Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories ed. by Wallace Stegner, Richard Scowcroft, and Nancy Packer (review)

74 Western American Literature the Reavises’ activities among the nobility of Spain, and almost a whole chapter is devoted to a trip to England where they were received at the court of Queen Victoria. Since there is no evidence that they ever went to England, this much would seem to be pure embroidery. Then there is the matter of the building of the walled Hacienda de Peralta and the sinister bodyguards, dramatic, but unsubstantiated. There is no evidence he ever owned a home anywhere, much less in Arizona. Possibly the chief defect of the book is its presentation of Reavis as a master forger. This is to distort the facts and Reavis’ character. His imagina­ tion was fertile but his technique was faulty. His forgeries were often crude, sometimes illiterate, as Mr. Cookridge has to admit tacitly in his account of the trial. His translations of Spanish documents were inaccurate to a high degree. All this was recognized from the very beginning by every government official who studied the papers. Most of this will hardly matter to the audience for whom the book is intended. Yet the facts of the story are so fascinating and so nearly incredible that one wonders if it might not have been better just to tell the story as it was. D onald M. Powell, University of Arizona Library Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories. Edited by Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft with Nancy Packer. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. 413 pages, $6.95.) Wallace Stegner’s introduction to Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories is particularly concerned with the microcosm that is Stanford’s Creative Writing Center, from its beginning in 1946 to 1964, and with the stories produced by his student-writers during that period; but it is also an illuminating essay on contemporary hazards in building a writing career and a defense of the Stanford writing program. Mr. Stegner, director of the Center with Richard Scowcroft, is himself a widely acclaimed novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, A Shooting Star) and story writer (“The Blue-Winged Teal,” “The City of the Living,” “Maiden in a Tower”) . Stegner makes clear that the Stanford writing program has been two things throughout its existence: a laboratory for undergraduates, and “a lure and coagulant”; “it represents one form of opportunity and one kind of apprenticeship.” Reviews 75 The twenty-nine stories in this volume were selected by Stegner and Scowcroft from the fifteen issues of Stanford Short Stories. They represent thirteen specific publication years, and all but eight of the stories come from issues prior to 1956. Some of the stories in the volume appeared in such magazines as Kenyon Rewiev, Pacific Spectator, Southwest Review, Sequoia, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle. Such publications by his students seem to offer adequate proof of Professor Stegner's claims for the Stanford program. But about the products of the Stanford writing classes, Stegner says, “It is very clear that in recent years the short stories have declined both in volume and in the general level of their quality.” He suggests that a smaller reading audience, fewer rewards, and a skimpy market account for the decline. If student fiction is declining in quality, as I certainly agree it is, perhaps the reason has something also to do with a defective or deficient imagination, and with a massive addiction to “realities.” These are sour times, and what was available in the past to sweeten the imagination—the mysteries—is generally rejected now. Dialogues, better than tales, deal with “the realities,” andthere are many more literary editors than half who insist that their fictioncarry “active agents” that dramatize the causes of multitudes and minorities. What it is that they are demanding in fiction is a bastard, gotten out cultural science coupled with fictional form, and dealing not with the mystic of the heart, “the heart in conflict with itself,” as Faulkner defined fiction, but with sosiopsypolianthropotoxic man as discovered in a classroom, on a chart, a graph, a public opinion poll, or a toilet wall. And what of revolutions on the campuses and the effect of those revolts on the young writer? The aim ordrive of the youth who trusts...