Wolfe had a flair for short fiction as well as long: he turned out to be a very good and very skillful writer of short stories. He composed his own special brand of stories which depended less on plot than mood, less on action and incident than on perception and the feel of things. A fair number made their way into the novels. Two collections—one published while Wolfe was alive, the other posthumously—stand by themselves, and are reasonably representative of his efforts along these lines. They include some particularly well-known stories, like "Chickamauga" and The Web of Earth, the one narrated by a returning veteran of the Confederate Army, the other by Eliza Gant in an extended recollection of her mountain ancestors. Both display Wolfe's underrated capacity to get out of himself and into the minds of others.

Instead of surveying everything in the two volumes, let us concentrate on two especially splendid tales, one from each book. If Wolfe had written nothing else, these would have been enough to establish his genius and justify his standing among the formidable writers of his day.

The first of these, "In The Park," appeared in the earlier collection which came out in 1935, From Death To Morning. It is a reminiscence, apparently by Mrs. Jack, of her life as a young girl in New York at the turn of the century, and of one evening in particular at the beginning of May. She was eighteen, the year before her father died, and the coming of a radiant spring that year seemed to coincide with her own age, with the sense of New York bursting with opulence and energy, and her feeling for her father, an actor with a highly developed appetite for living.

After the evening performance of the play in which he is performing, he takes her to a Broadway restaurant where they eat, drink, and chatter amiably with a pair of stagestruck priests. Then they go for a ride in a horseless carriage to Central Park. They are stopped by a mounted policeman who scolds them for frightening his horse. The car breaks down. It mysteriously starts up again, and carries them triumphantly into the park where, under the glistening stars, they ride about all night. At dawn they hear the birds breaking into song, an eloquent finale to an ecstatic occasion. And on that note the story ends.

In terms of plot it could scarcely be lighter or thinner. It consists of some engaging chatter in a restaurant and a ride in the park. Neither the conversation nor the ride leads anywhere in particular; they have no visible aim aside from registering their own existence. Yet the story is a delicate masterpiece, revealing Wolfe's ability to work in a small frame—which was quite as much within his power as his better-known, more widely publicized ability to operate in a large expanse. What he is after is the sense of joy, of life at high tide, not because anything special is happening but as a thing in itself, generating its own radiance, a radiance to which the high-spirited young girl narrating the tale in the first person is responding with uncommon depth of feeling.

This response is aroused by any number of objects: the fine spring night; the "velvety lilac texture" of the sky, "glittering with great stars"; the streets outside the theatre crowded with hansoms; New York in an intoxicating earlier era; DeWolfe Hopper, the actor, running around "pretending to be a horse and neighing, and trying to climb up a lamppost"; the old car itself with "its rich wine color, its great polished lamps of brass . . . and all its wonderful and exciting smells." These make up a rich compost of external detail, strategically drawn from both society and nature. No wonder the narrator exclaims: "Everyone seemed to be as happy and elated as we were, it seemed as if a new world and new people had burst out of the earth with the coming of spring. . . . I saw all of it, I felt myself a part of it all, I wanted to possess it all."

But the story is something more than a simple exercise in romantic enthusiasm. It is kept from soaring off into the blue by the somber presence of death. Death in two forms: as a premonition and as an actuality. On two occasions, near the beginning and just before the end, the girl mentions the fact that it all took place the year before her father died. And on a third occasion, as they enter the park and feel the first rush of ecstatic pleasure in their new surroundings, she looks at her father and suddenly knows that he is going to die. This so heightens her feelings and so sharpens her perceptions that the lengthy final paragraph of the story records in great detail and with scientific precision the exact cries of the numerous birds at dawn.

Her premonition of her father's approaching death escalates her appreciation of life and her sensory response to it. The intrusion of death jolts us but at the same time intensifies our awareness of life's familiar attractions. The birds break into their chorus every morning, though we usually pay little attention to them. By compelling our attention, death becomes an agent of life and is thus absorbed into the story's inner flow.

The naturalness and skill with which the tale is put together are revealed in the opening lines. The narrator gropes in her mind and memory to get back to that magic evening long years ago. For a few sentences she slides about uncertainly: "That year I think we were living with Bella; no, we weren't, I guess we were living with Auntie Kate—well, maybe we were staying with Bella: I don't know, we moved around so much, and it's so long ago. It gets all confused in my mind now." Then the fog of time miraculously lifts and suddenly everything is in the clear. The evening in question detaches itself from its murky background and glistens into focus. In this way, proceeding from confusion to clarity, one enters the story.

One exits from it along the same path, only in the reverse direction, from the spellbinding clarity of the bird songs to confusion and uncertainty again as memory begins to lapse. "That was the year before he died and I think we were staying at Bella's then, but maybe we were staying at the old hotel, or perhaps we had already moved to Auntie Kate's: we moved around so much, we lived in so many places, it seems so long ago, that when I try to think about it now it gets confused and I cannot remember."

This refrain at the end illustrates the familiar operation of memory. It also supplies 'Ìn The Park" with a band or circle of cottony haze inside which lies preserved and intact, like some magically propertied jewel, the briefly caught but blazingly lucid glimpse of an earlier time and place.

The same process on a larger, more complex scale is seen at work in "The Lost Boy," the second of Wolfe's superb short stories. This appeared in The Hills Beyond, the last of the books Edward Aswell assembled after the author's death. It deals with the death in boyhood of Grover, Ben Gant's twin, during the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. Divided into four parts, each told from a different point of view, the story is an intricate attempt to make tragedy coherent. Grover's death from typhoid fever is cruel, unexpected, and sudden. It has a shattering effect on everyone there: on his sister Helen who had gone about town with him on that last day; on his mother, whose passion for profit had brought them to St. Louis in the first place; on Eugene, only four at the time but already conscious of the tragedy which aroused in him feelings and vibrations he would be unable to explain until many years later. The story conveys the shock of death but equally the effort to absorb the shock, recover from it, and eventually conquer it.

Part One begins with Grover back home in Altamont, standing in front of Mr. Crocker's shop in the town square, greedily contemplating the freshly made candy in the window. The temptation is too strong. He enters, buys the candy, pays Mr. Crocker—a mean, spiteful figure out of Dickens—in stamps, is cheated on the change. Burning with injustice, he rushes across the street to his father, who invades the Crocker premises, gets Grover's money back, and helps his son through a small painful crisis in his young life. In the deliberate chronology of the four parts, the first starts with the father, the source and the beginning in the biological scheme of things.

Part Two shifts to the mother. With her narration, Grover passes into the minds of others. In Part One he had appeared directly and in his own person before us, the one occasion that he was wholly alive and himself. Then, as a foreshadowing of his approaching death, he loses his status as an independent, self-contained being and begins his existence in the consciousness of those around him. Beginning with his mother, whose thoughts contain everything of Grover's life and death.

She remembers the trip to St. Louis, with the train bowling along the Indiana countryside. She remembers Grover, now twelve, working at the Fair, how good he was at shopping and bargaining, what a grave, serious, disciplined, intelligent boy he had already become. She remembers the lacerating impact of his dying, a wound that continued to bleed within her for an endless time.

She never forgets Grover. Years later, after Eugene has become a celebrated writer, a scholar came South in quest of information about him. She remembers how surprised he was when she told him that Grover had been smarter than Eugene, and in saying that and thinking it, she finds Grover becoming more vividly fixed in her memory than ever. Thus Grover's life appears in two sections, before and after death. The section before death is the shorter one, and is exceeded in both length and power by the lucidity and vibrancy of his psychological continuation in the thoughts of his survivors. The story is of course about life and death, but it is also about immortality. Grover's posthumous existence outlives his mortal one.

The speaker of Part Three is Helen, sister and next in the biological progression of "The Lost Boy." She brings us the voice of someone much closer to Grover in age than his father and mother. But she is still older than he, old enough to feel the full brunt of his death, to feel it as something ghastly and inexplicable. Now deep into her adult life, she still cannot accommodate herself to it. How could it have happened? she asks Eugene. Why is the world filled with stupid empty people who go on living while someone as fine as Grover is cut down so young? To these familiar, conventional questions she has no answer.

Helen remembers how on that last afternoon Grover had decided to spend his pay on a treat instead of dutifully bringing it home. The two of them had gone into a cheap eatery and gorged themselves on pork and beans. After all this time, she remembers the sense of liberation the "treat" had given them. And not a moment too soon, for no sooner had they gotten home, even before Grover had a chance to be properly scolded, he came down with his sudden fatal fever, and by the next day was gone. For the rest of her life Helen was distraught and baffled by the tragedy. Grover's legacy to her was a deep groove of angry bewilderment from which she was destined never to recover.

Finally, in Part Four, we come to Eugene, the youngest of the narrators. He was present when Grover died but was too young at the time to understand fully what was going on. His response, necessarily delayed, comes later, more than thirty years later in fact, and Part Four is an account of Eugene's return to St. Louis in the 1930s in search of his lost brother. He goes back to the street where they lived during the Fair, searches out the house they occupied, which miraculously is still standing, and makes his way to the very bedroom where Grover fell ill and died. None of this is easy. The city has changed, the street is not as it was, and the present owner of the house is a stranger who proves accommodating only after Eugene explains to her, not without awkwardness, what he is after.

What he is after is not wholly clear to himself. It somehow seems terrifically important that he recapture and reoccupy the original scene. By reliving Grover's death, perhaps he can exorcise it, lay it to rest, quiet and settle the spirit of his brother so prematurely lost. But he is also moved by the opposite impulse. In getting Grover to die again, this time in his mind's eye, he will absorb the event into himself in a way that he was too young to do the first time. The quest for Grover is a quest for emotional understanding.

Grover's passing must not only be witnessed, it must also be felt. It is the emotion that triumphs over death, so that Eugene's search for the emotion aroused by the original catastrophe is in some obscure way a search for life. The story reaches its final intention at this point. Man does conquer death: by feeling it in all its horror, awfulness, and pain he absorbs it into himself, and thus survives. As Grover survives, in the clarity and strength of the feelings engendered by his terrifying departure in those around him.

The climactic nature of Part Four begins to emerge. Because he was so young when Grover died, Eugene is the only figure who must voluntarily, and with an immense effort of the will, engage himself in the reenactment of the tragedy. The others—Eliza, Helen—involuntarily caught up in it as captive and compelled witnesses, were able to experience it at the time.

In going back to the place of Grover's departure, Eugene relives not only Grover's death but Grover himself. The lost boy is never so real as when he is on the abrupt verge of being snatched away. If that moment can be fixed, preserved, sealed off from time, memorialized, kept intact, then Grover cannot be reduced and is ours forever.

So Eugene obscurely reasons, or perhaps only obscurely feels. The story is a supreme episode in Wolfe's relentless quest for immortality. The search for Grover is also a search for the secret process by which the human can be saved from the dissolution of time and the laxness of memory. Wolfe was a fervent, lifelong pursuer of these matters, and "The Lost Boy" is one of his great demonstrations in the art of robbing death to shore up life.