Warming trend

Sunday wanderings, waiting for the grass to dry out a bit before I make hay from it; not much in our heads today. I'm moving along in the Stegner short story collection, and some them are unsettling. He wrote, in his introduction, dated 1989, he hadn't written any short stories for some time. He states: "It seems to me a young writer's form, made for discoveries and nuances and epiphanies and superbly adapted for trial syntheses. Increasingly, in my own writing, the novel has tended to swallow and absorb potential stories. (Bernice Baumgarten, my first agent, who handled all my early stories, used to say that a short-story writer lives on his principal, using up beginnings and endings.) Whether because of a shortage of beginnings and endings or for other reasons, I found fairly early that even stories begun without the intention of being anything but independent tended to cluster, wanting to be part of something longer." Interesting, but I have read many short story collections which have spanned the writers' careers, and have long thought they were a great way to watch the growth of a writer. I read a review by Joyce Carol Oates of Roald Dahl's collected stories - speaking of a disturbing writer, with regards to his work for adults - in which she has this to say about collected stories: "Except for writers of major stature, in whose lesser work there may be some archival, extraliterary, or morbid interest, the indiscriminate all-inclusiveness of a 'collected stories' is not a good idea." She goes on a bit later with this: "Though the advantage of a purely chronological arrangement of work is that the reader may perceive the development of a writer's style, his growth, and the prevailing themes that make his work distinctive, the disadvantage is that the reader may perceive the deterioration of the writer's style, his decline, and his reliance upon predictable themes." This latter is an experience I've never had, but Ms. Oates has undoubtedly read many more works than I have. Anyway, though I don't care for her fiction, I completely respect her reviews. She's not terribly keen for this collection of Dahl's.