Stopping Places on an American Journey : COLLECTED STORIES OF WALLACE STEGNER<i> by Wallace Stegner</i> (<i> Random House</i> :<i> $21.95</i> ;<i> 469 pp; 0-394-58409-0) </i>

The very act of writing, of the creation of words and of sentences, is an exercise in mnemonics--the art of memory and of remembrance. So too, is the act of reading an exercise in creative memory, especially when the words and sentences are those of the master writer, Wallace Stegner, and are from his most recent book, “Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner.”

In his foreword, Stegner says that his memory is as much an inventor as it is a recorder. This is central to the reading of his work. Stegner’s inventions and recordings here include 31 fiction stories. Many were first published in American magazines at mid-century and were expressive of events and concerns of the day. Others are suggestive of American times further past and more distantly remembered. Some first saw print as chapters in novels and have been reworked back to their original forms. Together, Stegner, 81, and his stories represent a remembrance of almost 100 years of an American century.

For Stegner is quintessentially an American writer. Born in 1907 in Lake Mills, Iowa, he grew up in North Dakota, Montana, Nevada and western Canada. He was educated at the University of Utah (BS) and at the State University of Iowa (MS, Ph.D.). He is America’s pre-eminent teacher of English and of writing and has taught at the universities of Utah, Wisconsin, Harvard and Stanford. He now lives in Los Altos Hills, Calif., and in Greensboro, Vt. From among the memories of these places and experiences, he has invented and recorded these exemplary stories.

The reader of Stegner’s writing is immediately reminded of an essential America--one of fact and fiction. It is a distinct place, a unique people, a common history and a shared heritage remembered as only Stegner can. That this is true has been amply proven by the publication of almost 30 books of fiction and nonfiction.

Included are his first novel, “Remembering Light,” 1937; the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Angel of Repose,” 1972; the National Book Award-winner, “The Spectator Bird,” 1976, and his most recent novel, “Crossing to Safety,” 1989. (In 1980, Stegner won The Times’ Robert Kirsch Award for the body of his work.)

In “Beyond the Glass Mountain,” the opening story of this collection, Stegner offers a paradigm of mnemonics. Here he writes of a man who is passing through his old college town. The man, Mark, looks up another man there, Mel, who was once his best friend. Mark remembers Mel and the good times they had together as he walks across campus and over to Mel’s house to visit. Upon reunion, however, Mark immediately realizes that his memory of Mel is so very different from what has obviously become Mel’s present circumstances that Mark can not bring himself to remain. He is unable to reconcile the past friendship and good times as exemplified by memory with Mel’s present remoteness and sadness. He can not bridge the gap. He can not reach through to him. He quickly leaves.

Memory, in this instance, is like the glass mountain in the title of the story that is taken from another story, an old mountain-man story that long ago impressed Stegner. In the story, a glass mountain stands between a stalking hunter with his rifle at ready and the elk that he is hunting. The glass mountain distorts reality and raises the hunter’s expectation. The animal appears to be closer than it really is. And so when the hunter takes aim and the shot is fired across the mountain of glass, it fails to reach its mark. It falls short. The elk continues to graze, undisturbed. The hunter is frustrated, upset.

To Stegner the short story is “a young writer’s form, made for discoveries and nuances and epiphanies and superbly adapted or trial syntheses.” Let it be said that Stegner’s short stories themselves are superb and should be adopted by youth of every age.

Stegner says that these stories mark stopping places along his life’s journey--places to pause to try to understand something, to digest some action or to clarify some response. Stegner’s long life has taken him on a memorable journey across American history and geography and into its myths and metaphors. These stories deftly reflect this. But he has most often paused specifically in the American West to reminisce, to comprehend, to absorb and to make clear. These stories quietly celebrate this.

In them, Stegner writes always first of the individual, whether young or old, of passion or of reason or of some particular blending. He seems to know that in simply living, the individual is perpetually struggling--struggling every day of his life with thought and action and consequence. To acknowledge that this struggle has meaning and that it may be worthwhile, Stegner directs our attention to abiding lessons of human experience and evident examples from the natural world around us.

In the “Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner,” we have recollections that remind us that life itself is natural and inevitably attaining growth; repeated questions that ask how we will choose to grow and in what directions.