Insisting on the Moral

AN HOUR OF LAST THINGS by George P. Elliott. 292 pages. Harper & Row $5.95.

George P. Elliott is no square, but there is something sturdily old-fashioned about him all the same. The fictional fashions of the day are for chaos, apocalypse and sexual grotesqueries, splattered onto the page in a sort of verbal-action painting. Yet here is Elliott with 13 quiet, thoughtful stories, precisely fitted with conventional plot and narrative, and--at their best--fairly humming with moral earnestness. As for eroticism, Elliott is still getting mileage out of the kiss.

His only claim to outright novelty is his predilection for science fiction, represented by three stories in this collection. But even here, as in the memorable title piece of his previous book of stories, Among the Dangs (1961), he insists on the moral. The sci-fi gimmicks of his fantasy worlds point metaphorically back to the truths of the real world. Into the Cone of Cold is typical: a poet allows himself to be frozen and thawed out again in a scientific experiment; beyond the spooky suspense of the situation, the cone of cold comes to stand for a state of spiritual exile from which the poet must grope back to an altered life.

The point about Elliott, a professor of English at Syracuse University, is that he still believes things have a point. In fact, sometimes it appears as if he settled on the point first, then invented a story to illustrate it. When this happens, a deadening air of calculation clouds his writing. It is almost as if his critical faculty overwhelmed his creative instinct, for Elliott, at 49, is not only a novelist (In the World) and poet (From the Berkeley Hills) but also a provocative essayist on social and literary issues (A Piece of Lettuce).

On the whole, his tales seem to be a process of working through to the point, of justifying the rounded resolutions that he pats into place at the end. In the long, superb title story, a woman's grief at her husband's death seems at first as stiff and arid as their marriage was. Then she finds that her real grief consists of a series of discoveries about herself, notably the fact that she harbors a lesbian passion. Finally she draws back from contemplation of "last things"--death, ultimate commitments--and finds a practical way to go on living with neither illusions nor great hope.

Here, and in half a dozen other stories in this collection, the reader feels that Elliott was stirred by the characters and their destinies long before he knew what they meant. The result is that long after the reader grasps the meaning, he, too, remains stirred.

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