Introduction

In the course of his long life (1906–1984), John Betjeman became the most popular British poet of the late twentieth century. He outsold his contemporaries (including W. H. Auden); several of his lines entered the national bloodstream (mainly from ‘lighter’ poems such as ‘Slough’, ‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’, ‘How to Get On in Society’); and he became a television celebrity before the term was invented. Furthermore, in a career which was at once separate from and entwined with his life as a poet, he spearheaded a movement to change public aversion to most things Victorian into general approval of that period’s buildings and styles. As an example of a writer helping to create the taste by which he wished to be judged, it is an achievement to compare with T. S. Eliot’s championing of modernism.

Yet Betjeman — who was briefly taught by Eliot at Highgate Junior School in north London — is widely regarded as modernism’s great opposite; as the poet who managed, in Philip Larkin’s words, to ‘knock over the “No Road Through to Real Life” signs that this new tradition erected’. Even at the height of his fame, this created problems for Betjeman, and for his audience. It meant that readers who defended his use of traditional forms, his moments of music hall comedy, his accessibility and lack of writerly guile, were branded as reactionaries, while people who attacked him risked seeming doctrinaire, academy-bound, and interested in newness to the exclusion of everything else. No one wrote about this better than Larkin. In the longest of several essays on Betjeman — the Introduction to a Collected Poems for a largely uninterested American audience — Larkin admitted: ‘The quickest way to start a punch-up between two British literary critics is to ask them what they think of the poems of Sir John Betjeman. For while their author has attained nearly every honour open to a writer of verse in this country, his work and its reputation still evoke a remarkable variety of response here.’

Twenty-two years after Betjeman’s death, and in the centenary of his birth, this ‘variety’ is still evident. On the one hand there is still a flourishing Betjeman Society, a sizeable (but ageing) audience, and evidence to suggest that some of the most popular contemporary British poets (Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope) appeal to the readership he attracted. On the other hand, there is still a lack of academic interest in his work (university English departments have generally voted with the modernists), and no properly edited edition of his poems or prose.

Inevitably, this creates a sense of unevenness, even of instability, in his reputation. But there is nothing new in this. Right from the beginning of his career (his first collection, Mount Zion, was published in 1932), Betjeman went to considerable lengths to complicate the question of how seriously his readers should take him. Mount Zion itself — elaborately designed by his friend Edward James — set the pattern. Were the fancy typefaces a joke or a serious act of homage to earlier ages? And what about the poems? Some were obviously skittish (‘The ’Varsity Students’ Rag’), some were obviously sombre (‘Death in Leamington’), but many walked a fine line between the two types, or actually partook of both, in a way which confused categories. The subjects and titles of several poems compounded the problem — and its pleasures: ‘An Eighteenth-Century Calvinistic Hymn’, ‘For Nineteenth-Century Burials’, ‘The Sandemanian Meeting-House in Highbury Quadrant’. Nine years after The Waste Land, poetry-readers were used to seeing the old laws flouted — but Eliot and Pound and company did their flouting in the open, using broken forms which reflected the fragmented interior worlds of their poems. Betjeman’s rebellion was to put his new wine in old bottles, to make the staid Victorians dance, to see the airiness as well as the pathos in fast-vanishing things, and to incorporate details into the tradition (all those place names and ecclesiastical subgroups) while producing unofficial elegies for it.

There is a word for this: camp — meaning to make light of what is in fact taken seriously. And what Mount Zion did was to introduce into British poetry a voice that makes better use of the camp range, of its subtle opportunities, unexpected depths and defensive tendernesses, than any other modern poet. It is the single most significant quality of the early work in Betjeman’s Collected Poems. But because the register of his camp is so readily mistaken for mere silliness, and because its texture has a delicacy which can easily be overlooked, it might also count as a drawback. So it is worth emphasizing that although Betjeman wrote a lot of funny poems, and said a lot of funny things, his camp (and the instinct for self-protection upon which it feeds) has its origin in very unfunny experience. It is this experience which forms the bedrock of his work, and guarantees its fundamental seriousness.

In his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960), Betjeman admits to the embarrassments and difficulties of growing up in wartime England with a name that sounded German:

                                     “Your name is German, John”—

But I had always thought that it was Dutch …

That tee-jay-ee, that fatal tee-jay-ee

Which I have watched the hesitating pens

Of Government clerks and cloakroom porters funk.

I asked my mother. “No,” she said, “it’s Dutch;

Thank God you’re English on your mother’s side.”

O happy, happy Browns and Robinsons!

It wasn’t just the ‘tee-jay-ee’ that was ‘fatal’; there was the question of whether his name ended in ‘-n’ or ‘-nn’, too. And although Betjeman would have poo-poohed the idea of submitting the name-business to a thorough Freudian analysis, there is enough readily available evidence in the poems to prove that his upbringing was fraught with issues of belonging, identity, acceptance, and tradition. It helps to explain why, through his prep school, then Marlborough, and even more decisively at Oxford, he went out of his way to cultivate the cultivated — as well as the rich and titled. It also sheds light on why he preferred the old forms in his writing. He wanted to be himself, to maintain a watchful distance, but he also needed to develop contacts with the national past, and particularly with the Victorian period — which represented stability and prosperity — because his personal past was less than he wished it to be.

Around and beneath the formative name-drama lies an even more vitalizing difficulty: Betjeman’s relationship with his father as both man and tradesman. Betjeman senior spent all his life in the family firm (founded 1820) making furniture — most of it for the luxury market (‘Maharajahs’ dressing-cases’, ‘the Tantalus / On which the family fortune had been made’, ‘The Alexandra Palace patent lock’, ‘The Betjemann trolley’). Although many of these objects were beautiful, and produced to a high standard, the young Betjeman spurned them, along with the idea that he should enter the family Works. He would have been the fourth generation to do so, but this was not the kind of tradition he wanted. It was trade, and therefore beneath him.

Betjeman senior was understandably upset by his son’s decision, and by the feelings which informed it. (He might have felt a little baffled, too: weren’t these Tantaluses and so on the domestic equivalent of much of the architecture that Betjeman spent his life defending?) Their relationship suffered accordingly — though Betjeman generally had the good grace to keep quiet about this, in print at least, during his father’s life-time. But after his father died, he turned to writing about him at regular intervals, and what had once been a figure of fun and dislike became deeply touching — so touching, in fact, and so haunting, that Betjeman senior lives through the Collected Poems, let alone Summoned by Bells, as a quietly admonitory spirit: deaf, suffering, pathetic, and terminal:

“Oh, little body, do not die.

    You hold the soul that talks to me

Although our conversation be

    As wordless as the windy sky.”

So looked my father at the last

    Right in my soul, before he died,

Though words we spoke went heedless past

    As London traffic-roar outside.

Poems such as this (‘A Child Ill’) appear to be a far cry from the facetiousness of Mount Zion — and indeed many of Betjeman’s best poems have the same compelling clarity of utterance and directness of gaze. Yet they spring from similar ground. The campery is a form of protection for Betjeman’s deepest feelings — it converts them into forms and a diction that is entertaining and unthreatening. The poems about his father show deep feelings with the protective veil ripped away. They are studies of remorse and self-accusation, howls about death in general and the prospect of his own death in particular, and frettings about time. They prove his remarkable range as a poet, but they also show that its two opposite poles are connected.

Given this, it is not surprising to find Betjeman searching time and again for a mood or a place he can consider safe. The word ‘safe’, or ‘safety’, appears like a nervous tic in his poems — ‘safe in bed’, ‘safety with old friends’, ‘safe in G. F. Bodley’s greens and browns, / Safe in the surge of undogmatic hymns’: there are at least ten uses of the word in the one hundred-odd pages of Summoned by Bells, and it connects with every one of his interests and allegiances: his passion for the seaside (especially Cornwall), which distils childhood memories of feeling coddled and secure; his enthusiasm for parish churches and their time-honoured reassurances; his addiction to Victoriana, with its elaborate manifestations of solidity. Even his snobbishness forms a part of the pattern: it wasn’t greed or the wish for an easy life that drew him to posh people, it was his sense of their ancient rootedness. And there is a camp manifestation, too: Betjeman’s notorious teddy bear Archibald, much mentioned in his poems, much filmed in his films, and evidently much loved, is an image of childhood security (‘my safe old bear’) that he worked hard to unite with his public persona.

It is only a short step from Betjeman’s search for safety to his devotion to things — to objects that defy the passage of time, and accumulate significance as they do so. The few people to have written well about his work have often commented on this, enjoying the skill with which he uses hard facts and proper names to evoke time past. They are right to do so: he has a wonderfully sharp eye and a brilliant memory, and a sure sense of the pathos which lurks in half-forgotten or easily missed details. In this respect (and paradoxically) his work recalls James Joyce — a modernist who revelled in the everyday, but whose experimental forms seem entirely at odds with Betjeman’s own styles.

It is not simply that, for Betjeman, things, and the names of things, are a source of nostalgic pleasure. Rather, they become for him a means of conveying strong feelings that he may well choose not to deliver directly — either because the subject is especially inaccessible or awkward, or because his poetics require him to deal with ‘sensations’ rather than ‘thoughts’. One of his best poems, ‘Devonshire Street W.1’, is a good case in point. The street and consulting room, which we see at the beginning of the poem, act both as a background for the reticence which forms an important part of the poem’s subject, and also as a way of dramatizing the unspoken fears of the two central characters — an elderly husband and wife. As readers, we are then allowed into the mind of the man, and hear him wondering, ‘Why was I made / For the long and the painful deathbed coming to me?’ It is a moment of shocking candour, from which Betjeman characteristically turns away in the final quatrain to concentrate on everyday things. But this re-focusing is not an evasion. It is a way for the wife simultaneously to accept her husband’s reserve, find brief comfort in the familiar, and register a literally unspeakable sadness:

She puts her fingers in his as, loving and silly,

    At long-past Kensington dances she used to do

“It’s cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly

    And then we can catch a nineteen or a twenty-two.”

Time and again in the Collected Poems, and throughout Summoned by Bells, things are trusted to carry the emotional burden. The process has the great advantage of making the poems feel intimate, and of allowing them to retain their impact in a way that would be impossible if their conclusions had been more obviously spelt-out. Think of ‘that wide bedroom with its two branched lighting’ in ‘Oxford: Sudden Illness at the Bus-stop’, or the hock and seltzer, the astrakhan coat, the morocco portmanteau, and the palms on the staircase in ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’. They are adornments, of course, and often enjoyably actual and shrewdly positioned. But they are, more significantly, the means of conveying whatever fear, dread, desire, sorrow, delight is the poem’s main subject.

There is another side to this. Things anchor Betjeman — they allow him to show his heart without speaking his mind — and to that extent they are a comfort and pleasure. But they can have the opposite effect too. Physical reminders of death terrify him (the crumbling teeth, failing limbs, deaf ears, and rotting corpses we find in some of his finest poems — ‘On a Portrait of a Deaf Man’, for instance, or ‘I. M. Walter Ramsden’). And living bodies can shame him — either because they are trapped in a situation that he regrets (being ‘that strange, rather common little boy’), or because they are repellent. The ‘large behinds and jingling chains, / And riddled teeth and riddling brains’ of an early poem like ‘The City’ manifests a discomfort that swells with time and eventually includes himself (‘For I am bald and old and green’).

This awkwardness gains a special edge in Betjeman’s love poetry. Typically — and in line with his general tone of camp — he makes a joke of it by showing off about how much he likes big girls. He seems to be saying: look, these women are obviously slightly grotesque, so how could anyone believe I liked them really? Think of ‘Pam, I adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl’, or the ‘Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak’ that is ‘Myfanwy’ (‘Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?’), or the ‘golden hiking girl’ of ‘Senex’, or Miss Joan Hunter Dunn with her ‘speed of a swallow’ and ‘grace of a boy’, or the ‘sturdy’ and ‘flannel-slack’d’ legs in ‘The Licorice Fields at Pontefract’, or the beefy racket-squeezing Amazon of ‘The Olympic Girl’. In every case Betjeman seems to be letting himself off the charge of being taken seriously as a lover. Yet as the evidence accumulates, we realize the joke is on us. These big girls truly are desirable — and for reasons that chime tellingly with his other thoughts about safety. They are made unthreatening by recurring as a type. They are reassuringly familiar to the extent of being part-male (Betjeman always insisted that none of us is wholly straight or gay, but a variable percentage of both). And they take charge.

One of the highest accolades Larkin gave Betjeman was to call him ‘an accepter, not a rejecter, of his time and the people he shares it with’. This quite properly emphasizes what is democratic in Betjeman, in spite of his reputation for being a snob preoccupied by the horrors of ‘ghastly good taste’. But Larkin might have added that Betjeman accepted his own self, too — his flaws and fears and primitive needs, as well as his sociable gifts. This helps to explain why the nostalgia in his poems, and their instinct to run for cover, does not often turn into sentimentality. Betjeman is generally a tough-minded, as well as a tender-eyed, poet. That is reason enough for thinking that in the years following this centenary, his star will remain bright. But it will only attain its proper height if his readers can attune themselves to what is complex and unusual in his poems: their cultivation of comedy for serious ends, and their reliance on familiar things to express unusually intense feeling. ‘I do not think that what is said or written matters, but what is felt. Often most “serious” feelings are expressed in a joke. I very rarely talk about what I really feel.’ So Betjeman wrote to his father in 1929. He could equally well have said it every other day of his life.

Andrew Motion