Word: sansom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cautious Heart is British Novelist Sansom's fifth novel (among the others: The Loving Eye). It is sage, funny, benign and stamped with Sansom's special mastery of situations in which sex, humor and sympathy fight for supremacy in a human battle that never ends...
...CAUTIOUS HEART (186 pp.)-William Sansom-Reynal...
...Author Sansom has learned the lesson of V. S. Pritchett that the proper study of British fiction is class. One of the best stories in this collection is set in Venice and is strongly reminiscent of theVenetian episode in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Like D. H. Lawrence, Sansom plays his defunctive music undersea on the G string of sex, but class composes the melody. In this case, a gondolier rashly falls in love with a beautiful English girl whose snobbery is so intense that it simply does not occur to her that a mere gondolier could aspire...
...story after story, Sansom demonstrates his special ability for staging Grand Guignol within the puppet-sized theater of the short story. He can write about the rivalry of two barbers, in Impatience, without giving the reader the feeling that he has just dropped in for a quick shave; the scene in which the barbers take to each other with straight razors evokes the violence of the London slums in a specially horrible way. And On Stony Ground introduces a wistful clerk who has only two window boxes, but each day he buys a packet of seeds; his predicament is comic...
...Touch of the Sun, his title story, Sansom gives evidence that he is trying to escape the thrall of La Belle Dame Sans Merci-the enchantress who from Keats backwards and forwards has been the patroness of all true romantics. The unattainable, visionary woman dominated Sansom's novel The Loving Eye (TIME, April 15), and now she crops up again like a bad guinea. The story is a little shocker of how "this man Greville, traveller, Englishman, thirtyish, a sort of student on remittance, sitting now cooling off in his little Spanish police-cell, tried again to piece together...