The William Sansom Society

The inaugural meeting of The William Sansom Society was held in the garden yesterday.

The Society has been founded by his son, Nick Sansom, and will provide a convivial forum for the appreciation of his father’s work.

“William Sansom’s first collection of stories, Fireman Flower, was partly inspired by his experience as a fireman during the Blitz. The stories in this volume present common features and in many ways foreshadow characteristics of Sansom’s themes and manner in his subsequent works. The stories in Fireman Flower are not all about fires and firemen, but all of them have allegorical undertones. In most of them, owing to the author’s metaphysical preoccupations, the human condition is represented metaphorically. “Fireman Flower,” besides openly being an allegory of humanity’s progress toward self-awareness and the understanding of their condition, is the story of a fireman in search of the “kernel of a fire” in a huge city warehouse. As in his other fireman stories, Sansom finds here an opportunity to explore the gamut of sensory impressions, and he also exploits the high emotional potential represented by a building on fire. More striking still, his desire to extend the experience of his protagonist to that of all humanity transforms the setting and the events of his story. Coloured by his imagination, these undergo a subtle metamorphosis and become unreal and at times surreal. The adventure of Fireman Flower can be seen, in Sansom’s words, as a “surreal romance.” It is also a realistic fantasy in which we recognize Kafka’s influence, something Sansom acknowledged. The abundance of realistic details referring to the warehouse on fire stresses its strangeness: “great embattled cogwheels, lifeless pistons, curved shapes of rough-cast metal, stanchions, rods, the immense cylinders of two riveted boilers.” From one huge room to another, each place is endowed with characteristics that make it both easy to visualise and strange to conceive.” (Encyclopaedia.com)

If you want to know more about William Sansom’s work and might like to join The William Sansom Society express your interest as a comment here and I will send your email address to Nick Sansom.