.
Update:
Reread July 20, 2024
I hadn't read this since I was a child, when I was very taken with it. I remembered it all my life. But reading it as an adult I am more critical. I think it's a bit heavy-handed and predictable, the ideas being better expressed in other writing.
The gist of the story is that captives in 5 different rooms are given a task that, when they complete it, will lead to their freedom from captivity. The story show more is an allegory, and the approach that the people in each room take represents how different types of people live and view their lives.
I see several ways of interpreting the story:
The first is what I consider a Buddhist type message, that the mindfulness of each moment is all there is in life. Or, perhaps related, that life is meaningless and freedom an illusion.
Another is a Marxist interpretation, that freedom comes from the workers controlling the work for themselves, thus seizing the means of production. But this isn't a perfect analogy, imo.
A third view is similar to Camus' philosophy in Sisyphus, where the inner attitude of defiance is what gives humans a sense of dignity, and both stories have a similar existentialist observation about the human condition.
Finally there are hints of the antinatalist philosophy, especially with the young children, born into the captivity.
original review
1963
Haunting.
I read this story in grammar school and it made a huge impression on me. It's not easy to find, but it's included in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and as the 7th out of 12 stories in Fireman Flower and Other Stories, which is available to read for free on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207617 show less
Update:
Reread July 20, 2024
I hadn't read this since I was a child, when I was very taken with it. I remembered it all my life. But reading it as an adult I am more critical. I think it's a bit heavy-handed and predictable, the ideas being better expressed in other writing.
The gist of the story is that captives in 5 different rooms are given a task that, when they complete it, will lead to their freedom from captivity. The story show more is an allegory, and the approach that the people in each room take represents how different types of people live and view their lives.
I see several ways of interpreting the story:
The first is what I consider a Buddhist type message, that the mindfulness of each moment is all there is in life. Or, perhaps related, that life is meaningless and freedom an illusion.
Another is a Marxist interpretation, that freedom comes from the workers controlling the work for themselves, thus seizing the means of production. But this isn't a perfect analogy, imo.
A third view is similar to Camus' philosophy in Sisyphus, where the inner attitude of defiance is what gives humans a sense of dignity, and both stories have a similar existentialist observation about the human condition.
Finally there are hints of the antinatalist philosophy, especially with the young children, born into the captivity.
original review
1963
Haunting.
I read this story in grammar school and it made a huge impression on me. It's not easy to find, but it's included in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and as the 7th out of 12 stories in Fireman Flower and Other Stories, which is available to read for free on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207617 show less
On the Spanish Steps, in Rome’s golden dusk:
“Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed with faces intent on going somewhere - everyone in the city seemed intent on the evening's purpose. He alone had nothing to do”
The opening sentence tells us this concerns a “young man”, but the story is imbued with the world-weariness of a much older show more protagonist.
“The possibility of a perfect encounter - a dream that years of disillusion will never quite kill - decided him.”
That disconnect conjures a degree of unreality and makes the ending feel ‘right’.
The story also has an ancient and mythical air. The neon of the start is quickly forgotten, and I saw it set more in this time:
Image: A Festival In The Piazza Di Spagna (Spanish Steps) by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (Source)
The adjective before “click” in the final sentence made me shiver, deliciously.
“With a terminal click, she switched out the light.”
See also
In the anthology, Manguel links this with the tale of Melusine from European folklore, but I think it’s a tentative connection. Anyway, you can read about her at:
The British Library
Wikipedia
Short story club
I read this in Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 24 March 2025.
You can join the group here. show less
“Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed with faces intent on going somewhere - everyone in the city seemed intent on the evening's purpose. He alone had nothing to do”
The opening sentence tells us this concerns a “young man”, but the story is imbued with the world-weariness of a much older show more protagonist.
“The possibility of a perfect encounter - a dream that years of disillusion will never quite kill - decided him.”
That disconnect conjures a degree of unreality and makes the ending feel ‘right’.
The story also has an ancient and mythical air. The neon of the start is quickly forgotten, and I saw it set more in this time:
Image: A Festival In The Piazza Di Spagna (Spanish Steps) by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (Source)
The adjective before “click” in the final sentence made me shiver, deliciously.
See also
In the anthology, Manguel links this with the tale of Melusine from European folklore, but I think it’s a tentative connection. Anyway, you can read about her at:
The British Library
Wikipedia
Short story club
I read this in Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 24 March 2025.
You can join the group here. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 50
- Also by
- 55
- Members
- 547
- Popularity
- #45,592
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 14
- ISBNs
- 46
- Languages
- 2
- Favorited
- 3