Glitter & Gold

Three (191 pp.)--William Sansom--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

William Sansom is one of the morning stars among younger English prose writers. He has a gift for magic glitter that at times approaches that of one of his current literary enthusiasms, the young Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (TIME, Dec. 2). He also has the more durable gold of an original imagination. When both are kept in hand, he can write a story with all the finely selected observation (though not the humanity) of Flaubert. The Cleaner's Story, first in this book, is like that.

The narrator, a gentlewoman who has come down in the world, sees and tells the whole story from her knees as she scrubs the floor of a French provincial cafe:

"When you are down on your knees and scrubbing, this world of voices seems to lie a great distance above your head. You feel like a little child again, as a child takes for granted that there are bigger people always above her. . . . My muscles are working while they chatter, while they pose, disarranging their lives, striving perpetually to get things straight, yet merely disarranging matters more; while I, I am the person who is constantly straightening things out, keeping life fit to live in."

While the scrubwoman wades slowly down the floor, first one and then another of the villagers drops in for late morning coffee and gossip. They build and believe fictions out of malice, lay plans that are monuments of self-deception, respond to reality, when it is forced on them, with shocked disbelief. The behavior of their feet, which have a vivid animal reality for the scrubwoman, often gives the lie to what they say. But the drama of physical reality that they create finally becomes so exciting that even the narrator is infected. "Despite myself and the progress I have made by realizing the worth of my floor ... I fall upwards into a social tantrum."

Another of the book's three stories, Cat Up a Tree, is a short and exhilarating sketch of a fire engine's mission on a bright windy morning, "a witches' morning, a morning of little devils and hats popping off, of flurry and fluster and sudden shrill laughter."

William Sansom, 35, wrote these stories while serving as an air-raid fireman in London during the war. His Westminster in War, a carefully documented record of what the blitzes did to the city, will be published in England next month. Sansom looks like an Oxford oarsman and lives in a decayed house in northwest London where he is now working "only when I feel like it" on a book of short stories about Corsica.

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