Presence: Collected Stories

The text of The Crucible reads not unlike a novel albeit a fragmented, highly idiosyncratic one , due to the commentary Miller interposed, while the film treatment of The Misfits is even more novel-like. But while most of his work is distinguished by a more or less dramatic sensibility — a sharp dialectical intelligence, a sense of moral urgency — his stories have a muted, off-kilter melancholy and a lightness of touch that sets them apart in his oeuvre.

They are involving, and often affecting, but they are written in a minor key. Presence brings together 16 of them, the last seven of which have never before been published in Britain.

Most concern characters who feel themselves to be on the edge of things, sidelined by their family, by their friends or by society. It is a measure of how consistent Miller's interests were that the first and last stories, written almost 50 years apart, invite reading as a kind of diptych. In the subtly autobiographical "I Don't Need You Any More", a five-year-old boy, furious at being left at home and still worse encouraged to eat, while his father and brother observe Yom Kippur, carries out an act of rebellion that only increases his sense of isolation.

In "Presence", an elderly man on his morning walk discovers a couple making love; later, he finds a T-shirt in the long grass and, despite realising that it might have been "forgotten by previous lovers and only warmed now by the heat of the sun", feels suffused by happiness.

Incidental details connect these two stories: In "Homely Girl, a Life", perhaps the closest thing in this collection to a masterpiece, the subject is again an individual's estrangement. Janice Sessions, the homely girl of the title, passes, in the course of 40 pages, from an uneasy relationship with her family into a loveless first marriage, and then a second marriage to a blind man, in which she finally feels loved and accepted.

In Presence , he seems much less sure, with many of the characters, especially in the later stories, regarding the Left-wing politics of their youth with a scepticism that sometimes amounts to disillusionment. Thirty years later and widowed Miller writes very powerfully in these late stories about the weirdness of outliving your contemporaries , Levin returns to Haiti and discovers that the project failed.

All that remains is a ruined still in a ruined forest in a ruined country. The collection does, however, provide a fascinating and salutary companion piece to his stirring public utterances. Get the best at Telegraph Puzzles. A collection of the best contributions and reports from the Telegraph focussing on the key events, decisions and moments in Churchill's life.

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