FICTION

THE ANCIENT MEMORY AND OTHER STORIES, by John G. Neihardt (University of Nebraska Press: $19.95; 230 pp.) The odd thing about this collection of short stories Neihardt wrote in 1905-08 for such magazines as Smart Set is that it gives us a stronger sense of his talent than does the miscellany of “The Giving Earth.”

One reason for this is that the nine stories here are complete, not fragments. Another is that when we immerse ourselves in Neihardt’s writing in this one genre, we begin to accept turn-of-the-century conventions and appreciate what he was able to do within them.

Take the title story, about a barroom bum who claims to have been the warrior-king of an Indian tribe and who switches personalities depending on how much whiskey he’s drunk. Or the one about a jealous trapper who turns a friendship ritual--shooting a cup off his rival’s head--into murder. Or the one about a fanatical lone Scot who challenges a French fur-trading empire.

Dated? Yes. Easy to forget? No.

Neihardt’s protagonists tend to be inspired or cursed by capital-letter abstractions such as Revenge or Gold Fever or the Lure of Woman. Classical comparisons hover above alcoholic printer and lice-ridden mountain man alike.

But he gets closer to his subject in his Indian stories, and the pacing throughout this collection is admirable. Neihardt sympathizes with the underdog and conveys the loneliness and terror felt even by villains. His specialty is sending people through prairie blizzards, in which all sense of time and direction is lost. In his rendering of this frozen delirium, of humans gripped by titanic forces, Neihardt not only imitated Jack London but showed he had some of the same stuff.