Tapping Into Feelings : HOT FUDGE; Stories <i> By Richard Spilman (Poseidon Press: $17.95; 243 pp.) </i>

There was a day when short stories were as popular as novels, when good short stories were truly literature, the day of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and, a little later, Irwin Shaw. Magazines were devoted to short stories, and Martha Foley not only selected the “Best Short Stories” of each year but also taught a superb course in the writing of them.

Now, after all too many years of being consigned to a minor role, the short story has made a comeback, and Richard Spilman’s “Hot Fudge,” a collection of six stories, is an impressive example.

We have all heard people describe the so-called “stream-of-consciousness” technique--”It’s all about what goes on in this guy’s mind.” Spilman’s manner is far removed from that of James Joyce but it manages no less to get inside the minds of the protagonists. There is not a lot of plot in these stories; in a sense, nothing very much happens. But we are guided dramatically through networks of feeling, particularly how it feels to grow old:

“The confusion . . . lay in the shadows of his mind like a whisper at the bottom of a gravel pit.”

“It seemed to be in the nature of things nowadays that he couldn’t comprehend them . . . the girls had pills and the farmers had insurance, and there were atoms and the insides of atoms and the insides of the insides. . . .”

An aging war veteran reminisces, in as accurate an account as I have ever seen: “They say you get used to fear but you don’t. You stumble along, shooting at people you can’t see and wondering where the war is.”

These stories present us with a grandfather talking, as above, to a grandson about war; a woman’s encounter with a very young culprit in a fatal auto accident that compels her to look far out, far away and deep inside; a nearly senile grandmother who realizes that “the real world . . . she had to create from the past” and who discovers that “she could no longer feel pain as pain.”

At a family gathering on a holiday, it comes to her that “Thanksgiving had given her anger--not against this one or that one, but against them all. They were thieves. She had trusted them, and they had betrayed her. Because they claimed to love, she’d gone along when they handed her a cane, and when they said, ‘Don’t eat this. Don’t eat that.’ Then slowly, as if it wasn’t their fault but hers, they’d stolen the secret of the leaves and they’d taken the fields that stretched out for miles--so that her mind wandered in silence like a lonely dog. When she had rebelled, they’d said she was being silly, and she’d caved in. That was how they controlled you, they made you stop being silly.”

This is a strange and striking collection. Apart from some confusion about relationships in the title story, they are written with clarity as well as verve and insight. And, at the same time, the reader wonders, as he is no doubt meant to, where all these people are going and whether we are all like this and what it is all about; whether Spilman is not tapping universals.

Stories that raise these questions with such eloquence are both rare and encouraging.