Collected Stories: 1948-1986 by Wright Morris (Harper & Row: $16.95; 288 pp.)

The last decade has been a time of recollection for Wright Morris. His three books of memoirs--”Will’s Boy,” “Solo” and “A Cloak of Light”--have led us through his early childhood years on the Nebraska plains, a brief European excursion, and his time of self-discovery and self-possession as both a writer and photographer. Now, in “Collected Stories,” Morris offers a startling (if quite uneven) chronological retrospective of his fictional preoccupations during the last 40 years.

The 25 tales cluster in time: a few from the late 1940s and 1950s, a number published between 1969 and 1975 and a large group from the last four years. The first pieces are somewhat clumsy and uninviting. Morris insists on crushing the reader under the weight of life’s ugliness, particularly through the overclever, deliberately gruesome endings he concocts. Characters repeatedly ask themselves if living is worth the bother. They look for some decent vantage point, some place or pace from which they can make sense of it all. A colonel peers out at the world through binoculars from a hospital window, is overcome by the agony he sees, and becomes convinced that everyday life is a kind of Purgatory, a “new battleground,” as he calls it. A neighbor records the curious habits and monotonous timetables that regulate life for the family across the street, until father and daughter kill themselves in a suicide pact because they cannot imagine living with Truman as President. Other characters try to understand romantic drugstore countermen, or record their shock at first viewing people at a nude beach.

Everyone seems to be looking for a “safe place,” as the title of one story puts it, where he or she might pass unnoticed--a bed in one instance, a hidden garden frequented by the blind in another. But each person is startled, assaulted by unexpected affections. Their worlds fall apart before their unbelieving eyes, like the retired captain who loses his wife’s attention to a stray cat, or the man who becomes enslaved to the habits of a creature he nurses back to life.

The problem with most of these first stories is that situation and plot don’t mesh. Morris is able to create vivid and illuminating portraits, but then he botches the job by jolting the action forward in totally inappropriate ways. In “Green Grass, Blue Sky, White Houses,” a beautiful study of rural family life is undermined by the political message that such fulfillments are incompatible with the killing in Vietnam. Other instances make pat analogies between a woman and a cat, or get cute when developing the image of a life determined by the moment a child finds a dead body buried in ice.

With time, however, Morris’ solemnity gives way to a more retrospective, more accepting (if not forgiving) tone. Certain obsessions continue. Characters will look for a place where, or a time when, they might see things better: One is overcome by the view from a hill in Ronda, Spain; another studies prehistoric fossils to discover the “origin of sadness.” There is a pervasive, deadening sense of being a spectator to one’s own experience, a foreigner to oneself. People feel out of place--not alienated in any Marxist or modernist sense, but unfamiliar with the native habits and common expectations of daily life. The phrase “in another country” occurs in two titles and is mentioned in a third story. Another tale ironically recounts “The Customs of the Country”--an unbelieving German janitor forced to watch two boys drown a toddler; another story, of Southern racial games, is called “Going Into Exile.”

The most consistent alternative to this geographical and emotional estrangement is the often mad attachments Morris’ characters develop to animals. Cats, dogs, cows, pullets, parrots--the “Collected Stories” is a literary zoo. Tale after tale tells of human devotion to and reliance upon domestic creatures for companionship, something to tend to, a model for behavior, a way to give pattern to one’s moments. Lives come to depend literally on a cat’s meow.

What makes so much of this so striking is the insensitive, almost numbed voice Morris has perfected as a storyteller. The central character in “Country Music” berates himself for turning away from anything that “was going to end up sticky”; Morris is not so squeamish. A husband winds up in the family freezer, a dead cat is stuffed unceremoniously into a suitcase, flies drown in cups of coffee, a person freezes when immobilized by a broken hip joint--all this recounted with the same gentle yet unflinching reverence for human frailty and folly.

The best stories are the last ones, as Morris adds texture to his sensibility, tenderness to his metaphors. These late tales seem no more satisfied before life’s resistance, but they are less vain, more encompassing, more leisurely. They are about neighbors who are willing to take in stray animals and other of life’s “fellow creatures,” a broken friendship that is comically and uneasily revived, memories of a rather unsuccessful bike ride in Italy. The shock at life’s eccentric tricks and emotional earthquakes gives way before the effort to accumulate small truths, to discover the “things that matter,” like the barren vulnerability of a woman’s neck when she lifts up her hair. Morris is unashamed to circle, wander, and be a little tardy with his revelations. He has turned his pictorial skill into a kind of meditative narrative that amasses meaning by going nowhere. The ticks that grate between husband and wife in the first stories have become essential scratches that vitalize the nerves of love.