Unlucky Jim

STEPPING WESTWARD by Malcolm Bradbury. 390 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

Thou callest trousers "pants," whereas I call them "trousers,"

Therefore thou art in hellfire and may the Lord pity thee!

Thus Samuel Butler eased a case of culture shock he contracted on visiting the North American continent in 1874.

Since then, a great tidal wash of malice and misunderstanding has oscillated in the Atlantic. Malcolm Bradbury's Stepping Westward is the latest fictional flotsam on this tide. It is a pointed little farce, and as cultural anthropology it offers a thoughtful thesis to such British and American minds as can rise above the trousers-pants hassle. The Englishman in the U.S., it demonstrates, is no longer a comic figure known for his arrogance, social pretension, accent or what not. He is a switched-off, not-with-it fellow whose vague uncertainties about the liberal vision of life reflect the diminished horizons of the once Empire, and whose ineptitude in lifemanship contrasts sadly with the unshaken conviction of Americans that life is something to be lived to the limit.

Scrabble & Swap. The hero is James Walker, 32, English novelist, Angry Young Man. Actually he is dim and aging, and resentfully married to a dowdy, motherly, working nurse. Life, as seen from a dull suburb of industrial Nottingham, makes him not angry so much as itching with vague discomfort, as does his hairy tweed suit, which "makes him look as if he had been rolled over by a sheep." He has chronic spiritual snuffles. His novels are about "sensitive provincial types who live far away from where things happen."

Walker is invited to be Visiting Writer at Benedict Arnold University, located somewhere east of the Rockies, where some of the freshmen can hardly write their names in the dust with a stick, and where Scrabble, wife-swapping and Red-baiting are the faculty pursuits. With its Disneyland-cum-Mies architecture, a preposterous president, freakish faculty, oafish student body and a Neanderthal athletic program (the coach, accused of bribery, is demoted to full professor), Benedict Arnold seems to offer Walker an escape from the inconsequence and stuffiness of his existence. By rights, he should feel snootily superior to the joint, pouch his fee, and go back to Nottingham. Instead, the Creative Writing Fellow has a fling at, or with, life. He sheds his tweed for seersucker, tries to shed his wife by cable, swims by night in the buff, grapples with faculty wives, and plays madly on bongo drums. He has no worries except that he is required to sign a loyalty oath.

All Those Coronations. As a vaguely "loyal" Briton, this bothers him. He publicly refuses to swear that he will not overthrow the Government of the United States by force and so sparks a bout of local McCarthyism (the late Senator's name still evokes crocodile fears in liberal British hearts), from which he emerges an embarrassed hero. Agog with admiration, a leggy, Kierkegaard-quoting girl bagpiper sweeps him off in her car for a premarital shakedown trip to Mexico, where she hopes to make a real swinger of him, but, depressed by his invincible fuddy-duddery, gives him up as an incurable limey. "The problem is," she tells him, "you're too kind. You carry too many woes. You get thrown all the time . . . It's all those coronations and that changing of the guard. They hooked you, and you can't get loose." Walker makes it back to the States by Greyhound, bound for home, still clutching his now mute bongo drums.

The novel is a lot of fun, but it is hard to make a real hero emerge from a blizzard of custard pies; Kingsley Amis (One Fat Englishman), scored better in the U.S. Besides, not many native readers will share the conviction that American activities are inherently comic because they are un-English.

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