Telling Tales Out of School : THINK OF ENGLAND Short Stories<i> by Frederic Raphael (Scribner’s: $15.95; 187 pp.) </i>

Frederic Raphael went to Cambridge University in the early ‘50s and never got over it.

Three decades, 14 novels, and three volumes of short stories later, Raphael’s university days remain, it appears, the dominant shaping influence of his life. To the dismay of his admirers, those few years at Cambridge have continued to provide the source, substance and perspective for much, perhaps most, of his fiction, which, typically, concerns a group of Cambridge and Oxford graduates, and traces their subsequent marriages, divorces, vanities, and professional fortunes.

It has proved too narrow a focus to sustain a career; the unhappy truth is that Raphael’s reputation in Britain today relys mainly on his screenplays (“Darling,” “Two for the Road,” “Far From the Madding Crowd”) and an acclaimed sequence of TV plays called “The Glittering Prizes,” which he wrote a decade ago and which once again concerns sex and ambition among the Cambridge and Oxford set.

The 17 short stories (some published as far back as 1962) collected under the title, “Think of England,” share, for the main part, a semi-autobiographical tone reflecting Raphael’s life as a Cambridge student, his adventures in the screen trade as a writer of movie scripts, and his periods of self-exile in Andalusia and provincial France.

The style tends to be mordant, brittle, and unsentimental, occasionally confessional. The storyteller even refers to himself on key occasions as “Freddie.”

Several tales seem little more than brief, penetrating entries in a personal journal--associations recalled, anecdotes updated. Others, like the satisfying last story, “The People in Euclid,” a triangular tale of failed love and obsession, are so densely textured that some passages strike the reader as a constrained treatment for some fuller film or novel to come. (“Anna learned to ski. In due time, Michael and she were divorced and she married Oliver, with whom she led a smart life. He wanted her to become an actress again, but she preferred to be with him.”)

In the first story, “A Kiss on the Cheek,” Raphael makes no pretense at detachment, involves himself in a personal and endearing manner. About to leave high school to go to Cambridge, he develops a doomed schoolboy crush on an older woman who later writes a roman a clef which excludes any reference to young Freddie himself. Raphael writes: “I looked in vain for the scintillating boy who said precocious things.” Not a bad self-description, at that. Freddie sulks. He will be given to sulking throughout his life. Raphael confesses this fault shamelessly. Occasionally, sulking turns to malice. In “To Be a Pilgrim,” a film producer, who once befriended and betrayed him, is knocked down by a hit-and-run driver in Los Angeles and has both his legs broken. “Who would do such a thing?” asks someone, shocked. Freddie thinks about it. “Maybe an old friend?”

“Think of England” is slightly misnamed. An effort has been made to spread the net wide. The stories take in Jamaica, California, and Europe. (There are, of course, the expected tales about Cambridge and after.) In the longest story, “The Day Franco Came,” the arrogance of a strutting Spanish small-town mayor is challenged when the head of state’s motorcade, eagerly awaited, sweeps through the pueblo in a cloud of dust, without stopping. Minutes earlier, the mayor’s schoolboy son has been publicly discovered in a grotesque sexual situation with an imbecile village girl. Raphael handles the traditional Spanish themes of dishonor and suppressed lust with spare, brooding skill.

Other stories may prove a trifle manufactured and symmetrical for some tastes. In “A Long Story Short,” a married Englishman is unfaithful to his wife while on a wine-tasting trip in France. Years later, divorced and remarried, he meets his first wife on another wine tour of France, goes to bed with her, recycling the story.

American readers are warned that they are bound to be bewildered by the first names and nicknames of actual British personages, living or dead, who figure in the background of some of the tales. Not many U.S. readers will identify the “Binkie” named as the late Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont, the polished West End impresario whose post-war productions came to represent the kind of well-mannered sterility that John Osborne set out to destroy with his iconoclastic “Look Back in Anger.” I could quote other such unidentified figures by the dozen. Nor, dare I say, will the word Suez mean all that much to the average reader here. But the word, evoking memories of Britain’s military invasion of the Suez Canal region in 1956, still resonates in the collective British consciousness with an intensity unshared beyond Britain’s borders. “Think of England” is a book written by an Englishman who assumes that no reference, no nuance, will go unrecognized. U.S. readers will just have to lump it. But such mystifications should not prevent Americans from enjoying the bite and penetration of a very gifted writer--still the scintillating boy who says precocious things.