Where the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day : GROWING UP WESTERN Recollections <i> edited and with introductions by Clarus Backes; foreword by Larry McMurtry (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 240 pp.) </i>

Up behind the house in the hilly suburbs of Colorado Springs, my wife’s cousin has a little place marked out among the pines which he refers to as his “shrine of the West.” There he has some of the things that we all commonly associate with the American West: a couple of bleached cow skulls, an old wagon wheel, various odds and ends of mining iron, etc.

You can’t see the spot from anywhere around, not even the house. It’s just there, and he knows it’s there, and now and then he adds something to it. Another of my wife’s cousins retired with his wife to an isolated piece of land in western Nevada, with no running water until last year, electricity supplied by a gas generator, a privy out in the sagebrush, and no phone.

These little vignettes are not unlike those provided by the seven distinguished men writers (why no women?) who grew up somewhere in that almost independent nation we call The West: Dee Brown (“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”), A. B. Guthrie Jr. (“The Big Sky”), David Lavender (“One Man’s West”), Wright Morris (“The Field of Vision”), Clyde Rice (“A Heaven in the Eye”), Wallace Stegner (“The Big Rock Candy Mountain”) and Frank Waters (“Book of the Hopi”).

Mentioning single titles like this does not do justice to the writers, of course. Some are known best by these works, but all have written others--some more memorable than others--and of course Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris were the 1980 and 1981 winners of the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for the whole body of their work, and there are other national awards scattered among these seven.

The editor of this book, Clarus Backes, was book editor of the Denver Post. Before his death in 1988, Backes gathered these anecdotal pieces and wrote brief introductions to each. His children completed the editing and saw their father’s book into press, and another distinguished western writer, Larry McMurtry, agreed to write a foreword.

The writers chosen all are now in their 80s, so they grew up in a West--between Oregon and Texas--that has changed considerably since their several boyhoods. The vignettes of Western life have a common texture, therefore, which corresponds to a great extent with the mental icon, carried by many Americans, which represents this curious region.

And it is a curious region, with an even more curious iconographic consistency: One might say that the image we have of the West is of the highest definition, to a degree even more pronounced than that of the South. Western dress and Western music, for example, are unique in the American cultural heritage.

If we think about it, we might be able to concoct “Southern dress,” perhaps even “Pacific Coast dress,” or that of the Northeast, but Western clothes do not need any concoction: We know the elements of the cowboy outfit instantly; so do people around the world. We call the music “Country and Western,” but its origins are clearly in the cowboy ballad. Indeed, the West, as icon, was perhaps the first internationally recognized image of American character.

The texture presented in these vignettes should not, therefore, come as any surprise. The features of the land, and the raw quality of the civilization that crept into it, element by element, are not unfamiliar: ranch life, the railroad, whorehouses, telegraph offices, saloons, gold mines, all the panoply of the West that corresponds to our image of it, all spread out against the mountains, rivers, plains and deserts that are still there, some of them even untouched by strip- mining and real-estate development.

Here is Wright Morris, describing a scene from his boyhood: “At a time every western man smoked and gambled, spitting indoors was something of an option. My father neither smoked, drank, gambled nor swore, but he liked to sit and talk in a good lobby. A good one had palm trees in tubs at the front, with a tile floor all the way back to the desk.

“Without a lobby from where to watch what was going on, without a lobby where something of interest might happen, a town could have half a dozen or more good railroads but in no time at all none of the trains would stop. Even before I knew anything else, I knew that.”

It is an odd book, strangely comforting in its assurance that what we think of when we summon up an image of the West is not just the invention of Hollywood. As kids, most of us seemed to know that the movies were filmed in Simi Valley (after all, why truck all that film gear so far from the studios?), but we fervently hoped that the West of Randolph Scott had been in fact something like what we were shown.

But what, after all, is the appeal of the West? What is the hunger in us that its violent landscapes and the ruggedly individualistic character traits of its people promise to satisfy? There are lots of cheap answers, none adequate. Why did I buy myself a pair of cowboy boots in Colorado Springs, to the uncomprehending and sardonic amusement of my wife? Her cousin could not explain it to her, any more than could I.

Why did we both find the gently dying mining town of Victor, on the slopes of Pike’s Peak, infinitely preferable to the touristy hucksterism of Cripple Creek? I looked to Frank Waters, who grew up there, and to Dee Brown and the others for an answer, but they seem just as unable to explain it.

One of my best friends, the Western painter Ron Himler, moved to Tucson to get closer to the country of his subject, the Indians of the Plains and the Southwest. I asked him what made him choose the subject that ultimately drew him to where he feels he has found his roots. We polished off a lot of brandy one night talking about it.

He couldn’t explain it either.