BOOK REVIEW : Wry, Well-Crafted Short Stories : RANDOM STORIES <i> by James Laughlin</i> ; Moyer Bell $18.95, 202 pages

James Laughlin, founder of New Directions press, has not only published adventurous contemporary fiction but found time himself to produce an impressive body of criticism, short fiction and verse.

A tribute to a distinguished man of letters, “Random Stories” collects a dozen quietly powerful short stories written early in his career; it also includes an informal and candid autobiographical essay and an affectionate tribute by Octavio Paz.

The first piece, “The River,” is a winsome account of a European tour made by two American boys with precocious literary ambitions.

“There are boys dreaming such dreams in every city in America,” Laughlin says, but these particular two were lucky enough to “to get away from the home we so despised while we were still young enough really to despise it.” In the course of the journey, itself an affecting memoir of Europe just before World War II, that adolescent disdain for America gradually mellows until the narrator’s companion leaves for home ahead of schedule:

“I could feel the American in him coming back to rule him, could see him beginning to feel that time was wasted in which something wasn’t done and that walking and talking, sitting and sipping, watching and waiting were not enough to make a completed life,” as concise an explanation of the essential difference between a writer and the rest of the world as you can find.

“This Is My Blood” opens in a steel mill as two workers are polishing metal sheets destined to line the shelves of a mausoleum, a job that intensifies the poignancy of one man’s visit to his dying father.

Here the dialogue is spare and taciturn, a world of hard experience away from the conversation of the two fortunate young travelers. Description is minimal; the terse sentences alone convey the unbridgeable gulf between the desperately ill and the healthy.

“What the Butler Heard” seems rarefied by contrast, but genuine passions seethe beneath the veneer of an ordered, elegant life. A butler becomes infatuated with the daughter of the house in which he works, eavesdropping on her conversations with friends and admirers, reading the family mail, listening on the extension phone, taking a cut of household expenses.

By the time the story ends, the reader’s notions of privilege have been subtly and disturbingly revised.

“Melody With Fugue” returns to a Europe already warped by the war. Beginning with scenes of bucolic tranquillity, the mood darkens ominously as the accumulating details gradually fall into place, transforming what has seemed to be a rural retreat into the hiding place of a refugee family. The apparent normalcy of their lives is a pathetic pretense; their eventual fate inevitable.

Still a Harvard undergraduate when he wrote “A Natural History” in the 1930s, the story seems a quixotic inclusion in this otherwise sophisticated collection.

In prose almost parodistically reminiscent of Ring Lardner, Laughlin describes a rowdy beach party during which the revelers steal and destroy turtle eggs, an escapade that skirts but never quite confronts genuine danger.

Fortunately, Laughlin soon found his own voice, and the majority of the stories here are wry, rueful and elegantly crafted works, random (in the words of the title) only in the sense of having been produced infrequently.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Cape Cod” by William Martin (Warner Books).