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MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES by Saul Bellow. 184 pages. Viking. $5.

Since the end of World War II, Saul Bellow has published a greater number of intelligent, relevant and stylistically superior novels than any other U.S. writer. The only other American novelist who could challenge that record is Vladimir Nabokov, who is a Russian aristocrat by birth and an expatriate U.S. citizen by choice. He is the greater artist, but he lives in an entirely different world of the imagination. Nabokov is committed to the American experience mainly insofar as it defines his own exquisitely tuned esthetic intelligence.

In addition to matters of art, Bellow focuses his highly trained and intensely moral intelligence on questions of public responsibility and the possibilities of democracy. The force that his work exerts, however, comes not from political ideology, psychology or poetics, but from a resilient curiosity that encloses a molten core of doubt. What is man? How can he best manage his intellect and instincts? Those are the questions that spur Bellow's fictional quests. He finds no satisfying answers, but his special genius for characterization has progressively narrowed the distance between man's definition of himself and what he really is.

Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories is not major Bellow. In one respect it is a package designed to keep the author's name before the public. Three of the six stories in the collection, Looking for Mr. Green, The Gonzaga Manuscripts and A Father-to-Be, first appeared between hard covers in the 1956 edition of Seize the Day. This fact Bellow's publisher has conspicuously avoided mentioning. But once the reader gets into the stories, annoyance gives way to grudging gratitude, for these are fine examples of the craft of short fiction.

Crude Circus. With the exception of Leaving the Yellow House, published in Esquire in 1957, the early stories are staged with willing if befuddled ac-- tors who are too deeply involved with workaday concerns to do much lofty abstracting. In The Old System (1967) and Mosby's Memoirs (1968), the protagonists are aging rationalists of considerable accomplishment. Both are shown trying to define the meaning of their own lives by musing about the weaknesses of people they have known.

Dr. Braun, the biochemist in The Old System, wonders about the old standards of Jewish values that have led his relatives to both business success and family hostility. He recalls a resentful dying cousin who refused to see a rich brother unless he paid a $20,000 entrance fee to her hospital room. She believed that he had cheated her many years before. The preposterousness of the situation dissolves when brother and sister are reconciled in a scene that conveys forcefully the author's tragicomic sense of life. Even Dr. Braun, the scientist, is "bitterly moved" by the "crude circus of feeling"--but not so moved that it prevents him from trying to explain human emotions in molecular and cosmic metaphors.

Patchwork Life. Willis Mosby shares Braun's detachment, if not his ethnic background. An American Christian gentleman and noted action-intellectual, he has withdrawn to Mexico to write his memoirs "in the vein of Sir Harold Nicolson or Santayana or Bertrand Russell." He deals at length with his patchwork life; his fundamentalist upbringing, his Rhodes scholar days, his unorthodox interpretation of John Locke, a stint for Hearst in Spain, wartime service with the OSS, and his views on F.D.R., Comte, Proudhon, Marx and Tocqueville. But then Mosby decides that his memoir needs a touch of humor.

He settles on his recollections of an old acquaintance, Hymen Lustgarten, a former Marxist from New Jersey who has passed through all the radical ideological incarnations of the '30s. Lustgarten loses at everything, including the postwar European black market and the Laundromat business in Algeria. But as Bellow reveals in a balance of satire and compassion, Lustgarten's failures brim with life juices while Mosby's successes are empty and dry. "Having disposed of all things human," Bellow concludes, "he should have encountered God . . . But having so disposed, what God was there to encounter?"

Over-Refined. This satire of contrasting intellectual and ethnic types is a model (if not a parody) of what is often described as New Yorker fiction: the nostalgic revelation of an overrefined sensibility that emerges preferably in an unusual setting. More important, Mosby is a cameo that illustrates the dangers of the reductive, aggressively critical intellect.

Both The Old System and Mosby's Memoirs are soft Bellow, but even so, these stories lead the reader to the contemplation of man--the rational animal who too often finds it so easy to rationalize that other men's rationalizations are irrational.

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