Unmitigated England

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

John Betjeman, like suet pudding and the royal family, is one of those British phenomena whose charms have never really been appreciated on this side of the Atlantic. He is by far the most popular and beloved English poet of the postwar era — his “Collected Poems” have sold more than two and a half million copies — yet his name is virtually unknown here. In part this is because Betjeman managed to combine roles that simply do not go together in America: poet, broadcaster, preservationist, religious spokesman, and society figure. By the time he died, in 1984, he had become a national institution, in a way that no American poet since Robert Frost has come close to equaling. As A.N. Wilson writes, in his unabashedly admiring new biography, “Betjeman: A Life” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 375 pages, $27), “at some visceral level he spoke for England. He did so more than any politician of his time, and more than any of the religious leaders either.”

For that very reason, however, the particular resonance of Betjeman’s voice can be hard to pick up with our American equipment. The new “Collected Poems” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 498 pages, $25), issued in tandem with Mr. Wilson’s biography, is the latest attempt to transplant Betjeman’s work into foreign soil, but it is doubtful whether it will succeed any better than previous efforts. For while Betjeman is a truly masterful poet, in the sense that he can always elicit the effect he desires from the English language, he is also a deeply provincial one. In fact, reading Betjeman, and reading about him, offer a useful reminder that provincialism can be a strength as well as a limitation.

The vision of England that drove Betjeman’s work — his BBC broadcasts no less than his poems — is provincial in the best sense: a heartfelt love of the local, the traditional, and the familiar, in defiance of metropolitan opinion. Betjeman was born in 1906, and he lived to see the still Victorian England of his childhood discredited, its institutions and its edifices condemned. Yet he refused to repudiate the values of the 19th century, as almost all of his contemporaries were doing out of conviction or convenience. He continued to cherish the Victorian railroad stations and churches that modern architects were heedlessly demolishing, and his architectural documentaries taught the public to appreciate them. He remained loyal to the Church of England, even as it drifted to the margins of national life. And in his verse, he continued to use traditional forms, even as free verse became the 20th century’s idiom.

All this helps to explain his popularity with the common English reader, whose alienation from modernism, in the plastic and verbal arts, Betjeman understood and shared. In his lighter, more polemical poems, like “The Town Clerk’s Views,” he enjoyed making fun of the kind of restless modernizer who would rationalize life into a nightmare. “I blush to think one corner of our isle / Lacks concrete villas in the modern style,” says the villain of that poem, who plans to rename Devonshire “South-West Area One.”

Unlike the town clerk, but like Thomas Hardy, Betjeman relished the poetry in the old village names of “Dorset”: “Lord’s Day bells from Bingham’s Melcombe, Iwerne Minster, Shroton, Plush, / Down the grass between the beeches, mellow in the evening hush.” This same reverence for the ancient and local informs Betjeman’s religion, and it is clear that what mattered to him about the Church of England was less the Church than the England. One of his most moving religious poems, “Saint Cadoc,” finds consolation in the feeling of continuity with the ancient Cornish saint:

Here where St. Cadoc sheltered God
The archeologist has trod,
Yet death is now the gentle shore
With Land upon the cliffs before
And in his cell beside the sea
The Celtic saint has prayed for me.

Betjeman did not just find poetry in villages and churches, however; he also found it, more challengingly, in suburbs and golf courses, commuter trains and country club dances. In other words, he wrote admiringly about the conventional middle class world that has been poison to poets for two centuries. The problem for Betjeman’s poetry, which he solved only incompletely, was to find a language for sincere praise of the average, not to say the mediocre — to convert the negative charge of the word “provincial” into a positive one.

The solution that Betjeman found, and that makes his poetry so very hard for an American to hear properly, was irony. He praises with a mocking playfulness that often sounds like sheer camp. How else but as a joke can we read one of Betjeman’s most famous poems, “A Subaltern’s Love Song”?

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament—you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! Weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

This is a love poem in quotes; the trotting rhythm, the exaggerations and exclamation points, the use of tennis as a metaphor for erotic conquest, all violate the canons of sincerity. Yet it would be a mistake to read it simply as light verse, and in fact, the more Betjeman you read the less comic he seems. His jokiness is, rather, the toll that self-consciousness imposes on his emotions, which are not feigningly but genuinely adolescent.

Reading “Betjeman: A Life” confirms the impression that Betjeman deliberately prolonged his adolescence, in a way that seems peculiarly English. All his life he got crushes on girls, doted on his teddy bear, and gave people silly nicknames. It makes sense that his longest and in some ways most enjoyable work, the autobiographical poem “Summoned by Bells,” ends with Betjeman leaving college and taking his first job: It was childhood and the world of childhood that always meant most to him.

That is why Betjeman, for all the pleasure he offers, finally feels like a much smaller poet than Auden, or than Philip Larkin, whom he sometimes superficially resembles. Both of those poets are unmistakably English, yet they make their Englishness the condition of their universality. Likewise, they are expert in form, yet their formal poetry does not feel defensive or pastichelike, as Betjeman’s often does. The difference lies in the provincialism which is Betjeman’s pride — a provincialism not of place, this time, but of feeling and knowledge. Betjeman remains too content with the cozy and familiar, too willing to share with his audience a set of assumptions and associations as impermeable, and reassuring, as an inside joke. American readers can listen in on that joke, but it is impossible to escape the feeling that we are not its intended audience.

akirsch@nysun.com


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