Artful Legerdemain

THE STORIES OF WILLIAM SANSOAA (422 pp.) -William Sansom -Little, Brown ($6).

The worlds William Sansom surprises into life are populated with gentle stranglers and murderous lovers, with beasts that think like men and men who dream themselves into beasts. Their environs are often menacing and unfailingly strange: "The shadow of a cloud was passing over the map, it came towards him like a fast-moving tide, heaving the hills as it came. It came at a fast windblown pace, eating up the fields, blotting out life like the edge of a dangerous sea moving in. The grave earth itself and the green things growing in collusion with it took on presence and, never moving, breathed a quiet hatred on to the mineral air."

A Sansom short story is a piece of artful thimblerigging. There are eerily improbable confrontations: the lonely writer who discovers the blonde girl of his dreams on a Norwegian waterfront and stares deep into her dreaming eyes only to discover that she is blind and that the eyes are shiny glass. The cheerful salesman who meets an escaped lion on the deserted pathway of a zoo and is at first terrified and then forever mortified that the lion turns disdainfully away, rejecting him as a meal.

Sleight of hand, of course. But in his artful nets Sansom catches as much of the puffy anguishes and the razor-finned sorrows of middle-class life as any other story writer now at work. He makes many of his comments in metaphor. In The Vertical Ladder he describes a boy's slow ascent, in response to a dare, up a ladder on the outside of a six-story gas tower. The farther he climbs, the more terrified he becomes of the heaving ground below. When he reaches the top, he discovers that the last dozen rungs are missing. The dislocation he feels-suspended between earth and air, past and future-suggests those other climbers of various social structures who fear to edge their way down but who can never quite find room at the top. Sansom leaves his climber clinging to the uppermost rung, "shivering and past knowing what more he could ever do."

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