The Body

by William Sansom

Turning upon the smallest of hints, and taking the detritus of modern life - offhand diary entries, discarded cigarette ends, casual glances - as a series of clues, a London barber becomes obsessed with the idea of his wife's infidelity. In this masterfully told tale, jealousy, hatred and nostalgia stir uneasily in the quiet of London's post-war suburbia. First published in 1949, The Body is an excellent example of William Sansom's ability to suspend and play out momentary fears, building up to an altered vision where even the most familiar things are uncertain.

Genres: Fiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Sansom was born in London and educated at Uppingham School, Rutland, before moving to Bonn to learn German.

From 1930 onwards, Sansom worked in international banking for the British chapter of a German bank, but moved to an advertising company in 1935, where he worked until the outbreak of World War II. At this time he became a full-time London firefighter, serving throughout The Blitz. His experiences during this time inspired much of his writing, including many of the stories found in the celebrated collection Fireman Flower. He also appeared in Humphrey Jennings's famous film about the Blitz, Fires Were Started- Sansom is the fireman who plays the piano.

After the war, Sansom became a full-time writer. In 1946 and 1947 he was awarded two literary prizes by the Society of Authors, and in 1951 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He married actress Ruth Grundy.

As well as exploring war-torn London, Sansom's writing deals with romance (The Face of Innocence), murder ('Various Temptations'), comedy ('A Last Word') and supernatural horror ('A Woman Seldom Found'). The latter, perhaps his most anthologized story, combines detailed description with narrative tension to unravel a young man's encounter with a bizarre creature in Rome.

Sansom died in London.

From the Independent, October 2008:

"..William Sansom was once described as London's closest equivalent to Franz Kafka. He wrote in hallucinatory detail, bringing every image into pin-sharp focus. It was his strength and weakness; it made his stories hauntingly memorable, but his technique often left his characters feeling under-developed.

His style was as cool and painstaking as that of Henry Green, also a wartime firefighter. His 1944 collection Fireman Flower, and Other Short Stories may be his pinnacle. In "The Little Room", a nun waits for death after being bricked up in her windowless cell for an unnamed transgression. To make her fate worse, a meter on the wall marks the incremental loss of the air in the room, and Sansom describes her changing state of mind with passion and clinical precision.

The 1948 novella "The Equilibriad" owes a little too much to Kafka but shares the same strangeness, as the hero awakes to find himself able to walk only at a 45-degree angle. Sansom was also good with an opening hook. One story starts, "How did the three boys ever come to spend their lives in the water-main junction?"

Sansom's publisher described his work as "modern fables", but what makes them so ripe for rediscovery is their freshness and currency. His characters face inscrutable futures with patience and resignation, knowing that they can do little to influence the outcome of their lives. Sometimes terrible events, such as the collapse of a burning wall, slow down and expand to engulf the reader..."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

Christine Brooke-Rose shares short story space with Sansom in Winter Tales no 8, and homages him in The Languages of Love.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meet Henry Bishop. He leads a self-described 'passive, passionless life' with his wife Madge in London, where he presides over two hairdressing salons, whose proprietorship he has inherited from his parents, along with his comfortably upper middle-class home. Suddenly into the Bishops' staid existence arrives a new neighbor, Charley Diver, colorful basement dweller of the boarding house next door. Charley is everything that Henry is not: outgoing, confident, adventurous, and supremely masculine. And, to Henry's eye, it appears he has taken an interest in Madge. Thus rises the common threat of cuckoldry: age-old disruptor of so many dull marriages caught in the rut of middle age. This novel could very easily have gone the way of so many lesser books that traverse this well-worn path, but for Sansom's rather extraordinary writerly talents. There is an odd incongruity between Sansom's sensuous prose and Henry's first-person narration. Simply put, the style doesn't match the one dispensing it. And yet somehow it works. Henry's melancholic descriptions of the natural world imbue this story with an otherworldly glow. Running parallel to this is an undercurrent of vague unease—a light touch of suspense to drive the episodic narrative forward. Along the way Sansom enhances his familiar tale with certain devices bound to yield a visceral response: the nauseating private baby talk language Henry and Madge indulge in; the body horror Henry often experiences, particularly with respect to himself, Charley, and Madge; and the final drunken descent into existential hell that Henry undergoes. All of it melds together into something much greater than what it appears to be at first encounter.

My anxieties redoubled. However—the irritation of that hot inward blush, the stinging rash in the mind, seemed in some manner to recede with the long sense of leisure extolled by the river's evening presence. A feeling of welcome melancholy followed the hotter pain. Sadness heavy and yet as empty as the extending emptiness of evening, the widening of the sky, the cooling of the earth, the lifting of the day's substance that seemed to leave such an echoing wide emptiness in the hours before darkness. I felt all the yearning that plays like music at the end of day. How beautiful life could be—if I was not me! How beautiful life had been, in the past, in a past so far yet so nearly visible as up there high in the east the last true blueness of the day still lingered.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Bishop is a well-off suburbanite with a comfortable income from a hairdressing business that seems to run itself perfectly well without him. 20 years of marriage to Madge does not seem to have produced any children, although this topic never seems to occur to him, as he relates a recent crisis in his life.

Things to notice about Henry: he has odd ideas about certain topics being "male", and the power of science and technology, he is concerned to acquire "knowledge" which he admits he never seems to hold on to. When we first encounter him he is busy stalking an insect in his garden to kill with poison. He is already wound up with tension about his position in the world (perhaps that lack of children preys on him as a failure of his masculinity?), and ready to get obsessed with the possibility that his wife is having an affair with vulgar young Charley Diver next door.

When is this story set? All readers seem to assume it is contemporary to when it was first published (1949) and some push it into the early 50s. Yet, apart from a single line about "scarcity" (which doesn't seem to be borne out by the picnic feast Henry can supply in chapter 6) there is no austerity, no war damage, no references to military service by the young men. When a character makes a mock-patriotic speech during the boat trip, he mentions Kaiser Wilhelm, but nobody adds a jibe about Hitler. Could this be really occurring in the mid 30s, Sansom wrote it earlier and never updated the text? In which case, did Henry have a war record he is not mentioning at all? He is unsure about the very idea of physical combat. Perhaps the unspoken source of his anxiety is some deeper failure at manhood he has been keeping secret - unfit or unwilling for service in some way.

This is a world in which social certainties are shifting - old Mrs Lawlor has come down the social scale very badly, she has to let her house out to all sorts of people. Standards and conventions are eroding, and soon a middle-aged dabbler who lives off unearned income is not going to get any respect off the little upstarts he bumps into on the street. The confrontation behind "Sleuth", decades in the future, is murmuring here already - ironically, one of the minor characters is a hack crime fiction writer.

Altogether this is a very good novel with a lot more to it than the usual one-line summary of "jealous husband having a breakdown". A portrait of an unstable individual with a fragile identity, afraid of the changes he senses in society at large, this is nearer in spirit to late 60s/70s fiction in the vein of Ballard or McEwan.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hilarious! The wealth of kitsch detail, the pathos of the characters' little lives, dramatised to such delirious heights in their own heads, the sadness, the drabness and yet the glorious, absurd fun of it all, was intoxicating. The writing is sheer genius, and I was thoroughly entertained throughout.

[Daniel Abondolo]

Never mind the story -- which is startling enough bcz it is so detailed -- what riveted me here was the use of English. I shudder (with glee) at the thought of a grammar of English written with an aim to describe how Mr Sansom used the language. Brilliant, sentence-by-sentence, clause-by-clause, phrase-by-phrase, word-by-word, and, yes, syllables and even phonemes get into the act. The first five pages were enough to trap me.

[Dave Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Small events having massive impact - in this case, a narrator who is undergoing a tectonic epoch of midlife jealousy which his wife and neighbours hardly notice, until the magma starts to spill up through the cracks in his suburban English routine. A late 20th century classic.

[Λάζαρος Αλεξάκης · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some great writing. Alive, introspective, honest. Recommend it wholeheartedly. Language is a bit difficult, but once you get going it's impossible to put down. Might not appeal to everyone though. Reminded me a little of Nabokov - always a good thing.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 1949 novel is an obsessive, claustrophobic, first-person confessional by a meek, middle-aged London suburbanite who undergoes a sudden suspicion (and growing certainty) that his wife is having an affair with a younger and much more virile neighbor. We are taken deeper and deeper into the narrator’s insecure personality, a disturbing journey that becomes marked with skewed perceptions and ever-increasing dread. The writing is first-rate - from the opening describing the narrator’s attempts to poison a sleeping fly in his garden, to the heated climax that builds over the course of a sweltering, humid, airless mid-summer day.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful.

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy Patrick Hamilton and his portraits of the sad , insecure Londoners that inhabit non descript streets , homes , bedsits and pubs in the interwar period you are going to enjoy this .

Lurching between pathos , comedy , suspense and the dark ruminations of pathological jealousy we are inside the aging body of a middle-aged suburbanite who becomes convinced of his wife's affair with a neighbour . As his secretive spying takes on darker and darker twists we are pulled into the crazy logic of his thinking and the torture of his obsessive thoughts .

As well as being a perfectly pitched description of the mindset of someone in the grip of a delusion the novel suggests a barely realised eroticism of masochism and self torture that drives the obsession forward . The body is decaying but still has primal urges that lurk beneath .

I loved the pub scenes and bedsit crowd next door with their easy companionship, all surface and youth . A brilliant novel .

[Tom Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

An authentically derived story of how we process unfounded jealousies at times. An original story that I have not ever come across before. Sansom writes beautifully and probes the psychology that can be in all of us, yet comically and absurd.