Distant Horizons -- Stegner Casts His Long Gaze On Our Endless Yearning

``Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner''

by Wallace Stegner

Random House, $21.95

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How near or far does your gaze fall? The distance is part of your characteristic way of looking at the world, and it persists for a lifetime.

Wallace Stegner, now 81, demonstrates in his ``Collected Stories'' that he has always been literally far-sighted. In ``Goin' to Town,'' a boy growing up on a barren plain looks south: ``There they were, a ghostly tenuous outline of white just breaking over the bulge of the world: the Mountains of the Moon, the place of running streams and timber and cool heights.''

Or, in another story, ``Maiden in a Tower'': ``Ahead, across the white flats, the city and its mountains are a mirage, or a mural: metropolitan towers, then houses and trees and channeled streets, and then the mountain wall.''

Again and again Stegner begins with the long view and shows us characters yearning for something distant, pondering something not quite reachable. Character after character strives but as often as not fails. The metaphor that best sums up his vision is in ``Beyond the Glass Mountain,'' where Stegner alludes to the folk tale of a hunter separated from a beautiful elk by a mountain of glass, the animal seemingly within rifle range but in fact unreachable.

Perhaps his youth on the Western plains of the United States and Canada left Stegner with his habit of gazing into the far distance, but the perspective never becomes mere repetition. It adds a rich timelessness to the work, always reminding us that no matter how different this particular situation might be, we are still dealing with the same ageless, universal human needs.

``Collected Stories'' would be a joy and cause for celebration if only for the pleasure of seeing these scattered gems brought together in one grand display. Add to that, however, the opportunity to see both the change and the continuity of a writing career that spans more than half a century.

Having received (in 1932) one of the first master's degrees in creative writing ever granted in this country, Stegner went on to found the creative-writing program at Stanford University in 1946. Among his students over the years have been Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines and Wendell Berry. The list goes on.

Then, in 1972, his ``Angle of Repose'' won the Pulitzer Prize, followed by the National Book Award in 1977 for ``The Spectator Bird.'' By now, after this magnificent story collection and the 1987 publication of his most recent novel, ``Crossing to Safety,'' Stegner has taken on something of the aura of that splendid Japanese title: a living national treasure.

A few stories here begin in despair or desperation, opening with a vision somehow thwarted. ``The Traveler'' starts with a man lost and about to journey to his own past (lost enough to find himself, to paraphrase Robert Frost, from whose poetry Stegner took the title, ``Crossing to Safety''): ``He walked to the top of the next rise, but the faintly darker furrow of the road blurred and disappeared in the murk.''

Or consider the world of ``Volcano,'' where an American whose son is a German

POW visits a Mexican town ravaged by nature: ``Across the west the cloud of smoke was blacker and angrier, funneling down so that its compact lower plume was hidden behind the hills.''

Stegner has not strayed from that most characteristic tradition of the American West, the endless fascination with the distant horizon, the compelling puzzle of living in a world so vast that our widest embrace falls short. Yet many of these stories are also rooted in specific eras.

Those that seem to date from the 1930s and 1940s (unfortunately, the book provides no specific publication histories) often evoke something of their literary times. For example, ``The View from the Balcony,'' in its depiction of the eruption of long-repressed hostility between a graduate student and his advisor, recalls some of John O'Hara's way of dwelling on the moment of emotional nakedness. And ``Buglesong'' is an idyllic account of boylife on the prairie, but the boy's innocent glee as he slaughters gophers by the dozens suggests something of Hemingway's obsession with man's inherent violence.

None of this is to suggest that Stegner is a literary chameleon. He is an original, but like other great writers he combines the timeless with the ephemeral. How does the world look through this decade's lens? For 50 years, and with an extraordinarily clear eye, Wallace Stegner has been telling us just that.

Seattle writer Richard Wakefield's articles on American literature have appeared in the South Carolina Review.