The Rising Cost of Living Collected Stories, 1948-1986 by Wright Morris Harper & Row; 274 pages; $17.95

By Paul Gray

As a rule, anything that is titled Collected Stories suggests a summing up or a retrospective, a big book that gathers the contents of earlier, slimmer ones. Such volumes tend to be tributes to writers and testaments to their careers rather than displays of new works or directions. And that would certainly appear to be the case with Wright Morris' Collected Stories, 1948-1986. Morris is, after all, one of the most distinguished and honored living American men of letters, author of 19 novels (including Love Among the Cannibals and The World in the Attic), five books of his own photographs and texts, four collections of essays and three volumes of memoirs.

Surely Morris, 76, deserves to be honored with an assembly of his short fiction? Indeed he does, the only teeny little catch being that the author's extensive bibliography includes just one book of stories, Real Losses, Imaginary Gains (1976). Yet more has gone on here than gathering the contents of one volume into another: of the 26 pieces in Collected Stories, 14 have never before been published between hard covers, and eleven of these were written during the past six years.

So what is being offered is preponderantly a brand-new book, more than half-filled with stories that Morris' most dedicated readers may have missed when the pieces first appeared in periodicals. Also on view is the prospect of an author in his eighth decade of working at the top of his form, burnishing a reputation that was securely polished long ago.

On the evidence presented here, there is no such thing as a typical Wright Morris story. Unlike contemporaries like John Cheever and Eudora Welty, Morris has not devoted the bulk of his attention to a particular social class or geographic area. His principal characters may be anything from janitors to college professors, and his settings range from Vienna to Brooklyn to Missouri to Northern California, with numerous points in between. The common thread in Morris' stories, both early and late, is an odd, intense vision of life after nearly all passion has been spent. Well into their marriages, husbands and wives coexist in uneasy truces, wondering whether their remaining energies will run in tandem or blow each other apart.

In The Cat in the Picture, for example, a retired Army officer and his wife have settled into what seems to be a peaceful and stable routine. He dabbles at painting; she reads and turns out occasional book reviews. One rainy night, a stray cat drops through the skylight in the captain's studio and moves in with them, apparently for good. The next morning, seeing the animal in a bowl that forms part of a still life her husband has arranged, the wife says, "If you could paint that -- that would be a picture." The remark is not intended in entire innocence; it opens what turns out to be a protracted and vicious domestic war.

Something analogous occurs in Drrdla. While working in his basement, a man discovers an almost starved and totally feral cat. Saving and taming the creature becomes first his project and then his obsession: "What it all came down to, in Walter's opinion, was the emergence of life from darkness." His wife makes fun of his efforts and then, he becomes convinced, conspires against them, making as much noise as she possibly can in order to frighten the animal. She sees things differently: "If just her living in the house disturbed his little rodent, perhaps she should think of taking a room elsewhere." The end, when it comes, is not especially happy.

Morris writes tellingly about the bonds between his characters and their pets, a subject that does not crop up too often in serious fiction. Victrola recounts a day in the life of a man named Bundy and the dog he inherited when an upstairs neighbor died. As he runs his errands, Bundy notices that other dogs no longer pay any attention to his faithful companion: "One by one, as Bundy's dog grew older, the younger ones ignored him. He might have been a stuffed animal leashed to a parking meter. The human parallel was too disturbing for Bundy to dwell on it." But dwell on it he does: "Impersonally appraised, in terms of survival the two of them were pretty much at a standoff: the dog was better fleshed out, but Bundy was the heartier eater."

An undeniable theme of sadness and desolation runs through almost all of these stories. Morris' people are burdened with what one of them calls "the rising cost of living. Was it costing him more to live than he could afford?" But the answer such characters come up with is invariably no. In Here Is Einbaum, the hero, a Jewish refugee from Austria, has good reason to feel depressed but somehow cannot: "People amazed him. What would they think of next? His anger at human folly was not equal to the pleasure observing it gave him."

That is what Morris' short fiction consistently delivers. For every sad event there is a countervailing and arresting image: of swallows on a Spanish mountaintop ("Their flight on the sky was like fine scratches on film"); of a vista in Boise, Idaho ("My aunt's couch faced the door, which stood open, the view given a sepia tone by the rusted screen"). The author offers glimpses of strange lives and then, with wisdom and art, makes them clear and permanent.