Betjeman that’s best enjoyed from back to front
Why do so many people enjoy the poetry of John Betjeman? The first edition of his Collected Poems in 1958 sold 100,000 copies, enthusing the public like no poetry since Kipling or Housman. Kingsley Amis, a generation younger, wrote of “the sheer relief and delight to be felt at the appearance of a poetry of contemporary date that was easy to follow and yielded the almost forgotten pleasures of rhyme and metre expertly handled”. Readers got the whole Betjeman package, too: the love of English byways, old buildings, sporty girls and obscure sects, but most of all the shambling, diffident figure dressed in old-fashioned clothes and hats, who came over so well on television narrating small masterpieces like Metro-Land (1973). “He offers us something we cannot find in any other writer,” wrote Philip Larkin, “a gaiety, a sense of the ridiculous, an affection for human beings and how and where they live.” But far from using traditional verse forms to explore conventional themes, Betjeman delighted in using the obscure – a Sandemanian chapel, The Yellow Book poet Theo Marzials, the Additional Curates Society – as a distancing technique to spring the more powerfully upon the reader incidents of suicide or unrequited love. The editor of this new collection of unpublished works, Kevin J Gardner, of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is right that the label given to Betjeman of
“Teddy Bear to the Nation” is false. Perhaps he goes a bit far, though, in suggesting that “underneath that cuddly exterior ran streaks of filth and malice”. Of the filth, more later, but if there is malice, it is generally in the sublimated form of mockery. Indeed, Betjeman made his son Paul so unhappy as a child by constant jibes, referring to him as “It”, that the boy could hardly wait to put the Atlantic between them. In a practical joke bordering on the blasphemous, Betjeman also taught his children to say the Hail Mary in an Irish accent, like the lowly Catholics in the village. He could not choose between his companion Elizabeth Cavendish and his wife Penelope, so both were hurt. One of the most successful exercises rescued here is a dramatic monologue delivered by a real person, John Edward Bowle, who had been at Marlborough and Oxford with Betjeman. I think he took away from Betjeman his job as secretary to Sir Horace Plunkett in 1929, which perhaps the budding poet resented. Anyway, the poem shows Bowle as intellectually and physically vain, but a failure in life, plagued with longings for good-looking youths. Not surprisingly, it was never published. Though it takes up five pages of this collection, it is unfinished. Deftly managed rhythms carry the reader on: I can trace my ancestry back from Gervase Bowle of Devizes, Whose arms, a spear impaling a poisson d’or pursuivant, Are in my mother’s sitting room now. This was better than Bonas And very much better than Betjeman, whose quite untraceable forebears Were probably peddling hashish in the marts of Asia Minor When buccaneering Bowle received the rent of his manor. In “The Corporation Architect”, another dramatic monologue (in the mouth of Sir Horace Jones, the designer of Tower Bridge, as Gardner helpfully notes), a coruscating stroke at the moment of death is described, under the gaslight in a very low church in Nunhead, south London: Oh! such a pyrotechnic explosion: Saxons and mines and serpents, and Roman (shame of them!) candles, Catherine wheels and rockets and that illegal mixture Made of potassium chlorate and sulphide of arsenic, bursting Like benefit night at the Palace when seen from Penge or Anerley, Quite overwhelmed my sense. Such poems are a delight. Betjeman fans can’t get enough, which explains why Prof Gardner, having published three volumes of Betjeman’s poetry mined from obscure sources (two of religious verse, one of verse written for broadcasting), is back again. The interest of the juvenilia is biographical and historical, but I found that it was not until page 60 that the poems were much good (the first being “The Outer Suburbs”: “And bright within each kitchenette/ The things for morning tea are set”). So I’d advise reading the poems here from the back forwards. It is astonishing the material that universities (mainly American) will hoard as academic fodder, like ants collecting leaves in their burrows upon which to grow nourishing mould. At the University of Victoria, the Betjeman archive occupies 70ft of shelving. Gardner tells us that Charles D Abbott, collecting material for the State University of New York at Buffalo, wrote to hundreds of poets asking for the contents of their wastepaper baskets. It is easy to parody bad Betjeman, and even before the publication of this collection, Gardner has been caught out for taking a Private Eye parody by Richard Ingrams and Barry Fantoni as the real thing. Gardner innocently annotated “Lines on the Unmasking of the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures” with the remark that Betjeman had erroneously called the Kennet the “river Talbot” (a name used by Private Eye as a running joke on James Goldsmith’s Now! magazine). Editors of Betjemania seem susceptible to hoaxes. AN Wilson included in his excellent biography a spoof letter concocted by his rival biographer Bevis Hillier, the first letters of each sentence in which spelled out: “Wilson is a s---.” Then there is the filth. One poem in this collection is obscene. Prof Gardner invokes the poet Rochester, which is about right, except that I think Betjeman meant the thing to be funny, like one of those long afterdinner jokes over the port when the women have withdrawn, which I suspect are seldom told these days. This is also a book to read with a bus ticket tucked in the pages of notes at the end, to keep your place. There are no page references in the notes. Some of them throw light on the poems’ origins, as parts of film scripts or contributions to periodicals. The note to “St Aloysius Church, Oxford”, beyond saying that it was published in Mount Zion in 1931, is actually unhelpful. “St Aloysius,” it says, “is the Roman Catholic parish church in central Oxford, also known as the Oxford Observatory. Built in 1875, its formal name is the Oxford Oratory Church of St Aloysius Gonzaga.” I don’t know where “observatory” came from. There is an observatory quite near, completed in 1794 by James Wyatt with a design echoing the Tower of the Winds in Athens. Perhaps “observatory” was a spell-checking app’s version of “oratory”. But St Aloysius was taken on by the Fathers of the Oratory only in 1990, long after Betjeman’s death. In his day it was no oratory, but was run by the Jesuits; Gerard Manley Hopkins had been posted there for a time. Betjeman knew it well and wrote in Summoned by Bells: “St Aloysius of the Church of Rome:/ Its incense, reliquaries, brass and lights/ Made all seem plain and trivial back at school.” That’s the voice we recognise from Betjeman, and in this volume we can trace how it developed.
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