Beastly Business

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN by Kingsley Amis. 192 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $3.95.

No one is better at being beastly to the British than the British. In One Fat Englishman, Kingsley Amis has raised this particular form of beastliness to the level of high comic art.

Roger Micheldene is a plump package of just about everything Americans find detestable in a U-type Englishman. He is expensively accented (Oxford), twice married, with a modest homosexual past, a nonchurchgoing Roman Catholic, but a devout snob and a glutton, a sexman and a Potterish ployman of epic pretensions. His exploits in one-upmanship take the form of a baroque conversational style, impeccable scholarship in cigars, and a collection of snuffboxes with appropriate snuff (antelope horn for the Otterburn mix). He hates progress, Protestants, Negroes, Jews, Americans, today and tomorrow. Such a man, Amis implies, has done very nicely thank-you in England, but in the U.S. he suffers cruel and unusually funny punishment for all these things.

Roger comes to the U.S. ostensibly in his function as a publisher, but privately to visit his mistress, a blonde, heavy-lidded mother of one, who is married to a Danish philosopher at Budweiser College, somewhere in Pennsylvania. (Amis himself was a visiting lecturer at Princeton.)

Pursuit of Angst. What happens is a howling shame. Roger is defeated in conversation by an undergraduate "Jewish jackanapes" who enrages him by professing identical opinions. He tests his conviction that "these Yank college girls were at it all the time," and is bitten severely in his fat neck. He bloats with rage after a faculty party when he guessed the word was "effeminately" in a game of charades; the word was "Britishly." He is finally seduced by an ill-complected nymphomaniac and is comic in love as he conjugates Latin to prolong his pleasure. He is outdrunk, outmaneuvered, outraged and out-snuffed at every turn. The young "Yid scribbler" makes off with his mistress.

He is discomfited even as he clambers aboard the homebound liner and begins sadly to plot the next tack in his joyless rakery among available shipboard quail. The very worst kind of American bore descends upon the defeated hero to claim him as the right kind of guy to save a boat trip from being a real drag.

One Fat Englishman is very funny. But by the time Amis lets his ployman homeward plod his weary way, the reader finds his heart wrung with pity. In a puzzling way, the appalling Roger has endeared himself. It is not just that Roger himself in odd moments has recognized that he is a pretty dreadful character. "Very angst-producing, being a snob," he confesses to his mistress. Something deeper is involved. The secret may be that the totally selfish man is pathetic as well as detestable; Roger has some of the heartbreaking quality present in the rapt self-absorption of a child alone at play. It is sad when he pulls the wings off a wasp. It is even sadder when the wasp stings him and he howls against the fates.

True as Tape. In the ten years since Lucky Jim appeared, that frenetic farce of provincial English academic life has become a minor classic. In One Fat Englishman, Amis has faced and triumphantly cleared the hazards of translation. Most English novelists cannot manage a single sentence in demotic U.S. speech without setting on edge the big white American teeth. But Amis' mimic's ear is true as tape.

High spirits, deft wit and an elegantly sketched stage mark Amis' comic theater; the face-pullings, pratfalls and brisk tattoo of slapstick are the devices of a master. His aim is serious comedy. And, like the skewered and flayed Englishman of the fable, it never hurts except when he laughs.

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