Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Mr Sansom’s characters, the social world of his stories and novels are ordinarily neglected by his critics in their attention to the excellence of his prose style. In some degree, Mr Sansom invites this: his control over words, his care for them, are so superior to those of most of us who write novels in England today that they inevitably dazzle and beguile the reader’s attention by their unfamiliar excellence. With this love for words goes also a very exact eye, microscopic in its focus, turning people into surfaces, colours and textures; and the sharpest of ears reducing human conversation to that recorded inanity and repetition which as in Pinter’s plays often dehumanizes by its refusal to select. His work in fact shows us to our astonishment how realism, so usually accounted ponderous though worthy, can be elegant, stylized, witty and deliberately light. In the English bill of fare, heavy with morality, social comment, metaphysical symbol or aggressive commitment, Mr Sansom regularly produces soufflés that receive as regularly a round of clapping as much for their entrancing appearance as for their easy digestibility. But even a novelist as determinedly unassuming, as committed to craft rather than to message, as embarrassed by any sound of big drums as Mr Sansom, inevitably creates by his skills a world to which, even though he may refuse moral force or symbolic significance, he does offer his loyalty by the very fact that he bothers to bring it into being. By refusing to inflate the meaning of his world, Mr Sansom has given it an elegant clarity that must command our respect; but, it is also true that fear of inflation has made him steadily refuse to give his full intellectual involvement to his creation. He has preferred to rely on craft and instinct perhaps because they are less personally vulnerable. This abnegation has not, I think, gone unpunished, for if instinct alone is left to provide moral and intellectual significance to a created world it is likely that sentimentality or jogalong worldly wisdom will assume the place that should have been given to moral commitment or considered judgement. This, I think, happens in Mr Sansom’s larger works and, as in The Last Hours of Sandra Lee, it poises his creation somewhere strangely between something fine, distinguished, discriminating and something else that belongs to the sweet-sad, gay little heartache world of the sophisticated glossies. To be determinedly minor as Mr Sansom is avoids the treacly, bad-port depths of Book Club profundities, but it does not preserve one from the sparkling Babycham shallows of the magazines.

     Perhaps this arises because a novelist, however intelligent, ironic and artistically detached from the world he concerns himself with, must give himself some part of its values, unless he admits himself the pretension of looking at his world from some declared scheme of values. Mr Sansom’s world is one that receives surprisingly little attention from contemporary novelists considering how central it is to modern life. It is beautifully assembled in the office party which constitutes the total scene of his new novel — a London office, a glossy office, a world of suburban people, wearing not their home-made, homely English middle class manners, but their ‘Americanized’, smart, cocktail bar office suits. Mr Sansom knows the whole staff very exactly. The oldest generation of Miss Mavis Cooke with her little home of woollies and calendars built around her desk belongs mostly to the old lower middle class England which still has roots in a Wells world; so does Hearst, with his sentimental loneliness and his near the knuckle, commercial’s jokes. Yet about them there is a self-consciousness of the sort of people they must seem in the modern world, a sophistication which no one in Mr Sansom’s chic-shabby London can quite be without. In the next generation comes Monica, the smart careers-secretary, inevitably bitching up a dreary affaire with the boss — she seems already, if I may use a personal reference, to belong to some fading world of my own early stories The Wrong Set. Next in generation comes Sandra, the heroine, who wants at this office Christmas party a little real sex (not perhaps quite definite but not also too indefinite) before she marries the nice boy who is to take her off to Sarawak. She is as silly and lovable and maddening as any typist can be, but unlike the glossy-mag stereotype she sometimes resembles, she is imaginative and surprisingly sophisticated. She can dwell for a whole day not only on love dreams but in thoughts of what her colleagues may be like in their scattered homes and she can communicate the fascination of this game of reconstructing people’s mantelpieces to the other workers in the office. When she recalls what sex has not brought her, she remembers without too much surprise the boy who only wanted to try on her dress. Mr Sansom, in fact, has caught up with the surprising changed awareness of ordinary people today. And all these characters, in their turn, even so young a girl as Sandra, are thought of as ‘oldies’ by the teenagers who arrive in a gang, singing and tight on cherry brandy and Babycham, from the typists’ pool. An older character reflects of Shelagh Nursbaum, one of these teenage typists — ‘she intends to spend her summer vacation in a place called Jugoslavia — I-go-nuts. With a couple of Cats and Chicks. She’s Ape about Abroad, she said. And this, mind you, is the same lady who daily, on behalf of the Mission, types out long letters about rare esters, about methyl heptanone, colloid mills and even foot-operated tube crimpers. Can you tell me how she reconciles these two assumably separate worlds?’

     One feels that Mr Sansom longs to know, too, how all these characters of his combine their shrewdness and powers of imagination and sympathy with such tasteless chic and tawdry, pathetic smart-aleckry and so on. He knows the world he writes of inside out; he knows also that it is far more central to modern life in many ways than the much vaunted Establishment of C. P. Snow or the great healing working-class myth of Mr Raymond Williams. The people in my books. one hears Mr Sansom say, are the ordinary people of city life today. I’m sure that he is right and I’m sure that he is right, too, not to make the easy, conventional moral judgements about their materialism, their sloppy sex, their confused standards. But in avoidance of that easy judgement and in his refusal to set his world against any moral judgement of his own, it is inevitable that his affection and compassion for his characters should slip every now and again into the sort of magazine sentimentalism in which they themselves indulge, his inonic good sense degenerate now and again into the saloon bar cynicism by which they comfort themselves. Like Mr Colin Mclnnes, he really knows modern urban life, detests the cant with which so-called superior moralists attack it, wants to celebrate its vitality and variety; yet inevitably by refusing to permit themselves even their aesthetic superiority to the world they celebrate, he and Mr Mclnnes, both careful craftsmen, produce works that are muddied and blurred by the defects that they prefer not to condemn.