A Full Peal of Betjeman
John Betjeman's Collected Poems. Compiled with
an Introductibn by the Earl of Birken- head. (John Murray, 15s.)
'AMONG the many ways in which Mr. Betjeman differs from most of his fellow-poets,' according to his editor, 'is that his poems are commercially successful to his publishers and himself.' And here they are, bell-swarmed as ever, just in time for Christmas. Whoever buys them will know he is doing good' all round, except possibly to those fellow-poets, 'upon . . . whom the autumnal blight of obscurity seems to have settled.' Not the least of the disservices performed in Lord Birkenhead's bland introduction to this book is the fostering of a notion that Mr. Betjeman is a sound alternative to the fashionable madmen who nowadays pass for poets; that only his kind of thing is the real thing. In the end these claims will not advance the reputation of a poet who is certainly distinguished and certainly pleasing.
This inexpensive book is going to give a lot of pleasure, including a good deal of giggling, but it also testifies to a considerable achievement, easier to recognise than to define. First the eye takes in the Betjemanian details: the conifer suburbs and colonels, the tennis on polite lawns, the trams and churches, the eccentric anecdotes. Then it observes the gravity of many of the themes—sin and death, lust and old age, very directly dealt with. Directly, that is, from Mr. Betjeman's angle, which is so idiosyncratic that these themes often come out funny.
Now this comic astigmatism is carefully cul- tivated, first of all by the device of wanton par- ticularity. This poet hardly ever mentions a motor-car; his poems are full of Morris Eights and Rovers. See, for example, 'North Coast Recollections' : the lemonade is made from 'Eiffel Tower' powder, the tennis club is hidden not by bushes but by 'four macrocarpa,' the name of the actuary's firm is given in full. A woman 'shuts the Walter Crane' at children's bedtime; a girl hides in the Wendy Hut .(ghastly, but the class is right) and Harvey glances at his Ingersoll (the context shows him to be young, not poor). This density and contemporaneity of context helps to provide the special slant on lust, death and so on; like the bells they burst from another and mysterious world into a cosiness where every- thing has a name, to form curious compounds with the dear familiar goings-on—just as das Heilige is blended in Anglican churches with the smell of old hassocks: There is a new poem in the book, `N.W.5 & N.6,' which has many of the usual themes and all the skill :
Lissenden Mansions. And my memory sifts Lilies from lily-like electric lights. . . .
Then it specifies a childhood occasion when a sadistic nurse puts the fear of God into a boy (this juvenile recognition of evil is a recurrent theme): I see black oak twig outlines on the sky, Red squirrels on the Burdett-Coutts estate.
I ask my nurse the question, 'Will I die?' Always the necessary particular, followed by the tremendum mysterium. This need for named detail, before anything else can make sense, is basic, and explains the celebrated evocations of place, the appetite for architectural detail—even, in the very rare degree to which Mr. Betjemart possesses it, the feel of a special architectural complex, such as the City churches.
Obviously this leaves unexplained much that we recognise as characteristic—it only partly ex- plains the careful naïveté of the tone. In this, parody is a special ingredient, not always funny; the Tennysonian blanks verse sometimes is and sometimes isn't. The parody of Arnold's elegiacs in the poem in memory of the Marquess of Dufferin and AVa is perfectly serious, opening with a bold un-Arnoldian energy, but modulating to the steady tone which saves `Rugby Chapel' from being embarrassing. Here, as elsewhere, the object is to make possible the large and other- wise impossible statement, the kind of thing all modern poets have to work for, as, for example, Mr. Larkin works for the last stanza of 'Church Going.'
In fact, the difficulties of this poet arise when such statements are not adequately prepared, so that the naïveté appears false, out of control. On the whole, the particulars which redeem such statements are those he observes with love, or anyway tolerance, usually because they con- tribute to a nostalgia limited by class predilec- tions. Where he hates, Mr. Betjeman often seeMS to be alarmed by the power of his own diSgusi• This sometimes makes for good poems, like the ones about lust, where the fact that the jokes are uneasy makes them good jokes for poetry. But it also makes for bad ones, like The Town Clerk's Views,' a simple, angry piece of sarcasm which comes out flat and muddled; contrast the directness and particularity working together with sophisticated plotting in 'The Old Liberals' or with idiosyncratic explosiveness in 'Come friendlY bombs and fall on Slough.' The truth is that the control of tone in such poems is a most delicate affair. The good ones must suffer by vulgarisation if Mr. Betjeman is to be treated as the poet of everybody who knows, culturally and socially, what's what. At a dale when the intelligentsia appear to have taken over from golf-club secretaries the duty of defining social and cultural boundaries, one is sorry in, see here the poem 'How to get on in Societh which is about fish-knives, toilets, vestibules, doilies and all that. This sort of thing has, in the end, no more to do with Mr. Betjeman's poetry than it has with that of his blighted, autumnal fellow-poets, who will, incidentallY, have no difficulty in seeing how admirable, when all is said, much of his work remains.
FRANK IMMO°
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